More Good Old Days: Going Postal by Terry Pratchet

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There's another, huge difference between how businesses were run half a century ago (okay, laugh; brave new world, right?) and how they are run today, and more importantly, by whom.

When the Stock Market was invented, it was a way for entrepreneurs to be connected with development money, essentially directly from investors.  (It used to be the case that you had to get a bank to finance your project, and being under the thumb of a single bank was too difficult, not to mention open to abusive practices.)  You sold a symbolic fragment of your company --called a share--to each of a number of investors, and you paid them a share of your profits.  (You could, in principle, buy back those shares, at the going rate, when you were rolling in dough someday.)

When a better mousetrap began to be successfully marketed, the inventor and his sons (and maybe daughters, if he was soft in the head) would migrate into more of an oversight role, and let younger people, and assistants, take over the actual running of the company.  The Head Family, to coin a phrase, became the nucleus of a Board of Governors, added in some outside experts, a few representatives of the stockholders, a lawyer or two, and they elected you Chairman.  By now your son (or son-in-law, or daughter) was the Manager of the company.  So there was (1) The Board, headed by the original developer, (2) The Stockholders, who had given the money for development, and now simply sat back and raked in the profits, but kept an eye on how the company was run, and (3) the folks in the workshop, who kept churning out the mousetraps.  Of course there were (Appendix 1) marketing folks, who dream up fanciful names for your newer models, do research to choose the best colors for everything, accountants to keep the records, lawyers to make sure you stayed within the law, receptionists, coffee-brewers, etc etc.

Somewhere along the line, companies decided that small companies had it hard.  Big companies were better able to fight to stay alive, and survive the changing fashions of public buying patterns.  Who knew whether mousetraps would sell over the long run?  Better get a share of your biggest competitors: the Cat Breeders, just in case Cats became the fashion.

Once the idea of buying out your competition gained ground, it became the main interest of both the Board, and the Stockholders.  And so a fourth group of people came into being: Upper Management.  Their job was to diversify.  In other words, there were specialists to look after everything that had nothing to do with mousetraps.

One of my favorite authors is Terry Pratchett, a Briton, who writes in a genre that subsumes science fiction, fantasy, and parody.  For his own inscrutable reasons, he has invented a "corner of the universe" in which there is a planet that is shaped like a disc, called Discworld, all the better to emphasize the fact that any resemblance between anything that takes place there and anything happening on a more familiar planet is entirely coincidental.

In one of his more recent books: Going Postal [2004], Pratchett vents his frustration at this changing pattern of corporate governance.  In that book, a company that invents something akin to the Telegraph (but based more on a network of heliograph stations) is bought out by a new management, which drives it into the dust through business practices that one reads about with increasing recognition and mounting fury.  It is a mixture of deceit, financial maneuvering, blackmail (which almost never happens in modern finance, actually;), strong-arming, and murder.  Reading that book makes the forces in modern finance far more transparent than I can make them.  It is nothing if not a simple, funny story, in case my readers begin to suspect that it is a lecture.  Pratchett very occasionally falls into a brief lecturing mode, but in this case, the editorializing is usually confined to maybe a couple of sentences, and then we're back racing through the absolute riot of a story.

The story (spoiler alert!) is as follows: our hero, a confidence trickster named Moist von Lipwig at birth, finds himself on Death Row, but is plucked from oblivion by the Tyrant of the City.  (Tyrant simply means a cross between Mayor and Governor, in this world.  For all intents and purposes, the City may as well be a large country.)  Moist is charged with resuscitating the Postal Service.

Anyone who is impatient with inefficiency is unlikely to be amused by this book.  The first half of the book is essentially a rollicking introduction to the way Pratchett can describe almost mythic inefficiency, as well as a cast of toweringly wacky protagonists.  But, while this is going on, we begin to learn about the vicious crew that "runs" the telegraph company across the way.  Murder, mayhem, fraud, romance, chain-smoking, labor laws, all are paraded before our disbelieving eyes.

Unseen University Stamp

To be perfectly honest, a reader unacquainted with Discworld will be definitely left mildly puzzled by some of the inside jokes.  But only very mildly.  All the more reason to read this one a second time, after you've learned up the private jokes.  They are not very funny, but they have a lovely cumulative effect.  The rules of magic, symbolized by Academia, in turn represented by Unseen University and its breezy Archchancellor, are pretty much What You See Is What You Get.  It seems an enormous waste of time to read all the Discworld books, just to pick up a few inside jokes.

(Incidentally, another marvelous Pratchett story, The Truth constitutes a sort-of prequel to this one.)

Anyhow, to summarize, I recommend Going Postal with all my thumbs and my Big Toe up, as a brilliantly entertaining allegory for all that is wrong with modern business and the modern corporate culture, and its infuriating Too Big To Fail-ness.  The resolutions of all the inconsistencies are too Discworld, and sentimental (and satisfying) to give a hint of direction to resolution of our own real-world problems.  But recognition and understanding are first steps.  Modern Corporations do not represent American Ingenuity anymore; they simply stand for institutionalized greed.  It is a frightening thought that my own pension plan is cradled in the gentle hands of a modern corporation.

(Postscript: Evidently Going Postal was shown as a two-episode TV series in May 2010, something I just learned a minute ago.)

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