John L. Ware
Jul 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Great article. I can relate to this as I left two large tech companies in the early 2000’s. I won’t name them here because I’m still good friends with some of the leadership there. However, the main reasons I joined them were the autonomy promised and the “blank slate” I could add too, as both those companies never had my position before.

Early on, it was a gas. We grew, prospered, all ideas were on the table — all you had to do was be proactive, creative, open-minded and actionable. You had to execute.

These companies weren’t startups by any stretch of the imagination; by the time I joined them — in 1990 2002, respectively (they had both been in operation 8 years when I signed on), they were worth $3 billion and $770 million, respectively. Both were in the S&P 500.

However, as time went on, both these companies became “corporatized.” They started bringing in “career bureaucrats” with their forms, manuals and programs. Everything slogged down…sometimes to a dead stop. Pretty soon, decisions that I could make on my own had to be “cleared” with my boss (the COO) and/or the CEO (I was a senior operational VP with a multi-billion spend AND P&L).

When the C-suite took its eye off the competition ball and started looking at the grown/Wall Street/stock price ball, all bets were off. All of a sudden, we were tasked with “hiding” or selling or whatever millions and millions of dollars of inventory and other “costs of doing business.” It was like we were making high tech electronics through prestidigitation.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the crap we had to do but, needless to say, we stagnated. Creative, hustling people left like rats on a sinking ship. The last straw (in both companies) was a “mandatory rating” employee review scheme where 10% were exceptional, 10% were shit all of a sudden, and the middle 80% could skate along. Many of the most creative, innovative people were in the bottom 10% because, after all, it WAS a popularity contest.

One company was bought out near the end of the last decade, and the other ended up getting rid of the CEO and his bureaucracy and reinvented itself a decade later. But I couldn’t wait that long.

    John L. Ware

    Written by

    After a 40+ year business career, I’m still helping businesses get out of their own way, and teaching ESL internationally. A writer following a polymathic muse.