How Junkyard Dogs Can Bring About Real Change in the Corporate Landscape

Despite my corporate background, for most of my career I have been a nonconformist, a rebel against the idea of being relegated to the kind of cultural and behavioral box in which big companies invariably attempt to confine those who work for them. For nearly a decade, I wrestled with the protocols and procedures that corporate employees are expected to adhere to without question. Eventually I moved on, but while I was there, everyone around me always challenged my restlessness and dissatisfaction, and was quite skeptical that the entrenched ways, means and constraints of the Big Corporation could be changed by me or anyone else.

Ultimately, however, I would come to realize that these same objectives could be achieved by going into a different business – one that made it quite possible to effectuate positive change, only this time from the outside. While consulting was the conventional way it might be categorized, what I became in reality was a junkyard dog – that is to say, someone who had strayed from the security of the big corporation ,who knew his way around its terrain quite well and knew how to be very resourceful, but was no longer “owned” by an employer.

In fact, I found that when many people leave big corporations to start their own businesses, they are in a position to offer services or functions to the big guys that they couldn’t possibly have performed while in their employ.

And when these junkyard dogs come together in teams, the results can be are magical -- like ours managed to achieve with Natural Pet Nutrition.

Big corporations, we’ve discovered, are also willing to pay big dollars to infuse slow or lagging divisions with some of that junkyard dog spirit, often managing to accelerate their profitability in the process.

Increasingly, we are seeing junkyard dog types that have banded together having a considerable impact on the corporate culture -- by successfully introducing a certain restless creativity and disruptive attitude that few ‘insiders’ would be in a position to foster.

Please send me your own junkyard dog saga.