Although I work in the non profit world now, I have a background in the corporate, international world of hotels and hospitality. The company that I devoted many years to, in blind faith one might say, had its humble beginnings in Canada with major iconic hotels that were built from coast to coast following the westward trajectory of the growth and development of the country.
I was with them at a time that they made the fateful decision to go international, and I was sent into New York to bring that "ethic", that corporate presence, into the new collections that my company took over. This entity, since my departure, has morphed and grown, and what was once personal and endearing, even at the level of the CEO (which is why we used to love working there), has now become a grotesque pantomime of power, manipulation and greed. The Faustian pact has been completed.
The other day, I heard about former colleagues who had spent 20-30 years in dedication to this company being let go, in a "re-organization" that left them as canon fodder for the bottom line. I mulled this over for awhile, in sympathy mostly, but as the anger rose inside me I thought I'd better set this down in type as a way of articulating my rage and really addressing the overarching issue of how ancient and diabolical corporate organizations like this one really are.
Corporations who treat their "internal clients" (this is the nonsense philosophy that this particular company spouts, or it did when I was part of their team) as non-personal entities or line items on their budget sheets, eliminating them when the numbers dictate that they should, are evil. They are evil because they entice and then embrace their employee with false hope and beliefs when it is expedient to do so, and then brutalize them when their worth has run out, and this is the way of the corporate world up until now. Careers are lost, loyalty is desecrated, savings are compromised, and lives are made precarious. And all of this is delivered in in the forked tongue of the "adversary", smooth and eloquently so, as though to make it more palatable.
PLEASE REMEMBER: These entities have only the power that we give them.
I was with them at a time that they made the fateful decision to go international, and I was sent into New York to bring that "ethic", that corporate presence, into the new collections that my company took over. This entity, since my departure, has morphed and grown, and what was once personal and endearing, even at the level of the CEO (which is why we used to love working there), has now become a grotesque pantomime of power, manipulation and greed. The Faustian pact has been completed.
The other day, I heard about former colleagues who had spent 20-30 years in dedication to this company being let go, in a "re-organization" that left them as canon fodder for the bottom line. I mulled this over for awhile, in sympathy mostly, but as the anger rose inside me I thought I'd better set this down in type as a way of articulating my rage and really addressing the overarching issue of how ancient and diabolical corporate organizations like this one really are.
Corporations who treat their "internal clients" (this is the nonsense philosophy that this particular company spouts, or it did when I was part of their team) as non-personal entities or line items on their budget sheets, eliminating them when the numbers dictate that they should, are evil. They are evil because they entice and then embrace their employee with false hope and beliefs when it is expedient to do so, and then brutalize them when their worth has run out, and this is the way of the corporate world up until now. Careers are lost, loyalty is desecrated, savings are compromised, and lives are made precarious. And all of this is delivered in in the forked tongue of the "adversary", smooth and eloquently so, as though to make it more palatable.
PLEASE REMEMBER: These entities have only the power that we give them.