A Dangerous Place
By: Ullysses Winter
Tags: Corporate Culture, Work, Leadership, Workplace Culture, Corporate

I often wondered how corporations blow up and the CEO stands on the news and says “I didn’t know” and completely sounds like he’s telling the truth. But now that I have some experience in corporate America, I know it’s because he is telling the truth.

Today we had a meeting. In this meeting, our second where the majority of the firm appeared, I noticed a peculiar thing: in three presentations today with three to five questions a piece, no one below the Director level, with one exception, asked a question.

As the company has gotten bigger and more profit driven employees have made a striking but unsurprising calculation. It’s a calculation that errs on the side of self-preservation, namely, that there’s less risk in saying nothing at all.

While this is correct, it’s quite dangerous. By definition, a corporation’s root word is corpus, which means body, not bodies, but body, singular. That means that being driven by self-preservation is equivalent to an arm preserving itself at the expense of a foot, or a finger preserving itself at the expense of an eye. The reason a body works well is because all parts work in concert for the preservation of the whole.

Corporations are a lot like that. The entire purpose of the central nervous system is to allow for seamless communication of one part to another. But if questions, knowledge sharing, are stifled and allowed to fester for the sake of self-preservation, it can become gangrenous.

You hear it all the time. The CEO goes on television and tells his stakeholders that he didn’t know. It seems unbelievable. And yet it’s totally believable. He didn’t know because each member acted in their logical individual best interest and chose not to share.

The worst part about this type of creeping culture is that it metastasizes. It begins in an All-Hands and eventually moves smaller meetings and finally to one-on-ones. Information hording becomes, literally, a way of life, a way to stay alive.

The results over the long term become tragic. Lost opportunity. Lost knowledge sharing. Careful conversations lead to lack of interpersonal capital. Lack of interpersonal capital makes it easier to leave organizations which has a very real documented cost.

The best organizations find a way to avoid this. Apple, under Steve Jobs, was renowned for its open honest conversations about product and decisions. While uncomfortable, it was wildly profitable, leading to the world’s first trillion dollar corporation. Google has open conversations around data and code experiments where new development is either promoted or scrapped in a very transparent way. President Obama is revered for holding meetings and after the principals had spoken, purposely seeking out their seconds, and even their thirds, for their views, drilling down and actively seeking new perspectives. It lead to the end of the Great Recession and the longest stock market boom known to America.

In corporate America honesty is not always the best policy and silence sometimes is golden. But just like the stock market, the value of each changes with the market. Sometimes one is worth more than the other. And just like with the stock market, it is always wise to balance your portfolio and hedge your bet.