Entertaining Executives. Robert Spillane

       WHY ENTERTAINING EXECUTIVES?

      A few days before I decided to write this play I was invited by a human resource manager to an ‘interview’. In the halcyon days of my youth, those who were charged with the dubious responsibility of attending to the needs of managers, workers and themselves were called personnel managers. Around 1980 they were re-badged and timidly accepted the old Marxian term ‘human resources’ to designate themselves as managers of ambiguous activities. While many of their colleagues objected to being referred to as a mere ‘resource’, human or otherwise, a property to be converted into money, which is what the term means, the gods of management had spoken and the congregation bowed before them. When, a few years later, a senior god decreed that henceforth there would be ‘strategic human resource managers’, some of the lesser gods died laughing.

      Sitting behind a very large desk, thus proving that Freud was right on some matters, the strategic human resource manager who had summoned me to his black and chrome postmodern office insisted that I was indeed fortunate to be there because my consulting income would be handsomely increased if he allowed me to perform for his troops. He was in the process of designing yet another conference for his middle managers, most of whom he detested, and was determined to delve into their personalities. And so this hungry psychologist found himself sipping muddy coffee while taking instructions on how to entertain executives.

      As everyone knows, managers don’t actually do things, in the way in which pilots, pathologists and pastry-cooks do things. People who do things are trained to do what they do. Because they don’t do anything, managers are not trained. Obviously, they can be trained in accounting and statistics. But no-one knows how to train them to do management. This poses a problem for people who design conferences, a challenge for those who conduct them, and fun for those who attend them.

      While managers can’t be trained in management, they can be educated. But with which subjects should they engage? Philosophy, history, psychology, sociology? All noble pursuits, no doubt, although difficult to develop in the five days allocated to management conferences. And given that managers are practical folk with short attention spans, impossible to penetrate within a week. Besides, managers don’t expect to be educated at conferences: they expect to be entertained.

      Psychologists are indeed fortunate because their subject is seductively entertaining and so elastic that they can invent material as they talk. Human beings are forever in love with themselves and cannot resist stories about their personalities, motives, values, feelings, creative abilities and leadership qualities. Which is why it has been said, with some justification, that if you can’t teach psychology, you can’t teach. Moreover, even a mediocre teacher can make psychology entertaining. Some even manage to make it sound profound, although that is more difficult than regaling audiences with fairy-tales about their unconscious desires and fantasies. In some countries it is important to nod approvingly to the local religious values while fashioning stories which unfailingly increase people’s sense of their own importance. The key to success is telling people what they want to hear while giving them the impression that psychologists know more about human behaviour than they do. And who is to tell psychologists that what they say is often ‘pretentious illiterate verbal sludge’, to use the legendary words applied by poet and stirrer A.D. Hope to the novels of Patrick White.

      According to three other stirrers, Benjamin Marks, Rodney Marks and my good self, authors of the iconic or, depending on your sense of humour, iconoclastic dictionary,