Corporate Bullying

How many times have we heard about big companies intimidating upcoming small innovative companies? In most cases big companies are afraid that new players enter the market and take a significant piece of their market share. It doesn't happen all the time since bigger players usually brush-off start-up, but there are instances that it does happen. When it does happen the bigger player ends up purchasing the small start-up for its business potential. However there are instances where upcoming innovative companies grow so fast and influential that it ends up purchasing the bigger player. This is true in the case of companies like Smart Communications or J.P. Morgan.

But before any of this acquisition or merger happens there a few things happening in the background which I call "Corporate Bullying". In the workplace corporate bullying is a term use when a company's management force its employees to submit to its rule. However outside the workplace this means something else. What does this exactly mean? The definition is simple really, Corporate Bullying is a tactic bigger companies apply to intimidate and pressure smaller companies. Such tactics are put into effect to pressure small innovative companies to abandon its plans and strategies.

Let's take into consideration a small company, for this example one that I co-founded, AmanziTel. AmanziTel while starting receives a few nasty calls from bigger established players who feared that once AmanziTel gains ground it will eat-up their business. These bigger companies are afraid that a new, small and innovative company developing open source platforms and application will put them out of business. Such intimidation tactics results to issuing threats and bad publicity. However such tactics never worked and is only detrimental to the company who employs it.

Corporate bullying is a useless and expensive exercise since small innovative companies are founded to withstand the initial storm and geared for fast sustainable growth (Facebook, Google, and Red Hat). The publicity generated by Corporate Bullying gives the new player bigger exposure and fuels its growth (You Tube).

In retrospect Corporate Bullying is a move welcomed by small innovative players while bigger and more established entities keeps resorting to it. Like an old saying goes "You can't teach old dogs new tricks".