The New Big Three

I was born and raised in Detroit. For generations, my family has been working for the big three. It hurts my heart to see the death of the American car industry. A product that was once the corner stone of the American middle class is no longer. But this just didn’t happen over night. It has been festering for years. The big three as well as most of our major corporations have taken to the practices that I call the new big three — nepotism, incompetence, and arrogance.

Nepotism is defined as showing favoritism for relatives or friends in a work environment, by not objectively evaluating, their ability to perform the job. Personal, I have had relatives and friends get me jobs in the past. For example, every summer during high school and college, I would get a summer job working for a relative. Sometimes for the board of education as an teachers aid; my grandparent both worked for the school system and getting me a desk job seem to be better then me sitting around all summer. When I got a little older, my aunt who is in property management would get me a job working as a pool attendant. These jobs were easy and never allotted me any power.

The problem today is that major companies promote relative to powerful positions that they are not able to handle. Example, I currently work for one of the fastest growing department for one of the world’s largest companies. Last year, after 10 years of growing this department the director retired. My department is the internet development department in which no top level manager understands. The CEO decided to promote his son-in-law into this position. I guess he figured that this department was young and he was young so that went hand in hand. Within 3 months, our department was falling apart. Since taking over, he has hired many of his relatives, his nanny, and his college buddies to management positions. None of these people have any experience in website design, development, or management. Nepotism breads nepotism.

Incompetence is defined as the inability to perform the task in which you are assigned. I have never had a job in which I could not perform the task that I was assigned. Even with the jobs that I have been given through family and friends, I have had the experience and skills to handle. For the example of corporate incompetence, I will revisit my current job. We will be reviewing the nanny’s roll at my job. My boss decided that training and baby sitting were similar, so he fired our trainer (a women with 10 years of experience training at the company and has a masters degree from one of the most prestigious technical universities in the country) and hired his nanny (a woman who cannot turn on a computer). She is a nice lady, but we work in web development not a preschool. There is a major problem in today’s business world when a person with years of professional experience can loss there job to someone who has no idea how to do the job.

When the big three started to have problems in the early years of W’s administration, I was just starting college. I was always told that if I work hard and get my education that everything was going to be okay. But after the 8 years of W, I have learned that this world has two ruling classes – the merchant class and the aristocracy.  The merchant class is made up the business owners who have had to work hard for what they have (the Warren Buffets, the Bill Gates).  I work with small business owners every day trying to help them discover ways to sale their products and services using modern media. These merchants like the self-made millionaires have the same needs (customers). They own their businesses and need capital coming in, to grow their businesses. Unlike the merchants, the modern aristocracy doesn’t value their customers. Like my boss, they have been given everything and don’t understand that customers don’t care about how you got your job. They care about the quality of the job that you are doing.

The modern aristocracy includes the likes of our former president W Bush, Pairs Hilton, and all the starlets that we see every night on TMZ. This people shouldn’t be placed in any position of power over other people. But for many companies today these people are placed in positions of power that not only affect companies prefects but also peoples lives. The worst part of all is the arrogance that these people have. My boss is the most arrogant person I have ever met. He treats all of us like second class citizens that should be happy to be in his presents. After viewing his facebook page, I discovered that he has less of an education then 80% of his staff. And after a few people looked him up over the internet (what we do every day for a living) found out that he was just a C student and never really accomplished mush on his own.

For the past few years, I have been on a quest to make it big in this world. Even after W turned the economy into the disaster that it is today, I thought that hard work and an education still could get me as fare as I was willing to let it. But then I got a job (a good job) working for one of the most iconic companies in the history of the modern world. I have learned some great things here, that nepotism, incompetence, and arrogance can and will lead to disaster.  When, I start my own company because I just cannot bring myself to marry my boss’s ugly sister to get a promotion, I will not allow those things to run it. And hopefully when my children take it over, once I retire to a beach somewhere, they will not allow those things to cloud there judgment.