Becoming Indispensable

Managers are very important. They tell people what to do (they are babysitters), and they tell people what they want/need to hear (they are politicians).

Business structures built on the manager-run environment are becoming antiquated. Top-down business structures are too slow and anti-dynamic to run efficiently in today’s rapidly changing world. When the economy was based on factories, this was okay. Companies run by baby-sitters and politicians worked in an environment were workers were replaceable, compliant, docile cogs. Now that those jobs have been commoditized and moved into more efficient offshore work places, the modern American company must change or become irrelevant.

Seth Godin makes this point in his latest book, Linchpin. People need to make a choice: try to remain “a faceless cog in the machinery of capitalism” -- the old “factory” mentality, or become a “linchpin”, an emotionally invested owner of “their own means of production, who can make a difference, lead us, and connect us.”

To bring value to American business, today’s worker must become their own leader.

As Godin so aptly puts, “we have gone from two teams (management and labor) to a third team, the linchpins...The death of the factory means that the entire system we have built our lives around is now upside down.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of education. For decades, we have been teaching people to be followers -- cogs in the “old” system. That must change. We need to teach people to become leaders -- people capable of acting independently of “babysitters” and “politicians”.

As Godin puts it, we are teaching kids to: “fit in, follow instructions, use #2 pencils, take good notes, show up every day, cram for tests and don’t miss deadlines, have good handwriting, punctuate, buy the things the other kids are buying, don’t ask questions, don’t challenge authority, do the minimum required so you’ll have time to work on another subject, get into college, have a good resume, don’t fail, don’t say anything that might embarrass you, be passably good at sports, or perhaps extremely good at being a quarterback, participate in a large number of extracurricular activities, be a generalist, try not to have other kids talk about you, once you learn a topic, move on[ ]...Are we building the sort of people our society needs?”

And according to Godin, what they should teach in school: “Only two things: 1. Solve interesting problems, 2. Lead.”

As always, Godin has written another book worth reading.