And Are You Really Sure?
I’m Busy, Why Do I Care? Change is a given in life and work, but we frequently anchor our identity in the past or to things we cannot control. There is a huge difference between being attached to a durable, lasting sense of mission (“why” we do things) rather than our business models (“how” and “where”). Getting the two confused can have a terrible price.
Length: 813 words (4-5 minute read)
Seth Godin, whose work we looked at before here, is a master of asking provocative questions in a pithy, compact way. He was at it again in late July on his blog, in an article titled “Defending The Status Quo.”
His point is that there is a difference between what we do and how or where we do it. This works for organizations:
“Random House isn’t in the bookstore business, they’re in the business of publishing ideas that matter.”
And for individuals:
“You’re not in the business of having a job with an office. Your are willing to trade time and effort in exchange for money and a chance to do work you’re proud of.”
It’s a subtle point.
What we do, at the most fundamental level, connects to why we’re showing up. These things are about mission.
Where we show up and how we use our tools is a business model.
To go back to Godin’s second example:
What we do is trade time and effort for money.
Why we do that is to do work we’re proud of.
Where you show up is an office.
How you work is whatever that job is.
Missions endure; they can follow us across time. Business models don’t last; they change with time and circumstances.
This is important because both individuals and organizations easily fall into confusing the two. We struggle to preserve familiar “how” and “where” when we could more profitably ponder how to improve the “what” and “why”.
In the Covid-19 era, we see this with workers who are semi-permanently displaced from brick and mortar offices in favor of working at home. We are not our office, at least hopefully.
While the pandemic brought this home for knowledge workers, it’s been happening for a long time in other parts of the economy:
In 2019, General Motors closed its assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The plant’s main products were smaller sedans which had fallen out of favor with consumers. The closure was the culmination of three years of dwindling production and steady cutting of shifts.
This was a traumatic shift in an area which has seen decades-long reduction in manufacturing jobs. Many people quoted in the local news expressed surprise and dismay. Speaking in late 2018, the area’s congressman compared the closing to the demise of steel mills and jobs from forty years earlier, in 1977.
If you had been a worker at the plant, how you framed what was happening could be critical:
Do you say: “I am an unemployed auto worker?” The default, if available, would be to look for new opportunities in industrial or assembly work -- in other words, sticking close to the where and how of the work even if it’s an incredible long shot.
Or, “I am a worker who used to assemble cars?” This is subtly different, but acknowledges that you are still a worker first. The car part is in the past tense. There is more room to move forward: one can still work, but it will doubtlessly be somewhere else doing something different. It’s probably very, very cold comfort, but it’s something.
For better or worse, many of the people caught up in the example above are still in the mindset that the best jobs were ones that for--reasons none of them can control--have been in short supply for decades.
It looks like a dying business model merged with the sense of mission. Godin talks about this in a sanitized, abstract way; what happened to Lordstown and its people is the gut-punch, real-world version of that.
Real people live there, who want things they can’t have for good reasons. They see working in these vanishing jobs as keys to meaning, ways to provide for those they love and make a difference. The substitutes in areas like health care, education or distribution pay less well, are less secure, or require qualifications “ordinary” people may not have or know how to get.
They’re stuck.
This is tragic.
If we cannot separate our personal or collective mission (what we do and why we do it) from our business model (where and how we do things) then we are forever at the mercy of events.
We are tying our success to the parts of the equation over which we have the least (and possibly no) control. We can always decide what our mission is but we can’t summon conditions to suit us.
It is true that we often don’t have much control in any case -- this is the case for whole swathes of American society. It makes it that much harder, though, when we put our efforts into preserving a status quo which may already be out of date and never coming back.
If answering the question, “What business are you really in?” is a confusing one, be careful. It may be the prelude to finding out you have no business left at all.
References:
Image: CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77590638
a. https://seths.blog/2020/07/defending-the-status-quo/
c. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordstown_Assembly