Think Tank

The Gamesman

A lot has been written about how to play the corporate game, but--until Michael Maccoby came along--very little about the emotional costs of playing it. A psychoanalyst and director of the Harvard Project on Technology, Work and Character, Maccoby and his group of researchers interviewed 250 managers, ranging from chief executives down to lower-level professional employees, in 12 well-known corporations.

The survey's conclusion is not particularly surprising: The process of reaching the top can turn you into something of a heartless prick. What is surprising is that the new breed of corporate leader recognizes this fact.

"The managers we interviewed recognized that their work developed their heads but not their hearts," Maccoby says. "In answering questionnaires, they consistently identified intellectual qualities as more 'important for your work' than emotional qualities. They also indicated that their jobs 'stimulated or reinforced' qualities of the head more than those of the heart."

Maccoby calls the new breed of corporate leader The Gamesman, which, as it happens, is the name of his recent book on the subject. The Gamesman is, he says, easily distinguished from the other recognizable corporate types: The Craftsman, The Jungle Fighter or The Company Man.

"The Gamesman sees business life in general, and his career in particular, in terms of options and possibilities, as if he were playing a game," Maccoby says. "He likes to take calculated risks and is fascinated by techniques and new methods. The contest hypes him up and he communicates his enthusiasm, energizing his peers and subordinates like the quarterback on a football team. Unlike The Jungle Fighter, The Gamesman competes not to build an empire or build up riches but to gain fame, glory, the exhilaration of victory. His main goal is to be known as a winner, his deepest fear to be labeled a loser."

Maccoby, a 44-year-old disciple of Erich Fromm who spends a great deal of his time treating people in Washington who are not businessmen, brings to this study an outsider's perspective and his findings are all the more scary for it. The villain, as he sees it, is careerism, a process that begins almost from the time the child leaves the cradle.

"Careerism demands detachment," Maccoby says. "To succeed in school, the child needs to detach himself from a crippling fear of failure. To sell himself, he detaches himself from feelings of shame and humiliation. To compete and win, he detaches himself from compassion for the losers. To devote himself to success at work, he detaches himself from family.

"As a result, high-ranking corporate managers exercise and develop many positive intellectual characteristics, while their emotional qualities tend to atrophy. They lack passion and compassion. They are cool or lukewarm. They are emotionally cautious and protected against intense experience. The process of bending one's will to corporate goals and moving up the hierarchy leads to meanness and emotional stinginess."

A searing indictment of the business world? Yes. So what has been the response of the corporate community?

"Well," Maccoby says, "I think a lot of people recognize themselves in our composite portrait and are disturbed by what they see. Others think it's simply not important to possess emotional capacities. One of the most interesting responses came from the New York Telephone Company. They wanted to know if I could come and help them develop their hearts."

I can almost hear the guys up at the phone company. "Developing the heart...make a hell of a seminar. Probably get some good yardage on the media front. Let's get that doctor up here and give him the ball and really blitz this thing."

Sounds like a really neat game, doesn't it? --Jerry Bowles

Forbidden Fruit

"Nobody has the right to tell me what therapies I have the right to die by," yelled a witness at a recent Food and Drug Administration hearing. The subject of the hearing was Laetrile, the controversial cancer treatment derived from apricot pits. About 100 people cheered the witness on when he told how the drug had kept him from dying of cancer and he urged that the Government's ban on Laetrile be lifted.

Until irrefutable evidence appears to show that Laetrile does or does not control cancer, the acrimonious debate probably will continue. The medical establishment--namely, the FDA, the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute--contends that legal Laetrile might lure people away from more legitimate treatments that are known to be effective. It cites cases such as that of a woman who went to Mexico for Laetrile (where it is legal) when cancer of the cervix was diagnosed. When she returned six months later, the cancer had spread so severely that she had no chance for survival. The pro-Laetrile forces, growing rapidly in numbers and vocal support, have succeeded in getting it legalized in several states. For them, it has become a question of Government meddling in private affairs and messing with their human rights. "Where does the Government come off interfering with the doctor-patient relationship when we want a nontoxic therapy?" asks one supporter. This argument has been effective in winning over states such as Indiana, where a "legislative coup" was pulled off by fewer than 1000 supporters. The New York Times even quoted local politicians, calling it "the slickest grassroots lobbying campaign we've ever seen." But important distinctions between a cancer cure (which, medical authorities agree, Laetrile isn't) and a control (which backers contend it is) have been buried beneath "freedom of choice" rallies, John Birch Society pamphlets and pro-Laetrile bowling teams sponsored by health-food stores. Proponents have even taken to calling cancer victims after major operations and telling them they should have taken Laetrile instead.

The medical aspect of the Laetrile dispute, whether or not the drug actually works, has been around since Laetrile (whose chemical name is amygdalin) was patented in the early Fifties. In 1953, the California Medical Association conducted tests and pronounced Laetrile worthless. Critics attacked the testers' methods and results and the battle was on. The 1963 FDA ban on interstate distribution of the drug made it effectively illegal, since a state would have to produce it entirely within its borders, including growing the apricots and printing the labels (Indiana has proposed doing just that).

Although much research has been done recently, all of the results have gone the way of the original California test; they've met with fierce dispute. For example, the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research did a series of tests on Laetrile between 1972 and 1975. When one chemist showed that it slowed the spread of cancer in mice, three others could not duplicate the results. Supporters of the drug charged it was a cover-up by the medical establishment. But most pro-Laetrile evidence is from testimonials, such as the one from a pianist in Moline, Illinois, who underwent 53 cobalt treatments before switching to Laetrile. "I would never again go through the agony and the aftereffects of cobalt treatments," said Harriet Haedrich. "I am now strong enough, thanks to Laetrile, to be back on the concert stage." Because many people who claim to have been cured by Laetrile have also undergone more conventional therapy, the drug's opponents often insist it was the conventional treatment that made the difference.

Since the FDA has far less authority over vitamins than over drugs, some Laetrile supporters have tried to label it vitamin B-17, though B-17 is unknown to nutritionists. Since apricot kernels contain traces of cyanide, treating them as if they were vitamins to be gobbled at will could, and in one case did, cause death. Proponents contend that the Government, which allocates some $800,000,000 a year for cancer research, is standing firm on Laetrile because it poses a threat to the vast cancer-research establishment. If a simple, inexpensive substance were found to be more effective than all the treatments that have cost billions to develop so far, loss of public confidence in Government, to say nothing of the loss of jobs, could be enormous. A cure, says science writer David Rorvik, "will do in not only cancer...but the cancer establishment itself." As the debate goes on, the only thing both sides will agree on is that Laetrile is harmless; everything else is up for grabs. Tom Passavant

Risk Taker

Lloyd M. Levin is married, has two kids and a nice house in the suburbs. He has no trouble getting insurance and getting it at fair rates. If you aren't like him, however--if you're gay or cohabit, if you're unmarried or a divorced mother--you may not be treated the same way when you go to get your piece of the rock. That's when you may need Levin and his Chicago-based All Together, Inc.

"Insurance companies try to tell people how to live their lives," says the 23-year veteran of the insurance business. All Together, the nonprofit corporation he founded and runs, aims to fight the economic discrimination that results. "For example, we'll soon be involved in a lawsuit with a guy whose auto insurance was canceled because he lives with his girlfriend. What does that have to do with his driving?"

In addition to this sort of free legal assistance, All Together (which costs ten dollars a year to join) offers members a hospital policy that covers sterilization and counseling for rape. On the drawing boards is life insurance covering any two people who live together, regardless of sex or marital status. "We focus on 'eco-mores,' " says Levin, "that is, pointing out to the insurance companies the economic incentive of dealing with these minority groups. But they are built on the proliferation of the standard family. What we say to them and to the banking and housing industries, where there is tremendous discrimination, is, 'Dummies! Look at the market you're missing.' Society is terrifically unsupportive of people who are different. We want to give them equality, and with that comes dignity."

Investing In Prints

Voiceprints are images that identify patterns of speech much as handwriting analysis identifies the writer. Although speech spectrograms, as voice-prints are called, are not nearly as well known as fingerprints, they are also unique to every one of us and police are turning to them to solve crimes. If a voice has been recorded (such as in an extortion or kidnaping case), it can be compared with another tape made by a known suspect.

But, unlike the ease with fingerprints, identifying and comparing two voices on tape is a subjective business depending on the expertise of highly trained technicians. Not everyone agrees on how accurate that process is. "There are lots of variables involved with a taped phone call," says Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator who specializes in electronic security. "Telephone lines, for example, pass only those frequencies between 300 and 2600 cycles, only a portion of the voice spectrum, which ranges from 60 to 15,000 cycles. That leaves plenty of overtone and nuance out of the recorded sound."

Recently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that voiceprinting was not "generally accepted" in the scientific community and granted a defendant a new trial (he has since been convicted), but that ruling was an exception. Voiceprinting, which was pioneered at Bell Labs in the early Sixties, within the past six years has been increasingly accepted as courtroom evidence.

One reason for this acceptance has been the International Association of Voice Identification, whose 16 voice-analysis experts have testified in cases involving Hebrew, French and Spanish tapes, to say nothing of muffled and deliberately disguised English. Trainees in the I.A.V.I. program generally have degrees in speech and hearing and undergo two years of on-the-job training. After they pass a rugged set of exams, they are much in demand to testify when taped evidence is available. "We once had a tape where you could hear a murder in progress," says Lonnie Smrkovski, a former president of I.A.V.I., "complete with screams and bodies hitting the floor. I've also helped the U. S. Air Force identify pilots' voices in tapes of air crashes. But by far the number-one use of voice analysis is to clear suspects who were not the ones on the tapes."

Nazi Conversion

Can America's energy shortage be eased by the same technology that ran the German war machine in World War Two? When the Germans needed fuel to run their planes and tanks, they built 28 plants to convert brown coal (lignite) into synthetic oil and gas. Until then, this process, known as coal hydrogenation, had always been considered too costly; but Germany lacked any oil reserves of its own, so it was forced to use its coal. By the end of the war, virtually the entire nation was moving on synthetic gasoline.

Since this same coal abounds in the U. S., two Texas A&M University professors decided to look up the old plans that were captured by the Allies after the war and see if they could utilize them for modern needs. The task is proving formidable, but Dr. Richard E. Wainerdi, director of the university's Center for Energy and Mineral Resources, feels the goal is well worth it. "The German program began in 1936 and by 1989 it was producing oil successfully," he notes. "We have virtually all the documents, so we know it has worked. The argument is whether or not we should go ahead and do it."

Just finding many of the documents was an adventure. Files turned up all over the world in dusty boxes and on brittle microfilm. Some were in Russia and couldn't be copied, but 85 percent eventually were tracked down. The coal-conversion plans were among hundreds taken when scientific teams followed hot on the heels of military units moving across Germany at the end of the war. Data was collected on everything from the harmonica industry and bread baking to plans to make sugar from sawdust. Notes Dr. Wainerdi, "It's the only time in history that a country's scientific and technical documents were made available to the victor as war booty. Usually, the winner takes jewels and valuables. This time the winner took information." Maybe it's a case of making history by not forgetting it.

Two-Upmanship

What do the Beatles have in common with Bach and Mozart? Purists insist the answer is "Nothing whatsoever," but Denys Parsons knows better. He has found that they, along with hundreds of other composers, had a tendency to begin their themes with three ascending notes.

Now, that is not to say that writing a successful melody is as simple as dore-mi, but it is something to ponder the next time you find yourself humming a catchy tune you've heard on the radio. Think, for example, of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man (which Emerson, Lake & Palmer appropriated for their new album), with its initial ascending brass flourish. Lots of early Beatle songs, such as Can't Buy Me Love and She Loves You, also use this pattern, and Parsons found hundreds of others. So, after looking at the first three notes of the themes of some 14,000 compositions, his conclusion, recorded in the British magazine New Scientist, was that "some kind of herd instinct drives all composers to adhere, to a quite remarkable degree, to a standard preference order for starting patterns." While he is quick to admit that his analysis is too crude to yield any insights into the musical content of any of the works, he does think that opening with rising notes creates an air of euphoria or happiness in a melody.

Musicologists weren't surprised to hear of Parsons' results, and they offered some explanation of why it occurs. "There is a tendency to write music in arch forms," says Professor Robert Marshall, head of the music department at the University of Chicago. "Even medieval chants do this. In the Baroque era, Bach characteristically reached a climax early in the melody and then took his time coming back down." This habit presumably gave rise to the old joke about Bach's having fathered 20 children because his organ had no stops.

At the very least, Parsons has provided firm guidelines for any aspiring composer who wants to begin on the up and up.

"Voice-analysis experts have testified in cases involving Hebrew, French and Spanish tapes, to say nothing of muffled and deliberately disguised English."