The Organization Man

The defining feature of American life has been the father’s belief that his son will have more oEarl take the vows of organization life. The 24h workday became a moral imperative and ambition collapsed into the pursuit of incremental promotion. As Whyte put it: ‘The upward path towards the rainbow of achievement leads smack through the middle of the conference room.’ This no longer supports nor represents the promise of the American Dream.

The upward path towards the rainbow of achievement leads smack through the middle of the conference room.’

At every critical junction in history, innovation has arrived faster than the social structures to absorb it. When the water mill was invented, it took nearly a thousand years before medieval Europe reorganized entire villages around where the water flowed, enabling population growth. When cars first appeared on our roads, British law required a man with a red flag to walk 60 yards ahead of every car to warn horse-drawn carriages. The “Red Flag Act” lasted for two decades. Today, the average corporation uses 250+ applications. A simple question about the business triggers a chain: Slack five people, export from six systems, reconcile data in spreadsheets, and validate with three departments. The red flags are alive and well, just in digital form.

At their core, corporations are a beautiful invention. They organize a group of people toward a common mission where each plays different parts in achieving it. They provide purpose, create value both socially and economically, and forge meaningful relationships. But somewhere along the way, the corporation got out of control. Layers of management multiplied to not improve output but to coordinate the coordinators. The disassociation from craft grew with each additional hierarchy level, simultaneously hurting the organization itself while feeding the ever-hungry organization man.

We’re at war with the idea that humans exist to serve corporations. For the first time in history, craft can scale without hierarchy. Artificial intelligence eliminates coordination and the never-ending pursuit for answers that hampers direct action. You no longer need twenty people and three weeks to answer a simple question about your business. Eragon solves this by surfacing the billion-dollar insights buried in the infinity of ones and zeros. We return the corporation to being a tool for human ambition, not the structure that contains it.

The next era of corporate America is built on the these basic principles:

1. Companies operate at the speed of thought, not the speed of meetings
2. Society benefits from the exponential nature of progress and invention
3. Man’s search for meaning is driven by craft, agency, and direct action

The American Dream has never been a story of comfort. It’s a belief passed quietly from one generation to the next that the future can be larger than the past if we have the courage to uproot what we have for what could be. Restoring the Dream means ending the age of the organization man and opening the possibility toward exponential ascent.