“God Created Assistant Managers When He Was in a Really Shitty Mood.”

This quote is my comment on this post about young entrepreneurialism at willpate.org:

I've noticed the same thing myself. No intelligent person I know talks about what great big company they want to go work for anymore (unlike in the late 90's). I think one reason for this is the last death of the idea that a company will take care of you if you are loyal to them. People see high-profile bankruptcies and the workers taking the hit for it, and they aren't too eager to jump into the arms of potentially the next Enron.

Wanting to own your own ideas and be responsible for your own success or failure is the key to successful ventures, and that I notice that from those I talk to leaves me optimistic, even if it took the death of corporate culture to make it happen. The ashes of the fake revolution of the 90's may give rise to a real revolution born of a desire for self-determination rather than just hopping on the money bandwagon.

Al O'Neill

Further, I still don't think most talented creative people are living up to their potential to drive the market. This article about CORE Advertising is a good example of how I think more businesses should structure themselves.

When the service you’re selling is as ephemeral as “creativity,” sometimes it pays to defy the conventional business wisdom. “In so many traditional advertising agencies, art people become middle managers,” says designer John Dames of the St. Louis agency CORE. “They organize a process, but — almost in spite of their talent and training — they don’t actually create anything. Some specialist does their type, another does their photos, yet another does their production and color.

“The creative impulse gets diluted in layers of hierarchy — and the work suffers. When CORE was started, that was exactly what we wanted to avoid.”
Lead with the Heart

That decision has led the CORE Advertising team to an international reputation as an ad agency that always brings artistic passion to everything they do — from their ground-breaking typography, to their renowned photocompositions, to more recent experiments with lush motion graphics and special effects.

Any business that rewards good work by removing that worker's ability to be creative and putting him or her in a management position is a self-defeating organization. Actual good managers, those who can coordinate a team effectively and bring out creativity in others are indeed rare, and cannibalizing your creative people to fill the management positions hurts you twice. Once because they probably aren't good managers, and twice because you're draining your own creative talent.

I'm defining creativity in a very wide scope here, everything from design to engineering to media to scientific research operates in the same general model and all of those areas are hurt by overgrown hierarchies.