Rankism not allowed here

Written by Andrew

One of the founding pillars of Okashi Studios is the simple idea that every employee's company position denotes a role, and has no connotations of superiority or rank. Every staff member is valuable to the company for their expertise in one or more of the relevant problem domains (those that end up not fitting this description are not kept around for very long), and therefore should be treated with the same respect. I feel that is a rather important distinction, and in particular, is rife with the danger of degrading into lip service.

However, I didn't start this company just to be like anyone else out there. To me, it wasn't worth doing unless I can do something meaningful, from a "bigger" perspective. This game that we're producing...there's no technical wonder, or any "magic" going on. It's not about that. It's about trying to successfully put out a good product, while maintaining the most positive culture I can come up with, within my personal moral and ethical ruleset (and a big part of that ruleset involves treating everybody as an equal, socially and intellectually). The two go hand in hand. If I can't do both, I wouldn't have bothered doing anything in the first place.

The interesting thing about this, though, was something that occurred about two weeks ago, on the drive home from the office. I was listening to NPR, as usual (it's about the only thing I listen to these days, other than my anime music collection and the Shira OKa soundtrack). That day, there was an interview with a Robert Fuller, and that was the first time I heard the term "rankism".

To my surprise, there was an existing term that completely described my sentiments on the issue. Here's the wikipedia entry on rankism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism. Basically, rankism (of which sexism and racism are a subset) is when a person discriminates against another based on perceived relative rank. Basically, it's thinking that you're somehow "better" than someone else, and discriminating against or exploiting that person (now you can see why sexism and racism are just special cases of rankism).

I've worked at many companies in the past, both big and small. Fortunately, I've been lucky enough to have worked at places where rankism wasn't very prevalent. Nevertheless, there's the occasional "bad egg"...the self-important individual who pulls rank and gets indirectly rewarded for it because nobody thinks that something bad just happened.

Of course, part of my selection process for employment has always been to refuse to work at any place where I see this sort of thing going on. Then again, I'm in a lucky position where I can pick and choose my jobs, more or less. There are plenty of people (I daresay, the vast majority of people) who are not in a position to pick and choose.

Working with clients at other companies, however, I saw a different story. There were these two companies in particular whom I've worked with in the past (I won't mention their names, of course). When I set foot in their office, there was something oddly oppressive in the air. I felt extremely uncomfortable.

After a while, I realised what it was. The realisation was of such a profound nature that it changed me, irrevocably, forever.

I was around a bunch of engineers, and an administrative assistant came by to deliver something. But the administrative assistant might as well have been invisible. Head bowed down, eyes downcast... and not a word from the engineers around me. He just came and left silently. The engineers, preoccupied by their own smalltalk, didn't even give the administrative assistant a cursory glance. He was invisible, and this was accepted by both sides.

Later on, a bunch of people who I later found out were managerial and executives, happened to come by...and the roles were suddenly reversed. We were invisible. Heads came down, eyes downcast (it looked very much to be a reflexive reaction). I looked up and smiled a friendly smile, as I usually do in order to appear approachable...and I was sure that I was seen. But they just walked by, without even an acknowledging glance.

Okay, maybe they were really busy. I don't know. But I felt this vibe...and I found myself wanting to leave as soon as I was able. I did not want to be there. It felt very wrong.

I like to think that, at least in the U.S., these cases were pretty extreme. But I don't have enough life experience under my belt to make that call.

And maybe it was these incidents that made me, in some unconscious sort of way, want to build a company where a specific founding pillar was to never have this sort of thing happen to anyone, ever. Maybe I'm naive that way. But I'm a person driven by principles. And this is what my principles, and conscience, tell me is the right thing to do.

And for those with a short attention span (though I can't imagine they would have made it this far into my blog entry), here's a little litany that I try very hard to live by:

"You can tell how nice somebody is not by how they treat their friends...but by how they treat complete strangers."