My honest message to managers looking to contribute at APCON: keep looking! Heed the warnings posted on this site. If you have experiences or skills in leadership that you think you can apply at APCON, you are wrong. If you think you can be a positive instigator of cultural change, you will be disappointed. You may have limited success for a time in shielding your direct reports from the dysfunctional company leadership, but it is not worth the toll it will take on your sanity or stress-levels.
Here are the biggest cons at APCON:
__No Checks or Balances__
APCON is a one-man show, owned and led solely by the CEO. There is no board of directors, no means of accountability. The leadership team under him executes his orders but because of the CEO’s method of management, they will not challenge him or his decisions. Leading from a place of absolute power means that the strongest cultural truth at the company is that you are either under his radar (lucky you), on his good side (enjoy it while it lasts), or on his bad side (don’t let the door hit you on the way out). The impact of this on decision-making is tragic.
__CEO has to be Managed__
The CEO will disagree with anything and everything. If you are trying to present information to him, there will definitely be either too much or too little text on each slide, and the meeting will devolve into side-squabbles and nit-picks until it is over. He is a perfectionist without a sense of priority. For him, every hill is worth dying on. As a result his leadership team spends much of its time figuring out how to manage him in order to get actual deliverables into the hands of customers. It is a remarkable waste of energy.
__Lack of Cross-Org Transparency__
Attempts to communicate outside of the chain of command are discouraged. If you are in an org (Marketing, Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Support) and communicate across to another org about even simple things, the CEO will shut it down. His approach to leading different groups is to be the sole point of visibility across multiple silos. This leads to a company that can never be greater than the sum of its parts.
__Disregard for Ideas__
There is a general culture of all ideas flowing up to the CEO for approval. Unfortunately, he is where good ideas go to die. In one case I had an excellent engineer write up information about a patent that we could apply for. The CEO ignored it, it was brought up again, the CEO ignored it again. In another instance, I had an idea for a way to resource a project which had some difficult constraints. I sent some details and a request to discuss in person, but it was ignored. This kills creativity and lateral thinking.
__Command and Control Leadership__
The only leadership that is supported is command/control. If you are a leader that prefers a bottom-up approach where you value the expertise of individual contributors, you will not last. A healthy company knows that the center of gravity for technical knowledge comes from ICs; APCON’s center of gravity is the CEO’s knowledge, which is intended to trickle-down to every level. Highly unsustainable.
__Trust Issues__
The CEO does not trust anyone within his company. This is apparent in IT policies and weekly reporting. Unfortunately it has led to an entire leadership team of “survivors”, who divert a large portion of their energy to self-defense. Your best strategy is to stay off of his radar and stay out of his chair in the conference room (yes, it truly is that petty). The problem is that if everyone in leadership is so scared of failure, so scared of the CEO, then they can never come together to solve real problems. Eventually it is every person for themselves, which is a tragedy to witness.
__Financial Limitations__
I never saw a trace of a budget within APCON. CEO approval is necessary for almost any purchase, which means building corporate infrastructure (like paying for Slack) does not happen. Rewards for major deliverables are bagels. Holiday parties are lunchtime potlucks. Salaries are low, and there is no thought given to salary bands for titles. This lack of forethought about salaries has resulted in a general practice of hiring interns or junior developer/engineers and using them until they realize they can do better elsewhere. Career development is not a goal at APCON.
