Corporations: Not As Smart As You Think

I'm not much of a business guy, but I've worked corporate jobs for the last nine years, and gradually some awareness of how corporations work has filtered through my protective force-field of disinterest.

It cracks me up to read stock boards and watch some day-trader in Nebraska try to figure out where a corporation is headed based on the few hazy nuggets of information that he can get from the news. It's sort of like the old joke about the three blind men and the elephant--you can see how they got to their conclusion, but it's just ludicrously wrong.

The thing that I think is really interesting is just how often the prognosticators will overestimate the company's abilities and plans, rather than underestimate. I suppose that at certain companies, for certain bounded periods of time, they are able to execute phenomenally well, surprise everyone, and keep it all secret. In general, though, even reasonably nimble corporations stagger along, work inefficiently, execute poorly, and succeed in the end through a combination of:

1. blind luck
2. sheer brute force of resources
3. competitors that are similarly inept.

I'm not saying this is the case all the time, but it certainly is the case plenty of the time.

I personally had an experience, early in my career, where the company that I worked for was "caught" collecting data that could be tied to an individual user, without notifying them that this data was being collected. There was much outrage among our users and in the press, and quite justifiably so. It appeared that we had some nefarious corporate strategy to build up dossiers on our users, Big Brother-like, and use it for God knows what evil purpose.

The thing was, the probable reason that we were collecting that data was that some naive program manager had been working on a spec, and thought, "Hey, we should collect this data, that would be useful." The feature was granular enough and buried deeply enough that it probably never went through executive review. The developers were probably too overworked to spend any time thinking about the ramifications of what they were building. In the end, I would be surprised if anyone had ever even taken the time to look at the data.

In other words, this was not a corporate strategy, there were no plans to do anything nasty with the data, and probably no one even knew that it was there to look at. Once the story hits the media, though, nobody is going to believe that. There is no way for a corporation to prove its intent.

So in the end, we looked like huge evil assholes, when what we'd made was an dumbass mistake.

I should clarify that I don't intend this to be an apologia for my company; I'm specifically not using its name to avoid that. Generally, I think people are right to assume the worst of corporations, because there are plenty of examples of corporations doing truly vile things.

It's just sort of a bemusing situation when you know that you're not evil, but you have absolutely no way to prove that to anybody.

And this leads me to my next post...