Gerrymandering in Corporates

Story: Sandeep Kumar

Have you ever wondered how the no. of seats can vary drastically in a country’s election in-spite of having comparable vote share for two parties? More than that do you know that it can be well-framed to come up to this type of situation. Gerrymandering is a practice intended to manipulate the boundaries of constituencies in order to get an undue advantage for a party over the other.

With the advent of data, a party in power can manipulate the boundaries to strategically get an advantage to it. So, on the surface, everything looks transparent, but only the keen observers can understand the issue.

Let me draw an analogy to this. Employees in authority play their cards strategically in order to get undue advantages. Of course, this game is played in a different way. Be it a Directors’ meeting or a team meeting, corporate decisions are greatly affected by personal propaganda. Officially or unofficially, many meetings conclude based on the no. of people staying in favor of a strategy. So, various stakeholders safeguard their personal interests by changing key decisions in these strategic meetings. As a result, the stakeholders are generally divided into various cartels based on the overlap in their personal interests. As this becomes more intense, all the decisions become skewed. More than what is important for the company, the discussions, and arguments are defined based on these personal interests. That is how I feel companies lose track of their own goals and lose relevance to the trend.

Thoughts?