Of Baboons and Bimbos

I was recently fired from my job in Corporate America, in part, for being too proficient in my work. In the other part, for daring to expect the same from colleagues.

The company that canned me engages in engineering. You know, that useful trade in which the practitioners apply an egghead’s knowledge of math and physics to make sure buildings don’t fall down, electrical grids don’t blow up, that sort of thing.

Of course, proficiency — allow me to be more precise, allegiance to accuracy — matters in every line of work. However, we all know that in disciplines especially like the law, where carelessness can send an innocent to jail, medicine, where a physician’s smallest flinch or misdiagnosis can make for a patient’s bad day, and engineering, where imprecision can cause implosions, the importance of accuracy is redoubled by extraordinarily complex challenges that command not just smarts, but also levelheadedness.

Thus engineering actually requires even more than an allegiance to accuracy; it also begs an intensity of devotion.

Of course, this is how every kind of business should operate. Must operate.

So it’s troubling that my former employer doesn’t.

Instead, its engineers — and The Brass who persistently pussy-whip them into action beyond reasonable performance expectations — mindlessly enable a dysfunctional culture in which productivity is measured not by exactitude, but by volume and speed. At this company (as at far too many other American companies in this age of Profit First), bottom line is the Evil Queen and accuracy is Snow White.

Accountability also takes a back seat. I especially know this. I was responsible for proofreading the engineers’ technical reports, which, before issuing to clients, arrived on my desk invariably full of spelling, grammatical, and, in some cases, even factual mistakes. I also know this, because, before client invoices went out, I routinely discovered mistakes in them, as well, particularly omissions of time charges and expenses — the result of which is a continuous and significant loss of earnings.

Thus, as if engineer sloppiness isn’t troubling enough, many other of the company’s disciplines also suffer from accuracy apathy.

  • Accounting is known to pay credits as if they are debits.
  • I.T. is forever trying (and usually failing) to repair something or other in the company server.
  • Certain executives never send an email that isn’t full of typos. (I’ll never forget the emails, two in particular, of the most infamous keyboard-challenged executive in the company. In one, he’d typed the word “shit” when he’d meant “shift” — “Refer to the attached report for the specific changes in your shit.” In the other, he’d announced having terminated So-and-So, obviously clueless of the fact that it is far less violent to terminate employment than an employee.)
  • Administrative Assistants, who are responsible for taking in client assignments, also regularly make a mockery of diligence: misspelling client names, getting phone numbers wrong, bastardizing the language, and distorting the details of scope of work.
  • And so on...

Consider the case of an engineer on assignment who’d started driving west through Missouri, toward Kansas City. Halfway there, he called me.

“Where the hell is this place?”

Naturally I asked him what was written on his assignment.

“Kennett,” he answered.

“Kennett is in Missouri’s bootheel, southeast,” I told him.

The engineer had missed his mark by 300 miles. (I almost suggested that next time he might consider consulting a map; better yet, an online mapping service. But I didn’t. By then I’d willfully ceased being proficient in babysitting.)

The more I pointed out the company’s plethora of problems to my supervisor, the more they fell on deaf ears. So I started taking them up the ladder to his supervisor (whom I’d believed was a sensible ally), with a collaborative desire to help steer procedural changes that could fix the problems. In hindsight I realize, of course, that the more I’d elicited that executive’s assistance, the more black marks he’d compiled against me (probably on some spreadsheet where he’d entered my name, misspelled).

Baboons are known to place such a premium on accuracy that they can usually decipher the contents of shopping bags based on their exterior markings. How? Answer: a canny dedication to details. Thus the bag with the grocery store logo is the one they’ve come to know contains the mother lode, fruits and veggies; the other bags, the ones with the pharmacy symbol, hardware nomenclature, twine handles, etc., are superfluous. There’s a lot the bimbos of Corporate America need to learn from this.

Politicians, of their propensity to turn fibs into facts, are infamous for strutting a cavalier attitude about accuracy, especially in election seasons. And the media remind us of the mindless and apathetic inattention to precision that daily mangles mechanisms and causes throughout our increasingly dumbed-down society.

At least two explanations of the preponderance of U.S. workplace negligence are those age-old villains, hubris and deceit. Yet research suggests that our faux pas now are just as often (or more so) the byproduct of post-modern personality quirks: burnout; anxiety; the human mind’s natural resistance to multitasking; the steady increase of favorable performance evaluations despite mediocre work; and, to return to the animal analogy above, the fact that many in today’s workforce couldn’t give a rat’s ass about quality: they’re far more interested in slothfulness.

Can organizational mistakes be a sign of systemic problems? Responding to this question for a recent New York Times article, a leading expert in human systems integration (fancy phrase for collaboration), answered with a definitive Yes, and proceeded to provide examples of the most common causes of workplace mistakes in the twenty-first century: (1) failure to enforce fact-checking (checks and balances) and other corporate Best Practices; (2) breakdown in communication among departments; and, most telling in the context of my firing (3) fear among subordinates to question higher-ups.1 (Of course, what did me in at the engineering firm was that I have no fear.)

Are any signs pointing to resolution of these problems? Sadly, at large, the answer is No. In fact, in the U.S. workplace mistakes are on the rise.

Meanwhile, at my former employer (as well as at many, many other companies throughout the U.S.), The Brass continue to get away with treating underlings — the core of company success or failure — not as equal contributors, but as chattel.

  1. “Making the Most of Your Workplace Mistakes,” by Phyllis Korkki, The New York Times, January 17, 2009.