Sunday, November 18, 2007

Corporate Stupidity


I get a lot of requests, but I must make one thing abundantly clear. I am not allowed to write about my current employer. I want to keep my job which is why I never write about anything concerning my job including the name of the company I work for. This is a violation of confidentiality, and I don't do things like that at least while I am getting paid or could get sued. But I can write about companies I used to work for.

Before I begin with the bloviating, I want to stress what I consider to be the chief aim of a company. The chief end of a company is to make money. PERIOD. I am a capitalist, and I believe in making a profit. Any company that deviates from this purpose will not remain a company. Some left thinking shitheads may decry this as evil, but it is economic reality much the same way that gravity will always have a tether on you. The upside of gravity is that you don't go flying off into space. The downside of gravity is that sometimes you go flying into the concrete below.

The goal of profit is what determines what is smart and stupid in a company. It is smart to make money. It is stupid to not make money. And it is absolutely retarded to lose money. Yet, Corporate America seems adept at performing all three things. I can't count how many strokes of imbecility I have witnessed at companies, and I am amazed that they remain in business. This corporate stupidity has even spawned a comic strip called Dilbert which I think is the funniest thing in the funny papers these days. Scott Adams thinks much the same way I do. He is not a left leaning shithead but a capitalist. Yet, he is supplied with an endless stream of examples of corporate stupidity by readers who email him. This is probably why Dilbert continues where other high quality strips like The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes folded. Dilbert never runs out of material.

Where does this stupidity come from? Basically, it is an outgrowth of the bureaucracy you see in Washington. For some reason, corporate leaders have borrowed the bureaucratic tendencies of the executive administration within the Beltway and see it as the most effective way to run a centralized organization. The military operates on much the same principle which is why you get a clusterfuck like letting Osama bin Laden get away in Tora Bora because the Pentagon didn't want the CIA and Special Ops getting the credit. And so it goes. . .

The difference between government and business is that government stupidity can continue forever. Business stupidity cannot. When a company loses enough money, it folds and goes out of business. This is why one of the best ways to succeed in business is to capitalize off the mistakes of larger outfits either by starting a competing enterprise or going in and turning around the existing enterprise. Stupidity abounds and so does the opportunity to exploit it. This is why consulting firms make so much money. But I digress. . .

Corporate stupidity is the luxury of profitable companies. When a company makes money, they start getting stupid. It took brains to become successful, but there is a lag time between the fuck up and the results of the fuck up. It is in this lag time that we get utter idiocy. And Machiavellian types who are adept at surfing the seas of backstabbing, credit snatching, and blameshifting become the ones who are best at surviving in this environment. This is how you get a guy like Disney's Michael Eisner who did a few good things at the start and then destroyed what he had built. Eisner is the epitome of corporate stupidity, and he was compensated handsomely for it. He fired guys like Jeffrey Katzenberg who went on to cofound DreamWorks or Michael Ovitz who helped Disney become what it was.

It will become readily apparent to anyone working in the corporate world that many businesses often succeed in spite of not because of their leadership. If you don't believe this, read up on the debacle known as New Coke. It is a testament to the strength of a company that monkeys could run it which is exactly what happens. Unlike Jack Welch's General Electric where executive talent was recruited and rewarded, things such as talent, brains, and initiative are punished in the corporate sector. People who make money for the company are seen as enemies, and they are. They are a threat to the incompetents who have lodged themselves in the upper rungs of the power structure.

At some point in your career, you must decide what kind of person you are going to be. Are you going to be Machiavellian or a moneymaker? Are you going to be a weasel or a tiger? All I can tell you is that in the long run, profit always wins. It is the only thing that wins. It is the sure thing that wins. But you will take your licks on the way, and there is nothing you can do about it. A successful animal often carries with it a host of parasites. That animal would be more robust if free of these pests, but it often survives with them intact.

Here are some examples of corporate stupidity from three places I used to work for. I did not make this shit up.

1. DOMINO'S PIZZA

I used to deliver pizzas in college for a franchise of Domino's. I liked the job, and they liked me. I did a good job. I was reliable and energetic and positive. The owner of the store liked me. But it was a franchise, and our day of reckoning came when a stupid bitch from Quality Control paid us a visit.

I don't know where Domino's got this person, but it was clear to us that she was retarded. Miss Quality Control's job was to make sure our product was up to the standards of the company. This is an understandable aim. You want customers to receive what they expected. This goes to the purpose of the profit. But this was a clueless bitch.

Her method for ensuring quality was to make us remake every pizza we made until she liked the way it looked. I remember making the same pizza three times until it matched her standards. Needless to say, the customer called back and cancelled their order because they got tired of waiting for the pizza. This went on for a couple of days until she left. The franchise survived, but it would not have if she had remained there indefinitely.

I don't know a lot about business, but I do know that a product or a service is a compromise between quality, productivity, and cost. If I want it fast and cheap, I go to McDonald's. If I'm willing to pay and wait a bit, I go to Outback or Longhorn. Domino's is not the Olive Garden. Customers want it fast and cheap which is what we gave them. These people vote with their dollars. If we did a lousy job, we wouldn't stay in business. The ultimate arbiter of what is good or bad in a company is the customer. Too often, what the customer wants and what some corporate weasel wants are often at odds. But, hey, we don't need customers. Fuck 'em.

2. RPS, INC.

This company is now known as FedEx Ground, and I don't know if they follow the same policies now or adopted new shitheaded policies. But this is the story of the crayon.

RPS was a package delivery company that was basically a rip off of UPS. The difference between RPS and UPS is that RPS utilized an automated sortation system for its packages. This thing worked great compared to the manual sortation systems of an older company like UPS which relied on package handlers to hand sort each package to its correct destination.

When you sort packages, you are going to make mistakes even with a state-of-the-art automated sortation system. This is because the automated sortation system works with barcodes that have information on them which was keyed in manually by someone. These people make mistakes which carries down the chain. It happens.

Inside each trailer is a package handler who reads the label of each package before it is loaded onto the trailer. His job is to make sure missorts don't become misloads. He must do this job at the minimum rate of 400 packages per hour. This was the standard.

Naturally, you can load a trailer a lot faster if you don't read those labels or only read some of them. You can catch a slacker by tossing a salt in his chute. A salt was a package that was headed to the wrong destination. If the guy caught it, he was doing his job. If he didn't, he got his ass reamed by yours truly. The quality standard was one misload per 1000 packages. I had days when we had zero misloads for the entire area, and we loaded 10,000 or more for the shift. I must also admit that we had guys who were even better than me on this shit. In fact, they would talk shit to me about it, and I was always mortified by it. Of course, I had the highest productivity which I would rub in on them. But this is when stupidity came into the mix.

RPS became concerned about misloads, so they instituted a program to eliminate misloads. Each package handler was given an industrial crayon and ordered to draw the last digit of the zip code on each package before loading it. Each hub had their own color. Ours was puke green. The purpose of the crayon was to slow down the package handlers because they were working too fast and making mistakes. By using the crayon, a 400+ loader would be reduced to a 200 package per hour slug. I wouldn't care except that the company standard mandated 400 packages per hour. In other words, if you went too slow, you would be fired. But if you didn't slow down and use the crayon, you would be fired for that. It was no-win situation. I even held contests to see if anyone could meet the quality standard while using that crayon. None of them ever did.

Needless to say, the crayon received the same treatment as all other stupid policies enacted by companies or governments. It was ignored, and this was company wide. When getting my ass reamed for not using the crayon, I would grab packages from random and dare my superiors to find a single crayon mark from other hubs in the system. They shut up and left me alone. I was making sense.

Somewhere at RPS, an idiot was put in charge. He drew an exorbitant salary for basically being a fool. The crayon was his idea, and it was ignored. If the policy had been followed, the company would have lost millions of dollars in lost productivity. I know because my boss got fired for this reason. He didn't produce. Meanwhile, I lampooned the company, my superiors, and the entirety of middle management, and they kept me because I did produce. But being young and stupid, I walked off that job in frustration. I had let those bastards grind me down. Never again.

Folks, I can only tell you one thing. It is better to show your ass than not show your ass. You are going to get fired either way, so go ahead and speak your mind. Tell them exactly what you think of the operation. I have never been fired for my candor. In fact, I have been offered promotions because of it. Jack Welch at GE found that candor was integral to running his operation. He encouraged people to speak freely because he realized that candor was communication. Problems got fixed because someone had the balls to say something.

Remember, the goal is to make money. Companies will fire you because of this, but who wants to work for a bunch of losers? Give me a team that says that winning isn't the goal, and I'll show you that they are losers. The goal is to win. This is why you play the game. Likewise, you win in business by making money. At RPS, you didn't make money with a crayon in your hand.

3. TARGET DISTRIBUTION CENTER

This job was bizarro land. I had this job for exactly 89 days because on Day 90 we all became permanent and our benefits kicked in. They shitcanned all of us. This was one of the worst jobs I have ever had.

Basically, Target is a retail establishment with razor thin margins. There is a lot of pressure to make a profit. I should have thrived in an environment like that. Instead, I felt like I had stepped into East Germany. Target had this thing called the Team Target Attitude which was basically a form of brainwashing. You couldn't be candid about anything and that included saying something as innocuous as, "I'm not having a good day today." I am not making this up.

For the first three weeks at Target, we did nothing. We sat in class for training. I have never spent so much time in training in my life for any job. I usually learn by doing which involves WORKING. We didn't work for almost an entire month. Then, they tossed us out there and told we had to meet the productivity standard before 90 days was up. I met my standard. Others didn't. But knowing what I know now, I would have spent the bulk of my shift goofing off. They were going to fire all of us. There was nothing we could do.

It makes no sense to waste all that money training masses of people to do a job when you already know you are going to fire them. Add in the oppressive environment and the ill will they have fostered in the community, I don't see how they pull it off. I have talked with people who worked there, and their experience was the same. After firing people, Target would immediately hire a new batch of recruits and repeat the process.

I was not a fly on the wall, but I already know how this stupidity came about. People still in the 90-day probationary period were not credited on the labor numbers of that company. Nevermind that they are getting paid. For management, this is free money. They get the productivity upside from having extra people on staff without taking a hit on the labor cost side. This is all internal corporate accounting. The bottom line is a loss for the company no matter how you cut it. But within the company, it behooved you to maintain a permanent force of temporary labor. Utter stupidity. Factor in the cost of benefits when the 90 days kicked in, and there you have it.

I probably have this wrong and have overlooked some factors into why Target operates this way. All I know is that you don't make money when you pay people not to work for a month and to underwork for two more months. Somewhere, somebody is working the numbers for the sake of a career but to the detriment of the company. It is what it is.

CONCLUSION
So, what do I have to say about all of this madness? All I can say is that the customer is always right, and if a company and its owners want to run it into the ground, there's nothing you or I can do about it nor should we. Darwin trumps Machiavelli in the long run. It has taken me my entire adult working life to realize this, but I have seen it happen. The corporate weasels will get what is coming to them. This is because you can't lose money and stay in business. Focus on being a good worker and using common sense. If they want to fire you for this, you don't need that company. And speak your mind. There is no protection in silence. Being a good worker demands candor even if the people you work for are too stupid to listen.

This is an endless topic for me. I can go on and on about it. It just amazes me how people get paid to not make money or to lose money for a company. But as a weasel once told me, "Just do your paperwork and make sure it is done. No matter how bad you fuck up, they can't fire you if you do the paperwork and follow the rules." Folks, I swear to you that I did not make that last part up.

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