Be Careful What You Ask For
By Peter Block
Now the next
generation of the sporting life is upon us: Free Agency. A free agent is
an athlete who at the end of a season has no obligation to stay with
their current team, and can offer their services to the bidder of their
choice.
Free At Last
The new, conventional wisdom is that we should no longer think of
ourselves as employees, we are now free agents. The message is coming
from many sources. Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine,
writes and speaks about it, Tom Peters urges us to "be" the company and
do it with a bang and Peter Koestenbaum, my best friend, teacher and
philosopher, have all promoted us to president of our own company, "I,
Inc." We are on our own, now. Captains of our fate, no longer owned by
the company store.
I guess this is an
inevitable response to workplaces that in the name of shareholder value
and maximum flexibility, no longer value long-term, full-time employees.
There was a time when the social contract at work was that the employee
loyally put their future in the hands of the organization and the
organization, in turn, took care of them. No more.
Companies now
outsource whole departments to save money on wages and benefits. We will
all soon be part timers, temporaries, and we might as well face up to
it. The latest term for our marginality is "supplemental." It is a new
job category, and there are "full- time supplementals" and "part-time
supplementals." Next time someone asks what you do for a living, tell
them you are a supplemental. It means we do not belong with the company,
we are marginal, only there for periods of peak loads, and then off to
play for the next team.
What is most
interesting to me is not what the companies are doing, but our response
to this reality. The idea that we accept, even celebrate our free
agency. We should be happy to have our own company, single-handedly
finding work, seeking meaning, managing a career. We now work in the
home office, but instead of it being the headquarters of a company, it
is our family room. There is an appealing sense of freedom and
independence to this, but at a cost.
Home on the Range
My fear is that we are returning to a period of glorified individualism.
The workplace has now become the modern version of how the West was won.
Rootless, transitory, founded on personal competition, little support
and a place where humanity and vulnerability is considered weakness.
Folk heroes of the West considered relationships and community a
restraint to freedom and a burden to success. Modern folk heroes have
twelve computer screens in their entrance hall instead of two
six-shooters on their hip. Now, instead of finding gold in them, there
hills, we find it in internet stocks where inflated prices make
investing a crap shoot and price unrelated to anything earned. Free
agency seems to be the employee flip side to this corporate coin.
When we celebrate
free agency we have accepted the view that we are a commodity open to
the next most attractive bidder. When I incorporate myself, I treat
myself as a product and too easily become psychologically
commercialized. I take my isolation as a given. I stop looking to make a
commitment, belong to a place. I tend to treat my self as a commodity
much as the organizations have treated me. Maybe this is what we have
come to, but why treat it as a good thing? Why accept the business
world's definition of reality...that economics and market value is the
point? Why adopt the mentality that our work should be understood as an
athletic contest or an entrepreneurial venture ?
Rather we might
rethink the nature of commitment. Stop thinking of our commitment and
care as only a product of barter and reciprocity. Commitment does not
have to be conditional on the response of the institution: When they
stopping caring about us, why should we stop caring about them? I often
hear the complaint that the organization has amnesia, no memory and only
wants to know what we have done for them lately. Well, that stance has
now become ours. What have they done for me lately? And if the answer is
"not much", then off we go into free agency. This is the norm in the
computer world of Silicon Valley, where people move so often their
business cards are printed in pencil.
Commitment for Its
Own Sake
Without finding some place to commit to, I fear a world of entitlement
and a loss of any connectedness and community. It is a world I am
familiar with. I have been a free agent most of my career. A consultant,
gypsy, independent to a fault. While it may rank high on freedom, I
would hate to base a society on this kind of itinerancy. It breeds
isolation and self-centeredness to a point where you think that is the
way of the world.
There is a need in
us to commit to something communal, something that has a place and a
history and a future. We have the capacity to commit without barter,
yield to the requirements of a larger system and still be realistic
about the nature of today's marketplace. Let us be careful about our
heroes and not make Bill Gates one of them, nor treat the information
technology world as if it is the model of the future. Be a free agent if
you must, but don't glamorize it or look away from its price. This
period of corporate indifference to its people will pass and they will
at some point need us again. Until then, we can hold to our own values
of care, loyalty, commitment as our choice, rather than become a
reflection, a mirror image, of a workplace culture which we no longer
find attractive.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in July 1999
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