A Tale of Two Sides

It dawned on me the other day, that there are two types of people in this world, those who work for others and those who work for themselves. Every adult on this planet fits into one or the other. Before you start to refute this statement, a beggar, or one who chooses to do nothing, is actually self-employed. This fundamental difference impacts the way we look at the world as individuals, in later life.


The way we think, the way we behave, and our response to external stimuli are completely different based on which side of the fence we decided (probably very early on) to pitch our tent. This becomes very obvious if one happens to know people who squat on either side. There is a huge difference between the mindset of an entrepreneur and that of a working man. Most major companies want to inculcate the entrepreneurial spirit, precisely because it is non-existent. Now imagine how futile that exercise is!! The pursuit of a quality that is in complete contradiction to one, that needs to abide by the rules, processes and guidelines being hammered down day after day. It is like looking for a snowball in an oven!


Some organisations are better at harnessing this ephemeral quality than others. Organisations that are heavily dependent on the skills of its people or the nimbleness of their service offering will be better, than corporations that are driven by processes and flowcharts. We have all cut our teeth on the stories of people who forged the future of corporations through unconventional actions or approach. But these are legends precisely because they are exceptions. Normality is just the opposite, where any unorthodoxy (be it an idea or a person) is described as "interesting" or "unique", thereby quickly consigned to a footnote in the obituary of a sunk career.


People, who work for themselves, are unfettered in their dreams and ambitions, and that is the reason they work for themselves. They have huge self belief, are highly energised and know that nothing is impossible. For the same reasons, they cannot survive for long in an oxygen deprived corporate environment. I used to work with two guys who were dreamers at heart, but through lack of self awareness or options, worked in an MNC. They chaffed at the boundaries, rules and brackets the organization imposed on them, till they decided to take the leap to self-dependence. One jumped quite a long time ago, and is currently living a life that, in my emasculated state, I cannot even dream about - and the other has stepped out recently and hence is still flapping his growing wings. Neither of these guys was motivated by greed. Rather their dreams were just too big for the company they worked in. Both wanted more in terms of gratification, than a conventional "career" could ever provide.

The working man on the other hand is comfortable in taking his direction from others. His outlook is narrower, and blinkers limit his peripheral vision. Quite often he is plagued by self doubt, and his idea of extreme bravery is to jump from one organisation to another. This is not an indictment on his mental capacity or his intelligence, in fact quite the opposite. The most intelligent people I know work for others. It is just the way that their brains are wired or molded in their youth. They need someone else to extract that intelligence and put it to use. Unfortunately in this bargain he loses, since the employer always gets much more value than the employee.

The sum total of a working man's ambition is to increase his paycheck to beat inflation. A promotion masks this as a challenge of a job at a higher level, though reporting to someone else. Quite funny if you think about it. All corporate careers and high flying jobs at the end of it are exactly that - working for someone else. The wonders of our modern matrix organisations sometimes take away even the small comfort of having one reporting line. We now have multiple bosses - you get three for the price of one. What a bargain!! All our lives we are prodded to climb the career ladder, only to find more rungs above, and just like the children’s game of snakes and ladders, a chance landing on a snake means you go back a few paces (sometimes all the way back to start).

A working man's career progression is aptly described below in Alexander Pope's - An Essay on Criticism
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount over vales, and seem to tread the sky,
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labors of the lenghtened way,
The increasing prospects tire our wandering eyes,
Hills peep over hills, and Alps on Alps arise!


Neither path is wrong or right, good or bad - just what suits each individual. What, to me is sad, is a working grunt pretending to be a hot shot. Like any humble laborer, he has to wait till the end of the month to get his cheque, whether it is to feed his family or pay for his Porsche. The value of his services are dictated, not by his capacity, but by scales and structures. His annual bonus is a function of a formula, rather than the worth of his contribution.

Sad is also the pretence at leadership, when all one leads are other indentured minions. One does not get to choose their boss, and very often not even their subordinates. They are legacies handed over to you like a Patek Philipe watch, to be taken care of for the next generation. Same goes for you, as you are put into the nurturing care of a succession of line managers, where every step up is credited to the studied grooming of your boss, and every trip-up, your own doing. And before you know it, a young puppy is handing you a gold watch, as he felicitates your life's achievements, which will be forgotten even before the next days sunrise hits your office window.

Another trait that continually fascinates me is, when a working stiff believes that his job is worth more than it actually is, in terms of net value addition to humanity. I have never understood the arrogance amongst some of my finance counterparts - do they really think that balancing the books and making entries (however complex) actually means anything in the bigger scheme of things? I used to think it quite depressing that the pinnacle of one’s achievement was to close the books a day earlier, until I saw more upwardly mobile colleagues caught in endless telecoms, or confined miserably for days on end, listening to a series of presentations by people whose communication skills had been honed in the middle ages. The mind numbing paralysis of indecisive executives, having brought me to my knees, make me look fondly back at simpler days, when the monthly closing of the books, made me feel like the master of the universe.

I am sure that there are statistics on the ratios of self employed people to employed people, and I believe that the latter are in the greater majority. Hence a lot of you dear readers will, just like me, be working class heroes. It is quite natural that you will take umbrage at some of my observations. Being one of you, I understand the imperatives that drive our behaviour. If you have worked for more than 5 years in a big organisation, I can guarantee you that you have already been conditioned to zoom in on threats, and be blindsided by the opportunities. Take a deep breath and reflect. If quiet deliberation does not quell your objections, please do let me have your contrarian views. I would be most interested to hear them.