The Executive Way

What causes conflict among high-level American corporate executives? How do executives manage their conflicts? Based on interviews with over 200 executives and their support personnel, the author provides an intimate portrait of these men and women as they cope with problems usually hidden from those outside their ranks. Personal and corporate scandals, compensation battles, budget worries, interdepartmental rivalries, personal enmities and general rancour are among everyday challenges faced by executives. Morrill shows that what most influences the way managers handle routine conflicts are the cultures created by their company's organizational structure. The issues most likely to cause conflict within corporations, Morrill identifies as managerial style, competition between departments, and performance evaluations, promotions and compensation. Among the people whose day-to-day lives discussed are: Jacobs, a divisional executive whose intuitive understanding of the corporate hierarchy enables him to topple his incompetent superior without direct confrontation; Fuller, who through a mix of brains, guile, and connections rises from staff executive secretary to corporate vice president in a large bank; Green, an old-fashioned accounting partner in a firm being taken over by management consultants; and the "Princess of Power," "Iron Man," and the "Terminator"-executives fighting their way to the top of a successful entertainment company. The daily life and conflict management among corporate elites recorder here should be of interest to professionals, scholars and practitioners in organizational culture and behaviour, managerial decision-making, dispute, social control, law and society, and organizational ethnography.