About losers, clueless, and sociopaths

In other words: Corporations

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More than a decade ago, while having breakfast in the company restaurant (which was named after a famous restaurant from “The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy”), a colleague visiting from Norway asked me the following question: "Hé Jos, I am here with a few customers for a visit and I have a half hour gap in the program. Could you come in and talk about something, anything, to entertain them?"

"Sure," I answered, "I can always talk about anything to anyone for half an hour and make them laugh, but why?" She explained to me that our esteemed site director had been scheduled to give a presentation, but apparently a senior vice-president or some other bigwig had unexpectedly come to town and so the site director had cleared his agenda to network with the SVP.

"And that," she added, "is how you know you've gone corporate."

I thought that was a brilliant remark. If you ditch a group of customers to schmooze with a very important person, you clearly indicate where your priorities lie. And it’s not with the customers…

A decade before that, I was working at a bank. During a very frustrating project meeting I couldn’t control myself anymore and said that we were so inwardly focused that, if because of some dark magic, we would lose all of our customers and their business in an instant, it would take years before anyone in our organization would notice. Most people in the meeting agreed with me…

A decade before that, I was working as a chef in my parents' restaurant. One fine morning I was working on making meatloaf, which required me to be up to my wrists in minced meat, kneading it, adding spices, and removing the fatty bits. Then my mother walked in with an order for an "uitsmijter" (a fantastic Dutch lunch dish with bread, ham, cheese, and eggs sunny side up). I uttered a curse because I would have to wash my hands, make the uitsmijter, and then get into the raw meat again.

My mum asked me what the curse was for and I explained that I was annoyed because of the interruption. She immediately whacked me around the head and said: "Serving a customer is never an interruption of your work, but its goal."

Many corporations forget that, always at their peril. If you look at what makes companies in a competitive market successful, it is usually relentless customer focus. Companies that lose that, or maybe never had it in the first place (but did well for a while because they had a unique product in a market without a lot of competition) are inevitably doomed.

Going corporate means losing that focus. It also means that internal processes and infighting become more important than anything else. Ditching your promise to talk to a group of customers because you want to schmooze with the SVP is going corporate. Being an SVP who thinks they are more important than a group of customers is going corporate. Spending more time and effort on your internal shenanigans than on doing things that service customers is going corporate.

When companies go there, the people in them lose sight of the overall goal and it becomes more rewarding for your career to work towards personal goals than to do things that benefit the company as a whole. I fell foul of that sad truth more than once and consequently took some career damage because I tried to do what I thought was good for the company, without paying attention to the empire building that was going on.

One way you can detect if your company is “going corporate” is when processes become disconnected from the goals that they originally sought to safeguard. A common symptom of that is when approval processes take magnitudes more time than doing the thing the approval is being sought for (without that being justified by a sane risk assessment).

I have been in day-long approval processes for making a directory on a Unix machine. I have been asked to review plans for six weeks of development work because the approval process for a SQL UPDATE statement (that would update four rows in a reference table) would require escalation to two senior directors and we didn’t want to do that. Once, in my first job, I was asked to get an assembler program working that did exactly what the PL/1 LOAD statement did, but corporate “standards” forbade its use.

Going corporate often comes with technical insanity.

In the early 2000s I worked on an Internet mapping product. Inside the Rube Goldberg machine of arrows and boxes that provided the service’s backend, we had something called the "geomap service" that did something useful related to “geo mapping” (I forgot what :-). One morning I found a few “geomap” binaries running in some datacenter that seemed to be ... different. I asked around and found that this was in fact not the geomap service I knew, but instead a web facing front-end that implemented some really cool API we had just launched that allowed web developers to easily create charts and graphs from their Javascript.

It had nothing to do with our mapping product. I was ... confused.

Why was this binary called geomap too? It did nothing geo-specific. Somebody finally told me that some team had wanted to launch this charting API but they had to jump through all sorts of approval hoops to launch a new service. So instead, for velocity, they had told the approvers that this was not a new service, but part of an existing service (you guessed it: geomap :-), which removed the need to get sign-offs and approvals.

This is what going corporate does, it creates back channels and crazy tech decisions in order for people to continue to do their work. "Who" you know becomes more important than “what” you know. There is always some of that in every organization of a given size, but in a big corporation, "who" you know not only makes things go faster and more smoothly, it is often the only reason you can get anything done at all.

During a bout of frustration about how we were going corporate, a colleague once gave me the following organization model: "Jos," he said, "the company is a pyramid and there are three layers in it:

At the bottom are the losers: They give more in value to the company then they get out of it. It’s most of us. The next layer are the clueless; these are the middle managers who drank the Kool-Aid and they believe that the company is good for you and that if you work hard you can become successful and all that jazz. Then at the top are the sociopaths; these are the people who clearly get more value out of the company than they give to it. The sociopaths are completely in it for themselves."

"You can get promoted from loser to clueless," he continued, "but you cannot be promoted from clueless to sociopath. You have to be hired as a sociopath. That's why the people who aspire to be sociopaths leave the company and become a sociopath somewhere else."

This model made a lot of sense to me. Especially when the CFO of the company a friend of mine worked for, sold all of his stock at the top of the share price (following the IPO; apparently he didn't have a lock-in period?) after which the share price nose dived and never recovered. Shortly thereafter he left the company to “pursue other interests.”

I asked my colleague where he sat in this model. “Ah,” he replied, “there is a special category at the bottom, the loser sociopaths:

These are people who could be sociopaths if they wanted to, but they can’t be bothered 🙂.

I know where I am, but where in this diagram are you?