Horror Gallery of Corporate

Deep in the dungeons of the corporation, some of the most cruel and horrific tortures are inflicted on those that voluntarily accept them. These are nightmares that attack me during my deepest REM sleep. I hesitated to put them out in the open, but here they are. These will be a rolling list that will get more added, but hopefully not that many. Here are the first six:

Death by Ping-Pong email

This horrific procedure is based on the fact that each short, seldom self-contained email drains the energy of the responder. It slowly bleeds away the individual involved in the conversation and warps time. Each three second email consumes about 15-20 minutes of preparation. After five iterations the procedure starts to approach lethal consequences because it slowly erodes hope that anything can be accomplished at all.

Suffocation by back-to-back meetings

Many of us have experienced this. Back to back meetings drain the oxygen around any real work and thinking. It is only lethal in instances where it is also accompanied by starvation, but the risk of permanent brain damage is very high.

The DOS attack

This is a particularly cruel practice that is applied usually to those on solitary confinement. Consists in taking away your resources to do the things you are supposed to do by introducing a resource hog that eats up any trace of surplus resources. Manifestations of this type of attack can be the "Quick question" every 30 minutes, or variations of the Ping-Pong email and the Back-to-Back meeting.

Traction torture

This is a widely utilized technique when achieve resignation or ruining someone's career is an objective. Consists in having the condemned individual report to two different bosses with different agendas. The two bosses eventually end up pulling apart the individual until it is impossible to meet objectives or put his/her body parts together.

The Trojan Tool

This is a technique that is practiced by top executives that are masters in the art of deception. It consists of making mandatory the use of cumbersome tools of questionable value. It is particularly deceptive because it is usually disguised as something useful and as a time-saving tool.

The Suicide Bomber VP

These are a common threat, but they are very hard to spot. It consists in committing to unattainable goals, some times self-proposed as means of gaining visibility in the corporation, bonuses, or just showing off. Then it is just a matter of time. It takes between 2 or 3 Quarters to build enough pressure to detonate, however it becomes very hot around the SBVP; so hot that it is unbearable. At this point it can be more easily detected but usually very few people point it out. Once it detonates, it takes the whole department with it.

Working ourselves out of a job...

This is probably going to give away my age, if I haven't already.

When I started working in the Telecom industry, everything was shiny and new and the future was so bright that we wore our RayBan Wayfarers at night.

With great power, great responsibility came with it, in many cases and particularly with my engagement in developing markets, our work was somewhat heroic, deploying life-changing technologies and greatly impacting the quality of lives of the population at large. From enabling businesses to the levels of first-world countries, putting internet under the fingertips of the kids attending schools accessible only by dirt roads, to the birth of the mobile information society and the freemium long distance services.

While we did this, my colleagues and I were in privileged positions, calling a developed country our residence and working for staple-name corporations. We were the only ones that could do this job.

As the transfer of these technologies further advanced, we saw the world shrink and flatten and our colleagues on the other side of the wire get more empowered. The result now is that in many of the more mature technologies, the ones doing the work we used to do are no longer our neighbors.

When we foresaw these changes, we recognized them as a shift in paradigm and to a certain point, we succeeded in achieving these but somehow in the process, we might have worked ourselves of a job....

Time to grow up, dude...

Corporations many times are compared with real people. They are born, they die, can be sued, they pay taxes, etc. Free speech is a debate. Many of them evolve a quite identifiable persona.

Pretty much as people, we expect them to grow in all aspects and live a full life. That's what this entry is about. Social Responsibility. Very much like a guy who just steps into the picture to take care of some issue, we are OK with new and -specially- small corporations to be focused on task.

They have one thing to do, they do it well and they do nothing else.

Now, once they grow bigger and older, we start to look at them in a different light. We expect them to do all sorts of things. Give back to the community, create jobs, pay well and play nice. Just like we do with older guys. They have been around here, we expect them to pitch in somehow, be nice, don't just talk about the $%^& work, even party a bit and have a beer with us. If they don't, we call them a "Jerk" or in the best case, we declare that they "lack social skills".

So, aren't our Corporation's Social Responsibility expectations just another way of humanizing them?