Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.
Mary Kay Ash – Entrepreneur
Almost 40% of workers according to surveys say their work and jobs make little difference to the organization, customer or marketplace. OK! So why do these jobs exist in COVID time? Great question.
The Peter Principle in the 1950’s stated that people in a traditional hierarchal organization rise to their ‘level of incompetence’ doing wasteful work. David Graeber in Bull Sh*t Jobs analyzes wasteful work:
“a bullsh*t job is one that even the person doing it secretly believes need not or should not exist. That if the job, or even the whole industry, were to vanish, either it would make no difference to anyone, or the world might even be a slightly better place.”[i]
Is there a list of bull sh*t jobs? No. However, we could come up with a possible list: public relations, compliance workers, supervisors, and work titles such as data wrangler for data analyst, corporate evangelist, or digital overlord for website designer.
A theme woven through this book is there are not enough high paying and satisfying jobs for VUCANs worldwide. Hutchins’s principle states: ‘bullsh*t jobs are created to appease high worker expectations and to ensure the appearance of value-added, sustainable work’. Another way to think about bullshit jobs is in terms of what you do each day? How do you make something or create value? Are you a taker or a maker at work? Anyway you get the idea.
Work lesson Earned: Graeber asks why a job or work is done in the first place in the big picture of things? So ask yourself: Why did you write that report today? Why did the boss want that memo? So, what’s the meaning and value of your work in COVID time?’ Because if you can’t answer this question, there may not be a job for you?
[i] ‘Bullshit Jobs in the Yoke of Managerial Feudalism’, Economist Magazine, June 29, 2018.