left/right cults (was re: Lefty Despair)

Kendall Clark kendall at monkeyfist.com
Mon Sep 23 19:09:00 PDT 2002


On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 08:04:59PM -0500, Peter K. wrote:
> >The Andersen people -- however cultish they may have been -- seemed to
> >universally scorn *this* level of musically-reinforced cultus.
> >
> >So it seems a pretty relative thing.
> >
> >Kendall Clark
> >(Not an Andersen employee, just married to one)
>
> Ooops! Notice how I said "often" and didn't include all
> Andersen people under that rubric.

Sure, generalizations about 80,000+ people are suspicious. I noticed variations in the degree to which Andersen employees bought into the whole "we're just a team" ideology, variations by both geographic area (Dallas seemed less "team" than Chicago, for example) and by position in the corporate structure, which is probably pretty typical.

I've had friends who
> worked there which is how I gained first-hand knowledge of
> corporate booster culture and remember Chicago was
> Andersen headquarters. The snide tone might have been
> my inner anarchist talking.

No, I agree re: Chicago; their boosterism was a well-known fact about Andersen corporate culture, at least as Dallas/Denver/LA/Seattle understood it.

I was really just looking for an excuse to ridicule KPMG paying money -- reportedly a lot of it -- for such an incredibly stupid song, then requiring people to listen to it at the start of meetings, etc. That always made me wonder why they'd want as employees people dumb enough to be taken in by such inanity.

Kendall



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