Word: gamesman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...