Bulldozer00's Blog

In stodgy, arrogant, and paranoid corpocracies, everything is marked as proprietary: the company letterhead, the standard powerpoint layout, all documented processes (that (shhhh!) nobody follows), every e-mail, every conversation, the company newsletter, the recipes in the cafeteria, etc. Hell, when someone sneezes it’s deemed proprietary. Geez, what up wit dat?

“Lighten up Francis” – Sergeant Hulka (from the movie “Stripes”)

Heaven forbid that a competitor gets its slimy hands on any of your proprietary “stuff”. OMG, they’ll put you out of business by using all of your world-changing intellectual property against you. Anyone caught disclosing anything about the corpo innards will swiftly receive a peek-a-boo visit from a high ranking corpocrat, right?

To be fair, there probably is some stuff that really is proprietary, like some domain-specific algorithms and/or some custom hardware modules. But gimme a break Einstein. Regardless of what you espouse, the ubiquitous Bell curve says that you’re most likely not all that (pause for a yawn) great. Although you, like the vast majority of corpo citadels on the landscape, think and espouse that you’re obviously a cut above the rest, you’re not. Deal with it. Remove the camouflage that everyone is aware of, but is forbidden to discuss.

When you explicitly “allow” your  people to discuss the undiscussables in a truly open and receptive environment without publicly or privately tarring and feathering them, then you’ve taken the first courageous step toward differentiating yourself from the herd.  Mooo!

Note: I’m just a Dilbertonian DIC (Dweeb In the Cellar) who makes things up, so don’t believe a word I say.