Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Advantages of returning to the corporate world

Depending on your interests and circumstances, that may be the right thing to do. I'd like to explore just a few of the advantages of corporate life for the benefit of Julia who asks this question:

So, David, how about advice for those of us returning to the corporate world, and please don't say don't do it!

Corporations offer ready-made opportunities for travel, adventure, incredible challenges, huge incomes, extreme risks, safe boring jobs and extreme drudgery and hardships. All of these and more are yours, if you can qualify by meeting the requirements of the particular organization you wish to join.

I can easily say that I have experienced all of the above in my relationships with more than 25 employers and consulting clients. Working for a corporation is a natural rite of passage except for those few who create their own corporations and hire others to work for them.

Not everyone is cut out to run their own enterprise and there is a great joy in joining up with a team that has a good idea and is producing products or services that make the world a better place to live in.

Even if your employer only has a mission to feed people (McDonalds, P F Changs, The Four Seasons, etc., you can have a challenging role to play depending on your abilities and interests.

The one thing that a corporation does not generally offer is a lot of opportunity to improvise. Just as in a marching band, all of the players (employees) are expected to play the notes they are assigned.

There are a few positions, such as in Technical  Support, where improvisation within limits is encouraged and rewarded.

The main thing to remember is that Customer Service organizations are only necessary for immature or unfinished products. They are viewed as a necessary evil by the corporation and by the customers who depend on them. As a result, the good work you do does not guarantee longevity of employment, but it can be a stepping stone to a management position in time.

As a corporate employee, your activities are constrained to serve the needs of the corporation. If that is comfortable for you, then you are in the right place. If independence of thought and activity and a balance of work and life are a great need for you, consider learning all that you can from your corporate experience so that you can set up your own business at some future time.

Whatever you decide, corporate employee or self-employed, give it all you've got and deliver what is needed in the most professional way possible. Production is the basis of morale and when you are producing worthwhile results, your morale will stay high.

Do you work for an insane company?

Maybe you have suspected it, but this is the time of year when your worst fears may be realized. (This is what an insane company feels like)

Companies which have been focused on making the numbers look good finally face up the fact that they need to make changes. Unfortunately, too many make the wrong changes and never recover. Their first choice is to lay off those employees whose negative comments have been making management nervous.

That cuts down the noise level and management feels that there is hope of getting the situation under control now that the complainers in marketing and customer support are gone.

This hope is short-lived as they find themselves inundated with customer complaints that just will not go away. Somehow in their zeal to clean house, they have laid off the people who were working hardest to provide customers with good service. Then the contract cancellations begin...and the layoffs begin in earnest.

Perhaps you were so buried in work that you missed the warning signs.  You may have been the ideal employee, but that doesn't help when the corporate ship is coming apart at the seams.

If the corporate culture is sick, various levels of the company will be fighting each other and there will be little agreement on helping customers. You could view it as a multiple-personality disorder, with interesting overtones of paranoia, insane rage, and despair, whatever.

The bottom line as always, is that no one is having a good time and customers are getting the shaft.

What is not generally understood is that corporate culture is "the ghost in the machine" It is a set of agreements that grow out of the million and one discussions and interactions that go into creating and mobilizing a company. It is the most important component of any company.

Furthermore, like the human spirit, when the corporate culture is gone, the company is for all practical purposes, dead.

A sane culture is one which values and supports every part of the organization; it values customers and employees, it values the environment, and it values investors.

An insane culture values abstract numbers rather than real accomplishments. When a company shifts from satisfying customer requirements in an ethical way to meeting profit goals regardless of what shortcuts are taken, the cultural agreements are being broken and the company is on its way out.

If your company is ethically challenged, that is something you should be aware of and work to change, if possible. If you can't change your environment for the better, then you need to find an organization that operates with integrity and give it all the support you can.

Insanity is catching. Ask anyone who has worked in a sick corporate culture. Recovery can take a long time.  Spend your time working with people who recognize your worth and reward you appropriately.

For a more thorough treatment of this subject read the five articles I wrote about corporate insanity starting on June 21, 2005.

Finding an Ethical Employer

One of my readers is taking a break from corporate life and is living in a quiet corner of France to settle her nerves. She writes:

I am keen to return to work but having re-read my diary for 2003 I am determined NOT to fall foul of another bad position. ARE there ethical employers out there? And if so how do I recognize one?

The simple answer is that you need to look for an employer who does the following:

Promises only what he or she intends to deliver
Keeps their word once given
Follows through so as to meet expectations

A more useful answer is that you need to thoroughly understand both the company and the people you will be working for. For example, there ARE ethical employers which have some managers of doubtful sanity. There are also ethical and sane managers who work in insane companies. There are ways you can determine this during the interview.

The complete answer is that seeking to return to a job arena that has chewed you up and spit you out without reading Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day is foolhardy in the extreme. It is available as a FREE download, so there is no reason not to spend an hour or two reading up on the key factors in finding and securing the right job.

I wrote this unconventional guide to surviving corporate employment for hardworking people who have had career experiences that have crushed their spirits.

Chapters 6 - 8 describes exactly how you can find the right employer for you. The rest of the book will help you survive almost any career experience with your sanity intact.

It has produced some amazing results, but only when read.  :)

Is it possible to find satisfying work?

This is a topic that has filled many books, so let me give you the short version.

If you are considering changing your occupation, here are some essential factors you might want to consider. If you are an owner or manager, this might help you also.

Starting at the top, here are some fundamental factors affecting the perception of work as pleasure or pain:

Almost any work is satisfying if you can do it at your own pace.

The most interesting work in the world can be made unbearable, if you are forced to do it in a sequence and at a pace that is not of your own choosing.

Job satisfaction is actually more important than the money you take home. That is why acknowledgment from your peers and managers can easily make up for a lower salary.

Any job that requires you to lie for others will eat you out from the inside until you are no longer able to look at yourself in the mirror.

People will work unbelievable hours for little or no pay if they know they are helping to make the world a better place.

People will perform miracles working for a manager they trust.

If you are a manager or owner of a business, you might also want to look at your current work environment and see if you can make some adjustments that will incorporate these factors. It could make a huge difference in the viability of your company.

Wishing you the best...

(An earlier version of this was written in 2005)

Nepotism again...

A reader asks about the positives and negatives of nepotism in a school setting.

His comment read:

Regarding nepotism and ethics, what about a situation where a teaching staff where the principal has a practice of hiring married couples? Approximately 25% of our staff is comprised of married couples. He is very open about the practice saying it's like a family, but I argue that it could turn into a dysfunctional family. .... What are the positive and negatives of such a practice in a school setting?

I'm not sure I would consider hiring married couples nepotism. I have worked for many companies where several members of a family were employed. Usually, the company did not allow these people to work in the same department or for each other.

I consider nepotism to be the favoring of a relative or a friend over other employees. When family or personal connections interfere with the orderly management of a company, it is a recipe for disaster.

When workers or managers are productive and do the job that people expect of them, nobody cares who they are related to.

When employees or managers are incompetent and are protected because they are friends with or related to someone else in the company, the company has a hidden chain of command and hard working people resent it. Good people will leave as soon as they spot this occurring because it is unfair and unprofessional. Timid employees will remain and moan about their lot.

Are the incompetent people in your company being protected by someone?

Silver Bullet Fables - part 1 - targets

There is this wonderfully persistent idea that keeping your eye on a target and doing whatever it takes to attain that target will give you the best chance of achieving success. Your managers and even your parents may have pushed this approach ahead of doing things in a way that you can be proud of. Achieving the target was all that mattered.

This is the silver bullet approach to managing your life or career and it has an amazing weakness. When you commit to doing everything necessary to achieving a goal or target, you can set yourself up to be despised instead of being admired.

Why? Because the goal can become more important than how it is achieved! Others will only remember that you did not get results honestly.

So much attention is put in achieving goals in business and in schools that cheating or falsification of results is deemed less important than missing the goal.

When a student is not able to learn fast enough to keep up in school, the pressure to show success and to graduate often becomes more than the person can resist and she or he cheats.

When a group in a company finds that a product is not ready to ship and this will cost them bonus money or even cost them jobs, the temptation is to falsify test results, ship the product anyway and leave the problems for others to fix.

Targets are not achieved by accident. They are the result of focused effort and persistence. When the targets become mere statistics instead of real achievements, this opens the door to all kinds of corporate and individual insanity.

Some of you who have been in sales have experienced such extreme pressure to close sales by a certain date that you did whatever was necessary to close the deal. I have watched several companies go under after enough of these unprofitable deals were closed.

I worked for one sales manager who didn't care how many people we upset on the phone as long as we met our quota of orders. The bad word of mouth reports spread so fast that it permanently affected sales.

This focus on a target to the exclusion of the methods used to achieve it results in the discrediting of otherwise good ideas.  The target could be saving the earth or endangered species, but criminal acts or blatant hypocrisy can discredit the entire idea.

Global warming pundits jetting off to Bali for high visibility meetings do more environmental damage than the populations they pretend to be saving.

Candidates for office may justify covering up crimes in order to be elected and "serve" the people. They also rewrite history in an effort to erase earlier viewpoints they now say they never held.

Even retail establishments can place such emphasis on making goals that employees will lie in order to deflect criticism from customers. Try telling the employees at Michaels that their bathrooms are out of paper and see what happens.

Achieving a target in a way that you can be proud of lets you end cycle and move on to other targets. Cheating your way to achieving a target leaves open issues that will always come back to haunt you, even if you go on to achieve nobler things.

If your working life is not what you want it to be, you might see if you are being driven to make targets, "no matter what it takes!"

Thanks to the Applications Team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for their version of this classic illustration.

Throwing pearls before swine - a good way to drive yourself crazy

I have been talking to a number of people recently who made the unfortunate decision to work for dunderheads and are now beginning to realize that this is a losing game.

Having done this myself more than a couple of times, I have great empathy for them.

The problem stems from the fact that some of these employers don't appear to be dunderheads when they interview you for the job in the first place. They may be relatively intelligent in many areas and may even have advanced degrees. They often can carry on a social conversation and may even have a broad range of subjects that they can discuss easily.

The hiring manager with anger management issues is relatively easy to spot and you will do well to end the interview if there is any suspicion that your interviewer is crazier than you are.

Are you still with me here? Your job interview is the place where YOU find out whether you want to work for this organization.

Essentially, the people who really drive you crazy when you work for them are the apparently sane and intelligent executives who have no real clue what you are doing for them and how difficult it is to deliver the product or service you are being paid for.

What happens is that you fail to set expectations for what you are delivering.

Now, some of you will argue that you spelled everything out and even put it down in writing to confirm what you would do and how you would do it.

Sorry! I've been there and done that too, but it's not enough!

Some hiring managers are just glib. They will say yes to every condition you set as a requirement for working there and when you show up for work, there will be no office, or you have to supply your own computer until they get around to ordering one, etc. Or, they hire you for a management slot, but they want you to cover the phones.

Other situations are more subtle. During the interview they say that they want you to set up a marketing department, or a customer service division, something you have a great deal of experience doing, but they have never had a marketing department or a customer service division, so THEY HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE ASKING FOR.

They may even offer you a handsome salary, but you miss the clues and fail to ask what their marketing or customer service budget is. What you find out, all too soon, is that they expect you to make this function happen by yourself.

After enough of these episodes, your job interviews become quite different. You spend 70% of the interview asking questions instead of answering them. Your interviews are shorter and more successful. They become conversations between peers. You may still get blindsided by a management team whose social skills cover up their lack of ethics, but your recovery time will be mercifully short and you will probably exit stage left in the first few months.

Whether you work for an employer or a client, give them everything you've got, but make sure they understand what you are doing for them.

If you maintain that viewpoint, you will be ready to address the first signs of discontent with a positive attitude and probing questions that should uncover the issues that are causing your client/new boss to show unhappiness with your work.

You are often hired to change things, but the powers that be often don't like what that entails. After awhile, you learn to cover that topic gracefully in your interview.

If you do everything possible to set expectations properly and things don't work out, learn from the experience and move on.

If you are competent, there is work for you. Your task is to find work you enjoy doing and people you enjoy working for. That is actually a goal worth pursuing. If you produce pearls, find those who need and appreciate pearls.

Good luck!

Your Creativity vs the Corporate Life Cycle - Part 4

An inside look at Google - an unusual Stage Three company

In my previous articles I mentioned Stage Three companies and how they tend to stifle creative people. There are exceptions to every generality and I failed to mention the companies which put a forced draft under employee creativity and use various strategies to keep employees producing at top speed for long hours.

Google is one of the companies where creativity is not only encouraged, it is skillfully exploited. You will have to read further to see if this is something you could easily experience.

This data comes from an interview of someone who worked for both Microsoft and Google:

Google is a great place for someone just out of school. Google provides nearly everything these people need from clothes (new T-shirts are placed in bins for people to grab *twice* a week!) to food – three, free, all-you-can-eat meals a day. 

Plus on-site health care, dental care, laundry service, gym, etc. 

By the way, newly-hired professional employee starting salaries will be between $100k-$200k.

(Imagine going from college to this environment! It even provides laundry service!)

Google believes that developers are, with few exceptions, interchangeable parts. 

This philosophy shows through in their office arrangements which in Mountain View are all over the map.  There are glass-walled offices, there are open-space areas, there are cubicles, there are people who’s desks are literally in hallways because there’s no room anywhere else. 

There are even buildings that experiment with no pre-defined workspaces or workstations – people just take one of the available machines and desks when they get to work.

The overall management structure is very flat:

1. A hundred or more individual contributors report to

          2. a middle manager who reports to

          3. a division v.p. who reports to

          4. the management team (Larry, Sergie, etc.)

If you want to know more, read the entire interview.

I have worked in companies like this and it was a real rush. I wrote about these apparently ideal jobs which consume your life and may cost you your marriage. Yes, you get incredible experience and make lots of money, but eventually you need to get a life before your children grow up without you.

Your Creativity vs the Corporate Life Cycle - Part 3

(See also Part 1 and Part 2 of this series)

Stage Four - The company is in a long term decline

The only reason a creative person should be joining a company in a long term decline is if he or she is being hired to turn the situation around. It is a noble goal, but a successful conclusion is unlikely for the following six reasons.

1. The company is in a decline because management is unable to deal with change.
2. Management and the Board of Directors are afraid of anything they don't understand.
3. Management has probably made some major mistakes which they are not willing to discuss with you.
4. They are in a constant state of indecision and rarely follow through on decisions made or promises made.
5. They will want you to make things better without changing any of the corporate customs, upsetting secret agreements, and you must absolutely not upset anyone anywhere in the process of getting things squared around.
6. The finally and most damning point, they probably pay more attention to rumors than they do to actual pro-survival activities.

There are more reasons and some of you can rattle them off without notes, but I think these cover the primary obstacles that a creative person will face in a declining company.

In most companies, a creative person will stand out and may become the butt of envious comments from those who feel threatened. In this company, you as a creative person will post a threat to management just by being there because if you do your job, all of their mistakes will eventually be uncovered. The only people who welcome your presence will not be in a position to support you when rumors start flying.

Here is one scenario: You are hired as top management and the Board show great signs of relief that you are on board to save them from their past follies.

After meeting with enough key employees to get a sense of the emergencies that must be addressed immediately, you call a meeting of the employees and you outline a sensible set of steps to give them workable targets for improving conditions in the next 90 days. The employees are enthusiastic and you start getting positive feedback from customers in a relatively short time.

About the third week, one of the Board Members sidles into your office and hesitantly suggests that you are moving too fast. This is when you realize that you missed something in the job interview...

Your Creativity vs the Corporate Life Cycle - Part 2

(You may want to read the earlier post in this series to understand what Stage One and Two  are.)

Stage Three in the Corporate Life Cycle - your company is a major player in the field

Congratulations! You have joined a company that is a major player in its field. You have made the big time and your family is justifiably proud.

It may be several months before you realize that your creativity, which was why you were tapped for the job in the first place, is not acceptable in the new workplace. At this point, your career prospects undergo a major change...

You discover that creativity is restricted to a few select areas such as marketing campaigns and writing acceptable reports for your manager. Coordinated activity, not creativity, is what is needed by a management team that is struggling to get you all to march in the same rhythm.

It is vital that all parts of the corporation be defined to exacting standards and employee activity must meet expectations. Instead of designing better products or satisfying customers, your primary concern becomes "don't do anything to embarrass your management".

This becomes an all-consuming task because your management (the Directors and VPs above you) are increasingly disconnected from real customers and their concerns. It often appears that they live in an echo chamber where all is in accord with top management wishes and any unpleasantness is carefully filtered out. Any news from you which disturbs the euphoric mood of the echo chamber will seriously impact your employability.

Of course, if you are doing your job and trying to handle customer needs and salvage a contract, you may just feel that you have been left out to dry. As time goes by you may become a little frantic.

You may even decide to compromise your integrity and focus your energies on keeping your head down, keeping your mouth shut, and accepting blame for everything you have failed to handle to management's satisfaction.

It doesn't matter that you pointed out a potentially damaging situation in time to get it handled and were told to stifle yourself. When the customer finally cancels the contract, you will be among the first to go.

I'm sorry if this sounds like an employment nightmare. Too many of my friends and I have lived it for it to be an anomaly. It is what often happens in a Stage Three company.

This is not an indictment of most modern companies, it is a reflection of the fact that creativity and efficiency are two distinctly separate activities.

As a company becomes more efficient it eliminates the unsynchronized moving parts that interfere with management concentration. I am sure that there are some upper management people who dream wistfully of an all-robotic workforce which flawlessly executes orders again and again without deviation.

As a CEO, it takes extreme courage to place your future in the hands of creative types who just might come up with a new product line or business plan that could wipe out everything you have struggled to build.

That is why there are so few companies that can reinvent themselves. They have a perfectly valid fear that the exciting new product may cannibalize their entire customer base.

I'm sorry that this is the case, but this essay is about you and your creativity, so we'll leave them to solve that problem and let's return to using your creativity.

If you have good product ideas and innovative business strategies in mind, by all means do everything possible to get your company to adopt them and give you a role in implementing the ideas for the benefit of the company.

Now, if you have been following me so far and your company is actually in Stage Three, don't be surprised if your manager pats you gently on the head and urges you to stick to more productive activities like project dashboards in manager-friendly colors.

If you are unable to stifle your creativity to that extent, you will be far happier finding an outlet for it elsewhere, either in your own startup or in a company that is at the right stage to use your talents.

There is one more stage in the Corporate Life Cycle:

Stage Four - The company is in a long term decline

This is a situation you must examine very closely before you sign up.
I will complete this topic tomorrow.