He observed that this system led to risk-averse executives who faced no consequences and could expect jobs for life as long as they made no egregious missteps.

According to Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, the book is, "the most compelling portrait of middle-class Americans at midcentury and the starting point for all subsequent investigations of their legacy.

[5]The impact of Whyte's book complemented the fiction best seller of the period, The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit (1955) by Sloan Wilson, in inspiring criticism that those Americans motivated to win World War II returned to ostensibly less-meaningful lives.

It gave concrete evidence to a watchword of the decade: “conformity.” Whyte identified what he claimed was a "major shift in American ideology" away from an individualistic Protestant Ethic.

[7] In actual corporate practice, according to Robert C. Leonard and Reta D. Artz, personnel managers in the San Francisco Bay area generally preferred the organizational man over the individualist.