Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't)

Cooperate-Cooperate, Betray-Cooperate, or Betray-Betray.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game

In the golden era we imagine the corporate worker relations was a cooperate cooperate game, producing hard work, good will, and strong meaningful community for everyone.

Then corporations realized they needed workers to cooperate while reserving the right to betray them (layoffs, terminations etc) because as the market grew more cut throat due to everyone's success, a company needed to stay lean and competitive.

Workers are now growing wise to this and we are entering a betray-betray era. Corperations are working to force cooperation while reserving the right to betray (see google/apple/facebook engineering cartel) but workers in high demand fields are becoming savvy as they can use their skills to go anywhere

The problem is the net result of the betray-betray game is assumed to be net lower than the other strategy to play the game, causing the community at large to gain less over multiple games.

To me this is the net result of cynicism: damaging the community in the name of optimization. Capitalism as practiced is a pain-optimization machine and until we choose to risk playing the game as a cooperative endeavor, it will never improve.

The new system is not 'better' than the old system, and is probably significantly worse. While it's true that Welch's advice is no longer valid, it's because the legal, financial, and monetary environment has changed so much since the heydays of GE.

My grandfather retired a millionaire after working as a basic GE accountant for his entire postwar life. So as far as he was concerned, GE treated him well, and it treated his family well enough that my mother still remembers the Christmas parties that the company threw in upstate New York for their genuine human warmth.

When I compare how GE treated my grandfather versus how my father was treated by the companies that he worked for (taking the ambitious, go-getter advice), I am struck by how poorly he was served by both that and the overall cultural structure of the United States. My grandfather survived a Nazi prison camp for the US Government, and his weeks of eating grass soup paid off.

So to people saying that Welch's advice was psychopathic bullshit, I say sucks to you. Grandpa worked 9-5 for Jack, was not a particularly ambitious man, and came out way ahead in return for his loyalty. While surely this did not work for everyone, it did for enough of the people for stories like this to be common.

My perspective is entirely different -- because the US no longer rewards loyalty in either the public or private spheres. It is in fact punished, as this writer notes. How exactly can you build a company that lasts for longer than a relative eyeblink when every person is looking out for #1, and expects to be stabbed in the ass by everyone around them?

LinkedIn is a pain in the ass. Propagandizing for yourself to eke out a good living and career hopping all over the country is a pain in the ass. Both activities are tangential to producing profitable work over a long period of time. Every jackass who wants to get a VP position has to be a hot air spewing 'thought leader' now. This is all wasteful activity that defeats the entire economic purpose of firms.

The modern cynicism is corrosive to our long term prospects as a country, even if it is correct individual advice for the current environment. It will not survive, because this country will not survive as a single entity given such broken incentives and cultural mores.

The reason that successful people tend to give such useless advice about how to be successful is that most of them do not recognize how much of their success is due to luck. There is a tendency of humans to minimize the degree to which luck contributes to their success. The also tend to minimize how various advantages they were born with (social status etc.). Basically successful people want to believe that their success is 100% due to their brilliance and ability and anyone could replicate it if only they worked as hard as they did. When confronted with trying to explain how they became successful, they resort to all sorts of silly sounding platitudes.

Yeah, after reading about a dozen of these over the years, it's just depressing.

Look at it this way: success in life is 1/3 working hard, 1/3 working smart, and 1/3 being lucky.

You might ditch the first two and get really lucky. Or not. Your best bet is to do all three. Even then, guess what, little snowflake? You're not that special, and you may only have bad luck.

So what? If you're doing something you have passion about, or if you ever grow up enough to learn to create your own passion as you go along, you're going to be doing the first two things anyway. So this isn't about some secret formula to get what you want; this is about just doing something more fulfilling in life than taking up space and seeking to self-stimulate. Might be worthwhile. Who knows?

Yep, the old days of "I'll be loyal to the company and the company will be loyal to me" are gone. But that was just a tiny piece of the big picture. Simply because some of the details shift around doesn't mean the basics have changed that much. Good grief.

ADD: The more I think about this article, the more it bugs me. So the advice is don't try to impress your boss because he won't be around long? How about just trying to be a pleasant, hard-working, reliable person that other people find enjoyable to work with, boss or not? Or do we sulk around wondering why we should do anything at all unless there's something directly in it for us?

I found that it is very important to have enough free capital (energy, money) to catch opportunities when they come. If you work constantly at limit of your strength and have no free energy to even explore, it is practically equivalent to being broke.

There's no real alternative offered here.

I understand there's a whole 'open' and 'small' world out there and I can learn lessons from my peers, but if I'm not supposed to be 'working hard for my boss' in the modern corporate world, what am I supposed to be doing to 'get there eventually'?

Here's how I think of it.

Smashing your shoulder against a heavy metal vault door as hard as you can over and over, hoping someone at the other side will eventually hear you and open the door is a waste of time. It results in burn-out with nearly no hope of progress.

Instead, you should examine the door and try to open it yourself with a very deliberate attempts of sound reasoning based on where the weak points of the door may be. And after awhile, you may even discover that you can walk around it... or maybe that door isn't blocking the path you should be on to begin with.

Warning -- this article (while it has some valid points) should trigger your "bullshit radar." Why?

It's very heavy on the "this guy is old so he couldn't possibly know what we need." And the problem is, that's a message that strongly appeals to the biases we on this site are likely to have.

Readers of this site tend to be young, smart, and highly motivated. Anything that smells like "I don't need lessons from the previous generation; I already have the right instincts because of my youth" will automatically appeal to us because it would be very exciting if it were true.

That alone doesn't make it false. But it means your internal "I better check myself for objectivity" flag should get triggered. Beyond that, though, look at how much of the article's content is devoted to this theme.

Probably half or more of the sentences are spent on this idea. When you're writing for public consumption, you have to learn to be terse and efficient. All those words spent on "geez, just look how old this guy is" are expensive. But the author deemed that the most effective use of words, because he is intentionally trying to play on your biases.

When someone is intentionally playing on your biases, look out. You might be having smoke blown up your ass (which the Surgeon General does not recommend).

I fully agree.

One must seriously consider his or her professional trajectory and major milestones. Companies these days don't allow for upward movement unless you're willing to spend a decade playing nice with the right people and consistently over-delivering. On the other hand, changing jobs from company to company likely benefits the employee much more by allowing him or her to enter in to a new role that they are fully qualified for. The same goes for pay, even if its a similar role. The primary goal of a Company is to pay the employee as little as possible in order to get the most out of them fulfilling their duties in the role that they were hired to fill. Having the boat rocked by folks changing roles (upward movement) or increasing salaries is something that each Company tries hard to avoid.

Jack presents good advice that still is an important part of culture in certain sectors and within certain types of businesses if you want to move up the corporate ladder. He says to work hard but also to work smart, I don't think he's saying number of hours worked or level of brown nosing positively correlates to return on efforts or dollars. You must have a career strategy and not just be a hamster running around a wheel. Work hard at that strategy and whether it means being promoted up the ladder every year in the same company or to deliver on something groundbreaking and then exiting within a couple years or less. In other news, I wonder how Jack and Tim Ferriss would get along.

It's easier to call out bad and outdated advice (Welch's) than to offer good advice, which the OP doesn't.

The problem with Welch's advice is that it's what successful people say, not what they do. You should pay attention to what unsuccessful people say and know (they're the ones who know the organization's true character) but what the successful people do. Take knowledge from the losers, but copy the actions (often unknowingly competent actions) of the winners.

I'm not a VC, haven't completed an exit, nor am I an executive or technical architect at a brand-name company. At age 30 and an IQ over 150, not being in a decision making role is failure. While I'm OK by objective standards, you should count me as unsuccessful, because I should be leading with my talent and I'm not, because I've picked some terrible startups. You should take advice from someone like me in terms of what I say. You shouldn't do what I do, because it obviously hasn't worked. Cognitively, I understand how to play politics; in the field, I'm bad at it.

Likewise, you should ignore what Jack Welch says but watch what he does. You should listen to what I say, but not copy my footwork. That's counterintuitive, for sure, but unknowing competence is superior to learned, analytical insight when you're in the field.

Basic point: what successful people say about the career game is the socially acceptable bullshit (work hard, over-deliver, never lie, be a team player) that has nothing to do with how it actually works. If they were the type who'd talk about how the career game actually works, they wouldn't be successful. They'd be pissing too many people off (like I do) by telling too many ugly truths.

Welch says: Don't panic. Just get in there and start thinking big. If your boss asks you for a report on the outlook for one of your company's products for the next year, you can be sure she already has a solid sense of the answer. So go beyond being the grunt assigned to confirm her hunch. Do the extra legwork and data-crunching to give her something that really expands her thinking -- an analysis, for instance, of how the entire industry might play out over the next three years.

Terrible fucking idea. Executives don't see a young grunt trying to work on the big picture as "initiative". (I learned this at Google when I pointed to a superior G+ Games strategy.) They see it as a challenge to their turf. They hit back hard, and they have all the power. It doesn't end well.

In reality, overperformance is a lot more dangerous than underperformance. Underperformance gives you about a 30% chance of being fired within 12 months, usually in the context of a layoff that affords severance. If you underperform smartly (and focus on building contacts and skills for your next gig) you'll have plenty of time and energy in reserve to tackle any consequences. Overperformance gives you a 5% chance of being tapped as protege of someone important and a 95% chance of being fired (usually with a dishonest but humiliating "performance" case being manufactured; if you're a star, your job duties will be rearranged so you can't perform) inside of 4 months. Not fucking worth it.

In general, this is even more true of VC-funded startups than large companies, so I don't want to hear the "startups are the antidote" retort. The median VC-funded startup is way more dysfunctional and political than, say, a large investment bank.

Uh, Beavis neoliberalism is cool, huh huh

I feel weird reading a piece on career advice by somebody who works at Microsoft.