When a big company acquires a little company, while there may be some value to the desks, milling machines, customer base, patents, or other goodies that accompany the purchase, more often the most valuable asset of the acquisition is the corporate culture that made the little company attractive to the big company in the first place.
The issue is, how does the culture-as-an-entity of the huge acquirer avoid overwhelming and destroying the culture of the tiny acquiree, without trying or noticing?
The company from which sprang Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man Month as an object lesson in how things go wrong in software development despite our very best efforts to make them go right, has recently acquired a small company Whistle Communications almost entirely for Whistle's corporate culture.
IBM did this as a way of trying to wedge itself into the potentially enormously lucrative small business market from which it has found itself excluded for decades, despite a good reputation and a fine service and product selection the small business market needs and wants, but isn't buying.
This situation has persisted, probably as much as for any other reason, because of IBM's large company cultural mis-match with understanding the workings and aspirations of a small company and that small company's accompanying culture. Maybe bringing in a small, fired up, company with a good but hard to sell small business idea, and building a Global Small Business focus around it and its ways, could help fix the situation, the thinking driving the acquisition seemed to be.
Promises have been made that this time the small company culture will be preserved. Promises by people coming from the large company culture who really don't even notice when things start to go wrong, because from their point of view, things are just returning to normal.
Now, unless someone with the power to reverse the tide is at hand, the source material from which to write a new book, Killing the Corporate Culture You Needed to Survive into the Next Millennium is busily being created, in one minute of careless milling down of all non-conformity to the large corporate culture per minute of real time, and is in need of another annotator of the quality of Dr. Brooks, to warn future generations from going and doing likewise.
The signs and symptoms are everywhere I look, but the Devil is in the details, as ever. To tell this story, I have to tell it from the point of view of the details that have come to impinge on my daily work experience. Each and every one of these, individually, can be correctly and out of hand dismissed as unimportant, but that misses the point. Cultures are built exactly of an accumulation of individually unimportant but collectively aligned details, and they can be torn down forcefully by de-accumulating exactly the same sorts of stuff.
Who decides where an employee lives?
Many people working where I do commute in to work over two hours, and back out two hours, to afford decent shelter arrangements in safe communities. IBM's corporate moving policy limits moving expense reimbursement to moves done to residences within 50 miles of work.
This is Silicon Valley, and I cannot afford anything within 50 miles of work, not even a room in a boarding house, so I've been "locally homeless" since being hired. Want to guess how thrilled with and supportive of a homeless employee who seems intent on staying that way large company culture is? Don't guess, ask my supervisor. Sleeping at my desk is not an option.
Folks in startups are used to suffering, and are grown up enough to make their own tradeoffs between time spent commuting and quality of shelter, without corporate mandates. What we don't need to add to the misery is an "in loco parentis" policy like that one, enforced on us by our employer.
As a result of this policy, I was forced to move my family before our lease expired, in order to do my move under the more flexible Whistle policy and avoid the rigid IBM policy, dump it all on my wife's head before she was fully recovered from major surgury, and to pay double rent for 15 weeks. This IBM policy was of course completely inflexible and unappealable. Just ask human resources.
Devil++.
Who decides what an employee is named?
Surely I'm kidding? Sadly, no. I have used my full name Kent Paul Dolan all my adult life, on the basis of competent advice from a lawyer in the family, by whom I was raised, that I have no other legally recognized name. By enforced corporate policy, IBM employees cannot have middle names in their company records. I suppose fixing the software would be too much trouble. Where would they ever find someone with the needed skills, among all those computer practitioners? Thus, my first cubicle tag said "Kent Dolan", my IBM badge calls me "K. Dolan", every company form I fill out has space for a middle initial at best, never for a middle name. There is simply no corporate excuse for that policy which balances my need to retain my identity. After all, at fifteen characters including spaces, my full name is shorter than many people's family names.
Devil++.
Who decides what an employee is called to the world?
For perhaps eleven years, my computer accounts have used my well known (to millions of people -- no, really) login ID xanthian which is equally as much how I think of myself in this new wired together world as I do by my given name in paper documents. I answer to "xanthian" in spoken conversation without pause. In the fairly personal liberty oriented state where I live, that is enough, without further court action, to make it an alternate or only legal name of mine, if I so chose.
My Unix account was set up by a stranger who recognized this login ID of old (millions of people -- really), and he had no difficulty making that my login ID, and the usual corporate "first initial, last name" cluster a mail alias for that ID that I need never deal with again in my employee lifetime.
Oops.
Then my "productivity" computer needed a login account name. Despite that the computer itself is now named "Xanth" (thanks, Judy), "corporate policy" sets my login ID to "kdolan", full stop. In response, I turned off any way to send a signed document to the world from me via that computer. Why confuse millions of people (no, really) about who wrote what they are reading? Tough on the crowd that expects spreadsheets and processed words and pert charts out of that machine from me, but hey, it wasn't my idea, just corporate policy.
Devil++.
Who decides what I look like?
or,
Tommy can you see me?
The first two letters of "IBM" on my company ID badge are bigger than my face in my badge portrait, which shows where my employer's priorities are focused as well as anything else could. My name on the same badge is unreadable from further than six inches from the badge. This makes calling by name in a friendly manner familiar faces with unfamiliar names a real chore, and integrating the two workforces a pain-full of "excuse me, but I've forgotten your name"s.
Devil++.
No beer on IBM premises? Ye, gods.
No wonder the company almost went down the tubes seven years ago. Successful workgroups party together, hard, to help mend the inadvertant wounds of day to day employment interactions. The human species has had alcohol to help the healing process along for probably 40,000 years now. Nothing is sadder than a drunk in the gutter, but the rest of us don't want to suffer a work-life-time of boring parties and unassuaged work-wounds for the sake of the unlucky genes of the few genetically predisposed alcoholics.
Devil++.
Why is it objectionable to the company for me to get rich by working hard here?
Rules have changed since the acquisition, to comply with IBM policy, so now no stock options are given to new Whistle employees on hiring. Maybe later a pending review will turn them back on, but for sure, hired in the gap between, I have missed out.
This continues unbroken a deliberate IBM policy against making non-management employees rich from the fruits of their IBM employment that I can trace back, on my own experience talking with IBM employees, to 1966.
That's when I learned from the local IBM mainframe sales force that their commission rate dropped as their sales climbed. Excuse me?
Perhaps, considering how counter this damping of sales force enthusiasm was to IBM's best interests, this was done so that the sales force wouldn't be tempted to retire unexpectedly (or tempted to keep working as hard for lower proportional rewards per hour worked to make IBM rich, either)?
Yes, I had talented salespersons tell me they'd sold all the IBM mainframe hardware they intended to try to sell that year, because it just wasn't as interesting to them doing that for 1% of the ticket price as it had been for 3%.
It sure is interesting how many of those Microsoft Millionaires still show up for work every morning, and how much their highly visible success keeps attracting the brightest, best, and most ambitious talent to Redmond. Or maybe I'm wrong, and the attraction really is the 330 days a year on average that it rains in the Seattle area.
Amazingly enough, even wage slaves rise to the challenge of getting rich through hard work, if not told up front that the company is actively fighting against them in such efforts.
Devil++.
The exact corporate objection to my trying to stay sane in this job is?
No personal use of desktop computers?
You'd have to fire every single Whistle employee to enforce that here. This is the modern world, computer-centric office life is misery incarnate, sitting here hour after hour is giving me acute edema and one blood clot in a calf already, and from years of the S.O.S I have a pre-hire condition of programmer's presbyopia that makes me blind at every distance except the one to my computer screen.
If we employees are going to destroy our health and waste our spirit for the good of the company, on the altar of increased productivity through office computers, give us some small chance for revenge. Let us use the stupid things for diversion once in a while to make us less antagonistic toward them in general.
The risk of the existing policy is of course that we have a Second City TV ceremony for the computers, and toss the lot of them out onto the pavement far below, some near afternoon.
Devil++.
Who owns my brain and the stuff in it?
Whistle was an open source software shop, before the acquisition. We may not be able to stay that way.
The churlish, unenforcable, gratuitously insulting, and impossible of compliance by any normal human means even if I agreed with it IBM intellectual property agreement, is in direct contrast to the personal beliefs and practices of the majority of software engineers here. It has the scent of lawyers all over it.
I for one don't believe in "software patents", any more than I believe in leprechauns. I still see clearly enough the part of the original patent law that excepts "obvious mathematical algorithms" (which are arguably all I've ever created since I started programming in 1961), from patentability.
Despite these well understood rules, I've had to list five tightly cramped pages of things I've "already invented" to keep them out of IBM's clutches, I'm probably only halfway done, and this is a huge waste of my time and patience, and of IBM's money.
Apparently too, I live in the only state in the US where the stuff I do on my own time for my own purposes with my own equipment is my intellectual property, not IBM's.
You want to make an educated guess how demotivating all that is to having and then implementing bright new ideas for penetrating the small business market, ideas that might make IBM richer still?
Devil++.
My other health insurance, paid for by
me, should benefit my employer to the
exclusion of me, exactly why?
or,
You can't win, you can't break even, and
you can't quit the game.
The second law of thermodynamics as expressed in
English instead of math.
Sometimes, though, you just have to look at the math anyway, to see how things work. I have 80% health coverage from IBM once my new health insurance kicks into operation. I have 70% health coverage from another insurer, paid for by the sweat of my brow. So, I have 150% coverage of "reasonable and customary charges", and every time I get really sick, I get really rich, too? Hardly. Well, I don't demand to make a profit. How about 100% coverage? Guess again. Did you guess 80% coverage? Right on. Despite that my other insurer might pay the first 70% of the charges, IBM's insurance doesn't start at the other end of the money, paying up to 80%, and notice happily that there is nothing left to pay after only 30% due from IBM, a clear 50% profit for IBM from my generosity. No, IBM's insurance starts at the same end of the money, sucks up the 70% paid for by my other insurance entirely to IBM's benefit, and pays only the 10% remaining until IBM's 80% maximum is met. My benefit from paying for that other insurance, out of my own hide? 0%. I'd have had no more left to pay out of pocket without the other insurance, but IBM's share would go up by 70% of the total. So, explain to me the morality of IBM's sucking up the entire benefit of my other insurance, without having contributed a penny to its cost to me, and leaving none of the benefit for me, Ms. IBM Benefits Person? Oh, that's how it's done in the industry so that's IBM's policy too, morality isn't an issue to be considered, just minimizing IBM's insurance payouts? I see.
Devil++.
Somehow, the home team doesn't seem headed for a win here.
Worse yet, under the same policies, the away team is losing badly too.
Perhaps a little re-negotiation of the rules of engagement is in order? Just a thought.