Beautiful Day
This is the 100th edition and I though I should do something to mark it, so I have created a free gift for you, my dear readers!
I’ve created ‘The Best of the Blogs’, a little ebook that is a selection of posts from the past 2 1/2 years. If you follow me in LinkedIN, you might have seen some of them there. You can download it here
This was somewhat inspired by Seth Godin’s book ‘Free Gift Inside’. In fact, Seth is in many ways the inspiration for this Not-Newsletter. Him and Bernie Mitchell. (Bernie’s such Seth fanboy he’s going to wetting himself to be in that sentence)
When I first came across Seth’s blog, it blew my mind. At last, here was someone writing about marketing and saying all the things I wanted to say but couldn't put into words! It felt like he’d been reading my mind, I just kept saying ‘Yes! YES!’ as I read his stuff.
One of his key messages is to share your art. He encouraged us all to write, to blog, to do whatever to share our knowledge and talents because the internet had provided us with an unprecedented opportunity to do so and we had a duty to share our best stuff with the world.
Bernie also said the same, on a car journey to Swindon (the best stuff pops up in the mundane settings) “You should blog, you’ve got loads of stuff you know that people would like to hear”.
So I started blogging, somewhat irregularly. Of course, the style was very like Seth’s, which wasn’t too much of a stretch for me. I’d learnt to write in a very succinct style in my first job at Prestel, writing copy to be displayed on a teletext-display - that’s 24 lines of 40 characters. No room for waffle.
I’ve carried on blogging and my style has developed (yeah, I know, more waffley…). I was a marketeer and quite adept at writing in different styles, for different media, in different voices (even ghost-writing stuff for my bosses). What I wasn’t very good at was writing in my own voice because I’d never really had one. Finding that voice has very much been part of my post-corporate journey and I’m still refining it and playing around with it.
As well as blogging on a somewhat regular basis (about once a week), I’ve obviously been producing this every week (with the occasional gap). I treat this as more of a thinking out loud space, whereas the blogs are more developed ideas and opinions. They are much shorter too!
Have a read and tell me what you think. Whilst I write to figure out what I really think, I share it to spark discussions and debate my views. That way we all improve our thinking through constructive dialogue and I get to learn tons from my readers. Sometimes, I even change my mind! (alright, not THAT often…)
Download your free gift here:
Irreplaceable
Seth has written many books, some of which have become iconic, such as Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribes and The Dip. One that particularly resonated with me, though, is Linchpin.
The subtitle to Linchpin is ‘How to make yourself indispensable ‘. Rather than summarise it myself, I’m just going to lift the summary on Goodreads:
There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there's a third team: the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there's no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they're indispensable. And in today's world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.
As Godin writes, "Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must."
When I read it over a decade ago, I thought it was great advice. I very much associated with the idea, I certainly felt I had been a linchpin in my career. I hadn’t complied with the system, I’d drawn my own map. I’d been an artist and I didn’t even know it!
It’s seductive, isn’t it? We all want to be needed, to be the ‘go-to guy’. It appeals to our own sense of importance, the idea that without us everything would fall apart. All that stuff about doing your art and making your own map, that appeals to our desire for individuality. For those of us who are a bit of a rebel too, it’s intoxicating.
I also thought it was good advice, a way to protect yourself against the vicissitudes and capricious nature of corporate life. If you were indespensable then you’d have some protection, you’d be more secure. Maybe even get the best jobs and the most freedom, like Seth says
But now I reflect upon it, I have to question whether it really is a good strategy.
What happens if you do establish yourself as a linchpin? Well, you become indispensable but you are indispensable WHERE YOU ARE. Your manager will want to keep you there, where you are most effective. This can be done in malign ways, blocking promotions, warning off other departments from ‘poaching’ you, undermining your self-confidence so you don’t look to move. I experienced all of these (some of which I didn’t find out about until after I had left).
Or you can be killed with kindness. There is a phenomenon of people who are highly skilled and proficient in a role but want to stretch themselves intellectually. However, whenever they try to move the organisation throws more and more riches at them so they feel they have to stay. They are very well rewarded but utterly bored and unfulfilled, trapped in a role they now feel they cannot afford to leave.
So let’s look at this ‘not complying with the system and drawing your own map’, how does that work out?
In my case, not well. You get accused of being a ‘loose cannon’, of not being a team player, of ‘going off-side’. I did a pretty good job of making it look like I was complying with the system and yet I still got grief for not conforming. I didn’t fit in, I wasn’t like the rest and I was distrusted for that.
That’s not to say I reject Seth’s advice, quite the opposite, I endorse it. The same sentiments are part of being a pirate. Stepping outside the system and making your own map are the only way to make real change happen but I am at pains to point out that it involves personal risk. You won’t be lauded from the rafters, you might end up being treated as a pariah and either admonished or pushed out. The system rewards compliance and punishes rebels, even when the rebels have the best answers.
So do I endorse or reject Seth’s advice to be a Linchpin?
Well, for me, it wasn’t really a matter of choice. Complying with the system and ‘fitting in’ wasn’t something I felt comfortable doing. That path means surrendering your agency, putting your destiny in the hands of others. It means accepting mediocrity, it means making yourself fit the cog-shaped hole the system wants to put you in. Whenever I went down that path it made me deeply unhappy.
However, being a Linchpin carries its own dangers, as I have explained. It might also mean you make yourself subservient to others - the linchpin, after all, is in service of the wheel. I’m not sure it’s a good objective in itself. If you see the opportunity to become a linchpin, then it is worth taking it as it does carry some power but you need to leverage that to your own ends, perhaps to make a move to your next role. Because even as a linchpin, your destiny is still partly in the hands of others.
Seth positions being a linchpin against being a cog. I’d choose the former every time but make sure you do it in an organisation that really values them (and not one that just says they do).
The reward is not in ‘the best jobs and the most freedom’, because that’s far from guaranteed, it’s in the satisfaction of having an impact, becoming who you were meant to be and the real freedom of following your own path.
Push The Button
The knee-jerk response to those struggling in corporate is to tell them to ‘Go it alone, do it for yourself’. Herein lies the dilemma. For some people, sometimes, the best place of them to be brilliant and passionate is within an organisation.
Partly, it’s an issue of resources. Surgeons can’t work at their kitchen table, they need be in a hospital.
Often, it’s a matter of belonging and connection. Some people just wither on their own.
Organisations can be a platform for people to display their brilliance, to find out what they are capable of, to realise their potential. They can be the stage for people to perform on. Organisations can harness the variety and richness of the people within them to achieve their mission and deliver on their purpose.
However, that is not how most organisations are set up in today’s world. They are reductive, exploitative misery machines that force people into conformity and compliance in service of financial targets and the egos of their leaders. They are designed to harness the least that people have to offer, with a little divergence as possible. They crush potential, fritter away people’s gifts and kill their spirit and soul.
Richard Claydon said recently that he felt this waste of talent physically (in this LIn post quoting from David L Marquet’s book, Turn the Ship Around). I do too, it enrages me. It’s so utterly pointless and counter-productive. It’s criminal, in my view.
So we have to take action to change to system. We can’t all just run away from it and ‘do our own thing’. We can’t all be entrepreneurs, or freelancers. Many of us need to work in organisations, it’s the place where we are most likely to thrive. As a society, we need that so our organisations function and people can fully participate in society too.
That’s what Decrapify Work is about. Encouraging and supporting people to bring about change, starting with themselves and their own environment. That's the way to be a linchpin - not as someone indispensable to the organisation but as someone indispensable to your peers, to society and to the future. And yourself.
Everyone’s A Winner
Right, so about this free gift. I’ve selected 42 blogs from the 120-ish I’ve written. They’re each about a page long (due to LinkedIn’s 3k character limit). I’ve picked ones that were popular, or that I liked and or that others told me they liked.
If you’re dipping in then I can recommend The death of the work factory, Drowning in Horseshit, Where's the crap?, The importance of the Janitor, Follow the Science, No More Navy Seals, The High Church of Leadership and Survival is not mandatory.
I mean, they’re all bloody brilliant but these are the brilliant-est.
You can download it as a PDF or in EPUB format.
Let me know what you think (good, bad or just plain argumentative) at colin@colinnewlyn.com.
Enjoy!
Love the reframe of the linchpin concept.
The nonconformist in me is prompting a decision I'm currently making about going it alone after recent redundancy. Very scary, but the risk of going back into the misery machine of corporate life is even scarier. Even more poignant as next week I'm attending the funeral of a former boss who passed away suddenly in his mind 50s. A sharp reminder of the need to enjoy our lives.