#75: "Management" Via Slack
#75: "Management" Via Slack
Away Culture, The Big Law Trap & More Work Thoughts
December 7th, 2019: Hello from Taiwan! I was out sick last week but here for the home stretch of the 2010s. A cloudy day on Taiwan’s northern coast:
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I published a few things this week:
⚖ The Big Law Trap
A Guest-Post Essay From Ranjit Saimbi who’s working on a novel and writes about leaving the law profession and how he got there
📑 The Second Chapter of Success
An essay on finding on success, crises & “having faith” - Would love to hear feedback on this one - not sure I totally nailed it
Podcast: Moataz Ahmed On Creativity, Freedom & Freelancing
🎧 On The Web | Spotify | Apple | Google
A fun conversation with Moataz Ahmed talking about his Egyptian background, his love of culture and languages, starting as a freelancer out of college and his new book, The Lazy Person’s Guide To Freedom
#2 Slack and Modern Work Culture 🤳
A couple days ago an article was published about Away, the luggage company, and its “toxic work culture.”
I found the article fascinating, but not for the reasons you might expect.
Many of the screenshots of the CEO’s attempts are management are embarrassing, confusing and pure incompetent at best. This one takes the cake:
I’m going to teach you how to be accountable through authoritarian measures!
The real story for me is that this is happening on slack. Aggressive e-mails like this happen in all industries - I saw them across every industry and domain in consulting. However, in a slack world, the private criticism become a soul-crushing show of power that will motivate the employees to tip off a journalist.
In my last job I worked with an aggressive e-mailer and would often walk to their desk and say directly, “hey you’re being a jerk, can you please stop?” It usually worked.
With slack, the medium is the message and many organizations have not developed new norms to deal with this fact.
The occasional random e-mail becomes stream of consciousness insults broadcast to the entire company. What was formerly a 1-on-1 issue between two people becomes a rallying cry of an entire department to overthrow the CEO.
The norms might be a good thing in the long term. It seems like there is no going back from tools like slack. Public conversations raise the stakes for managers to do better and forces people to be more thoughtful about how they communicate.
Or companies will just ban slack and head back to e-mail.
#3 Tech Productivity Paradox 🧠
There is a a well-known phenomenon in economics of sluggish productivity since the mid-2000s that no one had explained well.
Some economists have recently proposed that there is a natural lag that happens when economies shift and that if we account for that lag with something else than labor or capital, it starts to make sense:
In addition to capital and labor, their model adds a third factor, a bottleneck which prevents economies from taking advantage of the abundance of digital capital and labor. They dub this third factor genius (G).
The G factor is primarily associated with exceptional talent, which -- unlike labor and capital -- isn’t subject to digitization. Its relative scarcity thus becomes a production bottleneck. “Many have the sense that intangible assets and superstar workers are more abundant than ever. Perhaps the most surprising thing then about our result is that these factors are increasingly scarce.”
Seems a little too good to be true, but if there is some truth here, we will likely see new work beliefs emerge as we did around the emergence of both the labor and capital theories of value.
#4 How Many Gig Workers Are There? 💼
Gig workers, solopreneurs and freelancers are mostly hidden from view in conversations about the economy, work and the job market but make up a rather large proportion of the US workforce. From this recent report
81% of small businesses and 17% of workers: “The number of nonemployer firms has grown during the last two decades and represents 81 percent of all small businesses. Nonemployer firms are sources of primary and supplemental income for 17 percent of American workers “
17% of the workforce is about 26.7 million workers. While many think of a business as something that needs to employ people, many are comfortable operating at a smaller scale with no intentions to grow, or have a small LLC to do supplemental work on the side.
Look for this group of people to have an increasing voice in a political process that still is geared very much around full-time employment, benefits through work and the mindset that most people want what full-time employees want.
As work becomes increasingly atomized and unreliable, we’ll need a new way for conceiving what work means in the modern context. It seems we’ll have to do a little better than merely pushing for a minimum wage for gig workers as so many states are doing for Uber drivers now.
#5 Dignity & Meaning 😇
Chris Arnade has a fascinating talk about his book Dignity. He spent the last several years wandering around America talking to people who are struggling and learning about how they find dignity in their life. He calls them “back row” people, meaning they have mostly missed out of the enormous economic growth that “front row” people have been able to take advantage of it.
I do recommend watching at least some of the video:
The word dignity is a powerful one. Arnade highlights it as one of the “things that give you value that you can’t measure.” The Economist Russ Roberts has also been saying a similar thing but within the domain of economics:
Those things are what really make our hearts sing: pride, dignity, respect. They’re cliches, but they’re not in our model. So we say, “Well, yeah, they’re working in the background.” Or “We’re just holding them constant.” Or “They’re not important for the question I’m looking at.” Then we get to something like universal basic income, where we say, “Okay, we’re worried — because of, say, autonomous vehicles or artificial intelligence — that people aren’t going to be able to find work, but that’s okay. We’ll just give them a check.”
Arnade says the public conversations and policy debates continue to focus on success and dignity through a “front row” lens:
“the way we think about the world is through a very narrow framework that only one thing mattering: resume, education and how much money you make”
For many, this game is not a practice possibility and they look instead for “non-credentialed forms of meaning” in three forms: place (local community), religion and racial & ethnic culture.
All three of these are becoming harder to achieve and Arnade finds that people are filled with shame and humiliation - being out of work or not knowing how to get the pieces together in their life. One thing he said stood out:
“the opposite of humiliation is looking for dignity”
As work becomes increasingly fractured, we are going to need a broader lens for thinking about how people can have dignity beyond the “front row” path.
#6 The Stable Jobs Aren’t Coming Back
A lot of political discourse across the spectrum seems centered on the foundation of stable full-time jobs. I think this myopia crowds out a lot more creative solutions for a an evolving and increasingly atomized labor market.
Eric Weinstein argued a few years ago that we are in a new age of a “gimmick economy”
This shift in emphasis from jobs to opportunities is great news for a tiny number of creatives of today, but deeply troubling for a majority who depend on stable and cyclical work to feed families. The opportunities of the future should be many and lavishly rewarded, but it is unlikely that they will ever return in the form of stable jobs.
That’s all for this week. Have a good weekend!
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