Mice and the Big Cheese

Cur­rently receive my employ­ment through a multi-national, pub­lic cor­po­ra­tion with annual turnover approach­ing 10,000,000,000,000 Greece Drach­mae (I do not mean to pick on the Greeks, espe­cially given their cur­rent finan­cial crises, but I just love say­ing “Drach­mae” and ten tril­lion is so impres­sive!). Cor­po­ra­tions, being largely struc­tured along the lines of the mil­i­tary, have ranks and divi­sions. Peo­ple get pro­moted, peo­ple get trans­ferred, peo­ple retire. There are even deploy­ments, base clos­ings and cer­tainly reorganizations.

The big cheese is the head of my par­tic­u­lar multi-national, pub­lic cor­po­ra­tion. If you work your way down the chain from the big cheese (wheel) to me, you have to go through the wedges, the slices, and the chunks and then me. So I guess I am a bite. . The other lay­ers of man­age­ment? They would have to be crack­ers and dif­fer­ent size pieces of crack­ers. And then we have all the mice that do all the real work that makes keeps the multi-national, pub­lic cor­po­ra­tion in business.

What I want to dis­cuss is what the big cheese did a few weeks ago and what it must look like to the mice. A lit­tle over two months ago the wedge my par­tic­u­lar part of the multi-national, pub­lic cor­po­ra­tion works under decided to shuf­fle the slices. So my boss chunk and his orga­ni­za­tion got moved. This hap­pens. We were going through the pains of break­ing in a new boss slice (some­times you do have to break them just like a wild mus­tang before they break you!). Not sure how long it was going to take, or even how well it was going to go, and then - with no warn­ing, and absolutely no sign that the wedge that slice reports to knew what was com­ing, the big cheese goes and makes our new slice into a whole new wedge (not includ­ing us). So now our wedge has to find a new slice. So in a span of less than three months our boss chunk, and orga­ni­za­tion, has had three boss slices. And all three of those slices are still in the multi-national, pub­lic corporation.

The mice, many of them still con­fide in me, the mice are amazed. The mice think man­age­ment is nuts. The mice won­der if man­age­ment has got any kind of plan behind what it is doing. The mice won­der if man­age­ment can­not work together on some­thing as straight­for­ward as this, where the only peo­ple you have to work with are you, your boss and/or your employ­ees, how you can pos­si­bly lead a multi-national, pub­lic corporation.

But no mat­ter what boss chunk and I say to our­selves in pri­vate, we have to keep up appear­ances. We have to play the good multi-national, pub­lic cor­po­ra­tion cit­i­zens. I you haven’t fig­ured out the boss chunk is a really, really good boss chuck. Trust me it is hard at times. I never tell the mice it makes sense. I just try my best to point out the good stuff I can point out, explain what I can, bring up what we need to do and change the sub­ject as quickly as possible.

The mice that know me well aren’t fooled for one damn minute.

This is the hard part of the job. There really is a lot wrong with large cor­po­ra­tions. No won­der I stay anony­mous on this blog!

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