Member-only story
Guaranteed Calamity: We Don’t Pay You To Think
We know we’re in trouble when people’s thoughts are a problem. And yet, the same thoughts from the same people may be the solution. Are we ready to change?
When somebody’s thoughts are a problem, we know the real problem is elsewhere and graver then we may have initially thought. Luckily, most of the time the situation is reversible and even susceptible of being used to improve the original state.
It is a classic: the well-meaning worker who truly believes in the work, who spends time outside the job to come up with ideas that will make things better, not for him but for the team, for the collective, for the venture, the enthusiastic worker who is then met by the busy boss whose time is too precious to waste on minions, minions who are repeatedly told, however enthusiastic they may appear, that they are paid to be minions, not to think.
‘We don’t pay you to think’ is a classic and probably one of the clearest symptoms of a moribund organisation, or at least of an organisation that is seriously sick, that suffers from a sickness that will inevitably spread and eventually cause it to degenerate unless an intervention is soon put in place.