Your humble author, when he is not producing these musings or crafting artifacts for the gods, is crafting artifacts for a large multi-national corporation. My artificing can best be described as legendary, in that it is best documented through lore and not through any discernible historical record. Nevertheless, a rather staggering number of companies have been willing to trade good coin for my efforts over the years, which demonstrates that having a good bard to sing one's praises is often the best ally a person can have. This, in turn, goes a long way toward explaining why I spend time honing my rhetoric in this forum.
Three of the aforementioned companies have been members of the fifty largest companies on Earth, while some of the others were more of a size where we not only knew the names of our colleagues' most significant others, but spawn and pets, as well. As the years have passed, I have learned that among the primary differences between one end of the corporate spectrum of sizes and the other is that in a small company there is a general honesty, whereas as the company grows ever larger, that honesty becomes overwhelmed by paranoia, arrogance, and ambition. These characteristics become more pronounced as you move closer to the seat of power. (For proof of this, please feel free to peruse the mythology of any culture. You'll note that gods and kings schemed against each other constantly, usually to the detriment of the mortals who dwelt below. The best things in life never change.)
I had this explained to me once by an organizational psychologist who had been brought in to train the mid-grade peons in how to deal with the perpetual in-fighting of the mighty. She pointed out that when forming groups, people tend to select those most like themselves. This is a phenomena that I had observed early in my academic career, when I was employed as a photographer of fraternity and sorority parties. After a very short period of observation, it became possible to identify which house a particular female had pledged merely by noting hair color and style, and the nature of her garb.
The behaviorist went on to note that the people who are successful in large organizations are paranoid, arrogant, and ambitious, as a rule. As they begin their climbs up their particular Olympus, they look for minions who are also paranoid, arrogant, and ambitious, because they understand the motivations of those individuals. Altruists and those who are open-minded regarding the intentions of others are scary people who behave in random and mysterious ways. And so power is concentrated on one end of the spectrum of collaboration, plunging exponentially to an asymptote only microscopically above zero for those who are actually willing to cooperate with their fellow man (or woman).
All of this is prelude to the events of the day, when there was the ritual known as a reorganization. Since the particular vessel on which I have shipped had grown fat and happy during the good times, the time had come for a reckoning. In addition to the random shuffling of deck chairs, a number of them were to be tossed overboard, in order to raise the freeboard. If this inspires thoughts of ship's officers walking along the promenade and examining each chair for its condition and suitability, I congratulate you on your naïvité and encourage you to quickly close this page and move on to some other activity, such as browsing the Garfield archives.
No, while determining the fate of the chairs on their merits may seem both logical and fair, it suffers from the unfortunate element of offering an opportunity for legal action by those left behind in the wake. Thus, with the courage that only Human Resources can muster, the decision whether or not any individual would stay or go was determined solely by seniority with the company. Thus, your narrator was spared while others, whom I freely admit could add more to the success of this particular organization, were cast off. My opinions on this process were not solicited in advance, nor would the proposed solution of a game of "Duck, Duck, Goose" have been accepted, despite being both less arbitrary and more fun.
What moves this from tragedy into farce (Damn, where is that chorus when they are needed?) is that the Captain of our ship, the Chairman of the Freeboard, so to speak (this will teach me to choose my metaphors with more care, if I wish to avoid mixing them), is possessed with an Ahab-like drive to pursue world-class engagement by his employees. This particular cetacean can be identified by the scores on particular questions in the biennial employee surveys.
Now, much to our Ahab's dismay, (Did you note how smoothly I moved from one unsustainable metaphor to another? You don't learn that in Freshman English in this day and age.) the employee engagement had not only been merely continental-class lately, but it had fallen considerably in the previous two surveys. This led to a letter from the Captain to the employees that came as close to the proverbial "the beatings will increase until morale improves" as any document that I have ever seen in real life.
The particular aspects of the survey whereby our Pequod had fouled its lines the worst were in communications and in dealing fairly with over- and under-achievers. I'd quote the figures here, but oddly, when we asked if we could have a copy of the results, which were being presented to us, we were told that there were instructions that they were not to be distributed. Identifying this as a potential example of the communications issue accomplished nothing more than to earn the enmity of the speaker.
Now, if I were a cynical man,
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Excuse me, I had to go and get a glass of water after almost choking on that line.
If I were to express my cynicism openly, I might point out that the method used to select which chairs would become jetsam[1] and which would remain on board the vessel might do wonders for eliminating those who want management to be more aggressive about separating out non-performers. On the other hand, the fact that the mechanism was never explained outright, but had to be inferred from muttered conversations in which the various parties tried to identify the distinguishing characteristics that led to the various outcomes may indicate that the communications line may still be wrapped around Ahab's leg in two years when the next harpoon is hurled.
Now, if you will excuse me, I shall retire to consume an appropriate elixir. Since Summer has finally departed these parts and the evening is cool and dry, I cannot in good conscience consume a Tonya Harding. Instead, to honor my metaphorical meandering, I shall have a whale of a rum and Coke.
Admit it. The two of you who actually have read[2] Moby Dick were waiting for a Starbucks joke.
[1] Jetsam is material intentionally thrown overboard. Flotsam is material from a shipwreck or other incident. There are legal differences between the two, which is why one refers to "flotsam and jetsam". I mention this only to point out to fair Aglaea why her father kicked her ass on the vocabulary test.
[2] Three times, thank you very much. Including the chapters on whale anatomy. I happen to think that it is one of the great reading books of literature.
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