Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

I’m really curious about the screening process. You talk about firms turning "anybodies into somebodies". Do these companies take all comers and try to mold them into a particular way of working, or does Starbucks say actively recruit the gregarious, Apple the geeky etc. Do you think there are certain types of individuals who are better suited to particular firms?

The best companies out there are very careful about who they hire and they have a fairly clear sense of what type of person will match their culture and mission so that they can look for the best people to bring on. To be so choosy is obviously a luxury that only certain companies have. A place like Apple certainly has the ability to attract people who are already highly engaged with Apple, the company, and passionate about Apple products. Having access to such a talent pool puts the company way ahead of any competition. Starbucks might not have so many people who are passionate about coffee applying, but Starbucks can identify a select list of traits that will make people good fits behind the counter and try to hire them.

Having read some of the book, I think the manufacturing of an hourly-worker corporate culture strikes you as disingenuous and maybe even a little poisonous. It’s hard not to compare your project to Morgan Spurlock’s experiment with McDonalds.  Do you think your book exposes or discredits the companies you worked for, and if so, how?

The film "SuperSize Me" by Morgan Spurlock had a different goal than mine—his goal was to be the ultimate customer of McDonald’s. My goal was to see what it was like to be the face of five companies and compare and contrast among those experiences. I definitely don’t believe creating corporate culture on the front-lines is disingenuous. On the contrary, having a strong corporate culture (seen at places like UPS) is a huge asset. But there are indeed good and bad cultures. An authentic corporate culture does not rely on printed materials—handbooks and diagrams—to inculcate new employees, the culture simply travels by osmosis from worker to worker. If a corporate culture can be loosely based on a few tenets but otherwise get handed from one worker to the next, it is most likely a fairly authentic culture. Starbucks made me cynical through its reliance on employee texts, whereas UPS felt real from the moment I got there.

How do you think your own biases played into the process? Did you seek to become of "one of them", or did you actively resist? When people really loved their jobs, did you think of them as brainwashed or just really well-suited to the corporate culture?

I certainly was not someone who was a natural fit in most of these workplaces so becoming subsumed into the culture was interesting for me to experience. In each place I worked there was always at least one person who cherished their job and was a devout believer in the company and its mission. This was exciting to see and that person, that believer, was in every case an inspiration for the people who they worked with.

Seems like you dug being a UPS driver. Is it true they get all the chicks?

For me, UPS was the one place where I simply never questioned what was required of me to do the job, I just did it.

Misha Cornes