Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble have some fun reading about whether or not your company is about to descend into mediocrity (about to suffer a bozo explosion) or even if you can plainly see that it has already gone.
My last big employer, a telecoms dot-commer, had a lot of bozos. We partnered with anything, moving or not. We had administrative assistant’s assistants. There was an entire row of BMWs out the back in the choice parking spots. We didn’t hire anyone unless they had a degree and it didn’t matter what the degree was (we had a lot of arts graduates sitting learning how to write code for weeks on end during the boom). We spent more on the cafeteria than we did on the datacentre. We spent a lot of time telling employees how bad our competitors were. We had lots of MBAs with good hair and no ability to lead. We brought in consultants for everything to second-guess our IT department and provide the same conclusions in prettier presentations. We had VPs who neither commanded anyone nor reported to anyone and they didn’t appear on any of the org charts. I learned to use the terms “win-win”, “five nines”, “task force”, offsite retreat”, “core values” and in normal conversation. We had heaps of marketing items like fleece jackets, pins and mugs, but employees were not permitted to have them unless they had a friend on the inside of the marketing department. We had more project managers than workers. Meetings would commonly last 4 hours. The IT managers promised new multimedia capabilities with a Windows migration and then neglected to configure sound cards nor install anything other than on-board graphics. We had good employees leave and we had excellent prospects refuse to join when they met some of the development teams.
Pretty depressing.
And it was nothing I could do. Eventually, I left. Sometimes the bozo quotient just gets too high and recent news shows that they’re still climbing out of their self-made downfall and they still need to make more layoffs.
Interestingly Guy includes some ways to avoid the situation, but it’s important for us to note that these are options open to management! These are not open to the rank and file – the people most likely to notice the bozo mushroom-cloud as it arrives.
Currently in my day job (not infurious):
- I hire people who can do stuff I can’t do.
- We love our customers and we welcome our competition (more on this latter point later)
- We need more staff, but we’re coping
- We’re not marketing heavily because we need to grow slowly
- I’ve never made a hire based on a resumé. We hire people.
- much like the first point – I hire people who do what I can’t do
- We spent the period of Summer 2004 to Summer 2005 culling the chaff.
If you can see the bozo explosion happening and you are in a position to do something about it (other than leave) then you’re negligent if you don’t do something about it. Think about it.