Many who balk at going out on their own fear that they will be insecure. The great irony is that I have found much more security and peace of mind as a freelancer than as a senior executive in a large organization.
How can that be? How can we fear less when we work for ourselves than when we work in a job?
Here is my answer to that question.
When I was a 22 year old I went into investment banking - those were the days before the big bucks of recent time - I deliberately chose that life because I wanted to be measured by my results. I knew intuitively that I could learn to be good and that I could work hard. What kept me away from other walks of life - especially the corporate sector was that I felt that they did not value results - I was not sure what they valued then - but I felt that I would have too little control.
I was correct. In the sales and trading area of investment banking, I could see every day how I was doing. So could my bosses. There was no fudging the numbers. I did learn how to do this well and I did work hard and in my early thirties was one of the top folks in my field. So far so good. This world was also comforting in that just as my bosses knew that I had value, so did all my competitors and my clients. This was security and this was control. I could leave at any time as I was a known quantity in a big field.
Then I made my "mistake". Bored with the short term aspects of winning and losing every day in the markets, I opted to leave the frontline and enter the world of senior management.
Over time I discovered what I had feared as a newbie all those years prior. In bureaucracies, results don't really matter. As I came to see what was going on more clearly, I could see what the game was. It was the pursuit of power. If you ever watched any BBC costume drama about say Henry VIII or Elizabeth I - that is what the executive suite of any large organization is all about.
There is a King. There are princes and princesses. There are big servants of the King who act as hit men. There are competing heirs. There are rebels. It's all about being part of a group that either is in power or has a shot at power.
Now the message to the "people" is all about the common good, the shareholders, making money, making good products. But don't fool yourself - all this is what all Monarchies told the people. The reality is that it is all about who has the power.
I found also that you could not hide and be outside this. You have to play this game. You have to publicly stand in one group or another. At my bank the game has always been the same. Below the King are at least two heirs. Both have their followers. Both teams work hard to get their man into the final selection. If you win, you all win. All the people in the losing other team die/leave/get fired within a year. The winners take it all and the game starts again.
Well, my man lost. I was one of the last to go. In a way it was kind of fun. But I did not want to do this all over gain somewhere else. I now knew that working hard, being good at what you do, getting results really did not count for much. But these were the only things that I could control.
As a junior person in a large organization, you can have the illusion that doing a good job is valued. But I think that many of us can now see that the workers are just expendable pawns in the larger game that is played. The rhetoric is all about results. But failure is hugely rewarded at the top and it is the pawns who pay for it. The breakdown of our current economy is starting to make it clear to more and more people - that they are just pawns with no control.
Worse, I back in 1994, like you maybe now, had leveraged my lifestyle. I earned great money but I had huge expenses. I somehow thought that I would always make this kind of money.
Worse, when you are a player at the top of a bureaucracy, you have no outside network as I had when I had been a front line investment banker. I also had no real value, for at that level you real value is as a player in the game itself.
So my bottom line lesson is this. A job only has the illusion of security. What you do or contribute has little real impact on your security. The real game is power at the top. This is not confined to banking but all bureaucracies. You are expendable.
Worse, now we are in a transition from one business model to another, the guys at the top have missed the opportunity to realign your organization. So car workers, journalists who have all done a good job are on the scrap heap. Soon they will be followed by people in every sector. You with a job have no control over what will happen to you.
Worse, like me back in 1994, you have no idea of how to live without a job.
More tomorrow and here is the information about our series on Freelancing.
