You can’t fight economic gravity with human identity.
What’s more, you *shouldnt*.
It’s unethical for a manager or leader to “pad” a job with performative identity elements to make it faux-fulfilling. Humans do not flourish as 20% genuine challenge, 8p% pieces of flair.
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As an employee (or hell, a free-agent self-employee) you should be ahead of your bosses/clients on this. If you aren’t continuously looking for ways to automate or outsource yourself you’re hiding from your own maximally expressed humanness.
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Thus has been creeping up me. 9 years ago when I went free-agent it was not even a thing. For managers/leaders everywhere, automation and outsourcing were real hard competencies to develop. Dealing with trumpification and wokification was just an easy compliance chore.
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Now this stuff is everywhere. And we all have to learn to manage and lead (and consult) in live minefield conditions. Perhaps we deserve it for sweeping these problems under the rug for so long. But well, they’re here now. And the incentives to solve them wrong are strong.
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The wrong way is to avoid these problems by gratefully delegating them to the first people who seem to want to deal with them. *These are exactly the wrong people*. Anyone volunteering to work on this thankless shit is 90% likely to be a grifter, 10% likely to be a saint.
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The right person to deal with this stuff is not a special interest group grifter or HR careerist but CEOs and senior execs with P/L or product responsibility. People who will be hurt on comp and reputation by the wrong solutions. Culture war navigation is now job #1 for you.
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Cultural safety is to 2020 what workplace physical safety was in the 1800s, when industrial accidents from boiler explosions, falling objects and crap was threatening to derail industrial growth.
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If you can’t ensure baseline cultural safety for *all* (plural) in the workplace, your business strategic acumen, product genius, marketing mono, and customer obsession *don’t matter*
Your company won’t last long enough to realize the value of those higher order competencies.
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Oddly enough falling physical safety is a deep symptom of bullshit-jobification. If you need workers to be in physical danger to do their work, one of 3 things is true:
a) You live in 1890
b) You fun a military or police org
c) You’re failing to automate/outsource well in 2020
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Replying to
How would outsourcing reduce exposure to physical danger? Isn't that just flushing the danger into someone else's river?
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Not necessarily. If it’s a low-cost geography, it may be possible to create better working conditions at lower cost. Or at least comparatively better. Like comparative advantage.
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Curious if this plays out in practice. If outsourcing is self-reliance, livelihoods, autonomy first, that looks quite different. If it's the usual jobs outsourced to low-cost geographies then I suspect the Law of Conservation of BS is preserved, with greater environmental cost?
