Damned Yankees Are Everywhere



The thought occurred to me when I wasn’t able to sleep last night (due to intense abdominal pain brought on by an insane amount of sit-ups) that you find the New York Yankees all over the place. I would characterize a Yankee organization as having the following characteristics:

· Very good at what they do, if not the best
· Arrogant
· Lacking in sense of humor
· Powerful
· Sometimes Wealthy/Costly
· Sometimes Monolithic

Accenture consulting are the Yankees of business. They are uniformly intelligent, driven, arrogant, and almost inhuman in their lacking of a sense of humor. They are one of the biggest, most powerful consulting organizations in the world, and they are obscenely expensive, billing out their recent college grads at $80/hour.

Microsoft, of course, are the Yankees of software. The only thing differentiating Microsoft from Apple or Google is the fact that the latter two have a sense of humor, and do not come across nearly as arrogant.

Is there something Archetypical or mythic about these qualities? Could you have an organization of bad guys in a book or movie that didn’t have these characteristics? You have the Death Star, the Matrix, the Borg collective, the Firm, and Big Brother, the biggest Yankee of ‘em all.

Who are your Yankees?

-M