I have worked in many, many offices and the work is never as fascinating as the power struggles that play out every single day in the corporate cesspit. I am singularly adept at spotting the ones who’ve worked for years to gain a globule of power and cannot wait to let you know in some desperate way that they are the linchpin of the entire business and what they say goes. In no other environment is your job description a substitute for your entire being, where the sum total of you is of absolutely no consequence to anyone. The only thing that matters is that you become a little bit bigger and a little less smaller with each passing day.

In hierarchical contexts, ‘little’ people have to defer to ‘big’ people, because big people wield more power, more authority and a bigger pay packet. These are what big people perceive to be the big credentials in life.  Yet once upon a time most big people were beleaguered little people suffering from the indignity of smallness. Their life’s mission was to fight their way out of smallness and become as big as possible – not necessarily with weapons like intellect or courage but through good defending with their shield of fear.  Fear of the world perceiving them to be losers rather than winners; fear of seeming always small and never big. Out in the big wide world, what was once fairly large appears relatively tiny, like the goldfish not in a bowl but in the sea, which is why the office is such an interesting microcosm, and one which brings out the essence of what we really are.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. Jean-Paul Satre 

Further reading:

The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams

Martin Lukes: Who Moved My BlackBerry by Lucy Kellaway