Authorpreneur Dashboard – Mark Edward Barnes
Thrive - Surviving in a Corporate Jungle
Humor & Entertainment
A light-hearted look at life in the Corporate Jungle. No science, no tips, no jargon - it's called a Jungle for a reason...
Book Bubbles from Thrive - Surviving in a Corporate Jungle
Highly Motivational
As unlikely as this may seem, this exact conversation took place with myself in 2008. The Big Cat who delivered this announcement perhaps didn't realise this was just the kick I needed to get up and leave the company for pastures new. This illustrates just how dangerous the corporate jungle is - there is absolutely no mercy when it is time to shed weight and I am personally aware of numerous people who are promoted one week and redundant the next. The word that springs to my mind when you witness this is 'brutal'.
Fire Fighting Sucks
How often are the best people in an organisation caught up constantly with fire-fighting? If these resources could channel their energy into the things that really matter and make a difference, corporations wouldn't build such fragile systems that simply suck the life-force out of the universe. Of course, the economics of this situations is completely insane to any rational person. Why would you ever have your most expensive employees constantly patching the work of the cheapest, most fungible resources? Why would you not have those resources focussed on enabling others to work more effectively rather than apply plasters to the haemorrhage?
What are we measuring?
Corporations love ceremonies, but very rarely do they apply them properly. One of the most misapplied ceremonies you will find in "agile" corporations is the sprint. Like project plans, teams will alter anything to allow them to measure something at the end of each sprint. They will compromise on the important stuff (constantly redefining their definition of done for example, or claiming a percentage of the points for Work In Progress). In this way, something that is designed to be extremely simple and factual is converted into something complex, subjective and of limited value.
