Money and Conformity

Not long ago, I met a young business executive who might well have served as the prototype for the entire breed of case-hardened conformist "organization men" one finds in ever-increasing numbers in the business world today. His clothes, manners, speech, attitudes – and ideas – were all studied stereotypes. It was obvious that he believed conformity was essential for success in his career, but he complained that he wasn't getting ahead fast enough and asked me if I could offer any advice.

"How can I achieve success and wealth in business?" he asked earnestly. "How can I make a million dollars?"

"I can't give you any sure-fire formulas," I replied, "but I'm certain of one thing. You'll go much further if you stop trying to look and act and think like everyone else on Madison Avenue or Wacker Drive or Wilshire Boulevard. Try being a non conformist for a change. Be an individualist – and an individual. You'll be amazed at how much faster you'll 'get ahead.'"

I rather doubt if what I said made much impression on the young man. I fear he was far too dedicated a disciple of that curious present-day hyperorthodoxy, the Cult of Conformity, to heed my heretical counsel. I'm sure he will spend the rest of his life aping and parroting the things he believes, or has been led to believe, are "right" and safe. He'll conform to petty, arbitrary codes and conventions, desperately trying to prove himself stable and reliable – but he will only demonstrate that he is unimaginative, unenterprising and mediocre.

The success and wealth for which men such as this yearn will always elude them. They will remain minor executives, shuffled and shunted from one corporate pigeonhole to another, throughout their entire business careers.

I pretend to be neither sage nor savant. Nor would I care to set myself up as an arbiter of anyone's mores or beliefs. But I do think that I know something about business and the business world. In my opinion, no one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or "get rich" in business by being a conformist.

A businessman who wants to be successful cannot afford to imitate others or to squeeze his thoughts and actions into trite and shopworn molds. He must be very much of an individualist who can think and act independently. He must be an original, imaginative, resourceful and entirely self-reliant entrepreneur. If I may be permitted the analogy, he must be a creative artist rather than merely an artisan of business.

The successful businessman's nonconformity is most generally – and most obviously – evident in the manner and methods of his business operations and activities. These will be unorthodox in the sense that they are radically unlike those of his hidebound, less imaginative – and less successful – associates or competitors. Often, his innate impatience with the futility of superficial conventions and dogma of all kinds will manifest itself in varying degrees of personal eccentricity.

Everyone knows about the late John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s idiosyncratic habit of handing out shiny new dimes wherever he went. Howard Hughes is noted for his penchant for wearing tennis-sneakers and open-throated shirts. Bernard Baruch holds his most important business conferences on park benches. These are only three among the many multimillionaires who made their fortunes by giving their individualism free rein and who never worried if their nonconformity showed in their private lives.

Now, I would hardly suggest that adoption of some slightly eccentric habit of dress or manner is in itself sufficient to catapult a man to the top of a corporate management pyramid or make him rich overnight. I do, however, steadfastly maintain that few – if any – people who insist on squeezing themselves into stereotyped molds will ever get very far on the road to success.

I find it disheartening that so many young businessmen today conform blindly and rigidly to patterns they believe some nebulous majority has decreed are prerequisites for approval by society and for success in business. In this, they fall prey to a fundamental fallacy: the notion that the majority is automatically and invariably right. Such is hardly the case. The majority is by no means omniscient just because it is the majority. In fact, I've found that the line which divides majority opinion from mass hysteria is often so fine as to be virtually invisible. This holds as true in business as it does in any other aspect of human activity. That the majority of businessmen thinks this or that, does not necessarily guarantee the validity of its opinions. The majority often has a tendency to plod slowly or to mill around helplessly. The nonconformist businessman who follows his own counsel, ignoring the cries of the pack, often reaps fantastic rewards. There are classic examples galore – (continued on page 52)Money(continued from page 47) some of the most dramatic ones dating from the Depression.

The Rockefellers began building Rockefeller Center, the largest privately-owned business and entertainment complex in the United States – and possibly the entire world – in 1931, during the depths of the Depression. Most American businessmen considered the project an insane one. They conformed to the prevailing opinion which held that the nation's economy was in ruins and prophesied that the giant sky-scrapers would remain untenanted shells for decades. "Rockefeller Center will be the world's biggest White Elephant," they predicted. "The Rockefellers are throwing their money down a bottomless drain."

Nonetheless, the Rockefellers went ahead with their plans and built the great Center. They reaped large profits from the project – and proved that they were right, and that the majority was dead wrong.

Conrad Hilton started buying and building hotels when most other hoteliers were eagerly scanning all available horizons for prospective buyers on whom they could unload their properties. There is certainly no need to go into details about nonconformist Conrad Hilton's phenomenal success.

I, myself, began buying stocks during the Depression, when shares were selling at bargain-basement prices and "everyone" believed they would fall even lower. "You're making a tremendous mistake, Paul," many of my friends and business associates warned me grimly. "This is no time to buy. You'll only bankrupt yourself."

The conformists were selling out, dumping their stocks on the market for whatever they would bring. Their one thought was to "salvagÈ" what they could before the ultimate economic catastrophe so freely predicted by "the majority" took place.

Nevertheless, I continued to buy stocks. The results? Many shares I bought during the 1930s are now worth a hundred – and more – times what I paid for them. One particular issue in which I purchased sizable blocks has netted me no less than 4500% profit through the years.

No, I'm not boasting nor claiming that I was endowed with any unique powers of economic clairvoyance. There were other businessmen and investors who did the same – and profited accordingly. But we were the exceptions, the nonconformists who refused to be carried along by the wave of dismal pessimism then the vogue with the majority.

The truly successful businessman is essentially a dissenter, a rebel who is seldom if ever satisfied with the status quo. He creates his success and wealth by constantly seeking – and often finding – new and better ways to do and make things.

The list of those who have achieved great success by refusing to accept and follow established patterns is a long one. It spans two centuries of American history and runs the alphabetical gamut from John Jacob Astor to William Zeckendorf. These men relied on those four qualities already enumerated: their own imagination, originality, individualism and initiative. They made good – while the rock-ribbed conformists remained by the wayside.

These conformists simply do not realize that only the least able and efficient among them derive any benefit from the dubious blessings of conformism. The best men are inevitably dragged down to the insipid levels at which the second-raters – the prigs, pedants, precisians and procrastinators – set the pace. The craze for conformity is having its effect on our entire civilization – and, the way I see it, the effect is far from a salubrious one. It isn't a very long step from a conformist society to a regimented society. Although it would take longer to create an Orwellian nightmare through voluntary surrender of individuality – and thus of independence – than through totalitarian edict, the results would be very much the same. In some respects, a society in which the members reach a universal level in which they are anonymous drones by choice is even more frightening than one in which they are forced to be so against their will. When human beings relin-quish their individuality and identity of their own volition, they are also relin-quishing their claim to being human.

In business, the mystique of conformity is sapping the dynamic individualism that is the most priceless quality an executive or businessman can possibly possess. It has produced the lifeless, cardboard-cutout figure of the organization man who tries vainly to hide his fears, lack of confidence and incompetence behind the stylized facades of conformity.

The conformist is not born. He is made. I believe the brainwashing process begins in the schools and colleges. Many teachers and professors seem hell-bent on imbuing their students with a desire to achieve "security" above all – and at all costs. Beyond this, high school and university curricula are frequently designed to turn out nothing but "specialists" with circumscribed knowledge and interests. The theory seems to be that accountants should only be accountants, traffic managers should only be traffic managers, and so on ad nauseam. There doesn't appear to be much effort made to produce young men who have a grasp of the overall business picture and who will assume the responsibilities of leadership. Countless otherwise intelligent young men leave the universities where they have received over-specialized educations and then disappear into the administrative rabbit warrens of over-organized corporations.

To be sure, there are many other pressures that force the young man of today to be a conformist. He is bombarded from all sides by Èrguments that he must tailor himself, literally and figuratively, to fit the current crew-cut image, which means that he must be just like everyone else. He does not understand that the arguments are those of the almost-weres and never-will-bes who want him as company to share the misery of their frustrations and failures. Heaven help the man who dares to be different in thought or action. Any deviation from the mediocre norm, he is told, will brand him a Bohemian or a Bolshevik, a crank or a crackpot – a man who is unpredictable and thus unreliable.

This, of course, is sheer nonsense. Any man who allows his individuality to assert itself constructively will soon rise to the top. He will be the man who is most likely to succeed. But the brainwashing continues throughout many a man's career. The women in his life frequently do their part to keep him in his conformist's strait jacket. Mothers, fiancees and wives are particularly prone to be arch-conservatives who consider a weekly paycheck a bird in hand to be guarded, cherished and protected – and never mind what valuable rara avis may be nesting in the nearby bushes. Wives have a habit of raising harrowing spectres to deter a husband who might wish to risk his safe, secure job and seek fulfillment and wealth via imaginative and enterprising action. "You've got a good future with the Totter and Plod Company," they wail. "Don't risk it by doing anything rash. Remember all the bills and payments we have to meet – and we simply must get a new car this year!"

Consequently, the full-flowering conformist organization man takes the 8:36 train every weekday morning and hopes that in a few years he'll be moved far enough up the ladder so that he can ride the 9:03 with the middle-bracket executives. The businessman conformist is the Caspar Milquetoast of the present era. His future is not very bright. His conformist's rut will grow ever deeper until, at last, it becomes the grave for the hopes, ambitions and chances he might have once had for achieving wealth and success. The confirmed organization man spends his business career bogged down in a morass of procedural rules, multicopy memoranda and endless committee meetings in which he and men who are his carbon copies come up with hack- (concluded on page 135)Money(continued from page 52) neyed answers to whatever problems are placed before them. He worries and frets about things that are trivial and superficial – even unto wearing what someone tells him is the "proper" garb for an executive in his salary bracket and to buying his split-level house in what some canny realtor convinces him is an "executives' subdivision."

Such a man defeats his own purpose. He remains a second-string player on what he somewhat sophomorically likes to call "the team" instead of becoming the captain or star player on the squad. He misses the limitless opportunities which today present themselves to the imaginative individualist.

But he really doesn't care. "I want security," he declares. "I want to know that my job is safe and that I'll get my regular raises in salary, vacations with pay and a good pension when I retire." This, unhappily, seems to sum up too many young men's ambitions. It is a confession of weakness and cowardice.

There is a dearth of young executives who are willing to stick their necks out, to assert themselves and fight for what they think is right and best even if they have to pound on the corporation president's desk to make their point.

True, an executive who crosses swords with his superiors may sometimes risk his job in the process, but a firm that will fire a man merely because he has the courage of his convictions is not one for which a really good executive would care to work in the first place. And, if he is a good executive, he will quickly get a better job in the event he is fired – you may be sure of that. You can also be sure that the conformist who never dares very from the noÈm will stay in the lower – or at best middle – echelons in any firm for which he works. He will not reach the top or get rich by merely seeking to second-guess his superiors. The man who will win success is the man who is markedly different from the others around him. He has new ideas and can visualize fresh approaches to problems. He has the ability – and the will – to think and act on his own, not caring if he is damned or derided by "the majority" for his nonconformist ideas and actions.

Among other things, the man who would be successful in business today must ignore the popular conformist laments about those factors which supposedly inhibit business and make it "impossible" for businessmen to get rich. These include the classic bugbears of "confiscatory taxation, creeping socialism, over-priced labor" and the "Communist threat." These are favorite alibis for incompetent conformists who must find excuses to explain away their failure to accomplish more than they have.

The excuses are lame. They will not stand up under even the most cursory examination.

No one can deny that taxes are high – very high – but I don't know of a single well-managed business that has been taxed out of existence. Nor am I able to go along with the oft-propounded theory that high taxes are making it impossible for business firms to expand. Business has burgeoned throughout most peak-tax years – and the expansion continues. One need only glance over the published facts and figures that tell the story of the current expansion programs being carried out by companies all over the country to realize that. The versatile and imaginative nonconformists in business are being neither throttled nor held back by high taxes. (The personal income tax for wage earners is another matter entirely, outside the purview of this article.)

Labor costs? The honest demands made by honest labor unions are – more often than not – reasonable and justified. The worker wants a share of the wealth he helps to create – and he's jolly well entitled to it. After all, the American worker is the American businessman's best customer. The businessman would be hard put to sell his products if the worker did not have the money with which to buy them.

As for socialism, it may be creeping, but it doesn't look to me that it has crept very far. The vast majority of American businesses are privately owned – and there is no sign that the situation will change in even the most dimly foreseeable future. I might add that I've often observed that the businessmen who howl loudest about "creeping socialism" are the first to clamor for government contracts – an apparent paradox which speaks volumes.

Then, there is the "Communist threat." Unquestionably, this is a very real and serious menace. The Communists openly boast they are fighting a no-quarter economic war against the Free World. The free-enterprise system can meet the grim challenge only if its businessmen are imaginative and forceful enough to devise ever newer, better and more efficient ways of producing more and better goods and services at lower costs. The economic war will not be won by timid souls who cling to outmoded concepts and methods. In my estimation, the mania for conformity can do the Free World's cause more harm than a dozen Nikita Khrushchevs.

The point I'm trying to make with all this is that the broken-record complaints and alibis given by the tradition-bound to explain why they can't succeed are entirely without value. The real reasons men fail in this era of unprecedented prosperity and opportunity are that they are afraid – or inept or downright in-competent – and pay far more attention to what the other fellows are doing than to their own affairs.

The men who will make their marks in commerce, industry and finance are the ones with freewheeling imaginations and strong, highly individualistic personalities. SucÈ men may not care whether their hair is crew-cut or in a pompadour, and they may prefer chess to golf – but they will see and seize the opportunities around them. Their minds unfettered by the stultifying mystiques of organization-man conformity, they will be the ones to devise new concepts by means of which production and sales may be increased. They will develop new products and cut costs – to increase profits and build their own fortunes. These economic free-thinkers are the individuals who create new businesses and revitalize and expand old ones. They rely on their own judgment rather than on surveys, studies and committee meetings. They refer to no manuals of procedural rules, for they know that every business situation is different from the next and that no thousand volumes could ever contain enough rules to cover all contingencies.

The successful businessman is no narrow specialist. He knows and understands all aspects of his business. He can spot a production bottleneck as quickly as he can an accounting error, rectify a weakness in a sales campaign as easily as a flaw in personnel procurement methods. The successful businessman is a leader – who solicits opinion and advice from his subordinates, but makes the final decisions, gives the orders and assumes the responsibility for whatever happens. I've said it before, and I say it again: There is a fantastic demand for such men in business today – both as top executives and as owners and operators of their own businesses. There is ample room for them in all categories of business endeavor.

The resourceful and aggressive man who wants to get rich will find the field wide open. The Millionaires Club has a solid-gold membership card waiting for him. It's his, provided he is willing to heed and act upon his imagination, relying on his own abilities and judgment rather than conforming to patterns and practices established by others.

The nonconformist – the leader and originator – has an excellent chance to make his fortune in the business world. He can wear a green toga instead of a gray flannel suit, drink yak's milk rather than martinis, drive a Kibitka instead of a Cadillac and vote the straight Vegetarian Ticket – and none of it will make the slightest difference. Ability and achievement are bona fides no one dares question, no matter how unconventional the man who presents them.