Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [21]
The experience could have been merely ordinary, merely another bit of good-enough. But
it's not. It's magical. It was created by someone who cared, who contributed, who did
more than he was told. A linchpin.
Anthropologie has a buyer, Keith Johnson, who spends six months a year traveling the
world, visiting flea markets and garage sales, looking for extraordinary things. Not to
sell, perhaps, but to beautify a store. It's not easy to hire a Keith Johnson, which is
precisely why his work is so essential to their success.
If your organization would get out of the way, and if you would step up, there'd be a slot
like that available. For anyone.
Creating Forward Motion
Imagine an organization with an employee who can accurately see the truth, understand
the situation, and understand the potential outcomes of various decisions. And now
imagine that this person is also able to make something happen.
Why on earth would you ever begin to consider the possibility of firing her?
Inconceivable.
Every organization, every nonprofit, every political body, every corporation desperately
seeks this person. This is our leader, our marketer, our linchpin. She creates forward
motion.
There are bosses who might be threatened by someone who can create forward motion,
but the shareholders and owners and board of every organization on earth desperately
want forward motion. The distinction is subtle; calming your boss's anxiety is a first step
in getting the organization to embrace the change you'll be making.
Doesn't matter if you're always right. It matters that you're always moving.
Linchpins and Leverage
You could do Richard Branson's job.
Most of the time, anyway.
I spent some time with Sir Richard, and I can tell you that you could certainly do most of
what he does, perhaps better than he does it. Except for what he does for about five
minutes a day. In those five minutes, he creates billions of dollars' worth of value every
few years, and neither you nor I would have a prayer of doing what he does. Branson's
real job is seeing new opportunities, making decisions that work, and understanding the
connection between his audience, his brand, and his ventures.
The law of linchpin leverage: The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock
minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. In other words, most of the time,
you're not being brilliant. Most of the time, you do stuff that ordinary people could do.
A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in
tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they're doing work that most any trained person could
do.
It might take a lot of tinkering or low-level work or domain knowledge for that brilliance
to be evoked, but from the outside, it appears that the art is created in a moment, not in
tiny increments.
This is more difficult if you have a job where your employer doesn't expect you to create
much value. In these jobs, it's grunt work, hard work, and persistent work that creates
value. Moving a pile of bricks from one place to another is important, but there is no
expectation that you'll contribute bursts of brilliance. The boss believes that it is merely a
slog.
Bricks need to be moved, of course. Understand that you don't have to be the one moving
them as long as there's someone cheaper and more replaceable you can hire to do the
moving. And if you've got no choice but to move the bricks, your opportunity is to think
hard about how you do even this mundane task, because almost any job can be
humanized or transformed.
It's difficult to train people to be Mark Cuban or Richard Branson or Madeleine Albright.
It's easy to train people to do the slog stuff because there's a clear process and a manual.
It's work. Any single person might not want to do it, but finding people who will do it
isn't really a problem.
Inventing Twitter or Digg or 1-800-GOT-JUNK or Flatiron Partners, though, that takes