Our Compliance is Not Their Fault

Most people sign an unwritten contract every day.

We trade a paycheck for predictability.

Does your arrangement go something like this?

Boss, you give me a predictable every-two-week paycheck, health insurance, projects to work on, lunch breaks, and a Christmas party, and I’ll give you my will, my dignity, my freedom of choice, my security, my sleep, and my future plans for my life.

Like the indentured servant, most employees take on the goals of the crown—the company and the customers—as their priority instead of their own goals. Creating great products and building great companies are wonderful ways to invest in a career, but at what expense?

Too often the objectives of the kingdom—the company—become the only mission. What you want, what you need, or what you value is rarely included in the company’s quarterly objectives.

How frequently have you been asked in your quarterly or annual review,

How is the company treating you?

What can the company do for you?

How can the company help make you a more content, enthusiastic, invigorated, challenged contributor?

The problem is that you have made a trade, an agreement:

You work for them and they believe that their mission—regardless of your feelings about it—should be fulfilling to you.

You will never offer your best if you are constantly editing yourself to keep in step with the contract you signed.

We can end up yielding so much of our true selves that we subject ourselves to emotional tyranny.

Isn’t it true that fear is the driving force behind our compliance?

If we hold conflicting views with our company or leadership, if we desire more than what is offered in the trade, we fear the consequences of standing up for what we desire and believe.

I owe this realization to a coworker.

We were taking a walk in the parking lot together outside of our office when he told me,

“I get it. I sign a contract and accept the terms of the agreement every time I cash a paycheck.”

He was right.

I had a business dealing that accurately depicted this type of contract. It was a contractual agreement between three parties that totaled seven figures over five years.

One of the parties never signed the contract, but they cashed the checks each year for their portion of the compensation.

After a few years the attorneys concluded that even though this party never signed the contract, they were acting according to the contract terms and receiving compensation for doing so.

Therefore, cashing the check was as good as signing the piece of paper.

MY compliance WAs not their fault.

THE UNWRITTEN CONTRACT

Cashing the check is as good as signing the contract.

By cashing my check every two weeks, I was agreeing with the terms of my employment even though I wasn’t externally condoning or agreeing with those terms. I had to take ownership of my participation in the dysfunctional system.

I could no longer blame or point fingers.

I had to become a part of the solution or stop cashing the checks.

*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

For your complete free copy download here.

How Long Will We Be Working?

It was very common for our grandparents to find a good company and hitch their wagon to it for the next thirty years.

In the post-depression and post-WWII era, finding predictable work was a blessing.

If you were able to work for a company like Ford Motor Company, then you were enrolled in their retirement pension plan.

This golden handcuff tethered you to the company until you reached retirement age, but your contract was mutually beneficial: the company benefited from your investment and you benefited from a reliable income source for the rest of your life.

That has all changed.

Saving for Retirement: We’re going to be working for a while.

Imagine that last week you attended your company’s retirement plan meeting. The young thirty-something presenter showed a chart proclaiming how the stock market boasts a predictable 30-year average rate of return of 10%.

For the last 15 years, however, you’ve only experienced down markets. You follow the advertised best practices, contributing your faithful (x)% every month. but you know that your retirement plan is not the golden handcuff it once was.

Indeed, the Ford Motor Company’s pension plan model vanished with our grandparents’ generation. And the promise of the stock market producing wild amounts of wealth with which we can travel the world and eat caviar does not seem to be panning out, either.

Maybe we shouldn’t try and stay with one company?

The belief that our company’s retirement plan will provide a guaranteed path to financial security is not anything you should count on. Instead, we should accept that you will be working for more years than the thirty-something presenter promised in that meeting.

Let’s not feel obligated to stick it out with any one company for our entire career.

The good news is that when the pension plan vanished, employees received greater freedom of choice. We can make career decisions largely independent of a company retirement plan.

Since most of us won’t end up in early retirement, we should certainly make sure our work is fulfilling.

We are going to be at it for a while and there is no payoff for hanging on to one company.

We are free to choose where to invest your skills and talents.

*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

For your complete free copy download here.

Why Serve Forty Years of Hard Labor?

In medieval times, indentured servants worked the land of a king for a fixed number of years until their debt was paid in full.

The king owned the field, the crop and the harvest yield.

He got rich, he ate and drank as much as he liked, and the servants learned to live on the crumbs from his table.

Kings love servants and minions.

Does this sound familiar to you?

For many people work can be a place where they feel like indentured servants. It

can be a place where they feel obligated and stuck.

Many companies and leadership teams have this same ancient mentality.

They believe that their employees are lucky to work for them.

They believe that each worker is a replaceable cog.

They are looking for compliant workers and employees, who, under the weight of needing to meet their own financial obligations, settle in for forty years of hard labor.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Why approach your workday with this kind of obligation?

I was an Indentured Servant

I realized that my truest desire was for a partnership, not an obligation. I dreamed of being in a business arrangement where the company and I were equally investing in each other.

Believe it or not, it is possible. I found that part of the problem was that I was acting like a factory worker or an indentured servant. In fact, I was training other workers around me to relate to me as a replaceable cog.

Once I could name and describe this arrangement I could begin to navigate and craft a new arrangement. I stopped thinking and acting like an indentured servant and I started being a skilled craftsman instead.

*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

For your complete free copy download here.

How Hours of Investment Improve Your Chance of Success?

Accelerated success

Have you read Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell?

Malcolm’s research he found that by spending 10,000 hours in your craft, art, sport, profession or skill that investment can be a significant accelerator for success.

Translated that is equivalent to five years of a full-time forty hour work week.

We tend to say an Athlete or Artist or professional person makes it look easy.

Easy is very relative. 

Most people are never willing to invest the time it takes to arrive at that it looks easy point.

Showing up is not the same.

Doing the hard work is where the differentiation exists.

Am I willing, are you willing to invest the hours and do the work to become (fill in the blank)?

We tend to start with desires like I want to be a writer or I want to be wealthy or I want to be in a good shape.

The desire of obtaining the dream is too often far from the daily behavior.

Start today.

Put in the hours.

What are you going to start today?

“Don’t Worry Be Crappy” Ship It Anyway

Photo by Guy Kawasaki

Have you ever shipped a new blog, software version, music track, speech, design, (your art) knowing it wasn’t perfect and you sent it anyway?

Like you, I am an artist, an innovator constantly fielding new ideas and rumblings.

That means there is always another idea waiting for me after I ship this one.

Let’s explore why shipping early and repairing later is actually better than waiting for perfection.

Real Artists Ship.
Steve Jobs

Fellow heretic Guy Kawasaki

Formerly Guy was the chief evangelist of Apple.  I am very partial to one of his first books, Rules for Revolutionaries -The Capitalist Manifesto.

In this twelve year old book Guy lays out nine rules for revolutionaries to follow.  (See all 9 here).

Don’t Worry Be Crappy.

Yep, that is what Guy said.  And you should too.

I’ve spent the past seven years in the software world.  Software is never perfect.  As a result you have to determine the impact of the imperfections.

Sometimes you hold back and conclude that would be a mess.  Other times you hit the publish, upload, send, compile button and hope you are right.

You never will know if you were brilliant or foolish until it’s out the door.

Will your customers, prospects, colleagues, friends, followers share the same belief that your defect was only “minor”?  Or will they berate you for your lack of professionalism and excellence?

Michael Hyatt has a great post on this topic related to his blog writing and readers finding mistakes.  Also check out a second post from Michael about Embracing Permanent Beta.

Alpha is worse than you think.

Each time I ship a new version of Alpha software I learn a lot more when it is in the field.  The benefit is that you receive the direct benefit of quickly finding out what is flawed.

The Market Will Tell You.

Shipping early means you gain the benefit of your market, customers, followers, tribe, telling you what you’ve done wrong.

I believe it is better to ship 75% of the right solution to the market than waiting until you have 90% and you are late.

You will never be able to address all of the market needs from inside the walls of your company.

Microsoft has mastered this art of Don’t worry be crappy.

Every second Tuesday of the month they ship us a new Windows update, they know the market will instruct them on what’s crappy.

It’s crappy, now fix it.

Guy’s Rule # 2 is Churn Baby Churn.  Once you ship then you hear what is broken, the clock begins ticking.

Fix it fast.  Equally important is communicating with your customers, tribe, prospects or followers.

Straight from Guy 
Churn, baby, churn. I’m saying it’s okay to ship crap–I’m not saying that it’s okay to stay crappy. A company must improve version 1.0 and create version 1.1, 1.2, … 2.0. ….. Innovation is not an event. It’s a process.

Being Nimble is your advantage.

I have a friend whose son is a Marine.  He was explaining to me about how in battle, the commander is always making decisions with 70% of the available information.

The battle happens too fast to have 100% clarity on what is occurring on the actual battlefield.

The ability to have real-time course correction is the safety net to not knowing if your decision is correct.

The difference between us and Microsoft is that we have the opportunity to revise quickly.

Their big organization moves slow.  It is hard to turn around or quickly change course .  Not us, we are nimble.  

With a phone call, a bug fix delivered to the Cloud, an Elance job, email, Asana task to our virtual assistant-DONE.

Mean What you Say.

The promise that you extended to your customers or your tribe I’m reliable. We care.  You can call the CEO with a problem.  

All of those previous statements now are tested.  What will you do?  Do you care?  Will you fix it?  Do you have an answer at all?

Mr. Customer, I know this looks crappy.  And it is.  It is worse than we thought and we’ve got a team on it.  We will call you each day or email you with a close of business summary of our progress and findings.  Here is my personal cell phone you can call if you ever want an update.  I may not know the answer but I can find it.  

How fast you revise is critical to your survival and integrity in the market.

And if you can’t fix it, say so.

Art I’ve shipped that I knew was crappy

  1. This new website had some rough edges.
    I knew the comment section had some issues.  Yet I knew the overall design and feel was a massive improvement from V1.0.
  2. PriceAdvantage V1.0 gasoline pricing software Spring of 2005.
    This thing was riddled with problems.   One time all of the prices at the pump went to Zero $…..yes Zero $….FREE GAS.  And the store manager called our help desk to ask if she Should I refund the money of the guy who pre-paid $20 cash.  

Now it is your turn to tell your story.    

What project, product, Art have you shipped that you knew was crappy?

And what happened?

Would you do it over again?