The Economist is, as usual, not untrue but a bit harsh. Many people born in previous decades, including me, have thought in terms of "mission accomplished, so I'm entitled to a promotion". But the metaphor, career as a video game, is apt.
In today's economy, the video game no longer works as advertised. Missions accomplished are being quickly replaced by even more arduous missions to accomplish. But the promotions and bonuses to sweeten the journey, which were a part of the deal, are no longer happening. This heightens the angst in the zeitgiest, we all feel like smashing our broken Nintendos.
So, it was refreshing to hear a different metaphor on Radio 4 last week.
Sean B Carroll describes the careers of biologists following in Darwin's footsteps; these careers were not games but adventures, defined by both spirit and deed. Carroll picked this phrase, adventure being defined by both spirit and deed, from CW Ceram, who wrote about "archaeology as a wonderful combination of high adventure, romance, history and scholarship".
This spirit of adventure - with its acknowledgment that every career is a journey into the vast unknown, where the familiar rules no longer apply, where one will make fast friends and combat appalling evil, where there is the possiblity of both spectacular success and awful tragedy, a journey which is essentially a journey of the spirit in which the greatest challenge is to find truth and integrity - this spirit of adventure is sadly missing in corporate life.
Can this spirit be introduced? Individually, yes. A lot of this spirit probably does exist, in private. But institutionally? Maybe...though I'm not about to ask the HR staff to inject the spirit of adventure into my workplace.
3 comments:
Loved both the video game and the adventure analogies. I have a different parallel to share.
Don't know if you've read Stephen Covey- his 2nd habit is 'Begin with the End in Mind'...Now for a long time, through school, college, early work years - this was almost axiomatic in the way I functioned - you have to set goals, translate those into actions, then go out and execute...and when those goals are achieved, you go out and set new goals. Doesn't matter if you have set them yourself, or if they have been set for you - essentially your actions are goal directed.
Then I came across Steve Jobs' address to the Standord grads - where he stressed the importance of just 'going with the flow' and connecting the dots...dots you may not even realise existed in your hoard of experiences, till you connected them. As an example, he said that he took caligraphy classes when at school, not with no larger intent in mind than merely the fact that it intrigued him. And many years later, when putting together the Mac OS, that came in handly when he created fonts that looked good and changed the paradigm of how text appears on computers. And I realised that a lot of my life was that way too - entirely in keeping with 'the spirit of adventure'.
Now the question is whether these two positions are exclusive and cannot be reconciled, or whether it is possible to believe in both. The way I've run my business last 3 yrs is entirely in the spirit of going with the flow, but I have also done a lot of things in the classic goal-directed manner as well.
Thanks Sriram.
I really like the Steve Jobs story about learning calligraphy because it intrigued him. The fact that Steve Jobs became rich and famous, and used that knowledge at work, is actually incidental. Maybe exploring fascinations should be an end in itself, a part of education, a part of the adventure.
I think Indy Jones (or rather Harrison Ford's charisma) is a better poster boy than CW Ceram. HBR ran a whole series of articles about stuff that happens at night, off the clock, moonlighting (i.e., not day job), and often without pay was the most creative and enjoyable. Now if I can only make the students buy into " ...lookin for fun, and feelin groovy" That's so 60s, I suspect
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