Same Old Song
This newsletter started as an outlet for the thoughts whizzing around my brain and somewhere to let off steam about the idiocy and nonsense that is talked about the workplace today. Most weeks, I sit down and a variety of things pop into my head, some of which I select to wrestle down onto the page (so to speak, because I haven’t ever written it out on paper!).
But this week … well, I could get myself into a froth about bullying in the workplace after Deputy PM Dominic Raab, a man who has a proud record of failing in several government departments and the emotional intelligence of a brick, had to resign after being found guilty of bullying. A man who then suggested in his ‘sorry, not sorry’ apology that there is a level of bullying necessary to get things done … but you can probably write the rant yourself. I’ve detailed how much I abhor bullying and how it is utterly inexcusable and totally counter=productive, what else is there to say?
Truth be told, I’m getting fed up writing about the negatives. I feel like I’ve said all there is to say and, frankly, it’s depressing to wallow in the mire created by the assortments of arseholes, idiots, narcissists, shills and psychopaths that either write guff about the workplace or behave atrociously in it.
So, I am resorting to the ‘get out of jail’ card of all artists who are struggling for inspiration - the ‘Greatest Hits Album’. Or, in this case, it’s ‘re-recorded and previously unreleased tracks’.
I have a big Keynot file called ‘Master Deck’ which holds all the slides I might use in a presentation. I add new ones to it when I come across things that I might want to use in future. These are either things I often to refer to, or new things I come across.
Much to my surprise, when I looked through it for inspiratoin, I found I’d included a few quotes of my own. I know, how up yourself do you have to be to make up your own quotes? Well, wherever that is, it seems I’ve arrived. So, just to compound my burgeoning self-regard and bumptious self-importance, I’m going to share them here.
If you feel the need to rush off and purge yourself, I entirely understand.
I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down
“The workplace has, for too long, been a play group for under-developed and over-confident men”
Does this resonate with you? If it doesn’t, you might want to consider if you are one of this particular gang of playmates.
We’ve all seen this, the loud, brash, laddish types doing as they please, egging each other on, with the banter and the in-jokes, resembling nothing more than a bunch of overgrown school kids. I remember coming out of the first board meeting I ever attended, open-mouthed at the behaviour I had just witnessed. It seems the bigger the role, the bigger the man-child that occupies it.
Just consider. Trump, Johnson, Musk - they are literally the tip of the iceberg.
Tomas Chamorro-Premusik deals with this in his book “Why so many incompetent men become leaders”, pointing out that we mistake the traits of Confidence, Charisma and Narcissism (the deadly leadership triad) as positive signs of leadership rather than the negative ones they really are.
We’ve seen the rise feminism and DEI as a counter to this but that hasn’t stopped it, as the sudden emergence of the ‘#metoo’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ movements testify. They’ve just got better at hiding what they are up to. The Mad Men are still there, sanitised for modern consumption.
The move to hybrid and remote working has made the office dramatically less interesting as playground for these people, who are now crying that they have nowhere to play, er, sorry, ‘collaborate, network and learn’, and that there’s no hi-jinks, er, I mean, innovation going on.
In a display of peak man-child, Starbuck CEO Howard Schulz told an audience 'I'll get on my knees' and 'do whatever you want,' as he pleaded with workers to return to the office. After this baleful cry of “I haven’t got anyone to play with” fell on deaf ears, he threw his toys out of the pram and spat his dummy out by mandating a return to the office.
(Sometimes I think I’m dreaming this stuff up but no. Satire had now been replaced by a Google search.)
This Will Be
“We have free-market economies and Stalinist organisations”
This is my pithier version of something that Frederick Laloux wrote in ‘Reinventing Organizations’ that hit me between the eyes when I read it. The full version is
“…the idea that a country’s economy would best be run by the heavy hand of central planning committees in Soviet style has been totally discredited. We all know that a free-market system where a myriad of players pick up on signals, make decisions, and coordinate among themselves works much better. Yet for some strange reason, inside organizations, we still trust the equivalent of central planning committees.”
It speaks to so many things that characterise the workplace today but are mostly ignored or unremarked on, such is the hegemony of thought that grips business and the media that support it.
Firstly, it is undoubtedly true. Anyone who had had to participate in the annual folly that is the Forecast, Plan and Budget process will attest to the folly of trying to predict the future and then doggedly try to impose this imagined future on reality. It was pretty stupid back in the days when I was still in corporate, in the relatively calm and stable times of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. In today’s VUCA environment, it’s absolutely nuts.
Secondly, it shows the devoted adherence to a narrative and a belief system even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is, at best, flawed and in truth just wrong. The linear, mechanistic thinking, the belief in the illusory control and the doomed pursuit of certainty that characterised the industrial era models of business were always a useful conceit but as they have become increasingly detached from reality. The determination to hold onto these stories is cultish.
And finally, it is a paradox, a common phenomenon that is almost completely ignored in management theories and discourse about business. Companies are advocates of democracy, capitalism and free-markets but resist any attempts to bring those foundational concepts into their structure and operation.
Makes you question why, doesn’t it?
Just The Way You Are
“In the corporate environment, culture change is, in fact, counter-cultural”
And here’s another paradox. The modern corporate environment is set up to resist change, apply control, enforce conformity and compliance. In short, to maintain the status quo.
Any attempts to bring in change will be resisted by the structures of the organisation. We see this time and time again, when companies integrate a new acquisition in the hope that their way of working will permeate the organisation, only to see it killed off by the corporate antibodies. If you’ve ever tried to make change happen in a large organisation, you will be familiar with the obstacles that exist and that dull, ache you get from being consistently hit over the head for having the temerity to even try.
As my mate Geoff Marlow says, corporate culture is a ‘normative behaviour control mechanism’. By that definition, it will maintain the existing culture.
This explains why the idea of ‘culture change projects’ is flawed and why they fail. How can you change something that is designed to be unchanging? How can the status quo change the system that sustains them even if they are wiling to act against their own preservation?
The answer is to have a culture of constant change, which is going to be something like the learning organisation espoused by Peter Senge. Given the reaction of the man-children to the cultural change caused by COVID and the shift to hybrid working (see above), it will be a cold day in hell before that happens under the current lot.
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes
So there you are, three little nuggets of wisdom that have tripped off the Newlyn tongue (well, more like dribbled out of the Newlyn fingers). Feel free to share these quotes, turn them into memes, dance them out on TikTok or paint them in big letters on the walls. I’m not really a big fan of tatoos but if that’s your thing … you know what to do.
If you’ve any little aphorisms, bon-mots or pithy sayings you’d like to share, I’d love hear them. Let me know in the comments or on the usual channels. Or even via Notes, the new twitter-like feature on Substack (I’ll post this up there as a conversation starter).
If you’d like to have a chat, then book yourself a slot via my Calendly. I’d love to hear about your workplace experiences and horror stories, and find out what help you need to Decrapify Work. Or if you want to shoot the breeze about the future of work or anything else that I write about, that’s cool too.
“Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down - Again” - from the Great King Biscuit Boy aka Richard Newell.
Pretty apt title for your best hits Andrew.
If you continue to struggle flinging sh1t at the unspeakable, undeserving, unctuous blobs of faecal matter masquerading as world leaders and corporate tzars, drop me a line. And I’ll come off the bench while you have a rest and a word with the coach.