Of Corporate Cliches & Cubicle Creatures

Has your boss ever told you that you need to think out of the box? Or perhaps he mentioned casually in the team gathering that times are tough and non-performers will be managed? Or someone's success is due to teamwork?

For anyone who has worked in a corporate cubicle long enough, they will notice that all the expressions in italics are common corporate cliches which are trite soundbites used by corporate ladder-climbers to sound impressive during meetings or euphemisms to subtly remind subordinates who is actually in-charge.

We who have spent our lives working for big corporations could be forgiven for falsely believing that we are actually contributing something meaningful to the company and society at large. Didn't the company constantly remind us that people are our greatest assets? Imagine the employee's shock when bad times do come, these are the very assets that gets disposed of first.

No wonder Dilbert by Scott Adams is one of the most popular cartoon strips these days and has become the mascot for those who are victims of inconsiderate bosses, backstabbing colleagues, know-it-all consultants and endless corporate mission statement brainstorming sessions. The Dilbert Principle is the bible of the modern corporate cubicle creature who's sole purpose in life is to navigate safely from one payday to the next and avoid the next round of layoffs (the euphemism varies from voluntary severance scheme to reduction in workforce to plain simple cost-cutting).

We, modern men are deprived of the adrenalin rushes our hunter-gatherer fore-fathers experience as part of their daily lives. The fight for survival has been transferred from the savannah plains and medieval battlefields to the corporate boardrooms of multi-national corporations. Our violent instincts, ego, desire, lust and hunger are still as primitive as the ape-man; only our weapons and modus operandi have changed. How else could one explain why Sun Tzu's The Art of War is considered essential reading for every executive?

The Corporate Animal is appropriately called so because we are in essence still locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival; the size of our office cubicles is a reflection of our territoriality instincts. The Human Zoo by popular zoologist Desmond Morris is a humorous account of how similar the behaviours of modern urban people are to animals confined in a zoo.

We shouldn't be prisoners of the corporate cubicle. Life is elsewhere. We must unshackle ourselves from these false comforts and shallow pretensions. Only out there in the wild does an animal realises its true splendour.