This Org Chart From The City: Fill & Download for Free

Over the past few decades, employers have dramatically shifted their attitudes toward employees. Today, most corporate executives and business owners will give the same answer if asked to describe their workforce: they’ll say payroll is their biggest expense.This may be true, but it reveals that their employees aren’t an investment: they’re basically a drain on potential profits. A necessary evil.Once upon a time, employers valued their workforce as the engine driving the business. Each employee’s professional trajectory was anticipated and enabled by employers, and those who wished could join a firm out of school and eventually retire from a single employer. A job meant you could afford to own a home, provide comfortably for a family, and live well.The seminal example is Eastman Kodak — virtually every person who lived in Rochester, NY (Kodak’s global headquarters) either worked for the company, was related to an employee or depended on Kodak employees to provide revenue for their businesses.In the early ‘80s, a janitor at Eastman Kodak would earn around $16/hour (adjusted to 2018 dollars).Janitors were full-time employees of Kodak; they received four weeks of paid vacation like every other Kodak employee, as well as a generous bonus paid each year in March to the entire workforce.Employees were pushed by managers to take advantage of Kodak’s tuition assistance program, which paid for training, classes, college courses and obtaining advanced degrees. The company had no requirements for the education to be job-related or beneficial to Kodak.One janitor at Kodak in the ‘80s was named Gail Evans. She had been cleaning Building 326 on the corporate campus for a few years, until the company decided to shutter that office. Evans wasn’t fired.She was a valued asset, and all workers in the closed building found new jobs within Kodak. The ethos and corporate culture — give employees skills, then advance them where those skills are valuable — meant Evans wasn’t limited to janitorial work, or unskilled jobs.Kodak trained Evans to be a film-cutter, which is a skilled trade. She moved upward.Managers knew which parts of the business were growing or in high demand, and at the time Kodak was selling a lot of high end 70mm film and processing "theatrical prints" of Hollywood movies: a print is a copy of the film master cut into reels, which are sent to theaters and projected on the screen.They taught her, then advanced her to a position that utilized what she'd learned.While working full-time, Evans took night school classes (paid by Kodak) to learn how to create spreadsheets using the curious new devices called “personal computers” that were starting to show up in accounting and distribution in big companies.Her manager — following the corporate culture of engaged management and being proactive in advancing their employees’ — knew she was learning about PCs and spreadsheets, and asked Evans if she could teach other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory.She did, and when she graduated from (Kodak-sponsored) college in 1987, the company promoted her to join Kodak’s IT department.Evans new job was a career-track information technology professional — the company groomed employees at this level to develop the skills and knowledge they’d need as Kodak executives.The career track to the top of Kodak’s org chart wasn’t a pipe dream or an empty promise: it was the default assumption. Put in the time and effort, get promoted, develop skills, join the leadership. Duh.Within a decade, Gail Evans was named Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Eastman Kodak’s global operations. She eventually moved on to larger executive roles at even bigger companies, and by every measure lived the American Dream.Starting as a janitor and becoming CTO for one of the biggest companies in the world was only possible because Kodak paid her well, provided generous benefits, and (most importantly) fostered a culture where managers had an obligation to move people upward and train them so they had the skills to succeed.Kodak's management style is all but forgotten in corporate America today: managers were trained to identify opportunities for their employees; recognize under-utilized skills and find ways to utilize them; and open doors to everyone.Once upon a time, a janitor could become a film-cutter if given the chance and training under good managers. And a film-cutter could learn to operate corporate IT systems, which means in time they could be the person in charge of an entire corporate IT division.A janitor doesn't become CTO by force of will, and this isn't a natural career path. But when a company treats every employee with respect and promotes a culture of growth, opportunity and employees as investments, the path upward reveals itself: unskilled worker becomes skilled. Skilled becomes specialized. Specialized becomes professional. Professional become executive and a leader is made.(The story above owes much to this excellent article in the New York Times: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now)Kodak was one of the biggest companies in the world 35 years ago.Today, its equivalent is Apple. Apple dominates the smallish Bay Area city of Cupertino, CA, where its HQ has been since the beginning. Apple pays its professionals well, and provides stock options to many worth a ton.But while many businesses and non-Apple employees inside Cupertino depend on Apple and Apple employees to earn a living, Apple has very little civic integration with Cupertino and the city’s leaders.Steve Jobs famously appeared before the Cupertino City Council, where he presented early concepts for the company’s planned giant ‘Ring’ HQ expansion. Jobs described the wonders of the $5 billion expansion, which covers 175 acres of Cupertino.When Jobs finished, a traffic consultant for Cupertino warned that the impact on traffic from 12,000 employees hadn’t been considered by Apple’s architects. He predicted catastrophic traffic jams, dangerous burdens on the adjacent Highway 280 on-ramps, and heavy burdens on the city infrastructure that would require issuance of bonds or higher taxes to cover.The City Council told Jobs that Apple needed to fix the traffic problems and present them with a revised design before the city would approve it.Steve Jobs, in his last public appearance before his death, told the City Council that if Cupertino didn’t like his building, Apple would leave Cupertino and find a city that did.Cupertino dropped the matter, and taxpayers will bear the burden of repairing city infrastructure that Apple could have preserved by changing the configuration of its employee parking lots. Steve Jobs said no. Apple, unlike Kodak, saw its power and influence in their HQ city as a weapon: give us what we want, or lose everything.This hardball mindset may make Apple a trillion dollar company, but nobody will be telling stories 40 years from now about Apple's legendary civic involvement. And they won't have any stories about janitors becoming chief executives. Here's why:Janitorial staff at Apple actually earn the same as Kodak’s janitors did, $16.10 an hour. But janitorial services are contracted through an outside company, so janitors aren’t Apple employees.Apple awards the service contract to the lowest bidder, so the company that employs Apple’s janitors offers them no vacations, no vacation pay, no tuition reimbursement, no chance for opportunities within Apple, and absolutely no job security.They are invisible, replaceable and an expense to be minimized. If Apple managers aren't even aware of janitors as individual people, they aren't spending any time finding them new opportunities.The janitors, to be fair, do have a path to higher pay: Those who work a certain number of hours and miss zero shifts will eventually qualify for their pay to jump from $16.10 to $16.60 per hour.That's an advancement horizon of 50 cents. Before taxes. Just don't get sick or miss your bus, and the world is your janitorial oyster.

Truthfully… not very often.I won’t say that I’ve never dealt with problems because I’ve had problems at work and they weren’t fun.On the whole though, I’m fairly lucky (and privileged.) My current company is so damn inclusive that part of their recruiting page calls out the fact that they offer transgender inclusive healthcare benefits (and, amusingly / embarrassingly, currently has a picture of me right next to that statement.)No employer is perfect and even in my current highly supportive environment I’ve had a few unpleasant experiences when I’m interacting with the general public on business, but in general, my day to day life doesn’t include harassment and bigotry at work.I’m lucky. Oh, I was picky about where I was willing to work and I only interviewed with companies that I knew could provide a welcoming environment, but it’s a mark of privilege that I could be picky that way. I live in a major West Coast city, I work in a generally progressive industry and somewhere between 30% and 50% of the team I’m on are LGBT (depending on how you examine the org chart.)I have it easy. Plenty of trans people don’t. A sad reality is that in many places, a person can legally be fired for being transgender. In many cases, there are no policies in place to help a transgender person transition at work and the process can become unnecessarily difficult or impossible because the people you depend on at work to take care of workplace issues may themselves have deeply rooted prejudice and bias against transgender people.So, for me, it isn’t something I face often. When I do, these days, it always comes from the public rather than fellow employees. It hasn’t always been that way and not every employer has been amazing, but I’ve gotten through what I sincerely hope is the worst of it.

I'm surprised that (unless I missed it) nobody has mentioned what must be the most famous "devious military strategy" of all time: The Trojan Horse. (We all know the story, so no need to repeat it here.)To this day, the term "Trojan Horse" is still used, figuratively, to refer to any thing, person, or plan that lulls the enemy (or corporate or personal adversary!) into complacency, then suddenly and horrifyingly turns out to be a devastating weapon that destroys him from within his own city's walls/org chart/personal circle of friends or family, etc.A lying politician who takes positions and cynically makes promises he has no intention of keeping and then stabs the voters who elected him in the back by doing the opposite once he's safely in office might be an all-too-common modern day example of a 'Trojan Horse,' too.