Posts Tagged ‘Work’

I’ve been harping in this space about how to change our economic thinking, how to do more with less, how to keep working even if the jobs are gone, that sort of thing.  I have a REALLY long post on this subject that’s still in draft mode, but maybe this week will see the light.

In case you missed it, I contend that the broad economy is totally irrelevant to you personally, and that making things better, creating jobs and increasing activity are things you can do – no, that you must do – every day in the place that you are.  Then along comes the incredible Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) and here’s a snippet of his post from late last week:

What economy? What is that? Some magical entity that decides when businesses are able to make money? Seriously?  Is that the answer? Is that what they teach in business schools these days? Is that what 25 years on various boards and whatnot have taught you? The economy is responsible for my business still looking at a lousy H2 in 2009?

Here’s something to chew on: The economy won’t start getting better until businesses start doing better, and that my friends is not something that will be decided in Washington D.C., Wall Street or even CNN. It isn’t a chicken or egg question. Businesses ARE the economy. No one is going to magically make the economy fix itself. Not Jesus, not President Obama, not the Fed, not even Kanye West. It starts here. Right now. With you. Not with some vague distant fairy godmother of business called “the economy” but with you: The business leaders. The CEOs. The CMOs. The creative directors. The agency principals.  The Social Media directors. The community managers. The customer engagement managers. THAT’s where it starts.

If I call a guy a genius who is saying the same things I am, is that self-congratulatory?  There’s a lot of big-business-speak in Olivier’s post, because he does big-boy things at his company, but I still recommend you read the whole thing.

Do something today to make someone else’s business work better.  I’m begging you.

@TylerOsby asked a question this morning on Twitter – “how long do you work every day?”  Apropos of this, I also read an article this morning by Tim Ferriss, who wrote The 4-Hour Work Week, about how he works, um, 4 hours a week.  Obviously.  But anyway, what I found was that I could not give a straight answer to Tyler’s question.  I’ve had trouble with this for a while, and it’s getting worse.

On the surface, it seems simple.  You work when you’re working, and you aren’t working when you’re not working.  Oh, if only.  Here’s an example: right now, am I working?

I don’t know.

The blog, in general, is a marketing vehicle to let people know that I have a certain level of expertise in mortgages.  I do.  In fact, I’m very good at them.  I’ve been doing them a long time, in several capacities, and I understand them well from many sides.  But the part of this blog that establishes that credibility is primarily the RateWatch segment, which I love, but which this post is not.  So is this post work or not?

Um.

There’s so much more.  In 20 minutes, I’m meeting with Nathan Larsen from Classic Books and Gifts to talk about a really innovative book contest we’re putting together.  There is practically no chance that this contest will pay me any money, though it is about 90% certain that I’m going to be headmanning it.  It will take volumes of time and some money.  Is the meeting work?  It will be benefitting the bookstore.  It will employ (eventually) many people.  It has lots of outgrowth possibilities that could make many of the people I know better off.  It’s also fun.  So what is this meeting?  Work?

I’m going out to garden at some point today.  Is that work?  I spent half an hour reading articles this morning and some of those led to this post.  Was that work?

I know there’s all this fancy talk about balance these days, how to balance your professional and personal life, how to balance family with work, how to keep your different compartments separate and weighing about the same.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I find that philosophy so stupid my eyes cross.  I can’t for one second separate all the different parts of my life.  Practically no activity that I engage in has no spiritual component.  Practically every activity has some family aspect.  When I’m with my family, much of the time, my phone is on and on my hip.  Am I working?  I’m on call.  Isn’t that working?  On the other hand, when I’m sitting in the office, often I’m discussing the Jazz with my brother.  Is that working?

Much of what I do every day produces no direct financial benefit.  Nearly everything I do EVERY day produces some indirect financial benefit, and the part that doesn’t produces other kinds of benefits in friendships, quality of life, larger vegetables, and suchlike.  It’s not a job, that’s for sure.  But isn’t “work” the thing you add to the universe to stop it from going straight to crap?  Am I not ALWAYS working?

I need help here, obviously.

So I told Tyler that my first communication with the outside world happens between 6:30 and 7am, and my last communication between 6pm and 11pm, depending on the day, which was true but not what he asked.  He responded that that was a long day.  I replied that everyone’s day is that long; mine just has more in it than most people’s.  I got the sense, though, that that wasn’t very satisfying to him.  It wasn’t all the way for me, either.

Can you help?

I have a lot of good friends that have lost their jobs recently.  Most of these guys are good workers, not at the bottom of the food chain, respectable guys with families and mortgages.  They are middle managers, sales managers, warehouse managers, and they weren’t the only ones that went down with the ship – all the people under them lost their jobs as well – but now they’re in varying amounts of trouble and jobs are very, very hard to come by.

Additionally, I know a goodly number of people in my industry that are underemployed now, with the real estate market in disarray.  Mortgage guys, title guys, Realtors, lots of us find ourselves with stretches of time and nothing in particular to do with them.

I have a suggestion.  You lost your job.  But you haven’t lost your ability.  You can still work.  Right now, there’s a lot of work out there.  Why not do some of it?

First, let’s split jobs from work, so that this will make sense.  A job I’ll define as something someone pays you to do.  Obviously, we need to eat and we have mortgages to pay, so jobs are definitely attractive.  I’m not disputing that.  Work is anything you do that is productive, whether it pays or not.  It therefore includes things like gardening and playing with children.

Second, let’s think about this a bit.  We have no job.  Nobody is going to pay us today to do anything.  We’re going to apply for some jobs, send out our resumes, make some calls to our networks, try to find an open position.  Guess what?  There aren’t any.  If there were open positions, we wouldn’t have had ours get eliminated (simplistic, obviously, but in general terms, when large chunks of the economy are firing, there aren’t going to be any open positions by definition).  So resume fairs and Monster.com will only be so effective.  It’s unlikely that we’ll find anything immediately, and even less likely that we’ll immediately find a job we want.

But we can still work.  The economy is shrinking.  Why is this?  Do people need less food than they once did?  Fewer cars?  They only wear clothes half the time now?  No, of course not.  But there are two ways to stimulate the economy.  One is to have people out there with money, looking to buy things.  That’s where we once were, but the debt fairy has come for payment now, and the days of lots of free cash are over.  The other is to supply things to the market that people will decide to re-task their money to buy.  This is called supply-side economics, and it works a bit differently than we’re used to.  But it still works.

Look, nobody stood around trying to figure out if there was something like a Rubik’s Cube to buy.  Erno Rubik produced it, and people said “hey, that’s cool” and bought them up.  What I’m suggesting is something like that.  You want a job.  There are no jobs.  But if businesses were doing better, there would be jobs.  So what you need is for businesses to be doing better.

How do businesses do better?  They sell more things, produce more things.  To do that, they need more workers, more ideas.  They’re cutting costs to try to stay in business, but what they desperately need is a reason to hire people.  They need work done, and they can’t pay for it until they get some money.

So make them some money.

We have incredible expertise.  If you’ve been in management anywhere, you know how to do things, how to sell, how to buy, how to get people working together.  Lots of the guys I know that are out of work are salesmen and marketers.  They have huge amounts of experience, probably a lot more than most businesses could afford to pay them for.

So we don’t have jobs.  We can still do work.

I work with a small group of people called the Main Street Gang, for want of a better name.  What we do is go from business to business, mostly on Main Street in Lehi Utah, meeting the proprietors, looking for ways we can help.  Sometimes we write reviews of their businesses and post them around on local sites, doing some web marketing.  Sometimes the help we offer is more substantive.  With the local bookstore, we had an idea that has now grown into a large enterprise, and has, it appears, some real potential.  It should be very good for the struggling bookstore, and for several other related businesses.

There’s a local organic market.  They need help.  There’s a barbershop.  It needs help.  An appraisal management company.  An insurance agency.  My mortgage branch.  A sign company.  A restaurant.  All these businesses could profit tremendously from the expertise that we can bring to the table.  We can organize campaigns, consult, see areas where things could be improved.  We come in as a consulting company and we do what we can to help.  And we do it for free, because someone needs to do it, and the people that need it the most can afford it the least.

It doesn’t pay.  It is, however, productive work.  It makes us better.  It keeps us sharp.  It brings us into contact with dozens of small businessmen and women, the very people that are most likely to feel the returning surge of power in the economy and look to hire someone to help them to exploit it.  Who are they most likely to look at first?  Some of us have gotten jobs in the meantime, and still return to help out once in a while.  When a job comes open where one of us is working, who are we most likely to recommend to the HR people?  Right – someone we’ve worked with before, that we know and trust, and that has already demonstrated his willingness to work even when the payoff was pretty obscure.

We supply work and expertise and energy.  We still have those things.  We try to push the flywheel of the economy a bit faster on every turn.  And we find that we’re happier.  We’re having fun.  We’re stopping a few people from joining us in the ranks of the un- and under-employed.  So if you’re out there, having trouble finding a job, how about joining us?  We could use you.

Now that you don’t have a job, why not do the work you always wanted to do?  It just might be the best career move you ever made.