Not every successful corporation has cultish qualities, but there are plenty of examples of these tendencies from companies that are household names. There’s Kraft’s refusal to let employees pack rival companies’ food products in their lunch. There’s Zappos’s whole-hog adoption of holacracy (a faddish new management style where there are no managers) and bold proclamation that those who aren’t on board with this regime should start looking for new jobs ASAP. There’s last year’s brouhaha over Facebook and Apple footing the bill for egg freezing for female employees, so that they could put off child-bearing in favor of career productivity. There’s a now defunct internal Wiki that discussed how to live (somewhat) comfortably on-site at the Googleplex for those who can’t separate themselves from their jobs. And then there’s the recent motherlode, a damning New York Times piece on Amazon’s workplace culture. In shades of Stockholm Syndrome, a former executive quoted in the article describes it as “the greatest place I hate to work.”
Of course, framing corporations as cults isn’t a particularly groundbreaking criticism. Search almost any talked-about company plus the word ‘cult’ and you’ll return results ranging from reasoned think pieces to drive-bys from disgruntled employees. Lululemon has been critiqued for being cult-like for years. Ditto, Walmart. A 2001 piece from The Economist describes the company’s Saturday morning meetings as “part evangelical revival, part Oscars, part Broadway show.” Even Amazon’s culture was being savaged long before the NYT weighed in, with a Seattle Weekly first-person piece that initialy ran in 1998 with the headline How I “escaped” from Amazon.cult.
Before .....and after!
Why do cult-like companies thrive in our current culture? At their most basic level, just like actual cults, they feed a need for order, acceptance, belonging, self-improvement and structure. With religious affiliation and participation rates on the decline in the US and levels of civic engagement waning, we’re looking for something greater than ourselves to believe in and strong, powerful corporate cultures provide that. With strict standards of conduct and clear success criteria, they give us a way of measuring our effort and, by extension, our worth. We know what makes a “good” employee (or disciple) and can understand what we need to do to be deemed “good,” which is a powerful, validating lure in a time when even the highest achievers among us feel a gnawing sense of inadequacy and self-doubt. The sacrifice entailed to get there might be unpleasant or harrowing, but the reward is often commensurate with the effort to be among the chosen few. As Noam Schieber writes in the NYT about the culture of elite law firms:
“The legal profession, one of the most brutal when it comes to pace and time commitment, illuminates the economic logic of a system where a large initial cohort of workers is gradually culled until only a small fraction are left. This small fraction then has access to the enormous wealth and prestige that survivors in this ultimate reality show are granted.”
