The Deadening Effect of Monolithic Hierarchy
Posted November 21, 2011
on: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.
9 Responses to "The Deadening Effect of Monolithic Hierarchy"

I understand that one of the purposes of a corporation is to limit personal liability. But that doesn’t make a corporation “dead”. Limiting risk is something prudent people do. Prudent LIVING people, because the dead are beyond caring about such things.
Try getting insurance (another way to limit risk) on a dead guy sometime. My wife, who has 25+ years in the insurance business, tells me it would be kinda hard. 😛


Like any living entity, there is more than one factor required to initiate or sustain life. Blood alone can’t do it. Food alone won’t make it either. Just as both oxygen AND food are required to sustain even the simplest life form, both ideas AND money are required for businesses to survive.
So the real question is: Which is most important? You say it is money. I contend it is ideas.
Money without ideas sits in a bank and does little to nothing to add to wealth. You can say that it can exist alone, though only in a vegetative state.
OTOH, ideas without money will attract money (see your examples above) to add to wealth of both investors and proprietors. They are both necessary for the business to live, but the ideas are what causes the business to add to wealth.


My wife tells me people get covered for stupid shit all the time. Getting the providers to cover them for this stuff is part of her job.
Corporations exist precisely to limit the personal liability of the employees and officers. They also exist to provide a legal framework for outliving those employees and officers. Yet without those employees and officers the corporation cannot exist. There is no dichotomy between the corporation and the people within it. Even “shell corporations” have to be set up by people and have a certain utility to those people.
You seem to hold the notion that the concept “corporation” exists in some Kantian nuomenal realm separate from the people and ideas which compose it. Sorry, there is no metaphysical “form of the corporation” for you to tilt at. Corporations exist because they solve the aforementioned problems for the people that create and work within its legal framework. Using it as an a priori pejorative (see “Mitt Romney is a Corporation” as an example) will change nothing. It merely makes you appear puerile.

Comments are closed.
November 22, 2011 at 6:32 am
First, I disagree with your characterization of corporations (or any business) as being “dead”. Businesses are made up of people, who are usually alive. Without these living people, the business would not exist. Businesses are as alive as the people who work there decide they will be.
Second, while I can see the analogy of money as being the life-blood of a business, it is not the *only* factor in determining whether the business lives or dies, just as blood is not the only factor in a human’s life or death. After all, one can die while still being able to produce and pump blood. Rather, much like humans, it is the ideas which a company produces which determine its life or death. Good ideas allow the generation of new blood/money. Bad ideas lead to death/bankruptcy. The lack of ideas is analogous to brain death, and will ultimately lead to death, even if it doesn’t happen right away.