EE Times <eetimes@eet.cmp.com>
I love your "Charlie" stories very much. Here is a contribution from my own experience at a subsidiary of an anonymous major telecommunications manufacturing firm. Please feel free to modify the story and use it (without copyright or royalty) in your column. Thank you for your attention.
Disclaimer | BNR may stand for "Burlington National Railways" which has an Internet sub-domain name of "bnr.com".
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Charlie believed in human touch, sensitivity and personal loyalty. So he continued to create new management positions and promoted competent technical staff into the world of corporate politics. He didn't care that the number of management levels were increasing since the company was growing. He was just sticking to the military-style pyramid organisational structure with an optimum number of subordinates per manager, a traditional management philosophy taught by Harvard Business School a few decades ago. With the empowerment fad, Charlie empowered managers all right, but didn't understand why employees doing the real work were so unhappy and were always looking out for other jobs, inside or outside the company. The best and the brightest continued to leave the company and made it big elsewhere, but Charlie didn't care much. He even thought the company was doing the right thing for the community. Charlie created a dual-career path system to boost the morale of the employees who were doing the real work. The employees were excited at first, but felt incensed when they learned that Charlie authorised a few senior managers to hold BOTH management AND technical titles at the same time! It was natural for Charlie to reward the managers. When a recession struck and the company lost $1B USD, Charlie cancelled company parties and picnics, which were just about the only perk for the employees who were doing unpaid overtime work for the company. He laid off employees who were doing the real work instead of hitting the management. Ineffective managers were shuffled into special assignments and newly-created "independent contributors" and "advisors", but some of them were still doing little real work but a lot of politics in their new positions. The company was very well wired with state-of-the-art network. However, Internet with open communication was a big threat to Charlie, so he discouraged it in the name of corporate security. He just could not understand that the trend towards networked corporate structure, flexible workforce, virtual projects, etc. are all for the sake of making the corporation more profitable by empowering the people who are doing the real work. Charlie received a lot of visitors to his company, so the corporate image was paramount for him. So, he harassed employees playing computer games to relieve pressure of doing unpaid overtime work till late at night. Even though telecommuting was ideal for certain kinds of work, Charlie discouraged it because it would make the labs look empty when he received visitors. Charlie still doesn't get it... |
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