My dad is retired. He was a corporate guy -- first a sales guy, then a sales manager and then a magazine publisher who did the corporate ladder thing when the corporate ladder was real. Now it is sawdust under our feet. My dad worked for the same company the whole time my seven siblings and I were growing up.
I never heard him so much as hint at changing jobs. I didn't know many dads who changed jobs when I was a kid. Not many of the moms I knew went to work.
My dad came back from World War II, went to college on the GI Bill and walked into an entry-level job straight out of school. To take a job as a new recruit and retire from the same job thirty-five years later is unthinkable today. Is it a good or bad thing?
I'll say this -- the postwar employment ecosystem was a bubble, no different from Tulipmania or Internet 1.0. It just lasted longer. It was harder for us to notice its bubble qualities. Now they are obvious. The old handshake "Work hard and toe the line and you'll have a great career with our firm" has shredded completely. No one can make that offer. No one can afford to accept it.
The amazing part to me is how just a few years' dipping in the corporate-ladder tea can make a person of normal intelligence believe that full-time salaried employment is the only kind worth having.
I remember meeting a guy at a networking event about five years ago. Like a lot of local networking events the shindig was well-populated by independent business people and consultants. "Do you work for yourself?" I asked him, as the guy wasn't wearing an ID badge.
"Oh no!" he said. "I'm one of the lucky ones." I may have gaped at him in astonishment.
Lucky? I can't agree with that assessment. To work your tush off toward someone else's goals with zero visibility into the future of your earnings, your resume or the way you spend your time all day - how is that lucky? I have no problem with full-time employment as a concept, but the past ten years should have shown us that to trust someone else with your career and earning power -- even the roof over your family's head -- is lunacy.
We need to insist on visibility, information and the opportunity to negotiate the terms of our involvement in any project as often as necessary. No one benefits when we pretend that we don't care whether the company's new strategic direction spells an expanded role for us or none whatsoever. Why the fake politeness? We can say "How will this change affect me?"
That's just prudence. We evolved on this planet. We know how to take care of hearth and home, or we'd better figure it out. We don't do that by behaving like sheep, following somebody else's plan for our careers. We don't do it by internalizing the idea "I could never work for myself."
You work for yourself no matter who pays you. It's an entrepreneurial world now.
Don't believe the "Let's hear it for entrepreneurs!" advertising you see everywhere, trumpeting the unique qualities of entrepreneurs. That's a fabrication designed to keep most of us down on the cubicle farm. I know because I drank that lemonade for years.
I said "I'm a corporate Sally! When you cut my vein I bleed the company Pantone color. I'd never work for myself."
I couldn't imagine doing it, and that's why I was scared. Then life went this way and that way and the next thing you know, I was working for myself. That's how you build muscles. It turns out that these are the very muscles we all need whether we have one client or many of them.
Don't believe anyone who says that entrepreneurs are inherently different from other people. Don't believe the lie that most of us aren't cut out to run businesses.
That's utterly false. Virtually all of our great-grandparents were entrepreneurs. They didn't need a fancy French unspellable word for it. They just worked the farm or made shoehorses or drove a cab. It wasn't considered risky and exotic to be a business owner then. It wasn't considered adventuresome. It was a survival thing. An entrepreneurial mindset is a survival tool again today. Find your inner entrepeneur, no matter who pays you.
