WORKIN’ IT
introduction
One of the secrets to a happy life is learning to not take for granted the things that you always take for granted.
One of those things that’s so easy to take for granted, is work itself. We think of work as something we need to do, something we get to take a break from, something we need to balance with “the rest of our life.” But might there be value in work for the sake of work itself? In other words, the way we usually conceive of work is that it is a means to achieve some other goal. This weekend I invite you to read five fascinating articles that blow up our preconceptions about the inevitability of work and what work is.
The first article today challenges us to think about what would a world without work look like? Hint: it ain’t pretty, and it may be a more realistic possibility than you realize.
Next, Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant both take aim at what work is today — a thing most people hate and a place where people don’t have friends — and ask if things could be different and if we can help each other re-imagine our workplaces.
The last two articles tell the stories of couple entrepreneurs who have re-imagined the work place and are trying radical experiments to implement their visions — one group is aiming for a renaissance of the Medieval notion of guilds. The other is Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, implementing a new corporate structure with no hierarchy and no managers.
Read wisely. Read widely.
Max
A World Without Work
by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic
(41 minute read) || Article Link
the gist: Thompson starts by describing the “regional depression” around Youngstown, Ohio when the steel mills closed and the town fell apart. He expands from there to consider what would happen to our culture if the equivalent thing happens economy-wide and millions of human jobs are automated away. “The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing.”
my take: Forty-one minutes? That’s like a short book! Yes, but you’ll learn more in this article than it most books you’ll read. This is the must-read of the week, (though honestly all of these are worth your time). While it starts in Youngstown, it quickly expands to be a thorough examination of our entire work society. One of the (many) ideas Thompson tosses up is that the 21st century might come to look more like the mid-19th century, where there may be “few jobs to have, yet many things to do.” That indeed seems like where we’re headed. Maybe we can look to history to prepare for the future.
nuggets:
“Youngstown was transformed not only by an economic disruption but also by a psychological and cultural breakdown. Depression, spousal abuse, and suicide all became much more prevalent; the caseload of the area’s mental-health center tripled within a decade. The city built four prisons in the mid-1990s — a rare growth industry.”
“’Youngstown’s story is America’s story, because it shows that when jobs go away, the cultural cohesion of a place is destroyed,’ says John Russo, a professor of labor studies at Youngstown State University.”
“Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life’s necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealth — at least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy.”
“What does the ‘end of work’ mean, exactly? It does not mean the imminence of total unemployment, nor is the United States remotely likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work — that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs. Eventually, by degrees, that could create a new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society.”
“If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions. What might happen if work goes away?”
Re-thinking Work
by Barry Schwartz in The New York Times
(10 minute read) || Article Link
the gist: People don’t like work. According to Gallup, it’s nearly universal. 90% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs. Schwartz explores why this might be and offers some suggestions for how to rethink work and again make it into an activity that people embrace rather than shun.
my notes: I’m grateful to Barry Schwartz. His book The Paradox of Choice powerfully influenced the way I make decisions and think about the world. It’s part of the reason I write this newsletter — b/c curating is a stress-reducing, time-saving service for people. Better to have a few great options to read than a million options of all kinds of quality. Judging from this article, I’m going to dig his new book too. Don’t just read my summary, read the whole article.
nuggets:
“Today, in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to. The call center employee is monitored to ensure that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s keystrokes are overseen to guarantee productivity….I think that this cynical and pessimistic approach to work is entirely backward. It is making us dissatisfied with our jobs — and it is also making us worse at them. For our sakes, and for the sakes of those who employ us, things need to change.”
I love this story about the custodians, a great picture of how the way you approach your work makes all the difference.
“About 15 years ago, the Yale organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied custodians in a major academic hospital. Though the custodians’ official job duties never even mentioned other human beings, many of them viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would joke with patients, calm them down so that nurses could insert IVs, even dance for them. They would help family members of patients find their way around the hospital.”
“The custodians received no financial compensation for this ‘extra’ work. But this aspect of the job, they said, was what got them out of bed every morning. “I enjoy entertaining the patients,” said one. “That’s what I enjoy the most.”
(Reminds me of the wonderful undercover boss episode with waste management. I’ll link to it at the end.)
Friends at Work? Not So Much
by Adam Grant in The New York Times
(7 minute read) || Article Link
the gist: “ONCE, work was a major source of friendships. We took our families to company picnics and invited our colleagues over for dinner. Now, work is a more transactional place. We go to the office to be efficient, not to form bonds. We have plenty of productive conversations but fewer meaningful relationships.”
my summary: Grant is a UPenn professor and the author of Give and Take. He’s a rising force in the social psychology arena. Do you have fewer friends at work than you used to? You’re not the only one. I think part of the issue must be commute times. I spent five years commuting more than an hour each way to and from work. That makes it tough to have people over or hang out after work.
I look back on that now and think I must have been crazy to commute like that. But I know I’m not alone. And I know it takes a toll. But this article has me thinking more broadly about what we consider “normal” in work relationships. Is this the way it should be?
the nuggets:
In 1985, about half of Americans said they had a close friend at work; by 2004, this was true for only 30 percent.
In surveys across three countries, Americans reported inviting 32 percent of their closest colleagues to their homes, compared with 66 percent in Poland and 71 percent in India. Americans have gone on vacation with 6 percent of their closest co-workers, versus 25 percent in Poland and 45 percent in India.
The New Guilded Age
by Nathan Schneider for The New Yorker
(8 minute read) || Article Link
the gist: a couple entrepreneurs with a quirky idea to bring back “guilds” as a key institution of working life.
my notes: I don’t know how guilds differ from unions, but this sounds a good bit like a union.
nuggets:
“From roughly the turn of the first millennium to the French Revolution, guilds operated as associations of independent craftspeople, setting standards for their lines of work and cultivating lively subcultures around their labor. Like today’s lawyers’ bars and doctors’ associations, they typically held legal monopolies over crafts in particular cities; one guild’s members might forbid non-members to make stone carvings, while another would control the market on locksmithing.”
“Members of medieval guilds typically progressed in rank from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman — distinctions still used by some trade associations today. Prime Produce [The new “guild”] will also incorporate three tiers, but based on levels of commitment, rather than on experience and proficiency. As a rite of passage, new members will each receive a pair of slippers to wear while inside the space — a ‘differentiating mechanism,’ Chavez said, between members and visitors.”
“Conventional wisdom holds that guilds in fact stymied efficiency and technological innovation. Epstein’s book sought to correct that narrative, as does the work of the Dutch social historian Maarten Prak. Guilds, Prak told me, “were not opposed to innovation per se, they were opposed to machines taking over.”
“It was a sort of deal between small businessmen and the authorities,” Sheilagh Ogilvie, an economic historian at the University of Cambridge who is more critical of the guilds’ legacy than Epstein or Prak, told me. Ogilvie stressed that guilds enforced an exclusionary economy, barring from their trades whomever they happened not to like, which often meant women, Jews, and immigrants. Adam Smith referred to the guilds’ price-fixing practices as “a conspiracy against the public,” and at the start of the French Revolution, they were among the first features of the ancien régime to be dispatched to the institutional guillotine.”
At Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision
by David Gelles for The New York Times
(8 minute read) || Article Link
the gist: Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, is attempting a wild experiment in how to run a company, instilling a new form of corporate organization called “Holacracy.” The goal is to “create a dynamic workplace where everyone has a voice and bureaucracy doesn’t stifle innovation.” Not everyone is happy about it. And not everyone understands what it is.
my summary: This has to be one of the most fascinating human experiments going on at work today. Imagine a company with no managers!
nuggets:
“At Zappos, this means traditional corporate hierarchy is gone. Managers no longer exist. The company’s 1,500 employees define their own jobs. Anyone can set the agenda for a meeting. To prevent anarchy, processes are strictly enforced. At the June meeting, a trained facilitator, in this case a young bearded man wearing a blue baseball hat, followed the Holacratic method by asking attendees to “get here, get present, get now,” and encouraged everyone in the room to briefly check in.”
“The idea that all voices in an organization are equally valuable is antithetical to the way most companies are run. Inexperienced employees, the conventional wisdom goes, should learn from managers who know what they’re doing…By contrast, Mr. Hsieh and other proponents of Holacracy argue that by marginalizing large swaths of the organization, important issues go unresolved and potential goes untapped.”
postscript
“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”
- Alfred J. Toynbee
According to a massive Gallup poll of more than 80,000 respondents, less than 1/3 of Americans are actively engaged at work. 51% are “not engaged” and 18% are “actively not engaged.” Nearly 1 out of 5 people are totally checked out of their jobs. This, I propose is a national travesty.
I promise we’ll hear a lot of talk in this election cycle about about jobs: who will keep jobs here, who will create jobs. My guess is that by and large everyone will talk about the quantity of jobs and no one will talk about the quality of jobs. Now, the number of jobs is important and should rightfully be a concern. But an unemployment rate of 5% is a fraction of the mentally checked out rate of 18%. Worldrwide, it’s even worse — 1/3 of people are actively disengaged.
Why does engagement matter? Well, first, why does a job matter? A job matters for many reasons but for simplicity we could say that it gives a person income, it gives a person purpose, and it gives a community stability. Without engagement, all three of these outcomes are put at risk. An unengaged person does not put his heart and soul into his work. He is not donating his blood, sweat and tears.
No employer wants an employee like that. Eventually that person will lose his job to someone else. Or maybe that job will be replaced by technology. Why should an employer deal with an unmotivated employee who mails it in when she can have a machine perform the same duties flawlessly every time? This is now a real option, and it is a big deal.
Macroeconomists talk about the rate at which businesses employ labor (people) or capital (machines) to create their products. We are at a moment in history where some businesses are able to get way more value out of machines than ever before. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out in their book The Second Machine Age, the photo company Kodak at it’s peak had 145,000 employees and one billionaire (George Eastman). Instagram, another photo company and its parent Facebook have created ten billionaires with a billion users and less than ten thousand employees.
Back to disengagement. So if work gives income, purpose and stability, we’ve seen how disengagement could lead to the disappearance of both income and stability(people often move or pull back from the community when they lose their jobs). And by definition disengagement means the second benefit of work, a sense of purpose, is also missing. And this lack of felt purpose is omnipresent — from busboys to investment bankers. This fact proves that money doesn’t solve the problem. As Barry Schwartz notes:
“The truth is that we are not money-driven by nature. Studies show that people are less likely to help load a couch into a van when you offer a small payment than when you don’t, because the offer of pay makes their task a commercial transaction rather than a favor to another human being…If people were always paid to load couches into vans, the notion of a favor would soon vanish. Money does not tap into the essence of human motivation so much as transform it. When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things.”
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Even if you are not an entrepreneur or CEO who can create jobs (or a politician who says he “creates” jobs), each of us can work to make work work again (see what I did there?). There are a number of ideas in the articles above — from cultivating friendships at work, to establishing whole new systems of corporate organizations. But I think the most important thing by far is helping each other discern the ways in which our work makes life better for other people.
The purpose of work has always been and always needs to be to create value for yourself and for other people. When we wrote the MBA Oath, this was our animating idea: you need to create more value than you extract. That’s not just the right thing to do ethically, it is what will make you engaged at work. It is a great irony, but serving others is secret to feel most satisfied yourself. Purpose comes from rising above yourself and seeing how you impact other’s lives positively through the products you create and the services you render.
“But Max,” some of you may say, “some jobs just aren’t fulfilling by their nature.” Oh really? Which ones? I grant that some jobs are much harder than others. There are clearly huge discrepancies in pay and in pay per unit of effort. I’m also not arguing that we shouldn’t actively support people rising to higher paying, higher skilled jobs. We should. But even those high skilled jobs can feel like a prison if a person has lost sight of the “why” behind their work.
And from what I’ve seen, joy can be found in almost any line of work. You don’t need to be convinced of this idea, I just ask you to consider it. I’ll leave you with a video, as an illustration of this way of thinking. It’s from the show Undercover Boss, where ABC had CEOs of big companies go undercover as low level employees of their companies to experience a day in their life. In this episode, Larry O’Donnell, the President and COO of Waste Management (a $45 billion company) spends several days posing as a a newly hired trash collector and janitor who has a film crew following him for a documentary.
The whole episode is good, but I particularly like the short section beginning around 23:30 when Larry gets assigned to clean port-a-potties at a fairground with Fred,whose attitude is so joyful and positive that it made the lowest job I can think of — cleaning human excrement — feel like a game and like a chance to do something worthwhile. Check it out. How does your job compare with his? How does your attitude compare? Each of us can lift up others, no matter where we are stationed.
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