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Julian Dunn's avatar

I agree with your bifurcation here, but the hardest part is discerning which problems in an organization are endemic and which ones are acute. Or perhaps more importantly, which endemic problems actually have the possibility of changing within an acceptable timeframe (poor leadership, inability to innovate, etc.) You mentioned Satya Nadella, for example - ask anyone during the Ballmer era of Microsoft, when the company was clearly in a decline, whether they would have held out hope for a revival such as the firm has seen, and I expect most of them would have emphatically said no.

Perhaps the most useful advice is to define for oneself what one's own acceptable timeframe for resolving endemic problems is, so that one does not get trapped in a "sick system" that constantly dangles the next variable reward just out of reach, and ensure that one makes good on a plan to leave that firm if the deadline has passed and things aren't better.

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Maarten Dalmijn's avatar

Every company has it's shit.

You gotta find one with crap you can live with.

This may be a cynical view, but organizations are comprised of humans and humans are peculiar. If you reflect on the people closest to you they all have their weird quirks that make sense when you know them.

If they don't have weird quirks you probably don't know them that well, it's part of being human. Nobody is normal. What the hell is normal anyway!

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