True friendship is precious and very difficult to come by. If you have one or two true friends then you should probably count your blessing.
When I'm a friend with somebody, I genuinely care about the person and I shared his/her joy, sadness and triumph. There are people that would like to count you as a friend, but sometimes it's so obvious that they don't really care about you, they just want to get on your good side for whatever reason. These are the people I called acquaintance and in my mind there is always this fine line that I put people in.
Since I started working in this company with the role I have; I have to deal with different people. I have changed and started to see the dark side of business. It's almost instinctive now that I would take a cynical point of view on a lot of things. What used to be good and beautiful acts done by people would be viewed through a tinted glass. There are all kinds of political games that people play for whatever gain they perceive to have. One thing I despise a lot is when a person can be your best buddy in front of you, he could try to stab you in the back without mercy.
The old timers here would just submit to these and regard the political things as part of corporate life. I'm looking at it with a fresh perspective since I'm a new comer. Sometimes when I look at these aged women and men that would just waste their breath trying to do something that is totally useless (in my opinion), I truly feel sorry for them. They have been in this jungle for over 30 years and half of their lives are wasted on arguing about trivial things that accomplish absolutely nothing. At the end of a meeting, everybody would feel exhaustive like they were just under water for a long time. When you really think about it, is there any good decisions being made? No. Are we moving forward in the project, no because people were too busy spending the time talking about the same thing three different times in three different ways.
I realized that there is a good way to do things and there is a way to do things that cover your own behind. When it comes to choosing one, you would always pick the one that cover your own behind, therefore the best way of doing something is not even in consideration.
It's totally pathetic to see these intelligent people wasting their talent and time and I'm in the middle of this political storm. It's totally clear to me from all the little clues and sights I picked up that our project is going to fail and fail miserably. The sad thing is looking at all the options that we have, there is nothing we could do about it. It's even more frustrating is that looking at this project from the PMI perspective, the project is never given a good chance to succeed.
Let's wait and see if I'm right. When the project starts to go south (which certainly looks more and more like it is), there is going to be a lot of screaming. I appreciate the opportunity to see how a big project get out of hand and fail. It's not everyday you would see first hand how a multi-million dollar investment get very poor return.
|