A letter to Messrs Hagel III, Seely Brown & Davison

Sirs,

Last Friday I finished reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (italics yours).

Okay, I was in a foul mood as British Midlands had waited until the very last minute before canceling my connecting flight from Brussels to Edinburgh and I was in danger of missing a wedding in Scotland the next day.  But, hell, your book came recommended by The Economist so I figured that there must be some sort of big idea in there.

I was intrigued (as intended) when you cited a group of big wave surfers from Maui as an example of 'Pull' in the Introduction.  It was nice that you followed up with Li & Fung, the hundred year old, Hong Kong-based fashion outsourcing business in Chapter 1.  And I admit that I was drawn in by the breathless description of the global effort to re-encrypt Twitter so that Iranian dissidents could keep on communicating after the fraudulent elections in June last year in Chapter 2.  Well done for using the SAP Developer Network and PortalPlayer to bring us readers back to the realities of the commercial world before moving onto Chapter 3.

But that was pretty much it.

These weren't just a few quirky examples, drawn from many, of vastly different but equally successful enterprises that had mastered this new 'Pull' thing.  They were pretty much the only examples (italics mine).

By the time we got to p. 167 we were at the banal heart of your argument.  The magic that attracts the people your life needs to you is your 'passion'.  The good news is anyone can have it provided they want it enough: -

The truth is that virtually any type of work can become the focus for passion.  Many auto-repair mechanics are passionate about cars and knowing what makes them run.  Carpenters can take great delight in building things that are beautiful and enduring.

Really?  Mechanics and carpenters?  That's it?  Your hat-tip to all those drones who don't have jobs as interesting as yours is, "Jesus.  Oh, and the guy who fixes my Prius"?

Maybe this would have gone down easier if I hadn't finished the amazing NYT piece from 2000 about work in a North Carolina slaughterhouse on the plane from Vienna to Brussels: -

Up to 16 million shoulders a year come down that line here at the Smithfield Packing Co., the largest pork production plant in the world. That works out to about 32,000 a shift, 63 a minute, one every 17 seconds for each worker for eight and a half hours a day. The first time you stare down at that belt you know your body is going to give in way before the machine ever will.

Not sure that there's much room for passion in that workplace.  Perhaps things have improved in the ten years since the Times article but I doubt it.  I'd bet that the same mix of racial competition, implied violence and race-to-the-bottom working conditions keeps Smithfield Packing profitable at the expense of their employees.

That's not to say that you don't know your readership.  We're all afflicted by 'illusory superiority', that cognitive bias better known as the Lake Woebegone effect ("where all the children are above average").  It's what keeps us upgrading to the latest version of prosumer software like FinalCut Pro and promising ourselves that next year we'll make it to SWSX and buying books like yours as soon as we read about them in The Economist.  But we're not everyone.  We're not even close.

To my mind many of those farmers and food processors and street sweepers and nurses and cops whose job it is to meet the first two layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (ie 'physiological' and 'safety') will struggle to consistently inject passion into their working days.  On a good day, sure, but not every day.  As my father told me when I complained that my first paid job was boring: -

If it was always fun they wouldn't pay you to do it.

By all means write your book and, caveat emptor, market it any way you want.  Just don't pretend that you've hit upon some ground-breaking reevaluation of all work.  Better technology leading to greater interconnectivity does mean that many 'knowledge worker' jobs will be done better by passionate people working in a more connected way.  Spare me the conceit that every workplace can be rendered artisanal.

Seth Godin, I'm looking at you too.