Rebel at Work

When your company has many competitors, with customers who abandon ship thanks to lower prices or novelty, you simply trade accounts with those competitors.

Here is the thing that is horrible about inertia—it kills thinking. It kills organic growth. For individuals, it destroys the feeling of creating something meaningful and feeling fulfilled. Inertia ruins a person’s sense of purpose.

Here is the thing that is horrible about inertia—it kills thinking.

When people feel the pressure to meet goals no matter what, they cut corners and try to max out opportunities, ethical or not. The mission for individual employees is to survive today and deal with tomorrow later.

“Do more with less,” is the company mantra. Work overtime, for free.

Marc, a help desk administrator, explains, “The workload exceeds the capacity of employees. We all sacrifice family time, our health, we are all on anti-anxiety meds, and we work weekends to meet service level agreements. Management is aware of all of this and has stated that there will be no changes.”

Companies grew, and continue to grow, to be so big that employees play it safe. They operate under the mindset that they just need to maintain what they do every day, plus enough to earn their raise and bonus. Employees focus on incremental add-ons to meet the objectives of contributing to the growth of the department. But they’re careful not to exceed those objectives, lest their goals next year require more effort to attain.
The mission for individual employees is not to screw up in these large companies. This avoidance of doing their very best translates into the entire organization striving to achieve the status quo.

Kevin, a partner in a large consultancy, said, “Complacency is rampant in corporate America. Just about anyone that has spent any amount of time ‘within the walls’ has seen this first hand. Overinflated, mature companies. They are breeding grounds for this type of behavior.”

Whether your corporate treadmill runs on a low setting or a high setting, the constant mile per hour pace is the inertia.

Corporate inertia describes companies that have become complacent in their business methods and just cruise along.