A Good Boss is Hard to Find: A Course in American Gothic Management

Palo Alto, CA (The Cheeky Post) Ever since she was a little girl, Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be a billionaire. She realized her dream briefly, as her blood-testing company Theranos reached a valuation of $9 billion and her personal worth nudged $5 billion, but what she accomplished is far more valuable than the accumulation of worldly assets. Elizabeth Holmes founded a novel way of doing business, exposed this week in John Carreyrou's terrific new book Bad Blood, a book that is destined to become required reading in business schools around the world as the foundation of the course known as American Gothic Management.

The Cheeky Post has obtained a copy of the outline for an American Gothic Management course to be offered at an Ivy League business school in the fall of 2018.

Course Objective

Workers’ behaviours are endlessly fascinating subjects that have a number of important implications. Unfortunately, misconceptions about how to manage people and run an organization abound. This course will provide a theoretical foundation that you can use to implement the proven principles of American Gothic management.

This course focuses on the “black boxes” of organizations. The people. Having a great product idea, coupled with well-designed financing arrangements, and a masterful marketing plan, will be of limited value unless organizational members can be manipulated.

The primary goal of this course will be to improve your understanding of how to influence people in the context of an organizational structure. Having a greater knowledge of human behaviour and being able to reset your own moral compass to achieve your vision will help you to better understand, predict and create the attitudes and behaviours of the people critical to your organizations success. The course advances through five levels of thinking about managing others based on Gothic principles.

Learning Outcomes

We will explore the five themes of American Gothic Management as they relate to Theranos in particular, and to organizations in general.

• Use of oppression and persecution, darkness and obscurity. You will learn how to use employee silos as a way to promote secrecy and avoid collaboration, and to extract the best from the best and fire the rest. Gothic office architecture will be of particular interest as we experiment with hidden laboratories, forms of surveillance, and bullet-proof windows. The pros and cons of engaging in a sexual relationship with a trusted employee who can be used to do dirty work will also be thoroughly examined. Upon mastering this section, you will feel empowered to explore extremes of employee abuse, and excesses of expense.
• Mocking humour. An undercurrent of mockery is a coping mechanism often observed in American Gothic companies that are designed as random reward-punishment experiments. The goal of American Gothic management is to put employees in a perpetual state of learned helplessness so that they will be receptive to your instructions. You will learn how to uncover pockets of insubordination where dark humour may be lurking so that you can expose and eliminate its practitioners.
• An inability to overcome perversity through rational thought. To operate effectively as a leader within a Gothic environment you must see yourself as an historical figure on a messianic mission, no matter how small or inconsequential or non-existent your product or service may be. You will learn how to design and promote a promised land into which you can lure employees, CEOs, former secretaries of state, and four-star generals.

Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. ~ from Bad Blood, our American Gothic Management textbook

• Liminal positioning between opposing worlds. You will learn how to become the embodiment of the unblinking Gothic CEO occupying the transitional space between child and adult, female and male, monied and bankrupt. You will become a master of the science of enclothed cognition, voice manipulation and strategic self-deprecation. We will study Elizabeth Holmes' TED talk from 2014 and you will learn how to perform in the lowest pitch your vocal chords will permit as you balance on the threshold between truth and falsehood.

• The outlines of real horrors. Most importantly, you will learn how your company can become an expression of the dreams and anxieties of the larger world. Feel the thrill of a transgressive experience where you harness the power of real-world horrors to amass fortune and fame where the only downside is public disgrace, a ban on running a company for ten years, and an SEC fine.

Evaluation

Students will be evaluated on their ability to argue that it's better to be rich and dumb than poor and smart, a TED talk in which they make an in-persona pitch for a transformative technology with a heartwarming message, and an employee intimidation plan based on the Gothic "fire-them-every-minute" principle.

No team work will be required in the American Gothic Management course.

Additional reading: Flannery O'Connor's classic of American Gothic fiction, A Good Man is Hard to Find

About the Author: Who cares about the author when we're talking about American Gothic Management? A copy of John Carreyrou's Bad Blood goes to the first person who can correctly identify the name of the diabolical man pictured in the cover art (there are few images of this mysterious man available online) who was Elizabeth Holmes' lover, COO and employee hitman.