Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [26]
by the results. Organizations that can bring humanity and flexibility to their interactions
with other human beings will thrive.
Why We Started to Care
Of course, for decades, companies have been mechanizing production so that the
opportunity for making a career out of following instructions and lifting heavy objects
has gotten smaller and smaller. Of course, you didn't care so much, but the number of
good jobs for manual laborers has been dropping for years. We've been eliminating
machine operators and paint sprayers and other trades in order to lower costs.
The key is "we." The jobs being eliminated belonged to a class of people that was easy to
ignore. We rationalized, because we were not being affected. It was efficient to eliminate
blue-collar jobs; it made us competitive; it was progress.
Now, thanks to the information revolution and the law of the Mechanical Turk, the jobs
that are disappearing belong to us, not those other people. Suddenly, we care a great deal
about the jobs that have disappeared, probably forever. It bothers us because the jobs of
people who followed the same rules we did are now in jeopardy.
A League of Your Own
Donald Bradman was an Australian cricket player. He was also the best athlete who ever
lived. By any statistical measure, he was comparatively the best at what he did. He was
far better at cricket than Michael Jordan was at basketball or Jack Nicklaus was at golf.
It's very difficult to be as good as Donald Bradman. In fact, it's impossible. Here's a chart
of Bradman's batting average compared with the other all-time cricket leaders:
Everyone else is grouped quite near sixty. Bradman was in a league of his own, not even
close to the others.
The challenge of becoming a linchpin solely based on your skill at plying a craft or doing
a task or playing a sport is that the market can find other people with that skill with
surprising ease. Plenty of people can play the flute as well as you can, clean a house as
well as you can, program in Python as well as you can. If all you can do is the task and
you're not in a league of your own at doing the task, you're not indispensable.
Statistics are a dangerous deal, because statistics make it strikingly clear that you're only
a little better than the other guy. Or perhaps not better at all.
When you start down the path of beating the competition based on something that can be
easily measured, you're betting that with practice and determination, you can do better
than Len Hutton or Jack Hobbs did at cricket. Not a little better, but Don Bradman better.
And you can't.
On the Other Hand . . .
Being as charming as Julia Roberts or as direct as Marlon Brando or as provocative as
Danny Boyle--that's way easier than playing cricket better than anyone who ever lived.
Emotional labor is available to all of us, but is rarely exploited as a competitive
advantage. We spend our time and energy trying to perfect our craft, but we don't focus
on the skills and interactions that will allow us to stand out and become indispensable to
our organization.
Emotional labor was originally seen as a bad thing, a drain on the psyche of the
stewardesses studied by Hochschild for her book. The mistake in her analysis was failing
to consider the alternative. The alternative is working in a coal mine. The alternative is
working in a sweatshop. It's called work because it's difficult, and emotional labor is the
work most of us are best suited to do. It may be exhausting, but it's valuable.
(Colbert's Rapport)
Why do so many handmade luxury goods come from France?
It's not an accident. It's the work of one man, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. He served under
Louis XIV of France in the 1600s and devised a plan to counter the imperialist success of
the countries surrounding France. England, Portugal, Spain, and other countries were
colonizing the world, and France was being left behind.
So Colbert organized, regulated, and promoted the luxury-goods industry. He understood