The Gray Flannel Office
Fifty years ago happiness was a job at a very big company. A look back at the days when the FORTUNE 500 was young and the Organization Man reigned supreme.
By Ellen Florian Kratz

(FORTUNE Magazine) – IN THE 1956 MOVIE THE MAN IN THE GRAY Flannel Suit, corporate recruiters offer Gregory Peck's character, Tom Rath, a job at a prestigious company for the same pay as his current position. When Rath hesitates, they tell him the money shouldn't matter if he really wants to work for United Broadcasting Corp. Rath speaks plainly: "You can hardly expect me to switch jobs purely for the pleasure of working for UBC."

Seems like a perfectly sensible sentiment. But in Rath's time the words were almost shocking. And the scene speaks volumes about what was required in corporate America 50 years ago. Anybody looking to hire him would think, Here is a man more concerned about himself than he is about his prospective employer. Here is a man apparently oblivious to the pride that comes from being part of a big, successful corporation. Salary is a major factor for Rath; why, if he allows money to determine where he takes a job, then some other company could just as easily buy him off (read: he's not loyal). People just didn't act that way if they wanted to succeed in business, with or without really trying.

Today, of course, Rath is a quaint antique from the days when businessmen were businessmen and businesswomen took dictation--and both of them showed up at the office looking rather smart. But the mid-1950s also marked the beginning of the FORTUNE 500, which debuted a year before Gregory Peck put on his suit. In fact, you might say that FORTUNE literally defined the postwar corporate soldier: A few months after the premiere of the movie, a FORTUNE editor named William Whyte published The Organization Man. It was a phrase that came to define the era. And depending on your point of view, that era was either a golden age of job stability or a grim slog of stultifying conformity. Either way, the Organization Man set the expectations of what a "good job" could be --expectations that we're still wrestling with today.

BACK THEN, THE 500 WAS awash in Organization Men: professional managers who were neither entrepreneurs nor sons of entrepreneurs, but white-collar lieutenants to captains of industry. They had an understanding with big business: They would work hard from nine to five, pay their dues, and be loyal to the company. In return they received a decent wage, lifetime employment, and pensions when they retired. Job hopping was a no-no. For the Organization Man, "one thing was clear," says Warren Bennis, co-author of Geeks & Geezers. "You're going to be in this organization for life." And life was good.

"These people only work for The Organization," Whyte wrote. "They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions." This sort of man (and it's fair to say that they were men) was not the rugged individual or the risk-it-all entrepreneur that American success stories are made of. For the luxury of not having to scramble for opportunity after opportunity, the Organization Man had to pretty much marry the company, usually right out of college. Corporations like U.S. Steel, General Motors, and Sears Roebuck would come courting on campuses. A 1956 FORTUNE story called "Twenty Minutes to a Career" notes that for a great many of the students, "a brief interview will settle their careers for life."

Once ensconced, the Organization Man conformed to whatever that company wanted him to do. The corporation superseded individual brilliance, and mavericks were not welcome. Or as ITT's Harold Geneen once put it, individuals were to be "as predictable and controllable as the capital resources they must manage." The Organization Man could often be a sycophant and a lackey. In one anecdote from David Halberstam's The Fifties, a reporter asks a high-ranking public relations official at GM for the time. The executive doesn't bother to look at his watch but turns to his aide and says, "Ken, tell him what time it is." Life was mapped out for the Organization Man. Business trips were planned well in advance. For the most part, he knew what he would face each day on the job and each year in his career. There was a linear quality to his path that could easily be charted. Job A led to Job B, which led to Job C, and so on. He got ahead by knowing a little more than the employees under him.

It was hardly the American way. But after 16 grinding years of depression and war, Americans were looking for something other than swashbuckling careerism. GIs and their sons wanted money, yes. But they wanted security too. The surest way to this new American dream was to align oneself with a corporation. And corporations could afford to keep rich promises to employees thanks to the pent-up demand that brought the economy roaring back to life after years of denial. It helped tremendously that the economies of competing countries were busy recovering from a devastating war--Europe and Japan were still in shambles, and rebuilding claimed most of their resources. It also helped that a business-friendly Republican sat in the White House. The military-mannered GI Generation and the deferential cohort that followed it, the Silent Generation (i.e., those born too late to fight in the war), fostered and fit into the command-and- control way of corporations. And when you consider that these so-called Silents were a smallish group in a booming job market, you have a perfect Organization Man storm. Says Chuck Underwood, president of the Generational Imperative, a consulting firm: "The white silent male has enjoyed the smoothest career ride in American history."

He hopped that ride in an office that reflected the mentality of the age. It wasn't difficult for a manager to figure out where he stood on the ladder. All he had to do was measure the square footage of his space, note the quality of his chair, count the windows, and register how close his office was to the big boy. Carpeting was a status symbol--that is, until carpeting became ubiquitous and hardwood with an oriental rug became the floor covering of power. Mathematical equality was key. A Crown Zellerbach executive once told FORTUNE that when his company moved into its new San Francisco headquarters, "we'll be able to arrange walls so that the offices for executives of equal rank can all be built to within a square inch of one another in size." At the Manhattan headquarters of Colgate-Palmolive in the late '50s, there were A and B offices of the same size, each with three windows. A offices were carpeted and had wood furniture; B offices were tiled and contained steel furniture. Try to guess which ones were on the VP track.

Companies were also big on uniformity. Forget bringing pictures, plants, or clocks from home; many companies supplied stock decorations for employees to choose from. "When we moved uptown, we wanted everything absolutely uniform," said one oil executive. "We wanted to get away from all that individuality down at 26 Broadway." Executives, as you can imagine, had the plush quarters--they had their own bathrooms and dining suites. GM chief Harlow Curtice once deigned to be photographed reading the newspaper in the bedroom of his corporate suite down the hall from his office.

All that loyalty and consistency seems quaint bordering on ridiculous today, but Organization Men really were the foundation of some extremely successful companies. An excellent example is IBM, which was built upon the quirks and values of founder Thomas Watson Sr. The company motto, THINK, was plastered on offices, cafeterias, stationery--everywhere. IBMers wore white shirts, tried to avoid alcohol, and sang company songs. "Our aim is clear: to make each year exceed the one before" is one line from the company's most adored song, "Ever Onward." The Hundred Percent Club was the emblem of success at IBM. How could a salesman join? By meeting 100% of his quota for the year. It was from this springboard that praise and promotions came. Membership also brought several days at the annual Hundred Percent Club convention, where salesmen were feted with dinners, speeches, and entertainment. "The Hundred Percent Club drove IBM's sales culture the way the World Series drives millions of baseball players to learn the game and try to be the best," writes Kevin Maney in his biography of Watson, The Maverick and His Machine. The fun and prosperity didn't end with the job: It was an all-encompassing lifestyle. For $1 a year, employees had access to swimming pools, golf, and social events at the IBM Country Club near Endicott, N.Y.

IT'S HARD TO SAY WHEN THE ERA ENDED, BUT corporations gradually realized that Organization Man was too expensive. He had to go--and his secretary too. The failure of Studebaker's pension plan in the '60s revealed the first cracks in his perfectly ordered world. When the company shut its South Bend, Ind., plant, a number of workers lost their pensions, which eventually inspired the creation of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. A relief, yes, but no guarantee that the workaday world would go on as before (and indeed the PBGC now has its own widely heralded debt problems). That '70s show of economic stagnation--inflation, gas lines, and a stunning rush of foreign competition--would wreak further havoc on the cherished big-company job. By the time Jack Welch was slashing GE's payrolls in the 1980s, it was clear Organization Man was giving way to Reorganization Man (and even Outsourced Man).

But the end of the era of the sure-thing corporate job (and the sure-thing corporate pension) hasn't been all bad. For one thing, successful businesspeople are now allowed to be nonwhite and nonmale. In 1950 more than half of white-collar women were considered clerical. Today Carly Fiorina heads the 11th-largest company on the FORTUNE 500. And who would have thought back in the 1950s that African-American men like Kenneth Chenault and Stan O'Neal would sit in the respective corner offices of American Express and Merrill Lynch?

There's been another, subtler change. Now that we're used to permanent job anxiety, we can at least enjoy not having to follow a strict, unvarying path to success. "We're seeing a much wider spectrum of potential ways to develop a career," says Robert Kelley of Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. People are more willing to go it alone--to go outside the company. And the role models for this startup urge grew up right under Organization Man's nose: Sam Walton opened his Wal-Mart in 1962; the Intel brainiacs set up shop in 1968; Fred Smith began flying his FedEx fleet in 1973--the list goes on.

It hasn't been easy, leaving Organization Man behind. But, as Kelley says, "We're going to come out on the other side of it in a much better place." And then no one will have to wear a gray flannel suit.