The next time you’re sitting through a company-wide meeting, half-listening to a leader drone on about updates or product launches (and hoping they don’t announce layoffs or budget cuts), remember this: at least they’re not rapping.
That’s what happened at Canva Create, a summit held in Los Angeles last week, in honor of Canva, a graphic design company known for helping non-designers produce good-enough flyers to advertise a yard sale or middle school talent show. In LA, Melanie Perkins, co-founder of the $40bn Australian brand, spoke to attendees about “brand-building, maintaining a strong company culture and scaling operations”, per Variety. (Something she knows a lot about: Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, who also spoke at the summit, is an investor and board member of the platform.)
After run-of-the-mill talks and discussions, the team decided to put on a show. Two presenters – and a cast of backup breakdancers, all of whom were most certainly regretting their respective life paths in the moment – performed a “rap battle” that they used to describe updates the tech company has made to the design app.
Sample bars included: “You can redesign your work / Canva got that glow up / We redesign errything / From the floor up.” On the topic of AI, which is known to steal art from actual human workers, one performer dropped: “We don’t train on your work without your permission / Safe and securrrrrr if that’s what you’re wishing.”
I will never understand why these corporations spend big bucks on this cringe. I’ve been to one such event and I was shocked. What’s worse is that long-serving people said you had to act as if you were enjoying it or else you’d hear from your manager afterwards. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged men at a sales conference shaking their hips and pretending to enjoy a cheesy rap battle. What an utterly soul crushing, suicidal-thought-inducing experience. I can’t tell if senior management actually believes that this sort of corporate cringe is inspiring, or if they do it purposely to crush your soul and make you into a servile automaton. Are they out of touch or is it an Orwellian power move?
Why not both?
Managers are not smarter or better educated than other people.
Also, many have inflated fragile egos, and feel less worthy than those who do “the real job” (the workers) and feel the need to do stuff so they feel they are doing stuff too.
Or so I believe. It’s so rarely about real productivity and so often about some sort of control. To control something they don’t understand (I’m in software development).
Sometimes the manager/foreman/supervisor is just the team member who is willing to be that interface between the frontline workers and senior management. The best middle managers are those who can thread that needle to the satisfaction of both groups.
I agree with you thst managers shouldn’t consider themselves smarter than anyone else. Quite the opposite. Particularly when managing professionals or others with extensive knowledge, I’m a big believer in the concept of servant leadership. That’s where you lead by inspiring the group to come up with ideas and then shaping, coordinating, and supporting those ideas through to a successful outcome.
My money is on Orwellian power move…
Management get to say they’re doing big fun events for morale etc, but the employees can’t make it look like they did a bad job of it (i.e. did not make the party entertaining).