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7
A
t ten o’clock in the morning, my phone rang. It was my dad calling rom his twenty-ninth-oor o ce in downtown San Francisco. Itwas 1994 and we worked about a city block apart. I worked or a large fnan-cial ser vices company and my dad worked or a public utility.“Can you come to the o ce?” my dad asked.“I’ll be right there,” I said. I took the elevator down thirty oors andwalked through the courtyard that adjoined our buildings.I arrived in my dad’s o ce and was slightly puzzled. The bustling, cre-ative o ce where he worked was totally empty. Desks with plants andempty in- boxes sat where there were once eleven people. My dad peekedout rom behind his cube wall.“They laid o everyone in my department this morning. I am the onlyone let.”My stomach dropped.This moment, more than a decade and a hal ago, was my abrupt intro-duction to the shit in the corporate world where solid, stable jobs were
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I Have a Fancy Title,Steady Paycheck,and Good Benefits.Why Am I SoMiserable?
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Escape from Cubicle Nation
wiped o the map in a matter o minutes. Many o my dad’s coworkers werecareer employees, who had started working or the company out o college.One woman had worked her entire career at the company, as had her ather and grandather until retirement. She came into work at 8:00 a.m., wasgiven a cardboard box to pack her belongings, and was escorted to the exitdoor by 8:20.That was the moment I stopped trusting the “stability” o corporate lie.
You Aren’t Crazy
I am sure that i you have worked in the corporate world or any length o time, you had your own moment when you realized that your job wouldnever be secure, no matter how hard you worked or how long your tenure.Nevertheless, many people eel quite guilty or expressing dissatisactionwith their corporate job.I it makes you eel better, I will sum up the advice I have given to hun-dreds o clients and thousands o blog readers over the years:
 you aren’t crazy.
I understand your train o thought. How can you not eel a little crazyto complain about a stable job with great pay, benefts, smart coworkers,and social prestige? Isn’t it selfsh to want more when most people in theworld would kill or the opportunity to work day in and day out in air-conditioned o ces with no chance o getting calloused hands?Logically, you are right. With all o these perks and a stable income topay your bills, it would seem that you should be content to get up on Mon-day morning and go to work. So why do you eel so miserable?The essence o the problem is two-old:• Large corporations have experienced tremendous change over the lasttwenty years, which have made them undamentally di cult places towork, even or extremely smart and motivated employees in an “ideal” job situation.• Some people are simply not cut out to work in large organizations. Youmay not have had a lot o direction when you fnished school, and justollowed the path put out or you by well-intentioned career counselorsor managers. My ormer client said it well:
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Opening Up to the Opportunities
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I realized when looking at my entire career since college that I had justallen into jobs without thinking about them much. I had a vague in-terest in computer science, but never thought I would end up as a ull- time programmer cranking out code in a gray cubicle. How in theworld did I get here and how can I get out?
Given my entrepreneurial tendencies, you might think that I am one o those “conspiracy by the Man to keep me down” people and reject all corpo-rate commerce. To the contrary, I loved the years that I worked as an em-ployee. I wore my blue suit, nylons, and pearls proudly. I enjoyed the smello reshly sharpened pencils and packs o multicolored Post-it notes morethan is prudent to admit. I met tremendously smart, unny, and creativepeople whom I am riends with to this day.However, since going out on my own a dozen years ago, I had theunique advantage o observing corporate culture without being part o it. That allowed me to see a number o patterns that, when put together,led me to believe that today’s corporate environment has some uniquechallenges that make it di cult or even the most motivated employees toovercome.Let’s start with the frst challenge: employees drowning in an alphabetsoup o trends, programs, and processes.
Mission Statements, Outsourcing, Rightsizing,and Reengineering
Corporations today go through a tremendous amount o change and up-heaval. This is necessary and by design, since market conditions continuallyshit, senior leadership turns over, management practices evolve, customer needs change, and competitors come out o nowhere.I would add, somewhat cynically, that companies also go through changesince management consultants need to justiy their existence. I they don’tcook up ancy new programs riddled with acronyms, matrices, and bulging decks o PowerPoint slides, how can they aord to send their kids to col-lege?In an attempt to explain or ganization changes to their employees, com- panies send out communications. Unortunately, this oten makes people
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