Company Politics: How would you describe it?

I was 27 years old when the communications and marketing company I had formed three years earlier had grown to the extent where I needed to take on a third employee.  Soon afterwards, I re-lived the nightmare that I thought I had escaped from during my short career as an employee.  Namely: Company politics!

Competing against other companies to win a new order is still the adrenaline rush that fires me up twenty five years later. Whereas competing against another employee for the attention of someone with influence, within one’s own company, simply bores me.  The waste of company time and money, only to serve the purpose of one’s own career, is abhorrent to me. And yet it is the life blood that sadly runs through far too many companies, eating away at the attention that should be focused on the outside world.

I was working on my new book this weekend, trying to come up with a short description to headline my chapter on ‘Company Politics’, the result was this:

“There is a difference between playing politics and active self promotion: Politics is the hollow game to obtain something more than you truly deserve, whereas self promotion is the open display of one’s natural talents and achievements”.

I wonder if this is how you would describe it? And I also wonder whether anyone, anywhere, has ever experienced a company without it?

Have a good week,

Harley