The Corporate Path

When considering working for a corporation, keep the following in mind as situations to avoid. Working for a corporation isn’t for everyone, but it can lead to a satisfying life for many if you can avoid many of the traps listed below. You may not be able to avoid all of them in one job or company, but it is possible to avoid many. Therefore, you’ll need to assess what matters most to you and try to avoid those that will make your life miserable. The first three are critical to avoid. For the rest, you can pick and choose what is important to you.

Avoid not contributing

Believe it or not, it is quite possible to earn a reasonably high salary and be in a high ranking management position, but not contribute anything of value to the company’s product or to providing value to your company’s customers. This can manifest itself in two different ways.

In the first case, the actual work is meaningless. This type of work is well described in the book titled “Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber. Unlike shit jobs which are difficult and low paying, but actually necessary and valued by society, Bullshit jobs provide no real value regardless of the salary or title and are mainly found in corporations with greater than 200 employees. These jobs are usually anomalies which eventually get found out or get eliminated because the company creating these jobs loses to the competition. While it might be enticing to consider or hold one of these jobs, you’ll ultimately suffer for having one because, per Graeber, they come with the high risk of psychological distress.

In the second case, the job is meaningful and of value, but you are simply not effective in delivering the value that the job requires. Of course, there is always a learning curve in doing any work, but within one month, you should feel that you are making a real contribution. Sometimes, regardless of effort and desire, there is a mismatch between your competency and the requirements of the work. Many people are not honest with themselves and force the manager to make the hard choice of moving them out of the position or the company. Do yourself and your manager a favor and try to figure this out as quickly as possible. Your goal is to feel indispensable. You should find work that makes you feel like if you didn’t exist, the product or customer would feel the negative impact.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find that having a job that you hate but still contributes value to the company’s product and customers is much better than enjoying a job that is meaningless or that you are bad at.

Seek skin-in-the-game

Having skin-in-the-game when it comes to you work is critical for meaningful work. For more detail on this topic, see Nassim Taleb’s book titled “Skin in the game” where he goes deep into the concept and provides numerous examples. The basic idea is that you should feel that if you do a bad job, it will hurt you personally. This may sound obvious, but it’s not the case for a lot of jobs. Management consulting is a great example of this. Many management consultants often come in for a short term bases, do some analysis followed by recommendations and reports, then leave the company. It’s possible that their reputation can suffer, but they usually walk away without consequences because few companies actually ultimately follow their advice. I know of numerous examples where management consultants provided either obvious recommendations or provided recommendations and reports that were lost or forgotten. Think about it, many of these people work long hours to provide little value. That’s because they are only making recommendations, they don’t need to live with the long term consequences of their advice. Therefore, you should always seek situations where if you do a bad job, you will actually suffer. These situation generally involve being in the position for many months or years with an outcome that reflects your efforts and puts you at personal risk if you do a bad job. If you find yourself in a position that requires that you need to live with the outcomes of your recommendations and your decisions, then you have skin-in-the-game. Getting a bad reputation from bad outcomes but not having to clean up the mess (restitution) is not skin-in-the game. Having a job where bad outcomes are hard to determine (not easy to assign blame) is also not having skin-in-the-game.

Examples:

• Economists: Essentially rarely personally suffer when they fail to predict bad outcomes, particularly academic or journalistic types. The exception is when they work within companies where they have personal equity at risk.
• Many professors: Rarely suffer for doing poor jobs at teaching
• Many journalist: Rarely suffer for poor or inaccurate reporting. Even worse, they often get rewarded.
• Many lawyers: When many lawyers do a bad job, they don’t personally suffer, their clients suffer and they still get paid. If the lawyer goes to jail with the client, then they have skin-in-the-game.
• Many Management Consultants: Do not have to live with the recommendations that they make.

Avoid non-learning situations

Regardless of your salary, if you are not learning, you will likely feel dissatisfied and even miserable. Not learning will not only lead to you eventually becoming obsolete, but it can lead to a significant amount of mental stress. An easy job that involves no learning can be surprisingly tiresome. Don’t put the onus on your manager or company to provide you with learning or development opportunities. This is your problem and you need to solve it. On the other hand, you should always avoid a situation where you’re learning but not contributing. They go hand and hand. It’s better to take lower level positions or less money for the opportunity to learn rather than to seek cushy positions that involve no learning. In the long-term, you’ll pay a heavy price for that luxury and it will usually be at time in your life when you can least afford to be kicked to the curb with no useful skills.

Seek a focus on the product

Not all of us can work in offering essential products or services, but I think that it’s a good idea to try because it makes for meaningful work. Working for a company that provides a physical product or a service that people really need is very satisfying and likely much more satisfying than working for a company that produces useless junk or a useless service, regardless of how much you get paid. Of course, one person’s junk is another person’s essential product, so the definition of “essential” product is very subjective. In the author’s opinion, the following is an attempt at essential versus non essential product/services:

Essential products and services (without them, civilization would not exist):

• Water (municipal or economically priced bottled water, not fancy overly expensive label stuff)
• Food (nutritious) – farmers, processing plants and preparers
• Utilities/Energy
• Housing – Building manager, maintenance, supers
• Tools and critical home supplies (light bulbs are essential, remote thermostat gizmos are not)
• Logistics and Transportation (Trains, Planes, Trucks) driving or making
• Teaching and tutoring of any type (math, art, science, history, music, etc.)
• Many but not all medicines (legal or not), Vaccines and antibiotics are essential, botox is not.
• Healthcare workers (providing frontline essential medicine or psychological services)
• All trades (Plumbing, Electrician, Iron-working, Mechanics, Repair-men, Welders, Food preparers, Woodworking, Crafts, Metal Working, Technicians, Testing, etc.)
• Critical municipal services (power, garbage, repair)
• Military, Police, Fire, Rescue
• Local political leaders (town managers, council members, health departments)
• IT services (critical systems support)
• Some journalists (non sensationalist local reporters that discover corruption)
• Useful clothing and shoes (these range from modest flip-flops to expensive work boots)
• Some spiritual guides (Very subjective, but the more fancy the costumes and buildings, the less essential. Money says it all.)
• Cleaning workers
• Child, elder and disabled care
• Quality Control/Quality Assurance (but not all because many create artificial risks that only they can solve, so be careful on this one)

Non-essential, but good to have:

• A small percentage of online video content (truth telling, art and essential remote learning/how-to videos, most of the rest is mostly harmful)
• A small percentage of the fitness industry (those that provide real health benefits, particularly strength training)
• Local non-paid sports (players and coaches)
• Some middle managers (people who guide and develop others)
• Some artists and poets
• Low cost financial service providers (i.e. Vanguard)
• Project Managers

Non-Essential (they can disappear and our lives would not be affected in any real way and might even improve):

• Most people who work on Wall Street and high profile banking have probably caused more death than actual wars. See Lancet article on deaths caused by the 2008 financial crises: “Economic downturns, universal health coverage, and cancer mortality in high-income and middle-income countries, 1990-2010: a longitudinal analysis,” Mahiben Maruthappu, Johnathan Watkins, Aisyah Mohd Noor, Callum Williams, Raghib Ali, Richard Sullivan, Thomas Zeltner, Rifat Atun, The Lancet, online May 25, 2016, doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)00577-8.
• Most journalists, reporters and presenters, particularly those associated with the major media outlets
• Many middle managers
• Fancy food (anything that costs more than $20/meal)
• Fancy clothing and shoes (If you’re involved with making or selling $600 women’s purses, your work is non-essential)
• Most of the mass market movie industry (it’s nice to watch a movie, but let’s face it, life goes on without them. The same can not be said for your plumber)
• Most of online video content (especially entertainment content)
• Lots of Technology (If Facebook and Twitter disappeared, life would go on and your life might actually improve. You’ll also be fine if you didn’t have a robot vacuum)
• Most electronics (Did your life appreciably change with the new introduction of the latest device version?)
• A vast majority of high profile sports and entertainment including everyone involved in its production.
• Most products advertised in infomercials, particularly motivational and wealth building content
• Anything involved with wealth books and courses

The conclusion is that when electrical blackouts, pandemics or wars occur, you find out very quickly what is and what isn’t essential. If society needs you to do your job, then your job is essential and it means that you are likely doing meaningful work. That can range from military leadership to a minimum wage delivery person who delivers food to the elderly.

Avoid working for salary only

It may be hard to believe, but regardless of how high your salary is, working for money only will probably not lead to a meaningful or fulfilling life. There are always exceptions in personalities, but satisfaction typically does not come from just making money. That’s not to say that making a lot of money or having a lot of money is a bad thing. Having money is a good thing and people who like what they do and are effective will usually be well rewarded in corporations. However, in my experience, people who simply work for money as an end goal usually end of becoming ugly and obnoxious people. Even worse are the ones who want to become rich and end up not becoming rich. In rare cases, there are people who have made it their life goal to make a lot of money and then end up transcending their prior life to make great contributions to society. Those people are few and far between. It’s far more important to do something that you are good at which earns you a sufficient amount of money to support yourself. If you like the work, even better.

Avoid being pigeon holed

When working in a corporation, you need to remember that the priority of the corporation and your manager is to ultimately satisfy the owners of the company while meeting legal and regulatory requirements. If the company or manager can help you develop and satisfy the owners at the same time, then it’s a win-win situation. Most of the better companies strive for this balance because they recognize that happy and well developed employees will usually contribute more to the company. However, it doesn’t always work out that way. For instance, if you become really skilled at one particular task and are preforming well, your company or manager may be reluctant to allow you to move to a position where you will not be as strong and effective even though you may feel that it’s the best next step in your career. If that situation occurs, then you have effectively been pigeon holed and must seek other options. Even if you feel happy in your current situation, it’s also important not to be lulled into feeling too safe or comfortable when you are performing as a well fit cog in a big machine. Market and industry environments can change quite quickly which can easily lead to you becoming an obsolete or redundant cog. After giving your company a reasonable chance to respond to your desires for a more challenging position, you may need to leave that situation to assure that you are learning and contributing.

Avoid abuse

It goes without saying that you should not accept abuse in the work place, but it’s not always obvious to detect when it’s happening. Abuse can take many forms and they are usually quite subtle and hard to confirm. For instance, it is not always easy to differentiate abuse from stern matter-of-fact feedback. Since everyone has different levels of sensitivity, a comment from a manager can be taken as direct feedback by one person and abuse requiring legal action by another person. Context and corporate structure have a big influence in how managers behave which can help the receiver of the comments or feedback understand whether they are being subtly abused or simply being given direct feedback. For instance, managers and leaders in small private companies, particularly the owners, will often maintain cultures where simple, direct and clear feedback and directives are given to employees. On the other hand, the culture in large publicly owned companies can be quite different. Leaders in such companies often attain their positions based on finesse and their political skills. With rare exceptions such as Jack Welch, communication is usually not direct and can be quite ambiguous in large corporations. Therefore, derogatory comments in these environments are much harder to differentiate from abuse.

Some signs of subtle abuse:

• When people joke, you are usually the butt of the jokes. Just remember, that “Many a true word is spoken in jest”.
• Unwarranted comments inquiry about your personal life with responses that express surprise or make you feel like an oddity.
• “Bro culture” – old boy network mentality involving immature behavior and exclusion to those who don’t comply.

Avoid bad politics, unless you like that sort of thing

The famous 13th century Persian poet Rumi wrote, the “Fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail”. His quote is more commonly rephrased as “The fish rots from the head down”.

When senior leaders do not collaborate and are in constant conflict, this behavior usually trickles down the organizations resulting in conflict and political battles among middle managers which ultimately impacts employees. This doesn’t mean that companies that have collaborative senior leaders are not without conflict, but their cultures are usually nowhere near as toxic as those with non-collaborative leaders. Therefore, to the extent possible when looking at joining a company, try to determine whether there is conflict or collaboration at the top level. It’s fairly simple to do. During the interview process, simply ask how the senior leadership collaborates. If you get a quick positive response with good examples from multiple people, then it’s highly probable that the senior leadership teams gets along well. On the other hand, the interviewers may not be open about revealing problems at the top level, but you’ll certainly observe hesitation of even some embarrassed facial expressions indicating that you’ve hit a nerve. Once you know that there is a possibility of a negative political environment in the company, you may find that what you see and hear about the company comes together as a potential corporate culture problem, particularly if you see reshuffling of senior leaders or a surge in company turnover. Assuming you dislike toxic political cultures, then this is warning sign about a situation to avoid.

Avoid environments where benchmarking guides the decisions

Benchmarking is an insidious disease among many companies. When company leaders aren’t sure of what to do, some leaders panic in fear of making the wrong decision. Instead, they ask; “what’s everyone else doing?”. They do this by asking their colleagues in other companies or even worse, bringing in management consultants to help them decide on what to do. This is a bad sign of weak or fearful management and it’s not likely that the company will become a world class organization. Good companies rarely ask what the other guys is doing. It’s one thing to ask a former colleague about a reference (i.e. how is ACME’s service?). It’s a much different matter to contact others and ask “What’s your strategy for moving your manufacturing operation back to the domestic market?” In the 1960s and 1970s, do you really think that anybody at Toyota was asking people at GM on how to make a better car? Did Apple look to IBM to for advice on building the best computers? Stealing technology is a different matter. I wouldn’t advocate it, but we have to admit that many currently great companies stole technology fro others. However, even stealing isn’t the same as benchmarking. Benchmarking is ultimately just a way of corporate managers to defend their decisions by saying; “It wasn’t my fault. We didn’t do anything unusual. We checked and most companies do it this way.” At best, benchmarking just leads to mediocrity. If you want to do meaningful work, avoid situations or companies where this practice is common.

Seek flat and lean organizations, avoid lots of management layers

Many people are title conscious. They want a fancy titles (Sr. Manager, Director, etc.) and many are obsessed with being a boss. In an effort for weak companies and weak managers to retain people, titles and levels have become inflated. I can speak from experience in making this mistake. However, it’s not a good long term strategy because it places artificial values (title, level) above the real tangible values (useful work, contribution). Therefore, it’s best to look for companies that are “flat”. This means that there aren’t many layers between the lowest paid employees and the CEO. The Tech industry has traditionally been very good at doing this. While it may be enticing to want to manage people and have a better title, it can be a bad longterm career trap. As an example, when I was the head of the supply chain department at a small company, I had three levels of people working for me even though the group was only about 15 people in size. As a personal example: there was a situation where representatives from my team were going to visit one of our contract manufacturers. It was natural to expect the project lead to attend the meeting because he was the one actually doing the work. However, his manager who was my direct report, said that she also wanted to attend the meeting to get familiar with the company and the manufacturing process. That also made some sense. My boss then said he wanted to attend to meet the company’s senior management. Then it was up to me to decide on whether I was also going to attend the meeting. I ultimately decided not to go because I thought that it made no sense to fly four layers of management via business class and other expenses for a meeting where only one person really needed to go. This is the problem with many layers. It makes middle managers useless in these situations. I eventually left that company to find positions where I was actually doing the work. I had to take a pay cut, but I was back to doing real meaningful work that had purpose. If you want to do meaningful work, you’ll always want to be close to the work and avoid situations or companies that involve lots of layers. I was fortunate to be able to leave middle management on my own terms. However, most people are not and it is the middle layers that are the first to get cut out during economic recessions or company cutbacks.

Seek leaders who are experts in the product

When looking to join a company, the first step is to look at the expertise of the senior leader. In my experience, the best leaders are those who have a strong background in the core competence of the business. For instance, for manufacturing firms; leaders who come from research, development or manufacturing usually create the best companies, especially when they are the founders. There are exceptions, but these people are usually in the game to produce the best product, not to gain the most sales or for self promotion. If a company is a sales and marketing entity, then it obviously makes sense for the leaders to come from a marketing and sales background because the core competency of the business is sales and marketing. If you’re a manufacturing engineer and you want to join a manufacturing company, but the CEO is a sales guy, then watch out. Some sales and marketing firms may need to have a small manufacturing function. In that case, it makes sense for the CEO to be a former sales or marketing person because marketing/sales is the core business. As a manufacturing engineer, you could have a unique role in such a company because you’ll be doing something that nobody else understands or wants to understand. You just have to realize that you probably won’t get the same recognition or priority as the marketing and sales people. You’d could basically be considered a necessary evil, but it is a niche that can be quite satisfying to fill.

Seek companies where the product experts hold most of the power

This is not easy to ascertain in a company, but it’s a very important factor in determining the company’s priorities. Generally speaking, companies where the Legal, Finance, HR or other support functions hold a lot of power, are not healthy companies. Legal, Finance and HR functions are there to protect the company and assure that the firm complies with regulations. Occasionally Finance and Legal groups can provide other values like raising cash and negotiating product acquisitions. However, the real value of companies lie in the intellectual property. Intellectual property can be a chemical formula, a design, artwork, original music or a unique service. As an example, I’m sure that the Legal and Finance departments at Apple have excellent people who provide value for the company. However, without cool and innovative products, Apple is nothing. The real value of Apple is in the product design, engineering and function. It’s not a coincidence that Tim Cook, current CEO of Apple in 2020, comes from an operations background. In weaker companies with weak leaders, political types in Finance, HR and Legal have the opportunity to grasp power at the expense of diminishing the influence and importance of R&D and Manufacturing. In the long term, those comes will likely rot form the inside and not last. How do you tell who holds power? It’s not easy to ascertain. While not a perfect test, there are two things to look at. (1) Who is closest in proximity to the CEO. It sounds ridiculous, but more often than not, the most powerful people in the company are located in closest physical proximity (offices) to the CEO. (2) Observe where the functions are located relative to the headquarters. For instance, if the Design department is located off of the company’s main campus in some modest or dingy building, then in all likelihood, the Design department is not well respected and the leader is not powerful. On the other hand, if the C-Suite is located on the top floor of a twenty story building and the Legal department is located on the nineteenth floor with great views, then you can assume that the Legal department holds a reasonable amount of power. Ideally, you’ll want to see the function that is responsible for creating the intellectual property closest to the CEO and in the company’s best location of the headquarters. This is a very general rule with plenty of exceptions, but you’d be surprised how often it actually turns out to be true.

Avoid cult-like environments

Strong leaders can create cult like environments in some corporations. Of course there are the famous examples such as Steve Jobs, but it surprisingly happens quite a bit in smaller companies. These are not necessarily bad people. In fact, some are quite good. The problem is that these companies are often susceptible to group think environments where people are afraid to challenge the CEO. Unlike Steve Jobs, many of these CEOs are not the founders, yet the company becomes theirs. Some employees love getting sucked into the cheerleading environment. If that’s not you, then you may want to avoid these companies.

Avoid bad bosses, seek good bosses

Last but certainly not least, the boss. If you are new to an industry, it would probably be very difficult to figure out whether a new prospective boss is good or not. Of course you can obviously ask your prospective peers what they think of the boss during the interview. However, their opinion can be biased if they have a long history with the boss. For instance, if the boss hired your peer because they worked together in a previous company, then their feedback will likely be skewed by their loyalty. At minimal, you’ll need to ask questions and look for micro-expressions which may reveal your peer’s true feelings about the boss’s nature. Since bosses are so critical to your work experience, the following goes into detail regarding the traits of a good boss.

Traits of good bosses

Good bosses care about their employees

This is hard to fake, so you’ll know it when you see it. During an interview, your prospective peers will describe the boss as being kind and a great person without you even asking. Of all the traits required of a boss, this is by far the most important. If the boss doesn’t care about you, it means that they don’t have skin-in-the-game and that the relationship is purely a transaction. The consequences are that you will not have skin-in-the-game and it will be hard for you to care about the work.

Good bosses support employee development and learning

This requirement goes hand-and-hand with a boss that cares for their employees. Without learning and development, you will become bored and even stressed from not being challenged. While it’s ultimately up to you to define how and what you want to learn, your boss should, to the extent possible, be there to support your plans. For more junior employees, managers should provide suggestions and directions for their less experienced employees because they don’t know what they don’t know. For more experienced employees, the manager should provide feedback and backing for your objectives.

Good bosses believe and have faith in their employees

This is an all or nothing requirement. Either the boss believes in you and trusts that you’ll get the job done or they need to manage you out of the organization. Having a boss that doesn’t believe in you is not good for you or the boss.

Good bosses have “skin in the game”

If you do a bad job or the organization suffers because of your mistake, then the boss should personally suffer as well. If the boss doesn’t not suffer as a consequence of your mistakes or a failure of the organization, perhaps because they are able to assign pure blame to you, then you are in a dangerous position and in the wrong company. You should feel that your boss has a lot a stake in your performance.

Good bosses protect their employees

There will always be situations where you mess up and this could trigger an attack from people who want to exploit the situation, especially in large companies where turf wars are common. Good bosses can sense danger and the best of them will preemptively shield you from such attacks. This type of protection leads employees to be extremely loyal to their bosses.

Good bosses play on your strengths

The reason why corporations work so well is because they are able to neutralize the weaknesses of each member of the organization and play on their strengths. A good manager understands this. Unless your weaknesses are debilitating, a good boss will tolerate your weaknesses and make the most out of your strengths.

Good bosses are clear on expectations

Your manager shouldn’t be telling you how to do your job, but they should identify clear goals (basically high level directions). The higher your level in the organization, the less need for clear objectives because the assumption is that you should be suggesting goals for the organization. However, early in your career, you will need a small number (4-6) very clear objectives that specify; Objective, timing of when it s due, how it will be measured and how success is defined. This helps eliminate ambiguity.

Good bosses listen

If you find that during your one-on-one meetings with you boss that he or she is constantly trying to suppress a yawn, it means that they are either uninterested in what you have to say or that they are bad listeners. Both a bad. A good boss will politely cut you off to change topics or be honest that they’re not interested in the topic. While it’s sometimes painful to know you’re boring someone, at least you know that they’re listening.

Good bosses run interference

There are occasions in corporations when people who are senior to you will attempt to interfere or block your progress. Good bosses will recognize these obstacles and will use their power to run interference so that you can move forward without the effort or distractions of blockers.

Good bosses make decisions when you need them to be done

There is nothing more frustrating than a manager that can’t make a decision or can only make decisions after they get consensus from a group, thus hiding behind the group. Good bosses know that it is better to make fast decisions that are occasionally wrong than to try to make perfect but slow decisions. When you need a decision made, regardless of whether it goes your way or not, you’ll want a good boss that can make a decision when needed.

Good bosses are competent

Despite being a wonderful person who meets all of the expectations on this list, if your boss is not good at doing their job, they are useless. An incompetent boss will not be respected by their peers which puts you and their team at risk. Your boss needs to be good at what they do, otherwise why should they be the boss?

Good bosses recognize their employees

Some employees need a pat on the back on a weekly bases, others every six months, but everyone needs to know that they are recognized for when they do a good job. Good bosses do this on a frequent bases.