Another excerpt from "Curse of the High IQ"
But the reason the entire country is forced to endure a daily commute on traffic-jammed roads is because instead of real leaders we have millions of compliant, obedient, and incredibly average bosses who are not intelligent enough to get past the third grade quandary of
“Well, if I can’t see you then how do I know you’re working?”
Alas, the entire country is held hostage by a bunch of Peter-Principled, MBA-laden idiot commoners because they don’t understand “telecommuting.”
Regardless, the example above highlights the difference between a REAL leader and your everyday, common boss. A real leader, a real boss is trying to make genuine advancements and achievements to not only benefit the company, but himself, and society. He or she looks beyond mere compliance and has a genuine intellectual interest in how to not only make things better, but dramatically better. It is these types of bosses that high IQ people can work for in that your brain will be intellectually stimulated and challenged.
Your average boss, however, comes nowhere near this. He is usually so incompetent, so average, and so obedient their “leadership” strategies entail the same tiresome tactics that have never worked in the past 50 years:
Meetings
Motivational posters
Motivational speakers
More meetings
Corporate retreats
Meaningless plastic trinkets as rewards (Wells Fargo is a perfect example of this)
Meetings about meetings
Continuing Professional Education
And whatever other pablum endorsed by the latest “business management” books.
In short, you may not personally hate your boss. He or she could be a great person. But even if they are personable, you will at minimum be limited to their ability to lead and achieve. And the truth is for every genuine leader that is out there, there’s a thousand everyday, average, incompetent bosses who don’t know they’re the butt-end of Dilbert’s Point-Haired Boss’ jokes.
Most 'bosses' are just people who have hung around long enough in one place to have additional responsibilities attached to them. Being seen doing work (rather, being at work) - and much of the other useless crap is necessary because that is how the mirage is held up: mutual belief.
ReplyDeleteWorkers (pretend to) believe they are producing something useful of meaningful and the 'bosses' (pretend to) believe they are essential in providing and managing work that is useful or meaningful. This needs to happen at the same time in the same place or reality creeps in. Thats not a good thing when upholding a grand mirage. Plus, most corporate or gov't work is about the management of power. Power to covet and control limited resources. This tends to best play out in person.
The reality is that the actual jobs that are not somehow suckling the gov't tit, subsidized through gov't interventions and protections, or merely running out the clock until a machine or offshore solution is more efficient or cost effective is a fraction of the total jobs.
What is that saying, showing up is x% of it...
Work from home is resisted because they want to have you in chains as they push the corporate culture flavor of the week up your rear. A girlfriend was ordered to work from the office after her feminazi boss overheard Rush Limbaugh on a phone call. The call was to her personal phone and radio was not audible on the work phone. I believe Marisa Meyer curtailed Yahoo work-from-home for fear her liberalized culture was not being fully indoctrinated. Office cubical culture outs the big thinkers and the boss can then pick on the biggest threats. Some of these bosses are such control freaks they follow people into the can to smell their shit.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand I've talked to a few work-from-home reservation/banking/CS clerks who must have been stoned or drunk.
This was just proved to me by my current boss who has been out since Christmas, so I'm doing work she usually did. There's literally years of issues she just did the minimum on, some are similar things that I was told to do nothing but the best, the latest and most advanced techniques on.
ReplyDeleteNeedless to say, I will be looking to take every sick day that is available this year.
Cappy, I could write a book on this topic after nearly ten years of telecommuting.
ReplyDeleteSuffice it to say that Anonymous has nailed some key points in his first two responses. The "Peter Dilbert" Principle is today's corporate America.
We need to remember also that it is not only our own bosstards who can't grok the use of the technology that they so loudly pretend is God as logical platform for telecommuting and making use of time, space, and resources more efficient. It's also our customers --most of whom are themselves bosstards in their own companies-- who obviously have a less than clear understanding of exactly what product is being delivered to them. If they had the vaguest clue, they would realize that in many (if not most) situations they don't need your ugly self to be present in their workspace to serve them. I think this further underscores Anonymous's point about most "work" today being chimerical in nature.
The root of it all, of course, is a lack of clear communication that is itself the inevitable result of a corporate culture built on cynicism, distrust, fraud, insincerity, and an utter lack of vision, to say nothing of a complete absence of competence on any level.
If you've ever had to work in an organization with AAs, you would understand VERY WELL why bosses resist telecommuting. And if you provide the opportunity to SOME of your employees but not to at least the same number of AAs, the EEOC and FedPig swill will help you understand the error of your ways.
ReplyDeleteEvery job that requires a physical presence is either blue collar, or it's a white collar job with sexual networking.
ReplyDeleteI think you have missed this one Captain. Average bosses don't want personnel close by, they NEED personnel close by so that they can snag the first warm body they see to give them an assignment. Any body will do so long as it fogs a mirror. A remote employee can't be tapped that way.
ReplyDeleteWhy the NEED? Because at the last minute due to lack of planning they need to tag someone to take the project (and the blame.) I call it 'management by proximity'.