"The great thing about the internet is its leveling effect; online all opinions are equally WORTHLESS." --Grant Morrison

The Anti-Corporation Rant

This new rant of mine shouldn’t surprise any of you too much. Here are four reasons why corporations are bad.

1. Corporations are needlessly and unfairly top-heavy.

If you are an average employee at an average corporation, your CEO makes around 500 times what you make. That's okay, though, right? After all, he (and let's face it, it's almost certainly a "he") works 500 times harder than you do.

Doesn't he?

Right. Of course he doesn't! Sure, some probably work very hard... but are they worth 500 employees? Think about that at layoff time. You could cut one person's salary, or lay off 500 others. Five. Hundred. Others.

And yet, which do you think is more likely, that 500 employees get laid off or that the CEO does? Yep. I thought so.

2. Corporations are inefficient.

The main problem with corporations is that they don't act like a person would. A person can be smart. A corporation is only as smart as its stupidest employee. To use the above rant as a point here, you -- as a person -- would never devote 500 times the resources to one aspect of your life when it does not even produce anything of real worth.

Take Wizards of the Coast, for example. They layoff a number of creative employees from their R&D department a while back, and then they launch a contest that costs them more than $160,000 to get a new campaign setting. This makes sense only in corporate logic (which is to say, it doesn't make sense at all). It's like someone selling his car and then spending that money -- and probably more -- to rent a car.

Why is this? Because corporations discourage long-term planning. Not intentionally, but consider this. The average person spends only four years at a job these days (the amount of time decreases the more technical the job is). Thus, when a manager makes a decision, is she ever going to think about the long-term welfare of the company? Why would she? She's not going to be there. She's going to make a decision based on the next few years, at most. This is called maximizing short-term gains, and you can see it all the time in most companies. A smart person plans for the long term (investing for retirement, or for the kids' college fund). A corporation -- not the board of directors, but the people in middle management actually running things -- never does. It can't. The process prevents it.

Here's another nifty little tidbit to think about, from Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Cosmic Trigger series. Wilson points out that no hierarchical system can ever work, because the very hierarchy itself precludes efficient communication. Here's how:

If a subordinate must tell his superior something, he is not going to tell her the complete truth all the time. He's going to tell the superior what the superior wants to hear, or what the subordinate thinks the superior wants to hear. If the subordinate does tell the superior the truth all the time, he's likely to get fired (not always, but often enough that the behavior is rooted out of the system like some evolution of inefficiency -- survival of the most survival-minded).

Thus, the superior never has 100 percent accurate or complete information to work with. She also never tells her subordinate the complete truth -- knowledge is power, and if she gives the subordinate all her knowledge, she gives him all her power. And then he's not a subordinate anymore.

So the subordinate doesn't have 100 percent accurate or complete information to work with either. This is a communication breakdown, and the cumulative effect, over time, is disastrous.

3. Corporations mishandle creative properties.

Corporations are, by definition, a large group of people. Each one of those people has an important job, or at least they think they do. Thus, each one of them wants to have input into whatever the corporation produces.

That may be a great way to produce new and improved dishwashing soap or zesty taco-flavored chips, but it's no way to produce a creative property such as music, a movie, a book or, for that matter, a roleplaying game product. Each of these naturally must represent the vision of one person, or of a band or small group -- not a committee.

4. It's people that are important.

For some reason, we often really want to like entities or groups. We say that we really like a TV show or a sports team. But most of the time, I believe what we really like are the individuals that make up that group. You need look no further than The X-Files to see an example of an "entity" that many of us liked. But when they changed the individuals involved (the actors), no one liked it.

It's the individual that matters. While plenty of people point to a specific author or actor or painter that they like, pretty much no one says, "I always buy every book that comes out from Del Rey" or "I only go to movies distributed by MGM."

Even the old brand loyalties ("I only use Craftsman tools" or "I drive only Ford cars") seem to quickly fade into the past nowadays. Of course, I think that's probably more due to the homogenization of our society, with everything taking on a bland sameness, but that's actually Another Rant...

--Editorial assistance from Shannon Bell, Christopher Campbell, Alysia Condon-Jacobs, Steve Cook, Lori Ann Curley, Karl Jacobs, Jennifer Knighton, Jose Nario, Steven Palmer Peterson, and Anton Strout at the 2002 Gen Con Editor's Workshop.

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