Business Insight Zone

Save your pennies.

That’s what came to mind when I read this snippet from “26 Rules for Recessions,” which Tom Peters posted on his blog earlier this week. Here’s Tom:

Find me a single example of someone who made the history books who hadn’t had the crap kicked out of him-her — typically time and time again. Adversity is the soil of great accomplishment — period. Which doesn’t make getting kicked around any more fun at the time. I’m at a bit of a loss here for pragmatic ideas — assuming you are not the boss of bosses, perhaps a good bet is to form some sort of offensive support group — The Resilience Rambos? The idea is to dwell on the opportunities that doubtless lie amidst the wreckage.

In a comment on the post, I wrote:

Actually, I think the personal solution is the same as the corporate solution: build value over time. As you say, this includes building relationships — a network — over time, and before you need it. Folks who have some sort of assurance, even if it’s as simple as six months’ pay in the bank and a jumbo Rolodex of true-blue friends, have a lot more freedom to act boldly when the chips are down, because they don’t make an emotional connection between the risks (real or perceived) in the marketplace and the risks to their own mortgage or the kids’ college accounts.

He seemed to like my idea: “Yup — I guess I got caught in my own trap — looking for something sexy when something straightforward is the ‘bingo’ strategy!”

Tom’s onto something there: I think that too often we look for that “Bingo!” strategy in tough times, when in fact we’d be better served to focus on the basics.

This is also coming to mind because of conversations I’ve had since I posted my review of Why Works Sucks and How to Fix It. A couple of people have asked me what they can do — or what the book recommends that they do — if they’re the victims of poor work situations, yet not in a management position that would allow them to change those situations by fiat.

Sludging yourself

In every organization I’ve ever been in — good, bad, or mediocre — there’s been someone who was pining to leave. In some cases, it was precisely because the organization was a bad place to work. In others, it was because that person’s particular team or department or boss was toxic. And in some cases, it was simply because the person had other goals in life: to tour the world, to bake cookies for a living, to own their own business, to act in films. Whatever.

Many of the folks I’m taking about put up with all sorts of bad conditions of the type that Ressler and Thompson describe in Why Work Sucks. Their reward for putting up with it, in many cases, was resentment (or outright bitterness); patronizing, rigid schedules; and living in a world filled with what Ressler and Thompson call “Sludge” — the sorts of casual meanness that denigrate anyone who fails to display total selfless loyalty to the organization.

When I think back about these people, many of them focused on what they lacked, or on the limiting conditions that “forced” them to keep doing what they were doing. Examples:

• Lack of a college degree.
• Single parenthood.
• “People don’t understand me.”
• “You can’t get a job with a sociology [film studies, history, classics, etc.] degree.”
• “It’s impossible to break into the film [cookie-baking, novel-writing, etc.] business.”
• “I have three kids.”

And so on. Some of these folks managed to make the complaints funny in a sardonic way. Some of them managed to keep their chins up while they suffered. But all of them — myself, too, at times — made me sad.

Taking charge of YOU

Bear with me if this sounds too self-helpy, but you must take charge of your own life and career — from whatever point in time, from wherever you happen to be. There might be nothing easier in all the world than to bemoan your fate, sigh deeply, and then get back to your cycle of pointless toil, all the while letting yourself off the hook for doing nothing to change the situation.

The careers of countless entrepreneurs, from Thomas Edison to Mrs. Field’s, were based upon the premise that the entrepreneur could rise above limiting circumstances. As Peters rightly points out in the bit I quoted above, the biographies of countless greats across the ages are studded with huge failures and setbacks.

In very many cases, down at the nitty-gritty level, this means taking charge of your personal finances. You need to save more than the average American does. You need to boost your income and control your expenses where you can — and do it with an honest view to the numbers, not with an emotional attachment to your SUV or your deluxe cable package or your restaurant dinners.

The downside: people like SUVs because they’re roomy and they give you a high vantage point and they can haul all of your stuff, all of your friends, all of your kids, and all of their stuff. If I felt I could spare the money and the time for a deluxe digital cable package, I’d happily watch baseball every night of the season. I love eating out. I’m not saying these temptations aren’t real.

I’m also not saying that the challenges of, say, single-parenthood aren’t real. I hope she won’t blush too much when I say so, but I admire my sister enormously for the way she built her career and family as a single mother. It wasn’t easy. But with a little help from friends and family, she took charge of her situation and improved it bit by bit.

The courage to rally for change

Maybe you’re the type who brings about change by silent hard work. Maybe you’re a rabble-rouser. Maybe (like me) you’re good at saying “What if . . .” in a way that gets people thinking instead of making them defensive. Maybe you fit some other category. In any case, you’ll be a far better judge of that than anybody else will — and it’s by figuring out your own style that you’ll figure out your own means of leverage in the working world.

Whether you’re a Sammy Davis, charming people into more enlightened views, or a Norma Rae, agitating for change, or a Robert Noyce, reinventing an industry by smarts and force of will, you can make a difference. More to the point, in my book you don’t have any right to complain if you don’t at least try.

And that’s my antidote for Sludge, for “Work Sucks”-style working environments, or for weathering tough times in your company, your industry, or the economy as a whole.

So, what are YOU doing to take charge of your situation in these trying times?

~

Related posts:

• Book Review: Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It
• The benefits of failure.
• Avoiding the Kitty Genovese syndrome in business.
  

(Photo by babasteve.)

Category: The working life