Avoiding Responsibility
Posted on January 21, 2008
Filed Under Weblosophy
Why Companies Fail
To get straight to the point, lets say that there are two types of organanizations in the world,
- One that employees believe that they are making the world a better place and by the success of their organization they will find their own personal success and happiniess
- The other is an organization that all of the employees secrectly want it to fail and their job responsibilities consist of doing just enough to avoid the personal responsibility for the failure when it occcurs
Now let us examine in detail the two types of Companies
The Winner
This company will usually have a deep ingrained purpose and culture. They will have a high employee retention ratio and their founder/CEO will generally be loved/admired by the workforce. While the pay may or may not be good, their employees are satisfied by a sense of acomplishment and greater meaning.
The Loser
This companies employees are motivated by that paycheck they recieve at the end of the week. Their primary job responsiblity will include doing just enough work to avoid being blamed when something goes wrong. So when the shit hits the fan, they can say with total legality.
- But I sent an email - Michelle in Marketing never gave me a response - I did my part.
Then Michelle in Marketing says
- But I tried to call him three times and he never picked up - I did my part
Without getting into more examples I think you all know well the situation. Everybody did their part. Everybody fulfilled their job responsibilities as dictated, but in the end it is still a failure.
A winning organization has people who fully comprehend that their job responsiblity also includes the results and not just the assigned actions to attain these result.
Programmers
Lets talk about programmers because I deal with alot of them in my day to day business and know lots of people in various orginizations. Not to take sides, but I will share my experience with various cultures
Yahooligans!
Yahoo programmers are in a sorry state. The source code for their applications is a mix and match of 5 different peoples vision at 5 different time in space. Usally the person that wrote the code you are trying to debug is no longer with the company and cannot be contacted. Most of a Yahoo developers time is spent going through other peoples work, trying to figure out what they were trying to do, rather than spending time being innovative
Google Fellows
Googlites are like cult members. Google code is like a long and continuous symphony written by a single hand. All Google developers know where the code begins and where it ends. It is predicitible and everybody is working on the same page. If someone leaves the organization, it is not the greatest loss because due to the standards and uniformity in the programming culture, the new employee knows exactly where the old left off and can adequatly continue the work without stylistic interruption.
AOL
What AOL programmers that are still left laugh and drink diet pepsi on the patio because they dont do anything anymore and nobody notices and continue to send them a paycheck.
Startup’s
Usually one wild visionary pacing back and forth a room explaining his vision to some kid who works the day shift at the gas station. The kid just nods and ignores what the CEO is rambling about and quietly plots how he is going to build the perfect database.
Indians
No offense to my brother Indians living overseas, but outsourcing programming work to the Indian sub-continent is one of the most harrowing experiences someone can go through. Outsourcing to India exemplifys all of the worst of the worst why companies fail. A typical conversation with an Indian development team
- “Why doesn’t this program work?”
- “Because Sir, as you can see there is a call function that is necessary to complete the process.”
- “So why didnt you include the call function?”
- “Because Sir, you did not specify it in the documentation.”
- “AAAHHHHHHHH”
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