I started thinking about this while reading “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, a novel about a family in Afghanistan that spans the twenty or so year period from the mid 1970’s to the takeover by the Taliban:
Fact: the American starry-eyed worship of youth is not just a marketing device, but a dominant factor in molding the corporate culture of businesses and especially office environments.
Fact: the eager young MBA’s and especially the over-competitive, short on social skills tekkie types that populate American offices have a lot in common with the “average” al Qaeda terrorist, as profiled by terrorism expert Marc Sageman back in July 2004.
“(Al Qaeda members are) well-educated, well-off, cosmopolitan and professional, with good jobs…Mostly these guys are the elite of their countries; they are very much like some of us in the West”, according to Mr. Sageman.
Noting that many members of al Qaeda live in Western countries, the article about Mr. Sageman’s research asks, “Is there something about Western society which encourages these otherwise well-educated and respectable individuals to hunker down, to create cliques that ‘distance themselves from society’?” and provides an answer: “There is a growing sense of atomisation and alienation in the West, not only among immigrants but across society.”
If this is so, then I’d ask (and am prepared to answer) a corollary question: if the well-educated “elite” among us feel a sense of disaffection with society, then are these young Americans reacting in similar ways to their counterparts from overseas?
I say the answer is “Yes”, but the type of terrorism practiced by the home-grown “well-educated and respectable individuals” is even more pernicious than threats to bodily harm because it degrades daily life for virtually every American who works in an office.
The fighting for position, over-competitive, spoiled brat, prima donna behavior is a type of domestic terrorism that, quite frankly, has had vastly more of an impact on me and the people I know than the physical threat of another 9/11.
I’m starting to wonder if these problems evolve as the result of putting young, inexperienced, immature people in charge of groups and organizations or, more to the point, letting them take over.
It’s easy to let that happen when the manager’s reports happen to be technical, but the manager is not, a common phenomenon.
Either the manager hero-worships the tech bully, or fears losing the tech bully’s corporate knowledge; or the tech bully has made her/himself indispensable by doing a job that the manager abhors.
Regardless, you end up with Lord of the Flies: an environment in which mayhem is permitted to flourish, whether it’s a country or a business.