The wolf who wasn't ( & the curse of big company superstars).

In an ancient mid-eastern fable , a wolf?was listening to a dog boast about the comforts at his master’s home. However, on accidentally seeing the dog’s collar and understanding what it meant, the wolf??turns around and runs away, never to come back. For, to the wolf, all the luxuries in the world cannot offset the burden of a collar around his neck. Yes, he knows he faces risks?in the forest, but he is okay. He is the wild one. He cannot be tamed.

Cut to 2016. At 34 years of age, Natasha,?a?magna cum laude graduate of a prestigious leadership program of a prestigious Fortune 50 organization, has been on a roll for the past 8 years, where, as a part of several M&A projects, she has brushed shoulders with the top brass of most verticals within the organization. Branded a high octane performer with a sharp mind (?And tongue. And internal networking), Natasha’s job profile mostly comprises of jet-setting across the world, sitting on integration meetings with relevant stake holders, laying roadmaps for restructure initiatives and presenting fancy PowerPoint decks to groups of suit-clad middle aged men and women whom she partners with in shaping the organization's future. Known as a 24x7 person, Natasha mostly puts in 15-16 hour work days,?and is always actively engaged in middle-of-the-night, cross-continental calls. She also has a reputation of being a tough nut who has no emotional qualms when it comes to drive decisions that lay off hundreds of people in the work she does. Rumor has it that Natasha seldom takes a day off, and has not gone on a vacation for three years.

Now, all of a sudden, in 2017, owing to a re-think in the strategic priorities of the organization ( that Natasha is knowingly ‘?kept out of?’), Natasha finds a ‘?catch-up’ meeting invite from the head of Human Resources on her calendar one morning,?where she is (?very sweetly?) informed?what a great asset she has been, but owing to the changing landscape in the company vision, she is no longer required to?‘contribute to the company’s future initiatives’. Obviously, years of conditioning and self-branding has toughened Natasha who smiles and shakes hands on her severance package, confident that she will be back in the game in no time, given her market reputation. She even updates her LinkedIn profile, adding some catchy phrase like ‘Globalist looking for the next big challenge’ etc.

Six months on, despite a dozen odd meetings and lot of polite conversations, Natasha is still sitting at home.

Brilliant, hardworking, tough and honest – Yet Natasha has no takers. So what exactly went wrong ?

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s last bestseller ‘?Skin in the Game’, he devotes an entire chapter to this unique phenomenon of modern day slavery, where, as employees of large organizations, people are often lured into donning a mask that they start mistaking to be their faces. Bit by bit, the wolf in them softens and eventually dies when they settle for the dog’s collar and the comforts it fetches. Taleb lays this through some great illustrations, some of which are referred in the article below. If you too work for a large organization, probably you can draw parallels.

Contractors Vs Employees?– Unlike what conventional wisdom suggests, a ‘permanent’ employee is a better asset for the organization than a temporary contractor. A contractor not only has minimal loyalty or stake in an organization, but is always easy to poach for smallest of incremental benefits, and can be especially dangerous when he/she leaves you during an emergency such as an IT breakdown, or a quarter end . An employee on the other hand, has a reputation to protect, EMIs to pay,?and no ‘?F*ck you money’?in his bank. Yes, an employee comes with slightly higher fixed cost and a long term commitment by the employer, but in return, an employee?will seldom ditch the organization in a crisis, or badmouth it ever for the fear of his job. In fact, longer the tenure, more the emotional attachment, and less the chances of an employee going rogue. Hence most large organizations ‘breed’?employees and make?‘Company persons?’ out of them.

The ‘Company Person ’ & the ‘Companies Person ’?– Using IBM as an example, where, for decades, employees were instructed on strict dress codes (?white shirt only, and dark blue suits), disallowed the slightest of idiosyncratic liberties (?they were IBM, after all?!), were highly regulated in their social life (?with other IBM employees), and made to spend?entire working lives at IBM, then retire comfortably and play golf with other IBM ex-colleagues - Taleb lays out the description of the typical '?lifer'?in yesteryear large organizations . Closer home, we see similar practices in many Asian work cultures where bright youngsters are nabbed from their universities and made into ‘lifers’ – a set of men and women who are designed to behave and think in a particular manner for all their lives and not stray, even if their inner common sense pricks them to do so. In the west, however, the 90s and the Silicon Valley revolution disrupted the game for large organizations, who started shedding some of their ‘lifers’?into the market place. Unfortunately but, like Natasha in the example above, they were unemployable in the market because they were pre-designed and conditioned ‘Company Persons’. Hence came forth the next generation of employees, known as the ‘?Companies Persons’, men and women who develop skills and competencies that are transferable within an industry and hence it increases their base of employment, and reduces their shelf life from 40 years to 5-7 years. I have a feel that Natasha will eventually manage to find a footing in another large organization and become a ‘Companies Person’?thereafter. And this time around , she will be wise enough to not get stuck with her next employer beyond 5 years, so as to steer free of Coase’s theorem that states – “?An employee is – by design, more valuable inside a firm than outside, more valuable to the employer than in the market place”.?Especially because, in the complex world where Natasha operates in, where products and services are subcontracted all over the globe, employers will go to any lengths to trap?people like her into being their temporary watchdogs till it serves their interests. And then fire her.

The?Pretenders?– Do all employees eventually become robots with collars around their neck ? Well, yes – but in varying degrees. So, for instance, when you are a revenue earner, like a great salesperson or a successful trader,?companies allow you a certain degree of?arrogance (?you could wear faded jeans to work on a Monday, for instance, without getting reprimanded?) that gives you a false air of being a wolf. But this freedom has limitations. So for eg. – you still cannot bad mouth your company on your Twitter page, or get drunk with a competitor on a Friday night. Also, such perks are highly temporary in nature, and can vanish after you have had?a bad quarter. So, if you are going through a purple patch, the boss might take you out for a few drinks over lunch ( remember ‘Wolf of wall street’??) or the General Manager might invite some clients to take a look at you, their?star sales person 'in action’?from other side of your glass walled cabin (?like a zoo animal on display). But the day your patch ends, you need to find your next hunting ground, because, like Natasha above, you have outlived your shelf life in their organization.

Expat Bob– Bob is an American who works in Southeast Asia for his American organization.?As an ex-patriate employee, Bob enjoys some benefits over and above his base pay (?a car, a driver, good international school education for his two kids and a nice house with a garden). Of course, these benefits come with an expiry date (?around three to five years). But by then Bob is hooked to his lifestyle and is terrified of being called back to the US, commute in public transport and have a sandwich for lunch. So, around the third year onwards, Bob launches a full steam lobbying campaign for his next expat assignment, which thereafter becomes his primary profession (?looking for his next role). In many ways, Bob’s bosses like this arrangement. It makes Bob more and more dependent inside and unemployable outside. Also, in times of a consensus vote in a leadership meeting , a collared Bob can be trusted to be a loyal supporter of the bosses. Most large organizations seem to have a ‘budget for Bob’?set aside for strategic advantages and having their Bobs around the world to keep an eye on their shops in foreign shores.

The Top Dogs?– After every major shakeup, large organizations off load some of their heaviest baggage into the market. These are disillusioned middle-aged men and women with a very lofty self image but with a very low ability to deliver on real results. Such people are less concerned about what they have or do not have, but more about what they might lose beyond the straightforward compensation if they are fired one day . It could be a fancy business card title,?some hogwash disguised as a membership to some club, or the license to write lengthy sermons in magazines on the basis of a borrowed self identity that is not theirs but of their company’s. These top dogs can be a real pain in the rear side while there are on the rolls of the company ( simply by virtue of being so damn ineffective and the level of politics they indulge in?to keep their jobs), and also when they are fired and they con their way into a next role, hoodwinking some unsuspecting smaller organization into believing that they are supercool, and in turn run the poor new company to the ground. I have seen some of these top dogs in my career,?and these days I have started enjoying their?rants on social media. Their pages are my favorite coffee break entertainment.

That ‘Bureaucracy trap’?– “?People whose survival depends on a qualitative ‘ job assessment’ by someone of higher rank in the organization, cannot be trusted for critical decisions”, as writes Taleb, brilliantly summarizing why employees are reliable by design, but at the same time, not equipped with survival skills for any crisis that is born?outside of their job description. This is so relevant in large organizations where once-brilliant men and women actually switch off their common sense buttons and submit themselves to a grind that they themselves are not convinced about, preferring a wrong map to navigate through their work. Such employees become so conditioned and trapped in a set of behaviors and competencies ( & of course– jargon and acronyms) that they lose all their horse sense. Such employees, sometimes bitten by an adventure bug (?mostly in their 30s), venture out in the market to test waters. However, I have seen 95% of them fail to turn into wolves, and they sheepishly return to the home base ( and their collars) in a couple of years. They then lecture the new recruits on their world-skills from the ‘experience they had in those two years in the wild’.

In summary, there are many benefits of working in large organizations (?training, exposure to systems and processes, shared risk pool, longer rope for failure ). However, in a world that is fast disrupting itself and where the laws of business are being re-written every two years, one needs to keep the wolf in him/ her alive. No one knows when an employer might release an employee from his/ her collar and leave them on their own to hunt for food in the jungle amidst a pack of wolves who are way more competitive and aggressive than an internally focused superstar like Natasha.

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Footnotes –

1. Natasha is a fictitious person introduced by me to drive an analogy home. So is Bob. Any resemblance to anyone reading this, is purely coincidental ;

2 Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a genius.

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(From my 2018 blog archives)

If the article resonated with you, do leave your thoughts in the comments.