Sources: Vulture.com, Startup Bros., World Economic Forum Meeting 1997
Harvey Weinstein is at the top of not just one list but two: that of sexual harassers and aggressors but also another one of abusive, tyrannical CEOs.
Both Harvey and his brother Bob belonged to various lists of America’s toughest bosses publicized by a largely admiring business press including Fortune and Business Week starting in 1980. Journalists and editors underscored their tyrannical and abusive management styles and praised their willingness to make "hard" decisions, such as downsizing middle management, cutting wages, and ordering massive layoffs during the heady days of the go-go 1980s and 1990s of corporate raiders, leveraged-buyouts (LBOs), and company mergers.
Articles included the names of Steve Jobs (NeXT Computing), Donald Rumsfeld (G.D. Searle Pharmaceuticals), Carl Icahn (TWA), Andrew Grove (Intel), and Jack Welch (General Electric). Many of those names are still with us--and so is their management style.
The return in force of financial and banking sector in the U.S. during the Volcker recession (1980-82) radicalized the old militarized command-and-control autocratic management model inherited from the Second World War. It transformed the workplace into the harsh and even treacherous environment for employees that we know it to be today. At that time, Wall Street, desperate to maintain stock prices by matching the high returns on certificates of deposit offered by banks that exceeded the inflation rate of 14%, pressured companies to produce unheard-of 20% profit margins.
The new obsession with stock prices and short-term profits and the awarding of exorbitant executive pay lay the foundation for not only corporate take-overs but also a surge in abusive behavior by senior executives and managers in the workplace. These new practices opened the door to what business columnist Stanley Bing (aka Gil Schwartz) called at the time “management by terror” and put in place a system of “short-term greed and long-term insecurity.”
For two decades running, Fortune and Business Week featured awe-struck articles such as “The Ten Toughest Bosses” or “Tough Times, Tough Bosses” that promoted this new figure christening him the “bullying boss.” He—rarely she--was one who was aloof yet mercurial, manipulative, abusive, arbitrary, and vindictive, and, to the delight of the press, often colorful and quirky. And—unmentioned in these accounts—an unchecked sexual harasser.
Media exposés followed with admiring nicknames such as “Chainsaw,” “Old Blood and Guts,” “Rambo in Pinstripes,” “Jack the Ripper,” and “Prince of Darkness.” Less impressed by this male personality type, female employees offered one of their own, “BSD,” or “Big Swinging Dick.”
Thus a new American folk hero was born, the abusive, tyrannical (and white male) corporate leader--what novelist Christopher Brown calls the visionary “savior CEO.” He was afforded every indulgence and every reprieve. His management tools of choice? Fear and suffering. As one chief executive summarized his management philosophy in the original April 1980 Fortune article, “Leadership is demonstrated when the ability to inflict pain is confirmed.”
This is the abusive workplace in which Donald Trump could thrive. His brilliant coup was to make the new over-the-top management ethos part of his brand and to convert the well-rehearsed humiliating theater of laying off employees familiar to office workers into the stuff of TV melodrama.
Thanks to the media’s obsession with Trump’s dysfunctional personality, the release last fall of the tape of him bragging about sexually assaulting women failed to redirect debate back to the workplace--and its abusive power relations--from which Trump first came. After all, the American workplace is where sexual harassment thrives, and where gropers still today enjoy the greatest immunity. Perhaps this time around it will be different, and the current outcry and the #MeToo campaign will take the national debate beyond the confines of scandal-riddled Hollywood studios, media celebrities, and politicians, and focus at last on the harsh American workplace itself and the depredations of power it promotes along with the issue of sexual abuse.
Women are vulnerable both as employees, together with men, and as potential victims of the sexual entitlement of male managers and CEOs.
The scandals of Weinstein and Company are no scandals at all for those who have had ears to hear and eyes to see for the last four decades.
Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego (rreid@ucsd.edu) and author of Confronting Political intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond (2017). He is a member of Indivisible San Francisco.
