What he said. And I repeat my suggestion about Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth - it uses books like those by Collins and Tom Peters to point out how ridiculous this all can be.
What is frustrating is that, to quote Spinal Tap, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid. Meaning: all of the tools touched on in books like this can make sense if the company in question has a sincere interest in its people, communication, teamwork and the like. And one of the easiest ways to get this stuff wrong is to rely on some outside consulting firm or even a book to tell you how to get it correct. If you can’t sit down with your people, open up about what you are trying to do and engage them, all the Missions and Cult-Like Cultures you aspire to won’t mean squat - there’s a direct line between that stuff and ending up a Worst Company to Work For…
I left consulting because it was as no fun being the outsider trying to introduce those concepts as it was being the staffperson having it shoved upon them…
As a contrast, I currently work for a consulting firm that is in a lot of “best places to work” lists. And so far, it is a pretty good place to work. My GF even says I seem “less furious about this job when I get home”. Sure you have some of the same ridiculousness and long hours and intrusions into your personal life. That is inherent to consulting and corporate America in general. But from what I’ve seen, they actually care about their staff a lot more than some other places I’ve been. And the people seem less douchey.
Now of course, many of the younger ones who have no frame of reference are a little frustrated because there haven’t been any raises or promotions over the past couple years. That’s more a function of the economy though and the firm has struggled to avoid laying off people (since we just have to hire them back once things pick up). So I like to tell them horror stories about some of my experiences working at other firms or in industry. Because really, many of the same complaints they have here are pretty much universal.
At least, unlike my old firm, they don’t have to wear a dunce cap and a Flavor-Flav clock if they are late to a team meeting in this company.
Hmm, sounds like Deloitte. If so, I am once again struck by the impulse to play “Do you know…” (sorry; it’s my nature) - I know at least a couple of senior folks there…and yeah, they describe a much more hospitable workplace…
I am not. I caused a huge uproar when I was told to wear them and simply replied “um…no. I’m not going to put that on.”
Close. They were my first job out of business school. It’s actually one of the other Big-4 (so you have a 1:4 of guessing) but for “not getting fired” purposes I avoid any mention of my company name or anything that would specifically identify me.
I enjoy the work, but it’s clearly not for everyone. There is a certain “sameness” about everyone. It’s sort of a natural extension of elite preppy East Coast university culture. Everyone shops for their business clothes in same Banana Republic, Charles Tyrwhitt, Brooks Brothers and Pink stores within a few blocks of the office. The lobby is always filled with guys in black overcoats and laptop bags and women with plaid Burberry scarfs. Trips to the local bar are standard. But I think a lot of that is pretty standard NYC professional firm stuff.
Godammit. Let me reword that. If a LOW percentage of employees approve of the job the CEO is doing, does that necessarily follow that its a bad place to work?
The guy uses his power for evil, unfortunately. I haven’t had the opportunity to refuse to shell green beans, but I am as honest as I can be with my customers. Meaning that if they lie to me about our source/quality/meat content of food, I may not know that I’m lying to them. It infuriates me.
We don’t buy the prepackaged jellies. We put them in little plastic cups with little plastic lids.
The “Vegetarian” Vegetable Soup (yes, the quotes are there) is the only thing on the menu that specifies vegetarian. We make collard greens with ham hocks. I see collards in the soup very often. When I asked about that, I was told “they wash the collards off.” I’m pretty sure that doesn’t make them qualify as vegetarian.
My husband works at a restaurant also, when he told his coworkers I have to pay for the ticket books (.50 each, .01 per sheet, ~4 tables per sheet) it is now a running joke for them.
When my brother (who is a chef) came to visit, I went through the usual bullshit from this place, he was rolling around laughing, horrified and mad. He decided that the guy was a raving psycho who got away with stuff because he could.
I am living in a very, very small town. Things are different here. We had a health inspection and the health inspector was wearing a spaghetti strap tank top.
Did I mention that not only does everyone run around terrified when the owner is there, they run around terrified of the prospect of him being there.
I once asked him a question about a new item on the menu. He went back into the office and SCREAMED at his wife, so loudly that people in the gift shop area could hear him. She then came to me and made it very, very clear. You do not ask him questions. You do not talk to him. You certainly do not mention the computers to him. Oh, and don’t try to avoid him, he can sense it.
As far as I am concerned, he is an arrogant, pompous asshole who does double duty as an Evil Santa type person. Oh, he is the town Santa, FWIW. He was on the front page of the paper. I saw the picture and was horrified that my daughter may think HE is Santa.
Also surveying WalMart employees would be difficult, the corporation isn’t likely to provide that sort of access to their people. And given the indoctrination that they’re given about talking to outside people about the corporate structure and the exhaustion that comes from working for a company that treats people like modern-day serfs, it doesn’t seem likely that the employees would say much even if they were accessible.
Here is a recent NY Times article from a journalist that worked at a Wal-Mart for a day. Even the cleaned-up “there’s a reporter here so everyone be good” attitude is pretty creepy. God knows what happens when there is no reporter around.
I worked for them in the Carly Fiorina days. I knew they would be on the list before I clicked on it. It is certainly the worst job I’ve ever had.
That place is a mess. The biggest problem is that it is a massive bureaucracy. At one point I counted fourteen managers between myself and the VP of my group. Keep in mind I was in one of the smaller business groups and I wasn’t low man on the pole. One of the managers managed one other person, himself a manager. My team’s direct supervisor lived in another state, we saw him maybe twice a year. He had no experience whatsoever in our field, but he had an MBA, so that made him “qualified to manage” according to company doctrine. He was a nice guy but he had no business trying to manage us, and even he would admit that from time to time.
This lack of overall direction also created a cliquish, hostile environment. Once a VP from another business unit told us flat out that she hated working with our group and that she would do everything in her power to make our jobs difficult. It basically started a feud that went on for as long as I was there. Nobody cared even though it affected the company financially.
Consultants would come in from time to time, hired by god knows who, and fuck with us for a few weeks, wasting our time, trying to push some asinine management program on us. Then they’d just disappear, never to be thought of again, while we spent months trying to pick up the pieces and get back to work again. Then it would start all over.
Entire departments doing essential jobs would be eliminated at a second’s notice, all the employees laid off. Then, literally weeks later someone would realize that they were needed, so the department would be re-created, only new employees would be hired for the jobs. These people would need to be trained of course, putting the company back several months on essential tasks.
I could go on and on. Mark Hurd made noise that he’d do a massive cleanup when he took over. I was already on my way out the door when he arrived. Friends still at the company say things haven’t gotten any better.
One company I worked for previously in my department when I transferred in had a VP how was rather vague about things. He wasnt too bad, he was able to learn new information. Under him was the department manager, she was a panic monster. She had a bad habit of talking on speaker phone, very loudly with her office door open, and the overall office for the department was rather small so she echoed throughout making our phonecalls difficult. She hated computers and ws only marginally proficient. Under/beside her was a guy that was amazingly good, a computer whiz, an organizational whiz, and a dream to work for. I worked with him and sort of sidestepped my theoretical underboss on special projects a lot of the time [mainly because my underboss was really good at her job and rarely had anything for me to do] Unfortunately he left after about 8 months, and 2 underbosses moved up into his position.
Despite the fact I worked my arse off [still] and did my job as thoroughly as before he left, I was having health issues and was missing legitemately a fair amount of time, all under FMLA paperwork. I got told to my face by the department manager that she had no idea why the now departed boss liked me and thought I was so good, and if she had her way she would fire me immediately for not doing my job. :eek: but by company practice all she was allowed to do was give me my first and second warning at the same time
All this despite the fact that I was the most organized person in the department, all the paperwork I was responsible for generating and processing was filed every night if it wasn’t completed according to accepted practice, each type filed alphabetically by client or vendor in the overall category that they belonged to, comments appended in writing and in the computerized notes, and on the spreadsheets we used to track paperwork. Anybody in the department could walk over to my desk, log in and grab paperwork and find exactly what they needed, with every bit of information they needed. I knew I was having health problems, and i did not want the work assigned to me to not get completed properly. Everybody else I worked with noted how easy it was working with me. And did I mention it was all covered by FMLA paperwork?:mad:
As far as I am concerned, it is sort of the result of working for a reasonably small, privately owned company - very cliquish and if you get on someones bad side, their entire clique gets pissy. I loved most of the people I worked with, but sweet jebus, there was a handfull of about 10 people in that 400 people that thought i was dogshit. If I could avoid dealing with them, it was fine …
No worries - I have the same considerations when I approach posting. As senior executive for a publicly-traded company, I have to be thoughtful about what I post.
Actually, the work is freakin’ fascinating - that’s why I stayed in it for so long. I love breaking down big, amorphous problems into a workable structure and finding a solution that can be clearly and elegantly communicated and implemented. The fact that there is a cookie-cutter-ness to the culture is a byproduct of its transient nature - when teams shift with each new project, it is easier to fit the pieces together if the pieces have “standard contours” - for better or worse. There’s a whole lot of George Clooney’s “Up In the Air” vibe…
As a Times reader, I found this article to be far below NYT standards. Why would you alert corporate management that you are a journalist who wants to work in one of their stores for a day? You’ll obviously end up in the most sanitized store they have. Was a condition of her one-day employment that she wasn’t allowed to write any unfavorable descriptions in her article? What was the point, then, of writing it?
This reminds me of Captain Black from Catch-22 who, as a civilian, was hired by Fortune 500 companies to purposefully mismanage their finances so they could receive tax breaks. How did companies like yours even survive?
Stories like this can be pretty tricky. I agree that they could have just tried applying at a Wal-Mart, writing about the experience afterward. But if they put down “reporter for the New York Times” in the section on the application about their past jobs, it would raise a major red flag, especially if they were applying for some lowly hourly position.
They could always try leaving it off, but if they’d worked at the Times for a long time they’d need to explain what they’d been doing for those years. Again they could just write down a fake job, but, except for extremely rare occasions, blatantly misrepresenting yourself is a major taboo in this line of work.
And even if they did write down a fake company, or just said something vague about what they were doing all those years that they’ve actually been working at the Times, there’s always the chance that Wal-Mart will do a background check.
Oh I agree. For the past 5 years I’ve moved from the business process improvement side over to the dispute advisory and computer forensics side so I get heavily involved in a lot of these big cases you see on the news. Seems like there is a great deal more money to be made in trying to finding problems than fixing companies. It’s still pretty interesting though.
You have to be working in a good group though. I’ve been some places where the consultants were idiots and charlatans.
I find it funny that people who work at companies like Speak to me Maddie! describes always think we are there to push some “asinine management strategy” on them. Their asinine management strategy clearly isn’t working and yet they are quick to dismiss anything that requires anyone to actually change their job in any way.