The New Orgman

The new orgman sells logistics. He sells management styles and networking protocols. Organization is content. Procedure is product. Similarly, logistical specifications and rules direct the arrangement "real estate products" -- offices, malls, global franchises, transportation hubs, and entertainment centers. Each set of instructions outlines a very specific spatial protocol or game that is played with the same ingredients and rules whether it is in Texas or Taiwan. Although these formats are often treated like emblems of banality, they operate in ways that are often elaborate and strange. The generic is often loud, hilarious and full of temporary public space, and it relies on mistakes and risks that make it, not banal and monolithic, but penetrable.

Business self-help magazines profile the new orgmen of just-in-time production and global commerce with choppy hard-hitting, copy that weaves new logistical jargon into old plot lines about the self-made man. The profiles maintain the fiction that the orgman is streamlining commerce with the optimal management of production and consumption. These claims of optimization, however often quickly become impossible within the comedies of the marketplace -- a marketplace based not on inherent values or logic, but rather reliant on the largely unpredictable desires of consumers. Comedy somehow suits the broad antics and characters of the marketplace. The orgman generates millions of square feet of space, sometimes even international territory that may cumulatively amount to the size of a small nation. Yet, in the same way that a joke can topple our accustomed constructs, the orgman's power and his earnest pursuit of optimal logistics are always on the verge of being replaced.

A company like Wal-Mart attempts to conquer the world with large-format retail. The Schipol Group makes international airport cities into a repeatable real estate cocktail. Other companies, like Starbucks, the cloying new urbanists of the hypermarket, attempt to generate their own form of urbanism through repetitive small scale commerce. Companies like AMC Theaters and Arnold Palmer Golf operate within the durations and specialized spaces of entertainment, looking for new agglomerations of leisure. They cross-match the time it takes to go shopping against the time it takes to play golf or tally the viewer cycles that multiple movie screens generate. Changing one small physical detail in these organizations recalibrates many more steps in a process and has exponential effects in a repetitious spatial format.

While there is no physical terrain left to discover on the planet there are desires and time frames and under-marketed populations within which the shaping of consumption is perceived to be an act of discovery, creativity and production. In the case of Virgin Atlantic, for instance, the company sells its management logistics, procedures that can be applied to any product and are, in fact the result of profiling customers, profiling generational behavior, the proclivities of a consumer population over a range of products and services. Companies like Federal Express or Price Club organizations actually sell their logistical intelligence to other companies as a kind of prized formula.

In a world organized by "teams" and "families," new age CEOs have replaced the word "monopoly" with "synergy." They are "sharing" intelligence when they enter into massive affiliations that numb the competition. Many of the companies want their brand to mean everything, to encompass an approach to living by providing everything from potting soil to dresses. There are, however, cyclical trends associated with the need to extend contact time with customers or create a seasonal promotions that ironically refreshes the brand by accessorizing it with other brands. More brands come into the constellation, and more potential competitors are on the same team. Brands as well as associations with infrastructure, advertising, entertainment, or celebrities seems to be about a desire for flattering accouterment to serve a catholic a company that no longer wants to look omni-functional and self-sufficient. It often means, however, that the company is simply going through another cycle of expansion and incorporation and risk spreading. And since process is product, the purchased item may become more generic by becoming more particularized.