One year in St. Louis Missouri, I worked seven days a week in the advertising department of a company, for seven months straight. Those months and days included two national holidays, and my two young children went to work with me Saturdays, Sundays, and those two holidays. My business card read at the time, “Assistant Creative Director, ROP/Photo Studio.” There were 16 people under that umbrella of responsibility, and none of them were there on those Sunday mornings when I went to work. I was a company man.
In July 2008, after 23 total years, the company sent me down the road.
“Well, don’t go blamin’ me. It ain’t my fault.”
“Whose fault is it?”
“You know who owns the land: The Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.”
“And who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company?”
“It ain’t nobody: it’s a company.”– John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath
I worked for a woman who had brought me to Indianapolis in 1986, when two stores were being merged and the advertising operations of one store were transferred to the second. That person hired me again, after L.S. Ayres was shuttered. My work ethic may have been what kept getting me hired, but I was doing what most people do. People do not work for companies; people work for people.
Let me revise that: People used to work for people. Once the people we worked for formed companies that became corporations (who became people after a Supreme Court ruling) that viewed the people as assets to be added and subtracted from the balance sheet, then we, the people, no longer worked for people. When companies become corporations, the distance between the beating hearts becomes greater and the faces for whom you once worked are barricaded behind “best practices” and procedures.
Compassion comes from individuals in companies: when my youngest daughter was born, I took two weeks of vacation and was granted four weeks of “paternity leave,” which was not then company policy. My boss gave me that grace, which is why I tried to never give her less than my best effort (and my best grief). I was still working for her in July 2008 (though one person removed in the reporting relationship) when the new corporate owners in the new city decided to transfer the advertising operations to another city and state, and in the process, rid the company of 850 employees.
I recently watched the George Clooney movie Up In The Air. When airline pilot Sam Elliot brings his mustache and baritone to sit next to Clooney to thank him for his 10 million miles of loyalty, I chuckled. My key ring bristles with “loyalty cards.”
We in this country live in a capitalistic society, and if a company “fails to thrive,” then the people employed there will not be retained. Savvy graduates are encouraged to research the companies they want to work for; I suggest that they also apply an emotional stethoscope to the company to see if within it, there beats a heart.
I labored in the way I learned from my mother, I often took my children with me (another outrageous benefit granted me by my boss) and I never heard the people who reported to me complain. I find it difficult to muster regret for having been that company man, for I was accorded many privileges normally reserved for the suits in the boardroom. I believe that I gave more than I received — which is necessary to make the corporate model work — but I never forget that my compensation came from a company, and my rewards came from people.