Cabbage. Cheddar. Bacon. Abstract words for important realities. Money. Great. Now, you’re hungry and thinking about money at the same time.
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Sadly, layoffs abound right now. In part it’s because investors reward executives who slash costs to drive short-term profits. As usual, it’s amazing how many execs got, but didn’t read, the memo. The movement about being leaner is about being faster and getting more done.
But, misunderstood missives make management a muddled mass. They hack away so indiscriminately they shed people who produce long-term returns. It’s classic baby-bathwater stuff. At some point, it may sort itself out. By the time it does, the damage to companies, people, and families will be incalculable and no will prompt the AI to do the entirely creative math.
Still, higher-ups know the talking points. The word “speed” crops up with surprising frequency at big companies. Most often spewed by the bloated ranks of middle management who drape themselves in it like the sashes they wore when they were hall monitors in primary school. It usually turns up in phrases like, “We move at startup speed.”
Now, to be fair, I’m an abstract pontificator. An armchair pundit. I don’t use or do the things I write about. I read about them. Do a deep dive. Apply some past experiences. Write. So, it’s not entirely or even nearly fair to call out the big company people who think bootstrappers wear certain types of jeans. But, here I am. As a guy who has moved at startup speed for a long time, let me tell ya, “You don’t.”
Today, I left the safety of my startup space and visited a big company. Fortune 500. You’ve heard of it. The giant, backlit logo over the door was 20-feet high, if it was an inch, could be any Big Co. The name is unimportant. It’s the story that matters.
They gave me a visitor pass that lets me walk around. It’s surreal. If the fully grown people here weren’t old enough to have male pattern baldness, you’d swear this were a college campus.
A campus of employees wandering around in Birkenstocks lugging backpacks with pouches on the side that hold third-party water bottles filled and re-filled at eco-friendly aqua stations.
Open spaces to collaborate. Smaller rooms for private contemplation. A lactation room. And, other trappings of college life abound. Starbucks installations. Photocopy service departments. A credit union. Gym.
Oddly, for all the productivity inducements, no one seems to do anything. I swear as a sit in the refreshment area sipping an organic Earl Grey from a recyclable cup beside an Orwellian monitor playing self-help leadership videos on a loop, I watched a lady fiddling with something for the better part of ten minutes. When she walked off, I took a look. It was a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle with white kittens in the snow puzzle. There was a sign that explained doing jigaws exercise your left and right brain, short-term memory, visual-spatial reasoning. Again, I kid you not.
Forget college campus. That was a crèche. That’s why I noticed the post-jigsaw meditation space.
Sort of repulsed by the abusive waste, I walked around some more to find large swathes of super high-tech desks for no one. I’d estimate 80% of this vast sprawling campus is empty. I’d love to be the person that sold this large enterprise the fanciest curved computer monitors that lived on specially made stands perched on voice-commanded standing desks. The unused equipment here could seed multiple startups. Run by the kinds of people who hoard paperclips and feel a twinge when an old-school VC asks them to print and FedEx a copy of their pitch deck (more on that soon).
I’m typing this as I sit on a bench in a public area pretending I’m in a Parisian café watching life go by. Birkenstock lady. Backpack dude. I swear I saw the same people pass by from the left. Then, from the right. Aimlessly.
Three non-company servicemen walked by me with a ladder. Then, again. The third time they happened by, they opened a panel in the ceiling to replace a low-power bulb with an even lower-power one. One said to the other, “They have a subsidized cafeteria in this place that serves more bacon than you can imagine.”
All you can eat bacon. Subsidized. At startup speed. I’m at a freaking loss.