The Infantilization of Corporate America.

In the Weekly Standard, Matt Labash has a sharp take on how Corporate America forces the fun on its employees.

There is, of course, a consultant for everything these days. Professional consultant-basher Martin Kihn, who is himself a consultant, and who wrote House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, writes of everything from flag consultants to compost consultants to Satanic consultants who don’t actually worship Lucifer (consultants tend not to believe in anything). So it stands to reason that with the new core value of fun on the ascent, there would be fun consultants. They don’t have a trade association yet, and they go by all sorts of different names, usually with “fun” as a prefix (funsultants, funcilitators, etc). But if you had to distill what they do in one word, “fun” would be your best bet.
A considerable corpus of literature on their discipline is amassing. I use the word “literature” loosely, to mean a series of often ungrammatical double-spaced sentences put on paper, slapped between festively colored covers, and sold to mouth-readers with too much discretionary income. While most business books, according to Kihn, are written on about a 7th-grade level (there are exceptions like Who Moved My Cheese? for Teens that are written on a 5th-grade level), the funsultant literature regresses all the way back to primary school. Since we all forget to play as adults, as funsultants repeatedly tell us, they seem intent on speaking to us as though we’re children.
Their books are thick with instances of how successful businessmen keep things loosey-goosey at work. Forget industriousness, talent, and know-how–the wellspring of employees’ satisfaction, creativity, and prosperity is fun. In Mike Veeck’s Fun Is Good, the cofounder of Hooters Restaurants reveals, “I don’t know if we could’ve survived without humor,” whereas to the untrained eye it looked like Buffalo Chicken Strips served with large sides of waitress’s breasts were the secret to his success. Whatever. “Fun” is the cure-all for anything that ails your company.

Posted by on September 10th, 2007 at 3:21 pm


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