“And so then Skeletor told Terminator he wanted a divorce, and apparently it’s all going to be finalized soon!” – South Park
As it’s a short post, here’s a link to the story about the vole above.
“No, John Wilder, I said I want to make less thank I’m worth,” said my friend, who I will call Spock.
I was surprised. I took it as an axiom, a truthticle (John Wilder Definition: A quantum truth particle), that the old adage was right – you want to get paid what you’re worth.
Spock continued, “Yeah, if I’m worth what I’m paid, I’m not a bargain. If I’m worth more than I’m paid? That’s the guy you keep around – he makes you money.”
And Spock was right, his argument as logical as his Vulcan blood is green.
If I go to work and don’t create more value than the amount I’m paid, unless I work at the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Customer Hostility Division, I’m going to get fired. This isn’t a moral judgement, it’s just that companies can’t survive hauling around with comatose employees that don’t make it money.
To put it simply: If I don’t make (much) more money for the company than they pay me? They’ll find a way to make sure I work for the competition. And if someone (or a cool robot) can do the job for less than they’re paying me? I’m probably going to be doing a lot more blogging in all the free time that I’ll have. I will have been Terminated.
Not killed, though at one company I worked at:
HR told the story of a gentleman that worked there who was fired. The HR Personbot2000™ told them that they were going to be terminated. Having been a recent transplant (with correspondingly iffy English skills) from a country where the voters regularly re-elected the dictator with a 99.9% majority, the employee panicked, and barricaded himself in his office. The standoff lasted until the Personbot2000® got another employee to translate to the fired employee that he wasn’t going to be killed, he just didn’t have a job there anymore.
No one in the world has been happier to find out he was “only” fired.
I digress.
One way to make sure that you’re creating value is to be where the value is created. I know that sounds circular, but understand that more than just working hard is required to create value. Another example:
I was living in Alaska, and loving it. I had a great job, loved the weather, friends, and the family loved the place. One day the phone at work rang. It was an old boss. Come to Houston, he said. He wanted me to work on a project that would impact the lives of (literally) millions of consumers, and be the biggest project of my life so far. We didn’t want to move, really, but the opportunity to work in the hottest (at the time) sector of the economy on a huge project was too much to turn down. Plus it was hard to breathe with all the money they were forcing down my throat. So we went.
In this instance, a small team was working on an investment of billions of dollars. The revenue per employee was massive. The team worked unconscionably long hours for years to put the project together and bring it to completion. I can count multiple days where my savings to the company was over a million dollars. And multiple days where I had to ignore huge problems to go work on even bigger problems.
Creating value was easy in such a target-rich environment, as was working 14 hour days and not exercising. But the food was awesome and the houses were cheap because Houston is as hot as the surface of the Sun.
In the end? The projects were finished. And me, too. I moved on to another economic sector, but my big lesson was: If you want to find an easy way create value, go to where the big money is changing hands.
Makes logical sense, as Spock might have said . . .
Another short post – the notes for the second half of this post will show up in Monday’s post, since they are broader in nature, and provide a better understanding of the workings of the world economy and didn’t really fit well with the above stuff. But enough shop talk . . .
