I’ve never really considered it before and I’m not entirely sure when it started, but since I’ve been looking for work this time around it’s struck me that there is an entire group of people, I guess we could call them “exit strategists” who appear to be employed to make a company appear as profitable as possible and get it sold on to a larger business. Then they move on to the next one.
They appear to have no actual interest or belief in the businesses themselves or what they actually do beyond what is necessary to spew vaguely credible bullshit at any PR opportunity; it’s all about the money.
I’m really not convinced this is a healthy situation, not least because it’s pushing more potentially socially-valuable services into the hands of fewer and wealthier companies who just view their customers as a cash-cow. It’s also encouraging people who start businesses to view them as just a means of ending up with a large cash pay-off and their employees as necessary inconveniences and a drain on finances which in turn leads to a complete lack of respect and loyalty on both sides.
I’m not sure it’s even now possible to build a company for the long term, investing wisely in staff that are not just “resources” that will contribute by bringing in new ideas or different ways of doing things because they won’t be able to compete on price and over the long term will probably lose out.
It all comes down to money, doesn’t it? How awful.
I was struck by something Jimmy Carr said recently: that the most important thing to know in life is what you really want. If the answer is pots of money then you’re wrong. Money is just tokens. Stuff you can perhaps use to obtain what you really want. Valuing the tokens themselves is ridiculous; foolish even. And if you’re moving from company to company just trying to make a bigger and bigger pile, have you actually thought about how they’re going to serve you in getting what you want? Or have you spent so much time getting more tokens that you haven’t even had time to think what you want them for?