Ramblings

I felt this was an apt image background for this ramble. It reminds me very much of the owners of the company I fortunately no longer am associated with. I used to try to understand why they would do the things they would do. There are four, well, I suppose technically six of them if you include spouses. However, I shall stick mainly with four because it is these four who have been the most involved for better or worse; scratch that, for worse, definitely for worse. The way they would blatantly lie to the employees about their plans of great things to come. The way they would not listen to the men that had been with the company for 30yrs and instead would rely on their own faulty thinking. And then one day it hit me; they are akin to infants. Thy are naive and ignorant. I'll spare all the mathematical details but ultimately each of these "men" and one "woman" were out of the trenches of the working world so early in there lives that they are ignorant to what life is really like.

Again, I'm trying to be somewhat sparse with the more banal details so as not to bore people to death but in summary the original owner, the father, was only around 26 or so by the time his little podunk operation ("operation isn't quite right; it was him and his wife working out of a barn) was discovered. Shortly after he caught his break he was out of the logistical, hands on part of the business and into an office.

Now, there was two men and one in particular that were hired shortly after this time and these men are the ones who established all the ways of running this new business in a production fashion. They created and invented and innovated the ways to do the product in an efficient and streamlined manner while maintaining what was considered to be top quality in this line of work. The original owner knows nothing about how to do virtually any of the processes he claims credit for.

Then we have the son and son in law. Both of these were out of the trenches even earlier than the old man. The son straight from high school to college to CFO of dad's company. The other, the son-in-law, straight from highschool to a little bit of time in a stone quarry and construction, to selling drugs, to jail, to college to salesman to preacher to CEO of pop-in-law's company. It's funny how the three man things this "man" has been in his life (drug dealer, salesman and preacher) have a common thread that runs through them; you don't have to believe in what you're selling, you just say and do whatever you have to to sell the product.

The fourth isn't worth spending too much time on because she plays a much more behind the curtains role dealing mostly in payroll and making sure that any employee that was late by even one minute had four hours of his or her vacation time taken away. I'm not exaggerating; that was not hyperbolic, literally you lose four hours of vacation time if you are one minute late. The only reason I dedicate any mention of her at all is because she has also earned herself a place on this family's wall of shame because she may be the worst of the four when it comes to spouting off ideas that would make things harder on the employees but better for their pockets no matter how insignificant the gains would be to them. When it comes to their employees they are always ready to sacrifice them for their own best interests.

Before continuing I would just quickly like to say that I don't inherently have a problem with or resentment towards any person just because they own a company or work in an office or have wealth or happened to have a dad who allowed them to come into "prestigious" positions within the company. I am no fan of communism or socialism. What I do have a problem with, what I absolutely cannot help but to see as utterly disgusting is when these types, especially the aforementioned, have the arrogance and audacity to walk around with their smug faces pretending as if it were truly them who was the cause for all their successes. Now, they certainly played a part but they are blind to the fact that if it were not for the two men mentioned, this business, I do not believe, would have ever taken off the way it was able to. It would never have lasted long enough for the boys to come in and get theirs. Now, this is probably fairly common but again, it is not that that I cannot stomach, it is the lack of respect and failure to compensate appropriately these men and some few others for all they've contributed. To not even recognize it. Some owners make sure that those who have contributed (and many who haven't) are compensated handsomely for their efforts because they have enough respect and humility to realize that were it not for certain people they would not be able to enjoy the position they are in. But not these misers, oh no. Their philosophy is to always give as little as late as possible.

I was always taught the importance of loyalty. To be a sort of "ride for the brand company man". I believed in that for many years and felt guilty if I failed to live up to it. After many years of seeing that not being reciprocated to the same extent from the company toward me (and more importantly not being reciprocated to one I hold in much higher esteem than myself) I became much more jaded in my views.

Loyalty has to be a two way street; otherwise it is just one entity leeching as much as possible from another while giving only as much as is required to keep its host alive.

Its host, ha, yes, parasitic may indeed be the appropriate image to envision. Really though, think about it honestly; is that not a fair description of the way working relationships often go? Beneath all the warm and fuzzy rhetorical slogans, i.e.: "We're family here!" or, "We really do appreciate you, we want you to know that you all mean so much to us." or, "We're all in the same boat together!" and whatever other shades of lipstick that get used to try to make pigs pretty. For one, we are not all in the same boat together. We are indeed all in the same ocean, but, some of us are on ocean liners and some in dingys.

A company expects loyalty from its employees... why? Has the company showed a similar level of loyalty toward the employees? Or does it simply engage in grandstanding; spewing feel good rhetoric that requires not much digging to find that just below the surface is emptiness?

You want the best employees the world has to offer you say? Well, let me ask you this, are you in turn an offerer of that which is best?

Loyalty, like respect, are not things that anyone has the right to demand without having earned it. And the more you feel entitled to the more you had better have earned.

This whole "loyalty" thing cuts both ways too. I've been dumbfounded by how many new people, brand new to a job, haven't proven themselves in any way shape or form by any stretch of the imagination and yet these people have the audacity to act as if they are entitled to something. They will leech off of a company just the same as a company leeches off its employees. Actually, let me be more distinct by adding this qualifier: its good and excellent employees. A company cannot leech off its poor, even its mediocre employees; they don't have enough to give. It's the dedicated, loyal, excellent employees who are ironically the ones who are most at risk when they should be the ones that are most secure. Of all the people that should feel entitled to anything from the company they are with it is these; the excellent, the exceptional, the 20%. And yet it is exactly these who are the least likely to have that sort of ignorant audacity that would allow them to demand what they are worth. They shouldn't have to demand it; it should be recognized and given. Not only because of their work but at least as much and maybe even more because they are not demanding it. That's true appreciation.

Conclusion (for the good ones): You don't owe every last drop of your being to a company, to any company. Save some of yourself for your family, friends, etc. No matter how skilled you are at your job, after you are gone you will be replaced, forgotten, or at best a passing memory, an afterthought. The return on investment just isn't what it needs to be to make such demands of people.