by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

Adam Bryant, who writes the “Corner Office” column for the New York
Times, knows no evil. The ceo’s he interviews on matters of hiring and
management, rhapsodize on the importance of being a team player, being
creative, enthusiastic, learning from failure. They are religious
about answering all their emails within 24 hours, of treating
subordinates with respect, sharing credit. Bryant and his ceo’s dwell
in a corporate paradise of interpersonal harmony.

In a recent interview, with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, there was no
hint of Ballmer’s reputation for abrasiveness, or the notoriously
confrontationist culture at Microsoft, where policy was often
determined by the “smart guy” (in Microsoft parlance) with the most
lung power. Instead, Ballmer engaged in introspection about his own
native impatience. Well, maybe all those billions have had a mellowing
effect.

There are no Bill Paleys in Bryant’s best-of-all-possible corporate
worlds. Paley, the founder and lifetime chairman of CBS, whose
“special vitality” Truman Capote once attributed to a special diet:
“He looks like someone who has just swallowed an entire human being.”
(David Halberstam, The Powers That Be,” P. 30)

Sometimes, however, intimations of disharmony do insinuate themselves
into “Corner Office.” The recent interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D.,
president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health
Program, is a case in point. Headlined “Talk to Me, I’ll Turn My Phone
Off,” Yamada held forth on the importance of respecting others. “I
don’t have a mobile phone turned on,” he said, “because I’m talking to
you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation
we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly,
but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be
sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and
I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts,
and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.”

The Times headline writer knows what he’s doing; this is worth a
headline. Who hasn’t suffered the indignity of a conversation
interrupted by an incoming phone call, email, sms, beeper? Not to
mention an actual interloper in the flesh pounding at the door. The
world has become such an endless stream of interruption, though, that
the very concept of interruption has become attenuated. If there is no
flow to interrupt, there is no cause for feeling impinged upon. Why
should anyone object, then, to being put on hold while your host takes
a call? It’s the “me-first” personality given cultural sanction.

In the midst of this culture of rudeness, there are still a few
people, like Yamada, who know otherwise. For anyone familiar with
Judaism’s Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, 5:6), though, it should
not be news. The Sages include interrupting as one of the defining
traits of a “golem.” Golem translates variously as dolt, primitive,
unformed or unfinished person. One who habitually interrupts
conversations is missing something. Not only is he missing the thing
the other person wanted to say that he stopped him from saying, but it
reveals a lack of respect for the person who was talking. The
interruptor is saying, in effect, “What I have to say right now is
more important that whatever you were about to say; and it can’t wait,
but you can.” *

There is another kind of golem in Jewish literature—the Golem of
Prague. According to legend, the Maharal of Prague used kabbalah to
create a powerful, robot-like defender of that Jewish community, who
acted strictly on the instructions of the Maharal. But the word golem
is the same, because in both cases the golem is missing something
fundamental. The Golem of Prague lacked free will; the golem Yamada is
trying to keep out of the corner office lacks manners.

Whereas the Golem of Prague had no hope of developing into anything
more than he was (since he was also missing the human emotion of
hope), not so the golem of today. Maimonides explains that a golem is
a person with the same virtues as anyone else, but that they exist in
disorder. Someone who doesn’t know the right time and place for
things, whether in social intercourse or anything else, risks
classification as a golem, an unfinished person. But such a person is
not without hope. He can learn to order his priorities. To begin with
that “me” should not always be put first; that waiting for the other
guy to finish may be the path to finishing, to perfecting, his own
personality.

* Yamada was averting interruption, the Sages were condemning
interrupters, it amounts to the same thing.

No related posts.