You don't have to be brainwashed to work here ...

I remember having a discussion with a Training Manager on the corporate responsibility to educate young staff to think. We agreed on the country in question's failure to encourage individualism through its education practices as was evident in the profiles of the latest graduate recruits. Should the organisation take on the task of turning these new recruits into, well, people? For the mutual benefit of them and the business?

That discussion echoes still. In many Western countries there is an assumption of individualism that is not born out by behaviour. The current fashion for measurable personality tests in recruitment, job-specific qualifications and constant financial targets demonstrate little understanding of psychology or the history of corporate success. Organisations always rely on individuality seeping through the system to provide innovation and challenge. Organisations always are at risk from the Systems Thinkers who regard everything as definable and measurable - and who seem to believe that other people will behave just like them in all known situations ...

Sigh. The Systems Thinkers are taking over. And the radical thinkers, like the falcon in that poem by Yeats, are turning and turning in the widening gyre. I don't see enough innovation and I don't see enough interest in innovation.

If I had to draw a composite for the devil, it would be an economist who believed in post-war French philosophy and behaviouralism.