The keys to the Vault of Corporate Default

You are either the problem or the solution; everyone else fits in as a default option. Most often the only choice is to allow yourself to be wired into the mainframe of Corporate Culture and become an integrated option of the default menu within the company. Don’t you dare create a unique option within this architecture, less you face the medieval challenges of your company. (the Dragons: Culture, the Overlords: Managers, the Nobility: Investors and the Rats: colleague traitors).

A salaried job of $3000 - $4000, good employee reputation, a few perks here and there, and the best of all, you being heir to the throne of Executive Director in about 10-15 years. Sorry, that just does not cut it for me. In the business ocean there are way too many reefs teeming with opportunity for me to be stuck under a 100 year old coral.

Haven’t you figured that last month’s unsuccessful interview was not about your competence? That career move or ambitious plumage shedding was your lack of  passion for the company’s vision, a vision for the past 20 years that has not made the company an industry leader, but a vision nonetheless that every new management team must squander resources to realize.

You are entrusted every so often with management responsibilities and the promise of redemption (to be the boss, write the rules, answer directly only to the board). And finally at the hour, your demise and forever pilgrimage to predecessors’ culture. Your 8 years at the company has been a regime which you have now embraced. Those luminous ideas, new employees that hold you in high esteem, and the two seeds of change that sprouted 3 years ago, are now all heaped behind priority.

Every new successful employee that’s sifted through the interview strainer was selected based on their ability to integrate and accept the “Vault of Default”, the same goes for you. Interview panels don’t care how brilliant, intelligent and grounded you are, especially if you have the potential to create havoc, and even if that havoc makes investors happy with the balance sheet, then for you there is a special hole in that interview strainer.

Tinkering with the cultural vault of default, means threatening (to harsh) the institution of management. No manager will allow their glorious legacy to be challenged by hopefuls fresh and buzzing with ideas, by those who think they know the business (business is war and markets are the battlegrounds – experience, patience, fortitude and great leaders win wars – not the loud mouths……In business this analogy is worthless – it’s the LOUDMOUTHS, who win the wars of business, those willing to challenged, seize the opportunities, rewrite the rules. Those who are constantly ridiculed and willing to deposit new currencies into the “vault of default” will gain the high ground in the battlefield of market share).

Our Caribbean companies do not investigate new employee backgrounds, simply what you put on paper is all we have time for and presto you are employed. There is no marriage of public and private sector leadership, it seems we are oblivious to the unique perspectives in leadership, foresight, innovation and pure competence that these two sectors have that can compliment each other. Imagine C&W or UDL management in the public sector, but then can that sector pay for that parallel perspective, in fact can that workforce withstand the tremors of motivation, results and being driven? Our companies no longer scout (did they ever scout at all) for national or regional talent, they try nothing to attract a group or one particular talent from company X, and they know very little of what is happening inside competitors’ camps (do they ever know).

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future ... the Establishment and the Movement." Seems one is failing us, but it’s my belief we don’t have the guts to look through the peeping hole.

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