"What if your whole company acts like an a--hole?"

I was talking to my friend this morning about Bob Sutton's "The No Asshole Rule" and its corollary, "if you can't escape working for an asshole, you need to learn how to be indifferent, now not to care too much."

My friend's question: "What if your whole company acts like an asshole?"

He elaborated. "I went to a retirement party for a friend of mine who worked for the phone company. They've been downsizing forever. There are guys who have been there 25-30 years, and they're trapped. They hate it there, but they have nowhere else to go. So they go through the motions. It's filled with people like that."

Me: "Economists keep telling us that economies of scale mean big companies have advantages."

Him: "Scale economies must mean a lot if those companies still make money, while they're full of people who don't care anymore."

Disclosure: I've worked for very large companies and very small companies in my career. As you can probably guess, I liked working at the smaller companies better.

Related posts:
The Value of Not Caring in the Workplace

Tags:
indifference, equanimity, narrative, organizational behavior