What exactly is accomplished when corporate culture sits everybody down and has a power point about the strategy, business goals for the next year.
Stuff like saying “our new plan is focusing on areas like key player, resilience and fast resource adaption to better serve customers”. Stuff that seems super abstract and boil down to “worker faster or harder” or saying that whats important to the company are “customers, excellent products and people who make products” but said over an hour and mixed in with corporate jargon
It seems like a ton of work goes into these things but its all not usable information. So what is it that these scrum master project managers and higher executives hope to achieve at the end of these calls?
I’ve been at places where the corporate policies were just buzzword doublespeak and they are a waste of time. Everyone knows it’s bullshit.
I’ve also been at exactly one place where the leadership team gave serious thought to what their goals were for the organization. Then they wrote down a set of goals that were
- simple
- coherent
- actionable And that actually made it easier to do our jobs. When we had to make a decision, we could actually refer to these principles and use them.
It was crazy helpful!
…And then they hired a fuckton of Ex-Amazon managers into high-level roles and they promptly drove away all the best people and replaced the helpful principles with Amazon’s work-or-die philosophy. So I bailed. 😭
Is this a common thing? I’ve also noticed this with ex Amazon managers if encountered in the workplace. Horribly incompetent, generally unpleasant to work with, but some how get themselves to get hired.
The name of “Amazon” carries cachet. It sounds like impressive experience.
The thing is, Amazon famously treats its employees like shit - even the highly paid ones. There’s a sorta Stockholm Syndrome that develops, where you convince yourself that this misery is the cost of “doing great things” or you decide to bail while you can and go someplace that doesn’t suck.
Managers who spend any amount of time at Amazon tend to be the former. They end up with this mindset that if your team isn’t miserable, you just aren’t working hard enough and that having “tough” conversations means that you berate people until they break.
So beware Ex-Amazon managers. They’re not all bad, but a sudden influx is not a good sign.
(In fairness - One of the best managers I ever had was at Amazon. If he left that place, I’d be thrilled to work with him again. Just. Not there.
The hands-down worst manager I ever had was at Amazon as well.)
Well, most of the time, faulty leadership and bad hierarchies fail to construct coherent strategies. But, strategy is supposed to be the guiding lead to a whole organization’s activities. A good quality strategy implementation has clear goals in mind and can be used to elaborate clear and concise mission statements for all the functional parts of the organization. A “focus on resilience” can be translated into many things at an operational level, but it’s way too vague at an strategic level. Why do they want to be more resilient? is the appropriate counter questioning here. Better serve customers, how? Why key player?
It’s different from “focus on production resilience to respond to customers regardless of adverse market circumstances”. That is more actionable. It’s part of the strategic responsibilities of middle management to translate that into tactical operational actions and communicating them to individual staff. For example, product design can create redundant packaging alternatives that use different levels of different materials, so shipping can respond to material shortages without incurring too much delay. Logistics can call for cache storage of production critical materials. Then factory can come up with the production plans for each packaging alternative and a contingency plan in case of shortages. Then acquisitions can scout ahead of time the different vendors for materials that would be required. Finance has to come up with a plan to finance the new storage caches. Marketing and sales can come up with reward plans to compensate customers on delays, and advertisement messages that spin negative circumstances into positives, etc. This is just one possible line of actions, out of infinite possibilities depending on industry, product and structure.
That’s a well formed strategy. Now, just giving a hollow presentation to an all hands meetings is not the most efficient way of communicating but yet again, a lot of incompetents make it into management without having a damn clue of what is their job.
I will say I went from a place that had these meetings to one that doesn’t. It’s more concerning when leadership doesn’t seem to have any plan at all, even if the plan is “do a good job and sell this much of this thing”.
It means someone way up the ladder fucked everything up, and now they want you to work twice as hard for the same amount of money but they want to spin it to sound like something they intended to do all along and they want you to believe it’s somehow a good thing for you as well.
I’d say their main goal is to keep managers busy with something to prevent them from hindering work that needs to be done to keep the place running. ;)
