Living the myth.

I did a lot of work this week. So, financially speaking, it was a good week. But there is an interesting lesson I learnt.
I had to get up at 5am on four mornings, which, if you are afraid of not hearing the alarm clock, it means the quality of sleep is not that brilliant. I drove about 1000km not to mention the 400km round trip to Zurich on Tuesday, by train.
What did I see?
I met many people who are locked into a soul grinding system. They work in what could be considered better office environments. They had all the tools they need. And there they were, tapping away at their computers producing, no wrong word, creating, no, still not right, ...well they were being mentally and physically occupied in doing something which someone else considered to be important.
In another environment, I met people who had more or less resigned themselves to their fates of being on an office treadmill. They would say that their work was interesting, was important but there was no sparkle in their eyes.
On Thursday I facilitated a workshop. One Dept. Head tapped into his Blackberry about every 5 minutes (The meeting lasted 5 hours). His company's share price was increasing. So what! The other person at the meeting hadn't drunk anything since our preliminary meeting which started at 8am and lasted for 2 hours. We had lunch together and he ate even faster than I did, which is a feat. He was tense. He was afraid to give is presentation because of telling some truths to his boss, because of hierarchical effects. His boss was upset because he couldn't access his emails from the room we were meeting in.
On Friday, I had a two hour meeting with a client who hadn't eaten and slept properly for 4 days. The reason was that he had conducted a successful meeting, decisions had been made. However, someone, who didn't attend the meeting criticized him personally for incompetence. All of this in a project which is going badly wrong and the project leader is now applying fear in order to save is skin.
And I spoke to many people who had lost the ability to see, to step back and look at what they are doing and either say, hey, this is good or no, we need to change it.
I spoke with people who had lost the ability to think because they are too roped in performing some brainless task.
By Friday, this aggression and frustration had begun to affect me, and to save myself, I thought how lucky I was to have a relaxed, slow paced working environment and time to do things properly.

Racing rats

I had a depressing conversation a few weeks ago. A woman in one of my client groups, who is a draftsperson, working for a transportation company, has had a colleague from India put in her team. His brief is to spend 6 months learning what they do so that he and his team can do the same thing in India. But at a fraction of the cost to her employer. This is a classic case of outsourcing coming close to my own working environment. She and her colleagues' reaction is to sabotage the whole operation because she knows that in about 12 months time, she won't have a job. She admits that he knows the necessary software better than she does and that he is incredibly smart. But by sabotaging the operation, which means only giving him useless information she can delay the process or even kill it. By producing bad quality in India, it could mean her keeping her job, perhaps 6 months longer. But in the end, her department would be closed down and whatever work would remain would be transferred to another site in Germany or to Vienna. She has a second job working as a paramedic for the Red Cross which is also what her husband does. The second job was the contingency plan because the future of her company's site is up for discussion.

So much for the basic facts. Now it gets a little different.

When she told me her situation, I asked her, why not relocate to, perhaps Vienna. It would be a dream location. Her husband could certainly work for the Red Cross there. She answered with the standard comments I always here. They've built a house, they have their friends, the kids are in school, can she get another job, can her husband get another job. Bottom line, it wasn't feasible. Instead, she would prefer to take the destructive line as long as possible and then get out with a higher salary so that she could claim higher unemployment benefits.

I have heard this story so many times, I tend to think nothing of it anymore. I just count my lucky stars that I don't have that scenario to put up with.

Last week, I spoke with someone else. Same company, different location, different job. His definition of success was defined as "if you have the competence to do your daily work and you just get on with it, you will be successful, no matter what your position is". That statement is in itself logical but when you hear the complaints about too much workload and too few resources, it sounds slightly different to me. I tend to read a more "shut up and buckle down, and if you're lucky, you can achieve a mini career, if you want it."

Along comes one of these self help gurus by the name of Tim Ferriss who's claim to fame is working a 4 hour week, with the goal to maximise productivity and time invested in order to enjoy life more. You could live a financially comfortable lifestyle without the huge sums people think are necessary. He's even written a book about it. The purchase of the book isn't necessary because there are enough hints in the various websites and places he has trampled on to get a pretty clear picture. At the core of his message is look ahead at what you want to do, less is more and utilize some of the resources that are available. Not exactly revolutionary. In a podcast that he left somewhere, he was lecturing to some students at Princeton and one of the things he said was "what is the worst thing that can happen when you lose your job? You take a little extended vacation and then find another one". When I heard that statement, I thought about the draftsperson, who's world seemed to be about to collapse around her because an entire system had programmed her and she didn't know where the "reset" button is.

It is the positive attitude, the intelligent risk taking which struck me in comparison to what I had been hearing from my clients here and there. One poignant case was to figure out what one's hourly rate is and job, even in one's own personal environment, which doesn't justify the hourly cost should be outsourced to, well India. That would free up time to do something else, perhaps more productive and fulfilling. So, it seems strange to me that people will get domestic help to clean their houses etc because they aren't prepared to do that and yet at the same time, outsource some intelligent stuff in order to do something even more intelligent.

But there are systems at work which are designed to prevent this. And if the packaging is right, then people have a comfortable lifestyle and are blinded by the changes around them and wake up to a rude shock sometime later.

Take time to think and act and be prepared. Learn to see and observe and keep an open mind.