Two things wrong with Corporate America

1. It is infantilizing.

I was sending emails to my old colleagues in Australia, and was remembering the programs that they undertook and managed, and the way they acted in meetings. And was thinking that, compared to them, all of us at my office are like incompetent, incoherent children. I guess I was also thinking about the prospect of the Global Ministry of Excellence and Supremacy that they're talking about establishing, and remembering trying to teach a bunch of drones in San Jose about the requirements of the field, and how we all seemed so much smarter than anyone working in the US. I picture how things would go if the Ministry of Excellence and Etc. tried to establish policies and push around the marketing folks I worked with in Sydney, and it would be exactly the same.

And now I know I am on the other side of it, and I am one of the Yank Incompetent Naifs. And why? It must have something to do with the fact that none us are allowed to do anything, not have an idea, not spend a dollar on something, not launch a program, not work with a designer, nothing, without about 7 layers of approval in all directions. Today I noticed on one of my websites, just a little thing, but that in one of the drop-down menus there's a link to a feedback area called "Web-Site Feedback" but when you get there it's called "Website Feedback". I should have caught that in the design, but was too busy putting out fires and calming people down and developing impressive (fake, lies) presentations for senior management to manage my "internal PR". And today, when I noticed this, did I send the change through? Sigh, no. Even if my IT guy felt like making the change, it would have to go through three levels of Change Control, and then sent to Offshore, and then back to implement on the Dev server, and then code review and testing, and then an email to me for approval, and then another, redundant email asking me to approve publication (part of their brilliant new system of streamlining the change process by me now having to send two "okay to publish" approvals for every change), and god knows how long it would take and how much shepherding. For fuck sake. So I just left it, an imperfection, a blot on the site, a little detail that my detail-oriented self didn't notice at the appropriate time and is just too fucking hard to fix.

I think all the layers of permission-getting and bureaucracy makes us like children. And then when we suddenly get global responsibility, because we work in North America and it, for a little while longer anyway, still runs the world, we blink in the bright light and do our little naif best and wonder why all the foreigners who talk funny are mad at us all the time?

2. Last week, and then the Friday before that, in conversations about our coming restructure and how angsty it's making me, I burst into tears on three different male colleagues. And not only did not one of them grab me and give me a big reassuring hug, not one of them even reached over to touch me in any way. Then this week (when I was feeling better about the restructure), a colleague who is my electric guitar mentor asked me, "How's it going, are you practicing?" And I reached out my hand to his so he could tell I was practicing so much I was getting callouses. And he reacted like my little hand was radioactive. I finally got him to touch the very tips of my fingers, but there was some awkward palm-up, palm-down adjusting until he worked out what I wanted him to do.

Men in corporate America are afraid of even touching at all their female colleagues. This is fucked up. I know they're all married (well, in fact, one of them is not), and I know I'm single and therefore a terrifying threat, but people should be allowed to touch each other in non-sexual ways, when there's a simple human call for it. Crying women should be hugged, even if they are work colleagues. At my last work, there was plenty of physical contact across reporting lines - the boss used to stop by and rub the shoulders of everyone there. Mainly the very handsome Italian guy, which made us wonder certain things about the boss, but all that aside - he wasn't afraid to introduce some human contact into the workplace, and it made us all work better, I think. Rather than feeling like we were going through our workdays in plastic bubbles or cones of hygiene. During all those stressful times.

Corporate America has gone too far. People in American corporate offices should be allowed to touch each other. And crying women should be hugged, and beginning guitar students should be allowed to demonstrate their new callouses, their newly developing shredder fingers, to their guitar mentors.

3. Oh, yeah, and the whole credit crisis thing. So, that's three things wrong with Corporate America.