In that discussion I found this sentence :”Finally Lorne Weil, a member of the team, proposed a new display to capture what was going on.” Though Keichel wanted his story to be accurate and complete, one of the rules of writing narrative to avoid referring to a minor character only once, and Lorne Weil was mentioned just this once. If readers paid the name any attention at all, they might have wondered if Lorne was a relative of the famous Sanford Weil.

But when I read that sentence my neurons started firing. I knew a Lorne Weil in high school. I think he was president of students’ council a few years before me. He was an excellent clarinetist and he performed Rhapsody in Blue and Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the school orchestra. And I vaguely remember sitting beside him on a flight between Boston and Toronto, probably forty years ago, and he was telling me about his job in management consulting.

I Googled Lorne Weil, confirmed my hunch, and found out lots of other interesting stuff. Yes he started his career in management consulting with BCG. He then moved to the technology sector, focusing on wagering systems and, from 1991 to 2008 was CEO of Scientific Games Corporation (SGMS on the Nasdaq), which describes itself as a supplier of instant lottery tickets and systems, online lottery systems, and pari-mutuel wagering systems and terminals.

Under Lorne’s leadership SGC did very well, increasing its revenues from $43 million to over a billion. Lorne also did very well: the industry publication Casino Journal told us that his total compensation in 2008 was $11 million, of which $ 8 million was in stock.

On the personal side, he lives in New York City and he’s on the Board of Overseers at Columbia Business School, where he took his MBA, and has endowed an “Outrageous Business Plan Competition.” He has a son Luke whose behavior appears to be outrageous, but in a different sense. Luke is discussed in a Jan. 7, 2008 feature article in New York Magazine by Jennifer Senior entitled Rich Kid Syndrome. Luke had a checkered academic career at Brown and Columbia Business School and served jail time for assaulting a girlfriend. Finally, Lorne gave the maximum allowable donation to the 2008 McCain presidential campaign.

What strikes me about Lorne’s narrative is the theme of personal reinvention. Walter Kiechel writes that “One can make a decent living as a senior partner at a major consulting firm - these days, a productive type can earn upward of $ 3 or $ 4 million a year - but as a few of the breed complain privately, it’s no way to become seriously wealthy.” (p. 223). The problem is that consultants advise, but they don’t manage. So Lorne went from being a consultant to the gaming industry to managing a firm in the gaming industry, he was rewarded with equity in the company, and he did become seriously wealthy.

The second reinvention involves crossing a national border. Quite a few ambitious Canadians leave for the Big Apple or elsewhere in the US, like it there, and as Michael Ignatieff - to the detriment of his political career in Canada - did, start to refer to Americans in the first person plural. Others-names names like Dan Aykroyd and Frank Gehry come to mind - retain some ties with Canada. It appears that Lorne no longer has any Canadian presence and sees America as his we.

The high school Lorne and I attended, Vaughan Road Collegiate, now Vaughan Road Academy, will be celebrating its eighty-fifth year next spring. (When I attended, Vaughan was one-third Jewish, one-third Italian, one-third working class WASP and it was a great place to learn about what would later be referred to as Toronto’s multi-ethnic reality, but that’s another story.) I’d like to re-encounter Lorne again at the celebration, but I’d be surprised if he makes it.

Chief Statistician Munir Sheik’s resignation on a matter of principle is extraordinary and courageous. I heard him speak once or twice and assumed from his soft-spoken manner and mild demeanour that he would continue to accommodate the government. To his credit, I underestimated him.

The most recent instance I could find of a resignation of a Canadian deputy minister on a matter of principle was in 1979, when Deputy Minister of Finance William Hood resigned because the newly-elected Clark Government wanted to institute income tax deductibility for mortgage payments, something his department, as well as most of the economics profession, saw as an unwarranted subsidy. Clark replaced him with an external appointment, Grant Reuber, a former academic economist then a vice-president at BMO.

To confirm my recollection of the event, I found a reference online to a 1989 article entitled “Governments Come and Go, but What of Senior Civil Servants?” written by Jacques Bourgault and Stephane Dion. In this context, the irony is, to use a favourite Stephen Harper adjective, rich.

One difference between the two events is that Hood was parachuted into a job at the IMF. Given the abrupt circumstances of Sheikh’s resignation and the tone of Industry Minister Tony Clement’s response, he appears to have jumped without a parachute. This is even more to his credit.

The bigger issue is what happens when public servants, on moral or professional grounds, disagree with their political masters’ policies. The story of appeasement in the Thirties in the UK provides one answer: stay in place but leak documents, as quite a few civil servants in the Foreign Office did, thereby enabling then renegade Conservative backbencher Winston Churchill to attack the government publicly. Those public servants in StatsCan who have been leaking thus have a heroic figure to emulate.

The papers tell us that Sheikh has been replaced by Wayne Smith, an assistant chief statistician, on an acting basis. Is Smith prepared do the politicians’ bidding and ignore the professional opinion of his colleagues, not to mention his entire stakeholder community?

The Government has the right to appoint the head of StatsCan, and it could search outside the agency to find someone in business or academe to implement the voluntary long-form census. Maybe it will find such a person amongst Prime Minister Harper’s former academic mentors at the University of Calgary. Tom Flanagan perhaps?

Where this story could be going brings to mind a common situation in the United States, discussed in Rosemary O’Leary’s book The Ethics of Dissent: Managing Guerrilla Government. There are a number of agencies, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor, whose agendas the Republicans don’t endorse, and indeed that the Republican core would prefer to abolish. Republican presidents have appointed agency heads as well as other political appointees who are at war with their career public servants. The career public servants then begin to operate as guerrillas.

This would be a very unfortunate outcome for a public service that operates on an ethic of professionalism and neutrality. Very unCanadian too, but, unless the Harper Government reverses itself on the census long-form, it may be where we are headed.

StatsCan is doing what public servants should be doing. They have accepted the government’s marching orders, but have indicated that to get a good picture of the population, they will have to send the form to a higher percentage of the population (one in three rather than one in five) and mount an advertising campaign. So we have the immediate irony, as we enter a period of fiscal constraint, that the voluntary long form will cost more than the compulsory long form.

Beyond the irony is a paradox. The politicians, most notably Industry Minister Tony Clement, who is carrying the can on this issue, continue to pander to the anti-government sentiment of their core supporters, telling us that the long census form is an element of the nanny state. In response to the retort that there have been only a handful of objections to the Privacy Commissioner, Clement is undermining that office by saying that people don’t think it is really independent, because it is only an arm of government. And Clement is also trashing the idea of public consultation, saying that the government was under no obligation to consult with organized interest groups that use the census.

When the Census happens next year, the advertising campaign will have to tell us why it is a good idea, even a patriotic duty, for those who get the long form to complete it, which will be exactly the opposite of Clement’s message.

Think for a minute about different instances when we give the government information. Generally, it is part of a transaction undertaken for another purpose. For example - and this was the subject of previous posts - to get a Nexus card, I had to provide lots of information, include the biometrics of an iris scan. But the quid pro quo was that I got the card. When we pay income tax, we provide lots of information, and the information allows the government to check whether we are meeting our obligations. In the case of the Census, there is no transaction involved, no immediate benefit. We provide the information - privacy-protected - so that the government can use it to design public policies that at some future date may benefit us.

How will this issue play out politically over the next few months? The Liberals appear to be getting interested in it, especially because it is one of the few where a clear principled difference can be made between them and the Conservatives. Will the NDP and Bloc support them, hence making it a test of confidence? Prime Minister Harper has said nothing, letting Tony Clement take the heat. Sooner or later, say Question Period when the House of Commons resumes in the fall, he will be drawn into it.

Finally, if the government persists with its position, next spring we will hear the advertising campaign and its message will be diametrically opposed to the Government’s. Will the Conservatives attempt to remain silent while the ads run? Certainly the Opposition will point out the contradiction between what the advertising campaign is saying and what the Government said previously. Conclusion: this is an originally technical issue that, having now been politicized, will continue to play for some time. Just watch.

First, the government’s. One interpretation of the government’s decision is that it is deferring to its anti-government core constituency. A more sinister interpretation of this decision, as well as the many cuts to Statistics Canada’s activities that preceded it (and were discussed in Picard’s article) is that this is a government that makes faith- or gut-feel based, rather than evidence-based, policy decisions, and so doesn’t need data. By all accounts, our prime minister is a smart man and a policy wonk, so this interpretation demeans him. I’d like to think Stephen Harper is no George Bush. But, if the first interpretation – deferring to the core constituency – is correct, then my response would be to urge the government to stand up to its core constituency, and tell them that better data is better for the country, and the best way to get better data is by keeping the compulsory long form.

My second perspective follows from the first, and provides a rationale for the compulsory long-form. The United States Government has traditionally spent liberally to gather data and then made it freely available. This doctrine has led to the Obama Government’s data.gov initiative to make government data sets available online for users to develop new applications. In this view, making government data available is seen as economic development policy of providing infrastructure to support American software developers. Our government talks endlessly about enhancing our competitiveness. Why doesn’t it adopt this aspect of the American approach to competitiveness?

My third perspective is bureaucratic. Statistics Canada is now led by Munir Sheikh, a economist with a superb track record in the Public Service of Canada. I can’t imagine he is very happy about this latest decision as well as the ongoing gutting of his agency’s capacity. Public servants may object to politicians’ intentions, but if the politicians do not waver, then they must loyally implement their decisions. So it would seem that Sheikh and his staff are doing that.

On the other hand, public servants have been known to act on their displeasure with politicians’ decisions by leaking information to the media and to interest groups. Perhaps there are public servants in Statistics Canada who are now acting as sources for Picard, or who are providing information for interest groups in business and academe who are voicing opposition to the weakening of the census.

Canada has a distinguished Chief Statistician emeritus, Ivan Fellegi, who served from 1985 to 2008. For his accomplishments, Fellegi won the Public Service of Canada Outstanding Achievement Award and is an Officer of the Order of Canada (among many other honours). I once encountered Fellegi in the early Nineties. I was editing a study of good practices and new developments in the Public Service of Canada that was ultimately published by the Commonwealth Secretariat. Regrettably, much of the material I was given by many departments was simply boiler-plate.

The one contribution that stood out was Fellegi’s report on improving human resource management in Statistics Canada. It was clear that the organization had done much, particularly in the areas of training and career development, and it was equally clear that Fellegi himself was the catalyst. Fellegi wrote the report in first person, and his passion for his organization was obvious. To make it consistent with the other reports, I was forced to rewrite it in third person. While I didn’t think of it in narrative terms then, as I do now, I was muting Fellegi’s voice. I now regret having done that.

To quote Paul Simon, “where have you gone Joe Dimaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

Two years after his retirement Fellegi remains professionally active, and I learned on the Internet that he is on a National Academy of Sciences advisory committee on the US Census, and is a mentor for the Trudeau Foundation. To his credit, Fellegi has spoken up publicly in an interview with the Canadian Press, criticizing the voluntary long-form because the data it produces will be unreliable.  One can only hope that a loud enough chorus of disapproval from users of Census data will get the government to change its decision.

]]> http://www.sandfordborins.com/2010/07/09/gutting-the-census-three-perspectives/feed/ http://www.sandfordborins.com/2010/07/01/winston-churchill%e2%80%99s-story-two-key-narrative-decisions/ http://www.sandfordborins.com/2010/07/01/winston-churchill%e2%80%99s-story-two-key-narrative-decisions/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:12:35 +0000 SandfordBorins.com http://www.sandfordborins.com/?p=709

There have been documentaries too numerous to recount about Winston Churchill, but very few docudramas. So I watched with great interest one that dealt with the interwar years (The Gathering Storm, released by HBO in 2002) and one with his political leadership during World War Two (Into the Storm, released by HBO in 2009). I found both compelling entertainment.

The challenge the directors (Richard Loncraine for The Gathering Storm and Thaddeus O’Sullivan for Into the Storm) and writer (Hugh Whitemore for both) faced was what to focus on in attempting to tell so full a story within a total of 150 minutes of screen time.

In The Gathering Storm, they paid considerable attention to the public servants, particularly in the Foreign Office, who leaked documents about German military rearmament to Churchill, thereby allowing him to mount a well-informed and effective critique of the government’s policy of appeasement. The whistleblower given most emphasis was Ralph Wigram, a senior Foreign Office official. In addition to his policy disagreement with the government, Wigram was personally motivated, having a disabled son, who would have been the victim of Nazi eugenics. The Prime Minister’s Office threatened to post Wigram far overseas, which, given his circumstances, would have resulted in separation from his wife and child. Even before the Prime Minister’s Office could deliver on its threat, Wigram was being ostracized within the Foreign Office.

Wigram was conflicted, depressed, and in 1936 died in mysterious circumstances that suggest a suicide. Churchill praised Wigram’s bravery in ignoring the threats and overcoming his fears to do what he felt was right. What Wigram did took great courage, and the creators made a brilliant choice in focusing on the courage of a man who, in his memoirs, Churchill referred to as a great unsung hero.

The second movie, Into the Storm, set out to explain a historical paradox. Why did the British electorate, barely two months after V-E Day, vote massively against Churchill? The movie was set during a holiday Churchill took in southern France between election day and, because of the long delays in counting the military vote overseas, and the day the results were known. Thus the movie combined Churchill’s reminiscences of the war, presented in flashback, and his growing doubts about the outcome of the vote and apprehension of a future in which he would return to the political wilderness.

The movie answers the question by showing that, during the campaign, the British voters came to realize that Churchill’s strength as a war time leader would make him a misguided peacetime leader. His weakness was that he would always be looking for an enemy to fight. During the campaign, Churchill gave a radio address replete with an exaggerated attack on the socialism of the Labour Party, implying that, if given power, it would enforce its policies through the creation of a British Gestapo. Clearly, this deeply offended Labour Party voters who supported the wartime Government of National Unity. Labour leader Clement Attlee was entirely on the mark when he said that Churchill disillusioned his own followers.

By deciding to present their narrative from the perspective of that turning point in Churchill’s life in July 1945, O’Sullivan and Whitemore found a way of thinking about Churchill’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader, as well as his fascinating contradictions as a person.

I did a post last summer (July 16, 2009) about Winston Churchill, CEO, a business book that attempted to mine Churchill’s life for leadership lessons for private sector managers. In it, I criticized the author, Alan Axelrod, for ignoring Churchill’s electoral defeat because it conflicted with his predetermined leadership lessons. In contrast, the strength of Whitemore’s screenplay is that he embraced that paradox, and used it as a vantage point for his narrative about Churchill as wartime leader.

My conclusion is that both movies are well worth watching: four thumbs up.

This is a lot that is almost always full, even in summer, by 9 am. So the drivers have to go somewhere else, and this creates inconvenience, and likely encourages some of them to drive downtown. Yesterday I parked on the street near the Lawrence subway station, the closest to York Mills, and received a $15 ticket for exceeding the 3 hour on-street parking limit.

In past years, the TTC shut down the York Mills parking lot for bus training in August. I assume that because they didn’t have more protests they shut it down longer this year. And of course this was done in typical TTC fashion, with no explanation. But couldn’t the TTC have found some alternative space for the activity that wouldn’t have disrupted hundreds of commuters for an entire summer?

This is typical of the TTC’s arrogant and unimaginative approach to service. It can establish a forum on public service, but whatever is said at the forum doesn’t seem to affect day-to-day operations.

I’ve sent a complaint through the website, but don’t expect a quick reaction.

Enlightened organizations have bots that scan the Internet for any comments about them in the blogosphere, and get back to the blogger. I’ve had such responses on several occasions, but again don’t expect this from the TTC.

Speaking of disruptions, I posted in mid-May about how disruptive and expensive the G20 summit would be, and, as more and more organizations are shutting their doors for that weekend, it’s clear I was right on the money about that one.

The only thing to do is escape, so I won’t be posting next week. I’ll be back after the summit, and hopefully in a better mood.

First, many fields within management have adopted a natural sciences research model that emphasizes publishing academic journal articles rather than books.

Second, the research component of the influential Financial Times global ranking of business schools is based on articles published in a list of 40 top-tier academic journals. Administrators attempting to improve a school’s rankings will therefore, as they say, incent faculty members to publish articles in those academic journals rather than books.

Third, business schools have been growing, which means hiring entry level faculty members. To get tenure, assistant professors need to publish quickly, and books take too long, so a business school with a young faculty - as most are - will concentrate on publishing academic journal articles.

Despite these reasons, there are a few management professors who continue to write books. I’ll suggest two important reasons why.

First, there are still some management professors, especially tenured full professors, who undertake big and ambitious research projects, and a book is the vehicle par excellance for publishing the results. A book is the place to publish a new theory, work out is implications and applications, and analyze the supporting evidence. A book is the place to synthesize a field or subfield. A book is the place to create a new field or subfield.

Here are a few examples at the Rotman School. Richard Florida wrote a book to explain and elaborate on his theory of the creative class. Andy Stark in a recent book addressed the complicated question of the shifting margin between public and private sector responsibilities in the US. In my own case, I found that a book was the best format for a comprehensive look at innovation in government, both in general and in a variety of different policy areas.

Books have the related advantage that they consolidate research in one place, rather than spread it around a number of different academic journals. A book is the place to go for the first word, last word, and the whole story in between.

The second reason for publishing a book is to reach a different and possibly larger audience. Journal articles are necessarily aimed exclusively at academic colleagues, who are the only people who read the journals. A book might also be read beyond one’s academic colleagues, possibly by practitioners and even the general public. Many academics aspire to write something that reaches out beyond his or her academic colleagues to a broader public, and a book is still the vehicle for doing that.

A three-part injunction for living a full life, attributed to the nineteenth century Cuban independence leader and writer Jose Marti, is to plant a tree, have a child, and write a book. I hope that more management professors, particularly those with the security of tenure, will embrace the third part.

The Royal Navy is an institution with a long and proud history. The narratologist would ask if its history is anywhere to be found on its rubric in cyberspace, www.royalnavy.mod.uk. It turns out that the Royal Navy’s banner headlines are “modern and relevant” and “capable and resilient” and it prominently displays a new blog. There is, however, a link to its history on a banner at the top of the site, and the history is organized by periods, ships, leaders, and battles.

Looking a bit farther afield, both the Number 10 Downing St. (www.number10,gov.uk) and White House (www.whitehouse.gov) websites have links to a history of the place and its occupants.

In one of the exam questions, I asked students to provide a rationale and organizational role for a Chief Narrative Officer, using as an example any organization of their choosing. One of the roles of the CNO would be stewardship of the organization’s official history, as described above.

A broader position description would be to model, encourage, and champion the effective use of narrative throughout the organization. Some of the ways narrative could be used would include narratives about the organization’s clients or customers and how they benefit from the organization’s products or services, narratives about the organization’s employees and how they do valuable and meaningful work, and narratives about the organization itself, including its history and achievements.

The CNO should encourage the use of narratives on the website, in speeches, annual reports, and advertising. She should also advise people about how to develop convincing and persuasive narratives.

The most important thing to realize about the role of CNO is that it is a classic staff role, intended to support both the organization’s executive leaders and its line managers. The key questions about staff roles are where they fit in organization’s structure and whom they report to. The CNO’s natural allies would be in corporate communications, high-level (as opposed to brand) marketing, and strategic planning.

One thing few of the MBA students who took the exam mentioned was that people in staff roles, particularly if the role is new, need a high level patron. So a particularly important question is whom the CNO would report to, and the answer would be someone at the senior level with clout over the long run.

Recruiting a CNO might be a challenge. There aren’t any obvious producers of CNO’s as there are obvious producers of accountants or marketers. So I would suggest advertising the position and recruiting widely and seeing who applies. This would also imply recruiting beyond business schools and thus looking to cultural institutions, places as outside-the-box as graduate programs in literature or cultural studies. Who knows, perhaps in the future one of the graduates on the course will actually describe her position as CNO.

It was my son’s first evening concert, and he enthusiastically enjoyed it, despite the late hour. I was amused to see a graying fair-skinned audience carrying their Union Jacks, a demographic that characterized the Toronto of my youth, not its current multicultural reality.

The program included the lyrics to “Land of Hope and Glory” and Jerusalem, with which I admit to being unfamiliar. Riding home on the subway with a tired son, I tried to explain the dramatic difference between the two anthems. The words have stuck with me, just as a tune will sometimes, involuntary, persist in one’s consciousness.

The nationalist jingoism of Land of Hope and Glory is unmistakable. “Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set.” A global land grab. “God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.” More wealth. A bigger navy.

If this was the world view of the British at the turn of the twentieth century, it was also the attitude of the Germans, Americans, Japanese, French, Austro-Hungarians, Turks, and even Belgians. In retrospect, it is obvious how this attitude set the stage for the First World War.

In his poem, “And did those feet in ancient time,” William Blake used Jerusalem as a metaphor for a better, more compassionate and caring world than that which he inhabited. As a liberal Jew, I refer to this vision as the messianic age. Blake asked whether, as legend had it, Jesus ever briefly visited England and then referred to the “dark Satanic Mills” of the industrial revolution. Those mills, paradoxically, are what those who would have fervently sung Land of Hope and Glory would have embraced as a key engine of economic growth that created the Empire.

Blake’s conclusion was that he “will not cease from Mental Fight” until “we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant Land.” The dominant interpretation of his poem is that building Jerusalem means overcoming the inequities of economic growth to build a more just and compassionate society.

The conflict between “Land of Hope and Glory” and Jerusalem remains at the center of politics and policy today. “Land of Hope and Glory” is an expression of the view that puts a priority on economic growth with considerations of externalities, equitable distribution, and values that cannot readily be measured by the yardstick of GDP subordinated. Jerusalem speaks to the concerns of externalities, limited resources, equity, and community. These issues were recently discussed in Joe Gertner’s thoughtful article in the Sunday New York Times on May 10, 2010 entitled “The Rise and Fall of the GDP.”

In Canadian politics, the Conservative Party sings to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory, with its emphasis on a strong military, economic growth, northern sovereignty, “useful” science, and limited government. My regret is that those who would sing to the tune of Jerusalem - particularly the Liberal Party - have not articulated their program with comparable force or clarity.

The second question asked students to discuss the significance of social class in four movies: Twelve Angry Men, North Country, The Class, and Remains of the Day.

The dramatic advantage of the prolonged use of an indoor setting, especially one room, is that it turns up the emotional heat of the narrative by focusing it on the interaction among the characters occupying the room. If that interaction is intense, confining it to one room makes it more intense. Facial close-up shots are often used and the audience is forced to zero in on dialogue, gesture, and body language. The two prototypical “small room” narratives we watched were Twelve Angry Men, where the entire movie takes place in a sweaty and claustrophobic jury room, and The Class, where most of the movie takes place in Monsieur Marin’s crowded classroom.

In contrast, the dramatic advantage of filming outdoors and in public spaces is that the movie incorporates panorama and spectacle. The narrative itself can be large, encompassing many places and many people. And the variety of settings should hold the interest of the audience. The two classic examples we watched were Charlie Wilson’s War, which moved between Washington and exotic Middle East locales (Afghan deserts, Pakistani palaces, and Egyptian belly dance lounges) with occasional stops in Houston, and The Insider, which after an opening scene in Beirut, wandered all over America. Some students noted that outdoor and public settings are better places to hold secret discussions than rooms which are being watched and possibly bugged, an observation which is correct, but misses the bigger point.

One advantage of using small rooms that, surprisingly, none of the MBA students discussed, is that filming in a studio is a lot less expensive than filming on location, especially if there are several locations, as well as hundreds or thousands of extras, involved.

Now, the second question about social class. The four movies treat social class in a variety of ways. In Twelve Angry Men, ethnicity and social class are markers that precondition the jury’s initial presumption that the accused is guilty. The jury deliberations, however, do not split along class lines. Starting with the upper middle class, the architect thinks the accused is innocent, the stockbroker that he is guilty, and the advertising man can’t decide. The working class jurors also split, with the ethnic and working man soon joining those favouring acquittal, while the salesman, garage owner, and messenger service owner hold out until the end for a conviction. Had the jury split along class lines, a deadlock and hence a hung jury would have been more likely.

North Country really is about sexism, and we find that all the men in the mining company, whether middle class executives or lower class miners, are sexists, with the difference being that the former were more subtle and less physical in their expressions of sexism. Thus class was not really at the core of this movie (call it a trick question).

In The Class, it is immediately evident that most of the students are lower class and of colour. But what struck me was the nature of their teacher Marin’s enterprise, which was to teach them “correct” grammar, usage, spelling, and accent. In effect, he was teaching them how to conform, linguistically, to middle class expectations. But the students were often resisting. This makes a for sharp contrast with other transformational teacher movies, most notably Stand and Deliver, in which Jaime Escalante was teaching his Latino students calculus because it would enable them to get ahead in Anglo middle class America, without necessarily buying in to the culture.

Finally, I see The Remains of the Day as a cautionary fable about class deference. The butler Stevens is deferential to his master and ultimately comes to realize he has drastically and unnecessarily limited his own life as a result. Mr. Benn, who ultimately weds Miss Kenton, is of the same class background as Stevens, but more assertive in every way: sexually, occupationally, and politically, and while his life was far from perfect, he had much more of a life than did Stevens. This contrast presents one of the main themes of the narrative, and Ishiguro’s novel can be read as a critique of deference and defense of a democracy in which the common-sense instincts of ordinary people are of equal value to the articulate but misguided musings of well-educated aristocrats.

Business schools are populated by students who are striving for wealth and ignore the existence of status gradations (and sometimes barriers) in society, and narratives are effective at pointing out this reality.