I had a friend in St. Paul, where I used to live, who insisted on celebrating with champagne occasions that most of us would take as bleak defeats, especially being fired from a job.
He’d seen enough of the organizational world, this every man jack (whom I’ll call Jack), to know that every organization has something of General Motors about it. It’s massive, unwieldy, uncomfortable with creativity and the (merely) personal. It won’t move gladly off the mark, which is the spot it is used to sit.
Jack celebrated his own firings and mine with insistent cheer and regularity, always producing a bottle of serviceable champagne to mark the occasion (no, not Pieper-Heidseck but not Andre’s either) and a stogie too for good measure.
This is the end of that disaster, he proposed, and the beginning of a brave new adventure.
I’ve known enough organizations to know the sad, slow dysfunction at the heart of the beast. It moves unwillingly, it thinks unwittingly. It sniffs out and coughs up those that don’t give every sign of assimilation.
Still, there’s this matter of “emotional intelligence,” as it’s been called. We can’t go on and on getting shit-canned, can we? The world doesn’t have enough champagne to float us in perpetuity! We don’t have enough peace of mind to stand in perpetual dissent and opposition. (What’s the point of fighting your whole life like the Tamil Tigers only to be done in, violently, at the end?)
So we choose our battles and bide our time, serving the beast and looking forward to the day when it will swallow us and not cough us up in a cannonade of chewed bones and wet feathers. We look forward to serving such a beast as sees a bigger picture than the near-term bottom line and Wall Street’s fury when the gains don’t meet expectations.
(For more about champagne and its association with both victory and defeat, go to http://salsabravagrill.com/a-toast-to-champagne-and-sparkling-wines.html.)
