Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [41]
them, to the exclusion of all others. Go ahead and make this sort of customer happy, and
the other guys can go pound sand.
In the words of Ev Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter,
The core thing would be just do something awesome. Try not to get caught up in the echo
chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do
something original.
A lot of things are evolutionary, and it is easy to get caught up in what the geek
subculture thinks. There's lots of valuable businesses that can be built there, but I think
that is where a lot of people tend to spin their wheels, and I've been caught up there
before. When I've had more successful things, I've thought, "Back to basics. What do I
want? What do I want to see in the world?" And create that.
Ev and Twitter didn't succeed at first. People didn't get it. What's the point? Where's the
business model? And then, once the word spread, Twitter became the fastest-growing
communications medium in history. Not because it followed a model, but because it
broke one.
Some artists create.
Some artists seek a patron, someone who will help them pay the bills while they do their
work.
Some artists think they need a boss. Someone who will not only pay them, but also tell
them what to do. The moment this happens, the artist is no longer an artist.
An artist's job is to change us. When you have a boss, your job is to please the boss, not
to change her. It's okay to have someone you work for, someone who watches over you,
someone who pays you. But the moment you treat that person like a boss, like someone
in charge of your movements and your output, you are a cog, not an artist.
Nobody Cares How Hard You Worked
It's not an effort contest, it's an art contest. As customers, we care about ourselves, about
how we feel, about whether a product or service or play or interaction changed us for the
better.
Where it's made or how it's made or how difficult it was to make is sort of irrelevant.
That's why emotional labor is so much more valuable than physical labor. Emotional
labor changes the recipient, and we care about that.
Soft Gifts and the Conundrum for MBAs
This news is unsettling.
The future of your organization depends on motivated human beings selflessly
contributing unasked-for gifts of emotional labor. And worse yet, the harder you work to
quantify and manipulate this process, the more poorly it will work.
The most senior levels in organizations have wrestled with this situation for a long time.
When you hire a vice president for business development, it's a given that he's not going
to be your errand boy. You're not paying all this money for someone who will merely go
down a checklist you've created and who will ask you before making any decisions. Of
course not. It's his job to innovate, to create new opportunities, to connect with hard-toreach people, and to follow the long line on the way to success.
As we go lower down the totem pole, though, management assumes that less pay = less
humanity.
The facts belie that assumption. From the U.S. Army to the manager at your local
McDonald's, it turns out that more humanity delivers better results. One of the most
difficult tasks the military had in Iraq was to teach soldiers how to treat Iraqi civilians as
potential partners, how to vary from the stated mission of the day, how to be human in
the face of huge unknown danger. It's easy to teach someone how to fire a missile, but
very difficult to take risks in the face of fear.
The digitization of work (measurement, Internet connection, mechanization) makes
typical MBAs very happy. This is the sort of thing you can put in a spreadsheet. The
challenge is that all your competitors are using the same spreadsheet, so your opportunity
for quantum growth and significant market advantage is tiny.
The easier it is to quantify, the less it's worth.
The Job Versus Your Art
The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing