Freelancing and Adult Thinking

CBS was talking this evening about the growth of freelance work – projecting significant growth over the next couple of years. What was striking was how negative the reporting seemed. One of the two people interviewed was saying “the important thing is not to be idle” and the reporter presented it as being just one rung above collecting unemployment – with employment clearly being preferable to freelance work. The entire piece presented freelance work as almost a sentence, certainly a misfortune, and implied that somehow it means less money. What are these people smoking?

What we’re seeing is a lull in the parental relationship between employer and employee, and I think that’s a good thing. But it’s like listening to 30-year old men complain that they can’t live in Mom’s basement forever. The idea that employee status is superior, is the goal, is in fact the pinnacle of success in our culture is assumed, as an unaccountable absolute. Didn’t we just learn the opposite? Apparently not. This is my biggest gripe with those who keep saying, “it’ll turn around soon” – like Napoleon – “this’ll all be over by Spring”. Besides the fact that they’ve been saying that for the last two years, a tiptoe through the tulips faith-in-magic kind of optimism that has no basis in how economics really works, there’s no real learning – no real sense of cultural repentance – it’s as if there were nothing wrong with the system as it was, and this is something that just happened to us. It’s like listening to a culture of perpetual adolescents who ruined their credit, present it as if they just had some bad luck – the universe didn’t smile on them, and are clearly going to be shopping like mad as soon as they can be, applying for that credit card the moment they’ve got a chance.

There are three lessons of this economic event for adults. Yes, I said adults. If you’re still saying it’s just a lull, go back to playing with your keys and let the rest of us talk. The first is that you obviously can’t dump trillions into a global policy of invasion and not break the empire’s bank. This is not primarily a political blog, so we’ll just say that and set it aside. If you want to debate it, I’ll mourn your intellectual funeral (bring a calculator), but we can do it elsewhere. The second lesson is that it’s your fault, all this, and my fault, and we all share in this fault in some way. It’s stupid to explain it as just a few rogue bankers, or the entire lending industry, or an irresponsible bunch of poor people (if you’re the right wing type). You did this too, and I helped, and again, we can debate that if you like, but come on – I think you know I’m right, so stop blaming everyone *except* yourself for “getting you into this”. That’s teenage talk. We got ourselves into this. Again, it’s an adult discussion. The third lesson we’ve mentioned before – all the BS that gets parroted from our parents’ generation about job security, education being your ticket to vocational wellbeing, economic stability being the same as having a job, etc – it’s all just hoodoo – and only a cultural fundamentalist goes on believing when the empirical science shows it to be a sham – when your faith healer is dying of cancer and you still just want so much for it to be a hiccup – a collection of “symptoms”. Symptoms are symptoms precisely because they point to sickness – the world is real – it’s not an illusion. All of the avoidance is for those who want to avoid these lessons altogether and keep living as though they aren’t so.

What this economic shift offers us, actually, is a chance to grow up – a chance to get ourselves a little more clean – an opportunity to live like adults. It’s interesting to watch even those who pride themselves in the rhetoric of self-reliance wail about “jobs”. What’s wrong with going freelance? The CBS piece linked it with the notion of a lowered wage standard in most jobs. Well, that’s likely true, for some time to come. Partly because we used an unprecedented portion of our economic potency to take over a number of pipeline routes and petroleum deposits. In other words, you may have lost your job, or be taking a huge pay cut but, hey, you get to drive cars and live where you can have your choice of colors. Hope it was worth it. The move was stupid in lots of ways, but it has made a lot of money for a lot of companies. It’s just not true that the entire economy took a huge hit. Haliburton, Blackwater, and Unocal got mega-rich from it. It was a reallocation of wealth – some people have been having a really good few years.

But the notion that freelance work necessarily pays less, I find dubious. At first, some of it will. After all, there’s the stupid notion in corporate circles that freelancers are less valuable, more transient, and somehow ‘deserve’ less than employees. Sensibly, the opposite is true. We pay our own benefits, our own taxes, our own expenses, and there’s cost involved just being freelance. On top of that, you survive by being superior. Someone wants to pay me employee’s wages, and the discussion is over – it’s got to be a lot more. Desperation is going to make some people foolish in what they’ll accept. OK, for a while. But it won’t last. A lot of us are going to get strong.

First, think about it – shouldn’t you be entitled to what they’d pay a staffing agency for a temp? I don’t mean what they’d pay the temp – I mean what they’d pay the agency itself. You incur the same costs, so damned straight that’s what you should be paid. Probably more.

Second, the shoe is going to shift feet. As the number of freelancers doubles, we’re going to find new ways to organize, group, and consolidate resources. The growth of social media indicates that a coming trend is for any set of disconnected people fending and fighting for themselves to, as they grow, utilize the attitudes and techniques of social media, whihc in turn will further that growth, and in turn further consolidate their ability to act in concert, support one another, and act in mental, emotional, and physical unison. In other words, what’s coming is an initial feeling of desperation followed by a transferrence of clout – a shift of power – from the employer to the contractor and the freelancer. What’s beautiful is that they don’t see it yet. Opportunity is glowing in the dark, and they don’t see it. The other thing that’s going to happen is an intellectual and emotional campaign to retain employer-like control in the context of contractor and freelance relationships. Be ready for it. Yes, I know it’s already there. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But not to worry. As I said, social media trends indicate an incredible likelihood of taking this out of their hands.

So, I’m not ready to sit around and mourn the growth of freelancing and look at it as a social problem. For one thing, I’m thinking about how to make it a source of prosperity. For another, I think it offers genuine hope for a more mature, more self-aware, more ethical set of relationships – a more equitable exchange of value between service providers and service buyers. I’m not out there shouting “jobs, jobs” with the tea party crowd, the health care opponents, and the people who are just going along. I’m asking for reduced taxes on the self-employed, and opportunities for the same kinds of benefits (especially health care) that employees have long relied upon. The Freelancers Union, Free Agent Source, and congressional legislation allowing the self-employed to act as groups for purchasing healthcare all seem like positive directions for this. As I’ve said before, I do some work for Free Agent Source. It’s not for them that I think these things though – I do work for them because I think these things.

I’ve only one thing to say to the CBS group: I hope to remain unemployed. I hope to be freelance. I have no desire to trade freedom and prosperity for the illusion of security. It wasn’t a good bargain at the start of this thing. It’s not a good bargain dealing with the fallout. You guys should look on the bright side, or at least acknowledge that there is one, even if the cost was a cool million Iraqi civilians, besides indebting us and our children’s children (half of whom supported the expense but are bitching about the deficit). Again, I’m really avoiding waxing political, but you really can’t ignore that these things are interlocking pieces. It’s not like oil prices mysteriously went up for no reason, or that the strain on the mortgage industry happened in a vacuum. That’s teenage thought again. Let’s grow up, eh?

Business & Client Expectations – The Arena of Technology

One of the realities of client – company relationships is that, not infrequently, clients may not understand the meaning and significance or processes, protocols, technologies, and media that you must use precisely to maintain an efficient and effective set of client relationships. This can be especially true, if they or you work in a single-person or small office environment, or work from home. The other thing that can happen is that you and I may not understand the significance and meaning that clients have associated with technologies. We’re each working with  our own assumptions, and there’s a disconnect between business assumptions and client expectations.

In the area of technology, this is particularly common. The now classic book net.wars discusses how the internet came to be initially as a community of people who had certain protocols and standards for interaction that prevailed until online services (chiefly AOL) opened their gateways to the internet, spilling the first wave of people into the net who hadn’t played a role in creating these protcols, and largely weren’t aware of them. The best example is, of course, SPAM. It was AOL users, when first gaining access to usenet groups, that began to flood them with the first SPAM, starting a mutation of what was previously a more open and purely collaborative community into one that was necessarily more restrictive and protective. The F.A.Q. is a less negative example. The protocol for interacting in any forum, BBS (bulletin board system), or newsgroup has always been to first read the Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.) before posting new ones. This both respects the users – keeping their attentions from being flooded with repetitive material and demanding redundant and wasteful effort in a collaborative environment – and also conserves storage, bandwidth, and general traffic over networks. If you came from an online service, however, it was provided initially by a corporation, not a collaborative community per se, and your expectations may have been to be able to post your question without reading anything at all, and to get an answer back from a customer service person. When the paying users of online services were let loose onto the more or less free internet, one of the things they brought with them was the view that discussion forums, newsgroups and the like were “help” forums, not *collaborative* communities.

The rules for each are different, obviously. In a collaborative community, you take into account everyone else’s time, attention, and interests before you post. The emphasis is on sustainability, more self-sufficiency and self-directed learning, and new questions and discussions should do what created the net in the first place – add to and extend what has gone before – grow it – further the development of the community itself and the technology that sustains it. In a help forum, the goal is to get your question answered quickly by an expert, regardless of whether it has been asked before by someone else. The result of these differing expectations was, as you can expect, that the original netizens (a term reflecting a sense of citizenship and civic-community responsibility – adherence to sustainable protocols for behavior) – the original netizens often viewed the newbies as uncivilized, arrogant in their demands to be spoonfed assistant by what are essentially volunteers and in the continual complaining over how things work, often without a lot of understanding of why some things are in place. The ‘newbies’ from the online services often viewed the original netizens as arrogant, “techno-geeks” who think you’re inferior or unintelligent if you don’t understand things, and too arrogant to “help” when there’s a document somewhere that explains the answer, and another document that explains the terminology used in the first document – which is of course, quite natural if these documents developed naturally over time, contributed to by a growing community of people who gradually learned their way around in a new society rather than paid $25/month (in 1993) for fast “walk-throughs” from large corporations like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL.

It’s no secret where my sympathies lie. I think you don’t barge into a community and demand it accomodate you as you pitch tent on people’s front lawns. And of course, having been involved relatively early, I have a strong respect for self-sufficiency – for people taking responsibility for their own needs to learn more – and for people who make an effort to learn instead of just demanding “walk throughs” all the time. But of course, I’m glad there’s a demand for training – I just insist that it be something we pay for rather than treated like something everyone else owes us. Community is where you collaborate by trading value for value – in that sense, you’re paying there, as well. If you just want the answer, not the community, and don’t want to contribute, then it’s got to be dollars.

A lot of the online communities have been transformed under the sheer pressure of humanity onto the internet, but a few exist now as services with paid memberships, precisely on the theory that if you pay, you’ll freeload less, though they work very differently than the service-oriented ones of the past. I’m thinking of a particular community that is mostly West Coast.

How does all this apply to business and work? Well, it’s precisely differing expectations that have to be managed in client-business relationships, and technologies and assumptions of protocol are the arena for working that out.

E-mail: Those of us that came from the world of typewriters and faxes, may not be aware of the many protocols. I have a colleague who used to try to treat it as chat. If I refilled my coffee before replying to an e-mail, I got back a bewildered response, a mere three minutes after the previous message, “Are you THERE?!?” Most of us know better, but a lot of people treat it like a walkie-talkie. Ever gotten or sent an e-mail that just says “OK”. Not every statement needs a reply. Then of course, there are people who don’t reply when they should. You make a substantive point and just never hear back from them. “Well, you didn’t ask a question.” All-caps is another one. It’s difficult to tell if it’s for emphasis, or if you’re shouting. So we end up sticking emoticons (smiley faces) on everything to make up for shouting. That piece of netiquette is well known. In corporate life, everyone loves to make fun of the person who hits “reply-all” to an e-mail from the CEO for a one-word response “OK” that then goes to all 5,000 members of the organization. It’s even worse when someone puts you on their “mailing list” and includes your e-mail address in the TO: or CC: line along with everyone else, effectively handing that ready-made “mailing list” to all the multi-level marketers he knows. Ever get that joke someone you know mails out to everyone in their address book? You know, the one containing that virus you got? Same thing.

Telephone: A much older technology, of course, but it has in fact evolved greatly. More and more of us are ditching land-lines for cell phones, or ditching cell phones for SIP phones (SIP is an internet protocol for telephony), etc. I make all my outbound business and personal phone calls in Skype. My inbound calls come to me as transcribed e-mails, allowing me to not interrupt my workflow. I don’t have a land line. And my cell is for emergencies, or for calling Google to get a phone number or address, if I’m away from home. But the way people talk on telephones has changed, too. My wife is a hair stylist, and a lot of her clients prefer to make appointments via text message. Cell phones are creating massive causes for car accidents, too – the mobility of communication is changing the protocols people follow. Some people think nothing of driving in two lanes while they chat about who is dating whom, or talking in a loud animated manner about things you’d expect to see on Phil Donahue when they’re inches in front of you in line for a cashier. I don’t even bother calling most clients on their land lines anymore – they don’t know why they have them, and neither do I, since they don’t answer them. The land line is more like “the voice mail line”. If I need to get through now, it’s the cell. But how business is expected to use the phone, even small business, is largely shaped by large corporations and paid subscription services. Sometimes people wonder that I don’t answer the phone 24/7 or have a staffer doing it. I can have someone do it, but you won’t get the expertise, so it’s just an appointment booking mechanism, and then the price of our services to the client has go to go way up. The overhead of having that staff around the clock as well as making all those appointments, and then hiring someone of equal talent and experience to keep them or else to do the work we’re doing for clients, means we now pay five salaries instead of one, just to answer the phone.

I figure not every client is my client, and just don’t do it. It keeps our costs to the client lower, my headaches fewer, and that’s a win-win for our target audience. As a small business, I don’t let large corporations set all the standards for me. After all, if we copied the way they build web sites, our clients’ marketing would suck. Small businesses have more flexibility to be more responsive than the large corps, and their advantage is in using it, not tying on tons of dead weight just to be “respectable”. If you want that, quit your business and go get a job. If you want to run your own shop, run it like your own shop. But you see, that involves considerations about how to manage expectations between company and client, specifically in the area of technologies. And should we, you may ask, put so much emphasis on technology as the arena for working this out? Yes. Yes, because what is contemporary technology in business all about? Primarily it’s about interactions and interactivity. From Twitter to live documents (like Google Docs) to Skype, it’s about connectivity, community (there’s that word again), and sociality (made that one up), and yes between company, client, and actually the rest of the world at large. And when that’s the case, when it’s a revolutionizing set of changes, as I believe it is, all these questions about our assumptions – our expectations – the protocols – the “rules” (as I like to frame them) – of our interactions come up. One of the things I’m continually talking about with my clients is how to be successful doing internet marketing in social media. The prime protocol – the primary rule – #1 – is don’t spam your audience. Don’t pitch them. Don’t confuse marketing with advertising. The surest way to alienate them and find twitter and facebook “useless” (which is something you convince yourself – not something that’s really what it is), is to keep telling them what you offer and how to get it. Instead, the protocol for social media – for the new Web 2.0 communities – is much, much more like what it was before 1994, than what it has been from 1994-2007. It is to give something of value away. To contribute by giving away your insight, analysis, information, expertise, and build a community through social contribution, drawing on your background and experience, earning you the place of resident expert. People who do that have no trouble ‘finding’ clients – the clients find them. The people who spam, find themselves in a pulpit without a congregation.

My advice, read two books. Tribes by Seth Godin, and net.wars edited by Wendy M. Grossman. Get yourself the picture of where we’ve been and where we’re going. It’s strongly related, because people are social animals, even the least social of us.

IM (instant messengers): Ever been in the middle of a really important thought, or activity, or finally trying to shut down, and up pops that <beep> instant message with “Hi. I saw you online”? Yeah, me too. It’s why I stay invisible all the time. Synchronous communication is for the absolutely lowest level of support in your organization. That’s why there are automated chat clients that do “automated support” for you, using artificial intelligence. If the chatter asks, “How do I reset my password?” the chat client dutifully responds with the link to the instructions along with some nice verbiage – “I have it right here, sir.” (it gets your gender from your client file, or guesses it from your name). If you have time to play that role in your business, by all means, put up one of those “Talk to me instantly” widgets on your site. I find synchronous communication to be a workflow-destroyer and, while it’s easy for clients to add me, I don’t use it for clients, I use it for staff. With e-mail, I can keep some structure and flow in my life. As an asynchronous communication form, it lets me have more than one client at a time, which is necessary to survive at all. I eliminate the expectation of instant responses, and usually set a standard of a reply within 24hrs. Ever seen those auto-responders that say “I’ll get back with you asap?” I don’t use them, but I understand why they are there. For one thing, the worst thing you can do to spam is auto-reply to it, thereby confirming your address as a sale-able part of the list, and exponentially increasing the likelihood of further spam in a never-ending snowball of e-garbage. Think before you automate. Some of us who have automated other things have, occasionally made mistakes, only to come back and find a serious mess on our hands. Wow, I can’t even tell you about a couple of things I’ve totally &*^%$-ed up that way. Automated payments, too. Remember that thing you thought you cancelled a year ago? Automate the expense, automate the payment, automate the renewal – argh! Anyway, managing client expectations for communications – synchronous vs. asynchronous – response time, times of day, etc. is key.

One of the things I always struggle with is how you make sure your clients know you work with multiple clients at once, so no you can’t stop and do six hours of straight work on their project on demand, just because they took the day off to focus on it. You may have six clients’ projects to touch that day. My best solution right now is to focus on turn-around time and response time. By conveying average turnaround time, up front, I am leaving myself free to have enough clients at once to survive, and hopefully communicating, at least subtly, that one client’s project is not all I’m doing today, one at a time, etc. If you’ve got good ways to get this across to set client expectations, please comment and add your advice.

Reminders: I send out action items frequently, and reminders if I haven’t heard anything in a few days. It’s interesting, because large corporations do the same thing, of course – I find the majority of clients appreciate it. Sometimes, if they’re feeling harried by other work obligations, and you’re dependent on them for deliverables to complete the project, they can feel pressured. Moreso, actually, because you’re a smaller business, your reminder is more personal, and it altogether seems more personal. This can prompt another exchange over it not being pressure, but just being what one client termed “due diligence” – staying up on it. We do what we can to manage the feelings of the recipient, but there are limits. If you’ve got ideas, please share them.

Online Documents: One of our solutions to the above issue is live, collaborative, online documents (like Google Docs). We’ll share a list of action items and other project documents that we maintain online in a secure environment, so they can at any time see the updates. The challenge is, of course, not everyone is yet used to live documents. Most people still think of documents as something you possess, that may be on your hard drive, rather than an interactive construct that you share and collaborate on and maintain. The former is the Microsoft mentality, who finds themselves haplessly trying to copy Google with Live Docs, though without the fundamental reasoning behind it, and the latter thinking – much more in tune with Web 2.0 and with how businesses really need to work to be efficient and effective – is Google’s. I’ve seen large corporations struggle, to much amusement, with sorting out and exchanging and collaborating on different versions of documents as e-mail attachments, meaning no two people can work on the same document at once (it’s “checked out” to use Microsoft’s early term when they first tried this), or else you can, but then you have to have another person who reconstructs a new version of the document out of the pieces worked on by each team member. That’s 2009 productivity for ya! So many useless jobs that technology gives us a way to live without. All it was waiting for was the motivation to waste less money. The only comforting thing for those of us that compete with big corps, is the assurance that they’re just finding different things to waste it on – it’s moving the peas on the plate, not making them disappear. Anyway, if you’re really, really not experienced with much beyond e-mail, the concept of a shared document, and even creating an account or logging in to see it, may be new to you. A lot of people get stumped, so it’s not the only solution. We fall back to e-mail until those clients’ own companies’ needs demand that they catch up.

Filing: That brings up e-mail again. Ever been asked for the same e-mail again and again – the client can’t find it, or deleted it, or doesn’t know what folder he put it in, etc.? It slows him down – he has to e-mail you to get his e-mail. And of course, it takes a bite out of your productivity and efficiency. This is why you’ve got to charge a substantive fee for your work. Because you’re going to serve as either tutor or efficiency triage for a percentage of your clients – one or the other. I’m not trying to pick on clients. I like my clients, and you probably like yours. What I’m saying is that we also have to talk about, and they about their clients, how you manage those expectations and what are the results. If my client is a real estate appraiser who is constantly having to stop during the day and take “What’s the status?” calls from his clients, he’d benefit from pro-active status updates – which is something my company uses, too. You get your clients started, then when they call, you wean them off of the phone, “Oh yeah. I sent you the status this morning. Did you get my e-mail?” Not an accusation, just always including the point that there’s another process already in effect, that they’re being taken care of. In the same way, we provide pre-designed tutorials at the completion of every project. And the tutorials indicate that custom instruction is also available for a reasonable fee. That sets the expectation. Before that, some clients would wonder why hours of custom instruction weren’t included in the spec. Now, we set the expectation by being proactive and also offering alternatives. That’s not all we do, but it’s enough to make the point here. Offer self-sufficiency and self-directed learning – offer the F.A.Q., so to speak – but make the “walk through” available for a fee. That’s the hybrid of the two protocols we described at the beginning.

Calendar Items: We send these and not everyone knows what to do with them, which is to be expected. They’re a protocol in corporate life, or in large offices with shared networks (server-installed e-mail/calendar applications like Outlook) where lots of meetings take place. Still, it works more than it fails. Some clients treat it as a confirmation, some as an invitation, and some as a calendar item. We love it. Rarely, but still sometimes, we get back “what am I supposed to do with this?” or the client gets confused over time zones. More commonly, because the client isn’t using these productivity tools in his own office, the client forgets about the appointment and is surprised at our call, which is exactly why calendar items were invented. Whether you are a one-man shop, a contractor, or working in an office of two people, calendar items can increase your productivity and minimize disparities between business-client expectations. I recommend Google Calendar. It’s faster and easier than Outlook (time is productivity), it’s compatible if your recipient uses Outlook, Lotus Notes, and a host of other e-mail/calendar applications, and it offers extra features if you’re a Gmail junkie like me.

Attachments: Ever ask for a .jpg or .gif and get a word document? Sometimes, you can’t even pull the image out of it without Microsoft reducing the quality down to garbage. Ever send an attachment, and your recipient has trouble viewing it? That’s why PDFs are helpful. Send a .jpg or .gif which is smaller and quicker, and your client might open it in Microsoft Picture Viewer which comes with Windows. Not only is the size it shows not real (it scales it without telling you), but your client might have trouble even finding an application to open it. What if it opens in Paint for them? It can be slow, and confusing. In the area of graphics, for that matter, it’s a very large number of people who can take photos but can’t locate them on their hard drive to attach and send to you, let alone crop or resize them (especially if Picture Viewer is displaying an scaled down size, when the real size – if they take photos at full resolution – is bigger than the wall behind their monitor). Attachments can be a pain. What I do is keep an eye on what my clients use every day, in their own profession, and that’s the format I prefer for that client group. If in doubt, I send PDF. A PDF printer driver is essential. Without it, your Word doc is going to open in Open Office, or vice versa. Your .jpg or .gif may be hopeless. Your Excel sheet may open in Excel, but if their default template is messed up, all the columns might get reset to standard width or something like that. What if they’re on a Mac, and you’re not? It’s not worth it. I manage client expectations by sticking with a cross-platform file format like PDF.

Social Media: What about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? I’ve had friends write things on my wall that I’ve had to delete, because my clients see them. I’ve had clients spam me, just like I’m one of their clients, because they’re hitting their entire contact list. It can be confusing if you haven’t learned the protocols and netiquette of being a netizen to graduate to understanding effective use of Web 2.0 social media. That’s why we teach this stuff, and provide consulting on it, etc. It can be used effectively, and it can be frustrating if you charge in not knowing how to do it effectively. I set up a blog for a colleague who promptly created an ideological flame war with it. I knew it would happen, but it was actually a good learning experience. You bring the assumptions of what you’re familiar with in other venues, and have to discover that “how the world works” isn’t really how it works – it’s just how it works in one place, at one time, among one group of people. The world is big. And if you see the world as big, the world is bigger. Remember, as we wrote about personality types and personality-based marketing, you are not normal – 75% of your clients are specifically *not* like you – they have a different set of assumptions, needs, and a different focus and direction. If you market to yourself, you sell 25%. Better put, you rule out 75% up front and pitch to a quarter of your audience. If you market to everyone, you’re at least reaching all those that are currently in your auidence with your message – then whether you grow your audience, and how they respond, is about the other things. The world isn’t the “how the world works” – that’s just my version – the quarter I’ve carved out. The world is also the 75% you don’t know. Anyway, after eventual frustration, the blog became an abandoned blog, like so many. But now the opportunity exists for him to rebuild, taking lessons learned – not overreacting by restricting discussion – monoblogs are overrated – not simply dumping the entire medium – “social media doesn’t work for me” – no, you weren’t working for social media – it’s you, not it, that must adapt, or else yeah, you’re tossing that audience away – that’s ok, more for the rest of us. Not to be cute, the point is that it’s a learning curve. Social media, whether for you, or your clients, is not Web 1.0. It’s not a “web site”. It’s not waiting for you to charge in with your existing assumptions.

It’s like 1994, when AOL allowed their users access to the internet. Do you go in and alienate the people that are already there, or do you choose to humble yourself, learn, and gradually come to understand the rules – the protocols of community in the new environment. Do you park on someone’s lawn or do you check into a hotel, visit the diner, and get to know the local vibe? Social media is a great venue for learning once again to learn, to become more self-sufficient in technology and, if you do that, you get to build amazing business potential. Rember the first spammer, who saw the gateway to the net as a license to blast every Usenet newsgroup with advertisements for multi-level marketing? That could be you, also. Ever seen a blog that was a series of ads? Or just a huge portrait of an otherwise boring personality? Here’s my favorite color this week. The rule is value. Give it away. Contribute. Focus on that, and only that, and all the rest follows. Your brand isn’t your logo, it’s what you say and do, folks. Social media is a great clarifying process. Your brand is who you are. It’s the substance too, not just the image. It’s the man and the mask – it’s both.

That’s it. Yeah, I know my writing style is unusual. It’s not wrong, tho. It’s part of the delightful incongruity that is me. As always, I hope it was helpful.

Reclaiming the Meaning of Money & Time

A friend and I were talking the other day about how we’re so used to thinking, as employees, of everything as net. The company takes out taxes and healthcare, and what’s left – that’s what you live on. But when you’re self-employed, you pay self-employment tax on top of your income tax, and you have to bank that out of every deal. So If you made $400, you really only made $200. And then you’ve got to buy healthcare out of that. If you made $400 only 10 times a month, and sock away half for taxes, and pay $250 for your half of the insurance (that’d be really cheap),  your $400 is now $150 “net”. $150 of employee-equivalent pay.

A lot of employed folks would look at this as a good case for not going out on their own. It’s actually the best case for why freelancers need to charge high rates. I concur. You just can’t do it for nothing. And what, freelancers aren’t supposed to have healthcare, or savings, or be able to eat? So, the goal is to figure out how to bring those fees up. Seth Godin offers a great quotation (don’t remember his source): “There are two kinds of companies. Those that want to lower prices, and those that want to raise them.” Those who shoot for the bottom, price-cutting, price-selling, appealing to price shoppers, and those who look for ways to add value, be the best, and raise prices. I’m with the latter. And I encourage my family members to hold the line on that, too.

I looked in on a conversation in LinkedIn where a person offered a service for $100, no conditions, to anyone, regardless of criteria. I provide the same service, and I can tell you it’s twice that, minimum, to do it right and do it consistently. I didn’t respond – no need – the entire community of freelancers jumped on him, asking if he realized that this wasn’t sustainable, that by aiming for the bottom he’s just appealing to the guy that wants it at $95, and encouraging the person who’ll do it for that, and not have healthcare, and not eat right. They ate his lunch – I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic pounding this guy down. He didn’t get it either. Bills himself as the president of his company but made a crass, rookie mistake in public. We’ve all done that kind of thing in one form or another, so you have to feel sorry for him, but wow – he made the 2nd mistake too: he just kept holding the line. “If someone doesn’t want my services, they don’t have to buy them.” He was missing the point.

They kept trying to tell him. A lot of us have had a prospect walk away because the price was obviously too low. And they’re right to. You can’t sustain good, consistent work that way, and companies that are in this for real want good, consistent work. They don’t want to watch a price cutter self-destruct, which is where it leads. A family member is a hairstylist, and a friend of hers comes from the Supercuts environment. The price difference is shocking. She’s a great lady, but you can’t invest in growing your business if you’re geared for the bottom. And once you do that, it’s really hard to break out of it. You can’t win, without retooling, infusing your business with some funds and a lot of effort, and changing the way you do business, willing to lose some clients. It’s a rough road to hoe if you’re taking care of a family and depend on repeat business; I don’t envy it. But that’s what Supercuts, superstores, super-anything does to an industry – it leaves its people scraping the bottom for the cheapest people there are, without decent health care, with an impoverished diet that takes years off their lives, and having to explain to people that work is worth something.

There’s a related principle. Not only is the compensation model for freelancers really fundamentally different than for employees… and we all know this, but when you’re rearranging your life accordingly, it’s something to meditate on and ponder… but so is this model for time. If you spend 8hrs at the office, your ‘work’ is presumably done, because your work is defined by the man. Your work is your job. But it’s really not done. You still have to pick up the kids, wash the car, buy the groceries, go jogging, and all the other things you do. What the freelancer realizes is that these are work too.

Occasional clients think a freelancer should be waiting at his desk at all times, when they get back to their office, ready to respond in an instant. “Where were you yesterday?” You don’t take vacations, don’t take a day off, don’t go to the gym. You work when they work, and you work when they sleep, because 24-hour turnaround is in demand, too. But that’s not sustainable. What, freelancers shouldn’t get 8hrs sleep or go to the gym? You can’t hire an assistant to work out for you, or get proper rest so you stay healthy for another day. The real story is that the model of work has been distorted somewhat by separating it from the home. I’m not suggesting there’s something inherently wrong with office work, just that it doesn’t explain, describe, or account for everything. The truth is that when a freelancer cooks the meals, provides the transportation, goes to the gym to stay healthy, or just engages in personal hygiene (how long does your full regimen, day and night, take from your day?), that’s work.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Work is what you do when you wake up, and what you do before you go to sleep. I’m not saying there’s not room to go read a book and rest, but that rest is part of the work, too. When I read, it’s fuel. When I rest, it’s preparation to work – it’s restocking the shelves. When I relax, it’s to be ready for the intensity and energy. Same thing when I blog, folks. That’s the truth. Without it, I can’t think at the pace that’s necessary to do what I do for you or for someone else. We’re *whole* people, and we need a *whole* life, sustained by work, involved in work, and linked to our work. This is why – this is the primary reason – why I’m always saying that work had better be a primary source of meaning your life.Take away the illusions about what your work is buying and what it’s not, and what actually constitutes work, and it had better be.

Income is not what’s left over after the things that sustain your life are taken out – like healthcare. Income is what you use to take care of your whole life, including your health. When you short the one, you’re shorting the other. Likewise, time for work is not the time spent on a task someone else makes you do, or a task that you have to drive to get to, or a task that directly impacts your client. Time for work is time spent on the entire person, the *whole* source of work, your whole life. It needs to be balanced, thought out, and reasonable – you can’t just sleep for two days every week and expect, in most freelance scenarios, to be successful. Even if that’s the sum of leftover time, what about going to gym and, again, personal hygiene, etc.? Time spent on work is, appropriately, time spent on your whole life, precisely on *keeping* it in balance, keeping it functioning at optimum, and in keeping with the very things you need to get paid for. I get paid so I can buy healthcare. I spend time and the gym so I can stay healthy. You can’t throw either one over your shoulder. Get paid a lot, work 16 hours, not 8 (or acknowledge that it’s work) and, though you’ll then realize that our taxes really are obscenely high (only an employee who has forgotten these principles can rant about how we pay less than other nations), you’ll at least be able to explain what you do without feeling quite as harried. A little harried maybe, but not because there’s no reason for half of it. And no, you’re most likely *not* overpaid.

Google is My Hero

You know, we’ve written a while back about how Google stood up to the Chinese totalitarian government by refusing to turn over dissident information on demand, while other companies like Yahoo bent over and dropped their shorts, handing those kids over to decades-long prison terms without even a cough. I’ve sent out gmail invites to all my Yahoo contacts with just that info. Some switch, some don’t. With Google’s motto, “don’t be evil” and Screwhoo’s model of secret prisons, torture, and rewarding free speech with reporting on its members, you get two kinds that stick with Yahoo – the ignorant and the indifferent. Which are you?

But now Google’s doing it again. While other companies never peep a word about government hacking into mail accounts, Google blows the whistle and points out an ongoing pattern of hacking from Chinese government IPs. It’s doing this in the face of censorship demands that, so far, everyone has honored to some degree. Google’s now saying ‘enough is enough’, and we’ll pull out altogether (leaving you in the dustheap of information history – you farks) before we’ll cave. And in fact, they’ve stopped censoring results in China.

If we spent as much time studying the heroes of information ethics as we do heroes of ancient Greece, Google would be our Hercules. As a member of the Google nation, I feel more affinity with her than with my own body politic. More a part of her culture than the culture at large. If Google were Russia, I’d abandon my current citizenship and go live there. What’s this got to do with work and the world of work?

Everything. Ethics is everything. Righteousness is everything. The world of work could use a healthy dose of righteousness. Not self-righteousness. Think Microsoft there. “We have done this, so we are entitled to what we want.” That’s entirely different. Just goodness. We need, for our work to be a font of joy, for it to be a primary vehicle of meaning, to be like Google. I meet people all the time who “love their jobs” and “find meaning” in them, but when they describe what they’re talking about, it seems to be the ability to afford Starbucks every morning, or eat $15 lunches, or to be thought of well in society. They’re not describing meaning or joy at all. They’re describing gratification and convenience, but not meaning and joy. And there is a distinctive difference.

I’m convinced that joy in one’s work comes partly from doing it well and partly from one’s work being a legitimate contribution to the wellness of the world. To wake up and work dishonestly cannot convey those things, regardless of the shifty guys that tell you they’re OK with it (that’s a commentary on their absence of the basic moral equipment, not a commentary on work). To wake up and contribute nothing, to neither lesson the agony of the world nor conribute to the mercy in it, cannot convey meaning. I don’t mean the cheesy substitutes of just making people feel good. Keebler makes people feel good. They also make people obese, shorten their lives, and contribute to their suffering. If you’re selling yourself that that’s the same thing, you’re just playing games. And I don’t mean doing whatever for a corporation that “gives something back”. The fact that there’s an annual United Way drive or toys for tots walk or whatever, while good, aren’t the same thing.

Work, for us to really feel it like we were meant to, like we’re built to, must shape the world into wellness through our day in and day out activity. The Christmas bonus doesn’t make a lousy job great, and the annual drive doesn’t grant the employees of an otherwise morally useless entity the kind of meaning in their work that they are designed for. To wake up and be a force for righteousness in the world (and yeah, I’m not afraid of the quasi-religious terminology), that’s a necessary path to meaning derived from work. Substitutes need not apply.

So ask yourself, if you want to contribute to the world, why not set your feet in the direction of doing so. Life is too brief (it’s very brief), to waste years paralyzed by fear. I’m speaking from experience. Life is too brief to look back and ask why you clung to something, to anything, when you couldn’t derive the primary experience from work that you were meant for. If it’s just an income source, or just something to be endured, or if it’s about as subtle in its attempts to compensate as an oil company that gives a few thousand to rainforest funds, you’ve got to change directions, don’t you? Look at Google. That’s what heroes are for. They’re there to give the rest of us an icon of what we want to be like.

Have you told your kids about Google yet? I’m serious. Why not? I know they know more about the tech side than you do – I don’t care about that. I’m talking about what Google means in the world. Do you know if they’re heads down in Twitter and text or if they see what transpires among nations and the world of work? If they don’t see, are they really being prepared to avoid the mistakes we made (you know you made them, too)? Microsoft puts people into bankruptcy for treating the software they bought like they own it. Google frees people from prison by protecting their files from torturers and totalitarian regimes. Who do you want your kids to be like? Who do *you* want to be like?

What’s Wrong With Discounts?

I’m not a believer in discounts, unless they are part of a marketing campaign. Half-hazard discounts, because someone asks for one, force you to work harder for less pay to justify your normal price. If you’re willing to do that, just make it your normal price. I think more people respect that.

Up Front Discounts: I think everyone that’s experimented with running their own business, contractor gigs, or freelance work, has at one time or another made the mistake of offering up front discounts to help close a deal – only to realize that that wasn’t what the client needed to say yes. I’ve been starting businesses since I was 12, and I was a Sales Trainer for some years. My experience, that I passed on to my students (which admittedly isn’t the gospel), is don’t assume a transactional sale – don’t assume price is your clients’ chief motivator, or even an essential one. It’s a lazy shortcut to being consultative. Consultative sales and marketing is about discovering your prospects’ true motivators and targeting those.

It’s the same thing I learned in education (spent a couple of decades in that field) – learners are motivated by different things – there’s not one type. What some people want is an extrinsic motivator (help their business, for example, and that’s as good as money), and what others want is an intrinsic one (it might be a sense of empowerment as you put more processes under their control, etc.). Where you add value is in satisfying motivators for different prospects, and where your marketing is successful is when you consult with these prospects and know what value they most want added.

Most people that tell me they’re only able to get business by slashing prices aren’t doing intelligent marketing at all. They haven’t got well-defined market differentiators – unique areas where they add value. They aren’t being consultative with their clients to uncover subtle needs. They’re leading with price precisely *because* it’s easier than being consultative. Or so they think. It seems easier, but then they’re also working harder than their competitors, and for less pay. Add value and earn the pay you really need to earn.

Campaign Discounts: A campaign that features a discount on one item or service for getting business in the door, and then charges fair, competitive prices (yes, full price) for other services – that can be part of a smart marketing arsenal. It should never be your only strategy. But as one tool, it can be great. For instance, if you want to give AARP, AAA, student, municipal worker or other corporate or membership discounts, those can work. They work *best* when you actually partner with such organizations or local municipal agencies or corporate partners and you get promotional benefit from it that they help you with. If they’re not willing to promote/market your business for free in exchange for giving their people a discount, stop wasting your time. There are plenty of people who will – focus on those. Don’t run a renegade, all on your shoulders, campaign with nothing in exchange for your discount. Be smart – give nothing away. That’s how you know it’s right – are you consistently getting something tangible in return for the discount. If not, get out of the deal and don’t get back in.

Referral Discounts: For the average caller, walk-in, referral, or whatever, don’t give discounts. Not even for referrals, you say? Isn’t that a justification for a discount? No, it most certainly is not and should not be. I *expect* referrals, just like I expect walk-ins and calls. I learned that as a young man from a colleague in the landscaping business (I also ran a landscaping company at the time, and he was my mentor). If I’m not getting referrals, I’m doing something wrong. They’re part of the normal process of my business – they’re one of the basic assumptions of my business model. I once told this to a couple of neighbors who expected me to work for almost nothing, because I had both of them as customers and they thought I could get one more in that neighborhood, if I did all three lawns for the price of two. I was a kid, but not a stupid kid. I told them what I’m telling you. I expect to get other clients in the same neighborhood – it’s part of my business model. That’s not a reason to provide discounts. There’s always someone who will do it cheaper, they pointed out. Exactly, I said. That’s why slashing prices is ultimately self-defeating. Adding value is the way to make out, not slashing prices. If you can’t figure out how to add value to your transactions – *that* is your first marketing move, not price-slashing.

Marketing for referrals, on the other hand, is different – that’s like campaign discounts. But that’s not the same thing as getting occasional referrals from satisfied clients. If you have a client or contact that can be reasonably expected to funnel a significant number (by significant number, I mean more than 10 people) your way, who has demonstrated this, and the prospects all fall under one demographic, you might consider offering a discount to that demographic when they are referred. You don’t have to offer it to the whole demographic, and you don’t have to offer it to the referring client or contact. That last may seem strange, but the value that client or contact is getting is a lot of promotion too, as someone who can arrange discounts through referrals. Don’t assume you have to deeply discount services for him. After all, you can also refer people to his business. Don’t trade work for referrals straight up, or almost so. If your work is stellar, there will be enough people who refer you anyway that you don’t have to keep giving it away.

Expected Discounts: Often we might hear that people “expect” discounts. Yeah, that’s because people have sold them a bill of goods. We all know someone in our family or group of contacts who will drive 10 miles to save 5-cents/gallon on gas – someone who will buy an expensive advertised/brand-name item because of a 20% discount, when an equivalent item is available regularly at 60% of that price, without the marketing. That’s the world, you might say, so don’t we have to cater to it? Not exactly. You have to correct it, and still run your business effectively – you need clients and so do I. So if you’re going to respond to it (you don’t have to, but if you are) here’s how – you have two choices:

Method 1: Don’t offer discounts like that. Offer “every day low prices”. That’s the world, too. That’s what Walmart does – it’s their slogan. A jar of mayonnaise at Walmart costs the same at regular price as one on discount at your local Homeland Grocer. Why do people go to Walmart? (I don’t – I hate them.) They go, because the prices are low all around. None of us wants to do what we’d have to do to offer Walmart-like prices, though, not if we’re ethical. I certainly won’t. So let’s say Costco prices. They’re a great, ethical company and their prices are still lower than Homeland. We won’t be bottom of the barrel with this technique (no rained-on diapers lying around in our parking lots – you want Walmart – go to Walmart – not every client is my client), but we won’t have to lure people in by constantly red-tagging items and displaying them on an endcap, either.

Method 2: Offer premium prices on everything, and discounts to everyone that asks for one. Some people won’t ask (the risk is they won’t tell you they’re concerned about the price, if you’re not consultative enough to gather their concerns – or else you’ll end up offering a discount to everyone – that’s not the method – that sounds like apologizing because your pricing structure sucks – to do this properly, you’ll have to rely on your consultation skills or take the risk). This principle, though, is the same one that says you ask more for your house, car, or flea market item than what you’re willing to take, and you agree to haggle.

Every day added value, not every day low prices: Personally, I don’t use either of these methods per se, though I’m constantly being told by both peers and other professionals and even clients that my prices are too low. So maybe I do. I have a niche partly based on a price break point, though, and I do OK. But what I like to think I do is charge one very fair price for my work – no discounts – I use a statement of work to define the scope of work – extras are extra. I have systems in place to do what I do, so I’m very efficient. I borrow processes from successful corporate models to maintain that efficiency. My profit margin is reasonable, and my clients get high value. Would I offer a discount on request? No. Would I offer one to an organization on request? No – not unless it was an offer to help me run a campaign that stood a demonstrated/proven  likelihood of bringing in at least 10 more clients ready for a full package. Would I let a customer go away because of price? Yes, I have done so, and I would do it again tomorrow. Even in this economy. Even if I were hungry.

Desperation Discounts: Even if you were hungry? I know, I keep making these radical-sounding statements. It might be hard to believe me, but here’s something I learned from a colleague (again, in the landscaping business). If you work for yourself, and you’re not making at least $25/hour, you’re working for the wrong person – go get a job. That was more than 15 years ago. You’re paying self-employment tax. You’re paying your own health insurance – yes, you’re damned well entitled to health care, so you’d better make sure you can pay for it. You’re paying for your own savings funds (let’s not kid ourselves by calling it “retirement” – the last generation to retire has already retired). You pay for overhead, equipment, supplies, services, and you’d better be spending something on marketing (a business will lose 25-33% of its clients annually to attrition – if you’re not growing, you’re dying, even if you don’t feel it yet – get your marketing in gear while you’re busy – don’t wait until you’re slow, when the pipeline will take potentially too long to build). You need to make a living wage. What, because you’re self-employed, everyone but you is entitled to a living wage? Fark no! Don’t buy into that discriminatory nonsense. If you’re thinking that way, or you’re willing to settle for that, you need to join a freelancers union or form a union of one and defend yourself  A living wage. [If you're a contractor or freelancer, by the way, you might want to contact Free Agent Source. It's sort of like a union for freelancer/contractors, but without the politics.]

So no, if I got hungry enough, I wouldn’t cut my prices continually until people came with me for that reason alone. I would add value, and keep adding value, and I’d raise – now lower my prices. Yes, in a “recession”. Everything I’ve said, every assertion is counter-intuitive to the way I was taught business by watching small, medium, and big corporate businesses whose names I can’t remember, or who aren’t around anymore. But it’s also what I’ve learned from businesses that could survive anything and have. It’s aggressively self-assured business. It’s a plan you might say is founded on arrogance – but, if you’re saying that, I’ll let you in on a secret: That’s why it works. This is rain folks, and your business is an ark. Build it strong. Build it to float. One way of doing that is add value rather than slash prices. Make it lowest-common-denominator-proof. Because the denominator is going to get lower. You want to survive? Plan to thrive.

And yeah, finally, if I had to choose between working for almost nothing and getting a job, I’d follow that colleague’s advice. If I couldn’t make it work adding value and getting a living wage, I’d go work for a better boss, and think and learn and plan again, until I could determine and execute what I needed to do better. I’d get a job.

So, what’s it going to be? You’re your boss. I’ve given you my take on discounts. This was asked as a question by a client or colleague, so I’ve thrown in my volunteer voice on it. You’ve got to do what you know to do. My two cents isn’t worth a tinker’s damn in your business if you can’t believe it when your own voice says it. If you find something else that works well, and you’re getting a living wage out of it, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with me – because, while I’m willing to stick my neck out and talk, and model my business after my talk, I’m also willing to learn. Let me know, and I hope this helps.

Mount Olympus is No More

When I was a kid, it was very clear what my parents and parents’ parents expected of me. Acquisition. And chances are, so did yours. You can slice it any way you want, the generation that came back from WWII, and their children, used words like “security”, “stability”, and “financial independence”. But then, they wanted you to give up your financial independence for a mortgage, trust your security to an insurance company, a retirement fund, and lots of men in uniforms, and your stability to a job.

And what has happened to their world? Not only have housing prices relative to income soared, but the mortgage turned out to be a curse in many cases. Your 401K or your mutual fund is worth a negative, and has been for a couple of years now, and will be for some time (you won’t be making that money back that way), and health insurance is so obscenely priced that if your employer didn’t pay most of it, you couldn’t afford it on a “middle class” income. And finally, the security one staked on individual employers is gone. It was gone before this bust, and it’ll have been long gone afterward. No one retires anymore at 50-65 with a gold watch and a pension. If you aren’t already an executive, you can forget it.

The wisdom, in other words, of the generation predicated on a world war and a cold war, has become a disproved religion, a mantra for those who prefer to live in old movies. None of us can afford, any more, to listen to our parents. Or their parents. Their system has become the ponzi scheme of contemporary economy. So what’s changing for us?

In a brilliant article, recently, wisebread detailed the fallacies of home ownership as an investment. It’s not diversifying your investments. A mortgage is a foolish form of renting -  like putting a car on a credit card. Most of your money is lost to interest, and the growth barely exceeds inflation – most decent investment funds can do much better. The return at sale from appreciation doesn’t even touch the the costs of upkeep, improvements, insurance and taxes, and that’s with the tax deduction figured in.  If you broke even at sale, in reality, looking at all the math, that would be amazing. And we have tons of historical data on the performance of housing, when applying the same rules as other investments. The money saved from renting, invested in something else, is likely to make you more financially independent than a home owner with a mortgage – says one economist, “You’re supposed to diversify as much as possible — put your money into stocks, bonds, many different geographies — and then use the income to rent whatever you like.” There might have been an argument against this 40 years ago. There isn’t, anymore. You use the money saved on upkeep, insurance, and taxes to pay your rent.

The job, too, we’ve spent a lot of space on here at Rules of Work. We’ve said the traditional job is a dinosaur. Working for one company isn’t diversifying either. It’s putting all your eggs in one basket, and look where that’s got us. The future of smart investment, for your work (and if  you’re not treating your work as an investment, why not?) is contracting. Whether as a free agent or someone who’s self-employed. If you were running a business, would you want just one client? “But that could make you rich,” you hear all the time, “if you could just get Walmart to buy in”. There are just as many broke, bankrupt souls who will correct that misguided notion who went down highway 71 to Bentonville (or went down because of it). Those stories needn’t be recounted here – you can find them anywhere. So if you wouldn’t want all your income dependent on one source as a business owner, why as an employee? A century of history with the company store, that takes care of everything, has taught us that eventually it doesn’t, and certainly it’s not the most stable investment, when looked at as an investment, fairly – like any other. Have you looked at how much you’re giving away by being an employee vs. a contractor? And if not, why not? If not, your security is more likely in the mythology propagated by our parents, and not demonstrably mathematical security at all. You’re just trusting in a generational company store.

But the world is changing with or without us. Not only is loyalty not rewarded, it’s punished. Even for those staying in a traditional job, if you stay too long, you hit a ceiling in which confidence in your ability wains, and you find contractors or outside candidates taking your next step. And you won’t be getting that gold pen, either. We’ve already talked at length in other articles about how contracting is widely replacing traditional employment – from the employer’s point of view – even if you haven’t caught up with that yet. They’re ahead of you. The company store always is. It’s like the house in Vegas. No need to rehash it again. The point is, the sound investment is in yourself – not just as a feel-good mantra, but in actuality, in genuine economics. Right now, there are still people saying “but I’m scared, and it’s more comforting being a… whatever” – they’re saying that now, but it’s about to get scarier being a whatever than at least having other irons in the fire. It will be gradual, yes. But gradual economics is not like gradual geology. It will be in your generation, and mine. Even small employers will be preferring contractors to employees.

What we will tell our kids, if we’re looking ahead, with vision, is that financial independence is not summed up in a mortgage and two cars with payments in the driveway. Security is not in a fund your employer picked out for you, and you’d better open a savings account, because insurance, unless the current government succeeds, will belong to the rich. Unless you’re starting out rich, start saving. And lastly, stability is not rooted in placing all your faith in the company, the organization, the corporation that is quickly distancing itself from what it was and still is portrayed as in popular culture. Stability is in a preponderance of investment in your multiple talents in multiple venues with multiple sources of income – not one. Whether work, or bonds, stocks, funds, or whatever. The guys that have been telling us, amidst the scorn of their parents and ours, to cut the traditional ties and live free, be mobile, be flexible, be responsive, be in more than one place, ditch the land line, the permanent address, and keeping your life in file cabinets and hard drives – be able, at least, to travel the world – those bratty, brash, bravado-mongers – those are simply the ones that realized, before you and I did, that the myth was just that. A Mount Olympus from someone else’s dreams. And it’s not bleak to discover this – it’s immensely freeing and empowering. It’s as if the answers come into your head at last, and the world is one of science – it begins to make sense.

Love your  parents. And their parents. Honor them. Just don’t live in their story. You can have a sock hop once a year, and chew some Black Jack gum, but you can’t live your life like that. And neither could they, if they were your age now.

Social Compact for Work Changes

Frankly, I find it hard to think of a recession only in terms of the numbers that matter to the people that got us into one. It’s still a recession, or worse (we don’t like the word depression), if people are hunting for jobs for 16months, qualified people with degrees are still losing their houses for not finding work, and applicants are having to go through eight interviews just to get a rejection letter. Replacing employee relationships with temp jobs isn’t a stabilization of employment, either, so the numbers can’t always be taken at face value.

It may well be that what has happened to the workplace for job holders and job seekers is not temporary at all – but is unprecedented and isn’t going away, not really. Hard to predict at this point, but signs that some changes may be more permanent are the reduction in employer funded retirement plans with widespread elimination of matching, and reduction of health care benefits with widespread use of contractors to avoid such entitlements. Pay cuts might be temporary, and it might be just belt-tightening to cancel the company picnic or the Christmas party. But eliminating health care and retirement – that’s changing the employer-employee relationship substantially.

Now even employees, in some cases, are really just ‘contractors’ with unemployment insurance. If that! Cut someone down to four days a week instead of five, and they’re not full time anymore. They may not be entitled to much of anything.

Some shifts in the employer-employee relationship have been building for years, but the recession, by making companies acutely cost-conscious, has accelerated them.

“I think we’ve entered into a fundamentally new era,” says David Lewin, of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. He describes employers as “leery of long-term commitments,” including both benefits and pay increases. . . .

In some cases, employers keep workers, but not on the payroll. Last December, staffing company Spherion Corp. laid off Roberta Marcantonio, a 14-year veteran who sold franchises to local operators. It brought her back as a contractor paid by commission. “We didn’t need the fixed costs, because of the recession,” says Spherion’s chief executive, Roy Krause. “But we needed the skills when she was able to sell something.”

[Wall Street Journal, Oct 20, 2009]

When you combine a trend toward ‘trial employment’ arrangements, with the growing practice of filling out workforces with contractors on a larger scale, and the reduction of the kinds of benefits that signify a long-term relationship (the equivalent of an engagement ring for an employee), it seems as if the relationship of employee to employer may itself be obsolete, at least in some fields, in some jobs, for some populations, and that what we’re witnessing is a work-culture shift, not a setback, not a minor adjustment, and not perhaps a temporary redistribution.

The contractor ranks are swelling. After all, even the unemployed are what, ultimately? Contractors waiting for a gig. The question will be whether this is empowering, for most, in the sense that it’s more like running your own business, or whether it will be debilitating, so that being a contractor is just another word for full-time employee with no benefits. If the latter, it may essentially ruin contracting for a lot of people who thrived with it.  What I hope, with glass hope,  is that it’s more the former, and that a shift to enhanced fulfillment from work, and from the very character of a traded, value for value relationship, will enliven the world of work for more people than ever before. We’ll see.

Mercenary Work is a Limp Woman

Have you ever given everything you had, vast numbers of hours, to hell with lunch and breaks and going for a soda, only to have someone say it’s no big deal, because you’re getting paid? The mercenary view of work, otherwise known as wage prostitution. Sure, you’re being paid because you work, but is that all it is, really? I mean, is that enough? God, I hope not.

Frankly, I feel sorry for anyone who finds work to be a simple matter of math. I want to work at things that possess me with intriguing problems and enticing challenges. If it was just about getting paid, I’d cave to the highest bidder, right? But when it’s everything I have, when I’ve spent all the sweat I can muster, the last thing on my mind is “Oh well I was adequately compensated.”

Adequately compensated? Nothing can compensate for the most productive hours of the best years of your life. They can’t be purchased with anything of like value – they’re invaluable – rather they are meant to purchase something else – meaning. If all that expenditure means is that transitory little check in the bank, well ho hum I might as well sell my tail on some sidewalk in Vegas, because it sure would be less hassle, not to mention more lucrative. That’s right, I’ve still got it. So let’s not play nihilistic little mind games – payroll is the basic expense reimbursement for living in such a way that you’re available to dedicate your mind at all. It’s not the point, any more than gasoline is the point of an automobile.

Work is about meaning, and people that talk about the check being everything don’t believe anything means anything. Mercenary nihilists – that’s what they are. They wouldn’t know the work that amounts to heroism, much less genius, or its value, if it bit them. At times, I work for the passion of it, and at times I work for my family, but I’ll be damned if I work like I work for a few extra digits. I want the digits, but I want everything else, too.

I want the awe, the applause, the sympathy, or whatever else goes to heroes – not for its own sake, but because it’s appropriate whenever I’m that freaking amazing. When I do in a few days what would normally take three people a week, and I can barely feel my brain as I fall down to sleep, I’m a freaking monster and, while I don’t necessarily need everyone else to realize it all the time (I’m a man; I’m used to people not realizing it), I’m certainly not going to lose sight of it. If not applause, then aplomb.

“You got a check – that’s all that matters” is just the flipside of “You got my time, that’s all that matters”. Saying it’s just about cash is the same as me saying it’s just about punching the clock. Ever been with a woman who wasn’t feeling anything? Yeah, work without meaning, work without desire, work without more than a check, is just like that. It’s pretty far from amazing. Again, I want the awe…

Asynchronous Communication – The Time Has Come

You’re a busy professional. What you’re doing is in demand. You’ve got lots of clients and lots of work. What kind of communications technology do you use – synchronous or asynchronous? Probably some of both, but probably not enough of the latter. Synchronous communication, of course, is talking back and forth live (phone calls, chatting) and asynchronous occurs at different times (e-mail is the chief example, but certainly not the only one).

Phone calls: how much time can you spend on the phone and still be productive? The phone call is still the standard for personalized contact, but so is calling people Mister and Ma’am and using their last name. In other words, its a vestige of perception from a previous era that is already past. The phone is the bow tie and the cuff link of the near future.

Sure, for people willing to pay premium rates for full service, the phone is a good primary tool. For a certain rate, for that matter, you can fly to them and set up shop on-site. It’s a higher rate, these days. But time is also a premium commodity – especially time in which you must focus on one thing and do little else – synchronous time – on-demand time. It’s time that’s worth three times your normal rate, because it’s time in which you can’t multi-task, or you can only multi-task for one client at a time. It’s exclusive time.

Sure, you can postpone synchronous communication by sending clients to an answering service or voice mail, but it’s still premium time  you’re promising, even if you return the calls after the prime time of your work day (and what do you do if your work day never ends?). Quite simply, wherever you move it around on the plate, the more time you spend on the phone, the less time you can be fully productive, and the more you have to charge each client. It’s not “included” in the sense of being “free”, it’s not just the cost of doing business – it’s the business cost you pass on to the client, because 10hrs/week of phone time is 10 more hours you have to work to make up for being exclusively available. Phone time is to the independent professional what meetings are to the denizens of corporate cubicles. The more meetings, the more you stay late. Why do you think so many of those folk are exempt (salaried)? Minimizing phone time, today, is a key aspect of staying profitable (or even staying in business).

Occasionally, we hear “I don’t do business w. people I can’t get on the phone when I want them”, and some of us have decided that this means that client goes to the other guy, who will charge them $750 for a $350 service and include all those reassuring phone conversations, and be available for the friendly hand-holding. How can we do that?

There comes a time to decide how many hours you really want to work, what rates you want to charge, what demographic you want to reach, and to limit your clientelle accordingly, effectively deciding what kind of business you want to run. The author of “The 4-Hour Work Week” knows this. Many of us are finding that the old “sky’s the limit” pattern of endless growth doesn’t fit with the lifestyle of meaningful work we’re constructing, nor into how work fits meaningfully into our lives as a whole. Frankly, I couldn’t afford to work at the rates I do for people who need it as much as do some of my clients, if I was following the endless growth pattern. I’d have to send them to someone who does less for them and charges more money, if I didn’t stay off the damned phone as much as I do. And personally, I’d rather do fewer jobs for people who get it and make it go smoothly, than twice as many jobs for clients who constantly need synchronous attention.

Instant Messenger: Do you really want to be on-call every moment you’re working online? Then add your short-term clients as IM “buddies”. It’s one thing if you’re doing a 10-month contract gig. It’s another fi you’re doing a 2-week job for them. Might as well give out a pager number and carry a beeper. Sure you can go unavailable all the time, but what’s the point of that – the joy of disappointment? That’s like turning on those instant “chat with me” widgets on your web site and then never being around to chat.

E-mail: E-mail is beautiful. You address it when you can, so it lets you integrate communications as one task in a multi-tasking environment. In fact, unlike the phone, it’s ideally suited to a multi-job, multi-contract environment. Sure, you can get 10 phone lines, but how many geniuses can you take away from their work to put on the phone? With e-mail, you have time to think through your answers, time to think of better answers and better solutions, or alternate possibilities. And it’s documented. If you’re really sharp, you develop some canned paragraphs you can personalize to explain common issues. For instance, if someone asks about the importance of blogging – whether it’s really necessary to marketing, I can reach out for the same paragraph I used the last time that was asked.

Sometimes, you hear “I’m just really a phone kind of guy.” If that’s your client talking, that’s perfectly OK, he can be a phone call kind of guy. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a phone-driven kind of business. I tend to respond to voice mails with e-mails. If I just get a “call me asap”, with no information on why, I’m even less impressed – you have to ask yourself, do you really want to be THAT available? I usually email an “I’m working on something at the moment. What’ up?” It’s always true, and it makes two points at once: 1.) I’m working all the time and, in order to stay working, I have to stay off the phone. 2.) I am available, I’m not unreachable, I just need to evaluate priorities – what’s your need? The client who treats every observation, thought, idea, or need as a top-priority, immediate need, is asking for a premium service. You’ve got to bill for it accordingly, or you’ve got to clarify how much consultation the job includes, and how much of that is phone time.

If you’re primary clientelle is welders who are buying welding gloves, I can understand the need for phone time, but I also understand (in that case) that you can put any reasonably polite and intelligent person on the phone to answer it for you. If, however, you’re offering a technology product or service, you need the brains bent over the circuit boards or the keyboards, and you don’t want someone who isn’t as well-educated, truly-informed, or deeply-involved fielding client queries. If you’re dealing with technology, your clients need to get used to e-mail. Yes, big companies provide highly-trained call-center support teams and, if you’re a big company, that makes sense. You also bill for that as a support contract, or built it, for a certain amount of time, into the premium price of your product or service. And if clients want to go to a big company, and pay those prices, let them; if you don’t have something going that big companies can’t easily duplicate (a niche, a specific clientelle, an added value service, etc.), you’re probably in the wrong business, or you won’t be in business long.  For most of us, though, when it’s based on high-expertise, electronic deliverables (forms, documents, web sites, etc.), we should be communicating asynchronously through e-mail.

Webinars: These are great, under the right conditions. If you’re getting paid, that’s the first thing – it gives you a fixed broadcast time for a fixed fee, if you manage it well. If you control and provide the agenda, and avoid mission-creep (On a web site training session: “can you help me figure out this one error message I get sometimes with my antivirus?”), and if you keep the agreed broadcast time, and bill for it even if your client no-shows. It’s tough, but again, do you want to get paid for your time? I guarantee they do. Time is the only true commodity. An appraiser does 10hrs of work and issues a report, and the client says “well the deal fell through, I don’t need it any more”. That doesn’t change the price of the work that was done. Get paid, or it’s not worth doing.

That’s another thing about phone time – it’s often un-billed time – it’s considered charity, gravy, icing, a freebie. But if you let it run like that, it can become half the job and, more significantly, half  your work. Is that what you want to do for a living? If not, then why would you do it for free? Your clients want to be paid by their clients, but even if their business model bleeds them through hemorrhaging synchronous contacts, that doesn’t mean yours should. The moment someone says you should consider it an act of charity, let them be the one that funds that charity. Then you’re golden. Make what you give away your own business.

Tweets: I use a tweet service (Twitter) to keep my clients informed on what I’m doing – it keeps them from wondering if I’m working on their project or not. Again, it keeps me off the phone. Go to one of my appropriate sites, check the appropriate page, and you know exactly what I’m doing at any moment. I use IM to update the tweet, so it’s synchronous (for me), but one-way. Neat, huh? If you’re not familiar, tweets are like mini-blog posts. Just a sentence that says what you’re doing. It updates a page and/or a feed or sidebar (or whatever else you want). People eye and follow tweets as they wish. My IM client is on all the time, but mostly I use it for this kind of asynchronous purpose rather than getting all kinds of incoming pop up windows when I’m trying to get a design job done.

Blogs: Don’t send answers, send links – it’ll make you a better blogger. I find a lot of the discussions I have with clients (by whatever means) inspire blog posts, and this means that when later clients ask the same questions, or raise the same issues, I can send a link to a well-articulated blog post, with links to more detail and resources, so I give a highly-effective answer and save us all time. And if I don’t have an appropriate post in one of my blogs, I can stop and write one, or I can do a blog search and grab a link from someone else who has. Of course, with blogging comes podcasting, and other blog-like technologies that accomplish similar things. In short, teach once, inform once, explain once, then go about growing your business, Use what I call the “ibid. method” (ibid. = “see previous answer”).

Extranets: Having an online shared repository for document sharing, project tracking, contacts, etc. can be great if the project really needs it (e.g. if the project involves more than a half dozen people). Or it can be your worst nightmare. Not every job should be a forum, and upload management environment, and a whole separate web site. Build these carefully, only when you really need them (not because they’re cool), and only build them to suit the type of team you’re running. Extranets have the power to reshape group communications, so use them carefully, or they’ll undo the professionalism you’ve built up. That said, in the right contexts, it’s stupid to go to work without them. I’ve seen it both ways.

So what about the “I was raised to make a personal phone call” culture? Nothing wrong with that. That may be your business. Let’s just not pretend you don”t have to charge for it, that you don’t build that cost in and bill it back. And let’s not pretend it doesn’t consume a great deal of time. Anyone who returns all their own phone call requests is working ‘makeup’ hours or to compensate. Outsourcing is great to handle the burden, but you can’t outsource genius. So if both the work and the conversation require astute clarity, technical information, and creative input, you’re just not going to get as far with someone else doing it.

The time has come. Look around at the culture. Kids obsessed with their little boxes, having endless text-message conversations about nothing important. Parking lots and streets clogged with horrible drivers engrossed in meaningless cell chatter. People on the phone at the cashier in front of you, fishing for bills and holding up the line while broadcasting the “he said, and then she said”. Phones aren’t making us ladies and gentlemen; phones are making us inattentive, unproductive, and stupid.

By contrast, online ordering, electronic forms, and the host of communications technologies that these presume (blogs, tweets, e-mail) – which have nothing to do with phones or chatting – these are making us more effective, empowering us, and extending our reach.

We may have thought it was a big switch to go to cell and dump the land line. And it is nice to have a cell that has land-line quality – especially for those whose businesses aren’t tied to one location. The bigger switch is to let people graduate to the realization that it’s either offshore call centers or you’ve got to stop monopolizing the time of brain-workers who need to multi-task (and multi-job) to make a living. If you insist on exclusive time, you pay first class. High maintenance is high cost, and making your guy stop and focus on only one thing is the most expensive maintenance there is.

We’ve got to communicate the value of e-communication, specifically asynchronous communication, and remember that it’s our edge, too – with it, we can do more work in less time, cut costs and pass on savings, and reach more people – and, yes, necessarily be more selective, but also have the freedom to do so.

One illustration: how many times has a client asked for a consultation, agreed with you on a certain time, and left you with a cleared hour on your calendar, but then just wasn’t available? Was it good for either of you? Same thing happens with webinars, right? One more illustration: whats more effective in the long run – a phone walk-thru of the design build you’ve just done, or a PDF e-book with screenshots, arrows, circles,  links, and explanations of what you’ve done – something they can take with them and look at and think about and refer back to? Someone will say *both* – that’s fine – nothing wrong with that – just charge for both. An e-mail that actually happens – a communication that actually takes place – beats any “personal” (synchronous) communication that doesn’t actually come about.

FYI: I am available by phone, but it’s part of the timesheet. The first consultation is free – after that, especially for “what *else* do you think I need?” or “What should I do about x?”, I’m serving as a consultant, and we’re into billing. Whether they’re price-shopping or wanting the free-diagnostic so they can do it themselves, time is the one valuable thing I can either trade or take away from something else. It’s also a fixed commodity. There’s just so much of it, unlike creativity, so you’ve got to parcel it out to things that matter most (e.g. the work), to things that keep the business alive (40/60 phone calls to work can kill a lot of businesses), and to things that pay directly (indirect pay is all well and good, if you’re really getting paid – if it’s not being billed, do it differently).

Asynchronous Communication: The time has come to move on from the lazy ease and ubiquitous ringing of constant phone calls.

Unpopular Comments on Unpopular People

One of the things that a business can do is sustain the very notion of what work means. It can use its resources to uphold the meaning of work itself, and so its own meaning, and the meaning of the myriad of endeavours on which its participants spend the vital years of their lives.

Almost every culture has a large segment of people it has consigned, like the Moorlocks of HG Wells, to blind toil. Almost every society has attempted to convert a very large number of its own people or its neighbors into machines. Deep below the decks, slaving in the steam. Behind the wall in the cloth cutter’s shop, from dark to dark, in misery. Bought as children and given a tenuous thread to a painful existence in the stinking alleyways. Coopted as abandoned, widowed, or unprotected women and exploited, chained by the intentions of others to a vacant survival. Dashed hopes. Betrayed trusts. Pressed into jars like commodities. Nearly every culture still derives its prim face and proper makeup from the invisible suffering of slaves.

In my view, we owe. We owe even if we fancy ourselves ‘innocent’. We owe because the world is big, and somewhere someone is rinsing from a plate some sauce or gravy they will never afford to eat, and the act of that machine, that turning of their arms, over and over like a perpetual turbine, is holding up the system that allows me to sell anything to anyone. I owe. And so, i think, do you.

I also think we deny the meaning of what we do when we do not strive to secure meaning for the work of others. The indomitable humans in the chicken factories, isolated places of ofal and gore that we might complain to be down wind of – they are the tall people, and we become less human by the measure of our neglect, indifference, and unwillingness to discomfort ourselves to protect the meaning of work for all.

I’ve no one charity to point at; I’ve already pointed before. I’m willing to make unpopular statements and make them even less popular by not tying them to an easily dismissed passing of the offering plate. This is a blog about work. Not just about making a profit, tho that’s certainly a good idea. It’s a blog about work, and it is as much, for that, a blog about meaning. So I merely point out that the meaning of what we do is just theater, just a simulation, unless it compels and enables us to relieve the poor. If not for that, I have nothing else to say, and all work – yours and mine – is just arbitrary, inherently uninteresting, and frankly at best a form of narcissism and masturbation. Sure, our families eat, but what’s so important about that, really? – what does that really mean if families and their endeavours aren’t important in general?

One of the all-time, inviolable purposes of work is the same as one of the primary purposes of fasting: it enables us to have something to give to the poor.

Lead from the Front, not your Rear

Who hasn’t had the opportunity to either experience leadership (good or bad) in action, or to exert leadership in some setting? Some basic observations from both sides of that experience can translate into effective rules for successful leadership.

A leader motivates through encouragement rather than ridicule or intimidation: Motivation involves the personal goals of the participants, not just the leader’s goals. Smart leaders try to help participants attain their personal goals, knowing that this will result in high achievement for team goals and project goals. Ridicule or intimidation are thought to be a shortcut to motivation, actually they undermine it and cancel it out. They’re a form of defeating the soldiers on your own team, and threatening the others. It’s not a smart form of leadership – it’s the sign of a leader abandoning the larger goals for the sake of winning personal authoritarian ones.

A leader doesn’t trade power for control: Power doesn’t need to exert control, it is confident enough that it can afford to persuade. When one reaches for control, it’s actually a denial of power, a confession that one doesn’t have it, and it’s to relinquish power in that area. Controlling people reduces them to ‘monkeys’ – anyone can go read a presentation for you but, if they’re not motivated, how likely is it that they’re going to win your audience and turn them into evangelists for your product? In most cases, anyone can meet the basic requirements and job description, and deliver what you ask on time. Whether or not they will be amazing, exceed your expectations, and deliver a ‘wow’ at the end is based largely on motivation, interest, and their own personal sense of meaning and success. It has to mean something to them and, if it does, and you know what it is and how to ensure they have that meaning, you don’t need control – you have power. Power is the power to create vehicles of meaning – which is why a master presenter can close the deal for your product in the hearts and minds of your audience. It’s not because he reads a powerpoint in the voice of Charlton Heston – it’s because he thinks about the sources of meaning for his audience.

A leader doesn’t base authority on absolutes: The ‘my way or the highway’, ‘what I want, and I don’t care about the rest’ approach is often thought to be authority. Respect for authority is said, in bad leadership, to be jumping on demand like a wind-up toy, to whatever one is told. But real authority (real leadership) isn’t based on absolutes. Real authority comes not from cancelling discussion, even after you’ve made up your mind, but from continually listening, considering alternatives, and welcoming constructive challenges. Authority that expects to be followed without question or challenge is actually undermining its own effectiveness. The role of the best minds on a team or project is to ‘push back’ when something may affect outcomes – if you silence that when you’ve made up your mind, you silence it for the future when you’ll need it to ensure your own success. That’s not authority – that’s absolutism. A leader with authority frees his people from burdens by letting them know the concern has been heard and documented, and that the responsibility for deciding against it is on the leader.

A leader doesn’t ask you to accept responsibility without control: A leader doesn’t leave it on others if we fail and on himself if we succeed. There are many forms of this. If you’re given a goal and a deadline, but then a number of other things are piled on, and the deadline isn’t moved, that’s a form of responsibility without control. “Just get it done.” isn’t the answer of leadership – it’s the answer of someone who intends to blame others for failure. If you can’t go to a leader with, “I can do what you ask, based on this time frame, or moving these things around – which do you prefer?” — not without invoking anger, frustration, and threats – then it isn’t leadership, it’s dumping on you.

A leader cultivates respect by giving respect rather than shame or fear: An effective leader doesn’t confuse cowed people who offer up the rituals of deference with loyal people who are working for you because it’s a joy to do so. The latter will work through hard times, rough waters, and pour their particular genius into the project. The former will do what you say. Would you prefer someone who does what you say or what you intend? Leaders who try to use fear and shame as motivators have a belief in their own infallibility. But leaders who recognize their fallibility are more effective, and know that what they need are fully-engaged minds, who wed their hearts to their work. This is accomplished by creating an environment of mutual respect. Often you’ll get schizophrenic environments where intimidation and ridicule are coupled with praise and pats on the head. For one thing, pats on the head aren’t the same thing – if you don’t mean it, no matter how ‘good’ you think you are, and how much your people pretend, deep down the best ones will know it. For another, on-again off-again respect-riducle fame-fear motivation attempts turn your team dynamics into a vending machine of self-serving detachment. If you want to win the nods but lose the will, use shame and fear to ‘master’ your team members.

Things bad leaders say:

• “But you don’t understand what it takes to lead in this environment. This is different.” (the ‘it was war, and war is Hell’ argument – excusing bad leadership by appeal to context)
• “It’s because you’re difficult to manage. Sometimes I have to do things I ordinarily wouldn’t do, just to get through to you.” (the ‘you made me beat you’ argument – excusing bad leadership by blaming the followers)
• “I do what I have to do – if you don’t like it, feel free to leave.” (a combination of the ‘leaders aren’t subject to standards for means, just for ends’ and the ‘love it or leave it’ arguments)
• “You have to do what you’re told. That’s all there is to it.” (an appeal to absolutes – to control disguised as authority – excusing bad leadership by silencing anyone who thinks differently)
• “Don’t complain and stop asking questions. Just get it done.” (the ‘make bricks without straw’ response’)

As much as a leader may talk about knowing how to motivate people, what it takes to be successful, and delivering the end result, these are just excuses for doing it badly. And it doesn’t work. The results of this kind of ‘leadership’ is that you stress out your most diligent workhorses, you create an amoral “every man for himself” atmosphere that expresses itself in gossip, tattling, backstabbing, and other social dysfunctions – bad team dynamics, and you de-motivate your most dedicated people – decreasing their loyalty and their concerns for keeping all the pieces together – you create silos. These things are the inevitable results of bad leadership that covers for, makes excuses for, and exalts itself, and blames others.

Leadership books are a dime a dozen. But there are few of them that recommend the techniques of bad leadership mentioned above, and most of the rules above would be considered basic to human motivation. That means even a wet-behind-the-ears assistant manager at a burger joint, or a green corporal may command more successfully than a veteran ruler with six figures and some initials in his title. But you would rather be that person? Or would you rather be that person and be effective?

The cost for bad leadership in a corporate millieu where bad leadership is ubiquitous seems relatively small. So yes, you may not pay for it all that much, and may prefer to take little lumps than do the work of being a decent human being, which is all a good leader really is – a decent human being in the context of leadership. How many “nice” people would turn into little monsters if they took on the mantle of command? This is the key point: I’m not going to try to tell you that you’ll suffer greatly and endlessly if you don’t follow these rules – you’ll achieve a mixture of mediocrity and success that will likely get you promoted through to retirement. I’m not using the fear of punishment as a motivator, here. Instead, I’m saying if you want to be amazing at it, want tremendous success, want silly levels of honor as a leader, then follow the above rules like they were gospel.

Things effective leaders say:

• What do you need from me in order to be successful? (This should be something you hear periodically.)
• What do you want in the context of this team and this organization? What are you working towards? (Assesses individual motivators. A good leader will help his people achieve these.)
• What am I doing well as a leader, and what can I do better? (Invites openness about personal and professional development, leads by example)

Not everyone is cut out to stand at the front of an organization structure; some are the right hand or the left or the rear guard or the avante garde. Leadership, though, as a conscious set of efforts to be effective, is useful in a lot of venues. The same person who is your right hand man, may be a leader at home, his church, in a non-profit, or in a small business for which he moonlights. The lessons from that are: an effective leader can often lead from behind the scenes (he doesn’t need constantly to be recognized as a leader), if you’re an ineffective leader, your mistakes are likely to be obvious to a whole range of people you don’t suspect, and leadership, effectively, is shared – it doesn’t demand sole exercise of the leadership role. Take away what you will, but leadership is everywhere; in any crowd of 100 people, it’s more likely that 75 will be leaders than 10. And we’re watching, and discussing this. Good leaders are icons and bad leaders are bywords in the effort to understand and use the rules of effective leadership. If nothing else, we can observe the successes and mistakes of others and the consequences of them, and hone our own skills. So lead on… lead from the front, and not your rear.

Faith in a Blog about Work

Look, here’s the point: I have more than a couple of jobs, but I limit what I discuss to two, so we don’t have to waste time with the “you’re a freak” discussion. I often hear people talk of: “putting in long hours”. As opposed to what? I was going to work anyway. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. People talk of “work-life balance” but why does work need to be balanced? Work *is* life. Work is balance. “Work and play?” Work is the way that I play. People say, “You do what you have to, so you can do what you want to do.” But work *is* what I want to do. I don’t get it.

Work is supposed to be the source of meaning. That’s the whole point of this blog. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. It’s worth, in other words, taking seriously, making the work of your hands, the work of your life. And whatever isn’t worth that much, you set it down for what is.

A fundamentalist lecturer who spoke extensively about work has said “the good things are the enemies of the best things, if only for lack of time”. We have so little time, so little life left to us in our mortality, to establish what it is we’re supposed to be doing with our lives. If you’re reading this and you’re over 30, your life is half over, statistically. Maybe you’re optimistic – ok, so even if you’re life is 1/3 over, and you’ve only got 2/3 left, if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, then when?

I used to teach a class in which I’d begin with a bonding exercise – ask each participant to answer a seemingly simple question: If we paid all your bills, alleviated all your debts, met all your obligations, and gave you the car you want, the home you want, the title you want, etc. – what would you do with the rest of your life? The goal was to bypass some of the social armor we put on, the defensiveness of new environments, and coming from diverse backgrounds, and see a little bit of the person in each other, just a little beyond the veil. And you see it, because you see in each person the universal search for meaning – meaning that can be understood in the context of work.

But it’s amazing how few people spoke of something resembling work. Some spoke of traveling or of learning/studying (both of which represent the search for meaning) – a small minority spoke of engaging in some particular profession or launching a business. The exercise proceeds by asking the question “why” until you get at the reason behind the reason (not just a restatement of the original). Suffice it to say that answers broke down (without people saying it explicitly) into either “I have no idea what my life means, so I would search for meaning” or “I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, and it’s work”. The final question – either way – was, “So, even given limited resources and time, what steps are you taking, on a constant or daily basis, in that direction?”

The goal was to accomplish a bit of inthinking – thinking together about a shared problem that’s uniquely held by each participant. The result is the creation of a much more effective learning environment, because further activity becomes attitudinally focused around the mutual acquisition of meaning that work constitutes in the first place. In short, this implied bond quickly created more cohesive work groups with a discreet understanding of what our work actually is. Minds were open to finding meaning through the work we were bound to do together. People still come up to me in crowds and tell me the turning point in their attitudes about their work was those classes. Those were sales classes too – full of professional skeptics. It’s not me, though – work really can be like that.

The answers to that last question, though – “what are you doing to go in that direction now?”, ranged from “You’re right. I will (or I am)” to the challenge, “What about you? Are you doing what you’re meant to do?” – to which I would always answer categorically “yes”. And indeed I was. And without belaboring the details, that’s still true. As much as I can, and I am trying to make more “can”. What I can’t bring myself to do is just whittle away the hours. Even reading a book is work. The best quotation on reading I’ve read is “When you read, make to do lists instead of notes – if you can’t do that, you’re reading the wrong books.”

Your work is holistic – it involves the whole person – what you put in and what you put out. Your work, the work of your life, the work of your hands, is too important to leave to the merely adequate, to a placeholder, to be in fact anything other than the source of meaning in your life. Even in religion, the word “liturgy” (the Christian worship service) means “the work of the people”. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth taking quite seriously. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work.

In fact, Christianity provides a very useful fork for attitudes about work: one attitude views work as a curse – a kind of necessary evil – a blight upon one’s life that one should rather escape if one can. This view has generated a generation of slackers – decades, in fact, of drop-outs, and beatniks on the Kerouak model. Work, in this experience, is the source of frustration, not the locus of joy, much less the means of salvation. And this is often thought to be the Christian model.

Historically, it is anything but. For one thing, the Christian view is that, when God pronounces a curse, it is an act of love, which is actually designed for the salvation of the individual – for union with God, rather than alienation from God and all things. It is saving man by putting a boundary on his despair (the opposite of meaning). The idea of a curse in the occult sense of a malevolent force of destruction is foreign to Christian tradition. Secondly, the tradition is that all things blighted with death – with frailty and frustration – all things deprived or distorted of meaning – are being redeemed, deified, transformed into vessels of meaning, conveyors of salvation. Work, in the Christian view, while it is uncomfortable because of the death inflicted on mankind and the world, is meant to be a means of overcoming death. In fact, without one’s work, one cannot be saved, according to the Christian gospels. If one reads the parables of the talents and of the minas and of the vineyard and the other Christian teachings on the mystery of work, it is a primary means of union with God. The alternative is “weeping, outer darkness, and gnashing of teeth” – that’s despair.

A common misconception is that the Christian scriptures say that work is a curse. Far from it; they say that the ground is cursed – the environment, the context of work – not work itself.

Cursed is the ground because of you, In sorrow you shall eat of it all your days. It will bring forth thorns and thistles, and you shall eat the grain of the field: by the sweat of your brow you will get your bread, unil you return to the ground, for you were taken from it. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In fact, the curse is that things will frustrate your work (e.g. “thorns and thistles”) – the implication is that work itself is a holy thing confronted by disaster which it and we must overcome for rightful ends. We’re not much on proof texts here, but that’s what the words actually say and that’s the attitude that Christian tradition actually preserves, pop-religion aside. Keep in mind that the first thing God said to man was to work- the work of rulership over the earth jointly with the work of tending and protecting and replenishing the earth and making it peaceful:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed-bearing fruit; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon the earth that lives, I have given every green plant for food”. And it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. . . . And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it.

It’s interesting that the very next thing God said to man was to fast, – it was a rule – to not eat up all the earth, or eat even of everything in it, even if man could consume it all, and even if it was designed as food, and even if it was in his care; but the implications of that is a different discussion for a different venue. We’ll stay with work. If you look closely at the Christian telling, work is the life of paradise, and the very deprivation of meaning from work, which came when Death fell upon it, is the very thing from which the curse is designed to save us.

There is, in our culture, a certain audacity in “bringing religion into” a discussion on work; it’s a faux pas – and I don’t violate it because I’m unaware of it. I’m a pretty smart guy – when I break a social rule, it’s intentional – I just have a reason that’s discreet and not readily apparent, or I’ve weighed the cost against a more desirable object and acted accordingly. I’m breaking this rule, because the rule itself – the separation of religion from work is, in part, based upon the very separation of work from meaning, and indeed upon the historical misunderstanding of the Christian view of work which is embedded in contemporary Western culture. Obviously, if work is thought of as a curse, the resultant “religious” ideas are not really smoothly compatible with an effective or thriving workplace. Keep in mind, I’m suggesting that’s part of the reason for the social taboo. Don’t believe it? What do people talk about on Monday morning and Friday afternoon – escaping from work – perhaps “having” to work during the weekend – sounds to me like they think it’s a curse. It’s culturally ingrained. So I break the taboo on religious talk at work to redefine the curse inherited from a religious misconception that’s breaking work for so many people.

The other causes for which I’m violating the norms of a professional blog are that: I find Faith to be the richest and most powerful and widely familiar source of metaphor to augment a discussion about meaning and about work, and also because we’re talking here about history. Historically, sociologically, anthropologically, these ideas have shaped our society in one way or another and are still latent within its cultural assumptions. What economist or historian or student of work completely throws Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) – over his shoulder? It’s required reading in the academies for any such professional, and ignorance of its thesis on the results of a particular work ethic is a basic failure of general education. One could cite other such discussions, but the point is, the faux pas only survives as such when we are not conversant in the breadth of discussion happening in most other places in our culture and in the world. The world is bigger than that rule, bigger than that supposed norm – and, frankly, this blogger always feels free to use ideas from anywhere anyway.

The primary subject matter of this blog is a synthesis of collective wisdom and individual insight on work. If Christendom had nothing significant to say, that in itself would be a profound commentary, and worth examining in that light. When it comes to work, we listen everywhere.

In any case, that’s the deal with the blog: This author deems a false construct that dialectical opposition of work with various avenues of life that are brimming with meaning. Work *is* the vehicle of meaning. Work isn’t opposed to family, to Faith, or to fun. One person commented on an earlier post that “hobbies” were invented, more or less, as attempts to survive the dualism that occurs when you oppose work with life in the mind. As reasonable and meaningful reactions to conflicting internal-mental and external-societal and cultural demands, I can’t speak against them quite so vehemently. But I can say, in my experience, they fade away when you find yourself doing what you’re meant to do with your life. Someone might say, “Well, I’m meant to play.” Perhaps you are – go play; I’m not – me, well, I’ve got to go to work.

When it has to be there Tomorrow

You’re filling a sudden order to bang out a Powerpoint presentation for 500 people by morning, and need to walk in looking rested and in control. You need to launch a web site yesterday, because your new client already mailed out their secondary marketing, and their own servers just died. The mobile headquarters of your social action group has twelve hours to get an underground newsletter together and get it into key places before the start of business in the morning.

You’re doing rapid prototyping. Frankly, I love this stuff. Combine virtuosity, brainstorming, and fingers flying so fast on the keyboard that they’re invisible, with a near impossible deadline, bragging rights at the end, and showing off the next day (which consists in just being done and effective), and I’m so there. The sense of accomplishment is immense.

Some key helpers for rapid prototyping:

• Go lean – if twelve slides can be one, make it one. The genius is in the layout and arrangement.
• Gang up – work fast and furious with a symbiotic team – some of the best stuff is clabbered together in smoke filled rooms with papers spread out on the floor, someone at the keyboard, someone at the whiteboard, and someone making the coffee runs, making notes, and giving things another eye.
• Focus on the big picture - get a working model up and running – if the broadstrokes are wrong, you’ll just end up starting over – the details can be nitpicked afterward, and it’s amazing how many opinions that get absolutized when you’ve got lots of time (which word, which phrase, which color arrow to use) don’t seem so contentious when you’ve got a reasonable time frame left to flesh out the details. Again… at the risk of being redundant… if the concept is wrong, you’ll be starting over – know what you want to deliver and why – don’t get sidetracked by tweaks.
• Everyone matters – don’t underestimate any of your team members. Often, the one who’s got his feet up and only refills the coffee pot now and then ends up having the key idea that’s responsible for the most successful chunk of your work. Everyone should be operational, but not necessarily doing what we think – besides, remember the Pareto Principle. 20% of the people will seem to be doing 80% of the work. It doesn’t matter.
• Have organized messes - sometimes it’s cut and paste and two or three mockups before you get it right, and the trash bags in the corner are your best friend. Make a mess, but have piles, and keep your ideas up on the whiteboard. If you don’t have a whiteboard, write on the wall. It’s faster to re-paint later than be at Walmart for 30-minutes with that one cashier they have left at night.
• Take micro-breaks – don’t try to justify 15 minute breaks for two cigarettes, video games, and bags of Cheetos. If you’re doing that, you’re not serious. A break is a 3-minute walk away to pee. You keep your momentum, but there is where you have some of your best summary ideas. If you take 15-minutes, you lose 35, so don’t.

What if you’re doing it alone?: Then you have to stop periodically, and become your audience, and look at that way. Then again, and become your stakeholders, and look at it that way. If you’re doing it alone, you have to be ingenious. And, you may need to set an absolute drop-dead time for sleep, based on the minimum that will sustain you, because very likely that’s what you’ll get. If you’ve got a friend or colleague that can grasp the immediate needs, deal with what (for some people) feels like pressure, and contribute to rather than drain your productivity, make the call. If your friends are just as likely to slow you down or distract you or need tons of looking after on mundane tasks, do it alone. Create the team in your head.

This isn’t meant to be a master-guide to rapid prototyping, just a few comments. If there were more to say, there’d be less to do. The key points: it’s fun, there are some good tips, and you can do it alone if you have to. Happy trails.

47 Lawnmowers

Office environments can spawn an odd kind of possessiveness. “Why did you throw that away in my trashcan, not yours?” (One was closer than another). “Those are my paperclips. Why don’t you get your own?” (They all come from the same place). You could attribute it to the personalization of space, but I personalize and yet I still look at all the basic instruments as community property. In fact, they come from the same community supply closet, so how do they become protected possessions on the way to your desk? I think, it’s a general phenomenon in a culture obsessed with personal property.

In a song called “47 Lawnmowers”, a musician critiques the fact that if you drive down an average residential street, you’ll find 47 lawnmowers: stored in 47 little sheds or garages, representing a tremendous investment, and used once a week. There’s no concept of having a community toolshed where expense, storage, and maintenance are shared, and you use what you need when you need it. Each house has to have it’s own box for its own mower for its own lawn, get 47 tuneups, 47 oil changes, fill with 47 gascans, and so on. It’s a commentary on our culture’s attitudes about stuff. True, it’s different in condo living where you share a large public space and split the cost of having one guy mow it. But from the suburban US you have a value system of . . . how did the gulls in Finding Nemo put it? . . . “Mine. Mine? Mine!”

When we start viewing office apparatuses like lawnmowers, we’ll either clutch them as though they represent the dream of personal ownership, or else look at them as tools to be laid aside when idle, shared as needed, and utilized when relevant to the goals of the enterprise, but not sources of meaning in and of themselves. It depends on your values. Mine is work. The work is the thing, and the stuff is just a means of working. Turned on its head, we end up working for paperclips, office supplies, and pretty new tape dispensers – not very enticing incentives in my book.

Stuff. It’s transient, not absolute. It’s made to serve your sense of meaning, not be a source of meaning. Yes, I know art is different; in general, though, stuff is the detritus of life, not life itself. The worst and yet most illustrative equation you can bring to the table is stuff vs. people – or, more accurately, Stuff > People. From there flows all the other ills of property: Stuff > Work, Stuff = Meaning, |Stuff| = ∞. You get the point.

I’m not attacking property rights – though I think they need to be reconceptualized in an era of digital media. It’s not communism I’m suggesting, either. I don’t think someone should come and take away your lawnmower and give you back 1/population of it. I’m simply saying that our attitudes about property can determine and reveal our attitudes about more important things, and frequently get in the way of them.

Addendum 8/8/08: This goes to the issue represented in Google’s office mentality over Microsoft. Google envisions a document as an online object to be shared, mutually contributed to, etc. Or else what is it’s purpose? A diary? One word answer: blogs. Microsoft still thinks of documents as static objects to be sent to one another in e-mail and held on our hard drives. Documents that are not designed to function in the community, or not built on a platform with that in mind, cannot be edited by multiple people without threatening confusion over versions (“Is the one you e-mailed me the one I sent you, or does it have your changes?!?”).

When the primary vehicles of our work are not based on the concept of a collaborative community, is it any wonder we guard our staplers so avidly?We’re working within a business culture that (overall) isn’t yet treating documents as community objects but, in a lot of cases, is still at the stage of using shared network drives and sending a lot of things back and forth in e-mail. We don’t make it a priority to have online project spaces in which to collaborate, though excellent out of the box extranets for that purpose have been available for decades.

The first thing I do, whenever I’ve started a team, is create a shared space for collaboration and communication – for sharing project resources, information, ideas, feedback, and keeping each other’s work on everyone’s radar.

We will evolve, because it just doesn’t make sense not to, and the business forces will push us there. In the meantime, though, when the primary vehicles of our work (documents), and the primary platforms on which we work (computerized offices) are not based on the concept of a collaborative community (for all the rhetoric about “good teams”), is it any wonder we guard our staplers (think Office Space) so avidly?

I Know How

Never market your own services by saying “I’ve been trained to…”. It makes you sound like a terrier. It might be a simple mistake, but it could also mean that you still are thinking of your work as a job. What will a client be more interested in – someone who makes his success relying entirely on himself – and his continued success depends on that being a consistently wise choice, or someone who sounds like he expects some invisible superior to step in if he makes a mistake? Training is a good thing, but just say “I know how”.

Working beyond the Void

Working into the Precipice

There’s an exhilaration from work that feels a bit like going fast on a 4-wheeler. Skiing, if that’s you. It surpasses exhaustion. It surpasses mere tedium – tedium just makes it go faster. There’s a kind of desire wrapped up in work, a euphoria in the work of one’s life, that takes you to the point that you drop, finally, because you just can’t anymore. It’s like sex in that way. There’s a work that wakes you up with new ideas – work that makes you forget about eating, the way video gamers sometimes do (no so much, these days – in the old days, gamers became computer geeks and invented mediums like these – it became the work of their lives. Now, it’s more of a kneejerk activity – it’s the mere recreation that consumes them.)

You can’t get this fully across to people who only experience work as a burden. They can’t understand why you would work, voluntarily, more than you have to – why you would do it for enjoyment. They’ve got it backwards. Work is the purest enjoyment. It is not that you enjoy your work, at first; it is that you set out to find the work that you enjoy. But you’re not seeking enjoyment in the way one enjoys a sitcom. The answer is not “Well, I enjoy sitting on my butt and eating Cheetos…”

To derive continual pleasure from work means that your life will be free of the pensive, all-encompassing boredom that grips the world of mere entertainment.This is the thing that’s sick about our culture – we’ve even lost the source of real enjoyment: meaning. The secret to enjoyment of one’s work is immersion in work that is brimming with meaning. That will be particular to you. One cannot help but think that the current culture’s denial of meaning – it’s underlying nihilism, skepticism, and rejection of sincerity and depth – is responsible for the inability to derive real and true pleasure from the things we call “enjoyment” and from things that offer the most enjoyment.

You can hear people talk about “having fun” the way they talk about “having friends”: most of them seem to have no real experience of the fullness of it. With friendship, it’s the kind where you give your lives for one another, continually. Similarly, their version of fun is reductionist. It’s like listening to someone describe wine who has never had a wine that cost more than $2 a bottle. We’re not really talking about the same thing. It’s like teenagers talking about sex – they may have some physical experience, but they really don’t know anything beyond mechanics.

To derive continual pleasure from work means that your life will be free of the pensive, all-encompassing boredom that grips the world of mere entertainment – of looking for that next, slightly larger, flat panel TV. The senility of recreation in our culture has reached a point of crying out for meaningful, delightful, fulfilling work.

But it’s like an elusive lover – you have to court her, woo her, tantalize and invite her, and then embrace her truly, with your real self, not holding it back. You can’t put only your social self into real work, your public self, your safe self. You have to kick in all of it. You have to let go of the edge and free fall into the precipice, and only then will it not be the void.

I wanna be a cowboy, baby…

Hallmarks of the Entrepreneur

• Breaks rules
• Continually steps (or stays) off the prescribed path
• Challenges or questions authority
• Sees a world outside the usual definitions
• Has a minority of peers
• Is accustomed to risk
• Is open to failure (indeed, successful entrepreneurs are typified by significant past failures)
• Invests and believes primarily in himself – his brand is himself
• Blends experimental and analytical approaches to problems (see ‘accustomed to risk’)
• Continually flirts with ideas outside the box (brainstorms)
• Makes judgments (discriminates between what is helpful and what isn’t: rules, relationships, adventures, and ideas)

And for all these things, the entrepreneur is widely considered arrogant, a rebel, and any host of words that may mean “anti-social” or proud or untamed. Despite the pejorative use of the term: he is the “cowboy” of the modern era.

The Rules of Work

1. If I’m awake, I’m working.
2. Power-shakes beat carbs; they take less time, and don’t turn you into a slut for food.
3. If it fits in a pocket or an office, it’s a tool, not a master.
4. If a thing doesn’t cooperate, switch tasks; come back when it’s ready to be nice.
5. Nice, means it’s helping me work.
6. Being effective means failing to contemplate the trivial, and always noticing the relevant.
7. Money is good for a few things: protect your family, liberate the poor, and make more money.
8. Spots teach the leopard to stalk, legs teach the stallion to run; find the cloth you’re cut from, and let it teach you your work. Then don’t let anyone take it from you ever again.
9. Your work is too important to be a sideline to anything. If you need a job to get started on your work, do it. But don’t ever confuse the two.
10. Hobby is a dirty word for wishing you had another life.
11. Work/life balance is another way of saying you don’t love your job.
12. Get enough sleep. This is inviolable. Athletes don’t run without rest, and every day you are groggy is a half-day. Half days are lost days. No pretenses. Not getting enough sleep is as stupid as ruining your credit. It’s not true that “money never sleeps“.
13. Don’t oversleep. Too much sleep is like too much alcohol; it makes a fool out of you and your business. It robs you of initiative. Set a time, get out of bed.
14. Don’t eat crap. You can fast, you can eat veegan, be a flexitarian, whatever. But you absolutely cannot make fast food and processed food a significant part of your diet. If it comes in foil or a “drivethru” window, or contains items from your chemistry set, it isn’t food.
15. Too much caffeine is punk energy. Get enough sleep, eat real food, and take vitamins. After one or two cups of coffee or glasses of soda, you’re not as smart as you think you are. Burning the candle at both ends is a rookie mistake. If you need to wake up, turn on CSPAN or something controversial to stimulate your intellect. Do this right, and you’ll be able to jump out of bed. Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross: “Coffee is for closers.”
16. Lunch kills momentum. Lunch is about as valuable as a meeting, or a meeting with yourself. In other words, do it if it’s work – if you have to have it, but don’t have lunch just to have lunch. Michael Douglas on the phone with Fidel Castro in Wall Street: “Lunch? Lunch is for wimps.”
17. All gluttony is the enemy of your work. Sugar, chocolate, alcohol, sleep, food in general, even sex. Excess kills motivation and destroys intelligence.
18. The ability to ignore pain and defy discomfort, when not taken to excess, is essential. Aches, bruises, scrapes, soreness, rashes, itches. The body is essential, but it mustn’t be allowed to assume hegemony. If you’ve got a sniffle, get well or get to work.
19. At the same time, if you’ve got significant health issues, deal with them. Eat herbs. Take medicine. Get it from Canada, whatever you have to do. Imagine closing the deal of your life and not being around to enjoy it.
20. Pain from sloppy tools, the tools of your work, is not to be tolerated. If you don’t have a comfortable desk, chair, space, or whatever tools your work requires, do what it takes to build, borrow, or buy them. Loss of productivity from uncomfortable tools is like printing a great resume on cheap paper.
21. Paper is cheap. My dad taught me that. Scribble, jot, write – don’t conserve paper, or you’ll end up conserving ideas.
22. Tools are the vehicle of ideas that carry them from theory to action. Don’t mess around with productivity; have tools. They don’t have to be luxurious, like a $200 filofax, but you have to have them. If you’re reading this on a one-monitor PC, add a second monitor, and double your productivity.
23. At the same time, if you’re work is worth anything, you’ll write on brown paper sacks if you have to. Never underestimate the value of napkins.
24. Buy only those tools your job requires, and not until it requires them. Not everyone needs a desk or a filofax. The punk thing to do is load up on extra notebooks and pens when you haven’t worn out the first ones. Don’t get the storefront until the customers are lined up in your driveway. Overhead without demand is the stench of a dying business.
25. Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t give yourself the weekend off. People that have a plan don’t sit around on patios drinking longnecks and talking about work – they’re working.
26. Don’t be a tough guy. Tough guys tailgate and make a point of cutting you off in traffic. Tough guys learn one thing and then show contempt for the non-specialist. Tough guys have time to brag and show off their “success”. Be a tougher guy. A tougher guy has the chutzpah, the courage, and the arrogant indifference to break with the pack.
27. Don’t be a showboat. Showboats drive fancy cars and blather about another man’s nametag inside their suit. A car is a tool not a spa. Not knowing the difference is the sign of a vain masturbator. Work involves knowing what a thing is for and using it that way, putting it to better use, or not using it at all.
28. Don’t let women distract you. Don’t slow down to look at women. Don’t put down your work for flirty conversations with women. Find one woman who supports your energy and drive and stick with her. If you’re already stuck, be honorable and stick with her anyway. A man that hasn’t got that much courage and decency isn’t worth a damn in business, either. When you abandon the honor in your soul, you depart from the wellspring of your work.
29. Don’t compromise your ethics. If you can’t respect what you do every morning when you get out of bed, you’ll never have the stamina, the guts, the endurance to do it for real. If you’re not in a situation where you “have that luxury”, know absolutely that you’re in the wrong situation, and work full bore to take back control of your own soul.
30. Never look for work. If you know what your work is, do it. If you don’t know, then you’re not looking for work, you’re looking for your soul.
31. Your identity is not about your job, but it sure as hell better be about your work.
32. Catalog your vocational mistakes, so you don’t repeat them. If you took a wrong turn with your work, even 35 years ago, back up that far and start again. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.
33. News is crap. But follow business news anyway; it’ll tell you what people think is real.
34. Always multi-task. If you’re doing anything and there’s a pause, look at what you can be doing in the meantime. You should never have to look back on a moment and realize that what you were doing was waiting. Patience is a virtue, but patience isn’t about waiting, it’s actually about knowing when not to wait.
35. Work standing up. How much of our lives is spent waiting in lines and counters. Use it to cross off things in your filofax, write checks, calculate expenses, tally receipts. For goodness’ sake, don’t be a cow led to slaughter. And if you catch yourself, say “moo” – it’ll teach you to be a bull next time. A quote from Gigli (one of the great under-rated films): “In every relationship, there’s a cow and a bull.” When it comes to the world, to the lines of society, be the bull.
36. Being a bull doesn’t mean being a bully. Have conversations with service people (even if it makes them nervous). But if you’ve got a problem, smile, ask them to listen, and tell them discreetly without drawing attention, but don’t ever rat them out to their bosses. A bull’s horns are for competing with other bulls, not for taking advantage of the weak. Let lesser beasts prey on cornered game.
37. A house is a tool, not a prison. If it’s holding you in one place, and you need to move, sell it.
38. Do we really even have to say that too much TV, music, gaming, “texting”, and other forms of dissipation are the antithesis to work? Any obsession that isn’t your work is the personality turned in on itself and made senile with its own abandonment of meaning. You are either consumed with meaning or consumed with flatulence.
39. Ego and narcissism are as different as life and theatre. The world is teeming with people who have a deficit of personality, and call it pride or arrogance (and far worse things) when they meet someone who is neither bewildered nor afraid. Agree with them; it’s irrelevant. The only real question is whether to work with them or work around them.
40. There’s no time to be afraid, only time to be rational, and you can’t do both at once.
41. Your work consumes “the most productive hours of the best years of your life”. If you should be doing different work, you should at least be doing the work to get there. (This rule is borrowed and loosely quoted, and I can’t find the source.)
42. Your mind, your determination, your integrity, and your joy: these are the soul of your work, just as they are your own soul.
43. When you can look at the best activity of your soul, whether the world wants it right now or not, and say “so be it”, then you can begin to plan for the work of your soul and move out of soulless employment. Christian Slater in Pump up the Volume: “So be it”.
44. They don’t have to want it; they just have to respect it; when they respect it, they’ll want it. What if they don’t respect it? Wrong audience. Sniff out your kind, or make a loud noise, and they’ll come to you. At a recent meeting: I roared a little and found two more while the herd grew restless.
45. Work is a calling, if for no other reason than that it is holy. Jobs are transient, temporal, and fraught with unimportance (even if the job itself is vital). Work is sacred. The work of one’s life is transcendent and recapitulates a life’s activity in a soteriological way. There’s a reason why the word liturgy means work of the people. The sacred activity of one’s unique vocation, the work of the individual, is also salvific. It is a thing beyond.
46. Nothing external can validate your work. E.g. I don’t want a “career”. “Career” is a word that means society gives me security. It means I’m afraid to lose it. It means there’s something larger than my work that envelops my work and gives it validation and significance. A career coopts work. I repudiate all things that presume to be external criteria for validating or lending significance to my work.
47. Gossip, rumor-mills, tattling: these things can never be given face by anyone serious about work. They’re the luxuries of those with enough time to pick out office supplies or spend the hour before lunch pondering what to eat. They’re the trademark of those who have gutted the economy with inefficiency. Gossip, rumors, tattling – they’re just another form of malingering.
48. If you’re not willing to resign, you’re not willing to take your work seriously. It has become a job.
49. Contempt for the antitheses of work is the proper homage and respect to work itself.
50. Regulation, centralization, and obsolescence can impact any venture, abbreviating it’s viability, so the most important trait in entrepeneurship is the ability to continually invent and reinvent businesses on a changing landscape.
51. The entrepreneur is never really concerned with authority; he’s concerned with success. When someone brings up “authority” (as in “so and so has a problem with authority”), they almost never really mean authority. Genuine authority is an expression of superior capability or competence, as in “Bob is an authority on grammar” (Power is likewise an oft-confused concept that never actually needs refer to itself at all.). So what do most people mean by the canard of “authority”? They mean a system in which pride takes precedence over competence and capability – it’s a system that is essentially pro-job and anti-work. This is why functional teams, in contrast to dysfunctional ones, distribute roles without compensating by centralizing “authority”: they’re based on the assumption that responsibility without control is the death of effective work groups. The only reason it’s hard to see how such a team works, is that most people have never seen such a team. We did it that way at MYTHOLOG for five years, and it was exceedingly effective. Decentralization, then, is one of the key traits of success, and the entrepreneur is the ultimate expression of both.
52. Work is fundamentally ascetic (an ascesis). You learn not to lie in bed awake. You stop luxuriating in long showers. You fast from excess food and sweets and drink – fast from excesses of all kinds. Ultimately, the path of work will always lead you to the desert and peace.
53. If you have to read a book on how to enjoy what you’re doing, be committed, or develop the right attitude, you’re involved in the wrong thing.
54. If your primary concerns are getting yourself noticed, carving out a corporate niche, or milking the system, stop reading now, because I sure as hell can’t help you. These are the “other” rules of work.

The Rules of Authorship

Daniel DiGriz

There are lots of rules for writing, just as there are lots of writers and ways of writing. This is what works for me.

1. Write what’s driving you right now. Cut through the fakery of subjects you’re only peripherally interested in. The key to it is self-knowledge, being healthy (i.e. on the right path in your own life), and knowing what’s really moving you and all your senses. Don’t write what’s cool to you at the moment – ephemera can’t sustain the task; neither can the future; write what you can’t live without today; write what’s changing your life right now.
2. Do it piecemeal. Keep lists of subject headings. Blog some paragraphs and start organizing them. But don’t set out to write the great tome or novel start to finish.
3. Never be anywhere without a pen or a keyboard. If you can’t write down an idea while you’re driving, pull over.
4. Write with encouragement. Not a writer’s group – that can kill your momentum, distract your passion, and substitute for the work. Not “feedback” – that’s for after it’s written. Encouragement. Forget criticism until you’re done. Show it to audiences you expect to cheer you on or, if they can’t, will at least be silent.
5. Avoidance behavior doesn’t mean you’re writing the wrong thing. It means you’re writing the wrong thing right now. If it doesn’t make you want to do it right now, either you’re not alive, or the idea isn’t; switch to what grabs you now and makes you want to write about it. If nothing does, get a life, because it’s out of life that we write.
6. One cardinal rule: Writing is work. Not as in “relationships take work”. Writing is work, meaning it’s the work of your life. Or if it’s not, don’t do it; find the work of your life and do that. Maybe that work will require writing, but then you’ll have the gut for it.
7. Don’t start a writer’s web site about the writing life. If you want to keep track of the things you learn, blog it and move on, but remember, above all, writing is work. It’s not fun, per se. People will get upset at this, but they’re not writers – they’re would be writers. Ignore them, buckle down, and work. If work is not a joy to you, you’ve got other problems.