In the popular wisdom of my country, Senegal, there’s a Ouolof saying “lou soti am borom” which means that as soon as a work is crowned with success, there are always impostors who claim to be the authors, instead of the true owner, the one who made it a success. Of course they know they want to reap what they didn’t sow, they know they’re lying, they know they didn’t sow the seed.

I can only use my christian spiritual references on this question, since our Holy Book expresses the Creator’s thought “I have engraved my law in their hearts”. This is to say that everyone has common sense, a sense of Truth. Even the most perverse among us, the jackals lurking behind the coffee machine in the meeting room corridor, even they hear the inner voice of their conscience. They know that this plump ear of corn shining in the sun didn’t appear ex nihilo. It took a lot of digging, planting, watering, monitoring and clearing, and a lot of hard work to get from seed to cob.

So the new self-proclaimed owner can only use felony, cheating, deceit and their cousins sneakiness and hypocrisy to try and monopolize this ear of corn. And myself, who sowed it, sometimes only have time to catch a few seeds at best before those voracious vultures get their hands on the spoils.

And those who read my CV afterwards almost always give me the same reproach, sometimes half-heartedly. I’m probably fickle, inconsistent, unstable. Why change jobs so often, almost every two years? Because that’s the time it takes to turn the seed into ears of corn and watch the hungry birds of prey swoop in to clear us out manu militari.

So what? Why not defend your steak (exactly the phrase used by one of my mentors). We have to fight for what’s ours, don’t we? So if I’m not unstable and consort, then at the very least I’m a weakling, a coward?

Not at all, because in my day-to-day life I’ve found that I’m not lacking in courage. Sometimes at the risk of my own life. I know from personal experience that I lack neither strength nor courage!

An arsene oudini for a neighbor

But if I’m not lacking in courage, what’s the explanation for this renunciation? I’ll give you two examples that I think are relevant.

The first is an absolutely brilliant Japanese film about the end of the Samurai. In the final scene, the Samurai decide to die as warriors, on the battlefield, rather than submit to the new imperial order. We see hyper-trained warriors, experts in all the martial arts, precision machines being shot like rabbits on the hunt by a small group of soldiers supervised by the British, simply because the latter had a machine gun, revolutionary at the time. All it takes is one small, novice and fairly stupid soldier, whose only talent is knowing how to point a gun in one direction and turn a crank, to wipe out dozens of superb, haughty Samurai mounted on breathtakingly beautiful horses. These Samurai were the best of the best in the art of warfare, but… the warfare of BEFORE. This machine gun is a game-changer, allowing the idiot to get the upper hand, who would otherwise have been chopped to pieces.

The second example can be taken from everyday life. If armed burglars manage to break into my house in the middle of the night and point their revolver at me, what should I do? Is it wiser to give them the money and jewelry they want, or to shoot myself in the head while playing the hero? It’s not for lack of courage that you hand over your possessions to burglars, but for intelligence. Because the gun in his hand creates a context where so-called recklessness has little to do with Courage and everything to do with Stupidity. I’m also well aware that if the gangster doesn’t execute me like common poultry, he’s still going to leave the bed, the wardrobe, the furniture and so on. He’ll take the light valuables and the TV, but he’ll leave me plenty of things simply because he can’t take them with him. And so I know that with what I have left and my creative genius, I can start again… And I choose to live!

A little kingdom of Denmark in codir

These two examples show that when a toxic colleague in the company comes to plunder the fruits of my labor and I don’t defend him, it’s because he often uses weapons that I simply don’t have. Not because I don’t know how to find and use these weapons, but because I forbid myself to do so! And these weapons of a brigand without morals leave me powerless to find an appropriate response.

That’s my business story, and that of so many others. Maybe we simply grew up in a family microcosm or a cozy little cocoon or a closed environment where we didn’t have to secrete from childhood those toxic tactics that often enable us to survive in the workplace. So we arrive like flowers, naive and a little silly, with our talent and skills as our only weapons, full of innovative ideas, projects and optimism. We try to be “positive”, to be fair to everyone, to be useful to everyone. Our good intentions under our arms, utopia slung over our shoulders, we try to earn our position, our salary, our benefits. And soon we’re being pummeled by the long-toothed sharks, the vampires of the company, the peerless reclaimers of our neighbor’s work, who leave no room for their venom to pass over and over again for our slow, gentle death. Of course, every morning these vampires give me “my brother” and “my dear friend”, and every night I wonder how stupid they must be to think I can’t see through their duplicity…

You can read the rest of this article in our next fortnightly issue.