By J. Copeland
Michael Scott, regional manager of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch (The Office on NBC), refuses to let professionalism or the ‘9 to 5’ attitude distort his moral judgment. Ok, he might lack the social skills and cultural refinement we expect from our superiors, but he has some redeeming qualities. For Mr. Scott there is no distinction between what is business and what is personal, there is only right and wrong.
Throughout his tenure as regional manager Michael has had trouble making the most routine of business decisions. His relative incompetence is partly to blame, but on the other hand it is always more than ‘just business’ to him. He doesn’t seem able or willing to reduce his co-workers to some objective performance measure or see them as soulless revenue generators. While Michael is stuck in moral crisis mode, others watch in puzzlement as to why he just can’t fire the lowest earner or accept the inevitable demise of Dunder Mifflin.
On one particular occasion Michael was instructed to prepare a presentation introducing his branch to the new chief financial officer of the company. Naturally, a business manager would compile a presentation full of pie charts and bar graphs mapping revenues, expenses, and other financial indicators. Of course, the thought of doing any of this never crossed Michael’s mind. Instead, Michael put together a short film including short bios on each of his employees. This left the new CFO scratching his head, how could insight into the personality of his employees be of any financial significance to Dunder Miffilin?
The average person operates under separate moral standards depending on his or her context. Michael does not check his conscious at the door; he applies the same moral guidelines to every aspect of his life. He is riddled by guilt after infiltrating a local ‘mom & pop’ paper store for its client list when upper management praises his effort. He is despondent over the fate of his employees when corporate threatened to close his branch and drives to the CFO’s to save their jobs (though they were all kind of bummed when the branch was saved).
It seems like every episode Michael is sent reeling by what most would consider ordinary business activity. His employees and superiors constantly remind him that it is ‘only business’ and implore him not to engage things on an emotional level. But, Michael refuses to play by the rules of the professional world that operate to distance one’s ‘moral mindset’.
A particularly illustrative episode took Michael to business school in the role of a guest speaker for one of Ryan’s (his ‘protégé’) classes. By the end Michael feels deeply hurt by his “cool, great looking best friend” who had the gall to give a well reasoned and researched presentation that concluded with Dunder Mifflin’s imminent obsolescence. Ryan predictably responds that it was ‘just business’ and Michael scolds him saying that, “Business is always personal! It’s the most personal thing in the world.” In short, the employees of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch don’t know how lucky they are to work underneath Michael Scott. That’s what she said.
