Companies today
Most of my life I worked in western companies, and I observed 3 recurring traits driving employees, sometimes balanced in the same person, sometimes with one prevailing on the others. To summarise, I ended up referring the 3 traits as survivors, passionates and careerists.
Survivors usually work for a living, their focus is on personal life outside of work, and a job is for them just a means to an end. They often represent the backbone of companies for their reliability and hard work.
Passionates find their satisfation in the work and learning process itself. They view their job as a passion, with a deeper meaning, and are less influenced by external pressures on behalf of the companies.
Careerists, strive to reach higher roles and power, and are mainly motivated by success and wealth. They don’t hesitate to bring other colleagues down if it serves their personal agenda, and their peers usually don’t trust them.
Companies’ Codes of Conduct
Another common trend among companies is to showcase their brand’s core values and ethics. Even if these codes of conduct start with the most genuine intentions, as the companies grow they slowly mold to become just a communication strategy to present the company in a more “human way” in the eyes of public.
Western Society
Anyway, companies are just a reflection of the society we live in, and as such their values are intertwined with the (lack of) core values of society itself. Western society for example, has reached in the last years the peak of it’s supposed civilization, but as history teaches, after the peak ineluctably decadence and decline follow, no matter how powerful an wealthy. Think of any big empire of the past, the ancient Egypts, the Mongolian Empire, and so on.
So while we might be tempted to think in the comfort of our homes and virtual realities to be the center of the world, the world is rapidly changing under our own eyes and the current geo-political balances are turning, no matter if with or without wars.
The rest of the World
Wealthy countries have always advanced their civilization by exploiting other countries. Just think of the cheap manpower in the last decades from “third-world” countries, without mentioning the exploitation of child labor, on which the West gladly turns a blind eye. Or Africa in the last centuries, whose victims of slavery and natural resources have been the fuel upon which Western countries built their wealth. Or in the present India, with its skilled workforce, which made the fortune of the biggest tech-companies.
Today different values and races start to mix, blend, and transform, creating new cultural trends that are shifting our culture on a new, unpredictable, and not always desired path.
The dinosaurs
As we were taught, during the Mesozoic Era the strongest dinosaurs survived the weaker of their own kind, and still they could not avoid extinction. Time for the world as we know it is ticking – only if you’re blind you don’t see it – but for those who believe that life has a meaning greater than the individualism, materialism and self-centered lifestyle that modern society promotes… change is welcome.