Corporations: Where creative people go to die

I work in a large corporation. Those of you that know me know what that company is. It's been nearly a year since I've joined the company and so far the experience has been lukewarm.

Since joining the company, as sort of an "initiate" into this whole corporate world, most newly hired members have attended all sorts of little lectures from the HR group with huge dreams of us creating all sorts of new fangled technologies for the future. At the same time, I still remember the HR people, during our orientation that our relationship with the company was that they "pay us and we work for them." We might not like the job we do, or some of the people around us, but the contractual relationship is pretty much "do what we're told to." Sounded like a paid version of slavery to me.

And now, that I think about it all, the whole idea seems rather absurd. I know there are people within the company coming up with projects that will hopefully make large sums of cash, the reward structure is that you might get a promotion or a bonus.. somewhere in the ball park of $10,000 or more depending on the contribution. But seriously, why would you want to settle for $10,000 if you're coming up with a multi-million dollar idea? I don't see any really good incentives.

And with that happening. I also think working in an environment like this will cause creative people to eventually go brain dead. I for one firmly believe that believe that creativity cannot be fostered by forcing people to follow orders. Especially from older people that aren't as in touch with the latest technologies or where the direction of technology will be going. I don't believe that most higher ups have the youthful visions of the younger people when it comes to understanding the potentials of what we can do with technology.

It says a lot about why most of the hottest start ups and growing companies are or have been full of young people. Older people, especially normal managers usually just can't cut it with coming up a great idea. It seems to be that they latch on to whatever seems hot or a cool seeming idea of someone else and start whipping people to do their bidding. I think it is kind of rare to find a management level kind of person that truly understands the pulse technology and where might it go.

One must truly love what they do, understand what would be truly be great to have and understand the community of people that use these things to understand where things will go. I'd have to say that most management people don't understand... they're just being paid to have their underlings make somethings that'll turn a profit.

Usually for large corporations it means more of the same. Make things smaller or bigger, faster, cheaper whatever. It's all sort of a variation of the same thing. 30~40 years ago, I guess you could say that having corporations was a necessity, because it was pretty expensive to get things done. Things have changed and the up front capital to building something or even getting a startup up and running has gotten much cheaper and I think it is the small startups with the fresh ideas are the ones that are going to have the biggest impact on society.

Large corporations aren't places where people have new ideas. Atleast that it from what I've seen so far, no matter how the managers and HR people want people to be creative to come up with the new great hit. The working environment of a large corporation just doesn't encourage people to be creative or take chances.

You just can't be creative when you have a bunch of managers telling you what to do while at the same time having to do all sorts of stupid things to get an idea past a manager so that you can just try it. It just doesn't work that way.

Would you want to pay $100,000 or $1,000

You know the saying "nobody got fired for buying IBM," I now have an idea of what that really means.

To do some experimentation work, we're ordering a $100,000 machine, custom built from the ground up. We have some power supplies here, some data loggers there and a bunch of other high precision stuff that lets us connect some wires to samples and measure data. After going through 2~3 levels of management to get the funding that machine is getting built. The problem is that I believe that I can build something that can do the same thing and probably out spec the machine that is coming in for about $1,000.

Sure, I made a presentation and suggested the idea of my version of the machine to the leaders, but it gained no traction. One suggested that it might be too much trouble to build the thing on our own. I recognize that the circuits that I've built will need some fine tuning to get things into spec but I think it's something doable. It annoyed me considering that with the current economic situation that we are being told to slow down on what we spend our cash on. Hell I'd rather build the machine and sell it off to them and pocket the difference!

The thing is that out of the people in my work group, I am pretty much the only person that knows anything about designing circuits and making programs. This is totally up my ally. Instead, they make me take charge of farming out the work to an outside company which I have a feeling that I can outclass the engineers doing the electronics and programming. I can understand why people might think spending $100,000 on the machine that we are brining in is reasonable but it's people with the $1,000 idea that can blow this stuff out of the water is what revolutions are made out of.

I have no interest in trying to bash heads with management because sometimes I think they're off the deep end. I've tried once to change the culture of a laboratory but that plan was met with resistance and apathy.

It would be exactly like the engineers at Xerox first giving birth to the graphical user interface and the mouse and then having the management people have no clue what this all ment. Apple and Microsoft came swooping in and now this technology is everywhere. It's exactly like that. Xerox would most certainly be smacking themselves in the head now for letting something like this get away from them.

I've once read somewhere that even if you've got a great idea, you're going to have to ram it down the throats of management to get anything done... in that sense, people won't understand a good idea even if it smacks them in the face. Some people at first thought that Google was a stupid idea with Yahoo, Excite and all the other search engines out there. I'll let results speak for themselves.

So far what I've learned is that if you really want something done, you're going to have to rely on your self.