• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

turned into dead-end traps of dissatisfaction and unfair risk.

The essence of the problem: The working middle class is suffering. Wages are stagnant;

job security is, for many people, a fading memory; and stress is skyrocketing. Nowhere to

run, and apparently, nowhere to hide.

The cause of the suffering is the desire of organizations to turn employees into

replaceable cogs in a vast machine. The easier people are to replace, the less they need to

be paid. And so far, workers have been complicit in this commoditization.

This is your opportunity. The indispensable employee brings humanity and connection

and art to her organization. She is the key player, the one who's difficult to live without,

the person you can build something around.

You reject whining about the economy and force yourself to acknowledge that the factory

job is dead. Instead, you recognize the opportunity of becoming indispensable, highly

sought after, and unique. If a Purple Cow is a product that's worth talking about, the

indispensable employee--I call her a linchpin--is a person who's worth finding and

keeping.

Thank You for Protecting Us from Our Fear

How was it possible to brainwash billions of people to bury their genius, to give up their

dreams, and to buy into the idea of being merely an employee in a factory, following

instructions?

Part of it was economic, no doubt about it. Factory work offered average people with

small dreams a chance to make a significant change in their standard of living. As a

bonus, this new wealth came with a pension, job security, and even health insurance.

But I don't believe that this was enough to explain the massive embrace of a different

way of life. The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you

don't have to think. Do your job and you don't have to be responsible for decisions. Most

of all, you don't have to bring your genius to work.

In every corporation in every country in the world, people are waiting to be told what to

do. Sure, many of us pretend that we'd love to have control and authority and to bring our

humanity to work. But given half a chance, we give it up, in a heartbeat.

Like scared civilians eager to do whatever a despot tells them, we give up our freedoms

and responsibilities in exchange for the certainty that comes from being told what to do.

I've seen this in high schools, in Akron, in Bangalore, in London, and in start-ups. People

want to be told what to do because they are afraid (petrified) of figuring it out for

themselves.

So we take the deal. We agree to do a job in exchange for a set of instructions. And for

the hundred years that it led to increasing standards of living, it seemed like a very good

deal.

The PERL (Percentage of Easily Replaced Laborers)

In the factory era, the goal was to have the highest PERL. Think about it. If you can

easily replace most of your workers, you can pay them less. The less you pay them, the

more money you make. The city newspaper, for example, might have four hundred

employees, but only a few dozen salespeople and columnists were hard to replace on a

moment's notice. The goal was to leverage and defend the system, not the people.

So we built giant organizations (political parties, nonprofits, schools, corporations) filled

with easily replaced laborers. Unions fought back precisely because they saw coordinated

action as the only way to avoid becoming commodities. Ironically, the work rules they

erected merely exacerbated the problem, making every union worker just as good as

every other.

The Rule of Ordinary People

One of the most popular books ever written on building a business is called The E-Myth

Revisited, and here's what its author, Michael E. Gerber, says about the perfect business

model:

The Model Will Be Operated by People with the Lowest Possible Level of Skill

Yes, I said lowest possible level of skill. Because if your model depends on highly skilled