Comment by artsyca
5 years ago
Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, the Medici, Nintendo and Apple in the early days, a lot of Canadian and probably American banks in the sixties and seventies and eighties.. Airlines before the economy model.. Lots of iconic hotels and restaurants, Ma Bell.. all kinds of companies have been great it's just that as people we think we're above it all somehow and our attitudes have brought us to a point where it's understood we're only trading time for money and we're selling ourselves short at every turn and all our corporations are merging into one megalocorp where it's just mediocrity and toxicity and even this forum is nothing but an echo chamber of the neurosis
Another problem is that CEO's don't understand what they're really in it for -- they're not in it for the mind state that comes with being a leader but only for the profits they can extract from the bargain it's obvious by their actions and their dress
In short a company that has high alignment and high autonomy the two are not mutually exclusive and indeed form the basis of what I'd call the American Way
So, a fictional company, a family before capitalism was conceived, two startups that made it big but before they became big, and pretty much everything else defined by nostalgia for a time during which your fictional company was supposed to have existed.
I agree that the current crop of MBA CEOs are detrimental as a whole.
Perhaps it's just starting off with a fictional company but this really reminds me of someone being asked to list heroes and naming John McClane and the guy who said Nuts to the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge. Which I got to give props to the second guy of course, but it feels like the viewpoint is limited and not securely tied to reality.
To give another fantastical yet limited viewpoint, the extremely short period of time in human history where
A) large scale production and innovation were required
B) but globalization hadn't arrived so there was an extreme lack of supply of educated and experienced individuals to deliver the objectives of A
Produced a lot of "great" companies in the sense that they offered for both labor and knowledge workers good jobs with upward mobility, and a strong sense of self-identity and orderly progress.
As soon as point A was subsumed by corporatism (patent and copyright wars, debt servicing) and B faded away (so labor lost its seat at the table) companies have become "commoditized" - there's absolutely zero point in establishing or aboding by a corporate identity today when you may have new masters tomorrow.
Nintendo's early days were in the nineteenth century (1890's, if I'm not mistaken). Not quite a startup.
thanks, I didn't know that.
Touché my dude! I'm trying to describe companies that were hardcore about branding and would retain people aggressively under penalty of death for dishonor
Look it may be idealized but what makes us think that we can grow complacent all of a sudden what happened to the cold war and the arms race?
Just because we declared peace and came from a generation of acid heads doesn't mean that we're not operating in a war zone
The most dangerous weapon is intelligence and intelligence operative is another word for knowledge worker
It reminds me of the Gervais Principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
> Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce
What?
A fictional advertising firm from the television series "Mad Men." A "great" place for heterosexual men in suits to work, a not-so-great place for anyone else.
I suspect the average person would actually find that a much worse place to work than most modern white collar companies. You wouldn't want those main characters as your boss, especially not if you're a woman.
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I'm well aware of what it is. it's just - if your example of a 'great company' is a fake company that is also intentionally terrible... what?
Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is the name of a fictional advertising agency in the TV series "Mad Men", in case anyone is confused by this confusion
So much this. Thank you. I've never heard it put more succinctly.
Well there's a lot to it -- we've been duped into thinking our work is a service when it's really an investment
Once we've been paid a generous pittance we're divorced from the fruits of our labour which are then flipped into astronomic profits while we continue to slave over features and slowly suffocate in meeting rooms similar to interrogation chambers
If we actually had ownership and took our rightful due we'd be far better off
The difficult part is that academia doesn't prepare us for these realities and let's face it the whole curriculum is a joke compared to real world professional activities
It's just that every year there's a new crop of naive youngsters willing to sign their rights away for the privilege of coming in wearing a hoodie and sweatpants
How to stop that though? You'd basically have to include contract law as a gen ed or primary education course. Or some sort of, "Business/Professional Survival" course. Which then runs you into the problem of, who curated a truly representative sample of how businesses operate, and what their rhetorical agenda is in terms of what image or philosophy of business they fancy.
I mean, I was in FBLA for a while, and it did zilch for communicating what the realities of modern business were.