Unbelievable

It's madness, Jim, but not as we know it

The Twist

If you don’t follow me on LinkedIN then you definitely won’t have seen this absolute doozy of a post that I shared, or the comments that it generated. There’s a lot to unpack here, so I think it’s worth sharing with you, my dear readers, and reflecting on it.

It contained this statement of values that was included in a job ad. I can’t validate the source, so we’ll have to take it on face value but it does have the ring of truth of a certain type of tech startup.

This is the epitome of hustle culture and tech bro-sphere wrapped up into one foul and stinking mess. As I said when I shared it,

’Whoever takes a job at this place needs therapy. The bosses need imprisonment.’

Funnily enough, I only got push back on the second bit!

So what’s wrong with this? Well, some people thought nothing.
‘At least they’re being honest, so you know what you’re signing up for. Not like most organisations that promise something very different to what you find when you start the job.’
I mean, it’s a point. Not a very strong one, imho, but a point.

However, when we look into this in more detail there are, as poster Sharon O’Dea remarked, ‘more red flags than a bullfighter’s laundry basket’.

For starters, this has to be a US company because quite a bit of this would be illegal in the UK and Europe and anywhere that decent employee protections exist. You cannot recruit on the criteria of ‘have a massive chip on your shoulder and/or a neurodivergent brain’. Nor for the requirement that ‘Work is a key part of your identity/fulfillment in life’. If they were being ‘honest’, as some claim, then they’d say ‘you must be ripe for exploitation, bullying and gaslighting’.

This set of ‘values’ (and I use the word loosely here) is normalising a set of extreme behaviours. Workaholism, obsessiveness, rudeness, ignoring of boundaries, excessive control and harassment of coworkers. These are not healthy behaviours, and certainly not in a workplace.

‘But people can choose whether to work there or not’.
Yes but people can choose to do all sorts of self-destructive things to themselves, which, as a society, we try to protect them from. We certainly don’t celebrate them putting themselves in harm’s way (yes, I know there’s a glorification of excess and the ‘rock and roll’ lifestyle but that is seen as an outlier and a cultural phenomenon. It’s not a normal progression from getting your PhD.)

The aforementioned criteria are almost selecting for people who are emotionally damaged or lack the capacity to properly regulate themselves. That’s why I said people who do work here need therapy, They probably needed it beforehand and, after exposure to such a toxic workplace, they will definitely need it afterwards. But hey, the unspoken promise is that by being so ‘hardcore’, they will make loads of money so they’ll be able to afford the best psychs. Assuming the business doesn’t go bust and leave them with worthless stock options.

So, this is an ‘honesty’ that we could do without. It belongs more to a drug trafficking gang than a proper and legitimate business.

But it also points to a kind of madness. Apparently, rather than doing your job, you should be hounding people to make sure they’ve done what you need them to do, so constantly interrupting them whilst they are doing the thing you want done to find out if they have done yet.

At the same time, you should be busy donning all sorts of hats and interfering in other people’s jobs because no job is not your job. But that’s OK because presumably, whilst you’re doing this, someone is interfering and doing your job. That’s if they are not hounding you to find out if you have done it yet.

No worries though because ‘Titles reflect scope’ (?), so in the event of a dispute (and there are going to be many, what with all these chippy people being ‘shameless’ all over the place), you can resolve them with a long debate about job titles.

No wonder you’re working nights and weekends and texting at 3 am. When else are you going to get the work done?

If all that wasn’t enough to make you give this a wide berth, it conjures up the godhead Steve Jobs by referring to A-players, a truly hateful concept. Recruiting ‘only A-players’ is a self-aggrandising move because it means that it confers ‘A-player’ status on you, regardless of whether you are or not. As the concept originally refers to the ability of the very best coders to outperform their peers ten-fold and many of the people who run companies on these lines are MBA-grads … well, you can figure it out for yourself.

Plus, there’s an entirely meaning free mission statement, “Help people resonate”. Resonate how? With what? To what purpose? Are we to turn them into bells and club them around the head with a hammer?

Who ever put this out there probably regards themselves as operating at the apex of entrepreneurialism. What they have done so perfectly is to show how exploitative today’s capitalism is and how screwed up work is. If this is the path to success (or ‘Winning’ as it is defined here), is it any wonder most people are deciding it’s not for them?

Wouldn’t It Be Nice

Time for another instalment in the occasional series of ‘Statements of the Perfectly Bleeding Obvious’.

Fortune published this article “As CEOs struggle to find the new normal, Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For have unlocked a secret to happy employees” (I think the headline writer must be paid by the word!)

And what is this secret? Hold onto your hats here, your flabber will never have been as ghasted.

“Listen more than you talk and your teams will tell you what they need from you in order to deliver their best,” Hammond echoes. “As long as you follow that advice, both your business and your colleagues will be stunningly successful.”

Yes, that’s it. Ask you people what they need to do their best. Who’d have thunk it?

Well, me. I mean, that’s one of the two thoughts that got me started on this whole path, namely, ‘Ask your people what they need and where things could be done better’ (the other being ‘If you want better engagement, stop treating your people like shit’).

Of course, I realise that most CEOs will need to bring in BigCon to run a vastly expensive programme to survey their employees. In fact, most of them probably have no idea where their employees are and certainly no intention of speaking to them. In any case, they’re not going to like what they hear and the only action they are likely to take is to make sure the matter is never spoken of again. But, hey, they’ll get some nice dinners and rounds of golf out of the whole process.

Although the article is pretty harmless and really just a puff for Fortune’s ‘100 Best Places to Work’ and Great Place To Work’s surveys (they’re a sister company), it does contain this contentious little phrase:

‘Striking the right balance is tough: What’s best for productivity and the bottom line doesn’t always translate to higher employee morale and retention.’

I am struggling to see how higher employee morale and retention is bad for productivity and the bottom line, and there’s plenty of evidence that it is good for both. So what’s really being said here?

I think it is referring to doing things to make a short-term impact on costs, juicing the numbers to meet Wall Street expectations. Like cutting back on benefits, like RTO mandates, like a round of lay-offs. These are often justified under the umbrella of ‘productivity and the bottom line’ although they only have a short-term positive impact on the latter and are detrimental to both in the longer term. But who cares, by then the CEO and execs have trousered their bonuses and disappeared off to wreck some other business.

Eve Of Destruction

The Fortune article is framed around how companies are adapting post-COVID and establishing the ‘new normal’, a seductive but flawed idea as there isn’t going to be a new normal. I, and many others, are of the view that there will be a greater diversity of work arrangements going forward and that each organisation will need to craft its own solution rather than merely copy everyone else.

Anyway, just to prove that there won’t be a ‘new normal’, there’s a much greater disruption happening right now. It’s the actions of the ‘Great Disruptor’ himself, the narcissistic Cheeto in the White House. Whether you support Trump or not, you have to recognise that he is upending the world’s geopolitical and economic framework that has brought a measure of prosperity and stability to world for the past 80 years.

This relative stability has been the foundation on which most organisations have been built and, whilst it has been slowly breaking apart during this century, it has now been ruptured by Trump. If the world was increasingly VUCA before, it’s now that on steroids. We are in a period of extreme uncertainty and volatility.

This last week has seen Trump announced tariffs (I believe the correct journalistic term is ‘swingeing’) that have caused immediate turmoil in financial markets and seem likely to drive then USA and much of the world into recession. What is worse is that these could all change tomorrow, and either up or down. The unpredictability is more dangerous than the introduction of the tariffs themselves.

Never fear, help is here. We have a new acronym!!

BANI: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible.

So, whilst we all frantically update our pitch decks to reflect the new reality (annoying, really, VUCA is a much more satisfying word to say. You can put some real force into it and make it terrifying. Whereas BANI just sounds like banal. As in the ‘the banality of evil’.), what are organisations to do?

Much of business practice and theory emerged during the period of stability that began when the post-war world order was established in the 1950s. Command and control hierarchies work in a stable and predictable world. What works can be repeated indefinitely. Great leaps in productivity can be achieved and were, leading to a sustained period of prosperity.

However, this made organisations rigid and slow to change. They were able to impose themselves on the environment (social, economic, political and material) and were not able to adapt easily to different context (as anyone who has worked for a foreign subsidiary of US multinational will know all too well!).

Over the past couple of decades, organisations have attempted to become more agile and adaptive but have remained, at their core, monolithic and inflexible. They’ve talked a good game but have not really changed that much. Look at how they have taken up agile, seeing it as a magic bullet but then systemising it and implementing it with such rigidity that they’ve squeezed all the original spirit out of it. Or how it took the shock of the pandemic for them to embrace flexible working and use the technologies to untether employees from their desk that had been available to them for years.

Now these organisations will have to get serious about redefining how they work and embracing progressive working practices. These will give them the agility, adaptability and resilience that they claim they have been wanting but will now absolutely need if they are to successfully navigate the next few years.

I’ve been saying for some time that I think one or more big companies will disappear quite quickly, either unwilling or unable to change quickly enough. I think the odds of that happening have just got much higher.

Organisations that are already embracing the new ways of working and more distributed, autonomous organisational structures (and I don’t mean financial engineering and offshoring to tax havens. Those tricks won’t work nearly as well anymore.) now have a competitive advantage. They are built for the world that’s just arrived, not the one that is disappearing fast in the rear-view mirror and is about to slide over the horizon.

It could be that organisations will be forced to change, at speed and scale, and take a more progressive approach or lose out to those that already have.

They say every cloud has a silver lining, don’t they?

(Of course, in my darker moments, I see a dystopian future of mega-corporations running everything and subjecting us to techno-serfdom, but the sun’s shining today so I’m looking on the bright side!)

Catch The Wind

Today, this popped up in my BlueSky feed.

She continues:

and I mean it's fine that we don't talk about it as a priority, because heaven knows countless people have it worse, but it feels......bad? probably? that as a graduate, until about thirty years ago, you had so many options for broadly fulfilling and enjoyable jobs, and now so many of them are gone

as a corollary - I wonder if that's why you get so many Gen Zers and below either noping out entirely or becoming sociopathically obsessed with wealth; until not that long ago you could have a genuinely interesting life somewhere in the middle, but what if that's not the case anymore?

I think the steady public services job isn't there anymore. Ones where you accrue pension, paid holiday, opportunity for advancement over time, professional development and/or decent hours, decent wages. An interesting life didn't have to be an interesting job if there was surplus beyond essentials

Of course, I said “Me, me, I do! All the time on my substack!” But you know that, right?

She is absolutely right that we don’t talk about it (well, apart from me, obvs) and I believe it’s a reality that is at the root of a lot of the disruption we see today.

At the organisational level, it is just not acknowledged how rubbish most jobs are today. That’s why people are so disengaged and just dialling it in. It’s part of why productivity is flat-lining. It’s why people don’t want to take promotions or try to get to the ‘top table’. It’s why people job-hop and take a transactional view of work.

This could be denial because they are buying their own bullshit about how wonderful their business is and how well they treat their employees. Or because they don’t want to admit it. Or because they don’t know how to fix it. Or because they don’t care.

At the political level (Marie LeConte is a political journalist), because the main parties won’t acknowledge this they don’t see how people feel that the current system is not delivering for them. The first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge the problem, after all. So they continue to tweak the system without seeing that more radical change is needed because it’s not delivering for those who should be doing well. If it’s not delivering for the middle class professional, then they have a problem.

And that lack of acknowledgment opens the door for the populists with their simple promises and offers of radical change. So we get Trump and the chaos that he is unleashing (other brands of populist chaos monkey are available).

So yeah, Marie has a point, doesn’t she?

Reach Out, I’ll Be There

I’d love to hear what you think about all this and what issues concern you right now. Maybe you just fancy having a chat about this stuff, to stop yourself going mad (like me!)? Drop me an email, DM on LinkedIN, or book in a call on my Calendly page.

I introduced myself the other day as “I am Colin and I have opinions”. If you’d like me to share these opinions with an audience, I am interested in doing some talks (or podcasts), so get in touch with your ideas.

I also play the ukulele. But I am not available for weddings, birthday parties or barmitzvahs, which should be a comfort to us all.