After 37 years in corporate America, I'm now on the "outside", thanks to a Bain & Company driven layoff in June. I'm feeling better by the day, if only because I can let myself off the leash and return to some semblance of my quirky self without fear of retribution.
My former dysfunctional employer ("DysCo") had grown rapidly by acquisition, buying up some very well regarded and profitable companies. Their attempts at organic growth were marginal at best, so they stuck with their core competency: buying their way to the ranks of a large firm intent on dominating their sector.
One of the hallmarks of organic growth is rebranding the new captives employees as members of the parent company. At DysCo, this meant that their former company's name was really never to be mentioned again. Needless to say, this made for mixed feelings among the employees, and among the clients.
All signs of one's former company (let's call mine "FormCo") were obliterated. New business cards, letterhead, company policies, and voice message greetings. If you slipped up once or twice and referred to yourself as a FormCo employee, you might be forgiven. But heaven help you if you remarked, "well, at FormCo, we used to...". Nobody cares. Sure DysCo bought FormCo because of their placement in key markets and geographies, and their superior profit margin, but once absorbed into the DysCo Borg Collective, everyone was expected to dance to the DysCo beat. [sorry... could't resist]
When an entire workforce is brought into a company like DysCo, you would think that the collective intelligence, experience, customer relationships, and dedication of the employees would be a major asset. You'd be mistaken. What DysCo wanted was the client relationships and contracts. Typically, the best and brightest people from a place like FormCo viewed an acquisition with justifiable suspicion, and many of them left pre-emptively rather than waiting to see their worst fears realized.
Those who remained found themselves envying these departees, because before long, life at DysCo revealed itself as a wearying trudge through new systems and processes designed to deprogram us from the FormCo ways of doing business.
Many of these systems and processes stood in the way of accomplishing anything, and added no value to customers. Indeed, customers often saw these acquisitions as yet another chance for DysCo to increase prices while eroding the quality of service, as key people either left on their own or were let go, being replaced with other DysCo bots.
Despite the colorful and hyperbolic e-mails from "corporate" extolling DysCo as a welcoming, diverse, and exciting place to expand our horizons, for most people, it was a dehumanizing quagmire of negativity. Human worth was measured week to week. All decisions were subordinated to the whims of Wall Street. Anything that could evoke a sense of ride or self worth was drowned out by the drumbeat of near-term financial performance.
Questioning authority (my forte) was a career-limiting move. Those who spoke up were branded as disloyal, and their "failure to embrace change" was duly noted. Every day brought another occasion to surrender a little more of one's soul, or to fight the system in an attempt to hold on to our integrity.
Complicating this process was DysCo's constant yammering about "core values". Just as developers in suburbia name the subdivisions after the displaced species ("Fox Run", "Heron Landing", and "Deer Woods"), so DysCo replaced their ethical void with all manner of "core values" platitudes, pronouncements, and programs. With each passing day, the gap between this vision and the ugly reality grew wider and deeper, forming a bottomless abyss. As employees, it became clear that straddling this abyss wasn't an option: we had to chose a side.
The mental anguish of working in a place where our natural tendencies towards honesty, integrity, teamwork, innovation, and aspiration were stifled or mocked took a tremendous toll on many of us. Hired for our unique skills, our perseverance, and our ability to solve complex problems for FormCo's customers, we now found ourselves as interchangeable and expendable bots that DysCo could reprogram or dispose of at will.
Fortunately, the harm done was reversible. Many of those who were tossed into the volcano have crawled out and gone on to work for DysCo's competitors or to launch their own businesses, as I did. We delight in finding that our abilities were not permanently compromised, and our customers remember us as we were in better days. Life will go on, and the dark days of DysCo will fade away in the rearview mirror.