Found this book at my local bookstore, and thought the "Welcome to the Company" speech was quite inspiring and thought I'd share it. It was taken from an un-named company and has been anonymized by using the generic Widgets Inc.

Hello, my name is William C. Dukenfield.

 

Welcome to your first day at Widgets Inc. As many of you identify as millennial, it is my job to align your expectations with the reality of our culture here at Widgets Inc.

Firstly, you can ditch the entitled mentality and realize that there is no such thing as a millennial. We have employees here from 20 to 65. If you’re 25 you have enthusiasm and no experience, if you’re 60 you have experience but you don’t have all the answers; things change. There’s a good chance that over the next few years you’ll be able to learn from each other.

 

You’re not special. There are no participation ribbons.

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Our goal is to treat you fairly, as adults. You will not get a balloon and cake on your birthday. For god’s sake, you’re not six years old anymore. Grow up. We don’t have slides, ping pong tables, nap rooms, a kegerator or karaoke machines. No one from HR is going to ask you about your dreams for the future. Frankly we don’t care. You are an employee, not a family member.

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You will be treated with respect and honesty. I’m sure in the past you’ve worked for companies that espouse transparency but have been translucent at best with a complete opacity shrouding salaries. The common lie is that your salary is private. The only reason the other companies value your “privacy” so much is so they can screw some people by paying them less than they’re worth. Often it’s the women and people of colour that are most disadvantaged by these policies. That is a fundamental flaw and we have addressed it.

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You’ll find everyone’s salary on the internal website. We believe you are being paid fairly. If you disagree you can either prove to us that your value is higher, or you can quit. Everyone is replaceable.

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We expect you to work for 8 hours. Not surf the web looking for shoes or cat memes. Not messaging your friends. Not chatting about sports or your new apartment. If you find that you can complete all of the things that are required of you in six hours, ask for more responsibility and a higher salary. Do not waste my time ... or your life.

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On the other hand, there is no overtime expected or tolerated. If you have to work more than eight hours to do your job there are only three possible reasons. One, you aren’t competent, and you will be fired. Two, your manager doesn’t understand the task they have assigned, and you need to communicate with your manager to align their expectations with your capacity. (However, if someone else has been given the same task and completed it in the allotted time - see number One.) Three, you don’t know how to manage your time. That is a training matter and we will train you as it is our best interest to make sure you are able to do your job.

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No manager is allowed to ask for unpaid overtime. That is theft, plain and simple. That isn’t to say that you’ll never be asked to stay late for an event, or product launch or extraordinary meeting. You will. Life sucks. To compensate, however, you will be instructed to come in late the next day.

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All meetings will have the total cost per hour written on the whiteboard at the beginning of the meeting. This is to ensure that the three people making $60,000 per year chatting in a room are cognizant that their meeting has a combined opportunity and real cost to the company $180 per hour, not including benefits and there had better be a damn good reason to be meeting.

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Speaking of meetings. Over the decades there have been several attempts to package common sense into methodologies with fancy names and ridiculous consultancy fees.  Matrix Management, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, and Management by Walking Around are the progenitors of the current nonsense Lean Agile Scrum Sprint. Historically, as each of these fads gets close to the zenith, the consultants realize that there is no more money to be made, and the “most important advance in business methodology” gets derided as a last week's bird cage paper just as the new methodology is trotted out. In case you’re wondering; Agile has jumped the shark.

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We don’t have a Workflow Optimization Manager, or a Scrum Master, or a Matrix Mavin. Not at Widgets Inc. You will not spend hours a week listening to the entire staff drone on about how they are “killing it” or “moving the needle” or “making an impact” when in fact they are simply doing their job. You won’t be required to write snippets on a whiteboard so that you can later cross them off in front of your colleagues to prove that you are actually, in fact, doing your job. In short, you won’t be interrupted from doing your job to go to a meeting to talk about doing your job. If you’re looking for external validation through high fives and group hugs, you’ve come to the wrong place.

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We don’t have a mission statement. We make widgets. We do it as efficiently as possible so that we can make enough money to pay you a salary. Any company that uses words like “empower” “accelerate” and “innovation” in their mission statements are lying to you. (And parenthetically, probably spent weeks of meetings to come up with something everyone could agree on.) Don’t kid yourself. Every single company’s mission is to make money. You’re lucky if you get to work in a place with people you like and respect and doubly lucky if you get to make the world a better place at the same time.

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Again, welcome to Widgets Inc. Your desk is over there. Get to work.