Amerika

While attempting to recover from cat-induced amotivational syndrome (CIAS) the other day, it occurred to me that people approach life with a fundamentally different mentality if they are dependent on employers. This mentality is both submissive and extractive.

To jobbers, or those who work jobs for large firms, money is something that appears from above and must be spent, with more coming regardless of what they do. For this reason, they see questions of entitlement before questions of utility, sort of like lawyers and judges.

Jobbers believe in the money train or money boat, a mythical source of infinite money that is apportioned only by the choices of those above them, and those are arbitrary. They view their task within the job as finding a way to ensure more of this money goes to them.

Jobs reduce focus on the goal in order to pay attention to method and that task of gaining money. Unlike a small business, where failure means everyone is in danger, large firms can absorb losses and take out loans, sort of like democratic governments.

To succeed at a job, you find a way to blame someone else for anything that goes wrong, overstate your own accomplishments, and rationalize why you deserve more access to money and power. You want to make yourself indispensable and yet unaccountable.

Business owners, on the other hand, know the money boat is a fiction. To them money means potential and is a zero-sum game, in that you have only so much and you have to put it in the right places or it works against you.

This is different than in jobs, where you spend to manage Optics and Expectations. You splash the money out to make sure that everyone on the committee has their worries addressed, even if — especially if — it achieves nothing. You silence dissent and encourage unity.

A distracted committee, which is what all “meetings” are, tends to nod with approval when everyone has been represented. A small business owner sorts the essential from the inessential and cares about results, not protecting his job title.

These attitudes toward money show us why corporations gradually become less competent and more expensive. They are not spending money to achieve results. They are spending money to feel good about it, and over time, too many people need to be bought off for efficiency to occur.

Tags: corporate culture, crowdism