My first foray into Corporate Land was in 1979. Up to that point, my most prestigious position was supervising college boys and native Inuit in an Alaskan salmon processing plant.
There also were the countless part-time and short-term jobs one gets if one is paying for one’s own schooling: moving furniture, flipping burgers, manager of a “gentlemen’s club”, aide to a paraplegic, selling clothes, selling fire alarms, tending bar, etc. But a real corporate job with a shirt and tie came while I was in a master’s program in Long Beach.
The company was Martin Marietta, Aluminum Division, up in Torrance. Forty acres under roof. Huge machines pressing hot aluminum into press or extrusion molds. Fire and brimstone. The company was formerly Harvey Aluminum, a manufacturer that made a fortune in World War II. The plant still had the underground shelters in case of air raids, where relics from the War and records from the Harvey days were stored.
Two thousand people worked in that huge plant, on three shifts. Big, strong people who carried hundred pound billets of aluminum, or two hundred pound tank wheels from machine to machine. Big parts. When I was there, we made the landing gear for the first space shuttles.
On my first day of work, a professional job in a big corporation, I was supposed to attend the general manager’s Monday morning executive meeting. I walked into the office promptly at 8:00 a.m., proud that I showed such punctuality, dressed in a white, three-piece corduroy suit, sporting just a little Hank Williams western piping. I thought that was what the pro’s wore in Corporate Land.
The secretary looks up at me and says, “You’re late. You’re supposed to be in the executive meeting. It’s started.” I hadn’t figured the commute time from my office to the conference room. Great. “How do I get there from here?” I ask.
She said, “The Head Shed is down this hallway, turn right at the cafeteria, left at the mainframe room and then a ways down on your left.” I hustled off to make the meeting.
I’d never heard that phrase before: The “Head Shed”. I knew instantly what she meant. It was the suite of offices for all the people who were paid to think and decide and tell people what to do. These folks had not made commercially saleable products with their own hands for quite some time, if they ever did. The phrase jumped up from my memory several years ago as I sat in the beautifully appointed auditorium at the Institute for Peace and Justice, on the University of San Diego campus. I was at the annual national conference for directors put on by the Corporate Directors Forum. Chris Cox, former chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission was describing to the assembled business leaders how he sees the current dire condition of our economy, and how the SEC failed to prevent the derivatives meltdown during his watch as SEC leader. I listened as Mr. Cox went down the list of factors he believed correlated to how we got to where we are. I realized that according to his biography, like the people in the Head Shed, Mr. Cox had never been involved in making a product. He did have a translating corporation at one time, but no experience like creating a consumable or a durable good. And Mr. Cox was not alone. Most, if not all, of the conference attendees were from the Head Shed. These extremely smart, well-educated business leaders are charged with the guidance of many companies. I looked at the attendance roster. From the companies represented, I would guess that these business leaders were responsible for about a half million employees, either directly or indirectly. And the leverage of economic impact is typically about seven to one, i.e., one employee significantly affects the lives of seven other people economically. So about four million people were represented at the conference.
As I listened to the dialogue and the presentations during the Directors Forum, I adopted the perspective I used to have. For a time I was the twenty-six year-old neophyte in Corporate Land, wearing a white three-piece corduroy suit, walking into an executive conference room where gruff men argued about who to blame. I listened carefully. Were these Heads in the Shed any better than they seemed to me thirty years ago? Did they understand the importance of their custodianship? Did they realize that four million lives depended upon them?
I’d have to say the answer was both “yes” and “no”. While these Heads at the conference may never have touched a tool in the name of creating a product, their hearts have touched the bigger truths of leadership. They take their responsibility seriously. But at the same time, none of the people in the elite, expensive conference would be materially affected by the economic implosion caused by relatively few financial engineers. These leaders were empathetic, but ignorant of the personal impact of their decisions. Perhaps it has always been so: those with wealth and good hearts cannot truly feel the imperative of those who reside outside of the Shed.