Author Nick: JohnBerlingHardy
Name: John Berling Hardy
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Those in the inner circle use a strategy often described as ‘creating the disease and then providing the cure’. It creates a base state of anxiety and fear. This creates a blowback effect wherein the employees become resentful and recalcitrant. The ‘cure’ for this ‘disease’ is for senior management to tighten controls in order in order to keep all in line.
When we think of internal audit, what comes to mind for most people are images of a kind of corporate gestapo. Gray individuals and blue or Grey suits, clean cut, hardworking, and singularly fixated on the one thing and one thing only – compliance!
Abstract: Sales = Perception Management = Deception! If you have integrity you offer something of real enduring value. If you are a cheat, you do not. Nevertheless, the way you go about peddling your wares is very much the same.
Corporate malfeasance, collusion, corruption are on everyone’s lips these days. Some of us want blood, those who are more circumspect say: we can do little about water that has flowed under the bridge; we must take steps to prevent this from happening again. What comes next? Better regulations and new laws.
The “talk “world of the corporate environment favours those who are adept at impression and perception management. In today’s marketing oriented, sales driven corporate environment the rain makers – the deal makers who bring in the business – tend to rise to the top of the corporate ladder. Looking good, deflecting blame is critical to success. This then gives the skilled manipulator, or Player, the edge in the completion to rise up the company ladder. Also, the higher up the ladder the individual goes the easier it is to cover incompetence with social skills. In this way success once attained, can be easily maintained.
The traditional approach to branding, as far as I can tell, goes something like this:
One of the cornerstones of our accounting, banking, and investing models is the assumption that pervasive collusion is an anomaly – a kind of perfect storm that needs many pieces to be in place for it to be successful. What if this assumption was false? What if pervasive collusion, instead of being an aberration, were something as mundane as rust on metal? It would imply that in the absence of specific safeguards, pervasive collusion would be the stasis towards which organizations and industries would gravitate.
As Donald trump tells us: “Go big, or get out of town!” It would seem that there is no place where this applies more than in relation to financial mismanagement.
Shakespeare prefaced one of his famous soliloquies “Each man in his time plays many parts.” The longer we play a certain role, the more the actor and the character he plays begin to merge. Over time, if we have played a role long enough we come to identify ourselves so much with the role that we cease to think of it as a role at all, but as representative of who we actually are. Despite this, our own personality continues to exist, however thoroughly sublimated. The greater the disparity between our personality and the role we assume, the harder it is to play the part continuously. In addition to this, at any one time we are playing not just one, but any number of roles – one for work, another with friends, another with our children, still another with our wife, yet another with our lover, etc. This conflux of personae multiplies the stress in our lives. For most of us, our lives end up resembling a pantomime, in which the persona is going through the motions, but not really present. As if in a kind of sleepwalk, the character is still on stage, but the actor has left the theatre long ago.
The distinction between those who live their passion and those who do not is so great that I believe that it is the defining characteristic that divides the human race into the two very separate camps. It is far greater than culture, religion, geographic location, race, or gender. Those who live their passion speak one language, while those who do not, speak quite another. There is really no conversation between the two groups.