Angelic Synergy

Oleg Batygin: That’s not surprising at all. Successful managers don’t walk the streets you and I walk. But I got lucky. It so happened that I have a good friend online. We’ve been in touch for a very long time. We’ve met offline too.

His views on things resemble mine in many ways. Except the body of knowledge he holds is heavily skewed toward the humanities. He understands history and sociology better; I understand physics and mathematics better.

This friend of mine holds a fairly high position at a wealthy and influential institution in the humanities. You probably know that in any commercial structure of significant size there are those known as the “gods” — the group of people holding maximum power within the company. Below the “gods” sits a layer of “combat” managers, who deal directly with the “gods.”

The “gods” once created the company and brought it to stability and prosperity. They also set up, beneath themselves, a structure meant to carry the company forward. Today the gods’ power is barely exercised anymore. About all the gods do is listen to reports from the layer of managers below them and nod their wise heads.

Since the reports from the second-tier managers are, as a rule, positive, the “gods” fully approve of their work and consider stirring themselves not merely excessive but unsafe. After all, even the smallest movement by any “god” always shifts enormous corporate strata. And moving anything back and forth in a well-tuned system is, obviously, entirely unnecessary.

From here on I’ll call the managers in the second tier from the top “angels.” As a rule, the gods do indeed approve of everything happening in the company, since all the “angels” are eager to please the “gods.”

The “gods” practice a certain, extremely rare, acceptance of “angels” into their circle. An “angel” will strive harder to please the “gods” if he has even a negligible chance of one day becoming one of the “gods” himself. My friend works as just such an “angel.”

Like any “angel,” he genuinely handles real, serious matters and makes important decisions at the scale of the organization. His power is active, unlike the power of the “gods.” And, as befits his rank, he very much wants to become a “god.”

My friend noticed a phenomenon long ago that calls for an explanation. He periodically attends sessions of the “angelic council” — that is, meetings of the company’s top executive leadership. And here’s what he noticed.

There are significant image elements that signal a manager belongs to “one of us,” to the “chosen.” This might be the brand and color of a pen, the pattern and cut of a tie, the cut of a suit and its maker, the brand and style of shoes, a hairstyle, and much else. These markers are a kind of password that raises the weight of a manager’s word at the council.

A manager who knows which tie to wear to the next key meeting seems to possess some important, secret knowledge. And for this sense of belonging he is valued above colleagues who wore the wrong tie.

Importantly, most markers of this kind change from meeting to meeting. It creates the impression that some secret channel exists, through which information about the markers is passed to the synergistic portion of the managers. Outsiders, for whatever reason, simply have no access to this channel.

My friend was precisely an outsider. He never managed to put on the right jacket. So he came to me and asked me to look into the situation.

Essentially, he asked me to use hacker methods to monitor several managers at his company and figure out where they were getting information about the corporate markers.

I took up the work with interest. I didn’t see an ethical problem in it. Corporate bigwigs constantly watch technical specialists, and watching back is a rational, and often very useful, measure.

I watched about a dozen “angels” for roughly half a year. And I found no secret chat, no covert mailing list of recommendations. Neither an offline nor a digital channel notifying anyone of the nuances of the corporate dress code existed, that much was certain. Honestly, I was sure from the start I wouldn’t find anything. The “angels” were too simple and schematic to organize themselves into a secret society. And yet, somehow, the “angels” did synchronize the color of their plumage.

When solving problems like this, it’s important not to hold back your imagination. I pictured a telepathic channel open exclusively to the company’s top managers. Telepathy, of course, doesn’t exist, but the moment I let my mind entertain the existence of a telepathic channel, I immediately understood where to look.

I compared the recreational content consumed by the top managers. And oh yes! It turned out the synergistic “angels” watched the same films, listened to the same music, and read the same texts at the same time. There is a corporate fashion for recreational content, and they follow that fashion scrupulously.

They trade tips on what to watch or read completely openly, in the smoking areas, in the corridors. The synergy in their clothing was caused by a banal resonance of aesthetic preferences, brought on by the overlap in the content they consumed. They wore ties the same color as the lead character’s in the show they were all watching in their free time.

You could say the managers synchronized unconsciously. Many of them probably didn’t even notice they were showing up to major meetings in identical ties. But my observant outsider friend noticed.

I told my angel friend about my discovery. In response, he said, in effect, that his career could go up in acetylene flame for all he cared, but he was not going to watch and read the same silage as his colleagues.

Some time later, while staying in his post, my friend opened a business selling “brilliant ideas” to the synergistic angels.

The thing is, the synergistic ones have one big problem. Leadership doesn’t notice them, because they’re all too similar to one another. To stand out, they periodically need to say or do something exceptionally bright and out of the ordinary. But with a mind working in unison with one’s colleagues, coming up with an original idea turns out to be completely impossible. My friend tried selling his own ideas to his synergistic colleagues.

He put together a banal mass email from a fake address, offering this service, at first for a very small fee. The first time around, only a couple of people agreed to buy a bright idea. But after about ten such mailings, three-quarters of his colleagues were already his clients. My friend sent the mailings a week before every important meeting. In effect, my friend had begun running his enterprise’s angelic machine from the shadows, and his income gradually grew several times over.

In a certain sense, my friend turned into the very “hunter” you and I are looking for. He watches the system and can regulate it by selling his “bright ideas” to the synergistic “angels.” From his place in the shadows, he can spot and sever any “dangerous connection” using the hands of his synergistic clients.

What matters for us in this story is the existence of a kind of “corporate unconscious.” That is, in any large company, tendencies drift about that most managers strive to follow. These tendencies arise by coincidence, or as a result of the actions of particular standout employees. The majority act within these corporate tendencies completely unreflectively. This could well explain my own case too.

Every manager in a company holds only a very small fragment of the knowledge of how the enterprise functions. At the moment of decision, tactical managers are guided more by the “spirit of the corporate unconscious” than by rational considerations. If an enterprise exists long enough, the logic of this kind of automatic, corporate behavior can grow very complex.

In sufficiently old and large companies, it’s as if a huge, endlessly powerful “corporate ghost” resides, possessing its own inscrutable will, strange whims, and a complicated character. It’s this spirit, not the passive and lazy “council of gods,” that the top managers of the angelic cohort serve.

All this strongly resembles trend-following in the stock market. In that game, whoever buys and sells when the majority buys and sells wins. In a company with a powerful “corporate spirit,” whoever best matches that “corporate spirit” wins.

A manager who wants to be successful has to catch tendencies literally in the air of offices and corridors and follow them without stopping to think about their meaning. It’s activity of this kind that I’m inclined to use to explain what happened to me.

It seems to me this version is the most plausible of all the ones I have. It resembles the truth mainly because it doesn’t presuppose any “intelligent design.” “Intelligent design,” in matters like this, always reeks powerfully of conspiracy theory.

The “corporate spirit” we’ve been discussing is the second candidate for the role of “hunter.” It could well have been the one who broke my toys — the ones it found unappealing — and given me, as if in consolation, what I received.

How could this have worked technically? It’s very simple. For many years, top managers had been siphoning money out of the wealthy company. Strange, often absurd financial flows were created. Any manager who opposed the draining of funds from the company was pushed out quickly and unconditionally.

An unspoken rule emerged. If an idea arose within the “angelic” circle to create a financial flow siphoning money out of the company, that flow had to be created. Anyone who stood in the way of that flow would not survive in the corporation. That’s how the financial flow was created whose beneficiary turned out to be me, Oleg Batygin.

On the surface, it’s just a system error. But one could suppose that expenditures of resources that look absurd like this are a kind of pseudopod, by which the system — the corporate system, in this case — probes the surrounding space. The system threw out a “financial tentacle,” and this island came into being, along with the way of life of its residents and the many businesses along the coast tied to this island. The system expanded.

The fact that the system’s pseudopods don’t die off but multiply may indicate that this particular random error turned out to be advantageous to the system in some way. All life on the planet develops exactly this way. Errors arise in the genome, and some of them turn out to be successful and become fixed. This error became fixed. And when I started wondering why it had become fixed, a second hypothesis occurred to me, one that explains what happened to me.