Re: Ask Yugo Anything!!
[ QUOTE ]
How is corporate MN so different from corporate CA?
[/ QUOTE ]
Lol, yeah, somehow I was thinking "I'll mention it but maybe someone won't ask."
Okay but before you read be somewhat warned that I'm going to make sweeping generalizations (that happen to be mostly true) and that of course contextual calibration is necessary in evaluating any sort of human interaction.
The people in MN are quite passive/aggressive in a way that ppl on the west coast are not. For instance in N CA people are quite straightforward compared both to S CA and MN. However, people in S CA are much more straightforward than in MN. In MN people are more straightforward in the twin cities than in the countryside (this seems to hold true throughout what I understand as the Midwest).
This was most obvious to me at college where the population was highly MN but not too much so. It was v easy for me to spot the "locals" as they tended to have this niceness about them and "inability" to bypass it at times directly towards people. The west coast ppl and east coast ppl had much less trouble directly speaking their mind and having (in my mind) authentic conversations (of course to a degree - most ppl are v bad at authentic communcations).
So in the corporate offices I worked in in MN people had a very set idea of how everything was supposed to "be." It was all about job security, paycheck, working for the man, having a house in the suburbs and kids and a pet, talking about weather, not getting into trouble, not getting fired. Now this is present everywhere but like there it's very thick in the air. Thus, people have a hard time taking any sort of course of action that hasn't been explicitely encouraged or demanded. If you work at a creative ad agency then you are allowed to do certain things, if you don't then you don't dare to even attempt to do truly creative stuff.
There are layers and layers of political stuff going on that could easily be resolved or avoided if the players talked with each other rather than taking subtle barbs and mention to their own "minions" about "what a big swinging dick xyz thinks he is." People had a hard time working with me until I adjusted for them. When things make no sense to me I ask about them....if someone is unwilling to help me with something I do it myself (and get into trouble b/c either it was their job).
It took me almost a full year to adjust to Campbell Mithun - MN and even then I was like 25% of what I am in the Irvine office. Here I let it all hang out and have the sophistication (lol yes, there is a somewhat method to the yugo madness) to pull it off.
I go around our office wearing paper burger king hats having everyone call me "the king." When the ceo and pres from MN came to visit I ended up bringing up blow jobs as a topic of discussion in front of the layers of bosses I currently have - and it was natural and ppl were fine with it. In MN, I finally had to develop a method by which I would talk with person X about whatever it is I had learned they found exciting (95% of the time this topic was extremely lame and they were unable to convey enough outward excitement to overcome it when talking about it) then I'd add actually exciting content/ideas to the conversation and ultimately win them over and get work done/tell them awesome stories they wouldn't have been comfortable with otherwise/etc.
Okay, I should write an article about this b/c whatever I just wrote is likely not even close to optimal, [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img].
Oh well, let's find another question!
[img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]
Yugoslav
|