Enter the world of suits to see why corporate deproductivity exists.
Productivity is my cigarette.
I love productivity. Why? Time is the currency of life. Saving time has the biggest impact on my happiness. When I feel busy, I feel like dirt. What causes the pain is I have zero time to think.
Corporate life spits in the face of productivity. To be productive in corporate life is non-sensical. Productivity is better suited to the startup world, where if you don’t fail fast or act quickly, you run out of cash and end up on the side of a curb holding out a dog bowl and begging venture capital vultures for coins.
The Biggest Productivity Issue with Corporate
There is one reason corporate life is unproductive: Layers of subtle micro-managing.
A Powerpoint is micromanagement.
An account plan is micromanagement.
A 1-1 catch-up with a leader is micromanagement.
A review board or deal review committee is micromanagement.
What often looks like an innocent ask is micromanagement. Micromanagement occurs when there is no trust. And corporations lost the trust of everyday people and their employees years ago.
Who buys the corporate message crafted by corporate comms that says, “We just donated $10M to the pandemic relief fund because we care?”
Not me.
Pretending to do the right thing and actually doing the right thing are a million miles apart.
A health crisis impacts revenue. That’s the real reason angelic corporations are reaching into their pockets and giving money away to the people — not because they suddenly became self-conscious. Corporate marketing disguised as charity isn’t fooling anybody anymore, least of all corporate employees.
A Doer’s Empire in Reverse
A corporation’s org structure is really layers of micro-managing. Doers on the bottom of the pyramid. Layers of micro-managers all the way up to the lead micro-manager, the CEO.
You can be in the middle of the pyramid and get away with doing little. But you can’t be at the bottom of the pyramid and customer-facing, and ignore customers. If you try to, customers will quickly leave negative reviews and report you to your corporation.
I’ve never understood why we worship Heads of Nothing or GMs. The heroes are the people that drive results for the customer and deal with all the bullsh*t. If these doers disappeared, the higher layers of management would crumble and bonuses would fly out the skyscraper balcony overlooking the city of ants (like me) working below.
My passion for frontline is so enormous that when a mentor asked me what my first move upwards would be, I said “I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay right where I am in-the-doing. Otherwise, I’ll become disconnected.”
A doer has to be productive by design. It’s why doers often get frustrated with corporate life and quit. They just want to do without all the overthinking and micromanagement.
Doing produces results. Corporations have forgotten this.
Imagine the doers were at the top of the corporate pyramid. Humankind’s future would be created at the speed of light. Maybe one day.
“Think Slow” Wins the Rat Race
With lots of layers of approval required to do anything, you spend your days conducting internal meetings to convince career-hungry executives to take a chance and make a decision they might regret.
No executive is going to make a decision quickly. They need all the data points to ensure the decision won’t end up being a secret nightmare that gets them fired. They’ve worked too long and hard to make a 3-second decision that feels fine, but hides lies.
You can’t blame them, really. There is no reason to act fast. They have revenue. They have customers. Upholding the status-quo pays well. And if a competitor comes on the scene, you can simply acquire them for a few million and then put them out of business with corporate de-productivity, created by slow thinking and layers of factory worker micromanagement.
The corporate game is slow by design. That’s why fast thinkers often take a huge gamble on joining a startup that could run out of money, or accidentally become a self-fulfilling lie like WeWork.
The Daily Unproductive Frustrations of Corporate Life
Let’s list them out so the lines aren’t blurred for those up top.
Meeting invites
Every day you get invites to meetings. Many don’t have an agenda or have nothing to do with your job. You find yourself accepting meeting invites just to be polite, rather than to contribute to the meeting. Meetings take away all the time you need to do the doing (for the customer).
Online learning
The tools to do your job are always changing. You are rarely consulted about what tools will actually help you do your job better. Some dude in a business improvement unit, who can take all the time in the world to do stuff, while watching Netflix on his phone, got sold by a software vendor on a supposed productivity tool. Having never done any of the doing, he believes it would be a good idea to roll out a new tool.
If the tool makes doers less productive rather than more productive, he doesn’t care. “You’ve got to be always innovating and changing, right?”
Changing software all the time requires never-ending online learning. By the time you do the learning and think you’ve mastered the tool, it’s time for another tool to replace the tool that sold broken promises and wasn’t tested with doers.
A lot of online learning could be cut in half if doers were part of the software selection process that’s supposed to make business more productive.
Progress trackers
Spreadsheets that live in emails will be the death of me, I tell ya.
A spreadsheet in an email is also referred to as a progress tracker. Rather than a dedicated software tool that updates as data changes, a progress tracker requires a human being to constantly email doers with “asks for data.”
So you spend your day going through emails and compiling datasets for Karen in Operations who is trying to put together another progress tracker to show management how unproductive we are this month because we still work in Excel like Cavemen and Cavewomen.
Excel = A Productivity Nightmare.
The pain doesn’t end there. Progress trackers have to be updated weekly/daily. Middle management has lots of meetings and these trackers make them look like they know their business and are doing work. They’re not really. They’re simply getting the doers to do more doing and attaching metaphorical ankle bracelets to their freshly shaven legs.
Kill Excel for high productivity.
Random departments wanting updates
There is always an update to be given. Someone who is far away from the doing wants an update to make it look like they’re in the thick of the action. The truth is they have no idea. They need you to write an update for them in an email, otherwise they will call a meeting because they feel lonely.
If you refuse to update them then they’ll simply get your boss to poke you with an SMS notification. Departmental updates are the result of disconnected teams that are a million miles away from the real customer.
Approval processes
Wanting approval in life is a basic human need. Wait until you work the corporate life. Every day you will need approval to do something, even though your job description says you’re qualified to make a tiny decision and were hired based on your prior experience and referrals who said you could.
An approval is supposed to be a safety measure.
In reality, the approver has no idea what they’re approving, so they just ask you and then approve it. The challenge is days and even weeks are lost in getting the approval.
Time lost seeking approvals means the end customer gets what they wanted much later than they expected. Customer experience is sacrificed over a false sense of safety known as “box-ticking.”
Ticking boxes is for monkeys, not humans.
Lunches for Karens you don’t know
A Karen is leaving. You have no idea who they are. All you know is they’ve had enough and complained as much as humanly possible. Now it’s time to set Karen free on another corporation and halt their productivity. The challenge is Karen’s lunch takes up time in your diary. You need the catering, the fake speeches pretending to care, and the Karen cakes.
Not showing up to all the lunches is a sign of disrespect. You care about your corporation and all of its thousands of people, right? I saw you look away after asking that question. How dare you!
Back-to-back meetings
I enjoy calendar tourism. It’s where you look at the calendars of other people you work in corporate with. You know the commonality between corporate calendars? Back-to-back meetings. It’s supposed to show you’re being deployed and utilized correctly. If you’re not in meetings all day, what the hell are you doing? Me … I’m doing the doing.
Back-to-back meetings gives doers no time to act, or to think about what needs to be done next. Most meetings could have been an email. Or better? Most meetings should have been validated for productivity prior to being scheduled. If meetings had to be productive or required approval to go ahead, a lot of meetings would die a fast death.
Why Does Anyone Still Work at a Corporation?
You might be thinking with all of this un-productivity, why anybody would commit to working for a corporation. Why doesn’t everybody just go and work for an early-stage productive startup? Simple.
Corporate pays more.
If the money you can earn in corporate was similar to startups, nobody work in corporate. Large institutions would become instant Kodaks. What keeps corporate alive is the high-paying salaries and the bonuses that favor the people who do none of the doing, but simply pretend to by getting the doers to help them portray the lie using data they make us doers compile for them.
If you value your time, corporate life will waste it.
Consider earning less money at a non-corporate, so you can get lost in the doing and one day never work for anybody again.