The Deadening Effect of Monolithic Hierarchy

Posted by: duckandgather on: November 21, 2011

• In: people vs. corporations
• 9 Comments

This is a long post. To save you reading all the gory details, let me first deliver these ideas in the form of a tweet:

Corporations are zombies. The longer we work for them, the more we become like them, and less like the children we once were.

Now tweets are not exactly the best medium for conveying complex, subtle notions. Case in point: the phrase “corporations are zombies”.

I realize that this phrase sounds pejorative. But it’s not. It’s a legal definition.

Zombies are the undead — the living dead. So the above phrase can be restated as “corporations are the living dead”.

How are corporations living beings? Well, the U.S. Supreme Court seems to treat corporations as people, under the Constitution.

But if corporations are living people, then how are they also dead things? The answer comes down to money. The lifeblood of a corporation is money. Money is a dead thing. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just means it’s dead.

If you or I slice our own jugular veins, we’ll bleed to death. That’s called suicide. How does a corporation bleed to death? It runs out of money. That’s called bankruptcy.

Now since money is dead, Corporations are dead too. Well, at least they are legal fictions.

It’s amazing to me that dead, legal fictions have such incredible power in our present culture. This power is such that pizza is now a vegetable. Got that one from a client of mine.

But the incredible power that I am discussing in this post is the amazing deadening effect that corporations seem to have on their employees. It doesn’t mean that every corporation has this effect on every one of their employees. Just that it seems to be a pervasive effect.

To define this corporate deadening effect, it helps to look at our children. What characterizes children?

To me, it’s their flexibility. Their amazing capacity for curiosity, learning, growth, and transformation, in all ways — physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively. The self-repair capabilities of children alone is amazing.

Now compare this to very old people. Very old people tend to be inflexible. Not all of them. Just most. Especially the ones on their death bed. (With some notable exceptions.)

Now I come to employees of large corporations. Each employee has a job. For the vast majority, this job is sharply defined, involving more or less repetitive actions. The job is sharply defined not only in the scope of the work, but in its location within the monolithic hierarchy of the corporate org chart.

In most such jobs, the qualities of curiosity, learning, growth, and transformation are typically not valued. At least, not nearly as much as consistency/steadiness/sameness.

Why am I thinking about these things? It’s probably due to four dynamics: (1) I’m a consultant, who is an employee of a very tiny corporation; (2) I have a young daughter; (3) I have clients that span “garage” startups, to funded ones, to public companies, to law firms, to patent “trolls”; and (4) it’s Thanksgiving week — a quiet business week — affording time for reflection.

I go hiking with some of my clients, and engage in extended conversations — outside the scope of our work — with many more of them.

Some of the people who are my clients move in and out of startups and corporate jobs, and between corporate jobs.

What I’ve noticed is that it is when my client/colleague/friends are in the process of moving in the above way, they become much more interesting as human beings. That is, they evidence more curiosity, learning, growth, and transformation during these times. They are more flexible.

Another example is colleagues of mine with whom I go hiking who are employees but who are not in the process of moving. I’ve noticed that ones who are employees of monolithic hierarchies tend to need to “slough off” the “deadening effect” of their jobs early on in the hike. Usually that’s the uphill portion of the hike. Then on the downhill, these people have “cleared” themselves of this effect, and have once again become flexible child-like people.

Employees of really small startups seem immune from this deadening effect.

What’s the upshot of all this? Am I saying that corporations are “bad” or that the people who work for them are “bad”?  Hardly.

As I said, corporations are legal fictions, hence incapable of being “good” or “bad”. And the people working for them are just people, like all of us, doing the best we can, given what we believe. They’re not “bad” either, just for doing their jobs.

All I’m writing about here is this odd effect that seems to be unstated in our culture. The effect is that the longer we’re in a corporate job, the “older” we seem to become (i.e. closer to death). Then when we undergo radical moves, in and out of these jobs (not just intra-company transfers), or into a startup, it’s like the movement wakes us up to our youthful humanity.

Note that what I’m saying here is not that some people are by definition more innovative or creative or curious than other people. I’m saying that all people have the capacity for these youthful things. After all, we were all once children. I’m just observing the dynamics that seem to bring these child-like qualities out in people versus deaden them.

This is a nascent observation of mine. I’m not saying it’s gospel. Just saying that this is what I’m seeing.

And I’m throwing it out here to see what you think.