Category Archives: Basic Business Concepts

It is utterly amazing how a company will spend millions promoting its services or products and then do or allow some deceptive activity that invalidates their reputation.

FEDEX did something yesterday that would make me hesitate before ever using them to ship something important…their tracking report contained falsified data.

I have been waiting for a critical shipment of parts for a commissioned project. I have been tracking the shipment on the internet and it was scheduled for delivery yesterday, December 14. It wasn’t delivered and no FEDEX truck ever came down our quiet street.

Today, the FEDEX truck went by without stopping and I got on the computer to find that the tracking report said that the package had been left at the front door on December 14th. After checking with the neighbors, I called the parts manufacturer and cancelled my order because I had to buy the parts locally.

Hours later, a FEDEX truck rolled up with my shipment. I asked the driver why the tracking report showed that delivery had already occurred. He said, without a moment’s pause, "They do that to fix things up so they look right."

Whether the company lied or he lied, I will never believe a FEDEX
tracking report again unless FEDEX clears the matter up for me.

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Tom,  at TrueTalk Blog, expanded on my Electronic Arts post to show the
other side of the job dilemma. Where my post on EA showed the "joys" of
working for an electronic sweat shop, his post, Hourmania, discussed
the far more common trap of losing ones life and family to the
seductive lure of an apparently ideal job.

He describes a work situation which most creative people would sell their soul for:

    I work with some of the most talented designers in the world.
They’re boundlessly creative, hugely energetic, and work harder than
anyone I’ve ever seen. Unlike the EA story, No one is driving them to
do so. They drive themselves. Their standards continually escalate, and
the work gets better still.

I worked in that kind of environment more than once. These
were the most intensely rewarding positions I have ever held. These
were also the times when I did the greatest damage to my personal
relationships outside of work.

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Living in unstable times means that the benchmarks that define success can become irrelevant almost overnight.

Congratulations on finally reaching that corner office!  Enjoy it while you can. Next year, you may be operating a business out of your garage.

Tom Peters opines that ninety percent of white-collar jobs as we know them will be disemboweled in the next 15 years. Done. Gone. kaput. This is just one of the fascinating topics dealt with in his new book, Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times.

I happen to think that Tom is right on the percentage, but his time scale is way off. I see the  change happening in the next five to seven years. I don’t take this change as doom, gloom, and disaster, it is change, as in obsolescence, renewal and growth. It is a natural process, just speeded up by the internet. Like it or not, we are all living on internet time now, which is generally 5x faster than conventional, pre-internet time.

New jobs will replace the old jobs and you will need a new set of skills to succeed in the new, distributed workplace.

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Electronic Arts apparently exploits the willingness of hardworking, creative people and perverts that into an insane company-mandated orgy of 7-day work weeks. It is manifestly insane because long hours of non-stop work increase errors and require even longer working hours to repair the damage.

This scenario comes about when top management focuses on maximizing short-term financial return and ignores what it takes to produce quality products.

EA’s work practices were exposed earlier by an EA Spouse, but a recent article by Joe Straitiff, a former software engineer at EA, provides a first-hand view of what it is like to work in such a mentally unbalanced environment. His disturbing account of his work and termination from EA elicited 443 comments, most of them corroborating his observations.

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