Idiots Inc.
I’ve just finished one of the worst weeks I’ve ever experienced while working for my current employer. I’ll call this employer Idiots Inc. We do hardware, software, middleware, silverware and God-knows-what else. We do it all, and we do it poorly. Actually, most of our products are quite excellent, but through a great deal of hard work and ingenuity, we avoid profiting from them.
Idiots Inc. has all sorts of charming, bad habits. Every year, for example, we rotate all our executives to different divisions. We call this “cross-pollenation” and it’s supposed to unify the organization as a whole. All it really does is ensure that none of the divisions ever get their act together. Executives can’t resist leaving their mark – and I do mean that in the canine sense – on their new organizations, and so the whole company is perpetually f__ked up.
My own sub-division is perpetually managed by overachievers, and so we’re reorganized in some fashion every six months. This year our budget was slashed, and so our VP canned a bunch of people. But then, apparently thinking this wasn’t an epic enough change, he randomly redistributed all the remaining employees to new jobs and departments, largely ignoring such trivialities as “appropriate skill sets” and “experience”. This technique is very similar to the way in which data is completely erased from a disk drive, and the effect on our organization has been similar – nobody has the slightest clue how to get anything done.
I wish I could tell you who I worked for, so that you would know which stock symbol to avoid. But then, it doesn’t really matter, since our stock price is actually an “imaginary number”, like the square root of negative one, or the odds of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes raising a normal, healthy child.
February 25th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
I feel your pain. Perhaps they will set you free with a decent severance package. Mine is going to pay for our new kitchen.
February 25th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Who ever thought “cross-pollination” would be good idea? Jeez.
I came up with a similar idea, but it would never see the light of day, even though it makes a lot more sense than “cross pollination”: For at least a couple weeks every year, all executives must work at the grunt level in their company. Not a lower management position, but the bottom rung. Assembling goods, crunching code (or trying), waiting tables, loading trucks, whatever the company does. I’d love to add the idea that during this time, they could be fired like any other employee, but that’d never happen. I think half the problem in American business is a total disconnect between the decision-makers and those who have to carry out those decisions.
February 28th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
It would be nice to see the decision makers actually have to live with the decisions they make. It sounds like “cross-pollination” is really just moving people around so they can’t stay long enough to permanently fsck something up. Or allow them to take responsibility since they keep changing. Of course, this is the cynical reading of all of these things. I personally just attribute this to people trying to pretend that they know how to run a business when they really couldn’t tell you what side was up. Then again, being a decision maker myself. I prefer to run things by just saying, is it broken? no? then let it keep going. Or is it broken? Yes? Will anyone notice? then let it keep going.