There is much pressure, often subtle, in our culture to be all of those things. Desperation is often presented as “hunger,” greed as “ambition,” and insincerity as a “positive attitude.”
You wonder whether it would be better if the people at the top were even a little cynical about it. But no, they’ve swallowed the Kool-Aid themselves.
I’ve often wondered about that. I mean every job has it’s unpleasent aspects. You just have to put on your “game face” and get to work. Clients don’t need to see your frustration. OTOH, you can’t build up a total fantasy world either.
When I worked at the “Drink the Kool-aid” company back in the mid 90s (a mid-sized Dot-com consulting firm), they handed us copies of Built to Last by James C. Collins. The book gives specific advice on how to build a cult-like company and cites examples from companies like Amazon, Apple, IBM, Nordstrom and Disney that successfully developed cult like cultures. And this company followed the playbook to the letter:
-Create a mythos around your senior executives or star performers
-Create a set of “Core Values” and constantly recite them like a mantra
-Create methods of oatracizing or humiliating individuals who don’t perform or follow protocols, including:
–Daily team status meetings where each team member had to indicate if they were ahead, on track or behind and why
–Wearing things like dunce caps or clocks if you came in late after a meeting started
-Team cheers, chants, etc
-Messages that employees are “special” by virtue of working there, “it’s more than just a job”, “we’re a family”, etc
-Forced socialization outside of work - dinners, happy hours, parties, etc
-Almost religeous-level evangelizing by senior management about the company’s “mission”
-Rejection of anyone who doesn’t embrace the culture
It goes beyond mere “branding” or “employee relations” or even just trying to keep employees happy. Companies create these sort of cultures because if you can make it more than just a job to people, they will approach they work like a bunch of fanatics. They will be more inclined to work long, grueling hours, less likely to seek other employment and basically willing to put up with all manner of shit.
But basically at the end of the day, it’s all bullshit designed to distract from the fact that it is just a job. The only people getting rich are the senior executives while everyone else toils in the code mines until they either snap and are ejected for not ‘fitting in’ or the whole thing collapses.
I had a step-uncle that tried to recruit my mother and step-dad into one of these. They were interested but hadn’t committed yet when mom asked me my opinion on it. Thankfully! I never found out who the company was but it sounded like Amway. You bought grocery items and cleaning products from a catalog.
I started asking questions. What brands do they offer? How much do they cost? How do you get them? There are limited brands. They cost more and you order them through the mail and wait for them to show up. So where’s the benefit?
Then she explained that if she got just six people to buy from her she’d get money back for whatever they bought. And if each of those six got six and so on, why before long she might have some serious money coming in.
When I questioned her ability to convince six other people that buying groceries and cleaning supplies through the mail was a good idea, it’s like the balloon deflated. She’d known all along it was a bad idea. She just tried to fool herself into thinking that it wasn’t. I imagine that if she’d actually committed and put money into it, I wouldn’t have been able to talk her out of it so easily.
(Deleted. . . thought better of it, sorry!).
That’s probably the most creative method I’ve ever heard of for getting “appointments” to “get in front of people”. There’s a certain logic that says that every opportunity is a good one, and if you miss them, it’s your own damn fault. So you end up annoying and alienating friends and family to hawk whatever it is you’re selling, and moving on to some other likely group.
If I’m invited somewhere and the host says to bring my checkbook, my checkbook and I are staying home. I am not so desperate for a social life that I’m willing to spend an evening listening to someone wax rhapsodic about the virtues of vitamins or whatever.
At any rate, I left a (legit) sales job recently over some of these attitudes. One Saturday, I was at the sprog’s soccer game when I got a call from my boss asking me a question from an exam I’d already taken, but he hadn’t. When I answered the question, he asked me if I were making phone calls to set appointments. When I told him that I was at my son’s soccer game, he told me that I should use the time to cold-call. The sad thing is, he was serious. That was the beginning of the end. When I turned in my resignation, the relief was instantaneous and obvious. I will never take a sales job again. Ever.
Robin