Other kinds of frustrations arise as enormous enterprises come to represent an increasing share of our workplace options.  I’ve learned through hard but not uncommon experience that mega-organizations have ways of doing things that aren’t always hospitable to initiative or good judgment.  Again, an example in my community provides a good illustration of the principle.

A supermarket near me was recently bought up by a megachain.  At the time of its purchase, it was a beautiful store--a showcase, actually.  However, the acquiring chain felt it had to be remodeled.

In the course of this endeavor, the chain spent money in a variety of odd ways, many of which were apparent even before you entered the store.  For example, all the landscaped parking lot “islands” were jackhammered up and repoured, with the net effect of changing their dimensions by maybe a foot or so.  As part of this process, established trees were ripped out and re-planted with twiggy replacements.

Inside the store, patrons had to endure months of dust and clutter as all the ceilings were torn down, all the flooring was pulled up, all the cases and fixtures were replaced, major walls were knocked down and rebuilt, and the entire store was rearranged.  When the work was finally finished, the reaction among customers was overwhelming:  it looked a good deal worse than it had before the work was undertaken.

It’s hard to imagine anything but a vast corporation throwing money around in this manner.   Who else but a mega-organization would (a) have the money at hand, and (b) be so remote and out of touch as to be oblivious as to how poorly it is being spent?

Wasn’t anybody within the supermarket company aware of the nonsensicality of the remodeling expenditures?  Well, actually, a lot of people were--at the ordinary employee level.  But they obviously weren’t listened to by the people making the decisions.  In fact, their somewhat furtive manner in discussing the transformation--in an understated, joking way, only when asked, and then only by customers they felt they knew well—suggested significant organizational and career hazards in being too candid about their emperor’s new clothes.

Having worked for my share of large organizations, I could relate only too easily to the supermarket employees’ discomfort and wariness.  Toiling in the mega-corporate anthill, I’ve learned that you never know when some spectacularly ill-advised endeavor will turn out to be the pride and joy of someone whose power and ego got into a crossing pattern with his judgment and common sense.  This can turn the simple act of talking frankly about issues that could affect the company’s success into a risky and potentially “career limiting” move.  Working for such an organization can be endlessly demoralizing and crazy-making.  It is the world whose absurdities spawned the Dilbert cartoon.

As corporations continue to merge and consolidate, the remaining jobs tend to be concentrated more and more in the surviving mega-organizations.  This means that we’re making working for them more and more bizarre at the exact same time that we're reducing realistic opportunities to work in a different kind of environment. 

Yes, there are still opportunities for a few high-flying “dot-coms” going the IPO route.  But this is a far cry from the environment that prevailed not all that many years ago, when it was the norm for a wide variety of businesses, from hardware stores to burger joints, doctors’ offices to embalming parlors, to be individually- or family-owned.