Comments on: Apropos of Nothing

By: Aufero

Aufero — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:34:51 +0000

No argument, corporate culture makes a big difference. The irony tends to come from the fact that the people who end up focusing your company on bullshit and power plays are often lip syncing the latest “corporate culture matters!” buzzwords while doing it.

By: sanya

sanya — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:47:36 +0000

I know what you guys are saying. Certainly I have a deep seated loathing for “team building” and other exercises aimed at stroking the kind of personality who already has a reputation for being a team player.

But culture does matter. Let’s say, oh, just for the sake of argument, that a company that HAD been very player-focused shifted over time to being a company focused on its own bullshit. The culture of player focus was lost under the layers of crap foisted on it by management types hired (or promoted) to accomplish different goals.

It’s not that the goals those people were hired were bad goals. It’s that the culture they brought with them ultimately overwrote the culture that made the company successful and beloved in the first place.

By: Aufero

Aufero — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:30:28 +0000

I had a hard time reading that all the way through without scoffing. I’ve worked for several companies that did corporate culture workshops, meetings and activities on a regular basis. None of them had particularly good work environments for the average employee, (two of them were spectacularly awful places to work) unless you count the occasional free donut as a major job plus.

Hope focusing on corporate culture works better for Zappos employees.

By: Skeetarian

Skeetarian — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:08:12 +0000

Those sorts of companies crack me up. Let’s spend our weekend building a log cabin inside a conference room! Woohoo!!! Build, Team, Build!!

I come up with my hair brained idea, run with it, see if it works and then show it to someone else on my team or our boss. He’s pretty cool about letting me come up with the ideas and then build the process/procedures once we determine if it is as useful as I initially thought it was…

Not getting ‘in trouble’ for trying stuff is enough incentive to keep trying to build a better mouse-trap. You can keep the goofy team building stuff and just pay me more money instead…

(and don’t get me started about people’s toon names!) :p

By: Bhagpuss

Bhagpuss — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:20:31 +0000

Ye gods, but that sounds like a nightmarish place to work. Exactly the kind of place someone rich enough never to need to work again would think up.

Then again, almost all tech companies sound like nightmarish places to me.