In the Corporate World, a Company Utopia = Bankruptcy
Well… that didn’t last long.
Her eyes dart around the colossal conference space at her similarly wide-eyed colleagues. She swivels in a Herman Miller, where not long ago she kicked off a team of 30. In that moment, an exciting corporate website redesign project lay ahead.
But instead of an eager team on a new threshold, the room is now filled with 30 people with questions on their faces. Why are we here?
The group remained generally silent in their suspicions.
They pondered the last year and a half, filled with happy hours and post-it notes dotted across glass. Of travel and cutting-edge design. Of huge clients and advancing web functionality, but disproportionately light workloads. Where ample downtime and loose deadlines led to fun, laid-back people playing hacky sack in the modern, swanky environs. A workplace utopia.
That is, if the budgets weren’t so low. Soon, the HR Director enters to deploy the news.
What did they expect?
Bankruptcy, that’s what.
After all, the stock price hovered at $1.30, then began a march down to $0.90 after the company IPO’d far too soon.
The entire room was laid off that day, free to leave their utopia behind. And with that, the tech bubble burst before their eyes.
This day, and many others like it across the industry, became better known as the dot com boom and bust (or, the Y2K tech crash).
With farewells and handshakes, she leaves the room, not all too surprised. As she clears her desk, she entertains silly notions about continuing to work with the clients she had. She did truly care about their fate. Collecting a few too many project files, she quietly makes her way to her car.
In actuality, apart from a few farewell calls to her friendly clients, she would never know how the dissolving company managed their projects to completion. Did Compaq’s new online IT training modules ever make it to their staff? Or, did NASA successfully pull off their innovative marketing program to drive International Space Station payloads? The outcomes remain unknown.
But given a hot job tip from a mentor, her next opportunity would not follow too far behind. Really, it all happened too quick: no break afforded before the next leg of her journey.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
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