Canary in the Corporate Coal Mine
WARNING: Wackazoid Political Anger Begins at Work
No matter what you think of the current U.S. political craziness and ourtrageous behaviors by those wishing to be the leader of the free world… (me: horrified, ashamed, and scared shitless) …all the pundits who preach “No one saw this coming…” and “Who could have imagined?…” are the canaries in your corporate cubefarm mines.
Trumpnados will soon hit many businesses in ways that senior execs never saw coming.
Unless they… We… (all of us who impact leadership decisions in the corporate world…) wake the hell up.
The current rage some of the candidates are channeling is not really about politics, Washington, or our dysfunctional political parties. It’s the economy, stupid!
More accurately, zooming in on a person-by-person level, for those in the wide middle of the economic spectrum, it’s… Where the hell is my future? My American Dream? My opportunities and rewards for paying my dues and taking one(thousand) for the team?
Here is that rage explained, clarified, and bottom-lined for business leaders…
The Canary
There’s a brutal economic truth behind all the anger Trump is leveraging: The new disruptive era’s Productivity/Wage Gap.
Historically, for the masses in the middle, wages and access to opportunities have parallel-tracked productivity. (Foundation of the Dream Thing: An equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.) But with today’s ever-increasing technologizing of efficiencies, productivity and wages have been permanently decoupled.
Since 1973, Productivity is up over 75% and hourly compensation (and opportunities through non-entrepreneurial jobs) have risen only about 9%. And with the current shifts into the Internet of Everything and robotics and analytics economy, that productivity gap is poised to leap to chasm levels.
(See Tech Revolution is Setting Up Another Civil War.)
Anger? Corporate Execs, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Related, interwoven trends…
The parallels and connections between workplace disengagement and political anger cannot be denied. Especially because so much of what’s driving the political anger originates in our workplaces: Where the hell is my Hard Work Dream?!
All that is missing for corporate execs to feel the same loss of control and freak out as much as the political system is a Trump-like lightning rod — something(s) or someone(s) to focus and channel everyone’s workplace frustrations in a polarizing manner.
Wake up!
Why We’re Not Paying Attention
We only want to look at the upsides of the disruptive era we’ve entered. It’s not fun to focus on the horrible unintended consequences.
Yes, innovators and technologies will create amazing new opportunities and possibilities. But at what cost? For every new unicorn business in the San Francisco bay area, there are thousands of working class people who just had their rent jacked up ten-fold. For every well-paid disruptive technology employee, there are thousands of Talia Janes in MiddleWorkadayAmerica who don’t have the time or energy to post rants about how hard and frustrating being an employee has become. For every amazing advance that AI/cognitive computing/and robotics will create, thousands of lives are also decimated. Robotics alone will cost five million jobs in the few years.
Everything is rosy and amazing if… If we stay macro. If we ignore individual pain. And if we ignore it long enough, that pain turns into anger.
In discussing Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, which debuted at SXSW 2016, Douglas Rushkoff says “It’s time to reprogram the digital economy for people….After all, if we don’t like the digital economy we’re in, it’s up to us to go program a better one.”
He’s absolutely right. But he’s also a member of the digerati elite throwing rocks at his kind’s bus. He’s not a busboy, or a middle manager in an insurance company, or a factory floor worker, or a UPS driver, or a school teacher, or, or, or…. The people feeling the most pain and anger from the productivity gap are those who will never attend SouthBy or TED or a hackathon. They’re the next wave rock throwers.
And we all should be paying attention.
The Dreams Gap
As part of our Future of Work Study, we asked over 7,000 people from across the globe: Can you achieve your dreams where you currently work?
First pass of the data revealed that only 29% could achieve their dreams where they currently work. That sucks! But we needed to dig deeper to find the real anger.
We then cut the data excluding senior execs, Silicon Valley types, and entrepreneurs. Result: 9.8% of line-level workers and mid-managers working in non-startup, more-established types of environments believed they can achieve their dreams and goals where they work.
There’s your anger gap.
And at 90% Where’s my dream? for the rank-n-file, how long do you think that can be prolonged before something sparks an explosion?
Before It Ignites
The solutions? Multi-layered, complex and difficult. Really difficult.
But we can’t go there until we — those of us who impact leadership decisions in the corporate world — heed the wake-up call.
The first step is to understand that there’s deep anger, hurt, and pain out there. And to accept that, embracing it as valid. And not attempt to happy-talk it, or disruptivize it, or manage it, or ignore it. Doing so only increases the likelihood of a Trumpnado-like event tearing through the business world.
As Anil Dash said in I Thought We Were the Good Guys: “For those who have good intentions but still sit on the sidelines: Are we just going to keep waiting, half-assedly saying to ourselves that we care about these issues, or are we actually going to step up and show what our values really are?”
The canary in the mine has alerted us to what’s coming.
Are we paying attention as much as we should?
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— by Bill Jensen
Please help spread these wake-up words…
Please help us all pay closer attention.
#NewWaytoWork #FutureOfWork
Jensen Site, Twitter, FB, LinkedIn
Bill’s latest book, Future Strong, is about the five deeply personal choices each of us must make to be ready for all the disruptive tomorrows heading our way.
