The corporate world is seriously flawed

I think the corporate world is seriously flawed. Let me list just three examples from the past few days to show you how I came to this conclusion:

1. “${insert your company here} Confidential – For Internal Use Only”

Today, an email to internal distribution lists was forwarded to me and to several other members of our bigger team. This email was about a security bulletin which was published on the internet and which dealt with several publicly available CVE/CVSS warnings and issues. Tho none of them dealt with our own development (all were third party issues), that email was marked as “confidential” as listed above.

This is a serious flaw.

I know that ${insert your company here} has values like openness, honesty, and generally strives for a relationship of trust with its customers. However, as the above “internal” (in bold characters as well!) demonstrates, this isn’t really understood amongst all the team leaders. In spite of being silent about something like this, we should rather send out emails to our customers immediately, proactively warning them about those issues and informing them how to deal with these flaws so that they (the customers) can go on and keep working with the feeling that we *do* actually care for them and their businesses.

Yearly, we have to absolve those lengthy ${insert your company here} values, security, and other presentations – however it seems that those are rarely understood and “lived” accordingly by those who ditribute them. And so the question must be allowed why the senders of these “confidential” messages are always of a “higher rank” than oneself?

2. Speaking of “ranks”

I also think that permanently, the wrong guys get promoted within today’s corporate environment (like in politics as well, but that is an entirely different topic; I don’t want to digress). So let me give you one more example, also from today:

${insert your company here} wants their employees to care for their own development, which generally isn’t wrong. But some of the colleagues take that as an excuse to develop lengthy “workshops” or presentations with the sole purpose of earning merits for themselves. They get taken off the queue of normal workload to prepare, to hold these workshops and presentations, and additionally to that, they generally behave at work like it all was some kind of social event. Instead of silently doing their job, they joke around, disturbing others in the office who have to work, and who have to work even more, because it’s the additional workload of those guys that has to be handled by those “workers” as well.

So in a nutshell, the type of guy who behaves like that does it all on the shoulders of others. Still that type of employee is typically the one who will push his career forward, leaving those who really work in the dust and behind. In Germany, we call something like this an “ellbow mentality”, something which definitely shouldn’t be promoted (in a more “normal” world, this would be punished).

With accepting a behaviour like that, ${insert your company here} and lots of other companies are rewarding those who – in my opinion – never would deserve this. So this is another serious flaw.

3. No way out

It would be nice if we could just turn our backs to the corporate world, and leave it all behind. But this is no option at all – the way we all do business today will always favour the big ones over the small ones, meaning that if you open up a small startup you have two options. One of these apply only if you’re a real genius, and if you invent or offer something which was previously not available, and who everyone thinks he/she needs it. In that case, you will be bought and swallowed by one of those “big ones”, perhaps making you personally a millionaire, but it won’t change the fate of those who helped and believed in you – your employees will become “property” of those again who they tried to escape from.

The second option is to become a “partner” of one of those big ones short after you start. The first years are almost always the most difficult ones, and without the “help” (read: the customers) of the corporates, you’re simply nothing. The problem with this option is that “partners” very often aren’t really treated as such – it’s much more like in my second example above, resulting in a scenario which lets those “partners” take all (or most of) the workload, and in this case also the risk. Play along our rules, or get kicked. My way or the highway. That’s the typical behaviour of “big” towards “small”. And why? Just because we can.

If you look at those three meager examples (and believe me, one thing I’ve learned during all those years is that there are many more), then the question must be: is this the world we really want to live in? We spend more hours at work than with our families, and for what? Just to increase shareholder value no matter what the resulting circumstances might be?

I think the coprorate of the future has to be different. Speaking of a “smarter planet” is one thing (and not a bad goal at all), but thinking about a more intelligent way of our own behaviour is something entirely different.

In the end, the moment will come when we all will have to leave this planet and life behind. Shouldn’t the real question be something like: what have I *really* achieved? How did *my* existence help mankind, or did it even help a handful of other human beings? Or animals? Or nature?

I’m afraid that as long as we don’t prepare ourselves for those final questions, the corporate world and the way of how we act and live today will be seriously flawed.

If you’ve read until here, I thank you for your time.