Today I read an article by marketing guru Seth Godin called “Everyone Gets Paid on Commission.” In it, he recounts a story about a Washington Post columnist who was laid off because his column on their web site wasn’t getting enough traffic. He argues that we should all expect this kind of hyper-measurability in our future, and expect ourselves to be treated the same.
Godin writes: “If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don’t, it’s hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.”
I think that with such a new discipline, it’s a slippery slope to use web measurement statistics, which are akin to a popularity contest, to flush away people’s careers. Web traffic is NOT a measurement of how good a writer or journalist someone is. It’s only an indication of how good that writing is being marketed to the potential audience.
I’m all for personal accountability and keeping up with the technological advances. However, some people were trained and raised to be thoughtful writers and great technicians. Some work takes months or years to bear fruit. And the work of some writers is subject to traffic that a different department is responsible for guiding on a web site. If their web page placement, headlines, inclusion in daily news bulletins, and other methods designed to drive traffic to the columnist’s article are under someone else’s control, people could be flushed away due to the whims of some kid in a department in another state that they have no chance to woo or influence.
Sure, we can promote our own work and learn to drive eyeballs to our own columns. I totally agree that is the wave of the future. We have rapid evolution in technology, and regularly wash out obsolete people and companies in a brutal survival of the fittest battle. But to fire people TODAY for something that was not in their job descriptions in the first place, without first offering them some opportunities to learn the new ways of the dog-eat-dog world, is cruel. In fact, it’s a great way to flush out all your employees aged 50 and over, many of whom have been slower to come to the web self-promotion table.
I think that if this new hyper-measurability is going to become part of our new reality, and one’s technical competence no longer matters as long as one can prove one’s popularity, the only fair thing to do is help the people of good quality learn all the new ways to become popular. A whole population was trained to be employees, not raised to be entrepreneurs. Many may need a total paradigm shift in order to take on this completely new mindset and compete on this micro-competitive level.
A little more compassion and assistance from the younger, more technically advanced generation would be useful. Let’s not replace all the brilliant minds with a bunch of slick Internet salespeople who sizzle with no substance.
Here’s an idea: how about pairing careers: put a great marketer with a brilliant mind? Now you have the best of both worlds, and a much better chance to dream up, build and market that Purple Cow. And both players have a heavy incentive to be successful. The marketer would be measured on how many eyeballs are driven to the columnist’s page, and the columnist would be measured on how many repeat visitors come back for the quality of the writing. If we rise and fall together, we can create synergy and mutual accountability that doesn’t sacrifice quality for raw popularity.
People are more than numbers, and companies need to keep this equation in mind before flushing their employees down the toilet. Perhaps the new legal trend in workplace age discrimination law will center around ruthless companies using this kind of shallow number crunching to get rid of older, more expensive employees and wriggle out of paying them for pensions and health care benefits.
So, a note to bottom line bean counters: remember the human factor, and help older employees transition to the brave new world, and avoid costly litigation. Hint, hint!
