Merger Problems -- No Problem :: essays research papers

I have documented in the previous paper for this class my beef with the authors: that they have a ready-made set of excuses absolving workers of all of the blame for downward spirals in productivity - rather, it’s the cold sterility of computer technology, or mergers, or globalization, or cost-cutting, or reengineering, or outsourcing, or some combination of the above that is to blame for the unraveling of the corporate culture as we know it. In the words of Charlie Brown, â€Å"Good grief.† Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been a part of a strong, warm workplace culture, but I believe that the authors underestimate the value of just coming in, doing your job, and not worrying about having a social life or friends at work, and not carrying on about awful the employment landscape is today. Those things are all nice and might be life-affirming and lend "meaning" to a person's life, but doing the job is paramount to all of the above. (It's not polit ically correct to point this out.) Again, I want to reiterate a point I made in the previous paper: a job is a privilege, not a right. There is no more â€Å"right† to a job than there is a â€Å"right† to win the lottery. I am a terribly lucky, blessed person to have the job that I have, and I work for someone who has the reputation of being an absolute monster at times. But we have gotten so carried away with assigning rights we have no business assigning, rights that the recipients have no business having ascribed to them, that we forget that responsibilities are also involved. The concept of "rights without responsibilities" leads to anarchy, and virtual anarchy is the condition found in many factories and other places of employment today. And the fact that so many people have conspired to legitimize the crap put forth by the two authors - from the publishers to the universities that assign â€Å"The New Corporate Cultures† as a text - makes me wonder if the world has not lost its co llective head. That said, the authors do make some good points about Merger Mania (the topic of Chapter 5) and its effect on organizational cultures, but they don’t offer solutions to the problems; rather, they tend to harp on the fact that the sacred employee is harmed in some way by the merger/ acquisition process.