On organizations that are less than world-class

This very short essay presents my views about a type of organizations that I call 'organizations that are less than world-class'. There are 4 characteristics of such organizations:

(1) They pay peanuts and yet they expect the people working for them to devote 300, 500, or even 800 percent of their energies. They tell you to be 'professional', to put in extra effort, to be 'prepared for long hours', and so on, conveniently forgetting that they are actually under-paying you (hoping that like a small child you'll forget)...They do not care if what you earn using all your time will not be enough for you to pay your bills or take care of your family, because what they care about is only the question of how to extract everything out of you (or in Mandarin, 'ba2 ni3 zha4 gan1'), like the way the SugarCaneDrinks Man puts the sugarcanes through the extractor-machine repeatedly until every drop of the sugarcane juice is squeezed out, and the sugarcane promptly discarded....

(2) Not only do they do (1), they also have the cheek to say this aloud and with a straight face - for the employees, temp staff, and the public to hear. It's obvious that such organizations (especially their useless HR departments) think that they are doing the right thing. The most sinister thing about such organizations is that they under-pay you but they tell you that it's 'a fair wage' or 'market rate'. The term 'market rate' is abused by these unethical organizations and their agents to justify the practice of paying peanuts. Ironically, these organizations tell you that you're really valuable to them and you play an 'immensely important role' in upholding the image of the organization and in delivering the goods; yes, you are crucial to the organization, without all your 'good work' the show cannot go on. Indeed the show cannot go on, for this is hypocrisy well-performed - co-acted by the employees who are sufficiently brainwashed...

(3) Following from (1) and (2), you might think that only people with low skills are affected by such unethical practices. This is not true - even highly skilled people are affected. The rhetoric of the knowledge-based economy may give the public an impression that 'ah, finally people with Knowledge are going to be recognized and rewarded more!' But this is a misleading image which masks the actual realities of organizational HR practices. In the knowledge-based economy, what happens might be the opposite: the highly skilled people are rewarded less, or at least less than what they deserve, because the transformations towards the KBE involve the mass production of highly skilled workers, to the extent that the plentiful supply makes each of them a cheap commodity. Have I shattered your dreams? No fear, my friend, for shit happens... :)

(4) They do not have the ability to recognize good people, including job applicants and existing staff. So if great applicants apply, they are promptly rejected, precisely because a mediocre or lousy organization simply cannot recognize greatness (If they could they wouldn't still be mediocre or lousy, would they?) Existing staff who add value or are rare gems are not treasured, and they are sometimes even treated with suspicion - precisely because of their greatness. Greatness sometimes manifests as a form of 'deviance' (without deviating from the crowd, how does one be great?), and mediocre and lousy organizations are entities that cannot tolerate deviance, so they remain just ordinary players in whichever industry or sector they are operating in. When the nail that sticks out gets hammered and only conformist 'yes-men' fill all the professional roles, how can such organizations ever hope to become 'world-class'?

So this short essay has presented my views on a certain organizational type. These organizations are liabilities in any knowledge-based economy, but Singapore has failed to recognize the threat that they pose collectively. The tricky thing about these organizations is that they are lousy but not lousy enough to die off, and so they go about their businesses as usual, projecting the image to outsiders that they are 'doing quite well'. But in their lastingness they do even more damage to the country as a whole, as they silently finish off on a massive scale all the great people or do things that extinguish their creative excellence, slowly but surely.....