Stolen Ideas: The Corporate Edition
Wil Russoul, the Executive Director of the Main Street America program in Aberdeen, Washington, isn't the first person who stole and botched my ideas. I've talked about those experiences a bit on this site previously:
When I worked at Aflac in the Claims department, all of their incentives and rewards were either throwing gum drops into the crowd to get people to scramble for crumbs or incentivizing speed demons who cut corners.
I have absolutely no idea how the people consistently hitting 130 percent of productivity to leave early on Friday kept their jobs because I frequently cleaned up their messes and wasn't rewarded for it. In fact, my psycho bitch boss on the team I was on the longest frequently screwed me on comp time (crediting you for spending several hours on a claim with a thousand pages or whatever when I needed to get credit for 60 claims a day and that meant in practice averaging about ten claims an hour or six minutes per claim).
I'm slow anyway. I'm old than a lot of their employees and I'm visually impaired and medically handicapped, but I'm also thorough and they did quality checks and if you had poor quality scores, you could lose your job.
Quality checks are random samples of your work, so something like three to five claims a month of the roughly 1290 a month I needed to do to make quota and they probably didn't run extra checks if you were hitting 130 percent of quota and going home early every Friday. So I'm guessing the speed demons whose messes I cleaned up were getting by on luck and the giant glaring holes in the system.
Because I would get a claim where they had asked for a specific benefit repeatedly and neither got paid for it not got notified why. We were supposed to address ALL issues, so if someone ASKS for X benefit and you can't pay it, there should be a note on their check saying "Please submit blah blah blah so we can review for that benefit." and that wasn't happening.
So I fairly often spent substantial time on properly resolving a claim after people were threatening to lawyer up and sue or had actually had their lawyer submit something and made sure it got paid and appropriate communication happened if I needed more information or if that benefit wasn't payable.
In other words, I was keeping the company out of court over the SHIT work they REWARDING other employees for and being treated like a bad employee for it.
So we got a new manager who had a creative spelling for a name pronounced Michelle and i remember that because I had been going by my middle name of Michele with one L and got moved to a new team with an immediate boss named Michele with one L and there was no secondary boss ("lead") on this newly created team and HER boss was a newly promoted manager Creative Spelling Pronounced Michelle.
So after having jumped through hoops to get Michele Traylor on my cubicle, I asked them to label it Doreen Traylor again and began going by Doreen.
Aflac's REAL secret to success is that one of the three founding brothers was a lawyer, a profession famously characterized in Jurassic Park as blood sucking, and he was apparently talented at cutting deals with government entities for corporate welfare.
The Japanese government granted Aflac ten years with no competition from other foreign insurance companies. Shocking plot twist: That defacto initial monopoly means no one else can really get traction in the Japanese market.
And when I worked there, they were supposedly the largest civilian employer in Columbus, Georgia -- the huge military base is larger, but no one else was -- and Columbus was like the third largest city in the state of Georgia, after Atlanta and Augusta. So when Aflac wanted to expand and wasn't readily finding the real estate deal it wanted, it began looking at real estate in Alabama and VOILA! the consolidated government for the city of Columbus and Muscogee County offered them a sweet deal to stay there and bring more jobs to them.
I have no idea how much that was PERFORMATIVE con artistry, but they probably knew that making motions to go elsewhere would likely have local government concerned. So at a minimum, they didn't make it a SECRET they were considering going elsewhere.
So the reality is the business doesn't seem to be all that well run. And here is the context I was dealing with:
1. Every summer, low level leadership OPENLY comments on how the queues are slowly getting backed up like they do every single year. Nothing gets done about the growing backlog that everyone can predict if they have worked there at least a couple of years.
2. At some point in the fall, they start getting more phone calls and more repeat claims submissions and other metrics that are evidence customers are unhappy with turnaround times and they mandate overtime and if you have a problem with doing overtime at gunpoint, you are a bad employee.
I mean this is the Deep South. I would bet money the ancestors of the founders were slave owners less than a hundred years before the company was founded.
So I wrote a very thoughtful and detailed proposal suggesting that people with good quality should be allowed to work overtime at will during the summer or anytime the queues were backed up because some people would decline to work overtime because they had a second part-time job.
They are giving their employees no control over how much they make or when they work overtime and it's having all kinds of problematic consequences for the company and this never changed in the five years I worked there.
So I believe I sent this detailed proposal to Ms. Creative Spelling and she meets with me in private to discuss it and then twists it into something wholly unrelated to what I proposed and claims it's her idea -- and it was. It absolutely wasn't what I actually proposed and it was so terrible, I was mentally going "No, BITCH, it's fine you shafted me, because I don't WANT my name associated with THIS pile of MANURE."
I didn't get more money out of it because they never offered the opportunity to work overtime at will, but I did get two hours of extra time off a week or something like that. This ended up helping me keep my job while deathly ill and struggling to work a full-time job.
I'm not Christian, but I ended up feeling like the universe is looking out for me and doing right by me even though these putzes are NOT. So I kept my mouth shut and was all "Works for ME! IDIOTS! I don't expect to stay here long-term ANYWAY!"
My timeline isn't adding up. I may have emailed her before I changed teams. But I remember her name because of the stuff involving changing teams.
I'm fairly certain that people who steal ideas are fundamentally not very competent. Because I have yet to have someone take credit for my ideas and NOT botch the execution.
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