This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“You weren’t born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were trained to become a cog. | There’s an alternative available to you. Becoming a linchpin is a stepwise process, a path in which you develop the attributes that make you indispensable. You can train yourself to matter. The first step is the most difficult, the step where you acknowledge that this is a skill, and like all skills, you can (and will) get better at it. Every day, if you focus on the gifts, art, and connections that characterize the linchpin, you’ll become a little more indispensable.” – Seth Godin, Introduction, Page 6
“Here’s the problem, which you’ve already guessed. If you make your business possible to
replicate, you’re not going to be the one to replicate it. Others will.
If you build a business filled with rules and procedures that are
designed to allow you to hire cheap people, you will have to produce a product
without humanity or personalization or connection. Which means you’ll have to lower your prices
to compete. Which leads to a race to the
bottom. | Indispensable businesses race to the top
instead.” – Seth Godin, The New World of Work, Page 11
“When your organization becomes more human, more remarkable,
faster on its feet, and more likely to connect with customers, it becomes
indispensable. The very thing that made
your employee a linchpin makes YOU a linchpin.
An organization of indispensable people doing important work is
remarkable, profitable, and indispensable in and of itself.” – Seth Godin, Thinking
About Your Choice, Page 35-36
Is This An Overview?
People are trained and educated to be cogs. Cogs are dispensable people. Cogs exchange their thinking ability for an
instruction manual, and do not take responsibility for decisions. Linchpins are indispensable people who make a
difference. A linchpin is not labor or
management. A linchpin is someone who
can figure out how to make valuable decisions that enable everything to happen. Linchpin’s decisions are creative,
passionate, have emotional work, lead others, and make human connections. Everyone has the capacity to learn to develop
the skills to become indispensable.
While cogs can be mistreated, because cogs are
replaceable. Linchpins have to be
treated better because linchpins cannot be readily replaced. For manages, what makes employees linchpins,
makes the manager and organization a linchpin.
For an organization that has indispensable people, develop products that
are indispensable.
Caveats?
This book is marketing what is known as the culture of
innovation, that everyone can contribute to the decision making process. Innovation is needed, but there are limits to
the culture of innovation which are based on scarcities such as of time,
resources, and attention. People already
spend their time working, and businesses are meant for efficient
organization.
This book is primarily a motivation book, in trying to get
everyone to become a linchpin. The
explanation method is to share examples of other people’s work, or abstract
claims about what linchpins can do. To
better understand various characteristics of what makes a linchpin, such as the
emotional work, would require more research from books more capable on those
subjects.
Although education has problems, the attacks on education
are counterproductive. Education can
make people cogs, but education can also enable people to figure out how to
improve the ideas and systems that people care about. What it takes is for people to want to learn
beyond what an educational system provides.
Having a system filled with indispensable people is fragile. Should a single person leave, there could be vast
negative consequences for the continuation of the business. Cogs might not be as productive, but cogs can
be replaced without breaking a system that is working. The initially indispensable people should
train and educate others to become better, but that would also result in the
indispensable people becoming dispensable.
