Throwing me under the bus-Corporate America
68This is an experience that I went through a few years ago and I still wonder if I made the right choice. To this day I think about it and I believe I did, but that doubt still exists as to what if I had handled it differently. Help me put this to rest. Either way, I can live with it.
I used to work for a very large wholesaler which had many distribution centers across the country. I worked at one of their largest centers. I was a finance manger reporting to the centers General Manager. Great job, helped build the center from the ground up. About a year after the operations started, corporate hired a VP from the competition. I used to work for that competion for many years but never got to meet this VP and never had any dealing with him.
Our first encounter was on a telephone conference about finance and a review of the receivables. As we were going through this, an account comes up in the conversation that the VP had a bad experience with before. He immediately accused me personally of not doing my homework and allowing this account to do business with us. He became agitated and kept with the accusations that we didn't know what we were doing. Simply because they had lost several hundred thousand dollars with this account.
This was my first encounter and I immediately thought this guy wants to prove immediately his value to the company (earn some brownie points) so I whispered to my GM, I am going to answer this question respectfully but what I have to say is going to make him look like a fool. He told me go for it.
So I answered, with all due respect you don't know what you are talking about, and being in such a high level of management, you should be familiar with the case. I told him that the reason your previous company lost that much money was because of the incompetence you had there. This customer had taken them to court due to improper handling of his account (related to rebates during the course of many years that were either not paid or wrongly calculated, The customer proved the case in court and won. So, you see sir, I told him, we do our homework very thoroughly here.
Dead silence. The corporate controller was in on the conference call and you could hear him whisper to the new VP, "is this true?" You could hear the VP quietly say yes.
The controller took over the teleconference and ended it within a few minutes.
At this point I knew I had made my point, and had reversed the situation. It was I now that made him look petty and incompetant. But, i also knew this was not going to be the end. This VP was going to make my life miserable from now on. Every action I took was going to be scrutinized and he wasn't going to let up until he was able to fire me. He first went after the GM and got him fired, he went after other high positions and got them fired. He transformed the operations within a very short period of time.
He never had a chance to fire me because I resigned but not before advising corporate that the decision being made were wrong and wouid be disastrous for the company. Well it turned out the company started to lose business, things started to get out of control and today they are about 70% smaller than when the opriginal crew was there.
And the sad thing is, this VP is still there.
Does Corporate America really know what they are doing? With overwhelming evidence that they were making the wrong decisions, they just threw more money at it to try to fix it. When in reality, all they needed to see was that the new VP was the problem and nothing was wrong to begin with.
The choice I made to stand up to this new VP started it all, although I think the VP would have made the changes anyway, but what if I would have kept quiet- would it have made a difference. I doubt it, but I will never know. I lost total respect for the company and in a way, I had warned them they were heading down the wrong path, but they didn't listen so they got what they deserved.
How do they grow so big anyway?
I am sure that many of you have had like experiences. Maybe the outcome was better than mine, or possibly worse. But in my experience, corporate America has lost touch with it's customers. I know, they look at profits and that is fine, but somewhere along the line they have to realize that some of the downfalls are right in their corporate offices and the people with these large egos that eventually their wallets can't pay for, It is like they can do no wrong.
That was the last big company I worked for and happily so.
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"Does Corporate America really know what they are doing?"
Not in my personal experience, either.
I had spent some years in a big corporation where I worked explicitly in support of one guy, serving as what the business school folks denigrate as a "subject matter expert."
You know, a completely fungible wonk without social skills, buddy system connections, or any ability whatsoever to brown-nose.
The guy who had the responsibility for managing me - and the division of the company in which I labored - was able to consistently generate real and significant revenue while other divisions were hemorrhaging profusely.
The other divisions' managers, however, were "connected" and extremely good at creative accounting. They repeatedly hand-waved illusions of revenues they were in fact not generating until eventually the company was skating along on no profit center other than the division being run by the management guy who had brought me aboard.
Given that this guy was not connected - not a "made man" in the corporate hierarchy - machinations began to get him removed so that one or another of these catastrophic failures could take over the division and take credit for its operations.
Hell, if the guy I'd been working with could keep his costs down, his customer satisfaction high, and his people efficiently productive, a "real businessman" - with an Ivy-League MBA and good hair - could certainly make it function even more profitably, right?
So they eased him out. Then a bunch of other people in the division, whose offices were immediately occupied by the "good hair" guy's sycophants. Then me. Then everybody who had been making any kind of qualitative difference in the division, down to the lowest level.
It was like watching a cancer go metastatic.
So the division became just like ever other division in the company, drowning in red ink, and the senior executives did some Enronic fiddlework with the 10K's to pump up the stock price, took their options, and bailed before the outfit did a spectacular Hindenburg-at-Lakehurst performance.
Your experiences - and mine - have been incredibly common in corporate America, where "who you know" long ago became much more a qualification for posts of authority than "what you know."
And one does not have to be an ornithologist to have predicted these raptor-like chickens coming home to roost.
Mike, thanks for stopping by. I have to agree with you on a certain level. I consistently have seen them act exactly as you state and it leaves you wondering how they got so far. Sometimes it even created doubts in my own mind if I am the one out of whack here. The hiring practice is pretty much as you state although sometimes it will be necessary to go outside when a major jump is needed in experience, education and resources that is not readily available within.
Tucci78, thanks for taking the time to let us know your experience. I know exactly what you are saying. At one stage of the game, all logic seems to go "puff" never to be seen again. I was hired by an insurance company (many moons ago) as their controller. They were in the process of upgrading computers and software to meet the regulatory requirements of the industry. About 10 days into my new job, a prestigous NY software developer was brought in for intial design concepts and I was brough into the meeting. After normal formalities and hearing our qualifications, the owner of the software company called out to the side our CEO and I could hear him say why was I there, I had no experience in the insurance industry and would be a waste of time if they had to bring me up to speed during the course of this project. My CEO refused and said that I needed to be there. After the project was completed, 70 percent of the software was my design, the software owner apologized for his comment and I became their consultant afterwards.They took that same software and sold it to other companies making them a good chunk. My point, some start of like this and it takes an outside force to change their minds. I get carried away sometimes with experiences but using examples can clarify some points.
ehern33, logic has nothing to do with the kind of phenomena you're discussing. Let me couch it this way.
Both internally and externally - when consulting services are engaged - most business people are (for good reason) insecure about the value they bring to any job they do. In my personal experience, the levels of real competence among ex-Business majors and allied clowns is very, very low.
Most of them can talk a good game, but their true fund of knowledge tends to be zip, and their ability to learn and adapt on the fly is nil. They lack original ideas, and fasten on co-workers' innovations (desperately filing off the serial numbers) whenever and however they can.
I've been told again and again "Don't talk about solutions in these meetings," chiefly because the guys with whom I'm working (a) want to take credit for these ideas themselves, (b) think that the number of such innovations is strictly limited, and (c) there's a general sense among higher-ups that anyone capable of readily churning out plenty of useful and effective ways of getting the job done efficiently and profitably THREATENS the order of things upon which the muckety-mucks themselves depend.
Frankly, I've never found innovation and ingenuity all that hard. My primary racket is medicine, and every time one encounter's a patient, there are a multitude of routes to diagnosis and treatment. You've got to know 'em all, and be prepared to pick up additional methods very quickly. Not only openness to new ideas but also thorough knowledge of old options, understand?
The ex-Business majors don't seem to think that way, and given their attitudes toward us ex-Pre Med majors in college (thoroughgoing contempt, perceiving us as "greasy grind" types who screwed up the grading curve in every course from English Lit to Survey of Art), their insecurities as adults in The Real World are understandable.
I guess.
The high level of incompetence associated with skills in projecting images of authority makes these people incredibly dangerous, and have resulted in degradation of performance throughout the business world.
They're the equivalent of "stupid/active" military officers (you familiar with the four divisions thereof? remember M*A*S*H and the character of Frank Burns), the most dangerous kind of people to be afforded positions of responsibility in any hierarchy of decision-making, and to the best of my knowledge there's simply no way of getting rid of them.
Short of ambushing them in parking garages while equipped with quicklime and shovels.
Tucci78, I used the word "logic" loosely here as a manner of expression. In reading further into your explanation, I can't find any fault with it as I have experienced this same thing, on many levels of corporate management. I have also seen the inability of management to accept fault for an action taken that did not develop into a positive outcome. This would include hiring practices and policies implemented for the improvement of an organizational structure. Some are in fact unable to recognize their own limitations and use intimidation tactics to hide it. As you, I have seen the full spectrum of their own idiocricy and yet they have been successful. You brought out a good point in your comparision with M*A*S*H, and the character Frank Burns; it is a dangerous combination and one that exists extensively.
This has brought me to the point of self-analysis and how I have reacted when brought into situations that have generated a more emotional response. I guess my responses comes down to my own defense mechanism embedded within my core or the lack of understanding of my deficiencies.
MikeNV says:
5 weeks ago
It's pretty much fact that you never tell anyone above you anything more than what they want to hear. Corporate America does not operate on logic or fact. It operates on the buddy system. When I graduated from business school I took a job with a giant health insurance company. I quickly learned that everything you are taught in business school is "theory" and the real business world doesn't operate that way. Over and over I watched complete boneheads get raises and promotions while the real competent workers were overlooked. It was a big deal to post nationwide job searches before anyone could be promoted from within.
The whole system is broken from the Government to the Executives to the rules of law. The only thing that is rewarded is politics and butt kissing.
I couldn't wait to get out of that environment. It's not worth a 6 figure salary to be miserable all day.