Is Your Startup Corporatey?
What in the world does “corporatey” mean? Well, I define it as “Corporate America gone bad.” You know, the typical business that mostly (re:only) cares about making money, paying their employees dirt, sacrificing integrity for additional profits, runs the company like a dictatorship… yaddah…yaddah…yaddah…
You get my drift, right? Oh, and let’s not forget the number one thing that defines “corporatey” — Bureaucracy. I think that we’ve all had our fair share of bureaucracy, especially those of us who have worked in Corporate America or who still do.
Bureaucracy is best defined by an article that I wrote a few months back, sharing my personal experience of working for a multimedia firm not too long ago.
We all have different aims with how we want to run our businesses, but it disturbs me when I see young entrepreneurs creating organizations just like the ones they hated so much when they were working for them.
I know, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s happening. Young entrepreneurs are turning into the bosses that they dreamt about killing. Some of us are turning into power maniacs and are spending too much time talking down to partners and employees instead of focusing on teaching and lending a helping hand.
Each young entrepreneur who runs a business should reevaluate the way that they are running the company every few months. Spend some time thinking about all of the things that you hated from your days of being an employee and do everything in your power to prevent those same things from happening with your own company.
Because before you know it, you can wakeup one morning with a bunch of people working for you who despise you, hate you, and are only sticking around for the paycheck — the exact way that you probably felt when working a job.
Don’t get me wrong, Corporate America is cool, no doubt. But when you find yourself sacrificing patience, concern for employees, and integrity, for things like increasing the bottom line, increasing your power, and becoming more “famous,” then you have a problem on your hands.
Sometimes we young entrepreneurs need to let the air out of our heads and head back to the basics, the original plans that we set forth to run positive, influential, fun, and motivating companies.
2 Comments
Lucas
January 24th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Good posting David,
I think that if you haven’t worked in a Bureaucracy then it is really something to experience as an entrepreneur as a lesson in what NOT to do with your company… it is the surest way to kill a business.
Cheers
Luc
David Askaripour
January 25th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Hey Luc,
Yeah, I’ll never — ever, ever, ever — forget those days on working for the “man.” Hah, it makes everything else look so damn pretty, eh.
Leave a Comment