Read 4 articles and watch 2 videos, And anser questions

Video 1 Zappos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mknIg_Abfw

Video 2 Invasion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3R5Uy5O_Ds

Article Joseph

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/21-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-indian-act-1.3533613

Article Sandberg

WHEN ERIC KNUDSEN worked at a software company, he started out with just one boss. But when he was picked to help lead a new product and set of services, his bosses suddenly multiplied and divided.

There was a sales director and a marketing director from one group, and a marketing director and a business-operations manager from another group. "Those four people were always in some way trying to direct me," he says.

"It gets even weirder," he adds. A vice president from corporate showed up on the scene and wanted not only to hold sway over his efforts, but had quite a bit to say about, for example, the marketing. When you considered all the bosses, Mr. Knudsen was chief surgeon in a hellish office triage.

"What I actually did in my job and what I was being told to do had no relation to one another," he says. "It was difficult to know who was holding the purse strings, who to support and who to ignore."

He is surprised he made it through the process, but he ultimately quit because of burnout.

It's no easy task to manage many staffers. It's even worse when you have to manage many bosses. They're powerful, and have a tendency to talk back a lot more. "It's a lot to manage a lot of managers," Mr. Knudsen concludes.

The outbreak of bosses can be blamed on many things: empire builders (whoever has the biggest team wins), glory seekers (anything touched can be taken credit for) and ubiquitous leaders-in-training (potential and potentate are close enough).

THE REAL CULPRIT of multimanager chaos, however, is the very thing that makes management consultants swoon: "organizational design," or how the company is structured. For decades, companies have been peeling off excess layers of managers to simplify chains of command, thereby becoming more quick and nimble -- as if companies can be athletic. Some call it "matrix management" in which project managers assemble teams across divisions run by functional managers. It's synonymous with "dotted line" management, where any one employee is responsible to more than one person.

Such flattening of an organization, as it's often called, means by definition that the bottom is a lot closer to the top, which doesn't always suit the bottom very well. Dick Nicholson used to work for a packaging manufacturer that employed a matrix design. "Everyone who could fog a mirror thought he was my boss," he says. "It was especially true of the bean counter and HR types."

Did it simplify the organization?

"It didn't in my experience," he says. "Everybody just became a boss."

That's not to say it can't work well. Until President Kennedy's call to the moon, organizations were largely modeled like the military, with clear chains of command. But the moon shot was such a complex undertaking that organizational matrices had to be developed with multiple centers of control. "The real reason we won the space race is we figured out ways to organize resources that no one figured out before," says Richard Kilburg, senior director, human services, at Johns Hopkins University.

But confine matrix design within the walls of a normal corporation and "all hell breaks loose," says Dr. Kilburg. Factional rivalries, personal frictions and other political degradations conspire to make it backfire. "Inside companies it fails more often than it succeeds," he says.

EVIDENCE OF SUCH a failure includes a kind of managerial free-for- all. And it can get worse: One of the latest trends in organizational design is a network form of governance -- teams of leaderless groups that are self-directed. It can have creative benefits, but it can also create a Lord-of-the-Flies scenario, with self-appointed leaders run amok.

It wouldn't be a problem if it didn't stretch some of us thinner than a bad excuse. When Pete Whittier worked for a bank, he had little doubt who was his boss. But another manager would pull him aside for other projects that lasted weeks. He was a big believer in teamwork, so he complied instead of complained.

A mentor of his also told him to just go with the flow. "Bad advice," says Mr. Whittier. "I couldn't develop a consistent track record and my performance ratings suffered."

You'd think the solution would be to get all the bosses to talk to each other. That assumes they want to. Why clash with someone powerful when you can lord over someone who isn't?

On paper, Frank Walker, a former shipping and receiving manager at a brick manufacturer, reported to the plant manager. "In reality, I reported to the plant manager, the assistant plant manager, the local sales manager, all of his salesmen and the individual who coordinated our rail shipments," he says.

He wondered if he was the problem: "Maybe there's something about me that makes me look like somebody you can dump this stuff on."

Mr. Walker begged the plant manager to run interference for him, but that never happened. "Since you're not going to do anything about it," he said one day. "I'm not going to stay."

Email me at [email protected]. To see past columns, go to CareerJournal.com.

Article Wood

https://thenarwhal.ca/how-the-wetsuweten-crisis-could-have-played-out-differently/

Article Smith

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm -- first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London -- I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world's largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs's success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients' trust for 143 years. It wasn't just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm's culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm's moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm's "axes," which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) "Hunt Elephants." In English: get your clients -- some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren't -- to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It's purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client's success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as "muppets," sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God's work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don't know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client's goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don't trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn't matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, "How much money did we make off the client?" It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about "muppets," "ripping eyeballs out" and "getting paid" doesn't exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn't know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life -- getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics -- have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn't feel right to me anymore.

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm -- or the trust of its clients -- for very much longer.

AuthorAffiliation

GREG SMITH Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm's United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Illustration

Drawings (Drawings by Victor Kerlow)