November 1, 2022 • 27 mins
When it comes to finding meaning in your work, is there a way to turn a bad job into a better one? Barry says yes. He calls it “job crafting” and there are three ways to do it: by changing what you do, who you do it with, and how you think about the work.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:35):
You're listening to the Happiness Formula. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli.
In our previous episode, Barry taught us the three ways
people view work as a job, a career, or a calling.
For me, podcasting is a calling. It's very fulfilling. I
like putting things together. I love hopping on a microphone,
(00:57):
doing some voiceover stuff, hosting a show like this one.
So I suppose I'm one of the lucky people who
get to do something that they consider their call. On today,
Barry digs into how to shape your work. It turns
out you do have some tools you can use to
make it feel more like a calling and less like
a job. Well, come on, Barry, don't keep it a secret.
(01:19):
Let's get right to it. I made a distinction between
people who think their work as a job, people who
think it's a career, and people who think it's a calling.
And I want to say a little bit more about
this third category, the calling category, because Aristotle, our old
(01:44):
friend Aristotle, had something to say that's related to this.
Several thousand years ago. Um. For Aristotle, every activity that
people engage in has its own appropriate goal, its own
appropriate end. The goal of medicine. The Greek where for
(02:06):
this is telos. The goal of medicine is secure disease
and ease suffering. That's the appropriate goal. People who are
doctors also make a living. People who are doctors also get,
you know, a claim and status and respect from their
community members. But those are not the goals of being
(02:29):
a doctor. Those are consequences of being a doctor. And
doctors who practice medicine to make a lot of money
will be less good doctors than the ones who practice
medicine to cure disease and he's suffering. In addition to
which they'll be less satisfied with being doctors than the
doctors who are in it to cure disease and he's suffering.
(02:51):
Lawyer's goal is to serve the interests of their clients,
or to be a bit loftier to pursue justice. A
lawyer who pursues the these goals that are the appropriate
goals of being a lawyer will be a better lawyer
than the one who is doing deals to increase billable
(03:16):
hours or arranging tax shelters so that rich clients pay
the government as little as possible of their income. Teaching
the appropriate goal of teaching. The intrinsic goal of teaching
is to awaken young minds, To stimulate young people to think,
(03:38):
to build skills that will enable people to learn on
their own, to get kids excited about the world. That's
the internal set of goals of teaching. But the thing
about teaching, at least in the US, is the hours
are pretty good. Uh there's this whole summer vacation and
(04:00):
long vacations during the year. The workday, the school day
ends at three o'clock. You can get tenure, which means
that you can't be fired. Salaries and benefits are pretty decent,
And so if you become a teacher because you like
the salary and benefits and shortish work day and job security,
(04:25):
then you're going to be a less good teacher than
if you become a teacher because what you like is
the opportunity to awaken young minds. So almost any kind
of work you can identify what Aristotle would call its
appropriate goal and what Aristotle would call other consequences that
are not essential to that activity. That's why if you
(04:49):
want to become a great golfer, wouldn't occur to you
to cheat, because a low score on a scorecard is
not the goal of uh improving your ability as a golfer.
It is merely the measure of whether you've improved your
ability as a golfer, and writing a low score on
(05:09):
the scorecard is only fooling yourself at the same time
that you fool the people you're trying to impress. And
so people with callings are in general people who are
in their work pursuing the goals that are internal to
the work that they do. That's the way Aristotle would
(05:33):
describe this. One other point that I want to make
is we still haven't quite resolved whether having one or
another attitude toward your work is about the work or
is about you. And to some degree it's about the work.
(05:54):
Some jobs it's a lot harder to get meaning and
purpose out of than other jobs. However, there are things
people can do to turn bad jobs into good ones,
or at least bad jobs into decent ones, and decent
jobs into good ones. And this idea that you can
(06:18):
shape the work you do also comes from my colleague
Amy Resinuski, and she talks about what she calls job crafty.
We have, most of us, within the workplace context, some
freedom to sculpt or reshape the work that we do,
(06:40):
and we we have that opportunity in one of three
different ways. We can actually change the work we do,
which is what the janitors I talked to you about did. Yes,
they washed floors and empty trash, but they also did
(07:01):
this other stuff with patients and patients families. So that's
a case where they are crafting their jobs by changing
what they actually do on a day to day hour
to our basis, you can also craft your job by
changing the social context within which you do the work,
(07:24):
developing relations with co workers or changing existing relations with
co workers so that the social world within which you
operate is different than it might have been if you
hadn't reshaped your social environment. You befriend some colleagues and
(07:44):
try to work with them, and you sort of keep
your distance from other colleagues and try to avoid working
with them. To some degree, you have discretion in that regard, uh,
whatever your job is. The third thing that you can
do is you can change the way you think about
your work. And here I think the example of the
(08:08):
retail salesperson in the shopping mall is the most obvious one.
If you think your work is selling stuff, then you're
going to have one attitude towards your work. If you
think your work is solving customers problems, then you're going
to have a different attitude towards your work. Or, to
take another example, the haircutters, if you think your job
(08:33):
is simply to do whatever your client wants, then you're
going to have one attitude towards your work. If you
think your job is basically to cheer, lead and nudge
your customer into wanting something that you know she will
actually be satisfied with after you deliver it, then you're
going to have a different attitude toward your work. And
(08:55):
the interaction that you have with your customer as your
customer sits in the chair is going to be a
much larger part of your work day than it would
be if you were simply using your technical skills to
change what this person looked like. And so often, not always,
(09:16):
but often people have the opportunity to change their work,
either by literally changing some of the things they do,
by changing who they do it with, or by changing
how they think about it. And when people do these things.
When people craft recraft their jobs, it can have a
(09:42):
big impact on how satisfied they are with the work
they do. I'm not sure you can move from having
a job to having a calling simply by reconceptualizing what
you do, but I think you can certainly increase opportunities
to be satisfied with your work by rethinking it. And
(10:05):
the main impediment to this job crafting is the degree
to which you are supervised and overseen and dictated to
by the people who manage you in the organization. If
you have no discretion in what you do, then there
(10:25):
are real limits to how you can recraft your job.
If you have some discretion, then there are fewer limits.
In these days of big data where you can basically
count everything. If you're working in an office uh and
every keystroke that you make and every website that you
(10:48):
visit it can be recorded and scrutinized. Then you don't
have a whole lot of room to transform the work
you do into something different from what it seems. If
the people managing you are a little bit less laid
back about supervision, then you may have room to turn
(11:09):
what is otherwise a not very rewarding job into a
rewarding one, and so to some degree, the ability people
have to craft their jobs is largely determined by the
degree of supervision they encounter in doing their jobs. And
(11:29):
so the combination of looking for work that is a
calling and reinterpreting the work you do as a calling
are two roots to getting more satisfaction out of your
time at work. And again, let me let me remind
(11:52):
you how we began this with the argument that Freud
make that made that the two most important things in
life are love and work. We spend half of our
waking live is at work or more. And if work
is something you dread, if work is something that you
basically have to force yourself to do every day, then
(12:16):
it's going to be really hard for you to have
a life that you find satisfying when you have to
spend half of that life doing something that you find repugnant.
So this is a very u creating workplaces that are
rewarding as a very large role to play in enabling
(12:38):
people to live lives that are rewarding. And I want
to emphasize this before we move on, because some of
you are probably not in positions where you can shape
the quality of work that other people in the organization do.
(12:58):
But some of you, maybe in managerial positions, may have
a lot to say about what a company does, why
the company does it, what the company asks its employees
to do, how it asks its employees to do it,
And so you have power in your hands two dramatically
(13:19):
improve the quality of life of the people who work
for the company and contribute to its success by paying
attention to how you answer the question, are the people
who work for me eager to show up at work
every day? Or not? And if not, what can I
do to make them eager to show up for work
(13:40):
every day? So I'm hoping that some of this will
empower people who are in positions of authority and decision
making to pay a lot of attention to how good
the jobs are that they are asking their employees to do.
It's time for a quick break when we come back.
(14:02):
Why our system of work is set up to be
unsat des by The last topic is I call it
(14:24):
idea technology, and that may sound mysterious to you. I
will try to demystify it. But here's the puzzle. I
have told you that when people are doing work, they
want to do when people are doing work that gives
them satisfaction, they do better work. When people do better work,
(14:49):
the company makes more money. When the company makes more money,
the shareholders are happy. Everybody's happy. So that would suggest
that if your interest is in the welfare of your employee,
you want to create workplaces that give your employee satisfaction.
(15:12):
But even if your interest is not in the welfare
of your employees, even if the only thing you care
about is making your company profitable, you will still be
You should still be interested in the welfare and the
satisfaction of your employees. The secret to a successful company
is creating a workplace where people want to be. So
(15:36):
this creates a puzzle because the way to make money
is to create good workplaces. And yet, as we'll see
in a few minutes, for the overwhelming majority of people
who work in the United States and in the rest
of the world, work is a chore and a drudge,
(15:58):
not something that they're eager to do. In other words,
almost everybody who goes to work every day would rather
be doing something different in another place. And the huge question,
the puzzling question, is why is this true? Why are
managers and CEOs leaving money on the table by creating
(16:20):
workplaces that are frustrating and unrewarding to the people who
have to work in them. So that's what we're going
to try to tackle that question. To begin, I want
to sort of do a repeat of something that I
did at the very beginning, which is to remind you
of some of the key attributes of this capitalist system
(16:45):
that we all participate in. Uh. First important point is
that people own things. That is private property is essential,
But among the very important things that people own is
their labor, so that when you take a job, what
(17:08):
you are doing is selling your labor to an employer.
Different employers will compete for your labor, or different employees
will compete to sell their labor to the employer. But
you are free to choose what you do, who you
do it for, and when you do it, you can
(17:30):
always leave this job and go to another one. Freedom
of choice is essential to the capitalist system. A very
famous economist named Milton Friedman once said, the distinction between
a boss and a worker is artificial. You could say
that the boss hires the worker. You could say that
(17:52):
the worker hires the boss. Those are two ways of
describing the same situation, and what he meant was that
power really sort of doesn't matter that you, as a
worker in this siding, which company to work for, our
in effect hiring your boss, just as your boss is
in deciding who to employ, is hiring you as a worker.
(18:17):
Another thing that's important is a kind of an anonymity
between buyers and sellers. You buy the best product for
the best price, and you don't care who's selling it.
I sell the best product for the highest profit, and
I don't care who I sell it to. So goods
(18:41):
buyers and sellers and goods are essentially interchangeable. You don't
have to buy from your uncle, you don't have to
sell to your nephew. You can buy from anyone, and
you can sell to anyone. And critically, what makes this
system work is competition. Adam Smith famously said it is
(19:04):
not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or
the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard to their own interest. In other words, the butcher
doesn't have to care about giving you nutritious, tasty meat.
The baker doesn't have to care about giving you nutritious
(19:26):
tasty bread. What will assure that you get good meat
from the butcher and you get good bread from the baker.
Is that there are other butchers you can buy from,
and other bakers you can buy from. And so it
isn't that I'm a nice guy that forces me to
give you good meat and good bread. It's that if
(19:48):
I don't give you good meat and good bread, you'll
buy from my competition. So competition is what enables us
as customers to have some confidence that we will get
good stuff from the people we buy from, even though
they have no interest in our welfare. The magic of
(20:08):
competition unleashes a whole bunch of selfish people into the
world and somehow ends up improving the welfare of everyone,
even people that these selfish people don't care about. So
that was a key part of the magic of capitalist
(20:30):
free market organization from Smith's point of view. Uh, and
that's the system within which we operate. There's a famous
economist from more than half a century ago who asked
the question what does the economists economize on? And his
(20:54):
answer was the economist economizes on love. And what he
meant by that, you know, what do you economize on?
You econ of mine, on things that are scarce and
the scarcest commodity on earth is love is real concern
(21:14):
for the welfare of other people. So to create an
economic system that requires us to love our customers is
almost certainly demanding more of that resource than is available.
So how do you create a system that works well
for everyone even when this key commodity of love is
(21:39):
in short supply. And the answer that economists provide is
you create competitive markets, and now you can be serving
everybody's interests even though nobody loves anybody. So that's the
framework of capitalism that we now take for granted. And
within that framework, how do you actually organize work? And
(22:02):
here the key idea is that you want to organize
work to maximize efficiency. In other words, you want to
organize work so that you produce as much as possible
in the output with as little input as possible. You
want to be able to produce lots and lots of
(22:24):
goods at relatively low cost. And this creates the factory
and the assembly line that Henry Ford made famous, and
that has become the sort of model for industrial production
throughout the industrial world. So the thing to notice is
(22:44):
that when you create this kind of efficient productive system,
you essentially eliminate any meaning, significance, discretion, and autonomy from
the work that people do, and what you substitute for
that is a paycheck com And the more efficient production is,
(23:08):
the bigger the paycheck will be. Because the more output
a worker can generate, the more profit the employer can extract,
the higher the worker's salary will be. And what Adam
Smith thought is that people are basically lazy. They don't
(23:29):
want to work. The only reason they work is to
get paid. And so the sensible way to organize work
is to maximize efficiency. Since nobody wants to work, and
there's no kind of work that people would choose to
do voluntarily, So maximize efficiency so you can pay better,
and that will get people to come to work and
(23:51):
to work hard. So that vision efficiency as the principle
organizing idea behind the way goods and services are produced
lead to a fact factory system in which people really
had no reason to show up at work except for
(24:12):
the paycheck that they were going to get. And this
was you know, Smith's ideas were at the same time
as the Declaration of Independence. Over the next century, they
evolved into the system of mass production that produced more
and more goods for lower and lower cost, and so
(24:33):
it reached a point where everywhere you looked, people were
marching through the doors of factories to do the same
task over and over again, day after day, week after week,
and year after year to get a paycheck that will
would enable them to buy the goods that they were
making and that their friends in the next factory we're making.
(24:57):
And what went away when work was organized in this
fashion was any opportunity to find satisfaction from work, aside
from the paycheck you got at the end of the week.
So that's the framework within which we find that when
(25:17):
you ask people how satisfied they are with their work,
how engaged they are with their work, the overwhelming majority
of people say they're not. The Gallop Organization polling huge
polling company, asks work satisfaction and work engagement questions all
(25:42):
over the world on an annual basis, and what the
Gallop Organization finds is that roughly six of people are
unengaged by their work, roughly thirty of people are actively
(26:02):
disengaged from their work, and about ten percent of people
are enthusiastically engaged in their work. In other words, one
person in ten working in various different workplace settings in
various different locations in the US and around the world.
(26:24):
One person in ten actually is eager to show up
at work every day, the other At best it's neutral,
and at worst, it's awful. The overwhelming majority of people
spend half of their waking lives working in places they
don't want to be, doing things they don't want to do.
(26:51):
Are you part of that that doesn't pop out of
bed every morning excited to start your work day? Well,
then join us next time when Barry talks about why
so many people are unhappy with their work and what
you can do to fix that. The Happiness Formula from
One Day University is a production of I Heart Podcasts
(27:14):
and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave
a review in your favorite podcast app, and check out
the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture,
true crime, and more. School of Humans
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:35):
You're listening to the Happiness Formula. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli.
In our previous episode, Barry taught us the three ways
people view work as a job, a career, or a calling.
For me, podcasting is a calling. It's very fulfilling. I
like putting things together. I love hopping on a microphone,
(00:57):
doing some voiceover stuff, hosting a show like this one.
So I suppose I'm one of the lucky people who
get to do something that they consider their call. On today,
Barry digs into how to shape your work. It turns
out you do have some tools you can use to
make it feel more like a calling and less like
a job. Well, come on, Barry, don't keep it a secret.
(01:19):
Let's get right to it. I made a distinction between
people who think their work as a job, people who
think it's a career, and people who think it's a calling.
And I want to say a little bit more about
this third category, the calling category, because Aristotle, our old
(01:44):
friend Aristotle, had something to say that's related to this.
Several thousand years ago. Um. For Aristotle, every activity that
people engage in has its own appropriate goal, its own
appropriate end. The goal of medicine. The Greek where for
(02:06):
this is telos. The goal of medicine is secure disease
and ease suffering. That's the appropriate goal. People who are
doctors also make a living. People who are doctors also get,
you know, a claim and status and respect from their
community members. But those are not the goals of being
(02:29):
a doctor. Those are consequences of being a doctor. And
doctors who practice medicine to make a lot of money
will be less good doctors than the ones who practice
medicine to cure disease and he's suffering. In addition to
which they'll be less satisfied with being doctors than the
doctors who are in it to cure disease and he's suffering.
(02:51):
Lawyer's goal is to serve the interests of their clients,
or to be a bit loftier to pursue justice. A
lawyer who pursues the these goals that are the appropriate
goals of being a lawyer will be a better lawyer
than the one who is doing deals to increase billable
(03:16):
hours or arranging tax shelters so that rich clients pay
the government as little as possible of their income. Teaching
the appropriate goal of teaching. The intrinsic goal of teaching
is to awaken young minds, To stimulate young people to think,
(03:38):
to build skills that will enable people to learn on
their own, to get kids excited about the world. That's
the internal set of goals of teaching. But the thing
about teaching, at least in the US, is the hours
are pretty good. Uh there's this whole summer vacation and
(04:00):
long vacations during the year. The workday, the school day
ends at three o'clock. You can get tenure, which means
that you can't be fired. Salaries and benefits are pretty decent,
And so if you become a teacher because you like
the salary and benefits and shortish work day and job security,
(04:25):
then you're going to be a less good teacher than
if you become a teacher because what you like is
the opportunity to awaken young minds. So almost any kind
of work you can identify what Aristotle would call its
appropriate goal and what Aristotle would call other consequences that
are not essential to that activity. That's why if you
(04:49):
want to become a great golfer, wouldn't occur to you
to cheat, because a low score on a scorecard is
not the goal of uh improving your ability as a golfer.
It is merely the measure of whether you've improved your
ability as a golfer, and writing a low score on
(05:09):
the scorecard is only fooling yourself at the same time
that you fool the people you're trying to impress. And
so people with callings are in general people who are
in their work pursuing the goals that are internal to
the work that they do. That's the way Aristotle would
(05:33):
describe this. One other point that I want to make
is we still haven't quite resolved whether having one or
another attitude toward your work is about the work or
is about you. And to some degree it's about the work.
(05:54):
Some jobs it's a lot harder to get meaning and
purpose out of than other jobs. However, there are things
people can do to turn bad jobs into good ones,
or at least bad jobs into decent ones, and decent
jobs into good ones. And this idea that you can
(06:18):
shape the work you do also comes from my colleague
Amy Resinuski, and she talks about what she calls job crafty.
We have, most of us, within the workplace context, some
freedom to sculpt or reshape the work that we do,
(06:40):
and we we have that opportunity in one of three
different ways. We can actually change the work we do,
which is what the janitors I talked to you about did. Yes,
they washed floors and empty trash, but they also did
(07:01):
this other stuff with patients and patients families. So that's
a case where they are crafting their jobs by changing
what they actually do on a day to day hour
to our basis, you can also craft your job by
changing the social context within which you do the work,
(07:24):
developing relations with co workers or changing existing relations with
co workers so that the social world within which you
operate is different than it might have been if you
hadn't reshaped your social environment. You befriend some colleagues and
(07:44):
try to work with them, and you sort of keep
your distance from other colleagues and try to avoid working
with them. To some degree, you have discretion in that regard, uh,
whatever your job is. The third thing that you can
do is you can change the way you think about
your work. And here I think the example of the
(08:08):
retail salesperson in the shopping mall is the most obvious one.
If you think your work is selling stuff, then you're
going to have one attitude towards your work. If you
think your work is solving customers problems, then you're going
to have a different attitude towards your work. Or, to
take another example, the haircutters, if you think your job
(08:33):
is simply to do whatever your client wants, then you're
going to have one attitude towards your work. If you
think your job is basically to cheer, lead and nudge
your customer into wanting something that you know she will
actually be satisfied with after you deliver it, then you're
going to have a different attitude toward your work. And
(08:55):
the interaction that you have with your customer as your
customer sits in the chair is going to be a
much larger part of your work day than it would
be if you were simply using your technical skills to
change what this person looked like. And so often, not always,
(09:16):
but often people have the opportunity to change their work,
either by literally changing some of the things they do,
by changing who they do it with, or by changing
how they think about it. And when people do these things.
When people craft recraft their jobs, it can have a
(09:42):
big impact on how satisfied they are with the work
they do. I'm not sure you can move from having
a job to having a calling simply by reconceptualizing what
you do, but I think you can certainly increase opportunities
to be satisfied with your work by rethinking it. And
(10:05):
the main impediment to this job crafting is the degree
to which you are supervised and overseen and dictated to
by the people who manage you in the organization. If
you have no discretion in what you do, then there
(10:25):
are real limits to how you can recraft your job.
If you have some discretion, then there are fewer limits.
In these days of big data where you can basically
count everything. If you're working in an office uh and
every keystroke that you make and every website that you
(10:48):
visit it can be recorded and scrutinized. Then you don't
have a whole lot of room to transform the work
you do into something different from what it seems. If
the people managing you are a little bit less laid
back about supervision, then you may have room to turn
(11:09):
what is otherwise a not very rewarding job into a
rewarding one, and so to some degree, the ability people
have to craft their jobs is largely determined by the
degree of supervision they encounter in doing their jobs. And
(11:29):
so the combination of looking for work that is a
calling and reinterpreting the work you do as a calling
are two roots to getting more satisfaction out of your
time at work. And again, let me let me remind
(11:52):
you how we began this with the argument that Freud
make that made that the two most important things in
life are love and work. We spend half of our
waking live is at work or more. And if work
is something you dread, if work is something that you
basically have to force yourself to do every day, then
(12:16):
it's going to be really hard for you to have
a life that you find satisfying when you have to
spend half of that life doing something that you find repugnant.
So this is a very u creating workplaces that are
rewarding as a very large role to play in enabling
(12:38):
people to live lives that are rewarding. And I want
to emphasize this before we move on, because some of
you are probably not in positions where you can shape
the quality of work that other people in the organization do.
(12:58):
But some of you, maybe in managerial positions, may have
a lot to say about what a company does, why
the company does it, what the company asks its employees
to do, how it asks its employees to do it,
And so you have power in your hands two dramatically
(13:19):
improve the quality of life of the people who work
for the company and contribute to its success by paying
attention to how you answer the question, are the people
who work for me eager to show up at work
every day? Or not? And if not, what can I
do to make them eager to show up for work
(13:40):
every day? So I'm hoping that some of this will
empower people who are in positions of authority and decision
making to pay a lot of attention to how good
the jobs are that they are asking their employees to do.
It's time for a quick break when we come back.
(14:02):
Why our system of work is set up to be
unsat des by The last topic is I call it
(14:24):
idea technology, and that may sound mysterious to you. I
will try to demystify it. But here's the puzzle. I
have told you that when people are doing work, they
want to do when people are doing work that gives
them satisfaction, they do better work. When people do better work,
(14:49):
the company makes more money. When the company makes more money,
the shareholders are happy. Everybody's happy. So that would suggest
that if your interest is in the welfare of your employee,
you want to create workplaces that give your employee satisfaction.
(15:12):
But even if your interest is not in the welfare
of your employees, even if the only thing you care
about is making your company profitable, you will still be
You should still be interested in the welfare and the
satisfaction of your employees. The secret to a successful company
is creating a workplace where people want to be. So
(15:36):
this creates a puzzle because the way to make money
is to create good workplaces. And yet, as we'll see
in a few minutes, for the overwhelming majority of people
who work in the United States and in the rest
of the world, work is a chore and a drudge,
(15:58):
not something that they're eager to do. In other words,
almost everybody who goes to work every day would rather
be doing something different in another place. And the huge question,
the puzzling question, is why is this true? Why are
managers and CEOs leaving money on the table by creating
(16:20):
workplaces that are frustrating and unrewarding to the people who
have to work in them. So that's what we're going
to try to tackle that question. To begin, I want
to sort of do a repeat of something that I
did at the very beginning, which is to remind you
of some of the key attributes of this capitalist system
(16:45):
that we all participate in. Uh. First important point is
that people own things. That is private property is essential,
But among the very important things that people own is
their labor, so that when you take a job, what
(17:08):
you are doing is selling your labor to an employer.
Different employers will compete for your labor, or different employees
will compete to sell their labor to the employer. But
you are free to choose what you do, who you
do it for, and when you do it, you can
(17:30):
always leave this job and go to another one. Freedom
of choice is essential to the capitalist system. A very
famous economist named Milton Friedman once said, the distinction between
a boss and a worker is artificial. You could say
that the boss hires the worker. You could say that
(17:52):
the worker hires the boss. Those are two ways of
describing the same situation, and what he meant was that
power really sort of doesn't matter that you, as a
worker in this siding, which company to work for, our
in effect hiring your boss, just as your boss is
in deciding who to employ, is hiring you as a worker.
(18:17):
Another thing that's important is a kind of an anonymity
between buyers and sellers. You buy the best product for
the best price, and you don't care who's selling it.
I sell the best product for the highest profit, and
I don't care who I sell it to. So goods
(18:41):
buyers and sellers and goods are essentially interchangeable. You don't
have to buy from your uncle, you don't have to
sell to your nephew. You can buy from anyone, and
you can sell to anyone. And critically, what makes this
system work is competition. Adam Smith famously said it is
(19:04):
not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or
the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard to their own interest. In other words, the butcher
doesn't have to care about giving you nutritious, tasty meat.
The baker doesn't have to care about giving you nutritious
(19:26):
tasty bread. What will assure that you get good meat
from the butcher and you get good bread from the baker.
Is that there are other butchers you can buy from,
and other bakers you can buy from. And so it
isn't that I'm a nice guy that forces me to
give you good meat and good bread. It's that if
(19:48):
I don't give you good meat and good bread, you'll
buy from my competition. So competition is what enables us
as customers to have some confidence that we will get
good stuff from the people we buy from, even though
they have no interest in our welfare. The magic of
(20:08):
competition unleashes a whole bunch of selfish people into the
world and somehow ends up improving the welfare of everyone,
even people that these selfish people don't care about. So
that was a key part of the magic of capitalist
(20:30):
free market organization from Smith's point of view. Uh, and
that's the system within which we operate. There's a famous
economist from more than half a century ago who asked
the question what does the economists economize on? And his
(20:54):
answer was the economist economizes on love. And what he
meant by that, you know, what do you economize on?
You econ of mine, on things that are scarce and
the scarcest commodity on earth is love is real concern
(21:14):
for the welfare of other people. So to create an
economic system that requires us to love our customers is
almost certainly demanding more of that resource than is available.
So how do you create a system that works well
for everyone even when this key commodity of love is
(21:39):
in short supply. And the answer that economists provide is
you create competitive markets, and now you can be serving
everybody's interests even though nobody loves anybody. So that's the
framework of capitalism that we now take for granted. And
within that framework, how do you actually organize work? And
(22:02):
here the key idea is that you want to organize
work to maximize efficiency. In other words, you want to
organize work so that you produce as much as possible
in the output with as little input as possible. You
want to be able to produce lots and lots of
(22:24):
goods at relatively low cost. And this creates the factory
and the assembly line that Henry Ford made famous, and
that has become the sort of model for industrial production
throughout the industrial world. So the thing to notice is
(22:44):
that when you create this kind of efficient productive system,
you essentially eliminate any meaning, significance, discretion, and autonomy from
the work that people do, and what you substitute for
that is a paycheck com And the more efficient production is,
(23:08):
the bigger the paycheck will be. Because the more output
a worker can generate, the more profit the employer can extract,
the higher the worker's salary will be. And what Adam
Smith thought is that people are basically lazy. They don't
(23:29):
want to work. The only reason they work is to
get paid. And so the sensible way to organize work
is to maximize efficiency. Since nobody wants to work, and
there's no kind of work that people would choose to
do voluntarily, So maximize efficiency so you can pay better,
and that will get people to come to work and
(23:51):
to work hard. So that vision efficiency as the principle
organizing idea behind the way goods and services are produced
lead to a fact factory system in which people really
had no reason to show up at work except for
(24:12):
the paycheck that they were going to get. And this
was you know, Smith's ideas were at the same time
as the Declaration of Independence. Over the next century, they
evolved into the system of mass production that produced more
and more goods for lower and lower cost, and so
(24:33):
it reached a point where everywhere you looked, people were
marching through the doors of factories to do the same
task over and over again, day after day, week after week,
and year after year to get a paycheck that will
would enable them to buy the goods that they were
making and that their friends in the next factory we're making.
(24:57):
And what went away when work was organized in this
fashion was any opportunity to find satisfaction from work, aside
from the paycheck you got at the end of the week.
So that's the framework within which we find that when
(25:17):
you ask people how satisfied they are with their work,
how engaged they are with their work, the overwhelming majority
of people say they're not. The Gallop Organization polling huge
polling company, asks work satisfaction and work engagement questions all
(25:42):
over the world on an annual basis, and what the
Gallop Organization finds is that roughly six of people are
unengaged by their work, roughly thirty of people are actively
(26:02):
disengaged from their work, and about ten percent of people
are enthusiastically engaged in their work. In other words, one
person in ten working in various different workplace settings in
various different locations in the US and around the world.
(26:24):
One person in ten actually is eager to show up
at work every day, the other At best it's neutral,
and at worst, it's awful. The overwhelming majority of people
spend half of their waking lives working in places they
don't want to be, doing things they don't want to do.
(26:51):
Are you part of that that doesn't pop out of
bed every morning excited to start your work day? Well,
then join us next time when Barry talks about why
so many people are unhappy with their work and what
you can do to fix that. The Happiness Formula from
One Day University is a production of I Heart Podcasts
(27:14):
and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave
a review in your favorite podcast app, and check out
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