Are we doing the right kind of work?
We're doing more of the work involved in delivering products and services daily. The busyness takes us away from the kind of value we seek.
I love reading. Actual paper books—hardcover, if possible—are my preference. Culture, social commentary, and history are some of my favorite topics. As you can see from the current series, it’s possible to have all three in well-written fiction.
Poems, screenplays, theatrical works, operas, literary novels, biographies—they all help me understand the world and the humans in it a little more. I’ve read encyclopedias and correspondence between people that held my interest.
But product support manuals? Not so much. They don’t even help me understand how the thing they were written for works. And yet, if you buy a product—any product—or pay for service, you end up doing most of the work.
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I still remember when my phone became not-so-smart, after all. Three calls to support left me trying to figure out how to recover from the wreck of advice I got. It wasn’t lost on me that the agent was reading from instructions. He didn’t know.
That must be the ultimate irony. Enough outsourcing of competence and eventually you bump against no knowledge at all. The ultimate Peter Principle.1
Also, a manual can be useful. But only when the writer takes the point of view of the reader. In fact, I solved the technical glitch by thinking like the phone. I know, it sounds weird to say it out loud.
Another example is the phone tree at the doctor’s. Because the system has to take into account a number of variables—are you sick? Do you need an appointment? A referral? Where there changes to your insurance?—it requires careful selection and a long wait.
That takes time and attention away from other things you could be doing. And when you get to a person, it’s usually an answering service person, not the nurse or staff at the office.
The disconnect between online check-in and baggage drop-off in another source of personal effort. And a waste of time as you stand in line. Because why would you pay additional gate agents when you have people trained to go online to check-in?
While we’re at it, I do miss travel agents. These days, I juggle all the booking, hoping an algorithm is not charging me more than the next person, the reviews were genuine, and generally to get lucky. When it comes to travel, the emotional component can overwhelm.
Self-service check-outs at supermarkets in another example. I studiously avoid them, unless I’m at IKEA, where it’s the only option. They’re a horrible excuse to shift the physical work of figuring out codes and bagging to the customer.
Bucking the trend, Dutch Jumbo Supermarket in Vlijmen, Netherlands recently introduced a slow cash register for people who want to talk while checking out. It’s an initiative launched by the Dutch government.
“We are proud our staff want to work the chat checkout. They really want to help people and make contact with them. It’s a small gesture but it’s a valuable one, particularly in a world that is becoming more digital and faster.”
Colette Cloosterman-Van Eerd, Jumbo CCO
I love shopping at Trader Joe’s for the same reason. Check-out staff is efficient, helpful, and usually cheerful. I don’t mind the physical effort of bagging. I know exactly how I’m going to unpack at home—I group items in the cart based on where they’ll go. And I bring my own bags.
(I was surprised to see that liquor stores in some townships have done away with bags in a recent wine expedition. I live in Pennsylvania, state liquor stores. Sadly. Their selection of Piedmont wines is consistently poor and unremarkable.)
Management consultants dress up the shift of work from producer and supplier to customer as ‘customization’ and ‘convenience.’ I see it as avoidance of accountability, with a related loss of agency for the customer. You have fewer choices.
Gaps in value
There are more demands on our time. Which increase the level of stress and anxiety we feel. Karl Marx was keen on understanding where value comes from, how commodities are exchanged, and what money is.
As he thought about the variables that made up the ‘political economy’ (he didn’t call it capitalism), he noticed gaps. Surplus value was in that gap. The theory of surplus value helps explain the cycles of boom and bust.
But also the unpaid work you and I do daily—for social media as for companies.
They’re transferring their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus value themselves. It happens over and over again. Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing with.
John Lancaster, Marx at 193
We’re drowning in uninformed opinion when we want advice, and the services are worse than they were before. I won’t go down the rabbit hole of tech parasites. These companies extract profit from industries without adding any actual value in the end.
Ted Gioia writes often about the collapse of value in the music and entertainment business. The real disruption brought on by Spotify was to the livelihood of artists. Big studios build brand franchises on old tales.
But nowhere we do more unpaid clerical work than, well, at work. Have you notice how assistants and secretaries disappeared? Sometimes even personnel or human resources. There’s ‘self-service’ software for travel, expenses, HR, procurement.
The companies that sell the software systems say they save money and ‘empower’ workers. Monetary saving for the company is a loss of productivity for the employee, especially when the systems don’t work. Because, of course you do the work to figure out what’s wrong with them.
“Don’t empower me. Pay me.”
(Entrepreneur Cindy Gallup would say that)
If you’re brave and have read Marx, or John Lancaster’s more accessible take on the evolution of capitalism (links below), you will know that he had not envisioned the erosion of natural resources. Indeed, we have work to do there.
We’ve also eroded the roster of options. Nowhere is this a bigger problem than with airlines and routes. Here we have both low quantity and quality. I’ve experienced my hub airport go from five international carriers to one. With little competition, the quality is just not there.
We need to broaden our definition of value beyond its current limits, which are many. What we value does change, depending on the context and situation. Bain & Co. says there are building blocks to value. Their assumptions cast us as ‘consumers’ and companies as entities that want to create opportunities for themselves.
Their scheme builds upon the hierarchy of needs that is not really as neat a hierarchy, using a pyramid format that wasn’t Maslow’s. It’s a convenient shorthand. So the narrative goes—repeat an incorrect premise enough, and nobody questions it anymore.
When we talk about humans, the needs are more like a ladder. They overlap and build on each other.
For example, I can tell you that when said airline drags its feet for forty days to solve a simple issue, the hassle and effort are emotional, demotivating, and do have social impact. The negative side is all around and across.
My representation of human needs includes the spiritual sphere. Companies that understand the blank space, that see the gaps in service (e.g., escalate an issue after the second call with no resolution) create more value—for themselves and others.
Unfortunately, the way we measure value—perceived or real—is wrong. Because our measuring stick converts everything into money and everything that can’t be easily converted into subjectivity. Therefore we continue to optimize quality out of it.
If you read the news, it looks like we’re stuck at security & safety on both sides of the ladder. Which could hamper our ability to give and receive love. Public conversations have become a shouting match, while private hopes are a return to sanity.
The positive is also in the gaps. We’re not going to see any of it in the news where madness passes for brilliance and dysfunction sells—it has since before P.T. Barnum made an art of it. And we’re immersed in this culture, especially in America.
It’s easier to observe and appreciate the nuance of being human within competing forces in fiction. We’re removed from the scene—either in time, like with historical works, or in space and voice.
In the next two parts of ‘How to Read Fiction’ I’ll expand on these points.
Supporters can find additional insights in the vault.
References:
‘Dutch Supermarket Adds “Slow Checkout Lanes” for Senior Citizens Who Could Use a Chat,’ Regina Sierna, My Modern Met (Dec 2022)
‘Marx at 193,’ John Lancaster, London Review of Books (April 2012)
Marx, Karl, Das Kapital (1867; translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, 1887)
‘Why is Music Journalism Collapsing?’ Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker
Ritzer, George, The McDonaldization of Society (SAGE Publications, 2014)
‘We are all secretaries now,’ Sarah O’Connor, Financial Times (March 2023)
‘The Elements of Value,’ Eric Almquist, John Senior, Nicolas Bloch, HBR (Sept 2016)
‘How an engineering company defined value,’ On Value in Culture
Developed by Laurence J. Peter. People in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence.” When you promote a person based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. Skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.