:: You May Kiss the Bride :: People ::

Every time I talk to people who are not close friends, they ask me "Is your company still alive?". Besides it being the most annoying thing in the world, I notice my answer usually is "Yeah, sure, we're working on this merger now". Yup, this is the trend these days. M&A (Mergers and acquisitions). The logic is - We have two companies that suck, yet somehow the combination sucks less.

Naturally, these merger negotiations take place in the high windows, between founders, investors and chief officers. The little people who sit in their respectable cubicles are just sitting there and waiting to see what happens.

Usually the reactions of people fall on the continuum between two extremes - I call them 'The Vision Zealot' and 'The Peer Lover'.
 
'The Vision Zealot' goes around the company moping: "Oh no, This is not why I came to this company for! This is not why I worked day and night for months. Instead of being a smart-search-engine-for-media-on-cell-phones start-up, we're going to be a cell-phone-search-engine-for-smart-media start-up. This is totally different. I might as well go work for checkpoint"

On the other hand, 'The Peer Lover' shows feigned indifference: "Well, You know, does it really matter what we're doing? I mean, we still get paid, we still get to be with the people we like to work with, You know".

Most people are somewhere between these two. And guess what?  Most of them are a lot closer to 'The Peer Lover'.

I guess these days Vision is something one can't afford anymore.