Three institutions are playing vital roles in binding together this new elite. The first are the business schools. Where the old elite studied history at Oxbridge or in the Ivy League, the new elite acquires an M.B.A. “The people at the business school actually looked like the people in ads for Caribbean vacations or for expensive liquor,” wrote one star-struck M.B.A. student at Harvard Business School. “They looked like winners.”[10] Business schools are turning themselves into the boot camps of globalization. They recruit both their students and staff from as far afield as possible. (Europe’s leading business school, Insead, was born global; American business schools are having to make more of an effort.) They also expect a good many of their alumni to spend some time working abroad. And you are never too old or far away to start—or to come back for a refresher course. Cosmocrats can join virtual programs such as Duke University’s Global Executive M.B.A. Program, in which much of the teaching is done by CD-ROM and students work together using electronic bulletin boards and e-mail. The students spend a couple of p. 232 weeks at Duke, but they are also supposed to take two-week trips to eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The cost is $82,500, excluding airfares.[11]
The second kind of institution in this transformation encompasses the big professional-service firms: law firms, accountancy firms, and, especially, investment banks and management consultancies. For much of the 1990s, from Johannesburg to Taipei, it was impossible to interview the chairman of any decent-sized company without finding some young person from Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch hanging around the door. “They’re young; they’re focused on global markets and they’re not afraid of new technology,” cooed BusinessWeek in 1997, as it hailed “the JP Morgans and Walter Wristons of the new era of global finance.”[12]
For a time, investment banks took the cream of the cosmocrat crop. Now, they have to fight it out with management consultancies and Silicon Valley start-ups. Every year, McKinsey screens fifty thousand résumés and undertakes tens of thousands of interviews, many of them involving senior partners, in order to hire five hundred new associates. The consultancies then devote an equally impressive amount of time to drilling their tyros in the language and techniques of management theory: Accenture subjects its new recruits to almost a thousand hours of training during their first five years, much of it in their in-house university in Saint Charles, Illinois. Consultancies allow their members to amass a far broader range of experience than regular business executives have by setting them to work in a wide variety of countries and industries. They also keep their people constantly on the move, switching them from posting to posting, lending them to other offices for short-term stays, and obliging them to fly hither and thither for specialized meetings.
The result is that former consultants are beginning to form a quasi-Masonic elite at the summit of modern business—and this elite regards the global life as a precondition for success. The frenetic pace of the business is such that junior consultants seldom see anybody outside work and thus form bonds that last long after they have moved on. But just in case these informal bonds are not enough, McKinsey has produced an alumni directory, complete with contact numbers, which means that products of the firm can be sure of finding others of their kind in whatever city they happen to touch down. McKinsey’s five thousand alumni form an “arboreal slum” at the top of most walks of life in much the same way that Balliol men were once supposed to in the heyday of the empire, running institutions as diverse as IBM, American Express, and the British Conservative Party.
The final key institution in this process is the Internet. The Net is an imp. 233peccably cosmocratic gadget: global, unrestrained by national rules, stuffed full of knowledge, and “gender irrelevant.” For a tribe as focused on staying connected yet as geographically dispersed as the cosmocrats, the Internet is much more than just an information center. “Dushan,” who would rather not be identified, is a successful Serbian businessman who has lived in Boston for nearly a decade. His wife is a Croat. They married, as he puts it, “at a time when Yugoslavia used to mean something.” Thanks to Slobodan Milosevic, they no longer have the option of living in either of their native homelands. But Dushan would not want to go back anyway. He has spent most of the twenty years since getting his engineering degree outside the country working in satellites and consulting. He likes his adopted home, but he would not think twice about moving somewhere else if he had to. His job often means that he is away most of the week anyway.
When Dushan thinks of his friends or where he “belongs,” he does not think of either Belgrade or Boston but about the network of friends he has built up through his travels around the world. In the past, keeping up with them was a drag, particularly for somebody who puts in long hours. “There is,” as he puts it, “no correct time to ring New Zealand.” Now, the Internet has given a sort of geographic center to the “community” of people about whom he most cares. He can send his friend in New Zealand a photograph of a pint of Guinness, which they used to drink together when they lived in Britain. He can check the scores of soccer teams in Yugoslavia and argue about them with other cosmocratic émigrés. “It is a series of small things that add up to one big thing.”
The Anxious Elite
The way in which they have embraced the Internet points to perhaps the most interesting thing about the cosmocrats: their insecurity. Cosmocrats are often fabulously rewarded for their understanding of globalization. But they pay a high price for their material success, both psychic and social. They are an anxious elite.
How does this sit with the sort of arrogant can-do Americanism that we described earlier? They seem to be two sides of the same coin. By any standard, America’s cosmocrats, for instance, are better rewarded than any of their predecessors. People talk about a growing group of “gold-collar workers”—young, fickle knowledge workers who resent having to pay their dues at consultancies, law firms, or banks. Kirshenbaum Bond and Partners, an up-and-coming New York ad agency, used to get desperate pleas for work p. 234 (one desperate applicant sent in a toilet-paper roll with the words “I’m willing to start at the bottom” written on every square); now, the firm gets notes from people who have chosen to go elsewhere just saying, “You lose.”[13]
Yet there is also plenty of evidence that all this money and power is not making America’s managers particularly happy. Consultants talk about companies producing burned out “human cinders” and about the rich-but-unhappy syndrome known as “affluenza.” Overworked young lawyers have their own “greedy associates” website that is “a place for the over-privileged to complain.” Some successful companies, including Intel, have engendered rebel websites on which current and past employees warn people against joining them; Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Business School, says that some companies are “toxic workplaces.” Many American companies, including the big car companies, have been embarrassed by the speed with which senior managers have accepted early-retirement packages. The wealth of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has increased in direct proportion to the ghastliness of American managerial life.
And, of course, there is the age-old horror of losing your job, something that has increased since the slump, though many of the extra profits of the 1990s came from thinning managerial ranks. A survey by Challenger, Gray and Christmas in 1998 showed that 41 percent of discharged managers had worked for four or more firms.
One immediate response to all this is to say that the managers who are suffering are usually not the cosmocrats but their parents, the trusting organization men. In terms of overall job losses, that is probably true. It is hard to imagine that many of the elderly white-collar workers at General Motors who took early retirement had global values or saw themselves as knowledge workers. In Wired’s poll of digital citizens, almost seven in ten of them felt they could “control change,” compared with an average of five in ten. But that does not mean that cosmocrats avoid such savagery altogether. They tend to work either in industries that have hire-and-fire habits (e.
g., finance, the media, and technology) or in ones in which a career path is really no more than a succession of gambles with big prizes but long odds. The grottier duplexes in the San Fernando Valley and Palo Alto are full of talented film producers and software engineers who have toiled away lovingly on dozens of projects that have failed to catch fire. The phrase portfolio career sounds quite romantic until you have children and realize that you have no company pension plan or medical insurance.
Even when they are established more firmly, America’s cosmocrats still suffer from several symptoms of affluenza. The first is overwork. According p. 235 to Laura Lofaro, a Wall Street headhunter at Sterling Resources, these days an investment bank will typically ask three managers to do the work that it would have once had five do, and pay them more. This behavior is goaded by analysts who often judge firms according to their profits per employee. In Silicon Valley, people talk about “sleep camels”—people who can work throughout the week and then get their rest on weekends.
Numerous studies have shown that American managers would willingly give up some pay for shorter hours. Sleep, The Wall Street Journal has decided, has become “the new status symbol,” with entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com boasting about the “regular eight hours” he gets.[14] Indeed, the ability to set your own hours is one reason many cosmocrats in large firms gaze enviously not only at Bezos but at their peers who have become independent consultants. The contraction of corporate America, as it deals with both the deflation of the bubble and the aftermath of Enron, has forced people to work harder than before to keep their jobs.
A particular bone of contention for many cosmocrats is expatriate life. Study after study shows that companies of all sizes want to send more people to work abroad, yet the same studies show that persuading them to go is getting increasingly difficult—particularly now that the destination is as likely Shenzhen as San Francisco. For married cosmocrats, moving abroad is often a two-career decision. Both the proportion of married expatriates and the number of expatriates taking children with them are declining.[15] And family concerns are still the most common reasons why people want to return home early. Things have gotten so bad that companies such as Whirlpool and Quaker Oats have taken to sending retirees to overseas posts for six-month stints.
The number of hours worked or the number of people sacked are fairly easy to measure; status and peace of mind are not. Cosmocrats often smirk at the official perks that organization men enjoyed, but the democratization of the American workforce has not always helped the managerial classes. Vice presidents have been forced to give away power to semiautonomous teams in order to make their organizations more flexible. Firms have outsourced operations that managers used to regard as part of their fiefs. Status-enhancing perks, such as executive dining rooms, have long since disappeared; now some companies expect their managers to be out on the road so often that they are forced to “hotdesk” and share offices. Perhaps the most important perk that has disappeared is the reliable career ladder. Careers now tend to proceed in great jumps. Those who are left out tend to feel as if they are going nowhere. Some cosmocrats who are promoted quickly p. 236 flourish; others arrive at their new positions unprepared and, because of the flatter structures, there are far fewer consiglieri to help them.
What is missing often is a sense of belonging. Most cosmocrats revel in the freedom they have to change jobs, but they do not enjoy the same freedom being shown to them. One day you go to work as one of Du Pont’s 2,600 information-system employees; the next day, after an outsourcing deal, you are all working for Computer Sciences Corporation. Many cosmocrats are haunted by the memory of “the day that Dad got sacked”; determined not to suffer the same fate, they jump from place to place. A McKinsey survey in 1998 found that the average number of companies an executive would work for during his career had increased to 5.2, from 2.9 ten years earlier, and was likely to increase to 6.9 in another ten years.[16]
Some business-school professors such as Jeffrey Pfeffer point to the growing number of American companies that are trying to build cultures that can retain the young and the talented; they also argue that pay is not the best way to engender loyalty. On the other hand, the cosmocrats’ insecurity seems an inevitable part of their meritocracy. Meritocrats in a fluid society are never quite as sure of their position as are aristocrats who have inherited their positions in a much more stable world.
The Perils of Placelessness
Are cosmocrats a good thing? Their anxiety may not be terribly good for them as individuals, but it is arguably good for their class as a whole. In his castigation of Davos man, Samuel Huntington argued that the species was doomed to disaster because of its own complacency. In fact, it is hard to see how this new elite will degenerate into a self-satisfied establishment in the manner of older national elites. Bill Gates may be arrogant, and he may be wrong, but there are not many grounds for calling him complacent. Globalization hugely increases people’s power to bypass established players in order to get what they want: to use FedEx if the national mail system is too slow, cable TV if the networks serve up too much pap, and Amazon.com if the local bookshops charge too much for too little. That means that everybody has to stay on their toes.
Indeed, the great virtue of life under the cosmocrats is that the elite is relatively open and meritocratic: Anyone who can get a good degree at a respectable university or who can invent a clever new product can enter it. The cosmocrats believe that people should be judged on the basis of what they achieve rather than on who their parents were. To be sure, the cosmocrats are a decidedly Western class, but within the elite this is seen as a problem to p. 237 be overcome rather than anything to be proud of. The elite is going out of its way to recruit people from the rest of the world.
Yet even as one admires their openness, there are several things that give pause. The first is superficiality. A young example of the breed is often far better traveled than even the most wizened sailor that Joseph Conrad could invent. But the very ease of modern travel imposes limitations. The cosmocrats have no Conradian depth. Just as it is all too easy to confuse motion with thought, it is all too easy to confuse a business trip with an in-depth study of another culture. Cosmocrats tend to think they know a country because they have shuttled between the airport and a hotel. But they seldom meet ordinary people, let alone study their lives in any depth. This faux familiarity leads to mistakes. Rupert Murdoch’s television empire in Asia would have done better if his lieutenants had realized earlier that Indians, Chinese, and Indonesians (just to name the populations of the three biggest countries in Asia) are profoundly different people. Had the IMF’s bright young economists ventured outside their hotel rooms in Seoul and Jakarta, they might have understood the relationship between business, politics, and society in the economies they were trying to guide.
Similarly, the cosmocrats’ reverence for brainpower is usually one of their redeeming features. Yet as William Fulbright pointed out, “the best and the brightest” can still succumb to the arrogance of power. Indeed, in some ways this elite is more likely to than previous ones: Even the stupidest monarch must have harbored the occasional private doubt about the divine right of kings, but nobody is allowed to argue with a top SAT score. A host of cosmocratic institutions, including both the IMF and Long-Term Capital Management, have been prey to the idea that all they needed to do was apply their formidable brainpower to any problem and it would disappear in a puff of smoke. In Russia, what was obvious to mere taxi drivers—the country was degenerating into a kleptocracy—somehow escaped many of the “new Morgans” that BusinessWeek profiled. In Asia, the localcrat billionaires were certainly mauled, but they tended to survive, unlike cosmocrat know-it-all institutions, such as Peregrine, a Hong Kong investment bank.
The biggest set of worries concerning the cosmocrats have to do with what Robert Reich dubbed the “secession of the successful.”[17] The cosmocrats are increasingly cut off from the rest of society: Its members study in foreign un
iversities, spend a period of time working abroad, and work for organizations that have a global reach. They constitute a world within a world, linked to each other by myriad global networks but insulated from the more hidebound members of their own societies. They usually secrete themselves in isolated suburbs, send their children to private schools, and in general p. 238 avoid city centers. Although they tend to cluster in certain areas, such as Bangalore or London, they have little in common with their working-class neighbors. They are more likely to spend their time chatting with their peers around the world—via phone or e-mail—than talking to their neighbors in the projects around the corner. Manuel Castells, a professor at Berkeley and Silicon Valley’s favorite social theorist, has summed up the problem neatly: “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”[18]
True, the offices of global companies in emerging markets are increasingly run by locals, yet these are locals with a difference, the modern equivalents of Macaulay’s Musalmans, “Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Wherever they triumph, the cosmocrats seem to eliminate whatever is distinctive about the local. International hotel chains often have the same design the world over, even down to the texture of the towels and the make of the toiletries. All these features help to persuade the cosmocrats that they are lords of humankind; they can also instill a dangerous sense of abstraction from the host society.
In the United States, a large number of cosmocrats seem to live in the sorts of places where signs promise immediate armed responses. In the emerging world, the isolation is even more complete. In Johannesburg, razor wire glints behind the swimming pools. In Moscow, heavily built “chauffeurs” take the children to school. At a beachside brunch in Brazil, behind yet more gates and guards, two foreign bankers’ wives whisper about a friend who had to go home after she was carjacked. One gated community in China, Shanghai Links, boasts a country club, an eighteen-hole golf course, an American international school, a baseball diamond, a strip mall, a hospital, a five-star hotel, and eight hundred ranch-style houses, each equipped with built-in air purifiers. Everything about the community, including the grass, has been imported; the power, sewage, and water-treatment plants are private, freeing the inhabitants from dependence on China’s unpredictable public sector.
A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization Page 34