What a company especially can’t afford these days is hiring someone that costs too much time and energy.  They have to be useful as soon as possible, preferably from day one.  “Hello, these are your colleagues, this is your desk, you know how to do your job, so nail it!”, that’s basically the welcome speech every employer wants to give, a quick ten minute briefing after which the employee can earn money for you straight away.

So they start writing job applications that are hyperspecified.  They want to be sure they’ve got the right man for the position.  They know what’s needed in the company, what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed.  But do they really?  Isn’t it a bit overzealous to imagine that just because you work someplace you know everything about your business?  Isn’t it possible that a company can benefit from someone who doesn’t fit the profile?  Maybe he has new ideas, new insights he can share.  If you keep looking for the perfect match, you might miss out on a lot.

And the result?  Any creative type will tell you that the result is a company where everybody thinks the same, where everybody lives on an island of his own and where creativity is seen as time wasted.  That’s great if you want results very fast, if you want short-term success.  But in the long-run?  You’ll lose one of the most important advantages every company has, the flexibility to adapt to a new situation.  It’s the reason why a lot of companies got into trouble in the first place and it looks like they’re not learning from their past mistakes.

It always starts very innocent.  Just one grade, to make them both happy, so you can go to that party, no worries,…  It’s so small, who’ll notice?  But how small it may be, it’ll never go away and the treshold to take it one step further will keep moving away.  It’s a basic snowball effect, the handful of snow you started with is a long way from the ball that’s steaming down the hill.

We don’t have to become saints.  Sure, it would make life easy, but boring as hell.  Give me a few sins to enjoy, just for the fun of it.  Nobody is more holier than the pope, so we don’t have to try.  If we only stop and think for a few seconds from the moment that little voice inside our head says something.  Think about how we started, how we got to that decision and if the risks are worth it.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but if you don’t even try to convince yourself of your choice, how can you convince someone else later, down the road?

Especially these days, where customers, even friends and family are more important than you can imagine, why risk so much for so little?  We all know what can go wrong, the worst case scenario.  If you’d know for sure that it would become true, would you still go ahead with your plans?  If Madoff would know that his scheme would be exposed, would he go on with it or would he stop?  We think (hope) we’re getting away with it, but we rarely do.

You have to do it, you’re responsible for your own success, if it all goes wrong, there’s nobody else to blame but yourself.  So you put in every possible hour.  I know freelancers who haven’t been on a holiday for over 8 years!  People who call in the weekend and act like it’s any other day in the week.

But it brings a lot of stress, because many can’t let it go.  They plan their day at the breakfast table, eat lunch while working, finish some calls while they fetch the kids from school and do some paperwork in bed, get up in the morning, same ritual.  Over and over again, wondering why they can’t relax, never feel like they’re ‘done’.

People need a real place, not just a time or a mindset, where they are really free from work.  It doesn’t work when you try to relax in the same room where you worked just a few hours ago.  Subconsciously you’ll always link the place to work, just like some smells take you back to a certain place in time.  If you don’t create that place, you’ll never feel like you’re done.  Even if you’re not doing anything, you’ll still think if there’s anything you can do.

But is it worth it?  All the time spent on a person or a project is time gone by.  We only have 24 hours in a day, so we should spend it wisely.  Because what’s there to gain when you spend 8 hours a week coaching/controlling/managing that lazy employee when his productivity goes up maybe 5%, or even make it 20%.  Is it worth it?

Because at the same time you’ve got other employees who perform every day of the week within the best of their abilities.  They know that one person is underperforming, they know you want to motivate that person, they only wonder why?  Why are you motivating someone that obviously isn’t bringing much to the table while others are working like maniacs without the same feedback.

Can you imagine what would happen if you invest the same amount of time on every employee?  It’s a very basic input vs. output story.  Time is valuable.  What do you get in return for that 8 hours of coaching every week.  If you’re sales go up and other employees are happy with it, by all means, continue.  Some people forget that you have to make a SWOT before AND after the problem.

The great thing about these moments is that you have to be aware that they can happen at anytime, at any place.  You don’t have to go to every networking event, speak to every industry insider you know or have weekly brainstormsessions.  Just keeping your eyes and ears (!) is enough.  The place, a hotellounge in Amsterdam.  The foods and beveragemanager said to one of his waiters something like: “When will you finally get how we work around here?”

He was frustrated, obviously since he was screaming rather loud, but he wasn’t angry at the employee.  It’s a small difference but it’s there.  He was frustrated that he failed to put the right guy in the right spot.  Nothing more.  The employee looked like he was trying, he wasn’t lazy, he listened, was friendly and frankly made one of the best mojito’s I’ve tasted.  But his manager has another vision of what should be in his mind. 

The best manager is one that doesn’t do anything!  Or to be more specific, one that doesn’t have to do anything.  It’s the perfect picture, find the right people to do the job.  When that moment comes, you don’t have to do anything anymore, you’re done.  In fact the perfect manager is probably one that makes himself obsolete.  Maybe that explains the success of consultants or interim managers these days.

You never imagined it would go like this right?  You read the job description, had some talks before you started working at that place.  Decided it was just what you needed, a new challenge, steering your life into a new direction.  But soon you find out that after 2 months about 50% of your time is spent on what you agreed on and the other 50% is ‘wasted’ on things you hoped you left behind at the previous job.

It’s a real wake-up call to realize that the perfect job doesn’t exist.  I know people who’ve actually wasted months looking for the job of their life, only to find out that it doesn’t exist.  But they kept looking for it, only to find out that they in fact wasted their time and effort and ended up with something they really don’t like.  And just because they kept hoping for the dreamjob, they go to work disappointed and come home depressed, knowing that tomorrow will be ‘another day, another dollar.’

What does exist is a job that comes close, really close.  We can all shrug our shoulders, saying to ourselves that it’s ‘just a job, a way to get cash, to pay the bills’.  But is that how you look at something you probably have to do for over 40 years?  ‘Another day, another dollar?’  That’s a pretty depressing future for someone who just wants to pay the bills.  Is it really that hard to find something you really like in a job?  To focus on what matters to you, not the company?  To find value in what you are doing?  Because as easy as you can find that, you can find a way to forget you’re working ‘another day.’

People make mistakes, that what happens when you grow up, when you learn.  The more you learn, the more responsibility you get and that includes leading other people.  It’s on our ‘most precious’-list when we look for a new job.  But isn’t it in fact ‘freedom’ we want?  We don’t actually want to be accountable for what someone else does, that’s too difficult to control, we just want the freedom to do as we please.  That has nothing to do with ’responsibility’, we just want to stay kids forever.

If you talk to some teachers it’s infuriating how some parents behave when their kid did something wrong.  They don’t show any respect for what teachers are doing, a perfect example of steerless, lazy parenthood. It’s not solely their job to educate your child, that’s yours!  Same in business.  You can’t expect to demand more responsibility and only enjoy the good part, the freedom.  Taking responsibility means other people can screw it up for you and you accept that. 

Taking responsibility means trying to figure out how you can minimize that threat.  Employ the best people, build-in sufficient (but not too much) control mechanisms, be a good leader, make people aware of the responsibility they have towards you,…  What it doesn’t mean is: “take it, hope all goes well and when it doesn’t… run for the hills!”  I think Shaggy said it best when he said “It wasn’t me.”

It’s hard for people who frequently use social media to understand this.  What so difficult about “Say what you are doing in 140 characters”?  It’s no rocketscience, you don’t have to browse through an 800-page manual to get started.  This should be easy!  I don’t expect my mom to understand what Twitter is all about.  God knows, if I try to explain, she’d probably tell me “I have to do something constructive with my life!”  But surely other marketers should know what it’s all about?

But then again, they aren’t asking what it is, but why it is?  Why should I tell people what I’m doing?  Why should I write a blog?  Why should I connect to people I haven’t even met in real life?  What’s the point?  We are professional idiots.  As soon as a new application is released we try to see some value in it, we don’t ask that why-question anymore because we already made the decision for ourselves that we understand what it’s all about and why it’s useful for us. 

We constantly try to answer the wrong questions.  And they can’t help it, because they don’t know what questions to ask.  Instead of trying to explain what it is or how easy it is to use, we should still tell them what the advantages are, the basics.  They’ll figure out for themselves what applications they can use, they don’t need a bunch of overexcited geeks like us to do that.

But money started to become something more.  Maybe we became emotionally too attached to it, but if anything, we put too much value into it.  And it’s a neverending story.  People tell you they want to be ‘comfortable’, ‘have no worries’.  But when is that?  Some people in third world countries will be ‘comfortable’ when they have one meal a day, a roof over their head and basic healthcare.  Do you think that’s comfortable?

Money has become so important that it has become too expensive for what it is used.  We got so used to it that our comfortzone kept moving further and further away from what we actually need to live.  And I’m not pleading that it isn’t good to have more money than you actually need, we still have people to take care of and with the extra money we have we make other people happy.  But we’re not getting happy.  When do we get happy?  When we do stuff for free.

Ofcourse there’s no such thing as ‘a free meal’.  You believe that any return you might get lies somewhere in the future.  Imagine if you could do business this way?  Wouldn’t the fulfillment you get out of doing something be much bigger than just getting the same paycheck every month.  It is one of the basic ideas behind networking actually.  Too bad a lot of people are missing the point totally.

And why wouldn’t you?  You worked bloody hard for it, stayed up at night, had more stress moments than anyone should have, a 90-hour workweek,…  You should enjoy it!  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with some egofeeding behaviour when you did something good.  There’s really no point in working hard and not getting any reward for it.  No difference from the dog and the cookie for that matter.

But what happens when you take that success for granted?  Can you take it for granted?  People like success so much that it’s becomes a vicious circle.  They want more, better, at any cost, by any means.  Some people are willing to put their own health at the line for some success, just so they can hear the applause at the back.

Success kills as much as laziness, it can destroy as much as it can create, can bring joy as much as it can bring pain.  You can start losing your focus, forget what’s really important in the long run.  Seen those drunk showbizzstars, those has-beens had success once, they were really good at something, otherwise they wouldn’t have had that success.  Than they go so hung up on that success that they lost focus.  Why do some people keep getting success and why do some people fail at it?