“Ostracizing people for expressing their opinions creates isolation — the opposite of inclusion.”

“Ahh, the great outdoors.” Possibly the best line re-iterated by toons within all of the World of Warcraft zones.

Ahh, the great youth. That’s how I felt about this post. Refreshing and vibrant. It can never be repeated too often.

As a senior having been tucked away in the staid, sterile dystopia of the Orwellian corporate world I find it is refreshing to walk into an article of youth.

I remember in my younger days of first entering the corporate world. Somewhere in the 1980s Tom Peters of Fedex wrote a management book that promoted empowering employees! And the empowerment movement was popularized! During the 1990s it seems every CEO had a management book that was a must read and most of those laying waste to the archaic practices of corporate America that oppressed the creativity of employees and the value that creativity represented. This movement lasted well into the mid 2000’s. Companies started adding gymnasiums to campus. Employee stock option programs became the norm. JIT (just in time) and TQA (total quality assurance) practices were put into place where anyone could stop the line or implement a suggestion. Ahhh, the great empowerment movement where management was discouraged form “ ostracising people for expressing their opinions [that] creates isolation — the opposite of inclusion.”

And how did that work out? Corporate America today is replete with campus corpses of long neglected gyms and unopened employee manuals of “open door” policies that have been long since forgotten.

For starters, when the empowerment movement started employees were just to jaded to take the plunge. I remember when I first thought to use the new “open door” policy to complain about my manager to another manager I first sought advice from an older employee. They laughed in my face. I was told that management was always looking for ways to smoke out the troublemakers and the discontent so as to nip them in the bud. To whit I was advised that to believe the “open door” policy was sincere was a sucker’s bet and employees who did this would eventually be fired.

The Google employee memo had been floating around internally for a month. However, when it went viral in public something had to be done.

Anybody who doesn’t understand the risk at age 40 for speaking out in corporate America, for being that nail sticking up, deserves to be fired for the sheer stupidity of believing that.

Corporate America has always been and always will be a great force of tyranny and oppression of its employees on the clock. The twenty years of empowerment history should have long ago laid waste to any youthful impression otherwise.

I’m not talking start-up here. I’m talking a corporate America behemoth like Google. If you stick up then you will get knocked down. There has never been a company where that wasn’t true.

It was either arrogance, stupidity or a combination of both that motivated the Google employee to float that memo with any expectation of anything but to get fired. And Google’s reaction to the memo going public was a predictable as gravity because at the end of the day corporate America cannot tolerate public embarrassment.

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