I’d like to suggest one probable cause for the increasing instability of employment in large businesses. The speed of business particle flow is approaching the threshold of human endurance.<\/p>\n
Back in the Fifties, when your grandfather was still working, men, and some women, worked long hours under often depressinging conditions, but they handled fewer cycles of action in a day than we do now in a single hour. <\/p>\n
They were busy, oh my yes, and everyone scurried around, as I recall, but firing off a memo took two people and an hour to complete. The secretary, remember her, would be called into the managers office and would sit and take notes while the manager dictated the memo. She would type a draft and the manager would review and revise it and she would type a final and he would sign it, and so forth and so on. Then she would put it in a envelope and put it in the outgoing mail for the mail boy. Remember him?<\/p>\n
At the end of a long day, a busy manager might look back with satisfaction on a handful of decisions made and a pile of memos sent off. Weekly staff meetings were the norm, but lowly engineers and clerical staff spent most of the time at their desks or the water coolers.<\/p>\n
Today, the cell phone rings while you are still eating breakfast. You have at least one life-shaking decision to make before you leave for work, and you have at least two phone calls to make during your commute to your office which is fifteen miles and 90 minutes away on the freeway.<\/p>\n
If you have a Blackberry PDA, your email has been piling up while you drive and you are tempted to look at the latest ones when traffic slows to a crawl.<\/p>\n
You get to the office, and your meeting has been cancelled, but
\nnobody seems to be able to tell you why. It may just be a minor glitch
\nwith quarterly sales projections, but your manager and the higher level
\ndirectors are closeted in an unscheduled meeting. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, you still have work to do on a new product release,
\nLeviathon IV, and you are running out of time and inspiration. Model IV
\nhas fewer real features than III, and it doesn’t address the problems
\nthat your sales people are screaming about.<\/p>\n
While you try to resolve this, you plow through 56 emails that have
\nappeared in your Inbox overnight, and you find one from the Leviathon
\ndesign team that says they will have to decommit on the only
\nsignificant improvement in Leviathon IV, because the designer has got
\nhimself reassigned to a higher priority project.<\/p>\n
While you are laboring to understand what this means to your bonus
\nand your job, the phone rings and your buddy at another company says,
\n"You remember that Open Source project…they’ve announced the release
\nof a Leviathon lookalike that runs on every platform including LINUX."<\/p>\n
He may not have his facts right, but your day is already in the toilet and you haven’t had your first cup of coffee.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile your cell phone rings and it is your spouse with the news
\nthat the dog is sick or that the kid has been sent home from school for
\nanti-social behavior and you are needed at the vet or the principal’s
\noffice as soon as you can make it. Your spouse is in a meeting at work
\nwhich will not break until 4:30, so it up to you to save the dog, the
\nkid, and the world.<\/p>\n
Multiply this scenario by the number of workers in a large
\ncorporation and you have a picture of highly dynamic instability. Every
\nperson in the company is being bombarded constantly by news and
\nrequests for action.<\/p>\n
We live at internet speed, and we are finally getting a good look at
\nthe enormity of the problem has been unleashed. We are pressed to make
\nmore decisions every day than many people made in a week fifty years
\nago. There is no respite. <\/p>\n
We are connected up 24×7 to people all over the world. If it isn’t
\nfamily and friends, it will be spammers from Nigeria or Saudi Arabia
\ncarefully crafting letters to tap into our bank accounts. Customers,
\nsuppliers and government agencies are all trying to get our attention
\nor our money.<\/p>\n
As a result, if we are managers, we rarely take the long view and we
\nmake shortsighted decisions. As employees, we are hard-pressed to make
\nrational decisions in the absence of long-term guidelines. We avert our
\neyes from situations we should speak up about, because we suspect
\ncorrectly that we will be jettisoned for rocking the boat.<\/p>\n
I am sure that we will evolve a more thoughtful and humanistic
\nworkplace model in the next few years, because we face hard times if we
\ndon’t.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, those of us who can view this from a safe distance, owe
\nit to those who struggle to keep our economy going to make suggestions
\nthat will alleviate and eventually correct this corporate meltdown.<\/p>\n
Bloggers should play a big role in this. We can be a major force for change in 21st century business.<\/p>\n