04.04.99
The Business of Arrogance/Good TV
Another weekends, another two days of avoidence.
At some point I need to do them, and it looks like it will be this week sometime…. errr, yeah, sometime.
In the mean time, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with my job. The guy in charge isn’t delegating, and he’s heading towards arrogance.
This was a problem (one of many) at my previous job. I’m seeing this as a pattern at certain companies that provide services to clients. (With that statement I’m excluding OMSI.)
The person in charge begins to develop an arrogance, a concept of not just being better informed, but in some way superior to the client. I don’t know if this is just in the technology industry. But it does seem to run rampant here.
I can see where it comes from. We as an industry are on ‘the cutting edge’, The newest of the new, The media for the next millenium. This starts to explain it. It doesn’t excuse it.
That division, that mental separation sets a company up for a downfall. Once you’ve removed yourself above your client, you start loosing touch. From where I sit, it seems like that begins to build a wall, a barrier. You build a certain amount of animosity that you then have to hide from your client. The more you have to hide from someone, the more likely they’ll start to see it. Then you lose their confidence, their trust.
If this entry seems disjointed the only excuse is because it was written while Full Circle with Michael Palin was on OPB. Just a delightful show. http://www.opb.org/whatsonopb/…
In the late afternoon there was great episode of Oregon Field Guide about the glacial floods that brought the rich farmable top soil of Eastern Washington down to the Willamette Valley. They had a fabulous series of computer animations that were layered on top of real camera footage. It really brought to life the floods that happened in the area 18 to 15 thousand years ago, from Montana’s inland glacial sea. http://www.opb.org/ofg/