KEY POINTS:
The SFO used to be dead glam. In the shoulder-padded, mirrorglass era of the '80s and '90s, the Serious Fraud Office was a repository for bright sparks; wannabe Eliot Spitzers with a pulsing frontal cortex and cool forensic smarts. In those days, under director Charles Sturt, the SFO crackled with intelligence and the arrogance of righteousness. Lawyers, financial journalists and politicians buzzed around it.
Other employers with the saucy allure of power and influence: the Treasury under Murray Horn, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington, Russell McVeagh, TVNZ when Brent Harman ran the joint and maybe even PR company Consultus during the Ian Fraser years. Oh, and Fay, Richwhite. Like the SFO, all gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, they were the corporate equivalent of an elite Swat force; a rigorous intellectual meritocracy where brainiacs were rewarded and muddled thinking was sneered at with an uncompromising Art of War bluntness.
But, like the SFO, none of these organisations have that sort of Darwinian culture anymore. Treasury is too wussy to give the Government bad news; Saatchi just makes ads; 'nuff said about TVNZ; Consultus are spin doctors; and Fay, Richwhite barely exists. Russell McVeagh tries to position itself above the pack but it's hard to be elite when you are aiming to be diverse and fulfil EEO objectives.
The SFO has certainly lost its mystique and become just another quango of accountants with a low metabolic rate. It was flat-footed in some of its most recent high-profile prosecutions. It belly-flopped in the expensive Digitech case after idiotically trying to portray savvy opportunistic investors as victims, and bungled the Westpac Rescue Helicopter Trust and Salisbury files.
Does any of this matter? Surely it is a good thing that we have gentler, team-focused workplaces with in-house yoga classes and flexible hours. The Darwinian corporation is such a joke that it is parodied on The Apprentice with its "You're fired" tagline.
And the gold standard of ruthlessly intellectual culture, McKinsey & Co, was deeply embarrassed by the Enron scandal and may never be the same. "McKinsey has always had a special aura about it, a sense that it employs only the best of the best, that its management advice is smarter than anyone else's, and that its theories are a little akin to tablets handed down from on high ... In fact, it's hard to think of a place that believes in the value of brainpower more than McKinsey," write Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind in The Smartest Guys in the Room. The McKinsey approach is now seen as arrogant and passé. But it doesn't solve one problem of human nature: bright people still want to work with other bright people. Some of them, batty as it seems to slackers like me, get a buzz from a winner-takes-all contest. A survival-of-the-brightest culture, ideologically unsound as it is, often produces the best work. And as the SFO can attest, if the work is no good: you're fired.
