Corporate Pendulum

Everybody likes to be successful. And since most of us do not have the courage to go out there and create something for ourselves we conspire to get successful at somebody else's expense. One of the most frequented paths in this pursuit is the Corporate ladder. Anyways, this blog is not meant to take a critical view of this path. I am more interested in sharing with my readers (I hope there are a few) the dilemma that I face everyday at my office. I call it the Corporate Pendulum.

For those of you who never bothered much about the science of simple harmonic motion (and also for those who never bothered about science itself) during your +2 classes here is the shortest course in Pendulum Physics. A pendulum oscillates around a mean position and it does so because there is some stupid force acting on it all the time trying to settle it at that mean position. Off course the pendulum, everytime it reaches that mean position, has some momentum and instead of settling down it overshoots that position until that stupid force once again brings the pendulum back. So this continues till eternity.

Back to my corporate pendulum. I call the stupid force acting on my corporate pendulum as "Desire to fit in". The force acts most strongly on those who have been in corporate for 0-5 years and since I fit nicely in that bracket I am in a state of eternal oscillation. During my initial days in the corporate, I used to pay a lot of attention to behaving appropriately in meetings and I presume all my colleagues did the same, otherwise why would all of them turn up with fake smiles and politely nod to everything that the boss said in every meeting. We all started to pick up the Corporate jargon faster than we must have learnt to address all our relatives as a baby. In a matter of a few weeks all the fresher's were using such uniform vocabulary that you would believe they have been fitted with digital dictionaries. "Weaknesses" became "opportunities for improvement", "Managing the bad actors" became "Stakeholder Management", "Playing politics" became "soft-skills", "Postponing" became "requires further iteration"etc. etc. Like everybody else, I too had managed to get fitted with a dictionary and so I was smoothly sailing towards the mean position. But once there, I realised that in those weeks not only has my vocabulary not increased by a word but it has actually plummeted to a few tens of those meaningless, politically motivated, overused and sometimes abused corporate terms. So once I had managed to fit in under the influence of "Desire to fit in" force the momentum part, which I call, "Be unique syndrome" set in. This syndrome now pestered me to be myself, voice my opinions just the way I feel about things and in the process dragged me away from the fit-in position. Now off course this has been going on for the past two years and more. And this is not the only case.

There have been other pendulums such as how much to speak in a meeting. So once you are hired with a bunch of other freshers you have this strong urge to differentiate yourself and so you are vocal and outgoing and all that untill you realise that everybody has started to do the same and hence there is perfect chaos without much content in every meeting room. And then your inner self pulls you towards being yourself, which means you might grow quiter and not say much and in the process run the risk of people taking you for either being not so bright or being plain arrogant.

Then there is this whole thing about dressing up. Once we start to make some money the cheapest most expensive things to buy are clothes and mobile phones. So we all rush to these Arrow and Louis Phillippes and Park Avenues followed by purchasng Nokia E61is and Sony Ericsson walkman and Ipods and what not. And all this in a bid to differentiate ourselves with little or no success because the moment you step into your office wearing these you realise that almost everybody else has been to the same shop and the cost of looking same just went up.

As time passes one realises this pendulum tendency sets in most aspects of our work life. In large corporattions there are tons and tons of procedures to do things. You have got a template to write reports, a template for power-points, a template to submit requests, a procedure to design machines etc etc. And your management, once having bombarded you with all these templates and procedures and processes then leaves you with a sweet message something to the tune of, "We value innovation and out of the box thinking and we believe that you will do us proud by coming up with new and better ways of doing things". Off course what they dont say is that please make sure that all your new ideas are presented using those templates and should not challenge or edit any of our existing procedures.

So again the pendulum tendency in us sets in and we start to churn out our first set of 20 reports in exactly that format and template and receive kudos from our boss and we continue to do this until the "Be unique" momentum again tries to pull us away from the mean position. But unlike in the case of clothes or meetings where you may not be severely penalised for drifting a bit too far off from the mean position, in the case of the above you might severely limit your career options if you drift too much from the mean.

Some people can manage to differentiate themselves at the superficial levels. One of the techniques nowadays is to use a cheaper mobile phone or to say that I dont like blackberry or even to wear sport shoes to office and pretend that you are so cool and not afraid of anyone. But most of these individuals scramble to be as close to mean position as possible when it comes to making difficult decisions, or designing stuff or presenting information to the bosses. In these moments all the courage and looking cool talk is quickly out of the window.

So far I have not seen any individual who has genuinely been able to render the "Desire to fit in" force powerless.

And this is what keeps me awake all night, the pursuit of that one person who is truly himself/herself. Someone who is so much under the influence of "Be myself" momentum that the "Desire to fit in" force has no chance. I know such a person lives in all of us but just like most other good things in us this person too is probably fast asleep and in the years to come may even die a silent death. May be I am also mistaken in trying to find such a person in this corporate environment because if you wish not to be a corporate pendulum then you can probably not survive for too long in the Corporate World.

I hope some of you can relate to this Pendulum tendency and have the courage to let the Be myself momentum win over the Desire to fit-in force.

Wish you all a happy new year...