The CGI dream and what to make of it

This morning I’m writing you from my hotel in Madrid, we flew last night from Heathrow, we had a grand time with our UK staff. All I can say is this: Glenfiddich 50 years. But man, how am I going to continue partying last this for another 4 weeks? Hopefully I can sell CGI before the annual tour ends.

Speaking of CGI, I want to address today something that is very dear to me. The Dream.

Any large corporation has its fair share of bullshit when it comes to mission statements and objectives. We at CGI do actually more than that, because we have a dream. Of course the content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, so you must take our dream at face value. Our dream statement goes like this:

"To create an environment in which we enjoy working together and, as owners, contribute to building a company we can be proud of."

We carefully explain what you can expect from our dream in a corporate statement:

It goes without saying that creating this type of environment is particularly challenging in consulting companies such as ours. Personnel generally work at client locations, making it difficult to develop a sense of belonging through a shared workplace. There is the risk of certain people being "forgotten" when they spend long periods at a client site, and this risk is amplified when these individuals have few CGI colleagues working on the same engagement.

The thing is, being forgotten is not a risk, it is an absolute certainty. Don't take this in a personal way, but we really don’t want to hear about you as a person, all we care is about is your billable rate. Once we know your rate and you’re tagged on a project (preferably for years), our internal processes and forms take care of you much like Neo’s body is lifted by snake-like creatures at the end of The Matrix Revolution. You may be human, but a corporation is not and never will be, so by definition any effort trying to prove the contrary is doomed to fail.

Problem is, this dream thing was put forward years ago when CGI was still a small company and Serge entertained the romantic idea of a “human” company. Since then we grew considerably, middle management happened and the natural instinct to kill anything fun and human was too overwhelming to resist. Creative people with initiative are always pushed out by stiff technocrats, it’s the corporate Circle of Life. Some people say this stage is the death of an organization, I say it’s the coming of age – you grow out of childhood one day or another and you become an adult and you start filling forms. And adults know their dreams are just fantasies.

Yet, I like to talk about the dream during the annual tour because it’s a powerful way to escape hard questions. If someone asks me about putting less pressure on sales and more on trying to keep on own people, I always start a long spiel on CGI dream. Once people are flooded with wishful thinking they become more hesitant in confronting me.