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2  What You Want Them to Think

Warning

Draft. References marked TODO still need to be checked.

Is what you say what you think — or what you want others to think?

I was asked this question in a journaling exercise, and my first honest answer was: it depends. Manipulation is no stranger to me. I sell for a living. I know how to frame, how to soften, how to say the thing that will move the room rather than the thing I believe.

But “it depends” turned out to have a very clear shape. My world splits in two.

Nothing about this is dramatic. I do not lie in meetings. I just choose, every day, the version of the truth that is safe, useful and expected. Over the years the choosing became automatic. Then it became tiring. Then it became the job.

2.1 A bar, during the pandemic

I remember the moment I first saw the gap clearly.

It was during the pandemic. Our team had a rare trip together, and one evening a dozen or so of us ended up in a bar that, officially, should not have been open. Everyone was thrilled: we were sneaking into a pub. The atmosphere was that of a school trip.

Then we left, stepped out into the fresh air — and almost everyone put their masks back on. Voluntarily. Outside. The conversation moved on to the next vaccine dose, and how, thanks to the company healthcare plan, we would get it sooner than ordinary mortals. People were proud of it.

I sat with them and, at some point, literally had to bite my fist. I looked around the table and one question kept repeating in my head: what am I doing here? Not because I needed them to agree with me about the pandemic. Because in that whole group there were maybe two people able to even consider that there might be other scenarios — that what we were being told every evening might not be the whole story. And I did not say a word.

That silence was not a one-off. It was the corporate voice, working exactly as designed, outside office hours.

2.2 The cost nobody puts in the budget

I now believe this gap — between what I think and what I say at work — is one of the main sources of my inner conflict and of the burnout I have been circling for a while.

There is a name for this in sociology. Arlie Hochschild called it emotional labour: the work of managing your feelings, and the way you show them, as part of the job.1 She distinguished surface acting — displaying what is expected while feeling something else — from deep acting, where you try to actually feel what is expected. Surface acting is the one that wears people out. TODO: add a source on surface acting and burnout.

Corporate speech is surface acting with words. You agree with the strategy in public and doubt it in private. You call a layoff a “realignment”. You praise an initiative you know will be quietly dropped in two quarters. Each time it costs a little. The bill arrives years later, and it is addressed to you, not to the company.

2.3 Reputation or how you feel

A few months before I admitted all this, I had answered another question in the same journal: is your reputation worth more than how you feel?

My answer then was confident. Reputation and how you feel are both consequences of your intentions and actions. You cannot be a jerk with a good reputation and still feel good — you will know you are a jerk. And if you are slandered while knowing you are doing the right thing, it shows, and sooner or later the truth comes out. So if I do what I believe is right and the rest of the world does not understand it — to hell with the rest of the world. Check now and then with someone uninvolved that you have not lost your mind, yes. Accept that it hurts to be misunderstood, yes. But the alternative, I wrote, is to become a spineless conformist.

Reading both entries side by side was uncomfortable. In my private life the first answer held. In the corporation, the conformist had won — quietly, one safe sentence at a time.

2.4 Why the organisation speaks the same way

What makes it harder is that the organisation does exactly the same thing, at scale.

A corporation presents itself as fair, just and driven by values. In practice it plays to the tune of capital. The pretence is not an accident of culture; it follows from interest. And interest depends on who owns the company and how long they intend to own it.

A publicly listed company has to deliver every quarter. Its managers are agents, not owners: they are paid to hit the next number, and the next number is what they optimise for. Economists call this the principal–agent problem.2 When the horizon is ninety days, politics — looking good, saying the right thing, never being the bearer of bad news — pays better than merit. So the organisation learns to speak in the voice of what it wants the market to think, and everyone inside learns the same.

In a large company with a real owner, the incentives can be different. An owner who intends to keep the business for decades cares whether it grows, not only whether the CEO hits a bonus. Merit matters more than politics, because merit is what drives growth.

Michael Dell is the example I keep coming back to. In 2013 he took Dell off the stock exchange, arguing that the company could not make the long-term changes it needed while being judged every quarter.3 Whatever you think of the deal, the reasoning is the point: change the owner’s horizon, and you change what the company needs to pretend.

So the double voice is not a personal weakness you can fix with more courage. It is a property of the environment. The question is how much of it you let into yourself.

2.5 Voice, exit and loyalty

In 1970 the economist Albert Hirschman described the two options people have when an organisation they belong to declines: exit — leave — or voice — speak up and try to change it from within. What decides between them, he argued, is loyalty.4

This book’s title is, in a sense, Hirschman’s choice. Leave is exit. Live only works if you keep some voice. And the trap I describe in this chapter is the third state Hirschman’s model makes visible: staying, out of loyalty or comfort, while having given up your voice. Neither exit nor voice. Just presence — biting your fist at a table in a bar.

That is the state that burns people out.

2.6 How to live with a corporate voice

I have not solved this. These are the strategies I am testing:

  • Keep a place where you speak your mind. For me it is my small businesses and my family. If every place in your life requires the corporate voice, the voice becomes you.
  • Prefer silence to falsehood. You do not have to say everything you think. You can choose not to say what you do not think. Saying less, but meaning it, is cheaper than saying more and performing it.
  • Spend your real voice deliberately. Pick the few topics where you will say what you think, even at a cost. Spend that voice where it can change something, not where it only makes you feel brave.
  • Notice the drift. Once a quarter, ask yourself the opening question again. If the answer is “always what they want to hear”, something has moved, and it is not the company.

2.7 A temptation worth naming

When I first wrote this down, one of my next thoughts was: maybe the problem is the culture, not the corporation. Maybe I should look for work in an Asian company. The world’s centre of gravity seems to be moving east anyway: Japan, Korea, Vietnam.

It is a fair question, and I have not closed it. But I notice that it is a question about changing the stage rather than the play. A different corporate culture may ask for a different mask. If the argument above is right, what matters more than culture is ownership: who owns the company, and how long they plan to stay.

2.8 Questions to take with you

  1. Where in your life do you say what you think? Is there still such a place?
  2. When did you last say what you think at work — and what did it cost?
  3. Who owns the company you work for, and what is their time horizon? What does that make it pretend?
  4. If you stay, where will you keep your voice? If you leave, what are you leaving for, and not only from?

  1. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983).↩︎

  2. Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure”, Journal of Financial Economics (1976).↩︎

  3. Dell was taken private in 2013 by Michael Dell and Silver Lake; he describes the decision in his memoir Play Nice But Win (2021). TODO: verify details and add his own words on quarterly pressure.↩︎

  4. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970).↩︎