Corporate Mindset

[Note: this is the post for October 27 - posting was late on account of the stunning beauty of fall in Seoul]

A lot of people working in startup land seem to have an aversion to anything "corporate."

Corporate to many working in startups seems to be understood as anything that large and especially legacy companies do from an operational perspective.

The pejorative tinge that accompanies the corporate descriptor seems to stem from the belief that processes at such places needlessly slow down progress and/or exist for no real reason other than keeping the people responsible for them in a job.

In a word, criticising something as being "too corporate" is another way of saying something is inefficient.

Coming from a corporate background, the critique of corporations as slow to adapt or embrace change is directionally correct, but the absolute disregard for anything corporate is super short sighted.

One of the amazing thing about many - but not all - senior executives and operators at large, legacy corporations is their memory. They remember everything.

Now if you couple their amazing memory with their average 2~3 decades of experience, and if you are at all honest with yourself you should probably reason that they may know something you don't, and thus their way of doing things "corporately" may have some merit that you're missing.

Anyways, being open minded will provide you better opportunities for discovering better or at least interesting ways of thinking an problem solving. So be open minded.