The State of Work 2020 by Paul Millerd

December 15, 2020

The following is an excerpt from a Twitter thread. Something that connected with me and wanted to re-share it out there.

Pauls thoughts lives at https://twitter.com/p_millerd

Topic: The State of Work 2020

I’m going to give you a short intro of why I care then I’ll just throw out 1-opinion / 1-like style takes. I imagine this will get a little unhinged towards the end.

A little background. I studied org change, complexity, systems dynamics, supply chain, leadership & other fun stuff in 10+ years working in consulting and a MS/MBA ops program at MIT.

I left my job to my job to make sense of an increasingly confusing world of work.

After I went back into consulting after MBA I started to noticed that almost no one cared how organizations worked. The people that studied organizations had fancy frameworks but they were rarely predictive. They mostly made people feel good.

I became obsessed with how to design an environment around fundamental principles. Build environments & cultures that:
- cultivate learning
- DON’T stifle motivation
- Don’t kill emergent experimentation

I realized this was counter to all individual career incentives.

Over time I realized a lot of this tinkering in consulting and initiatives in the corporate world were just part of the performance of work. no one seemed to care if any of it worked.

Most of the big “impact” was finance, M&A, and government affairs were a better ROI.

I got a bit exhausted because no one really cared about this and was a bit cynical but eventually realized if I was going to criticize it I had to start writing and sharing my thoughts.

So here we are. Let’s dive in with some opinions

Most people are tied to some sort of work belief and don’t even know it. Often goes back to protestant reformation or other religious backgrounds.

Oprahs “you need to express your gifts” is the same as Calvin telling people to find their calling

The ikigai chart is absolute nonsense. It takes a japanese idea of “reason for being” and maps the idea that one needs to get paid as part of their reason for being.

Maslow abandoned the idea of a hierarchy of needs almost immediately after publishing it. stop referencing it. he went full hipping without becoming a hippie.

MBTI can be a fun exercise but can we really trust any organization using this to organize their company (ahem Bain and Disney)

Career paths are silly for 99% of people. Most people should aspire to a much more random walk. The career path is an outdated idea from simpler companies and time.

The idea that we need to progress up ranks and incomes keeps people trapped in jobs unnecessarily with.

The US tying healthcare to employment by accident in the 1950s might be the sickest joke the universe has ever played on the world. If anyone thinks this setup is a good idea I don’t think we can be friends.

Trying to find meaningful work if you are miserable is likely a lost cause. You need to find meaningful life before you can find any joy or solid relationship with your work

Frederick Taylor did not kickstart the optmization trend. It was knowledge workers who needed to prove that they deserved to stay employed and get promoted in the 70s/80s

The labor market has split into a high-wage and low-wage worker economy. The US is leading the way because we have the most dynamic labor market but eventually the whole world will look like this.

Our middle class work myths are dying.

Covid has unleashed more latent curiosity and creativity in the millenial generation than anyone understands. People have only begun to test the waters in new ways of working, living and where they live.

It is great we have opened up labor markets for men and women in almost all fields. But this combined with the idea that everyone should work has stopped more people from thriving and having families than people think.

In order for work to become fairer to women (its not right now) it would take men to stop competing and working insane hours.

If consulting firms wanted to get 50/50 partners for example, they would just need to cap work hours.

They wont.

If companies really care about work-life balance, they wouldn’t force you to volunteer during a workday or give you a stipend for yoga. They would give you Friday off.

The four day workweek is my favorite idea that might transform the way people work and live. It seems tiny but has a major impact on people’s relationship to work.

Work has become more necessary and important because especially in knowledge work you move away from your family and friends to find a job. You literally need to belong to something.

People want to go back to the office because that is their church.

Work provided “accidental meaning” for many years because it coincided with a single-income earner family and people locating together in suburbs with active involvement.

Jobs moved to cities + now two-income families mean default work path doesn’t provide automatic meaning

Yet companies know people *want* this and literally advertise it. People then think they want that and then try desperately to get it.

I worked at 7–8 companies before I realized meaning comes from your life not job.

The knowledge worker consciousness was totally new in the 1950s and led to a whole new way of conceiving of what life was for. Prior blue collar vs. owner conflict was the primary mode of work so it seemed silly to place too much importance on it.

Knowledge workers saw themselves as eventual business owners / executives / rich people. So they identified with their own journey rather than getting tied up in a conflict.

Thus it became important to be agreeable and conform in a certain way.

Most advice tells young people to follow these same norms except that the workplace is going to eat you up if you conform. You’ll end up mid-thirties not knowing what the hell happened over the past 15 years

The Gervais Principle is probably the best guide for navigating a career. In knowledge work what people say is often not what they do. You need to understand power, psychopaths & politics to have any idea whats happening.

Our jobs and companies change us more than we ever change them. Most people don’t realize how much their health, happiness and success are dependent on where they work.

The best workplaces have growth and high profit margins. Good culture is always downstream of excess cash.

Also unethical culture can be downstream of excess cash. Just ask Enron.

Elite Business schools will not end. These could probably raise prices 200% tomorrow and people would still come. They are a great place for children of rich people to hang out and meet other people like them.

The optimism around the “creator economy” always misses the fact that for every 1 interesting creator job there are like 10 new gig/precarious jobs emerging. The “creator economy” also turns knowledge workers into total workers.

The creator economy also seems to enable people to escape total work much quicker than if they were in the corporate world. The fact that work is your life makes it much more painful when things are out of balance.

A full-time job kind of tricks people into thinking things are okay in their life even though when at work the person feels totally lost. Unlike the creator they stay in a low-grade burnout for years. The need to induce a crisis can be put off for years.

At work we mostly pretend that everyone is energized, health, able and mentally clear every day. This is insane. Just being in good relationships, eating & sleeping okay is damn hard.

That being said — I’d love to see a company design performance around optimizing for these things.

If you didn’t sleep 8 hours, don’t come in. No meetings before 10.

The US has steadily been adding more jobs below the median wage than above it every year since 1990. Since 1990!

The wages have been stagnant charts are misleading.

If they accounted for the increase in total compensation including healthcare, US wages are pretty good.

The problem is healthcare. Its too damn expensive and shouldnt be a “perk”

Instead of UBI I want to see three six month paid leave sabbaticals that any american can take at any time after 25 for any reason.

Corporate jobs are underrated right now especially among twitter tech types.

Working at a big company and learning how to engage in this world (even if it can suck) is super valuable to do creative stuff later. These companies teach a certain quality standard

Almost the entire business world lacks good writing and thinking skills. This has done far too much damage to our capacity to think and solve broad problems. We mistake business thinking for tough human problem thinking.

A lot of this traces back to what we think college is for. For most people it is “to get a job”

At their best these places are to teach one to be wise. we’ve lost this but I think universities can rediscover it.

not as bearish on universities as most

A lot of our ideas of success are based on common knowledge of what we think other people think. We all think it is money yet don’t like this. It seems if we can loosen this in the next 10 years we can free up more people to work on things that matter to them