Arguing Agile

AA230 - The Human Cost of M&A: When Good People Turn Against Each Other

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 230

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Ever wondered why mergers and acquisitions turn good people against each other? 

In this deep dive, we explore the systematic destruction of workplace relationships after an M&A. 

From sponsors-turned-foes to information warfare, discover why even the most collaborative cultures become pathological survival games.

Key Topics:
• Why M&As create artificial scarcity and paranoia
• The sponsor-turned-foe phenomenon
• Information as currency and weapon
• Blame archaeology and scapegoating
• The performance of fake collaboration
• How PE controls destroy generative cultures

Whether you're facing an acquisition or leading through one, this episode reveals the uncomfortable truths about corporate transformation.

#MergersAcquisitions #Leadership #CorporateCulture

LINKS
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596
Website: http://arguingagile.com

REFERENCES

  1. Arguing Agile 61: Experiences in Corporate Buyouts (Mergers & Acquisitions)
  2. Arguing Agile 96: Stages of Company Decline, or When Companies Hate Their Customers
  3. Arguing Agile 217: Extreme Ownership Military Leadership Lessons
  4. Arguing Agile 219 - How Private Equity Killed Instant Pot (And Why Your Product Could Be Next)
  5. Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games (2008)
  6. Marty Cagan - Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model (2024)

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Way back in May 13th, 2022, we did an episode called

Arguing Agile 61:

Experiences in Corporate Buyouts(Mergers and Acquisitions). It was an hour and 16 minutes long. Whoa. I vaguely recall that we did that. I listened to that episode not too long ago. And it was it was good, but I had some deep thoughts when I was listening to it. It was informative about the process of an m and a and like why they happen and the nuts and bolts basically. Yeah. But at the very end, I had this little quip that I said something about the human toll of going through the m and a was the thing that bugged me the most and I thought about that for about 24 hours and sat on it. And I said we need to talk about the m and a Hunger Games. Why M&As turn good people against each other. Because I think it's a systemic thing. I don't think it's like a one-off thing. This is a great topic, I think.'cause yeah, you're right. I think it's time we revisited that topic and said, let's think about what it means on a personal basis so the rest of this episode, we're gonna talk about what m and as really do like, not necessarily due to companies, but what they do to the people inside the companies. And we're gonna talk about the manager that sponsored you to New Heights. That now becomes your greatest foe. That's right. We're playing lizards and wizards. Ooh, going back to that. Yeah. We are, we're talking about FO friends and fo. The F Folio. Sorry, that was a FO portfolio, that, that was a deep cut into an episode that most people probably didn't even watch, arguing Agile. 96, the stages of company decline, or when companies hate their customers. I said, I did. Or in that because I couldn't decide what the title should be. I really loved that. The company that we were talking about that was totally fictitious and had nothing to do with a real company at all. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But there's the stages of company decline. Yeah. It was a real fun that podcast by the way, was only 31 minutes, so you're, if you're looking to squeeze a podcast in at double speed over lunch, where it doesn't even take up your whole lunch break arguing Agile 96 is a real good one. I now realize that the intro to this is like way too long. And there's like no joke to be like, there are no jokes in this podcast to be found. We look to left, we look right, we look under the table. There are no jokes to be found. Listen, we're, we're in this jungle. We're now playing the Hunger Games, right? Yes. In the m and a jungle. Yikes. So we've got no choice but to grin and bear it. But whether you're a survivor or you're a victim, depends on you listening to the rest of this podcast, because this, we're gonna cover various aspects of it from a human perspective. I'm a survivor, like Kelly Rowlands. There you go. Still waiting for Beyonce to make that call. Today we're examining the inevitable. Human tragedy of m and a. It's not a bug, it's a feature of the system home. Ooh. It's a feature of the system. So you are in this mag megapolis, whatever. You are in this culture, this city called Corporate city. We built this, Yeah. Rock and roll. I do not sing any part. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm gonna spare our audience for my singing. Welcome. Thanks for coming to livestream. Oh yeah, . Yeah. So here's the thing. You are in a situation that you have absolutely no control over. Your company is going through either a merger or it's being acquired it's not even obvious what it is, right? Companies do these things all day long. They're doing it all the time, but it affects people at a personal level. Yeah, I mean, that was sort of the genesis that got me to think about. This was the hype cycle. The hype cycle. I don't know if you pay attention to the hype cycle the hype cycle in Silicon Valley now is like, they're looking at 9, 9 6 or 9 9 6 9, 9 6, 9, 9, 6 6. They're looking at 9, 6, 6 as a positive thing. As soon as I said it like it came right outta my brain. I am by no means a China analyst. I work with many that are very, very good. But I will just tell you what Google tells me about 9, 9, 6. Culture 9, 9 6 culture refers to the widespread practice in China's tech industry of working from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM six days a week, totaling 72 hours of labor per week. It's promoted it's all lauded actually now by the Silicon Valley folks as the path to success and is often criticized, rightfully so, because it is exploitation. So you know, again this is what's hot in Silicon Valley right now is 9, 9, 6 culture. Well, it, it's really corporations will do whatever they need to do right At the expense of human beings , basically. It doesn't matter what you're told at your company or other companies. You said corporations. In my head I heard bad people. I think they're synonymous sometimes. There's not always, but yes, sometimes they're synonymous. I want, I want some, some ground rules. I want, I want, I want to know where the goalposts are. That, that's what I'm saying to start this conversation because every acquisition. I've been through four. We established on the podcast that we started sorry. It was arguing Agile 61 Experiences in corporate buyouts. We establish in arguing Agile 61, every acquisition creates resource scarcity. This game of resource scarcity.'cause again, remember, like there still is money to keep people, and there's money to hire people, but there's no raise money. No. You know what I mean? There's like, oh, every team, there's no room to add another team member or whatever. There's no budget for that. It's even, so it starts even before that because when two companies come together. The first thing they do is de-duplicate right. So they'll say, we don't need two CIOs. We don't need two. Fill in the blank. Yeah. And so immediately. Not necessarily half, but a lot of people are essentially let go because they're deemed as duplicate. It starts there. And we didn't really deep dive into what it means to the individuals impacted by that, which is the point of this podcast a little bit. Well, here's what I'm gonna throw out as the overview to complete the overview. Don't worry, I'll complete an overview at some point is, at some point when your company gets gobbled up, you move from a abundance mindset. You move from a generative type organization to a pathological type of organization. Or maybe if you get acquired into a big enough organization, you move from a generative organization to a bureaucratic organization. That could happen too, right? You can get scooped up into the bureaucracy of whatever, you know what I mean? I, I think of like companies that I worked at where numbered in the hundreds of thousands of employees. Yeah. It's like so much paperwork and processes and all that kinda stuff that is, is impossible for one person to really make an impact. You know? Pretty much everybody listening and watching to this who is or has worked in a in a large organization can relate to this. Where the process itself gets in your way to making progress so, so even to make a little bit of progress, like you said, there's so much administrivia you have to drive navigate through. Yeah. And at some point some people will just say, well, is it worth it? I'm just not gonna bother. But you have to realize there were, there were people who came from the organization and through the purchase up into the larger, they came from a smaller organization up into a larger organization. Yeah. Because like a big, the, the, the big boys of the world, the, the, the, the FAANGs of the world or whatever they are now they're still FAANGs anyway. I don't know. They may have added another A anyway. Yeah. Fans, there's a bunch of a's That's right. Yeah. Ooh, boy. But that the you're coming from a generative mindset where like, we can change the world through whatever every Silicon Valley company is. Oh, change the world or whatever. And then you're going into this like fundamental culture shift that need, that like all people's brains have to get rewired for them to succeed in that culture shift. Where looking over your shoulder looking for betrayal all the time. Like that, that's, that's just the culture. That's just the way it is. This is America, don't get caught slipping. So suddenly you go from a small company that's lied and nimble to a company that where you're just paying survival games. This, this is the, the quicksand culture that you just can't move. Right you're stifled. Yeah. And if you're not careful, you're not just staying steady. Yeah. You're actually drowning so the point I'm gonna throw out in this category is the controls that PE will put into place, which we talked about in the last podcast. So I don't want to re I'm trying not to rehash as much as possible from the last podcast. Sure. Unlike other companies when PEs involved, they create, they deploy controls, which again, we talked about in the other podcast. So I'm not gonna go on too deep on it right now. But they deploy controls that makes this artificial scarcity gets deployed with the things that we talked about in the last podcast they take budgets away from managers. I told a story in the last podcast where like, yeah. When PE came in and I was a manager, they took my budget away and said, oh, you gotta come to us to hire people now to make the case for a, and I was like, well, what if someone leaves? Oh, well you gotta come to us to replace them. I was like, so what you're saying is the default now is if somebody leaves my team, my team's getting downscaled. Yeah. Just by default. And then I gotta make the case to make more. And that's the way it was. And then all the budgets moved up to like the VP director level of above or above. And then just by moving the budgets. To be controlled by very few people. It created this atmosphere where if those people didn't necessarily like go outta their way to overly communicate what they were doing with the money, then like the rumor mills started and the bad feelings bubbled up. And no, nobody really the all kinds of like prisoner's dilemma kind of stuff kicked in is like, you gotta get one over on them, get, get a, get a favor over them before they get one over on you. And that culture just takes over and it's all inauthentic. It's all completely fake. It's made up with manipulation and financial control and lack of information and. All that kind of stuff. Lack of transparency. Yeah. Yeah. Ala. Hunger games so was it President Snow? So, so I think you're right in saying that it doesn't matter what size of company it is, you're gonna experience this at some level. Yeah yeah. So how do you navigate through these choppy waters, right, when it happens to you? Well, I would like to tell you that you navigate through these choppy waters by being the guy that maintains integrity and continues with your processes and tries to drive alignment and whatnot. The issue with people like that,'cause I was a person like that at one point is that's let me think about a way to say this. That doesn't scream adaptable survivor to me. that screams like a, oh, Brian, you're causing problems here at Brian o's new PE firm, acquired company. You're, you don't seem to be. A team player. You, you don't seem to be wanting to work 9, 9, 6 or whatever, whatever was it? 9 6 6 9 9 6 9 9 6. So, yeah, I agree. I I think there's another side to it that kind of really pours fuel on the fire. Well, hang on. Hang on one second, because people might just hear what I say and be like, well, Brian, you're not, you're not, you're not being a key player or whatever. Let me give you an example, not being a team player you knew this project was very important. Why did you choose to have a baby now! You are not being a team player! That's the type of, argument I'm talking about unfortunately that is all too real you just said what doesn't help and what really actually hinders throws fuel on the fire is your work is not something that they feel they can measure tangibly. Yeah. Especially if you are like an agile coach, scrum master, even a product owner. Why do we need five product owners? We, we just keep one and fire the other four and they just products, right? That's right. They can do this. The people that come in, their purview of how they measure things are very, very different. Well, one, why when we fire for the product owners and we're left with one product owner, that one product owner should be happy to have survived. Exactly. I understand. I gave them two other people's jobs, but they should be happy to do those other people's jobs. They made it. They should be happy because they made it to the other side. I selected them. They should be happy they even have a job. How dare you. So let's defer that discussion but unfortunately that is a reality. I feel very passionately about these topics, so it's gonna be hard for me to stay on one side or another. I hear the pushback in my head. Yeah. Loud and clear, which is like, listen man, listen, sorry, I don't know why the dude is giving the pushback in my, Hey man, like tho that's just like your leaders making a choice to lead that way. Like they don't have to be 9, 9, 6 culture. They can tell private equity, you know? No. And stick it to the man or whatever. And, and if they had morals they would do that. Like strong leaders. Can protect their teams and, and people with individual character like that, that matters in the you, you can't, you can't absolve people of this moral responsibility. They have to stand up for the team. They'll say leadership is a choice, is what they'll say. Yeah. They will say all of that, but you know, at the end of the day, those that are impacted, are probably taking a long walk of a short p sadly. When you're in it, it's easy to be given this advice, but when the advice giver is in those shoes, it's a different matter altogether. I mean, like 20 years in tech. I've seen some terrible things like the HR person who is pregnant and has to continue, moving fast and breaking the law not hiring the old people or firing the old people for cause or reasons, quote. Because what she gonna like, she can't lose her health insurance. No. I mean, that's right. How are you gonna have a baby without health insurance in America? Oh, man. So I agree. You know, these are the sorts of things that you hear when this happens, right? You'll hear things like, well, we need fresh blood, Brian. Oh, fresh blood. Yeah, that's right. We need fresh blood. So you can't hire just the person that you're interviewing because it just so happens that they're over 50 ish, whatever. But we need fresh blood. It's really frustrating beyond belief. So if you, again, like some people might be listening to this completely undeterred. Some people might be listening to this. Sure. Just with a straight face being like, Brian, you have no idea what you're talking about. Like some people might have cashed out. So what is the Cartman thing? Cashed out. Sold. Sold out, cashed out. Brodown. Is it a leadership choice? I mean, because a lot of the pathological organization that you've been brought into has been created, it's been crafted mechanically to force these kinds of issues. Yeah. So like, sorry, Carmen the leadership complies my answer to that it's not really a choice. They just fall in line. I wish I had a better transition to startup cash in sell out, bro. Down. I don't think you can get a better transition than that. I don't know either. I don't know if there's a solid takeaway in this category. Maybe the solid takeaway is when they announced the acquisition look around the room because within 12 months, like half the people in the room are gonna be like playing these games. That's, that's an interesting point. So one of the acquisitions that I went through, sorry, the other half are gonna be gone. Exactly. So one of the acquisitions I went through, they did a, a town hall meeting. Hundreds of people on this call and basically everybody's remote at that point. Right. And here's what the CEO of our organization who our organization was being merged. Acquired, by another company. So our CEO came up and told about, he talked about all these synergies and all these other fricking terms. And then he said, okay, you see the screen where you see every participant on the screen, find yourself on that screen. Look the person to the right person to the left. One of you isn't gonna be here on Monday. Oh boy, this is exactly his pitch those in pretty much in so many words. So like he is already put the fear in people but wait. This is supposed to be a merger of equals Oh boy. Take over. So I mean, come on. They play these games, right? And it's, this is like everywhere where this happens, whether you are the acquirer roar or the acquirer, it doesn't matter. Well, let's transition to a, sorry. I was gonna say a better topic, but it's actually, it's way worse. It's like, oh, the sponsor turned foe reveal. Oh yeah. When the, the senior person like that at a lot of companies, especially, especially this is especially important when I watch podcasts and stuff where it's mainly like women talking about their careers and stuff about finding a, a sponsor in the organization to kind of catapult you ahead to kinda like to, to talk to your achievements so you don't have to do it alone. That kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Which is great great, great advice. By the way. But in these kind of pathological organizations, like the, what you end up is the senior person, the, the, the person who championed you in the first place now has to quote rightsize their department. And the psychological term is a moral injury. Injury, I believe, when people are forced to violate their own values for survival. And I got, I got, I, I got some great against points in this category, so I'm gonna lay out the against points first. Sure. To kick off this discussion. Good. So the PE firm, obviously they're the owners of the company. This would be like the board of the company just coming to you as a CEO and be like, you need to do this. Whatcha gonna do? Be like, all of you are wrong. Mr. And Mrs. Board members the manager who executes the orders that are given to them. Because again, remember you're imagining an organization like you might not be a CLO executive or whatever, but okay, let's say you're like a director or a manager, some sort of person with budget and hire fire authority organization comes to you and says, Ooh. In the previous podcast, in the arguing Agile 61, when we first did this, I talked about an employee that I had where HR came to me and said, we're reducing your budget by X amount of dollars. And I was like, Hmm, that's a very suspiciously, it's an exact number. Exacting number. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and they're like, well, it's exactly the salary of this person in your department. And I was like, so let me get this straight. You're firing this person from my department without me being in the loop by just reducing the amount of budget you're giving to my department without saying their name, they're saying, Brian, you're the hatchet man. That's right. That's, and that's exactly the position they put me in. Yeah. And what I, what this, so this category is. Oh, you're the sponsor now. You've been turned into the foe. So your choice as a sponsor, the way I see it in this category is you're just following orders. So the against that I'm gonna throw out is complete moral cowardice disguise as pragmatism. They're just telling me I gotta do it. Sorry, Brian no hard feelings. It's not you just business, not you. Yeah, just business. They're telling me you gotta do it. If you brought someone into the organization saying like, ohm, you gotta join Brian and om it's real o it's real weird for me to bring Om in. But Ohm, it's a real company too. You'll be om number two in the company and you got, it's a great company. It'll be great. Come work with me, om and I recruit you, sign me up and then turn around, turn around a couple months later. We, bro, what was the cartman cash out bro? Down? I can't remember. And we sell the company and, and now suddenly like, sorry Ohm, we got a right size, the hiring budget is still got budget, but the budget to pay people is being reduced. Yeah. Strangely by your amount of dollars that you get paid. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, that, that's this category is like, I'm being told what to do and like, oh, what do you want me to do? I'm just following orders I'm not gonna resign 'cause like, what do you want me to do? Give up my livelihood. When I'm in the system, I can make a difference And when you're at the top, you will change the system that's what you'd be telling people yeah. That's what I tell my friends. That's why No, I don't blame those people that are in that situation because look, everybody's got bills to pay and they have to put food on the table for their family. So I understand that. But to your point about if they were righteous, they would resign. I don't know anybody who's actually done that. It sounds great, but I don't know anybody who's done that. So it's like the messaging is well, you are a very talented person and you'll have no trouble letting on your feet in no time at all. But this is one of those places where you're going with the against. So like that leaves very little in the force. So if you're a manager who has to deliver this message, you should not really pick the, the people that you're laying off as. The target initially for your message, you should actually look up and say, what are we doing here? We're losing valuable information that this person knows, right. The knowledge that they have. And we're continuing to hire new people and hiring new people. Okay, fine. But there's onboarding costs, which we don't have to expend. There's the loyalty factor. We don't know if these new people are gonna stay around, but this person's been here five years or whatever. It's, they should go to bat for you, is what I'm trying to say and again, I don't know many that have done that. I, I really don't. I mean, people may say, I'm gonna try to see if I can move you in another part of the company, right? Mm-hmm. Are they really, right. Maybe, maybe. I, I don't know. I get your drift about no manager's gonna fall in their sword to be like, I'm not doing it. And, and that's it. I wish they did, but they don't. Maybe they should. And then this wouldn't be the cultural cancer that it is. Like if people would stand up for themselves When you're the leader of the tribe and you betray the tribe it should be a lot more than simply no soup for you. The, In this like, post m and a world, the people at the top that are doing these layoffs that are not standing up for the people that they're in charge of, if they want to be seen as leaders or thought leaders they're taking no accountability in the process. Like, and it is not about falling on your sword. It's about like taking accountability. Like you, you worked yourself into a leadership position, right? And then when it comes time to do leadership things, you're taking no accountability, none. You're, you're completely passing all the bad effects through. To all your people that's your response. And it wouldn't be, I wouldn't stop to highlight it on the podcast if its presence wasn't like a specter over every m and a I've ever gone through. I cannot think of a leader that really stood up for their people and got washed out because of it. I can't think of a single one. Yeah, that's what I was saying. People should, but they don't yeah. So it's like their own individual survivorship. Yeah. You know, that kind of rules, again, going back to our reference of the Hunger Games. Sad but true that that's the reality. So what should a person do who's not in that leadership position, can see that there's activity happening, there's buzz around getting merged or acquired or whatever. I think we only have one piece of advice right now. Which is keep their resume updated. Keep me updated. Exactly. The cruelest cut here is not losing your job. The cruelest cut is you believed in somebody and they end up being the one who turns on you. You know, that that's the cruelest cut. And the worst off you are. The worst, the betrayal is. Yeah. You know, that, that's a terrible part of this. I think there's another. Oh, it gets worse probably. No, no. There's another, probably not a, I don't know if it's a takeaway, but something to bear in mind. Okay. So those that are advocating for you mm-hmm. You know, the friend who might turn into a foe, just keep on good terms with them. Don't be burning any bridges, right? Because maybe they are in that situation, but fast forward, sometime forward, I don't know how long they might even be looking for people in that same work, and they may. Call on you, or they may find themselves gone. Yeah. Because nature has its way of repeating these things. So if they find themselves getting washed out and land someplace else, and they need somebody who they trust, who as a lieutenant, whatever, they may call on you. So keep those relationships intact. Just because your friend turns into a foe doesn't mean you need to reciprocate. Keep those relationships intact. So your manager's sudden urgent requests to document your work. Aside from our normal advice of. Keeping your resume updated. Watch out for the pattern recognition of these things. I think recognizing the patterns that you touched on, that's important so there are several things that you can look out for. Just outta the blue, you're being asked to document what you do right. Another thing is we need to formally document your review. Whereas in the past that didn't happen, let's say. Mm-hmm. But now suddenly there's this thing about, well, we need all your you know, what are you gonna do? How are you gonna improve? We need all that written down, whereas that didn't happen in the past. These are all signals. another signal is within the company, your realm of responsibilities is reduced. so suddenly you have a sidekick that's been assigned to you so that they can learn from you that's another huge signal. These are things you should watch out for. And try to connect the dots in your head. I would say, if you're bold enough, Just go talk to your supervisor, your manager, and just say why what's going on I don't think that'll work. I think if you're, I get it. This whole category is sponsor turn foe. Like, I don't think that'll work. I, no, it won't think. I think, I think if you were, even if you're, I mean like me, like I can, I can spot the end of a contract. Like I got very good at that period of my career when I was in contracting, spotting the end of a contract. Sure. You know what I mean? Knowing when like, and, and like the signs are just crystal clear. It's just like your calendar suddenly like, like it's, you're like driving in a tunnel and you suddenly exit the tunnel and like the whole world is open and whatever. It's that kind of like all your last minute super urgent meetings and all your like, last minute requests and pings and stuff like that, and super priority things. Say, oh, you gotta have this done by this date or whatever all that just stops. Exactly. Now you just like, you feel like you're coasting. You're like, oh, oh man. Like I have a little time to work on some extra stuff and a little time to help some other people, and a little time to service this thing and whatever. A couple, one-on-one meetings, cancel or some other like, yeah. You know, big, big important like meetings where you usually get like grilled to the fire of like, when's this gonna be done? That kind of stuff. Like those meetings start canceling and people start canceling one-on-ones with you and stuff. You stop getting invited to call, start getting meetings, get invited. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. Absolutely. Yeah. We touched on maybe one or two of those types of things in the last podcast. This is not necessarily like the podcast of like, these are the red flags that you're about to get fired, which by the way would be an interesting podcast. But I wanna, I wanna keep us moving The documentation arms raised in the post-acquisition world, every conversation needs a paper trail. Casual slack messages become evidence. Coffee chats require meeting notes. You don't talk to anyone without notes, email, follow up, that kind of stuff. If you're in this realm where the people you're talking to that are like director level or manager level are taking notes every time they talk to you. Like the jury's out at that point. Yeah. Like they're already deciding your fate. They, they're just looking for one slip up. You know what I mean? Like somebody might be making their case going back to the previous category. Somebody might be actually making the case to be like, let's try to keep them. But then every perceived negative, every perceived slight is being documented and use. And then when HR gets involved, it's like, you know what? At the point where this documentation, we're not gonna take any risk. Let's just wash this personality risk perceived are real. You know what I mean? Right. No, we're not gonna do this. often, often, I wanna say most times, but I don't know that so often it is a perceived risk. Yeah, because you've been in that role for a while and you've survived you're doing a, you're doing a good job. This isn't about you. Yeah. But also like when you get into this BC, C culture where the paranoia takes over, like when the paranoia takes over, like that's a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. It's like, trust is eroded, it's gone. We go back to advice number one on the podcast at that point I would say keep your resume updated. Start actively looking, because again, the culture is starting to eat itself now. And also I want to ask for the people that would say like, well, documentation that's just like. Self-defense. You should be doing that anyway. You should be following up on deadlines and things that you agreed to take on as an email. That's a good practice to have regardless if you're being held with your feet to the fire or not. And you should hold your commitments. Right. It's a good accountability thing in both directions, which, which I'll agree to. However, again, you go back way early on the podcast to where I was like, you don't realize you're dealing with like rational, sane people that are working in a normal organization that is generative. That the focus is on the customer and the work being produced. This is a psychopathic organization. Sorry, what did we call it? Pathological. Pathological, yeah. This is a pathological organization. So like every little thing is like, there's like this neurotic. Kickoff event that happens with every little right perception that's outta place where you are being put at a disadvantage if you're not taking these extra steps. Again, the PE controls that go into place are reinforcing all these things and enabling further steps, right. That they will take. Yeah. Agreed. Absolutely. I expect this category to be short because there's not a lot of positives here. When they announce the acquisition, like start the timer to your eventual layoff. Get ready for the paranoia to start ramping and start taking documentation. You, you can work through it. Om you can be better. Can't, you can't work through it. This thing's bigger than you and everybody put together. So don't wait until this happens, don't wait for the signals that you're about to be about to go undergo this experience. You should always start, keep your resume updated, of course but always start by keeping your eyes peeled and see what's next for you within the organization. First and foremost, if you are loyal to that, but also outside of it. But the next topic that I want to talk about is the whisper wars. The whisper wars. So information becomes currency, and it becomes a weapon simultaneously. Like who's getting cut, who's safe, whose program is like favored, whose program is not favored? The information sharing networks are broken into like competing factions inside the company. Clicks leadership clicks, that kind of thing. We talked about it on a previous podcast, a very recent, previous podcast, actually. Information hoarding. Yes. As, as a weapon, as a way to get ahead in the organization. We we, we, we didn't advocate that. We, we, yeah, I was gonna say we advocated against it pretty hard. That's, a professional way to say it. One of the things you can look for, again, are simmering signs in the company, right? So communications messaging, it's starting to be more predatory, more defined, more focused, but also, what's the right way to say this? Well, it's really not something you've seen before. So there's a marked change in how people are communicating. The information warfare accelerates the destruction of the company slash system. Because disinformation spreads far faster than accurate, truthful information. Okay. That's just the truth that I have learned the hard way through working with excellent people that can like flag disinformation very quickly for government clients and whatnot. Okay. Yeah. Disinformation spreads way faster than the truth. And I would also say it's easy to produce because anyone can produce disinformation and throw it out there. Well, I agree. And also people that are good at it know the golden rule, right? Which is say something doesn't have to be factual, typically it isn't, but. Keep saying it. That's right. Keep repeating the same message and eventually people will start believing it. So this is like people that are morally bankrupt can use it to their advantage when they need it. What we talked about a couple like the last I You weaponizing it. Yeah. Weaponizing it what we talked about in a previous podcast. This stuff is no good. Like if you're a leader in an organization, like you should stamp this stuff out as quick as possible. And even in my past, I know I've been part of a network like this because you don't get any information. And like good leaders can come out and just clear all that out and be like, none of this is true. This is what's really going on, and you should have normal cadence, delivery of transparent information to just wash away stuff like that. So maybe those whisper networks are still operating, but you can just regularly clear the decks and be like, this is what's really happening with this thing. This is where the rumor comes from. And now I'm letting everyone know, and a little leadership is what I'm saying. Can Yeah. Go a long way to solve these problems. However, again, the PE Overlords here they're not about to they're looking at silicon, the company in four years. Sure. So if they're, if you're, they're not replacing team members, what are they gonna say? They're gonna say like, Hey, suck it up. Like, we're like, we're not putting any more money in like it Yeah. Anything your pe overlords will say is going to be not positive. Not that it's not favorable, not helpful to you. Yeah. That's what I'll say. it's like someone's telling you, ah, I'm gonna give you the real talk, real truth. But the real talk, real truth is like, they're like the landlord that paints white over all the door locks and hinges and everything like that why'd you do that? You dirt bag. You could have just taken two seconds and taken the hinges off, or put some blue tape over 'em. Why would you like that? And they're like, well, I don't care. I don't care how they look. That's right. LOL don't live here. I, I agree. So if you're a leader who really means well for. Your people and you want to be transparent. You want to communicate what's really happening, but you're afraid because obviously you're following your, your overlords. I, I've known one person in my life like this, who, who actually was a genuine leader, but he knew how to play the game. So what he would do is he would basically say, look, we're all gonna go out to lunch on Friday and it's everyone pays for themselves. Yeah. Because then there's no trail, there's no like, ah, he's an expense check for 15 people for lunch. Yeah. None of that. So there's no visibility above him as far as what's going on. And he'd invite those that he were in his inner circle, basically, people that report up to him. And he would do exactly what you said earlier. He'll say, here's what's really happening clearly no one's writing this down. No one's recording any of this stuff. Yeah but he is being upfront. Now, you are better informed if you are a person who has a leader like that above you. Again, this is not very common because people are afraid at the end of the day. I mean, that's, that's what you just outlined is true leadership. Maybe the distribution of the message does not need to be super formal, but the distribution of message definitely needs to happen. And also again, 'cause I'm on the information warfare side of this like I threw out, like there's nothing you can do, fight all you want. I'm gonna keep making up nonsense. And like you can't react at the speed that I can make up fake stuff you know what I mean? Like, hopefully you find those. People or mechanisms or in the information warfare sphere, you find those bad actors or whatever and you either shut their internet down or Right. Or do other things but the, the case that you just threw out is fantastic because controlling the narrative with better information, more transparent information and faster prevents all this nonsense that I just threw out. It prevents all this bad actor behavior and others. And also what the other thing it prevents is it prevents other people who are looking for opportunistic. circumstances To insert themselves from claiming credit for these things. Right, Absolutely. It, it basically stamps out the rumor fire from spreading or just at the cinder level instead of fanning the flames. So that's one thing to consider if you are such a leader, And you are, instilling and building trust among those people that you lead for the future you never know who you may work with in the future. Now, let's say you are not a leader, but you are being led by somebody like this. That, that's the kind of person that you should feel safe to reach out to and say, can we just grab a coffee somewhere at some point? Right? Yeah. You don't have to necessarily put it down in writing in any way. No, no messaging, no, no emails. Just go have a verbal conversation with that person. I'm gonna move straight to the takeaway of this category because I really feel now that you're like, I feel strongly I would like to work for someone like that. Oh, it'd be nice to see some people like that in the modern m and a world of businesses, but also, like I, I have in the back of my mind, out of this conversation with the fours and against it, we talked about the person that you're talking about that suddenly, like they, they know what's going on with the business. Maybe they're still getting promoted, maybe they're still holding their like leadership position or whatever. I have to feel like they're planning their exit. Like either they're leaving on their own accord and they're not telling anyone, or. Like they're, they're going to get pushed out and they just don't care. Like they, they have stock or they have something over people and they don't care. But I feel like that that person is not long for the world. Of working in the company. absolutely agree but that's okay because you're still maintaining that relationship with that person as a subordinate to that person, right? Yeah. Going forward. So both of your time is limited with the company, but again, he's more likely or she more likely to call on you Right. If they need you in the future. So there is, there is that side of it. I think the credibility aspect really kind of took me by surprise when he came in and said, look, I'm not even supposed to say this. Right? So he's being vulnerable and he's just simply saying, I care about you as people so here's what's really going on, despite all the rhetoric that you hear from those up on high. Yeah. That's weird. Caring about people as people rather than objects. That's that's odd. Yes. Cells on a spreadsheet. It's almost weird. in the next category that I wanna talk about, is the survivor's guilt, or is the category really survivor's greed? I don't know either way. This is the one I said we're gonna talk about this later on the podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Congratulations. Om!. We are here. We're here now. Because those who survived the cuts, like at first they experienced relief. Some people experienced guilt. But again, the atmosphere of PE will turn those feelings into the feeling of opportunity, the feeling that like, oh, all these These empty desks over here. They become territory. Because remember in arguing Agile 61, I told the story about like the front desk admin person they're like, we don't need an admin person. What the heck are we gonna pay for that for? And then like, fast forward 18 months and they're like, oh, there's nobody here to greet our investors when we want to have a board meeting and new snazzy, new corporate space that we paid all this money and made you go into debt on Yeah. And they were real and they made the company like, just take employees and put them at the desk. And it was a real weird situation. It was a great story by the way. It was also as I remember that one, as awkward as that story was on that podcast, I could talk for a whole podcast about how awkward that was about like, just get me any pretty girl and put her at the desk.'cause that that's really what was happening in the, again, you, you, you listen to this podcast and you think that like, oh, Brian, you're not giving him a fair shake, no, I think you're dealing with the worst people in the world making the worst decisions that they can make f financially, legally, emotionally, ethically I dunno. Pathologically, certainly pathologically. I, I agree. I, I think, I think this topic is really good. It brings out the worst in people typically. I wanna hit you right away with the against category. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna just go, I don't, don't wanna give you a second because again, I'm trying to win this, but this is the pathological podcast I'm trying to win here. All right. Listen, profiting from the purges, like that's just, that's just that. Like you're just ending up on top. Okay listen, somebody's gotta end up on top and it might as well be you. Okay. This is the, this is the best, I'm putting my best foot, foot forward. Yeah. Going against the Deming podcast. Saying like, Hey, competition's not destructive. Competition's what gets me ahead. Oh, all right. This is, you're, you're the, the ground is rife for competition and I'm just taking advantage. Quick territorial grabs reveal who is always waiting for those opportunities. So I might as well be the first one to jump in. Okay. The speed of grief to greed transition, like that just shows me. The moral bankruptcy that is going on in the organization that's being incented, in the organization. And those are my ones that I just wanna shoot out the gate right there. Survival of the fittest. That's right. Darwinism, so typically what people will do, well-meaning people with a conscience. The few that are there, what they will do is they'll justify this right to themselves, specifically by saying, if I don't do this, somebody else will. That's a very rational response listen, if I refuse this opportunity, the opportunity's not gonna come back. I'll just lose the opportunity. Right, right. Yeah. I don't know this, I did this last podcast as well. I was like, this is the ASMR arguing Agile podcast. Now, If they just suddenly spontaneously resigned because they believed in the cause, right? What would happen? That seat isn't gonna sit empty for any length of time whatsoever, because the PE folks will put somebody else in there really, really quickly. And also first of all, I don't agree with any of this, but, but if I were to for a moment, I would say when you, when you are champion, like self-selects out of this pathological culture, not only will they very quickly fill that role, but they will fill that role with a complete psychopath like that. This is my story about C-level leadership that leaves because they have principles. Mm-hmm Hey, I'm not good with this. Mm-hmm. This extreme debt, which we talked about in the argument one. Yeah. We talked about in the Insta Pot podcast. Yeah. About this extreme, Hey, I'm not good with being strapped with all this debt and not having a say in the fact that we are taking out all these loans that are not even going back into the business. The loans are being taken out as dividends. I don't agree with this we shouldn't do this as a company. And when you're say like, okay, well that's great. Om, Om the COO. You stand up for your beliefs and whatever, and we watch you out and you lose your stock options and everything. And then we go get like psychopath Brian, who only cares about himself, the former Microsoft Financial executive. To get in here. Okay. A, that's a, deep cut to another podcast, I'll let y'all hit me in the comments and see if you can figure out to make the red string connections Oh, boy. that's the risk here is like you drive the good people out and they get replaced with absolute psychopaths. That's the only way it goes. I found they're not gonna get replaced with somebody better than the person who just left. So the question to ask yourself is, do you really wanna be around when that happens? If you're uncomfortable at the situation that you are in now, meaning your friend is still there. Boy, you will not be happy. Just a few days, possibly just a couple of weeks from then when somebody else comes in.'cause you're absolutely right. They've seen the incumbent is doing what they think is best for them but the incoming person knows what doesn't work, what they believe doesn't work, and they're gonna double down. Right. And at that point, you being the subordinate, you don't wanna be around there. The takeaway here, watch who moves into the corner office before the previous occupants personal items are even mailed back to the company. They were measuring the drapes while you were saying goodbye. And that's up and down the organization in every role, all, all the way up into including the C-level executives. Because again. EE like I have seen before, I, I have been through mergers and acquisitions where on day one the C level is out like that. I brought that up the story I told in the arguing Agile 61 experiences in corporate buyouts that I led with day one they got everyone together in a room. They're like, oh, this is so great. And also it's a CEO's last date. Today he's retiring. Yeah. He was encouraged to leave. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. So where, where, where I can share a quick anecdote here. Where I've come across this. It was on Wall Street. What happened is this, and this is typical if you're in it, by the way if you're in it, they're not necessarily gonna even let you get your hands on the keyboard in the morning off. Oh boy. They will not do that because they figure the risk is too high. So what they'll do is you come in and you try to log into your workstation, whatever it is, and you can't log in. Yeah. So you try again because you don't know any better. You're gonna try again. Yeah. And it just says contact your it. Yeah. So you contact your IT and they say, report the room. 2 0 6. Oh boy a oh boy. They've locked you out of. They're basically reducing the risk of sabotage in case you put two and two together and came up with three. Right? So when this sort of thing starts to happen, don't fight it. Where I've seen it. To finish my anecdote, a person came into work, couldn't log in. In all honesty, they went somewhere. They were followed by security. And if they were told point blank when they went to that whatever room it was, the services are not required. And thank you. But you know, Joe over here, the 18 foot gorilla is going to escort you out of the building. And they're like, but I have belonging. Can I empty my desk without a box? Listen, it doesn't happen in it like that, right? Yeah. There is no box. All your pictures of your loved ones at your desk. Sorry they're gonna, you're gonna be told, oh, we'll send them to you. Yeah, we'll send 'em to you. This guy had a jacket on the back of his chair that he used selectively whenever he was pulled into management meetings or whatever. Sorry. Can't go back to your desk. You just literally cannot because he had to go through the area where there's like the server room and all that. No chances taken here. He went straight out the building. You're laying out all the next category for me. You don't even know it, but you're laying out. The next category, by the way, which you already transitioned into, was the backstabbing becomes preemptive. The backstabbing becomes preemptive. Once the final happens, everyone realizes it's strike first. Or be struck down like that's, I feel like I miss a return of the Jedi quote right now. Like the workplace becomes preemptive war where perceived threats get eliminated before they can act. So the perceived threats are everywhere. And the organization is constantly looking out to strike them down before they can act whether real or perceived it doesn't matter. And what you just outlined is like preemptive action is like the reality of game theory. Yes. It's like that someone's gotta lose. If I'm gonna win and I am going to win so like the whole like, oh, you can't even go back to your office well what, what? Going back to arguing Agile, 61, near the end of that podcast, I was like, the thing that bothers me the most is like, I built this company. Yeah. I wrote the software, I went to the customer sites, I talked to people, I built this company what makes you think that? Like in the last moment, I wanna like tear the whole thing down. Show me the ladder that, that I stepped on, like the, the escalation ladder that I stepped up to where I was like hacking the company in the middle of the night or stealing staplers or whatever. We disagree on the direction in the future, Brian, here's your payout you've been employed here for many, many years. Here's some money. To help you on your transition, whatever's fair, right? And no hard feelings, right? Like, why can't we just sit down and have that adult conversation? Why do you gotta take it to like DEFCON five over here? Why do you have to assume that I have the worst ill intent without sitting down and having an adult conversation with me to be like, Hey, you seem to want to go in this direction. We want to go in this direction. We respect all the work you did up until this point, but now we're going in a different direction let's talk about that. You were like, Hey, you can't even go back into your work center to get that jacket on the back of your desk. That's right. How? I'm like, how do you, what does the jacket on the back of my desk have to do with a bunch of like pre-programmed scripted bombs I could have in the code. Like what, what are you talking about? Yeah, exactly. Do we respect each other? You're basically accusing me of being a criminal at the point where you decide that I can't work for you anymore. Like at what point did we cross that bridge? It's, yeah. If they actually let you at your desk, right? If they let you at your desk, you could do things, you could say, look. I've got pictures on my on my desktop of my kids that I wanna take away and, and save.'cause I didn't save them on this. My USB drive security. Yeah. Joe, the security guy isn't savvy with all this stuff that you're just plugging in a USB to save photos of your desktop, but you're really not you're doing something more nefarious. Sure. So, so companies take the viewpoint of we're not even gonna take a chance. It feels pretty bad. As it is. You just found out your fate with the company. So you feel like you hollowed to the core, especially to your point, you helped build the company, right? You gave it your 150% over the last whatever, months, years, whatever it might, it doesn't really matter. And suddenly they're treating you like this, it just feels so rotten. But that is exactly how it is. And you're told to your face typically by hr, right? It's not you. Yeah. It's the situation yeah. We wish you all the best, but you won't even let me get my jacket right. The paranoia here creates more damage than an actual betrayal. Yes. You know, across the board and, the, the, the, basically the monster that you fear happening oh, every employee ever is out to get me that's not true, but you are creating that monster by acting in this way. Well, I'll tell you what's really bad here, other than even worse than how this person that's impacted feels. Your peers see all this stuff. Presumably you're in an open office or whatever it is, and they can see this happening, right? You came to work, you couldn't log in. Maybe you just had a couple of conversations with your friends or your peers, and then you went away and now suddenly you are being escorted around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By Mr. T. All right. So they know and he pity the fool. This is how people are treated you know, that are impacted and they feel, well, this is how I'm gonna be treated. Yeah. So if you really had a bone of ill intent in your body, right. You're gonna think, before this happens to me. I'm gonna plant that bomb. That's the best part of this is like the more that you see it happening to other people, the more you're like, oh, maybe I should back up all my emails in case . I ever need them for a lawyer. Or maybe I should back up all my scripts well, we can't recommend that. Okay. We don't want any liability on this podcast. What we do say is check with, check with your lawyer is what you Yeah. Check, check with your lawyer. Exactly. But this is exactly how people feel. Some people may say, Hey, I put all these tools out there, that help me do things why should I leave them behind on the corporate network? They're gonna shaft me anyway. So you're gonna take. Those out, and then it goes downhill from there. The funny thing is like, none of this helps a company well, what would help the company is to go through an offboarding process. To talk to you and kind of like go through a negotiation. I mean, the company has a negotiation period of like how much severance you're gonna get and that kind of stuff. And like the how well you separate from the company. Should work into that negotiation. I mean, there's a lot you can leave behind, right? If incented properly. And again, in the PE world, we don't do anything unless we're incented to do it, because that's the way that the pathological organization exists. Indeed. You don't, if you don't get paid for anything, you don't do t do it. Yeah, you're right. So in most companies, there is no offboarding so corporate responsibility, corporate accountability is completely missing here. Because they don't really care about people that are being washed out. It's the accountability part that I have a problem with. Yeah, yeah, I do too. The post m and a culture here is like, you don't wait to see the knife coming. You just preemptively act like there was a knife and it doesn't matter if there was or not, right? You at, unless you're ready. You tried to act before as if there was always a knife. And then afterwards you kind of self-talk yourself, like there was. Maybe a knife, or maybe not, doesn't matter. You're protecting yourself. Like there's just this paranoid kind of like self delusion that happens. It's completely contrary to what you actually need to be effective in an organization yeah. Aside from it's sapping your morale all around and you know the other thing that's sapping is your ability to really be creative and collaborate with other people and really open up and all that kind of stuff. Like, you're not gonna get, like at this point, the good idea generation. The really advancing the really like working together to kind of like pull ahead in the market. Like that's over at this point. I mean at, at the point where the, the, the m and a has taken over and that, that the m and a culture of gripping your hands around things like tightly to take control of things, like deploying all these methods of control. That's it. Like you've hit peak creativity and it's only downhill essentially. Sadly. That's true. So if you care for your own sanity and your own future recognize the signs, get ready I mean, those are the takeaways really. I mean, there's really not a lot you can do. It's a big tsunami coming at you. So get ready. Don't hang around by the beach. The other thing I wanna bring up here is the blame archeology expeditions. Ooh. I worked at a company one time where you were the rockstar superstar until you made one mistake and then they never forgot. That's what you became known for. They never forgot that mistake. Yeah. yeah. It was, it was absolutely Luke. Oh God. This is during my time when I was a consultant. I worked at a, at a company where you made one mistake and it didn't even have to be a real mistake, like with financial implications, just like it could have been perceived as a mistake. Like the, the leadership people didn't like the way you handled yourself in a particular situation, even if there was like no monetary impact or personal impact or whatever, like timeline impact to the project or rep damage or anything like that. Yeah. They just didn't like it. and like you, you ba they basically would just dredge that out no matter what. It was forever. And I, I, I thought of myself how bad is your morale? Where you're looking for, like how, like what do we believe in here? First of all? That, that's, that's what I remember.'cause I on that, with that customer, I was more of like a program manager where like I was doing product and team building and sort of like future kind of tech leadership. It was very confusing. Anyway so failures from like years ago get exhumed like Indiana Jones over here trying to like, find a scapegoat. You have like a hundred successes, one failure. They'll use that over and over and over again, so you failed one time to jump across this chasm Yeah. With arrows flying across and, and the little guy, you a little sidekick who's probably 40 years old now, but anyway this little guy he's gonna remember that, right? So next time you come across a similar situation, he's gonna advise you against making the leap. You get labeled in corporations Yeah. You get labeled as somebody who didn't do something right. I'm carefully avoiding the word failure because you don't even have to have failed. I'm gonna give you the worst of the worst push. Just to see the rest of this category. Yeah, , because remember, this is blame archeology expeditions at this point. Okay. It's retroactive blame. It's scapegoating. That's what it is. It's scapegoating. Okay, so like, let's like I understand, like I see you wanna push back immediately. Just take a deep breath. Decisions made with then available information. Like they all get Jesuit, like today's information and all the information in hindsight of like, we always knew this, you always knew it was gonna, you know what I mean? Oh, we always knew that in order to build the best LLM responses, we need context from here and we need programming information from there and we need API from there. And we always knew that, of course we knew that this is the ambiguity of software development. It's like now that we are, the project is done. With perfect clarity in hindsight and no ambiguity. Yeah. Now we can judge all the developers and all the product people and everyone to be like, how come you didn't know this when we started? Yeah. How come you didn't know? Number one, number two complex failures get simplified into a single person's fault for convenience of poor leadership, bad decisions on one person. Yeah. Complete convenience is like, Hey, rather than taking the complex series of events and or people, or spiderweb of people sometimes, right. Or teams that it took to get to this point that you had to dig through to get here. No, no, no. It's your fault for not getting here. The best is whenever I can take the podcast that we did on, arguing 217 Extreme ownership, military leadership lessons for professionals. When Ed was on the podcast, by the way, an hour and a half, we did that podcast. I know that was a marathon. Whenever I can take that podcast and co-opt it and use it to help the worst people in the world to try to reinforce their viewpoint, to say. You should have taken ownership and all the failures of the whole program and all the failures of all these people hiding information and everything. You should have just worked harder Om, because I read the Extreme Ownership book and I translated it to somehow defend myself in these psychopathic, sorry, what they called Pathological. Pathological, yeah. Organizations and then the most tragic, yet hilarious part of this is that that archeology that is happening in this category, that deep digging in the ground for the well of souls so you can put the staff in the thing and Right. The holy, like watch Indiana Jones a good movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's selective, like only certain failures get investigated and blamed. And then like other failures with other leadership gets kind of shifted around. This is a great category because it, it, like the cut is so deep about like, oh yeah, well we're gonna blame you because you didn't sell enough customers, but also. You're selling Brian Ohm's like widget producing product, but also you're not invited to any of the Brian OMS widget producing like sales sync calls. And also we don't bring you on any of the sales. Eventually when we go to meet with prospects. Sure. We don't bring you to any of those. Like we just come back and tell you, like customer A said that you're not doing enough good jobs. So I think it's time to get rid of om on Brian and M's company. Not only your abject failures or perceived abject failures get magnified up at that point. None of your successes. Even on the horizon at this stage, they just suddenly get pushed aside oh, that one time you failed with this one customer, it cost us $300,000, but my next four projects made us 4 million. Right. I know, but what about that one time? It's always that. It's always about that one time. Are you saying it's, are you saying that $4 million you brought in like this, that doesn't count for anything? No. Is that what you're saying? It doesn't count for anything. It sounds like it doesn't count for anything. It's like Indy keeps saving the little guy every single time, but the little guy's always saying, Mr. Indy don't do it. Don't do it who is this little guy? I don't even little guy. His sidekick. He's the guy who keeps saying, Mr. Indy, Mr. Indy. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Oh. Short round. Short, round. Sure. Yeah. Something like that. I forget his exact, yeah. He drove the car. No time. We love Dr. Jones. That's him. So this is my point, like he just says he just wants to safeguard. We gotta go, we gotta go. I need my hat. And then he goes back. Anyway, so, so my point is, all your successes pale into oblivion compared to one trivial little failure six years ago. Just because somebody wants to. Basically do something right that they believe they should be doing, which is instigate your outage, essentially. Yeah. Yes. And, and I like it. And blaming you for these failures is a way to absolve myself of any accountability or responsibility in the decision to not bring you in when I went to talk to customers because what are you gonna like, get outta here, kid? What are you gonna like the, the, the adults are talking? What are you gonna add to this conversation? What are you? Some product manager or some, some, Sorry, I don't, sorry, I don't, I was trying to think of a better job description. So to trivialize your role contributions, contribution. This is typical. This happens in politics as well. The reason I love this part, it's because it's half blaming and half projection. I love it's half blaming, half projection and full scapegoating. 20 years in tech. I love a good. Story. About scapegoating and blame. I love the blame game because usually the first person that points the finger is wrong in the blame game. It's so transparent to see people who obviously are so in over their head blame pointing fingers at literally everyone else. You know what I mean? And by right of their position. I mean, if you're an executive and you don't know any of the workers, you're like, who are all these unwashed masses? I don't know any of these people, but I do know this director because when I go to the board meeting, they tell me everything's great. It's all, everything's green, red, amber, green, everything's green, everything's on track, under budget, on track. In orgs like that, you get this, the watermelon reporting, right? So the teams raise up something, they go, we're at risk. And the director doesn't quite feel comfortable saying the same thing to his supervisor. So it's like, yeah, everything's on track, we're okay, no risks and on, on and on it goes yes, you're right about that. They don't know. But it's like being at the fair where you shoot ducks, no, no. Ducks were harmed in the making this podcast Even plastic ones. No. When all you have is that as your objective, it really doesn't matter who's in your crosshairs. You're gonna find somebody. Yeah. Now who will you find? Right. You can look at somebody who has some evidence of failure in the past, no matter how small it is. Yeah. You had failed at one point. That's your fault, right? Because the alternative is to find among others that have never failed maybe or not failed as badly. So you take that and you just extrapolate that out and you sacrifice somebody. Mm-hmm so yeah, if you play chess, you sacrifice your peace. Sometimes you have to sacrifice your pieces, and that's exactly what these guys are doing. I like that. it transitions well into my last thing that I want to talk about, which is everyone performs in elaborate collaboration theater in this this PE backed, I love this topic. Squeeze, disclosing. I did that in the. I did that in the arguing guys system. That's great. I'm bringing it back. Like every, everyone, when they're getting quoin, that's, they go into this theater again. Marty Kagan calls it product theater, it's just theater. While undermining each other behind the scenes, they go into this collaboration theater oh, well, I'm just working on the, I'm just trying to do what's best. I'm trying to like bend over backwards but quietly they're undermining, hoping for other people have failed. Sure. Like meanings become stages where people pretend to work together while documenting evidence against each other and backbiting and everything we talked about earlier. The whisper wars this is, I don't wanna just simply just say, well this is human nature. But, but to a certain degree it is. It goes back to the Roman days, right? Where everybody's saying the right thing to the emperor, to their face, and then it gets back stabbed. Every, everything goes back to Rome. That's what we're saying. Yeah, exactly. But also when in Rome, so he, so when in Rome keep that resume update! So the thing about this is people that simply say, well, I'm collaborating. Here's a signal to look out for. Okay. In this environment, yeah. I'm collaborating. We're going great on the work that my folks are doing, but. I have a dependency on Mary or Fred if they don't deliver, I can't deliver. Did you just double down on dependency tracking is a sign of this, deflection in this m and a situation. It is magnified tremendously because all I'm trying to do is to say, Hey, not my fault. No, no. That, that what We're like us, like me like hiding and you doing this that might be the, that might be the thumbnail for this whole podcast. Okay, so let me, let me try to break what you just said into small chunks so I can at least ingest it a little bit and like have to take some medication to get it through Myy system. Everybody performs this collaboration theater . open Conflict gets you fired in these environments we just went through a whole bunch of topics where we said, well, your manager could stand up for you. Your sponsor could stand up for you. That person that got you into the organization could stand up for you. Yeah, but they won't because open conflict, they know he's gonna get them fired in the worst cases, they're gonna be like, well, if I get fired, I can't protect anyone else in the future. That's the best case they'll make. Yeah. Okay. The worst case is like, well, they were never gonna protect anyone anyway, so like they're just hoping they can cash their check as long as they can cash checks or whatever. The energy spent on this fake collaboration performance. Immediate pushback in this category is the energy that you spend on this fake collaboration, kabuki theater. Yep. It is worse than open conflict. Oh God, yes. It is worse than open conflict. I'd rather have people arguing in meetings and screaming at each other, which I've seen in private equity firms, like and subscribe. The energy spent on this performance could be spent on real work. And I'll also add false harmony, prevents the real problems from getting talked about and then addressed. What you want to do is you want to. Draw out conflict. So that you can have it in a productive way in the conversation because the conflict is where the real discussion points come out. And you can really agree and align on things.'cause if I can get your point out on the table and then I can talk about it, really actually, really talk about it and consider it, then you won't be leaving the meeting with this feeling that you were dismissed. Or you were jaded from the conversation or whatever. You'll get your point out and we'll really have discussed this and we'll wait against the evidence and we'll really talk about it until we all agree. Okay. And that's the best, most healthy way of dealing with conflict. You want a healthy way of dealing with conflict. Take everything I just said and throw it in the trashcan.'cause that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about, we've set up a system for conflict. For conflict to never arise in a group setting because conflict is seen as something that can get you fired. You need to shut up and you need to shut up. And oh, sorry. What, what was it called? No, it's not called shut up and commit. It's called you need to just disagree and commit. You need to disagree and stay silent now. Yeah. On what we need to do. So, energy, so I had three points. I had energy spent on performing when that energy could be spent on actual work, I had this false harmony. It is creating this, this false, like just shut up and commit to what I'm telling you to do could be spent on actually addressing and knocking down real problems that need to be addressed. Which by the way, real problems translates. Business speak translates into risk that you need to de-risk. So you don't encounter these problems later. People, employees are bringing these up and they're betting real political capital to bring them up. Okay. And then the, third point is the cognitive dissonance of performative friendship. While some of your mental capacity is like even when you're performing this friendship ritual, whatever, you're getting ready for the betrayal in your brain. I can't even carry that stuff in my head. Yeah. You know, so, so like, what would be better is you don't do those things. You just bring all this stuff out into a transparent conversation where we actually care about what people are saying. And, the PE way of doing things like just lends itself. To not doing any of this, like just do what I tell you! this category, the fake collaboration it's worse than open conflict. The theater provides cover for defensive actions to make yourself look good and everyone else look bad. I agree a hundred percent. So one of the things that happens here is you have this perceived calm Yeah. That wasn't there before, but it's overt, right? So it, it's like people saying, well, can we just meet and we'll figure this out? And these people never met with you before. They never even gave you the time of day when you emailed them or, or ping them or anything like that. And suddenly they're your next best friend. Yeah. Come on so all they're trying to do is survive. They're trying to keep from being in the gaze of. King, whatever his name was, in the movie hunger Games, president Snow was President. Yeah, that's right. Can I, he president, he was all adjusted white too. He was a president of the of Penem. That's right. Yep. Not the airline. So what you would do is you would say, look, we we're competing but in front of. Pre the President. That's right. You are simply co Yeah. You're cooperating so he doesn't know who to kill. That's right. Basically. That's right. He's Oh, good guy, good guy. A good guy. B, good guy C who do I kill here? So he's gonna now pitch you against each other, right. Hunger games. Yeah. Corporate style. Sometimes we do a podcast and I'm like, what was the point of this podcast? So, but usually in the editing I can make a point of the podcast. Yeah, yeah. You might have you hook it out today, man. This one, I'm not quite sure. I'm not like the, the, what was the point? If you're in an m and a right now, like is there an uncomfortable truth that we can point out? I think from the podcast is like the person you trust most they're gonna disappoint you because the system around them is going to force them to take these actions, and to them they're gonna say, well, it's not personal, it's just business. It's just what the people want me to do. I'm just following orders here. Like the colleague you're protecting. Yeah. They might be like looking to take your spot, like the manager defending you today, they might fire you tomorrow because well, budget cutbacks we got like, I really love working with you, but we got budget cutbacks this is the way that m and as and private equity run firms, this is the way that they've, every single one in my career that I've been part of. Yeah. This is the way they've all been run. So you either grow a spine, grow, grow something and, and then stand up for yourself yeah. And you know, just say, look, this is not happening on my watch. Okay. You will not survive. The org will, or you align yourself with, what was his name? President Snow. And just say, look, hey, I'm your friend. but I mean, even in the Hunger Games, like I happen to have read the Hunger Games part one. I didn't read the rest of 'em,, even the president Snow, like it was, it was a big game to him. Yeah, of course. Wasn't a real life, I mean, until he died. Spoiler alert, right? Well, yeah, because it was a movie, or a book. But in real life though, right? If you align yourself with leader you might actually last a few more days. So that's one option. So take that door to your left or take the righteous Road. I sorry, I completely missed your outro point. It was like, door, door, door to your left is like staying true to your principles and riding this Titanic all the way down. And the door to your right was Carman's four point plan, like a, a startup. Cash in. Sell out, bro. Down, bro down 'cause that's gonna happen eventually. Absolutely. They gonna, they're gonna come for you for sure. So I guess it's either stand by your morals and get like get dismissed today or give into the dark side and get dismissed in the future. Yeah. But you make some money. And then people you really liked are already people that you just sacrificed. So your money that you're making henceforth is really just like blood money, if you're comfortable with that. Yeah. That, that was the whole point of me even wanting to talk about this. Yeah. Yeah. In arguing Agile 61, we talked more about the process of like, this is what you can expect. That's right. Yeah. In this version of the podcast we're talking more about, well, like the, the, the people aspect of this is what's going to happen to the people. Pretend for a second. That we go into business and Brian o's a software development company, we sell out the pe, they come in, they start dividing us. They start in imposing these draconian rules that we have to follow. That make no sense because these people aren't, they don't know software development, and we follow 'em because we're trying to do our best with the tools that we have but over time it sours our relationships. We all end up hating each other. And yeah, maybe four years on in the future when we don't work there anymore.'cause we all got watched out at different times. Maybe then we connected at a networking event, or we bump into each other and like, right, we all forget oh, why did we all hate each other? We all enjoyed building this ride together and becoming profitable to the point where we could sell and have the business be sold and stuff like that. And we, we really all enjoy. Enjoy each other's company and, and enjoy working together. But for a moment in time, we all forgot that. And we all lost our minds because PE put all these controls and all these rules and we all got swept up in this pathological organization? Yes. We all, we, we, we came from this generative organization and we ended in this pathological organization and we all lost our minds until it drove all of us out, or burnt us all out, or fired us all or whatever. And then years later, we all come back, listen, there's a faster way to go on that rollercoaster is just don't get on it. That's right. Don't get on it. And you will never get dizzy. There you go. It's a choice you make. It's a choice you make. Exactly. Yep. Well, that's that I'm depressed. So now that you know this and you've had the the advantage of having watched two podcasts on this related topic, you know what to do. What do we do? What do we. Like and subscribe. Oh yeah, that's right. And let us know what you think about this. Keep that resume updated though, folks, because that is the only sage advice you're gonna get consistently on this podcast. That is worth every penny you didn't pay for.