What amazed me when I entered the workforce is how dysfunctional even highly successful companies are—or at least how dysfunctional they seem to be.
What you’ve described above is an entertaining read, but does it really depict anything unique to Wal-Mart? Other places I’ve worked:
Glorified their corporate leadership
Issued well-intentioned-but-tonedeaf “edicts,” unrealistic quotas, or contradictory guidelines to regional offices
Scapegoated a person for not fulfilling some impossible set of requirements
Wallpapered over problems at the expense of doing real work for the sake of impressing superiors
Working for Wal-Mart sounds like working for lots of companies. I suspect that hidden somewhere inside the nonsense are a few things they do well to make them successful, whereas other corporations do the same set of counterproductive things without that useful core.
What amazed me when I entered the workforce is how dysfunctional even highly successful companies are—or at least how dysfunctional they seem to be.
What you’ve described above is an entertaining read, but does it really depict anything unique to Wal-Mart? Other places I’ve worked:
Glorified their corporate leadership
Issued well-intentioned-but-tonedeaf “edicts,” unrealistic quotas, or contradictory guidelines to regional offices
Scapegoated a person for not fulfilling some impossible set of requirements
Wallpapered over problems at the expense of doing real work for the sake of impressing superiors
Working for Wal-Mart sounds like working for lots of companies. I suspect that hidden somewhere inside the nonsense are a few things they do well to make them successful, whereas other corporations do the same set of counterproductive things without that useful core.
Look at some freelancers and tiny companies and you’ll see that severe problems and inefficiencies exist on both extremes of the size scale.
They happen in the military and in all levels of academia, too.
My point is that a small set of good practices can apparently overcome a wealth of bad ones.