Corporate Culture becomes Legend(ary)

Legend: a story from the past that is believed by many people but cannot be proved to be true.

When I was trained to be a Cabela's Outfitter, the main focus of the first days of training was my indoctrination into their corporate culture.  I must admit, I was impressed with the core values, the mission statement, the commitment to excellence, and the diversity and inclusion philosophy statement in particular.  I wanted to be a part of that. 

Unfortunately, the reality on the floor was pretty much diametrically opposed from the ideals promised by the corporate culture. Our GM could talk passionately about the "good old days" when the culture was real and active, but I think he might have quit partly because he knew it wasn't real anymore. The next GM came from Sam's Club. She can seamlessly cram the corporate goals of retail profitability and visa club card down our throats, while espousing the legendary corporate culture - and the door keeps revolving.

The latest facet of Cabela's corporate culture is their "It's in your Nature" campaign.  It's brilliant. It's innovative. It's different. It meshes well with their new stitched in products. It's just unfortunate that most of the employees at Cabela's can't afford the new stitched in products and don't have much time to spend in the outdoors because they have "open availability" and spend most of their waking hours in the store.

In short, Cabela's started out with passion, dreams and a vision that was probably a shared culture for a period of time. But like many successful business ventures, once a business reaches a certain size, the culture becomes legend. Cabela's even uses the word "Legendary" to describe so many of their products that the word has lost all meaning... and that is my point.