Avantages
- A solid majority of the team consisted of warm, genuine, brilliant people who I am happy to have gotten to know. - In the right packaging, the core of the instrument technology is fascinating and fun.
Inconvénients
You can meticulously gather the greatest sandwich ingredients in the world, but if there is a rock at the center you will still break your teeth. This is the ROLI conundrum: it is a bus full of intelligent people being driven by a CEO who misinterprets hubris for leadership. It is the poster child for "has great potential." Maybe the greatest tragedy of all is that there is a parallel universe where ROLI instruments are thriving in a smaller, specialized market. Where senior leadership had opted for foresight and realism, rather than fever dreams salivating over Forbes and black turtlenecks. During my time at ROLI, it was a festival of dichotomy. An overly loud emphasis on work-life balance, while expecting many team members to do the work of two, even three employees without proper compensation. Marketing campaigns that promised non-existent functionality while hardware teams behind the scenes tore out their hair trying to solve paradoxical complications at the drop of a hat. The list goes on. The root of dysfunction stems from the CEO and the small band of sycophantic followers he has fully indoctrinated into his deafening echo-chamber. He and his acolytes singlehandedly sow the chaos that tears at the insides of the organization. Every split-second, haphazard decision. Every failed promise to employees and customers. Every question dodged. Every infantilizing corporate acronym to sum up an initiative that coils up and dies within three months of its birth. The examples are innumerable and inexcusable. Again and again, I watched the gray, stifling look of realization steadily creep over new employees once they realized these were the people with their hands on the steering wheel. Many of these new recruits left because of it. Others were indoctrinated themselves. I'm not sure which is the greater tragedy. At the end of the day, I feel more sadness than frustration. The ROLI dream was alive when I first joined, and I had front row seats to watch it systematically beaten with a stick until I decided that that was enough for me. If I learned anything from my time at ROLI, it was two things: 1) Good coworkers can make help make light of even the most dysfunctional leadership. For a time, at least. and 2) Narcissists are not good bus drivers.