I've Been Represented

I heard an interesting segment on NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday about China’s growth and the accompanying rapid changes in the Chinese language. The latest is the emergence of a special meaning for the word “bei” (pronounced bay), which when used in front of a verb makes the tense passive. Bei and passive tense are used by the Chinese these days to convey the idea of the people’s misrepresentation by authorities, part of a widespread rebellion against China’s heavy-handed leadership and slowly dwindling authority – “bei” is used to communicate in the “passive subversive” tense.

Thus, in China if you’ve been beaten to death in prison and the authorities are claiming it was suicide, then you’ve been “suicided.” If they shut down your subversive blog, you’ve been “harmonized.” And, if they gather together a group of people you’ve never heard of before and have them vote on matters you care about, you’ve been “represented.”

Especially for the younger people in China there’s an increasing thirst for freedom of speech and other liberties many of us take for granted in the United States. On the other hand, I can say I’ve seen something like the same type of scenario play out right here in the U.S. on occasion. Suppose your corporation conducts an employee survey which reveals that a number of employees believe poor performers are not being dealt with properly. So, the company decides that the best way to handle this challenge is to impose a strict curve on the performance review ratings each year, wherein managers must assign the highest rating of 1 to no more than 15% of employees, the next highest rating of 2 to 50%, the “average” rating of 3 to 30%, and the “not meeting expectations” rating to 5%, regardless of the actual distribution of productivity or growth for said employees. If you happen to be a skillful manager who works with the lowest performing 5% to either help them improve or move them out of the company, well then you get to identify the new 5% of losers next year from your remaining employee pool.

And suppose further that when managers and employees protest that this is not very fair all in all, they are told that the company is merely responding to the employee survey and giving the employees what they themselves requested.

It looks like this is a case where employees have been “represented.”

Real management would involve something much more difficult – senior managers identifying and taking a look at each of the poor managers in the company who are not truly differentiating when they assess the performance of their employees and who are lazily giving too many of them high ratings, and dealing appropriately and individually with each of these managers. But instead a “one-size-fits-all” approach with an easy-to-measure curve is applied. And everybody--the good, the bad and the ugly--can equally claim that they have been “managed.”