Loyalty to a corporation

Interesting:

A few weeks ago, a client that I worked at laid everybody off and it was brutal, it was cold. They held an all-hands meeting and said, “You’re all fired. There’s no severance, we’re going out of business, there’s no COBRA, there’s no coverage. People that are outside of the state are not eligible for unemployment. You’re just all out in the cold right now.” And a lot of the people that I really like at the company had not been curating their own careers. And I was so sick at heart at how they’ve been treated and then I kind of got angry that they let this happen to them.

I know you’re not supposed to blame the victim but at the same time, I was also feeling very sick at heart that they kind of let this happen to themselves.

And so, I wrote a post called Loyalty and Layoffs. It’s an epic. It’s 3,000 words. It’s one of the longest blog posts ever written. And I’m very, very angry talking about me getting laid off and realizing that it sucks and that I would never let this happen to me again and that I needed to curate my own career.

The takeaway from it is that a corporation is just a fiction. It’s a document that exists for a purpose. And if you do not serve that purpose, you have no place there. And the CEO’s job is actually to get rid of you. Or he is incompetent or she is incompetent if they don’t fire you for this. So, being loyal to that corporation is a sickness, it’s a madness and don’t do it. But you absolutely can be loyal.

I wrote some follow-up posts to it that generated a lot of feedback, got about 160 replies. And I ended up packing them all back and qualify and say, “No, you can show your allegiance to a corporation, but don’t give your trust to a corporation. Trust only flows down because loyalty only flows up in a corporation.” And it sparked a lot of controversy on Twitter, people very angry at me that were very happy at their jobs. Some people that were angry at me because they were comfortable at their jobs and the post made them suddenly very uncomfortable. And I’m kind of happy that those people are now feeling uncomfortable because that was the entire point of the post.