March 2nd, 2006
I have a friend and former co-worker who spent one dreadful year working for a company that was the result of the efforts of a single man. It was his original venture, his company, all of it his money and decisions. And, like all self-made men, this man worshipped his creator. 1
So she worked for this man, doing her best to do her job, but of course he had to keep his hands in everything. He could not possibly trust that she was doing the right thing, he had to come and investigate everything and mark up every little piece of her writing, even if it was to introduce errors where none existed before. (That really pisses tech writers off, by the way: They absolutely hate the apparently random red marks that erode the quality of the language of their writing, and then try to defend the original work against someone who thinks it's all arbitrary anyway.) And so she suffered under his micro -nay, under his femto-management.
It is the mark of a man who has had some success that he is certain his way is the only way to the promised land, and you'll never convince him otherwise because he can point to his previous success and tell you that he clearly knows what he is talking about. Who knows? Maybe he's right. And in the case of my friend, there was nothing she could do short of resigning (which she eventually did) because even though he was wrong about the ad copy and user manuals, he was right about the business model (or just lucky; you know, I think that this is probably more true than anything else: He just plain got lucky in the right place at the right time, and his methodology had less to do with it than he thinks). So he had to be suffered, because he couldn't be persuaded.
By the way, right now there is some guy on television flogging his alarm company. He has that look that says "I built this company with my bare hands; there is only one right way, and it just happens to be mine" and you can tell this by the fact that he awkwardly trips over his words as he speaks to the TV cameras about his alarm company—he hasn't got the wits to admit to himself that he is a bad TV spokesperson. He built this alarm company, damnit, and he is going to envelop all aspects of it too, damnit, including the ad copy and the spokesperson job, damnit, and even the camera angles too, damnit. Right, and as a result there is a homogenous, slightly amateur feel to all this company's TV and radio advertising that betrays that single overbearing hand getting its smug self-assured fingerprints over all of it. Oh, and he is not exactly the most attractive man on Earth, yet he insists on standing in front of the camera in a 10-years-out-of-date suit. Whatever the real truth of the matter, the message I get is that this man is certain he carries his own little Manifest Destiny through life. And, if I am right, I cringe at the purgatory his employees might possibly live in.
The argument to this, of course, is what I already addressed: It's his company, why shouldn't he be allowed to run it any way he wants—including with a broad grasp over every little detail? His company pays the salaries of the employees, so they should just put up and shut up. Right?
Well, I don't think so. He doesn't own them for their salaries, and although they work for him, they weren't hired to be little yes-men and -women. They were hired as humans with abilities and dignity and the common sense to make their own decisions. So maybe they needed the work and are willing to prostrate themselves before the owner for their money, he is maybe not so justified in bulldozing their abilities and talents (as well as their feelings) as he thinks.
But that argument only goes so far; they don't get to rule the roost either. Money does flow into their bank accounts, after all, and they are there to work, not complain about the owner. He set up the environment, they have their own set of lines they must draw within.
* * *
So, anyhow, this is all percolating through my mind right now because of a change in myself that I have just recently perceived.
I mean, I used to be wracked with self-doubt and indecision. It made me rather unpleasant to be around sometimes. I may have appeared to be opinionated when I was younger but I was really just trying out ideas on others to see if they would react the way I hoped they would. Invariably, the act of testing the idea was enough to distort it enough that I never got an accurate response back anyhow; if you want to test your ideas for their popularity, you are not really expressing a point of view. Oh, and nobody will like you because although they won't usually know why, they will experience an unpleasant feeling about every conversation they have with you because they can't sense genuine honesty from your side. All the uncertainty about whether you are justified in having Opinion X or Feeling Y will guarantee you a life of misery, because others' smell of blood will kick in. You will become breakfast.
So, that is a lesson I learned for myself and I am less and less the target of shark attacks (though I am like everyone else: I am not immune and never safe) and I have developed my own sense of self and my own rules and paradigms (d3wd) to live by. I think I am right about my view of the world, and there are enough successes in my life now that I can point to them and say, "See? See? I'm right!"
Well and good.
But one always has to be careful, doesn't he? 2 There are absolutely no absolutes in this life, and so I cannot simply say, "There, I've got the answers to life finally, so everyone around me please play by these rules I have discovered." You see, it seems it is possible to go too far into one's own convictions of how things work. One only gets a small slice of life to look at, yet we all seem to develop a world view based on that slice that we decide is the definitive one. After a few years of seeing our lives, we all think we've got the answers. And if we are lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time, and we have our own little venture that is profitable enough that we are able to affect other lives, then we are setting ourselves up to be like the guy my friend worked for: Insufferable, but unchangeable.
This is a big deal for me, you see, because I have noticed that in the last few years my convictions have gone from hypothesis to out-and-out lecturing. I have had my own successes in life, like most people, and I have been somewhat amiss in acknowledging that although my own slice of life may have a set of paradigms one can live by, not everyone's life is consistent with mine.
"I got one word for you: Plastics!"
Yeah, well, while we are mostly all able to draw conclusions from our own lives and make up a story that can be transferred helpfully to others in the form of advice or advisement (hopefully not until it is asked for), we are also all in danger of dispensing useless—or perhaps damaging—advice to other lives based on the experiences of ours. Our own little slice of the world may not have anything in common with others'. And what we learned about our lives in the past may not be relevant to anyone's life now—including our own. And if we are truly interested in being self-sustaining, honest, real, and responsible citizens looking to leave the world in about the same state as we found it, we should ask ourselves at least every once in a while if maybe we are getting a little too full of ourselves.
I don't mean that we should tie ourselves into knots of self-doubt and constant navel-gazing ... but I do think that there really is a razor's edge that it is easy to slide off of.
1) "He is a self-made man who worships his creator." –John Bright
2) I am more careful with language than most people. If I write "he" it is because I meant "he".
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