The organisation and the individual

April 23, 2009

Working with multinationals can be fabulous. Big money, big toys, big achievements. It can also be a disaster for the individual, tearing the ground out from under their own definition of self.

I have a friend, let’s call him Robin. Immensely talented. He’s one of these people who finds himself in the right place at the right time with all the right contacts. At university he found himself working with leading national expert on climate change, his dissertation used to frame the country’s climate change policy. Went on to work with the world’s top international bodies, UN, International Energy Agency and the like.

When he wanted to come back to Australia for family reasons, he hitched his wagon to a global oil company, lets call it Oilco that had, in the late 1990s, experienced a Damascene conversion to the cause of alternative energy and climate change. It had very publicly committed the (suspiciously round and quite random) sum of “$8 billion” to alternative energy businesses, rebranded itself in green at the cost of $2 million, and declared that its future lay, um, beyond petroleum (got it yet?).

In Australia, Oilco had invested in the country’s most significant alternative energy project, a massive factory producing the country’s only domestic supply of solar panels. Robin was happy there. It wasn’t the global political scene, there were few international conferences or high level policy discussions, but he had a rewarding job that involved putting together complex projects and bringing together a variety of partners including federal and local governments, the manufacturers and others to deliver large solar energy projects to create sustainable municipalities and change the world in other ways.

What’s more, the company treated him like a king. When he got ill and had to take six months off, it was at full pay. He never flew economy. His salary was substantial, and at review time, they always surprised him on the upside. When he decided that he wanted to take the family back to Europe, the company created a job for him in London to which he could commute a couple of days a week from a house in Normandy. Sweet.
Until late last year.

Last year it became clear that the Damascene conversion had been that of the chief executive alone. When said CEO was forced out of the company under a cloud, he was replaced with an oilman. Someone with oil running through his veins. Someone who had little time for the exigencies of climate change or global warming, solar energy, or the new bioethanol plant in China Robin had been setting up. Someone who had to show results immediately by cutting costs and boosting profits, despite the global financial crisis and the halving of the oil price in six months.

One day Robin received a phone call telling him not to come into work on Monday. There was no longer a job for him. The company had decided it was out of the alternative energy business. Just. Like. That.

What angers him the most is not the strategic change of direction: “I understand… When people buy Oilco shares, they are buying an investment in an oil company, not in an energy company. This whole alternative energy thing, it was just a strategic diversion. The mistake was that I didn’t recognise that ten years ago when I signed on to the project.”

What makes him really angry are the lies that he told on behalf of the corporation. “You know, you go into China and engage with an energetic entrepreneurial network of people, people who are skeptical of the motives of the mutinational. You tell them: ‘No, no, this time its different, we’ve committed $x billion to alternative energy, we’re in it for the long term, we are going to build a bright future and we’d like to do it with you.’

“And if you do your job properly, they believe you. They put their skepticism aside and get excited about doing something properly with the full resources of a global company behind them, and they begin to think the world can actually change and that they can have a part in it.”

Then…nothing.

Robin was, understandably, pretty angry. He thought back over the years he had spent representing the company at conferences, when others had said Oilco’s activities were just greenwash, called him a professional bullshit artist, said he was only in it for the money, a toy of the global corporate. He had been sure of himself at the time. He knew that this was different, that Oilco was serious about what it was doing and that the new businesses would eventually be core to the company’s activities and its profitability. The world would change and Oilco would drive that change, and by extension, Robin himself would fulfill his potential.

Turns out he was wrong and the sceptics were right.

Oilco has provided Robin with “outplacement” counseling, firstly to help him through his anger issues, and secondly to help him function outside the confines of a large organisation. He gave himself 3 months to be really angry, and, having done that, is now slowly putting together a life as an independent consultant. He is trying to salvage his Indian project, without the bullshit and bureaucracy of Oilco weighing him down and has a raft of exciting projects sitting tantalizingly on the horizon. He’ll be fine.

But that’s not really the point is it? We all need to be pretty clear eyed about our place in the workplace. Robin subsumed his sense of self to that of the organisation and began to believe the rhetoric – he had to really, in order to do his job well. The company made it easier to do so, showering him with money, privilege and a sense of purpose. How fragile it turned out to be.

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