This Saturday at midnight (and on a couple of other occasions in the coming weeks), Turner Classic Movies is showing Executive Suite--an Academy Award-nominated film from 1954 that is, unfortunately, not yet available on DVD. Directed by John Houseman and starring luminaries such William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, June Allyson, Walter Pidgeon, and Shelley Winters, the film represents one of Hollywood's first studies of corporate culture.
I happened on the film when my Tivo recommended it several months ago. What I found unsettling, but not surprising, was the film's all-white cast and relegation of all of the women in the film to "stand-behind-your-man" roles. In this respect, it provides a benchmark against which to compare what has changed in 50 years.
But what surprised me were elements I did not expect to see in a film portraying corporate culture half a century ago. Poor succession planning launches the plot. A secondary plot revolves around insider trading. And a major character--notably, the antagonist--is a practitioner of crisis communication planning and Lean Six Sigma. No one in the film actually utters any of the terms I've italicized in the three previous sentences. But their presence suggested to me that while the players and lexicon in corporate culture may have changed significantly in 50 years, the underlying archetypes may not have changed as much as I used to think.
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