Pleasing the Burger King
Originally published on August 9, 2010
Emergency. Sense of Urgency. Project A. Project B. Project C. Needs to be done yesterday. Stress moves us, but also exhausts. What is Project B, and how does it compare in urgency to Project C, or A? Am I going to even remember what any of these projects were which made me feel as if my life were on the line? Will they fulfill on their promise to change the world in some way? How many projects have an impact -a long lasting one that deserves an exchange for my life? The stress of every project takes a bit out of me. I believe that it eats away at my life span just like smoking cigarettes.
Who am I working for, and why are they so important in my life? Some leaders know what they’re doing. Most leaders are driven by self-righteousness and impose projects which have no purpose, and provides no value to society. Millions of dollars are spent on one person’s half-baked idea. An idea with no research. An ill-informed idea out of touch with what their audience is concerned about.
At Adobe, thousands of dollars are spent on the color of buttons, 4 pages, fake benchmarking graphics. Who are the people who are spending this money and how many jobs are affected in their failure? We call them ‘stakeholders’, but is it really their jobs that are at stake or those who ‘fail’ to meet their baseless projects?
Names. We are a corporate society which puts a lot of weight into names. We stress about pleasing ‘Anne’, ‘Andy’, ‘Jonny’, without question. The only thing that matters is that they make decisions which they are inclined to think are ‘golden’, regardless of those who may know the market better than them. We forget that they are individuals. Individuals carry with their own aesthetics. The smart ones know how to separate their aesthetics and to trust those who understand the market better than them. They are the ‘gods’ of our industry and we must please them in order to ‘survive’. We sacrifice what we know is right based on numbers, and from being ‘in the weeds’. Most of us know how to separate our aesthetics from understanding. And yet we ‘stress’ because we are forced to do work that is based on ignorance.
Workload is not necessarily in proportion to stress. However, workload has become synonymous with stress because we are forced to do work without understanding or the belief in what we’re doing is right. To a person who believes in their work, that their work has a purpose, the amount of time put into it yields not stress, but a huge sense of accomplishment upon completion. For this person knows the virtue of their toil. They understood the purpose from the beginning and have come to an agreement with its value. These are the projects that will have/deserve true names and memories associated with them. For these are the projects from which they grow.
The leaders of these projects are those we come to respect. They come down from their perch, and speak to us in a language we can all understand. They trust us, and we trust them. They know that they are not designers. They know that they are not experts at information architecture. They trust us and create projects, and spend their money on informed sources, on people, not on numbers. If you give those a choice between A or B it is still your A or B they are deciding on. There is no C, D, E, etc.. Intelligent leaders understand this, and are not afraid to take risks, not afraid of challenging the ‘Bean Counters’ who have somehow made it to the top. They also understand that the perpetually changing societal events which shape our world shape business, and that adapting their business model must follow in synch. And thus, consultation with those whose expertise they lack must be part of an evolving workflow.
Anyone who watches ‘A day in the life of Adobe’, being one of the ‘Top companies to work for’, can see that it is not about the work, but about the life outside of work that our workplace provides. Shouldn’t it be more about believing in the work that we do?
