Corporate America: Anti-Creativity
This essay explores why Corporate America is so boring.
Corporate America is a different place. Within Corporate America, an inversion of values has taken place. It is not the openness to ideas and freewheeling social atmosphere of the university; it certainly is not about the comforts of home; it is not the freedom and democracy we were taught were America’s ideals. Corporate America is chains; it is Ordnung. The corporation runs on authoritarian principles.
In other words, corporations value sameness/consistency, order and definite structure, industriousness, and obedience. Employees are treated much like robots, acting out some established process and following orders. One can see in this behavior echoes of Calvinism, the idea that an “elect” predestined for heaven would show worldly signs of this through not only wealth but also by being a stupendously dull but industrious person. The values of creativity, autonomy, individuality, broad thinking, and the experiential life are all far outside Corporate America’s understanding.
Corporate America is what happens when a bunch of boring people come together to see who’s the dullest of them all. To get an insight into why this, we must look at the generalized personality of the creature that lurks within America’s offices. My impression of the corporate type is someone exceedingly low in openness to experience while expressing very high conscientiousness. This would be the obsessive-compulsive personality style, or as Freud put it, the anal retentive. In Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, a person who became fixated at the anal stage felt the need to “hold it in”; in adulthood, this compulsion became a need to hold onto money (interpreted as symbolic feces) and hoard other possessions. Of course Freud’s theory is now discredited.
Regardless, low openness succinctly explains why corporate employees are themselves so dull and simultaneously rejecting of anything that could make things more interesting. Curiosity motivates people relatively higher on openness to learn about different ideas, try different cuisines, explore exotic cultures, and try to incorporate different insights and perspectives into what they do. Someone low on openness is most inclined to learn something new only when sheer pragmatism dictates. Thus the kinds of experience that make life more meaningful and rewarding to more open individuals instead provoke fear and skepticism in less open types. The more open individual is happiest learning, creating, innovating, synthesizing, and experiencing. The more closed type is comforted by routine, familiarity, and order; they like to know they are productive, reliable upholders of their tradition. For the more open individual, the opportunity to use a new technology at work to solve a problem sounds exciting; for the less open types, is is a cause for concern: The idea wasn’t a directive coming down from the chain of managers, and it didn’t place itself snuggly within the fixtures of bureaucracy. The concept of taking a bud of an idea and working together to fertilize and let it blossom into something spectacular does not compute.
This corporate outlook extends from work to life in general. To the corporate mindset, life is a straightforward path largely predetermined by society’s conventions. In Corporate America, one will find twenty-somethings getting married, having children, and prudently saving for retirement. Life should never be enjoyed too much. Musical taste is subdued and conventional. Sense of morality is repressive. Alimentary choice is the healthful or familiar. It is hard not to get the impression that the corporate type simply feels less—except perhaps for work and for duty or against any deviation from the norm.
Matt Wittmann