Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

executives’ personal values tended to include terms like ‘good health,’ ‘honesty,’ ‘beauty’, ‘love,’ and ‘peace of mind,’ and the organizational values included words like ‘success,’ ‘power,’ ‘competitiveness,’ ‘efficiency,’ and ‘productivity.’
    Pruzan noted that after that consulting experience, he began to picture the “strongly shareholder-oriented manager” as someone who puts aside his or her personal values at work for the sake of managing, shaping, and organizing, then collects those personal values again at the end of the day and goes home to enjoy beauty, love, friendship, and peace. The gap between a leader’s personal values and the values he or she promotes at work is so extreme, Pruzan said, that leaders have unconsciously developed a modern form of schizophrenia, threatening the health of both the leader and the organization. 18
    Employees and executives alike might wish the gap between their personal values and the values of their company were more aligned, but who can be sure value alignment is going to be different anywhere else? Employees learn to keep their heads down and lower their expectations about job security. They start keeping an eye on the door. They think seriously about developing portable skills that can walk out that door with them in case the company sheds them to become more competitive and efficient.
    Employees also find themselves working more hours than they once did. In the economic story, it’s cheaper for a company to have a worker put in longer hours and do more with less than it is to hire more people; every new hire represents an additional overhead expense. Seventy-seven percent of American workers now work more than 40 hours a week, and less than half of them are “very satisfied” with working conditions in their main paid job. Compared to the countries of the European Union, North Americans report the highest incidence of working at a high speed “all the time,” contributing to stress and burnout. 19 The Japanese have a word for “sudden death from overwork”: karoshi . 20 In China, the word for “overwork death” is guolaosi ; 600,000 people are estimated to die of it every year. 21
    In America, working long hours used to be the fate of the lowest-paid workers. But by 2002, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the highest-paid workers were twice as likely to work long hours as their lowest-paid counterparts. 22 Lawyers are a prime example. When the billable hour was first introduced in law firms (before that, lawyers billed by the task, not the hour), lawyers were expected to bill between 1,200 and 1,500 hours a year. Today they’re expected to bill 1,800 to 2,000 hours a year; almost half of practicing lawyers in the United States bill at least 1,900 hours annually. Too, every billable hour involves administrative hours that can’t be billed out, so 2,000 billable hours actually translates into 10-11 hour days, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year. 23
    In addition to having long workdays, lawyers also have four times the depression rate of the general public and twice the substance abuse rate. Two-thirds to three-quarters report high stress, and a third say work stress is hurting their physical and emotional health. 24 But for better or for worse, being willing to work long hours is often about survival in the firm. As the American Bar Association’s introductory book Making Partner explains to young associates, “If a firm expects a minimum of 1,850 hours, and two associates do equally good work, the associate who bills 2,000 hours will be more valuable to the firm than the associate who bills 1,850 hours. By doing more to help the firm’s bottom line, the associate who works harder is demonstrating that he or she is thinking like an owner.” 25
    Lawyers aren’t the only highly-paid workers facing overwhelming hours. In an interview, Robert Devlin, former president, chairman and CEO of insurance giant