Combatting Corporatism

 Although the official book of articles has gone to press, this is being written in December now and will be included in the 2026 book later.  I just wanted to reflect on a few things that have transpired since last writing, and I felt they needed to be addressed here.

I wanted to begin about how things can be taken the wrong way if they are said, as an incident came up last week which affected me personally.   As you know for now, I work at a parochial college-prep school as a teacher, and an accepted fact of life is that we have to interact with the principal of the school, who in essence is our boss as teachers.  When a principal comes from a different type of background, or perhaps has a management style which can be something to get used to, it can create some communication issues.  I had one of those with the principal this past week, and it was somewhat intense.  Our principal here tends to have - and how shall I put this delicately? - a bit of an authoritarian leadership style.  He is not a micromanager, which is good, but he does tend to not receive feedback well when it is given.  The particular issue that came to mind entailed a malfunctioning heating system in the classroom, and to be honest it was a bit uncomfortable and the students were feeling it - in all honesty, I almost had a riot on my hands in one class as the students were really uncomfortable (as was I in all honesty, so who could blame them?).  Now, in our particular working environment, trying to get some help with something like this can be a bit of a process, as due to meetings and other things the appropriate authorities to address things to may not be readily available.  However, I was getting a bit flustered as the students in the particular class were acting as if the heating issue was somehow my problem, and to try to elicit a response I wrote the following message - "is anyone else in the building noticing how hot the rooms are?"  It was an innocent question, and as I found out later, some of my colleagues were having a similar issue in their classes.  However, the principal really took offense at it, saying the comment was "unprofessional" and "sarcastic."  Everyone else I showed the message to did not see that at all - it was just an informal inquiry as to the condition of the classrooms.   I ended up having a meeting with my principal, and it was a series of head-butts in all honesty - the principal refused to budge on his opinion (as of late, he still is), and things were compounded in that there was an incident in the front office earlier that exacerbated things.  I honestly felt like walking out the door that day after all this, and for me nothing was resolved although I tried to do so.  

A second issue with the same principal came up that weekend, when a proposed agenda for the upcoming midterms for our students was discussed.  For some reason, whoever had put together that schedule at the beginning of the year really did not think through the implications of it, as it has the midterms at the end of the week before Christmas break and no room for make-up exams for students who might be absent.  I mentioned that this current plan was not good, and I was chastised by the principal for "unprofessional communication" again - in other words, the message was the principal is infallible, and he did not like questions or criticisms.  This time, the communication was solely with him so there was no one else involved in the communication except us.  This led me to an inevitable conclusion - this principal has made himself untouchable and unreachable with criticism, and therefore I am thinking that any communication should be made through other channels.  In all honesty, we do have an assistant principal who is more approachable, so the resolution in this case is to air concerns with him instead.  This way, if the principal must be involved, any communication can be filtered through the assistant principal instead.   As to the midterm issue, I later found out that they at least did allow for make-ups in January, and had our principal addressed that and offered that solution, I would have been satisfied - I still don't think it is the best idea, but I could at least work with it had I known what was going on, hence avoiding a lot of unnecessary conflict and stress.  This has led me to make a few observations as I reflected on this.

Long before working in this school, I had approximately 27 years in the corporate world as essentially an administrative consultant.  Much of that was worked in temporary assignments for a variety of companies ranging from multi-billion-dollar corporations to tiny mom-and-pop offices.  I learned a lot of things through observation in doing this work, and I want to share a few insights now:

1.  For one, the bigger corporations have leadership that is so out-of-touch with their employees that often they cannot relate.  Therefore, the corporate head-games are something one inevitably faces in the corporate world.

2.  Once a person is promoted to an upper management role, it seems like one of the requirements of the job is to jettison common sense.  An upper-management corporate person finds foreign the most mundane of reasoning, and to them everything has to be made far more complicated than it should be.  They appear at times to be more about creating issues rather than resolving them. 

3. Consistency is often preached but rarely practiced.  Many corporate types are all about drilling the ideas of "consistency" into those under them, but then they lack it in principal.  Despite all the "life-coaching" and other faddish trends corporations use, much of it is just fluff to make the company look good, and at times it only benefits the employees, who can apply good principles from those things into other areas of life. 

4. The bottom line is the numbers.  People matter little to upper management, and this is true whether the setting is a multi-billion-dollar corporation or a private school.  The stats, the money, and the flowcharts are all that matter, and often employee satisfaction is sacrificed on the altar of the idol of subjective success.   Let me give an example here.  If a school has a 100% college acceptance rate for a graduating senior class, the powers-that-be tout that as "success."  What is often overlooked though is the retention rates of those graduates - how many of them will actually complete a higher degree, and how many of them will simply not be able to cut the college experience?  This is something that I personally feel needs to be re-examined in the field of education.  The same is true of standardized testing - does that truly measure the retention of knowledge of the students?   It is perhaps time for us to look more at the long term rather than impressive numbers, and this can be applied to any industry, not just education. 

5.  Communication - the huge problem with many in upper-level management is that when someone reaches that level, they lose touch with those who are subordinate to them.  Communication on the part of upper management is reduced to a lexicon of buzzwords, technical jargon that usually doesn't encapsulate the actual meaning of the word, and the annoying way that employees' concerns are often dismissed as being either "expressed unprofessionally" or they are explained away by a word salad of corporate babble which often leaves the poor subordinate more confused than before.  The bottom line to this is always the same - the management is always right, and the employee is always wrong.  What is really tragic about this entails two things.  First, a lot of brilliant ideas are more or less tossed into the rubbish bin by management because they don't like them or it may expose their own weaknesses and they don't want a lowly subordinate getting credit for solving a problem they may have created.  Second, if an employee is really upset about something, they are not always going to address the issue in sterile "professional" corporate-speak - a human being has emotions, and also everyone has limits, and if a problem festers for too long it causes some distress for the person.  Managers should really stop scolding people for "unprofessional communication" and instead exercise some empathy for whatever the underlying issue is.  A little of that would go a long way.  

6. Treating Employees like Automoton Robots.  Companies tend to, due to the other factors listed above, view employees as a commodity rather than as human beings, and thus they push, and push, and push people until they wear out.  This is the result of a toxic combination of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism and the faulty economic policies of John Maynard Keynes, and it is a big reason why so much dissatisfaction exists in many industries.   While many entities try to buffer this with attractive benefit packages and such, it doesn't address the underlying problem of workplace discontent.  Other factors that led to this problem are both Enlightenment thinking itself as well as the Industrial Revolution.  When I read Josef Pieper's seminal text Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he focused on a point that a lot of corporate types really miss, and that is the idea of acedia, or the busyness of sloth to put it in my own terms.  Acedia causes complacency, discontent, and it also makes an idol out of a subjective definition of success, and that starves the person of both spiritual and intellectual growth.  The big criticism of capitalism comes from this in all honesty, and when leftists decry the whole system of capitalism, it goes back to this (although, the question is posed as to what they offer to improve it, as the leftist totalitarian model actually makes this worse).  The problem is not capitalism as a system, but rather the corporatist variation of it, which is not in reality true capitalism at all - that is the point people like Chesterton, Belloc, and the late Pope St. Leo XIII make.  Dignity of personhood is not a convenient option, but a vital necessity.  And, it is time the corporate types rediscover the importance of dignity of personhood. 

These are only six things I could mention, as there are many more if time permits.   Needless to say, toxic corporatism is a cancer in our society, and it does affect overall quality of life.  While some of my personal experiences may flavor what I am writing, I think it is something many of us can relate to.  I only pray that those who hold the power would learn how to use it responsibly. 

Thank you for allowing me to share again this week, as this was an unanticipated post.  I may or may not post again, depending on how the remainder of the year goes, so if not, I will see you in 2026.