Personification of Corporations
A year or so ago there was a film that explored the thesis of the modern day corporation as a personality. If you summed their actions what sort of person would they be? Their conclusion was that most exhibit psychotic behavior.
Can you imagine what Google might be? An incredibly smart person no doubt. But also a rather shy, stubborn and insecure one:
- They wouldn’t talk to CNET, a trade publication, after an article appeared about CEO Eric Schmidt and some person details that were gleaned through searches on Google. Now, after months of not talking to CNET, they finally are again.
- Yahoo came out and said its index was bigger than Google and Google was not happy. They said that index size doesn’t matter and just in case it did its index is now three times bigger than Yahoo’s. But you can’t track or measure that claim, they say. And they are taking the number off their frontpage because the size of the index doesn’t matter people! But theirs is three times bigger!
When you add thousands of employee per year from a very small base I think these sort of growing pains are inevitable. You can dampen the effect by striving to be a different sort of company but in the end you can’t change human behavior.
