50 years ago, Oldham and Hackman proposed the job characteristics model. It so resonates with people that it feels like common sense: Job satisfaction is driven by five factors:
Task significance: Does the work you do create meaning or impact?
Task identity: Do you feel ownership (emotionally) in the work you’re doing?
Autonomy: Do you have the freedom to make choices?
Skill variety: Is the task monotonous?
Feedback: Are you in a place where you can safely and easily get feedback and use it to improve?
If you think about your moments of flow, or the pastimes and hobbies we choose, they have all or most of these elements.
And if you think about the most boring day you’ve ever had, or the worst job you had to do, it’s likely that most of these were missing.
And yet, even though it’s easy to show that these five factors are critical in attracting and keeping skilled and talented workers, many organizations work overtime to eliminate them. “I’m just doing my job” is the antithesis of what works for workers.
So why?
Because industrial systems hate variability. They work to mechanize as many steps as they can, and if forced to use a human, work hard to keep that human within very specific boundaries.
Better to have a three-hour Zoom call where everyone listens to the rules than risk having someone make a mistake, even one with no negative impact. Better to parcel out jobs to the cheapest available cog than depend on a linchpin to make a difference. And better to know in advance exactly what to expect.
The industrial system would rather settle for mediocre than suffer between moments of brilliance and occasional defects.
The solution is not surrendering to the system. It’s to realize that in a competitive marketplace, automating human performance is a shortcut to becoming a commodity. If you can automate it, so can your competitors.
Instead, we have the opportunity to do work that is unexpected, generous and original. It won’t be perfect, it won’t be the cheapest, but it will matter.
August 14, 2021
Jack Benny died when I was 14. He was an early radio and TV star, a comedian primarily remembered for just one line.
The other day, a peer said, “well, if you’re giving me a Jack Benny choice…”
It occurred to me that few people younger than us were ever going to use that reference. It ends with this generation.
YouTube and the net have extended the half-life, dramatically. Instead of TV shows or memes disappearing forever, they simply move to the back row of search. But they’re still there.
Will Pi Day or Rickrolls be a thing in 44 years?
There’s been an explosion in pop culture. I created a book a long time ago: The Encyclopedia of Fictional People. Today, there would be far too many to ever fit in a book. It doesn’t make sense to create books on trivia or music or cultural ephemera because there’s just too much to fit inside. But our brains can’t keep track of all of it, so we go shallow and we forget the old stuff. Was Paul McCartney in a band before his solo career?
I’m not sure the perfect preservation of culture is possible or even beneficial. It marches on, regardless.
August 13, 2021
There are countless ways to make a point. You can clearly demonstrate that you are angry, smart, concerned, stronger, faster or more prepared than the person you’re engaging with.
But making a point isn’t the same thing as making a difference.
To make a difference, we need the practical empathy to realize that the other person doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t believe what you believe and might not want what you want. We have to move from where we are and momentarily understand where they are.
When we make a point, we reject all of this. When we make a point, we establish our power in one way or another, but we probably don’t change very much.
Change comes about when the story the other person tells themselves begins to change. If all you do is make a point, you’ve handed them a story about yourself. When you make a change, you’ve helped them embrace a new story about themselves.
And even though it’s more fun (and feels safe, in some way) to make a point, if we really care, we’ll do the hard work to make a difference instead.
August 12, 2021
That used to involve putting film or paper into a chemical bath. You could have a small influence over what happened, but almost all the work involved setting up the shot in the first place. The goal of the bath was to uncover what was already on the film.
Developing today has a totally different meaning. We’re not simply uncovering, we’re building. Software, careers, our culture–we develop them daily, adding a little bit at a time, toward the future we seek to create.
August 11, 2021
(Or your logo, your house, your tie, your business card, your website…)
Like a suit or a skirt, it needs to fit. You’re going to be looking at it for a long time.
And you’re certainly going to look at it more than any other human will, so if it’s not perfect, don’t sweat it, that’s mostly a personal challenge.
The book cover should work at any size, because most people will see it before they buy it, and they will see it online, at just a one inch square size.
The book cover should not only reflect the genre it’s in, it should send a powerful signal within that genre.
One signal might be: It fits! I get the joke! This is what works, for example, in romance novels. If you’re looking for a book like this, this is a book like that.
Another signal might be: I know what sophisticated books look like, but this one is deliberately not that. It’s for people who don’t buy a lot of books. Something like The One Minute Manager belongs here.
And a third signal, my favorite, is: I know what the genre looks like, AND this book is in that genre, BUT, this book is a bestseller and so it is stretching the boundaries in a way that only an important new book can.
It’s worth noting that your cover will almost certainly NOT sell even one copy of the book, but it can certainly unsell someone who might have considered your cover. So there’s not a lot of room for risky, daring maneuvers. You don’t need them.
When in doubt, check out this gallery of movie posters
A lot of people spent a lot of time arguing at the meeting, but it doesn’t change how people engage with the movie. Unless you go too far away from the genre.
August 10, 2021
Once you’re in a slot, it’s harder and harder to move out of it. The status quo is here because it’s good at persisting.
One option, particularly if you’re on your own, is to take your development seriously. Instead of simply clearing the incoming and reacting to what’s knocking on your door, you can invest the time to learn and the effort to practice.
My friends at Akimbo have a few workshops that are worth considering:
The Freelancer’s Workshop begins tomorrow. It’s about one simple idea: becoming the sort of freelancer who gets better clients. Because better clients change your work and your standing as well.
Bernadette Jiwa’s Story Skills Workshop is back beginning tomorrow as well. The story we tell ourselves (and others) drives how we spend our days and who responds to us.
The breakthrough Real Skills Conference (truly a conference, no speeches!) is back on August 19th but you’ll need to get tickets in advance.
And, if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll consider the altMBA. Six years in, it’s proven itself, and now it’s your turn to leap.
August 9, 2021
If you’re at the station, sitting on a train about to leave, you might notice that the train next to you is moving.
But, perhaps, that train is sitting still and you’re moving. It’s hard to tell. Without the lurch of sudden acceleration, the only clue we have is that our relative position is changing.
For most of us, it’s disconcerting–we know something is moving, but we’re not sure exactly what’s happening.
Do we stay where we are… does anyone?
Whether or not we commit to movement, the world never stays precisely as it was. Insisting that it does is simply a waste of time and a source of frustration.
Neil Postman pointed out that bureaucracies control the flow of information. A form, for example, has no room for all the information, just the stuff that’s requested. It’s impossible to share all the information about anything, particularly at scale.
The deluge that is the internet is an opportunity and a problem. With a few clicks, we’re able to get more data. And there’s no end in sight, since new data is posted faster than we can consume it.
If you want to get better at astronomy, it doesn’t pay to get up to speed on all the books about gardening that you can find. Or texts on gambling, posts on the stock market or tweets about today’s political gambits. They won’t help you learn what you seek.
It’s easy to be in favor of more data. After all, until we reach a certain point, more data is the best way to make a better decision. But then, fairly suddenly, more isn’t better. It’s simply a way to become confused or to stall.
If you want more information, be careful about the data you seek out.
August 8, 2021
That doesn’t happen very often.
When someone combines generosity, insight and bravery to provide something before we know that’s what we need, we are particularly grateful.
It’s a special form of leadership.
August 7, 2021
The office is a fairly modern phenomenon. We got by for millenia without them.
For a century, the office was simply a small room next to the factory or the store. The office was upstairs from the bakery, or next to the stockyard or the foundry. Proximity to the worksite was its primary attribute.
For the last fifty years, though, more and more office workers never actually saw the factory floor.
Office culture became a thing onto itself, with layers of workers supporting other workers who supported workers who helped improve the productivity of the factory, whatever sort of factory that was.
And office culture was based on physical proximity. With most written communication taking far too long (a week for a letter!) and electronic communication insufficient in resolution, we built office towers to house the layers of office hierarchy that were evolving. We even named ‘the corner office’ after an executive’s physical location in the flow of information and power.
But then the factory was moved even further away–most big company CEOs have never even visited all of their factories, retail outlets or development centers. And if you have more than a few, it means that no matter where you are, you’re not at most of them.
And then email turned written communication into something instant and high resolution. Asynchronous messaging eliminates time.
And then Zoom meant that location didn’t matter much either.
Over the last 18 months, many of us have felt isolation as part of the dislocation from the office. Easily overlooked, though, is how much faster and more efficient so many systems became. Now, it’s not the communications system that’s holding us back, it’s our unwillingness to make change happen in concert with our peers.
Some organizations dealt with enforced work-from-home by using endless Zoom meetings as a form of compliance… a high-tech way to take attendance. But others leaned into the opportunity to create nimble, task-oriented decision making and communications hubs, ones that were no longer constrained by physical proximity.
The last forty years have taught us that the technology that most disrupts established industries is speed. The speed of connection to peers, to suppliers and most of all, to customers. The speed of decision making, of ignoring sunk costs and of coordinated action. The internet has pushed all of these things forward, and we’ve just discovered, the office was holding all of them back.
As social creatures, many people very much need a place to go, a community to be part of, a sense of belonging and meaning. But it’s not at all clear that the 1957 office building is the best way to solve those problems.
August 6, 2021
