Career Management Monday, November 17, 2008
There’s a reason this site is for “Cubicle Warriors.” It is because people who work in cubes for Corporations need to fight to keep their jobs and successfully navigate their careers. The need to fight comes from the consistent frustration, indignation and feeling of powerlessness that comes from working for companies that manage to profit and consider their customers and employees as transactions to that profit.
While it is understandable that business needs to make a profit, along the way executives of corporations focused on shareholder wealth at the expense of their employees and customers.
Carryover to politics
In a well-written critique of top management in American Corporations in Business Week, Shoshana Zuboff lays down the gauntlet in “Obama’s Victory: A Consumer-Citizen Revolt:”
This column is dedicated to the top managers of American business whose policies and practices helped ensure Barack Obama’s victory. The mandate for change that sounded across this country is not limited to our new President and Congress. That bell also tolls for you. Obama’s triumph was ignited in part by your failure to understand and respect your own consumers, customers, employees, and end users. The despair that fueled America’s yearning for change and hope grew to maturity in your garden.
Millions of Americans heard President-elect Obama painfully recall his sense of frustration, powerlessness, and outrage when his mother’s health insurer refused to cover her cancer treatments. Worse still, every one of them knew exactly how he felt. That long-simmering indignation is by now the defining experience of every consumer of health care, mortgages, insurance, travel, and financial services—the list goes on.
Obama was elected not only because many Americans feel betrayed and abandoned by their government but because those feelings finally converged with their sense of betrayal at the hands of Corporate America. Their experiences as consumers and as citizens joined to create a wave of revolt against the status quo—as occurred in the American Revolution. Be wary of those who counsel business as usual. This post-election period is a turning point for the business community. It demands an attitude of sober reappraisal and a disposition toward fundamental reinvention. If you don’t do it, someone else will.
The article goes on to outline how business came to this point, from being accepted in the social fabric of America to the loss of trust by anyone who deals with the company. When the mission is profits and keeping executive perks, customers, suppliers, and employees are reduced to transactions that serve to fill the coffers.
AIG is a prime example
A perfect example of this out-of-touch management is AIG, the insurance company that took on insuring every credit default swap on the planet to increase profits — only to have them all come crashing down.
A mere $150 billion of taxpayer bailout money later, top executives at AIG just don’t get it. After being saved by billions of taxpayer dollars, AIG paid a pittance of “$47 million severance package to former Chief Executive Martin J. Sullivan, whose resignation took effect on Tuesday.”
Plus, “Sullivan also will hold on to outstanding equity and long-term cash awards valued at about $28 million, the filing said.”
And while some education of those that sell their products makes sense, the lavishness of the events — my part of the bailout pays for spa treatments??? — does not:
American International Group Inc. said Thursday that it would cancel most of its planned events after lawmakers castigated the insurer for hosting a $440,000 function at a resort while benefiting from an $85-billion government bailout.
The cancellations include an event that was scheduled for next week at the Ritz-Carlton in Northern California’s Half Moon Bay. The gathering that drew the rebukes was held last month at the St. Regis Resort in Dana Point. About 100 independent insurance agents who sell coverage for New York-based AIG attended, spending $23,000 on spa services, among other things.
One would call this “tone deaf” to the needs of taxpayers. And employees.
The trust is gone
Yes, the trust is gone. As much as I would love to get on board with a company mission run by executives, I come back to my senses quickly knowing that I could just as easily be laid off in a cold-blooded minute. All the while the corporate executives pilfer the company for salaries and benefits that are far beyond the hopes of people who work in cubicles.
And if they screw up? Those nice $47 million “severance” contracts will certainly help tide them over while people who work in cubes are lucky to get a month’s pay.
The Cubicle Warrior
So we end with the need to face the reality of corporations today. Yes, we want to have satisfying work. Yes, we want the opportunity to build our skills and show off our performance.Yes, we would love to give ourselves to something bigger; something that working for our company could make a difference in the world past merely making a buck.
But underneath all of those aspirations is this low-level anxiety about our jobs. A low-level indignation at how employees are treated. A low-level frustration that even though we know how to make things better, we have no voice. And we have long lost the outrage of corporate executives and the pilfering of their companies to support a lifestyle that no longer connects them to their employees and customers.
We wonder why management hasn’t figured out how to understand their business well enough to see disasters in the making. Why they have one answer to downturns: laying off their employees while keeping their bonuses. Why there isn’t a sense of decency and respect to the lives they are impacting with their simple sounding “reduction in force” statements — so they could be prevented.
And management wonders why there isn’t “employee engagement.” Why employees don’t just support what management is saying. Why the spin isn’t accepted as truth. Why the water cooler gossip is “must hear’ news. It is, after all, for our protection.
And that’s unfortunate.
So we hope for the best — and prepare for the worst. This is why we are Cubicle Warriors.
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