Trumpification and wokification are the exact opposite of sagification. Trust me: if you can’t stop these processes from metastasizing your company will die. If they take over a sector, the sector will die. Neither trade wars, nor fine-grained regulation can stop it.
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Note: despite perceptions of sweathshops and Foxconn, outsourcing done well *increases* worker safety relative to jobs lost in high-cost geographies. Low cost basis means you can achieve same output with better treated employees. Precarious wages here are princely elsewhere.
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Same with white collar workers. You don’t have to be a woke ideologue to accept that workplace minorities shouldn’t have to be 2x as good for 0.5x reward relative to majority mediocrity You don’t have to be alt-right to accept that extreme speech policing kills a workplace
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These problems have good managerial/leadership solutions *so long as the jobs are not bullshit jobs* If they are bullshit jobs. There’s no solution. If they aren’t both are easy. Real recognize real. Output quality shows. Trusted bonds form that accommodate unpoliced speech.
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So seriously, to get ahead of culture war cancers before they arrive at your org, automate, outsource the bullshit out of the jobs ggressively, create physical and cultural safety by grounding everything in quality shipped output and the high-trust bonds they catalyze.
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Like I said, this stuff has crept up on me as well. It’s not stuff I enjoy consulting on, but over the years it has migrated from minor annoyance in peripheral vision to footnote to other items, to “oh, one more thing” agenda item in sparring sessions with clients to item #1
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I’d *much* rather work with clients on tech roadmaps, org structure, product vision, innovation management, market modeling, branding/positioning, OODA loops... all the fun stuff. The growth of this other stuff almost makes me want to quit consulting and bet on writing full-time.
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I still might. If I find myself spending more than 30% of my time helping clients navigate this stuff, it’ll be time to quit. And possibly invest in a bunker or sailboat.
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The enterprise today is where internet culture was in 2013: on the cusp of descent into internet of beefs madness. If you thought that shit has been toxic in the 7 years since, wait till we get to the intranet of beefs. It will be utterly awful. I’m seeing 2013-level signs now.
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In 2013 I underestimated both speed and magnitude of the internet of beefs exploding and shaping mainstream public life. I don’t want to make a similar mistake with the enterprise edition. We haven’t yet had the enterprise edition of something like gamer gate. Let’s try not to.
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Covid is a HUGE shock to the business world and has accelerated the reckoning with this stuff. Soon, like in 1-2 years, the window of opportunity to do the right things (cut bullshit out of jobs) will close. Not only will only wrong solutions be available, they will be mandatory.
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Covid is to the private/business world what Trump was to the public culture war: a virus that precipitates cascading rapid change in the environment as pent-up dams burst. If you’re a BTFSTTG happy at the prospect you’re either rich or an idiot. Possibly both.
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To survive Trump we went cozyweb. The corporate intranet is the OG cozyweb. What are you going to do when it goes up in flames? If your title is VP or higher it’s your job to answer that question. If the answer saves bullshit jobs it’s the wrong answer.
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I’m going to refer back to this thread in 2024. If I’m right — and I hope I’m not — the business world will be in as much of a meltdown by then as the public world was in 2017. Those who saw it coming and acted in time will see their businesses/orgs survive. The rest will die.
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Coda: I’ll turn 46 this year. I finally have enough experience across enough gigs that I’m fairly confident about my instincts on this stuff. Unfortunately I also have enough experience to not want to touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole.
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This is not what I was hoping my midlife career would be about. In 2011 the plan was to gradually do less consulting and more fun writing and making more money with less work based on a couple of decades of experience with “normal and fun” business problems.
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I now charge about 3x per hour as I did when I first started out. And I think I add more than 3x as much value per hour — if I’m having fun. Big if. That if is increasingly not true in culture-war consulting. The years of experience don’t matter if you dislike the work.
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Fingers crossed that the business world sees this looming and acts to steer it down a better path. Otherwise my next 4 years will be increasingly miserable, and my 50s, which I’d hoped would be 3-4 hours lucrative consulting and 30-40 hours fun writing, will be very different.
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End of conversation
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