Corporate and you: how to handle large scale group organizing and master bureaucracy without going fucking insane.
So, couple disclaimers at the beginning. This is the how to survive Corporate and why you need to learn bureaucracy rant I mentioned a few days back. This is based on my 12 years working (and thriving!) in a Corporate environment based around the US but not being physically living in the US. It's also the result of 20 years doing consistent activist work with large scale organizations and doing mostly logistics support.
Full disclosure, the realization this rant needed to exist came from a very popular blog chronicling a Bad Work Spiral and a friend sharing that with me, and me having a Weird Uncomfortable reaction to it. I will not be linking to this person because they're already having a really shitty time of it, and having a random stranger they don't know from Adam writing commentary on how to avoid landing in that kind of situation seems to me deeply unkind.
I want to be clear and upfront about this from the beginning: these observations are not meant to absolve an abusive, toxic workplace just because it's Corporate. What I'm trying to do is give you tools to navigate boundaries in Large Groups Of People, of which Corporate is one of the most common places you will find yourself in. Not knowing how to navigate the dynamic makes you vulnerable to exploitation; it never makes you responsible for it.
So with that in mind:
What the fuck is Corporate?
Colloquially, Corporate is the name we give large labor forces that are organized under a single hierarchy and function under a distinct identity. I'm talking about the work force and not the Corporation itself, because as part of the fun (read: unconscionable and corrupt) structure of modern day Capitalism, a Corporation is just a piece of paper that obscures individual ownership of things. We're not talking about the legal and financial entity of a Corporation (and the source of all those fraud ads about not paying taxes if you set up an S-Corp! Totes legit!).
I'm talking about the labor force. I'm talking about the actual people that make up a Corporation and how those people are organized and how that structure works.
Corporate at its core is bureaucracy under another name. Privatized bureaucracy, to tell it apart from Government bureaucracy, which is also deeply stigmatized and presented as an inescapable labyrinth that no mere mortal can traverse. This is equally bullshit. Don't buy that snappy, snarky nonsense. If governance and organized labor are inaccessible and incomprehensible, that only means they're forever out of reach. That you have no hope of affecting change or taking control of it.
That's a lie.
Ultimately Corporate is just a way to organize a large group of people to more or less effectively get shit done. And I know. I know. You've worked in Corporate and spent hours doing nothing. You think Corporate is the most inefficient fucking thing to ever exist. There's meetings and meetings and endless chains of emails. "Middle Management" is just a bunch of assholes collecting a large paycheck for doing nothing!
But see, that's the propaganda. That's taking your misunderstanding of how Corporate works and weaponizing it to keep you out. To keep you from seeing the purposefulness of it. If you don't understand WHY things are done a certain way, you can't identify who made those decisions and who benefits from them. And you can't really tell, at a glance, if you're dealing with a Corporate entity you want to interact with or not.
Ultimately, Corporate is bureaucracy: it assigns a role to each person and each role comes with responsibilities. What is obscured in most cases is how these roles and responsibilities interact with each other. And that's where people fail.
How it breaks down.
Let's say, for example, that you're hired as a secretary or personal assistant. And one of your roles is to manage meetings for your boss. Their entire job is meetings, it seems, with all sorts of people. And your job is to make sure their calendar doesn't contradict itself, and maybe that the meeting room is setup properly, for each meeting: i.e., if they need to present, there's a projector or the right cables or the right speaker, etc.
This is pretty straightforward, right? And when you're first hired to work Corporate, it really does feel like it's a simple job. You can manage someone's calendar. Send a few emails. Sure. And then friction happens: two very important, very busy people want to meet with your boss on the same day and at the same time. Or something is broken, in the meeting room.
The first friction, double-booking, is within the scope of your job. You need to reach out to their secretaries and negotiate time and see if it's possible to reschedule or move things around: you might need to reschedule other meetings and reshuffle the entire calendar to accommodate. But that IS your job. To manage the calendar. And that's something to keep track of to show you're doing your job properly. That you send cordial emails or networked with other secretaries to resolve this with a real time chat instead of a long email trail. Or traded favors to shuffle schedules, etc. That's within your role. That's something you're expected to do.
The second friction, however, it's not part of your job. It's a trap waiting to snare the unaware. Because your job is to make sure the meeting room is ready to be used. But your job is not to fix whatever was broken. And here is where the nature of bureaucracy/Corporate breaks some people. Some people will look at a frayed cable or a missing speaker and go "that's an easy fix, I just need to go to the hardware store." And what's worse, they'll do it. Out of their own pocket, they will pay for a cable or a speaker or what have you, and personally fix the problem. And they will feel very accomplished and satisfied with themselves. They will note this down and present it as "going above and beyond" when they talk about their performance with their boss. "Look at me," they say, "I'm fixing SO MANY THINGS."
Well, we have a name for people like that, in the Corporate sphere: The Well-meaning Idiot.
Because they're idiots. Full stop. They're in fact fucking up and documenting they're fucking up, and they're so busy self-congratulating over how Good They Are At Work, that they don't notice all the ways they've fucked up royally. But they're not mean-spirited idiots or actively trying to cause problems. They're well-meaning. They are trying their best.
It's just that their best doesn't work.
How it's SUPPOSED to work.
I know, I know. Hear me out. The thing about working in Corporate, is that there is probably someone whose job is to "fix frayed cables" and "replace missing speakers." There's probably a policy or an intake or a way to contact them and say "look, this meeting room needs to be ready by this time, and this needs to be fixed by then." And they would be able to help you deal with that friction without having to pay out of pocket for things. Or worse, they might not be able to help, because they're understaffed or underfunded, and your request not being fulfilled could be a blessing to them. Because they might have been telling their boss "we need more people/money" for months, but their boss can't actually give them anything, because there's no evidence of it. No one has complained. No one has documented it.
You went out of your way to be "a team player" and "think outside the box" and sure. You fixed your problem. But systemically. Structurally. The problem remains. The "fix cables and missing speakers" team is still understaffed and underfunded. Your fix is temporary. And possibly only benefiting you, individually. After all, if you bought the cable, you're not leaving it in the meeting room. That's your cable! You keep it for yourself and your boss' meetings.
But you will never be repaid for that cable. And you will not be graded on that cable, either. Because it's not part of your job so it's not something you're expected to do. It will get you a pat in the back and maybe some warm, social capital and maybe being treated as "a hero". But it won't reflect in your performance or your metrics or the things that decide if you get a better salary.
And that's the view that people don't see, about Corporate. Corporate runs on failure.
What you should have done was raise a request with that other team. And if they replied back and said "sorry, we're backed up and it's not possible for us to do this now"? You escalate to your boss. "Hey boss, FYI, the meeting room is not going to be ready for this meeting: the cable is broken and the team responsible doesn't have time/money to fix it." And then your boss - if they're a good boss - sends an email to the boss of that team, asking to be prioritized. To get it solved. And now there's documentation. There's evidence of an impact. So the boss of THAT team can reach out to THEIR boss and be like "see? I need more people/money." And because there's evidence, there's documentation, there's a paper trail, there's a bunch of people from varying ranks in the hierarchy speaking up about this being necessary? Yeah, something will be done.
The minimum viable solution will be applied.
And it will always be the minimum. As it should be. Remember, the point of a corporation is to make money. The reason there's policies and structures in place that demand evidence before authorizing fixes is because this is a measure against waste.
Imagine a world where, rather than going to the "fix cables and missing speakers" team, you had the option to just. Order a new cable. You don't pay for it, the business does. But you ordered it and they send it to you and it feels like YOUR cable. So instead of leaving it in the meeting room as public property, you decide to keep it. It's yours, after all. I mean, it belongs to the business, but you ordered it and it was given to you. It feels like your work laptop. Yours, but not really. But still yours enough to be exclusive.
What happens if someone else needs to use that meeting room? Well, they'll order their own cable. And now there's multiple cables, for the same meeting room, because without the friction of having a team administering those fixes and having to provide evidence of failure to release resources, you perceive things to belong to you, instead of being common goods.
Corporate policies have a tendency to be misrepresented as inaccessible and archaic and just straight up nonsense. That's propaganda. That's saying "I don't understand why this works this way, therefore it's nonsensical." Instead of "I don't understand why this works this way, therefore I should research and try to learn more." It's a thought-ending cliche designed to keep you from learning how to navigate this kind of dynamic.
And it's important that you learn how to navigate this dynamic. That you get comfortable and used to the fact "failure drives action" and "evidence justifies results."
Because that's how large scale groups of people operate.
Sike! We were talking about bureaucracy the entire time.
Bureaucracy runs on failure. Bureaucracy requires evidence of failure, in order to dispense a fix. The reason for this approach is to prevent waste. Waste can take many shapes! It can be money or food or time or people.
Bureaucracy is the best way humans have found to coordinate large scale groups of people towards a common goal. In the case of governments, to distribute and administrate common resources towards the common good. (Think, spending tax money towards improvements for the community.) In smaller scales, like activist groups or common good advocacy or sociocracy organizations the point is to divide labor up and distribute available resources towards specific goals.
Here's the thing though. In real life, we're not playing with cheats on. Money runs out. People burn out. Corporate (and bureaucracy) is frustrating and annoying until you realize the whole point is to preserve whatever resources we have and trying to route them to best possible recipient. This means people go without. This means there's always someone getting left behind.
That is the cruel reality of not having enough resources to do all the things you want to do. And in the majority of social endeavors you find yourself organizing large scale groups of people? You will not have enough resources pretty much ever. This is where compromises come from. This is where concessions and negotiation comes in.
This is where ideological purity seekers get shattered inside out and refuse to engage with the system. Any system.
Because there's not enough to go around to fix EVERYTHING. And if you don't understand how priorities are built, you are never going to be able to advocate for YOUR priorities to be taken seriously. You need to document failure. You need to build evidence. You need to SPEAK the language of bureaucracy, to get what you want.
But failure feels bad!
The elephant in the room is that failure sucks tho. Failure feels bad. Failure might require people to incur harm. Preventable harm! Harm that you could personally stop if only you step out of your role and-
Nope, nope. Look, I get it. I do. I'm brown and queer and fat and neurodivergent and VERY expendable. I understand there's a human cost, down the line. I understand there's a level of detachment and cruelty to requiring failure to action... and even then it doesn't guarantee that there WILL be a solution.
What that means is you don't put all your eggs in a single basket. And you become aware of what you personally can do. Where do you fit in the large scale system, what shape of cog are you. And where ELSE might you fit.
Because the thing that people forget in the midst of being paralyzed by the horrors is that there ARE multiple systems in action at the same time. Sure, there's government: but there's Federal and Local and State government. And even outside government, there's private and public support networks.
The lie is the idea that there's only one singular system and it's too complex and big to change or move with any kind of velocity. This is a lie. There are MANY and multiple systems of varying sizes and speeds, to respond to your needs. The more urgent your needs, the smaller the system you need to push for, because it's less numerical and more personable.
But the bigger the problem, the more long-lasting the solution you want, the bigger the system you want to tackle.
One of the most important things I have ever learned in my time as an activist has been the ability to scope out a problem and match it to the right size of system to interact with. Because yes, actually, it's insane to tell someone who is fucking starving "I get it, you're hungry, but we need DATA of starving people in order to start the multi-year process of reallocating resources to get people like you food." It's fucking evil!
It doesn't mean it's not true.
But you can get that data from a soup kitchen that's serving starving folk. You can route the starving individual to a immediate fix for their FUCKING STARVATION, while also engaging with the soup kitchen to use their data and use it as evidence to pressure local government.
All of these interactions are nuanced and complex, but they boil down to "someone has a job that is JUST to fix this, and by not routing people to them, you're fucking them up and setting them to fail." Think of all the librarians desperately asking people to use their services. Think of all the advocacy non-profits desperately wanting people to attend seminars or workshops. Because that's THEIR job and they have metrics and quotas. Because the resources are limited. And they need to justify the resources they've been given, to keep existing.
So how do I navigate this?
First and foremost, you need to accept that social problems cannot be solved individually. Please stop looking at issues as opportunities for you personally to be a hero.
Instead, figure out the shape of your cog. Where do you sit in any of these systems? And if you don't... then figure out how to join. Join local town halls. Join neighborhood watches. Join local humane aid societies.
Figure out what you are responsible for, and then try to route anything you're not responsible for to the person who is. Give them data. Give them examples. Make sure people and their needs are documented. That they don't end up as a conversation that no one remembers a month later.
Understand what are the metrics your resources are tied to. What do you need to demonstrate to get increased scopes. And also identify what are short-term solutions for those long-term goals that can be passed on to people in need.
Help people understand that challenging and reforming systemic issues is a long-haul, slow, tedious but extremely necessary process, and that it is a distinct thing from helping people who need things immediately. And that very often the people doing one are NOT the people doing the other.
Educate yourself and those around you, and do not let yourself be radicalized into paralysis. Don't let people convince you that you're too small to matter. That you can't possible affect any sort of change anywhere. But also be on guard against the people who see any kind of concession or negotiation as a betrayal. Watch out for attempts to diminish or negate efforts to improve things because they're not efforts to improve ALL things. Whether they know it or not, those people are spewing propaganda and trying to rob you of your ability to impact the world around you. Do no fucking let them.
Sure, sure, Comrade, but what the fuck do I do about my Corporate job?
Fair, fair. My main bone is the fact negativity towards Corporate structures very often bleeds into negativity about bureaucracy, which is truly negativity about large scale organization and the paths to empowerment that individuals have when they join a group of their peers.
And while these are all principles you can apply to your Corporate job, here's a few things to help you decode how to navigate that world:
Read the fucking policies.
Every Corporate job out there has policies in place. These are the ground rules. These are the things that truly dictate what needs to be done and by whom. Sure, a power tripping manager might be giving you all sort of grief, but what matters is the policy.
Read it. Understand it. If you don't understand the policy, ask the person who wrote it until you do. And then follow it.
And if you're ever asked to break or circumvent that policy: DOCUMENT IT. Get it in writing. Don't be aggressive or combative. Play the clueless nerd card.
"I'm sorry, I know in the meeting you told me to do X, but as I understand, it's policy to do Y. Can you confirm you want me to do X?"
If someone wants you, repeatedly, to break policy and is being slimy about confirming it in writing, document it yourself anyway, and consider passing it on to HR.
HR is not the enemy. They're also not your friend.
HR exists to keep the company from being sued. The moment you threaten a lawsuit, that's the moment HR starts treating you as a threat instead of part of the company.
While HR is not your friend and will not go out of its way to look out for you, personally, and you should not expect them to: HR exists to protect the company from lawsuits. Policies were written to enable the company to complete its work, comply with regulatory requirements and avoid lawsuits. When you avoid or break policies, you're a danger to the company and will be targeted by HR. Redirect that shit to whoever is demanding you avoid or break policy and duck your head to avoid the fire.
Do what you're paid to do, not what you think they should pay you to do.
The most important thing to be able to survive and even thrive in Corporate is to know what the fuck they're paying you for. What's your role. What are you responsible for. If at any point you're not sure, go ask your boss. Get it in writing. If your boss can't or won't give you clear expectations of what your role and responsibilities are?
Fucking.
Run.
Do not look back.
Do not let yourself be swayed by promises of future growth or raises.
If you can afford to, quit immediately. Otherwise, start looking for employment elsewhere.
Remember, the whole point of Corporate is that you're a cog in a machine. You have your little scope of what you're responsible for and what people expect you to do. You're the guy who wrangles the calendars. Or the dude who schedules the meetings. Or the guy responsible for replacing frayed cables. The system only works when everyone has a role and they KNOW what their role is.
When your boss can't or won't define your role, your boss is trying to exploit you. If you don't know what you're being paid for, you don't know what counts as extra. You have no real visibility as of what's considered the minimum you should do, or what success looks like. This is a common problem of companies that are large enough to be Corporate, but small enough to still have people who run things on vibes.
Nope. Fuck that. There is no amount of promised pay that makes that kind of environment worthwhile. I promise you, they will exploit you for all they can, squeeze every tiny bit of usability out of you, and then kick you to the curb and scam you out of as much money as they can, on the way out.
Figure out what you're being paid for. Get it in writing. And also get in writing what your boss considers "minimum" and "acceptable." You'll find in Corporate there's always the whole "year end review" about what you did and what you can improve and how to grade your performance. Well, you can't be graded without a metric. If you don't know what your boss thinks is "Satisfactory"? You will never be able to make decisions about your own work.
In toxic work places, this is by design. If you don't know what "good enough" looks like, they expect you to just. Work endlessly. Tirelessly. As hard and as fast and as much as you can. And that's a one way ticket to burnout city.
Which brings us to my favorite piece of Corporate advice:
Do not ever fucking put 100% on anything. Ever.
So the truth of it is, even if your manager isn't actively trying to sabotage you. Even if they're not a massive dick. Anything they see you do once is something they will expect you to do always. Unless you make a big deal out of it and get it in writing that it's a big deal and make an effort to remind them that it's a big deal? Yeah, they saw you do it which means you can do it, which means you should do it.
So no, do not stay late without overtime pay. Do not switch to work a double shift. Do not do more than you're required (BEING PAID FOR), without thoroughly documenting and clearly getting IN WRITING notice that it's a one-off and also what reimbursement you're getting for it.
But I just want to be nice to my coworkers! Right. So you're taking on the extra work instead of letting the system fail and your manager realize they're understaffed and need someone else to join. I mean, are you REALLY understaffed if you're there and able to do the work? For no extra pay? Why would they hire new people?
It all circles back to: what's your place in the machine? What were you hired to do? If they want you to change or move or do more, politely request a meeting with HR and ask to explore your options for further compensation.
You do this for money. They want you desperately to forget it's all about money. Do not fucking let them.
In the most general way, you're exchanging labor for money. However, you should be aware of whether you're selling specific actions/end results, or if you're leasing your time. These are not the same. And one might be better for you than the other.
Here's an example:
I get paid for doing a report. The report is my responsibility. The expectation is that I deliver the report on time. If I'm selling a specific action, that means I will be paid the exact same if I take an hour or forty, building the report. All they care about is that it's delivered on time. And in that scenario, the faster I can make that report, the more my time is worth.
Conversely, if the report is not as important as me being available during a certain hour window to answer questions/respond emails, I am leasing my availability. And since my boss is paying for that window of time, they probably want to see me look busy as much as possible, to feel like they're getting the most out of their investment. But looking busy doesn't mean being busy. And if it's been established that I get a certain amount of hours to do something, and I manage to do it faster? There's no real benefit to anyone about it. Because I will not get a break. I will get more tasks to do. And if it was a fluke, getting rid of new tasks is a lot harder than being assigned them.
You're not a slave. You're not a serf. Your purpose in life is not to be working 24/7.
But what if I'm idle? What if I could be PRODUCTIVE? Are you? Actually productive? Or are you putting the entirety of your sense of self on your ability to be a Good Cog and get a good grade in Working, to the point you sacrifice any kind of freedom and space to breathe you can afford? Are you actually helping or are you being a Well-Meaning Idiot and fixing shit before it fails and therefore ensuring it NEVER gets properly fixed?
It's just a job, dude. As long as you know your role and your responsibilities and you're keeping up with those?
It's okay.
A job should not feel like torture. I get it, we're in a Capitalistic hellscape and everything is awful all the time. But like. Do remind yourself, even if you can't, for any reason, remove yourself from the Torment Nexus that is your job: a job should not feel like torture. You're not insane for wanting to be treated with respect. There are in fact places where you can exchange labor for money and not be routinely exploited. I hope you're able to find one.
But mostly?
Understand the systems around you. Understand the systems you belong to. Identify when they're broken and when they're fixable.
And don't let doomerist bullshit convince you there's no way out.
One of the best descriptions I’ve ever seen to understand why, for example, I as a public defender should stick within the confines of that role and yell when things outside that aren’t being done, rather than try to be more than a lawyer to my clients.
