Age of the Gamesman

What kinds of people become managers in today's well-run corporations? The latest prober of the executive psyche, Washington Psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby, identifies four types. The first is the "craftsman," a gentle holder of traditional values, an admired worker so absorbed in his own specialty --engineering, finance, sales--that he cannot sense broad corporate goals, let alone lead a complex organization. Next comes the "jungle fighter," dog eat dog all the way, destroying peers, superiors and eventually himself. The "company man" is occasionally effective but lacks daring to bring about bold changes: his is a world dominated by fear and caution, filled with self-protective memorandums and low-risk courses of action.

Enter the winner, and hero, of Maccoby's book The Gamesman (285 pages; $8.95), published last week by Simon & Schuster. The gamesman loves glory and winning--not for the sake of wealth or power (though he may acquire both) but for the sheer joy of victory. He detests losing. Maccoby, 43, isolated the type after six years of Rorschach tests, dream analysis and interviews with 250 managers (4% of them women) at twelve elite U.S. companies. As Maccoby's interviews, conducted for the Harvard Project on Technology, Work and Character, took him higher into corporate structures, he found more and more executives who showed gamesman characteristics, though most were a mixture of two or more types.

The gamesman label sounds almost pejorative, but Maccoby did not mean it that way. There is a world of difference between shallow deceivers who play selfish games and the gamesman who revels in the corporate game. He lives it lustily, healthily, eagerly and is likely to rise rapidly with the encouragement of peers and superiors, and the adoration of flirting, sexy secretaries.

Short Cuts. What are this super-manager's characteristics? Typified in public life by John F. Kennedy, the gamesman loves taking calculated risks and is fascinated by new techniques. He is simultaneously cooperative but competitive, playful but compulsive, a team player but an aspiring superstar. He does not worry much about money; his main concern with the size of his salary is that it is the way corporations keep score.

The gamesman is not fanatically loyal to his company; he accepts corporate rules but is skilled at finding short cuts. Indeed, one of his main concerns on the way up is to get superiors to leave him alone. Politically, he may be something of a closet liberal: Maccoby's gamesmen worried about pollution, and a surprising number thought the U.S. was spending too much of the national budget on defense. But the gamesman sees little connection between those attitudes and his work: he will cheerfully build polluting products, weapons or anything else that will sell. One of his chief goals is to build a skilled team loyal to him. In dealing with its members he is tough and demanding, but not destructive. In one of the Rorschach blots, Maccoby's company man saw coffeepots and the jungle fighter found figures locked in violent combat; the gamesman saw spurting fountains.

But the gamesman in most corporations is troubled, and therein lies the chief difference between Maccoby's findings and those of William H. Whyte Jr. 20 years ago in The Organization Man or Douglas McGregor in his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise. For all his success, the gamesman admits that his work does little to stimulate what Maccoby calls the "qualities of the heart": loyalty, a sense of humor, friendliness, compassion. Managers may display those qualities at home, but the games executives play do not encourage heart to develop in the office.

The Gamesman has already been placed on many executive "must" reading lists. Among the businessmen who have already read it, one finds it an interesting contribution to management lore, another calls it "outrageous." A third cautions that junior executives cannot learn to become gamesmen by reading the book: the skills and attitudes are instinctive, "not like learning geometry." But Maccoby did not intend his work as instruction, only as description. In that capacity, it should fuel cocktail-party and water-cooler discussion for months, as workers try to classify their bosses--and themselves--according to Maccoby's types.

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