Fare Thee Well, Boss

The boss-employee relationship is defunct. Managers think young workers aren’t willing to pay dues, but really young workers aren’t willing to be employees. Managers dangle the lure of a raise or a title, but young workers just want to build something together as a team.

The new org chart shouldn’t be based on hierarchy then, but a horizontal ladder of peer-to-peer management, where employee and boss teach and learn from each other. They share, knowledge, experience and ideas.

Working together in service to a larger vision is a more human way of employment, but it is antithetical to how businesses currently run. A business is successful – no matter what it’s product, salsa or insurance – because it can replicate a system to make that  salsa, distribute the salsa and find customers to buy the salsa over and over again. The 5,674th jar of salsa has the same chance at delighting a customer and turning a profit as the first.

Start-ups call this the secret sauce.

That’s why many people love working at start-ups so much (and why many people don’t). At a large company, you advance your career not on the originality of your own ideas, but because you can showcase increasing familiarity and understanding of the company’s secret sauce. You’re the company man.

At a start-up, particularly in the beginning, all ideas are equal. The secret sauce is unknown. It’s a mystery. The mode of work is to test, experiment and recycle constantly. Will it work to do it this way? How about this way? It is a puzzle, an unfinished essay, half of a log cabin. The end result is only known as something great in the mind’s vision. A large company buys a start-up because the start-up figured out the replicable system.

When a company finds the secret sauce, it is institutionalized because it works. A hierarchy is put in place to ensure it continues to work and that no one deviates from the system, because that would put the company’s success at risk.

Originality is siloed into its own department, but companies do have to keep pace with innovation, so orders to add to or subtract from the secret sauce are handed down from those who are most familiar with the company’s system, typically upper-management.

You usually have to advance through a company’s hierarchy to change the system, because factory workers don’t have their own widget factories to experiment with, for instance. In order to know all there is about creating a widget you have to continue to be promoted. Hierarchy makes sense.

But wait, we don’t make widgets in the knowledge economy.

The Internet gives everyone connected to it the same opportunity to experiment on the same platform, whether you’re a company or individual. Now low-level employees have front-level, do-it-yourself access to the tools that create the systems and sauce on a scale more omnipresent than ever before.

A blog is an experiment. How do you bring in consistent subscribers? Does commenting on other blogs work? What about guest-posting? Does emailing other bloggers work? Should you build relationships with Blogger A or Blogger B? Why? What is quality content? How do you write it? Does it matter?

An Etsy shop is a test. What headlines work? Does it matter how the crocheted plastic bag holder is photographed? Where do you advertise your products? Google? Facebook ads? What is good SEO? Which color is better? What is the customer’s feedback? Which shipping method is cheapest and fastest? Does including a personal note give you a better rating?

Expertise is no longer institutionally created, but self-made. And it is no longer systematized but shared in the open for the rest of the web to adapt, change and build upon.

There is no need for hierarchy. Decision makers, yes. Titles and responsibilities, yes. But hierarchy, no. Leadership is now inclusive and collaborative.

Fare thee well, boss. It was nice to know you.