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Busting Your Corporate Idol

Treat a Community Opportunity Like a Career Opportunity

January 26, 2012 by 5 Comments

We are taught to be on the lookout for career opportunities, and rightly so because really good opportunities don’t come around that often.

The career opportunity conversation goes something like this:

“This is a chance for you to come in, kick some ass, prove yourself, and then you can write your own ticket.”

Or maybe it goes like this.  ”We know what you are capable of, and need you to come in and build the department.  This is a chance to do it your way, to put your stamp on something great, and when the company goes public you cash in big.”

As you evaluate the opportunity, the narrative progresses to: “It will take a lot of work and sacrifice, but opportunities like this don’t come along every day. If you say no, you may not get another chance.  What is unsaid, but likely understood is that someone else will be the hotshot.  You don’t want to be stuck in a crappy job a few years down the road, wishing you had taken this opportunity when you had it.  You will only live once.”  These fears – of failure, of saying no, of being left behind, are all powerful drivers.  At the same time, the prospect of the new and exciting – to make an impact, to learn, to be part of something – those are also powerful drivers.  All normal and healthy.  But the question is, why don’t we apply this same diligence to Community Opportunities?

A Community Opportunity arises when someone invites you to do something outside of work, which brings a chance of connection to other people in a wider network.  According to Wikipedia “Community usually refers to a social unit larger than a household that shares common values and has social cohesion.”  What is most important about a community is that the people support each other, physically, financially, emotionally.  And research shows that one of the biggest determinants of happiness is community and connection to other people.

Community Opportunities also don’t come along very often.  When is the last time someone invited you to do something new?  We are not in college anymore, where we can walk down the hall to find our next adventure.  Some people join spiritual organizations to build community, but this is not for everyone.

A Community Opportunity looks something like this: “I am going to book club next week.  Do you want to go?”  How often do you say yes, and how often do you say “I’d love to, but I have work/family/travel obligations and I can’t make it.”  It seems like a book club, or invite for a drink will always be there, but if you say no too often, the offers stop coming.  You should evaluate a community opportunity the same way you evaluate a career opportunity.- chances like this don’t come along very often, and you may wake up one day and find you are lonely, even if you have a loving family.

For many people, work has come to substitute for community.  Companies actively foster this kind of thinking.  But DANGER DANGER DANGER.  A real community will never kick you out, but a company not only can but should let you go if the market changes.  Let me repeat that.  A company may need to let you go solely due to changing market conditions, no matter how good a job you have done.  If all your community eggs are in the company basket, you are risking a serious crack up.

Community is something that must be built.  And like a good career opportunity, a community opportunity can take a lot of work and sacrifice in order to see its benefits.  But its a different type of sacrifice.  A career opportunity asks you to sacrifice family and personal time for career advancement.  A community opportunity asks you to sacrifice some of your after-hours work time for a chance to be with other people.

Recently, I wrote a post about Corporate Idolatry and time allocation.  If your time allocation looks looks like this, there are not many hours to build a community outside of work.

It is very hard in the abstract to just say “I”m going to work less.”  It’s much easier to say “I’m leaving work by 5:00 every Thursday to go to book club or bible study or dance class or volleyball practice.”  There are people out there who share your interests.  You need them, and they need you.

My suggestion: start looking for community opportunities, and say YES to them no matter what.  And take the time for your community building from work, not sleep or family.  It’s a matter of priorities.  You only live once, and you get to decide what is most important.

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Four Questions To Ask Yourself. Inspired By MLK Day

January 16, 2012 by 1 Comment

Slaves needed to do whatever their master asked them to do, and they did not have the right to refuse work.  They also worked for free.

Dr. King pointed out in his 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech that the legal abolition of slavery was not the same thing as freedom:  One hundred years after the Emancipatio Proclamation, “the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”

In the corporate world, we are not slaves, but how much freedom do we have?  Here are four questions to ask yourself.

1. Do you ever work for free?  During this economic downturn, I know several people who worked for no pay at a for-profit startup company, to “keep their skills up to date.” To be clear, they were not founders or owners, they did not get stock, or even minimum wage. They were not doing a favor for a friend.  I think they were crazy, and in the end they were frustrated and felt taken advantage of.  No duh, they were taken advantage of.  Working for free is akin to slavery.  

2. Do you have the freedom to say no to after-hours work?  If your boss calls you at 9:00 at night, do you have the freedom not to answer?  If you get an email at 10:00, do you have the freedom not to respond?  If you are asked to work the weekend, can say no?  Will you say no?  If the master asked a slave to do something, he or she had to obey.  A free person controls his or her own personal time.

3. Do you get paid for incremental work?  Of course not, unless you are a contractor or hourly employee.  A salaried employee is expected to work as much as it takes to get the job done.  Plus, the more senior positions carry a greater expectation that you will be on call all the time.  The more hours you put into these after-hours calls or other incremental work, the lower your effective hourly salary. Sometimes an incremental project brings a bonus if successfully executed, but sometimes it means overload, lower quality work, and negative career consequences.

In addition, “what it takes to get the job done” is rather arbitrary, and at the end of the day it depends to a large degree on the manager – even at the most senior levels.  One VP in marketing told me that the CEO would call him on weekends to complain about the color scheme in an ad campaign under development.  This was not a mission critical issue, but the VP did not feel he could refuse a call from the CEO.  Every after-hours phone call, no matter how trivial, is free to the company.

4. Do you really have to do it?  I’ve interviewed almost three dozen executives about these issues, and sometimes I get an interesting reaction that goes something like this.  ”Don’t blame the company.  It’s not their fault.  I am choosing to do it.  I’m bringing it on myself.”  I know, I would think.  But why are you choosing to do it?  

On this MLK day, we are reminded that once in this country, African Americans could not choose when or how they worked.  We can.  Choose wisely.

Filed Under: Identity, Values, Work Life Balance Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Idolatry: A Secular Guideline With a Religious Origin

January 12, 2012 by 2 Comments

 

In Christianity, idolatry is a mortal sin.

In Judaism, you are allowed to commit any sin if it can save your own life, with the exception of murder, rape/incest, or idolatry.  In other words, if someone points a gun at your head, and tells you to worship an idol, you are supposed to take the bullet.  Murder, incest – pretty heinous, I get that prohibition.  But why should I take a bullet to avoid bowing to a statue?

 

 

Idolatry is about far more than a question about whether or not there is one Grand Divinity as opposed to many competing divinities.  Idolatry is really about whether there is one unchanging value system, as opposed to many competing value systems.   In my opinion, values are the key to human behavior, because they determine our priorities, and set the boundaries of our actions.

To bow to an idol is to accept the idol’s value system, and in so doing, you have rejected the notion of a single unchanging set of right and wrong.  And as soon as

Let’s put this in the business context – someone points a pink slip at your head and tells you to ship a product before it is ready to go.  Using the standard above, it is ok to ship the product to save your job (assuming there are no gross safety concerns.)  Shipping would not be the right thing to do, but an understandable decision if one’s livelihood is at stake. Ethical dilemmas don’t come up in easy situations.

But what if someone pointed the pink slip at your head, and told you to publically swear to do whatever the company told you to do?  To this, you cannot agree, because you have no way to know what the company will ask you to do in the future.  What if it asked you to ship an unsafe product?  Blind obedience is a form of idolatry because in essence it outsources values to another party, in this case the company.  There cannot be both a universal set of values, and a set of values determined by the company.

We are human, and it is understood that we will make mistakes.  We will not always know the right thing to do, and sometimes we knowingly do the wrong thing.  But we are not allowed to change the definition of what is right and wrong.  We need to preserve the universal standard of right and wrong, along with the right to choose to do the wrong thing.  (And yes, I do think there is a clear and simple set of universal values that can be summarized in three bullet points.  But that is a subject for another day.)

I have shipped products that clearly were not ready, and had to deal with the aftermath of furious customers.  I don’t regret the decision to ship the product.  I do regret that I got myself into a place where I felt that I had no choice.

More on Corporate Idolatry 

 

 

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Corporate Idolatry Explained

January 12, 2012 by 2 Comments

Idolatry, the worship of statues in the ancient world, has many similarities to the corporate world today.

In the ancient world, there were many different gods, each with its own value system.  The gods would fight and compete with each other, but no god and therefore no value system was supreme. Individuals could pick and choose which god to worship, depending on the values they wished to espouse, even in different circumstances.

This is similar to the corporate world.  There are many different companies, each with its own culture and values.  And if you don’t like the values of your company, you can move to another.  For example, if you think your company is not honest enough with customers, you can find one that is more transparent.  But if you think transparency is bad for business, there is a company for you too.  There is no overriding set of values, beyond the need to be profitable and to obey the law.  But whatever the value system of your company, you are expected to follow it as an implicit condition of employment. [Read more...]

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Do You Practice Corporate Idolatry? Look where you spend your time.

January 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

 


Which is more important to you?

Things or people?
Your company or your family?
Your status or your health?
Before you answer, think about where you spend your time.

 

Each day, your time goes into one of 3 categories: sleep, work, or life (which is everything that isn’t either sleep or work).  I’ve created a graph for my Time Profile as it was a few years ago. I worked 14 hours a day.  I didn’t get enough sleep. I was out of shape and overweight.  I was stressed and irritable.

If you asked me the questions above, I would have said my family was the most important thing to me, and my health was more important than status.  But I spent all my time working or thinking about work.  The numbers don’t lie – the company was the most important thing to me in my life.

And objectively, the decisions I made were in favor of the company over my family.  The most egregious example came on the 4th of July in 2005, when I spent several hours on a conference call. Even worse, I was at a resort for a family reunion.

What kind of an asshole schedules a conference call for the 4th of July?  That would be me. I was leading the project, and we needed to make an October launch date.  We were going to revolutionize medicine.  We needed to beat the competition to market, and we needed to make the revenue number.  And I wanted to be promoted.  (For those of you keeping score, we made the launch date, we missed the number, and I was not promoted.)

One definition of idolatry is excessive devotion or blind obedience.  I define Corporate Idolatry as excessive devotion or blind obedience to one’s corporate employer. My actions met both definitions.

Idolatry is a really big deal in a religious context, but it matters even more in the secular context.  The details of why is the subject of a future post.  Here’s the short version:  Idolatry puts things in front of people, and that is a recipe for a shorter and less happy life.

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Forget New Year’s Resolutions – Make Decisions Instead

January 1, 2012 by 7 Comments

New Year’s Resolutions are soooo 20th Century.

Last year,  I wrote about eight people who sent me a sentence or two about the year that was ending.  It became clear that their year was colored by the choices they made in the face of challenging circumstances.

They did not make resolutions, they made decisions.

A resolution is a promise about the future, a declaration of intent to do things differently.

A decision is a choice that is made in the present.

New Year’s Resolutions are popular because they come from the desire we all share to improve our lives. It’s part of our culture, and the new year is a natural time to take stock, and contemplate change. I’ve made plenty of New Year’s Resolutions, but most of them were forgotten or ignored by the end of January.  And now I understand why.

For most of my adult life, the company was my highest priority.  But the resolutions I made dealt with surface issues, and did not address my underlying values.  For example:

  • I need to get in shape, so I will go to the gym.
  • I work too much, so this year I’m going to spend more time with my family.
  • I don’t have any time for myself, so I’m going to start a new hobby.

But when it came time for me to make a decision on a day to day basis, the company was my highest priority, so I skipped the gym, was late for dinner, and never came near a hobby.  In general, the decisions we make reflect our underlying values. The decisions we make also serve to reinforce our values.  So, my company first value system perpetuated itself.

Real change came when I changed my values, to put my health and my family ahead of the company.  New values brought new priorities, and as a consequence I made different decisions.  For example,  I decided that it would be ok for me to come into the office an hour later twice a week to give me time to go to the gym.  It worked – I got in better shape and felt better as a result.  I should say it wasn’t without consequences –I didn’t lose my job or anything, but I took a little heat, and had to work to keep that time free.  But it was ok, because the company was not as important to me as my health.

So my advice is to skip the resolutions this year.  Instead, make a decision that puts you or another person ahead of the company.  Make it right now.

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