Well, I guess “a brief interlude” is still not that bad of a title for this phase of my life. Before, I considered moving the blog posts to a less prominent place, but in the end, given the nature of consulting, that you are hopping between different projects, or that people are coming and leaving fast, the word interlude is a quite fitting one after all.
Yes, people are coming and leaving fast. So fast, that my 2 bosses who offered me the job here are leaving again. Compared to the last job, it is not too much out of the blue anymore, since, on one hand I had experience dealing with this and on the other hand, given all the politics happening, and the mood people are in recently, this is hardly a surprise.
If I remember correctly, with the last consulting job they took for 11 months, they were not happy about the elbow fighting that was happening. They hoped this would get better in the new company. But I guess this culture within the big corporate will always be there. And within ours, the fights apparently also happens behind your back. Kindergarten all the way. Another thing on top is the business model we are in. Consulting is a people’s business, the only scalability that you have to earn more money is to either hire more people, or automate more things. But on the management level, the understanding of the client’s issues and his/her own politics, is nothing that you can automate fast.
Many things happend in the last 14 months actually, and I do not know how this path is gonna continue for me, but 2 years at the same company is something that I consider a good thing on the CV. And my direct manager will still be there with me, so “at least I have that going for me, which is nice”. There are so many things to learn from him, so, I won’t be wasting time there.
If you really do want to analyze why these politics exist, I don’t have an answer to it. I have my theories, but well, they are formulated so that I can make sense of everything. Are my theories the truth? I don’t think so. Do they explain everything that I see? You can never know because you can’t read other people’s minds.
I really do think, that politics is driven out of ego, or greed. Whereever that might have been formed, you want to be better than others, you want to be the one who is in charge (but most of them don’t want to be accountable), you want to be recognized because you made it to Partner, and maybe you want to be respected because you only spent 10 years to do so. Along the way, you play the game the way as it benefits you the most. You promise things that might never be fulfilled, you sell projects that you can’t deliver. Things were never done as they were stated in the contract. If we would be more ethical and more responsible, this world, and our everyday mood might just look a lot better. But in the end, it is easier just to let it flow, instead of controlling it. Some people also say that suppressing your mood too much is not healthy in a mental way. And I do know people that have to vent, or get the steam off in order to feel better. I am certainly not that type. I hold whatever I can, and maybe explode in one of those rare occasions, which, I have not encountered many so far in my life.
Last flight out to Frankfurt, I started to read another book (finally). More to that maybe in the next one. But I have let this post sit for quite a while and I am not in the exact mood anymore to continue writing. All that I remember is that my bosses were leaving, and I need to reconsider how my near future is gonna continue. And at the time of writing, I just want to finish my 2 weird projects …
