2801 The collapse of the corporation

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Ray Wilson, in an Amazon reader review of Nickel and Dimed in America: “With the enormous expansion of social programs in the 1960's and 1970's, America waged war on poverty - and poverty won.”

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Becs has written about how the corporate culture has changed. I believe it.

I first joined The Company in 1968. Back then it was still run by the family that grew it, and it was run like a family, with a unique management style. If you made it through the training, it was pretty much taken for granted that you had a job for life, and The Company was interested in the welfare of their employee family. The only way you'd get kicked out was if you did something that amounted to company treason or felony. Being bad at the tasks you were given wouldn't get you fired. There was more a feeling that you were just given the wrong tasks, and a strong effort was made to find what you were good at, and move you into that.

Ex#2 ripped me out of that in 1971, moved me to St. Louis where I went into a support division that had a more military culture (but still very family), then the birth of Daughter with a medical problem pulled me out of that, and I didn't get back to the development plant environment until 1983.

I was shocked at how much had changed. The last of the founding family had retired, and top management was now hired guns. The family feeling was gone. Management training had changed. Where before people had worked as teams because we were all in it together and no member of a team could pull you down, you could just lift people up, now employees were competing against each other. Where before the company was successful because they put out a good product and supported their customers as well as their own people, now the emphasis was on getting money out of the customer without spending more than was necessary.

Over the subsequent years there were all kinds of programs and exercises aimed toward fostering teamwork - but teamwork continued to deteriorate, because when you pit people against one another, they have to ask, "Why should I make you look good, when it only makes me look less good by comparison?" Back in 1968, The Company put an enormous investment in training people, and providing continuing education, so it was in their interests to keep these highly trained people. Now, they expect people to bring the training with them. No investment, no incentive.

I hated the new corporate culture. It just got worse and worse. When they started secret peer reviews, that's when I knew I had to get out. Peer reviews might work in a "family" environment, where there's no personal cost to being honest and helpful, but when people are competing to hold a job, peer reviews turn vicious. The goal is no longer to help management assign resources, but to confuse management.

Nowadays, people are nothing but furniture to be exploited. Get a few chairs in when you need them, throw them out when you don't. I don't know why anyone would feel any loyalty to the company, why they'd want to make her shine. Just do the minimum required to get the check, because even if you are outstanding, if your project is canned for some arbitrary reason, you will be too. They don't care about you, so why should you care about them?

This is not good.
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