I’ve been working by some order for about 20 years now, although you could argue at present I’m barely working that hard as I try to figure out existing contracts and what I actually want to do, which is a much harder process than anyone realizes and made doubly hard because I’m currently still banned from LinkedIn for claiming, however incorrectly you might think, that executives tend to lip-service diversity initiatives. Anyway. Across those 20 years there’s one astounding theme I keep seeing, and I wanted to dedicate a few paragraphs to it quickly.
First: realize that most everyone has a boss, and resides within a department. (Different for freelancers, of course.) If you have a boss and a department, those functions mean you have certain deadlines and deliverables and incentives, no? Managers often have no fucking clue how to manage deadlines, but they still exist and they’re sacrosanct to millions of people. But most people tend to follow their own incentive structures, which means they care about the deadlines set by THEIR boss.
In the last 10–20 years, what’s happened is that a huge chunk of the “thought leadership” community has doubled down on “collaboration” and “teamwork” and other pie-in-the-sky terms, which is utterly comical because organizations advance individuals, not teams, so at some point the whole model…
