I spent many years working as a coach, consultant, trainer to big Fortune 500 corporations. I worked with many brand name companies and their CEOs and executive teams. There is perhaps no more heady experience of walking around a big company with the blessing of the CEO: What does the chairman think about this or that? Would you consider coming to work in our part of the organization? Then there is first class travel all the way.
Having said that, I have found most of these big companies to be a totally soul-stultifying, dysfunctional environment for no less than 90% of the people that worked in them. As one EVP of State Street Bank once told me, “If someone gave you a million dollars to sit in a room and do nothing for a year would you do it?” He said, this was exactly the situation he was in.
I read a book by Clayton Christensen a few years ago, called The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen wrote that, while most CEOs are under pressure from Wall Street to grow the business and grow it faster, doing so often requires taking risks unacceptable to shareholders. He asks, “Is there any way out of this dilemma?”
The way most Fortune 500 CEOs try to do so is to send mixed messages to their minions, while pretending that they are not mixed: grow the business, just don’t spend any money and keep costs down. Look, it’s human nature to want be effective, to want to have an impact and make a difference, but the opportunity to do so in most big companies is very small.
I recently came across a YouTube video with Professor John Kotter of Harvard where he revealed how he had invariably observed that people who took any kind of initiative at odds with the status quo would get their vote cancelled. He said, “I found this so maddening that I wanted to pick up the furniture in the room and throw it against the wall.” He then went off and wrote a book Leading Change to help managers get buy-in. However great the book is, I doubt that the world has changed much as a result.
“Just do what I tell you do to,” said a CEO I know to one of my clients who was in disagreement with a bone head decision that CEO was about to make, “or I will fire you by tomorrow morning and find someone else to do it.” My client, a brilliant guy with CEO potential, went along with the insane decision that would cost the company over $100 million, but inside himself, he decided to look for opportunities elsewhere.
I observed that most coaches and consultants working in such Fortune 500 companies become part of the insanity, blindly accommodating themselves to executives who are jerks, as well as to their misfired strategies and poor decisions, just to hang in there and collect a few more bucks. I call it “milking the cow” until the udder dries up. These consultants unwitting traded in their aliveness in order to earn a living.
In about January of this year, I decided that whatever the cost in terms of fame, fortune, and other goodies, that I didn’t want any part of this anymore. I decided to focus my energies, not on Fortune 500 or Global 1000’s, but to focus instead on the rise of a new entrepreneurial class who, if truth be told, are the source of most of the innovation, economic growth, and jobs in our society. I was influenced in this decision by three factors.
First, I read a book called 3 Billion New Capitalists by Clyde Prestowitz. My reaction: Wow! There is a huge market here for coaching entrepreneurs who want to create a scalable, high-growth business. Why am I so busy genuflecting to the Fortune 500 (a relatively puny number in comparison)?
Second, I had a conversation with my son Roc, an MBA type, who told me from all that he heard from his friends about the soul-crushing culture of these big companies, he would be afraid to work in them. At 30, he works in an entrepreneurial outfit, a hot e-commerce company called Optaros and is fielding websites for companies like Bloomingdales, Coach, Gilt.com (Not bad!)
Third, I ran across a great story about Steve Jobs who said when he started Apple, he decided to build products for the consumer, not the Fortune 500 corporation. The reason was that people in the corporation don’t have a vote on what to buy. They have to ask a bespectacled automaton in purchasing, who in turns has to ask another bespectacled automaton. This seemed to be a great metaphor for me. I am tired of working with executives (managers) who don’t have a vote.
I would rather work with entrepreneurs who do have a vote. The consulting profit margins may not be as good, but again there are three billion of them. To draw an analogy, what if instead of trying to sell mainframe computers at a million or more a shot to a few Fortune 500’s, what if I sold iMacs to millions and millions? What if I could offer a coaching product that would really help entrepreneurial innovators all over the world grow their business. Well I am going to go for it. Will you join me?
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