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Being
in Play
By Michael Alan Hamlin
September 24, 2001
If you are a geek or a shrink, you're well positioned
for success. Or so says Robert B. Reich. In his first major work
since leaving the Clinton administration where he served as secretary
of labor, Reich reflects on how work and lifestyle are rapidly evolving
- more frenetic than ever - and the often harsh personal choices
those changes demand.
The future belongs to the smart and innovative, Reich
counsels in, well, The Future of Success. Ok, nothing new
there. But by smart this university professor and writer is not
talking about the magna cum laude elites. Instead, it's the just
better-than-average types. Those who get to the future not by playing
by rules that leave them disadvantaged, but by breaking the rules
and replacing them with their own.
And who are these people? First there are the professionals. Those
geeks whose passion is to create not for the sake of creating, but
for the sake of profit. They're mostly not highly computer literate
or engrossed, as the term geek has come to suggest. Many, perhaps
most, aren't computer wizards at all, don't solve complex problems,
and don't enjoy a monopoly on some vast resource of valuable "knowledge."
Instead, "the real value these people add to the economy derives
instead from their creativity - their insights into what can be
done in a particular medium, what can be done for a particular market,
and how best to organize the work in order to bring these two perspectives
together," Reich says.
Rather than exhibiting a talent for writing elegant code, creative
workers have a talent for asking the right questions and carefully
listening to the folks who do write the code - or some other task.
They are synthesizers, organizers of chaos, and den mothers expertly
leveraging yin against yang to produce products and services of
extreme appeal. And since appeal has a short shelf life in this
consumer-controlled global economy, geeks never tire of creating
new things over and over and over.
But where would the geeks be without their shrinks? Reich says not
very far. Like geeks, shrinks also defy the conventional wisdom
in Reich's dictionary. They don't have couches for patients but
they may charge by the hour. These are the people who take what
the geeks create and make it famous, and they're called marketers,
talent agents, rainmakers, trend spotters, producers, consultants,
and hustlers. They are the people, "in short, who can identify
possibilities in the marketplace for what other people might want
to have, see, or experience, and who understand how to deliver on
those opportunities."
Together, they provide the two faces of an economic coin. One doesn't
exist without the other, but they are never seen together. Collectively
they have value. But a value that simply wouldn't exist if the two
personalities weren't a single whole. And so Reich implies by intent
or otherwise that aside from exhibiting the qualities required of
geeks and shrinks, the single most important thing these modern
workers must do to succeed is to somehow find each other.
Once they do, they can count on working as hard as people have ever
worked, at least if they're based in America, that land of opportunity
(and sad tragedy). Reich returns continually to the relentless pace
of life - a pace he sought to escape in part by leaving government
- and its contribution to American productivity. Americans work
harder than anyone on earth, he says, up to 350 hours a year longer
than the French, for example, and even more than the notoriously
efficient Japanese, who work about as hard today as they did in
1980.
What's driven the Americans to do this to themselves? They are richer,
but for what purpose? Reich believes the urge to stay in the office
has to do with the near universality of variable income in corporate
America. Because so few people on the move in their organizations
work for a fixed salary, income is insecure. There's no more of
that steady work and steady pay increase routine. Excel, and your
paycheck excels with you. Fail, and plummet to a bottomless pit.
The gap between success and failure and the haves and have nots
has never been greater, and it's growing, and is itself a catalyst
for extreme endeavor.
Reich's conclusions provide a much more plausible explanation for
the huge jumps in productivity in America than that espoused so
regularly by Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan. Greenspan credits
technology-induced productivity for the sustained expansion of better
than a decade up until the great dot-bomb. But Greenspan has recently
been embarrassed because productivity figures have been revised
downward, making them far less spectacular than they once seemed.
And the gains that remain were probably more directly the result
of Americans working harder than technology sans the human dimension.
Working hard, however, doesn't complete the success equation. Lots
of people are smart and lots of people are creative. Being smart
and creative just isn't enough to distinguish the crusading future-rich
professional from the competition. That takes marketing.
Well, maybe not just marketing. Some things never change, like networking.
Reich believes that in a cluttered field of creative workaholics
"who you know" has never been more important. And while
success isn't sustainable without substance to back it up - something
Reich doesn't say much about - getting the chance to be successful
frequently boils done to using someone else's foot to get in the
door.
Which is just the first step, of course. Next comes brand building
? you're own. "In the new economy, you get ahead not by being
well liked but by being well marketed," Reich argues. "The
goal is no longer to fit in or to gain the approval of one's peers.
It's to stand out among one's peers, to dazzle and inspire potential
customers, or people who will connect you to them."
The more dazzling you become, the more valuable you become, too.
Just how valuable? There's a way to find out: put yourself in play.
Fast movers suggest through Internet chat rooms, associations, and
party talk that they are being pursued. If the talk is credible,
offers start piling up, which can then been dangled before their
current employer. If the employer is willing to pay more, that's
the player's value. If not, it's the value of the offer. For now.
And it's probably not surprising that like variable income, being
in play is the nature of the beast across professions, from lawyer
to university president.
So forget that silly shyness. Success depends not on being the smartest,
or the most creative, or the best networked. It depends on being
different, knowing the value of that difference, and marketing it
well.
(Mr. Hamlin is managing director of the consultancy TeamAsia
and the author of three books on Asian economies and managing in
Asia. His latest book is Marketing Places Asia, which
is coauthored. His e-mail address is mahamlin@teamasia.com.ph.
If you use a Smart/Talk N Text GSM user, you can text a message
to Mr. Hamlin's mailbox by typing the keyword mikehamlin and sending
it to 200.)
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