The Diminishing Returns of Productivity Culture

marketingscoops

Apr 25

akindo/Getty Images

In 2006, Karen Ho was an anthropology student at Princeton. She wanted to study the culture of Wall Street, and she understood that the easiest way to gain real access was to work there herself. She had virtually no qualifying experience, but because she was a student at Princeton — one of the handful of schools that Wall Street firms deem acceptable in their search for the 'best of the best' — she was able to finagle a low level position.

With time, she built enough connections and trust that dozens of bankers agreed to sit with her for an interview. The resultant book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, came out in 2009. There's a passage from one of Ho's interviews that, as the kids say, lives in my mind rent-free. She's talking to a banker about his preference for the sort of work ethic you find on Wall Street:

If you go to the outside world and you start working with people, people just are not motivated in the same way. It is just a pain in the ass to get anything done in the real world. People leave work at five, six p.m. People take one-hour lunch breaks, and people do this and that and whatever.

Believe me, it makes a big deal, because if you are working with people who all work real hard to do whatever it takes to get things done, it just makes things so much easier. And doing things is what makes people feel good about their life and makes them feel important. This is the whole self-worth thing — to complete and do things.

He talks a little about how he thinks workers in big corporations and the academy just aren't as motivated — they lack ambition, or:

I think in the old days, back in the fifties or sixties, people kind of just had a set pattern of life. They went to work, climbed the ladder slowly, and did whatever they were told. I think now that people are so seduced by the capabilities that you can jump ahead and how much difference you can make, how important you can feel or whatever it is that gets you off…

He's referring to the 'Organization Man' approach to work — made possible, at least for white men, by the middle-class security of the post-war period. Who needs manic ambition when you're not terrified of falling from your class position? But then he finishes with:

It feels like now, you can get a lot done, be really productive, and it is seductive. And that is why people who have more than enough money…more than enough respect, still are involved in this at the expense of their families because they need to feel needed. And there is nothing better than to complete thing on a regular basis.

There's something great about this dude with so much confidence in his approach to life that he doesn't have to dress up what he gives him self-worth ("completing and doing things") and his addiction to it. Productivity is what gets him off. Everyone else just doesn't understand the thrill of completing things on a regular basis......

Continue reading....

By: Anne Helen Petersen

Source: The Diminishing Returns of Productivity Culture