This December will be the 10th anniversary of my "Unjobbed" life. "Unjobbed"? I have been talking to Chris Corrigan about "Unschooling" what he means by that is not that children should not become educated but that school is not the best place or process.
I am beginning to see that the same is true about paid work. We all need it but to perform work within the structure of a "Job" is an experience that shrinks us just as school does and for the same reasons.
What is "bad" about schools is that their priority is control. What is bad about most work places that are conventionally structured is that they too are about control (see the extension for a snip) In this type of control organization, we as people get lost. It is not just the peons either. I am amazed at how little control any member has even CEO's. I only have one client that really can get things done and he owns the company.
I have noted a big trend. Most of my children's friends cannot stay in the conventional workforce. They try for a while but have to get out or are pushed out. They don't fit. Many middle aged men (hi guys!) that I have met in the last few years are the same. Many of us have ben successful in the old world but we cannot go back. The trouble is that there is not a good place for any of us to make the essential money.
Most of us are under employed and under compensated for what we do. So what can we do?
I tend to look back into history for guidance in the future. Not at single events but for patterns. This feels like the end of the Middle Ages to me when the "Job" system of liegedom based on land was broken for a new system based on talent and cash. If you think a bit, a feudal organization feels a lot like a modern organization. The binding issues are property and obedience. How will this change? Well in the Middle ages, there was a demographic earthquake in the Black Death that caused an extreme shortage of skills. Over 25% of Europe died in 5 years. Well folks we have our own version happening with our low birthrate and the boomers retiring.
The slides are thumbnails - please click for scale
This slide shows how the young and the old cross over in 2010. The next slide shows the impact on the labour force.
These are PEI figures but they are replicated throughout not only the rest of Canada but also the developed world. The power will shift decisively from capital to labour as it did in the Middle Ages. The immediate problem is what do we old farts and the young turks do as we wait for this event to become real? Frankly I don't know but suggest that if we talked more amongst each other along these lines we might find out.
Culture – the challenge
“Know thyself”
Only revolutionaries, saints and fools operate easily outside their own self-interest. Our operational culture has a series of rules, incentives and punishments that reinforce the old metaphor. It is not easy for anyone inside a traditional organization to make the changes to the new metaphor as all these forces will come into play against them. It is helpful to look at the power of these forces with fresh eyes. Only when we can see them clearly, can we see the value of building new organizations outside the power of the old.
All the rules of the old culture are based on the assumptions that the most important activity is control. The extension of this assumption is that if only we tried hard enough, we could control everything. This illusion seemed to work when we did not operate in a global society. But when we began to operate in a global economy, the complexity of controlling everything has overwhelmed us. As we talk about being more responsive, more customer-focused and more flexible, let’s look at the real rules that govern most of our organizations. They work against these objectives.
The budget process is the most important process in the traditional organization. Budgets, not value, determine who has the power. Controlling large budgets, large numbers of people and large physical plant is what gives you power. At a time when the jargon is all about being close to the customer, the traditional reward system values being a bureaucrat. The further you are away from the customer, the more powerful you become. Career success is determined by obtaining and using good bureaucratic skills. The result is a managerial emphasis and a bias against creativity.
The management process is hierarchical with all the key decisions taking place at the centre. Important decisions therefore take a very long time and are based on a narrow slice of information that has been processed by the supporting staff. The feedback response is therefore very poor. This creates the risk that the organization will not see important issues until it is too late to cope without drastic measures. Many of the costs and pain felt in organizations today are as a result of the endless silver bullets and reorganizations which are a sign of acting too late and with too big a response.
Executives, managers and workers are categorized in jobs that are defined by a set of tasks. The money we earn is mainly related to the job and not to the value that we create or the outcomes that we achieve. The risk to the organization is that its employees are not focused on the key outcomes. The risk to the employees is that they are not connected to their innate capability. Much of the internal alienation arises from the fact that employees are disconnected by the concept of the job from the true purpose of the enterprise and from their own needs and capabilities.
The external stakeholders, be they investors, bankers or governments, view the enterprise through only one aspect of a balance sheet, financial capital. As the bigger is better approach has taken hold, the financial balance sheet has grown geometrically thus driving up the hurdle rate for earning an economic return. The purpose of the organization tends to become obscured as the pressure to meet the investment hurdle increases. So schools and hospitals are increasingly evaluated in terms of their budgetary impact rather than on any criteria of whether they are educating our children well or not. Businesses cannot afford to miss an operational beat because they have to run their system at full tilt all the time to meet the returns on a large capital structure. Executives are being measured quarter by quarter rather than being given a more appropriate time horizon.
The purpose of executive management is to concentrate the wealth created by the organization at the centre. This wealth is largely seen as being financial. Poor management is often hidden by exploiting the true components of wealth creation the human, customer, social and natural capital on which the enterprise truly depends. This is not because the executives are bad people. It is because they are responding to the prevailing performance criterion, which is made up of a series of abstract financial ratios.
I believe that the power of the old culture makes it almost impossible to change our organizations from within. The reasons for this failure are not lack of effort or lack of vision but the nature of the cultural reaction to the new. The rules of the old culture operate like an immune system seeking out new and dangerous ideas that threaten the old way of doing things.
