It is a wonder indeed to behold the awsome forces of the corporate cosmos. Against the vacuous backdrop of mom & pop businesses and meager franchise operations are the corporate galaxies in this business universe. There are the super massive galaxies consisting of giant business units orbiting around the central holding company. On occasion, these galaxies collide, sending fragments hurtling into space and leaving a merged core of black holes sucking dividends into the shareholder event horizon to points unknown.
I said it is a wonder to behold. But I didn’t say it is necessarily a “good” wonder. Occasionally a fellow gets a look into that gaping maw, the churning core of the organizational furnace and sees more than he bargained for.
To perpetuate the methodical ratcheting in of ever more profit, large corporations filter the continuous stream of applicants for people who can administer the hard-as-steel facts of corporate life. Certain personality profiles, or folks with certain predilections, need to be advanced in the system to promulgate the mechanical and financial needs of the corporate entity. Hatchet men and enforcers, rain-makers, and sneering sycophants seem to find these organizations and achieve buoyancy.
At some point a person will run into the reptilian brainstem (management) of the corporation. Large, impersonal corporate management is the perfect venue for many of our brothers and sisters to express their most antisocial and misanthropic inner selves. As long as the behaviour is in parallel with the fiduciary goals of the organization, the most vile actions are validated with flippant phrases like “business is business” or “nothin’ personal, it’s just business”.
The seasoned employee knows that the Human Resources department, for all of the caring talk, really isn’t your friend. HR is the mechanical arm of the corporate entity that dips into the human melting pot to stir things up from time to time, occasionally pulling out the unsuitable or the plain unlucky for a “rightsizing” exercise. If you’re aged 50 and well up the pay scale, look out. That mechanical arm is never far away.
Corporate life has its rewards for certain kinds of people. Some corporate cultures are better than others. Some understand that they are institutions and have a beneficial role in the advancement of civilization. Other corporate cultures are driven only by the mathematics of growth and are essentially extractive industries charged with the rapid accumulation of wealth by the end of the present quarter. There is always a rationale for ugly corporate behaviour and there always hordes of aspiring hard-asses trying to get in to do it. The greedy corporation is a physical manifestation of dark human desires which supplies the tools and opportunities for the acquisitive.
If some recent experiences are any guide, I have to conclude that civilization is still paper thin. To paraphrase a comment by another blogger, we’re only three missed meals away from anarchy.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
In a company with 100,000 employees, a worker who takes off a year or two or twenty reduces the company’s output by 0.0001%. In a company with 10 employees, such a worker reduced the company’s output by 10%. The inverse it tru too. I’ve worked in both such situations (well, the actual numbers were 70,000 and 25, but I didn’t feel like working the math this early on a Friday morning) and will never go back to the large corporation again despite the incredible analytical labs and information resources (i.e., desktop access to hundreds of journals). I can carry my weight and then some. I want to be in a place where my work is immediately visible so that I don’t have to track down my boss (a near impossible task as his calendar was nearly completely filled with management meetings and discussions with brownnosers) to say “did you see that I did this?”
On greed and rightsizing: when a division lays off 15% of its workforce during a year of record sales AND profits because it needs an additional 10% next year and can’t see any other way to achieve that goal, that it GREED. UGLY GREED. MORTAL SIN GREED. GREED THAT HAS CHANGED THE SOUL OF THE COMPANY FOREVER.
In a company with 100,000 employees, a worker who takes off a year or two or twenty reduces the company’s output by 0.0001%. In a company with 10 employees, such a worker reduced the company’s output by 10%. The inverse it tru too. I’ve worked in both such situations (well, the actual numbers were 70,000 and 25, but I didn’t feel like working the math this early on a Friday morning) and will never go back to the large corporation again despite the incredible analytical labs and information resources (i.e., desktop access to hundreds of journals). I can carry my weight and then some. I want to be in a place where my work is immediately visible so that I don’t have to track down my boss (a near impossible task as his calendar was nearly completely filled with management meetings and discussions with brownnosers) to say “did you see that I did this?”
On greed and rightsizing: when a division lays off 15% of its workforce during a year of record sales AND profits because it needs an additional 10% next year and can’t see any other way to achieve that goal, that it GREED. UGLY GREED. MORTAL SIN GREED. GREED THAT HAS CHANGED THE SOUL OF THE COMPANY FOREVER.
Gosh, John, do you have a firm opinion about this?? \;-)