Back in the days

There are some people that are just naturally gregarious and love being around other people and more power to them. Others find it difficult to sort through all the mixed messages people give them or find other people in general to be annoying or even terrifying.

There used to be a place for that second kind of people. Librarian, bookstore owner, computer programmer, outdoorsey jobs where you're alone a lot, lab technician, well technicians in general. There were behind the scenes people everywhere who were perfectly happy to just do their work quietly and get paid for it.

Now everybody's gotta be entertaining in order to make the first sieving. If you don't pump that interviewer's hand and baldly stare him/her in the eye it makes no difference whether you can do the job or not. You'll lose out to the competitor who can manipulate people emotionally.

This is wrong. It takes energy for that kind of gregariousness. Assuming that on average people have about the same amount of energy, simple math will tell you that the energy spent on making sure the network is good, making sure you get recognition for your work, making sure to grease the wheels, knowing who to grease, knowing exactly what kind of joke you can tell your boss, etc. is energy taken away from the work itself. I'm not saying every non gregarious person should avoid teamwork. I'm just saying that if each member of the team knows what their job is, and feels fine to simply ask without any one upsmanship or game playing, if he/she needs some information, as well as provide it to others when appropriate, the team works a lot better.

Too many teams are really folks jockeying for positions. There is bogarting, seeing who can be in the right place at the right time for the boss to notice, individual career strategy, finger pointing, back scratching and/or stabbing. Problem is, there's very little option to choose not to play. If you don't play, you will be assumed to be up to something. If you just spit forth the truth without any embellishment or wordspin to make sure you look good, you'll look bad by comparison, and you'll be the first one to get a pink slip.

This is the message that's being hammered over and over. What it's doing is turning the workplace into one incredibly complicated game, in which major work is not valued as much as the ability to make other people believe you're doing major work. This is particularly a problem in the knowledge work field.

I mean if you worked on an assembly line, you could say I attached 2500 cup nuts today, or I cut out 500 left sleeves and even if you were unattractive and surly they couldn't really argue with your output statistics. An invisible non-entity could quietly do quite well at this type of thing. They don't care in a factory whether you're visible or not, as long as you mill out piston shafts within their tolerance...

But how do you measure knowledge output when it's generated by a lot of people together? It seems to be quite a bit the matter of the squeaky wheel. And I would put forth that many of the giants in any knowledge work are standing upon the heads of invisible non-entities, and that by themselves they're utterly useless.

And bosses need to realize this. Because now they think they're taking the jobs that used to be held by invisible non-entities and outsourcing them to India. so they don't have to pay so much. And so they are turning their rock solid feet into crumbly clay. and the man with the heavy golden head and the feet of clay crashed hard.