In this climate of massive unemployment and high inflation, ranting about how bad your co-worker is may seem insensitive, but the issues concerning the young employee in a corporate setting are so massive that they need to be addressed right now.

The term ‘disgust’ needs to be clarified first.

No, we’re not talking about personal hygiene. We are talking about the lazy, unimaginative, incompetent, obsolete paper pushers (I acknowledge my bad habit of using too many adjectives, but in this case each one holds true). I call them OKKHHOMS. 

People who pretend to be important but will not be missed if they drop dead this second, people who flaunt their seniority, yet you know as well as everyone that his grey hair represents who he really is, grey and unwanted. People who use you and your peers to make their life comfortable, and people who you look at and think, how is this guy not fired yet? Is the manager blind or something?

Walter Kiechel, in his book The Lords of Strategy, put the organisational culture into perspective, saying quite famously, “we are not all in this together; some pigs are smarter than other pigs and deserve more money.”

I believe the average employee, or freshers specifically, deserve more from the few good companies that are able to function in this economy. And certain “pigs” occupy positions that not only regress the young, hungry upstart, but also force the whole organisation to follow the ‘traditional’ way, no matter how evident its wrongness.

An organisation is supposed to be a well-oiled machine. Almost all management textbooks compare the organisation to something whose every mechanism has to function in unison; otherwise, it ceases to reach its intended goal.

The problems start when the top cannot distinguish between the competent and inexperienced and the experienced but “Okkhom”. And in failing to differentiate, what they do is build small roadblocks in what is supposed to be a freeway that cannot afford any traffic.

Even a well-oiled small private firm can become a bureaucratic nightmare when the top fails to decolonise its roots from tenured employees. Employees who do not represent productive ants working for the greater good; rather, they act like leeches, holding on for dear life at any cost.

And the cost is most often efficiency. Government institutions suffer from this in every major nation, no matter how advanced. However, major firms in the developed world have been able to somewhat mitigate this natural human instinct of getting “too comfortable” in the cubicle.

Consultancy firms, such as McKinsey, have been vilified and hated for their role in “Destroying the Middle Class”, as a columnist in The Atlantic put it, but they may well be the reason why American companies are so fast-paced in production and innovation.

From the late 80s, these Ivy League-run elite firms have systematically re-engineered what an organisation should look like. And they identified, quite accurately in my opinion, the leeches that slow its progress.

McKinsey called those who make the firm inefficient “incompetent inbred middle managers”. Incompetent in the sense that they fail to reconcile with the greater good of maximising shareholder profit, which, according to Milton Friedman, is the “only responsibility” firms have, and inbred because these middle managers are developed from within and get comfortable as they climb the corporate ladder, somehow feeling a certain essence of ownership which realistically they cannot claim over their workplace.

McKinsey’s solution to all this is to cut the middle managers altogether and build the CEO class. Very simply put, they are the reasons why you see CEOs doing 14-hour shifts and earning 300 times more than the bottom ones who barely survive on minimum wage. They engineered the organisation to represent an hourglass rather than a triangle. The bottom portion consists of the many “unskilled” minimum-wage workers, and at the top are well-bred Ivy League executives who earn more, demand more, and are the aforementioned “pigs who deserve more money than others.”

I acknowledge this sort of re-engineering may be cruel, and may not even go with our own cultural ethics. But Bangladesh is at a point when efficiency and productivity are non-negotiable. As the world becomes more globalised and competition intensifies, the top brass cannot expect to come to the office at 9 leave at 5 all while signing 6 documents they have barely read.

What the reduced participation of the top brass means is that middle managers in Bangladeshi companies are able to wield decision-making capabilities that resemble their government’s own broken bureaucratic system. A system that makes a decision after having 5 meetings, spending 10 days discussing minuscule issues while failing to manage the broader obstacles on hand.

And, this, my friend, is why I am disgusted. I am disgusted because I see people holding back projects that do not require “managerial oversight”. I see people not embracing the challenges which they are empowered to take on, and who are too afraid of what their own upper middle managers might think about them. I see people having the talent and capabilities to grasp anything that is given to them, only to become lazy because they’re not given the responsibility to move ahead.

Bangladeshi culture has welcomed into it a capitalist philosophy, but it seems to have left out the edgier sides. It touts a great game, but it still cannot extract what it needs to from a regular 8-hour shift. The pressure to leave the office at 8 pm just because the boss might “like and appreciate” the effort is another disgusting element representing the inefficiency described above. The bosses in those cases are just like the leeches that suck the blood of their own employees gleefully, enjoying a throne that they themselves are not skilled enough to occupy.

So what to do with all of this? How can this country embody capitalism without implementing its more core tenets?

A simple answer is, we need ruthless McKinseys, no, not management consultants, but McKinseys who occupy the top brass. The top has to step up, has to start reading a bit more, and has to understand how globalised we truly are. The average corporation needs to be ruthless in its pursuit of profit, and it must identify costs that are not limited to its payroll.

As the market never lies, we already are aware of how some are adapting to it, but those who aren’t may become the incompetent, inbred OKKHOMS they’re currently payrolling.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of The Business Standard and TBS Graduates