Kevin Carson posts on “Who Moved My Cheese?” and the whole “do as your told and don’t question authority” school of management http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/03/spencer-johnson-cowardly-weasel.html.
In my own career, I have rarely had the pleasure of working for anyone who was not an idiot, and if I did not question the migration of the cheese, sometimes loudly and vehemently, the consequences to the organization would be dire. It is usually easier to prevent a disaster from happening than to clean it up afterwards. Still, bad managers often don’t appreciate it even when you pull their chestnuts from the fire.
I have learned over the years to pick my spots and to let my bosses screw up as much as they like without interfering unless the issue is likely to have an impact on me. Otherwise, I would be in perpetual confrontation mode. Accordingly, I keep on the lookout for decisions which could bankrupt the company or expose it to unmanageable risks, and I watch our for errors and omissions that are likely to put us as a company in a bad relationship with the bureaucrats up the corporate chain. When these major disasters are in the making, I pull out all the stops, since I feel that I have nothing to lose anyway.
The best you can hope for in a job where you work for a largish corporation is not to hate yourself for what you have to do. Your cheese is going to be moved all the time, usually for no good reason, and there is not much you can do about it except to keep your resume updated. Try to savor the comedic aspects of your situation as much as possible.
The most important lesson to learn about the cheese movers is that they might be stupid and that, even if they are not stupid, their agenda does not usually coincide with the welfare of the company. They are looking out for themselves, and if the company benefits from their actions, it is purely coincidental. Accordingly, your cheese mover's actions and logic will not make sense to you until you figure out what he is trying to accomplish.
My current immediate cheese mover likes to look busy while engaging in as little constructive activity as possible. This is because he is trying to justify his job and the jobs of everyone else in our unit while avoiding any potential for accountability whatsoever. He wants our performance to be measured by activity rather than results and for any major decision or undertaking to be deferred as long as possible.
For the most part, I simply embrace this, and having figured out what he is trying to do has made his actions seem somewhat less irrational. Of course, he does not always do the right thing even in pursuit of his own agenda, but I am able to steer him in the right direction from time to time now that I know what direction he wants to go. I focus my efforts on making sure that we don’t defer action so long that we lose valuable opportunities or increase costs too much in a way that draws adverse attention to the unit. The organization is not structured to provide for accountability except in the case of a massive failure or appearance of failure.
As you may guess, I derive no satisfaction at all from my work outside of my compensation and benefits. It is just a job. I neither love nor hate it, and I don’t think about it for even an instant when I am off duty. When people ask me what I do, I just say that I work in an office, that I sit in front of a computer screen most of the time and have meetings. That about sums it up. Compared to a lot of jobs I have had, it is paradise. I am not obliged to do any evil deeds, and my cheese movers are pretty well intentioned all in all. It helps that they don’t really understand what I do. I don’t have to put in any overtime most of the time, and nothing I do is of any real significance to anyone.
I am not living up to my potential, but then again I never have done. I am too busy keeping track of my cheese.
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2 comments:
Wonderful post. My own cheese movers, at the hospital where I work, spent millions of $$ remodeling the empty 2500 floor so they could move the med-surg ward on it. It was far less functional and practical than the old floor the ward was on, and virtually the entire staff loathed it. The cheese movers also spent big bucks remodeling part of a floor for a gimmicky "ACE" unit (Acute Care of the Elderly), but despite having announced the beginning of the project with great self-congratulation and PR fanfare, decided not to open it after all the work had been done. They decided there weren't enough beds in it, and to do it as a hospital-wide program instead of a specific ward. Of course, the memo started out in the passive voice, last refuge of weasels: "It has been determined...." Yeah, and "mistakes were made," big time!
And after wasting God only knows how much money on shit like that, they deliberately keep the place dangerously short-staffed as a cost-cutting measure. There must be a special management school where you get half the gray matter sucked out of your skull, and then they pump in shit from a septic tank.
I wish I could say I don't think about my job when I'm not there. But from the time I leave work until I go back after my days off, it's in the back of my mind like a cloud of doom. The worst part of it is that, in the name of "professionalism," the management wants to make it even harder to compartmentalize that shithole from the rest of your life. You have to go in there dreading whether there'll be some kind of staffing crisis (or rather, the usual planned incompetence) so that you're pressured to stay late. You have to screen your calls on your day off. And lately, some wards even require everybody sign up for one mandatory on-call day on their day off every two weeks.
Irritates the shit out of me. They use the "professionalist" ideology of "teamwork" and "the patient comes first" to guilt people into working overtime they don't want. Well, if we're a "team," they must be playing for the other side. And sorry, but no--I WON'T allow myself to be made responsible for keeping the place staffed. I don't own company stock, I don't have the authority to set staffing policy, and I can't hire people or make out the schedule. And I didn't make the strategic decision to cut average staffing levels by a third over the past decade, as a cost-cutting measure. It's NOT MY FAULT that the place is an understaffed shithole.
I speak so freely, of course, because a blogger comment will be very, very far down the list if one of the HR Nazis Googles "Kevin Carson."
Kevin-
I attribute much of my ability to forget about work to Zoloft. It helps me avoid endogenous anxiety and to maintain a "don't really care" disposition. Of course, my work does not have an impact on patients, or anyone for that matter. Truth be told, if nobody did my work, it would not have any impact one way or another on anyone other than my cheese mover.
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