
"All I do is work here" - pclark
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/07/all-i-do-is-work-here.html
======
raganwald
Is there a whoosh going on here or am I "playing baseball, standing out in
left field?" I guess I'm a fielder!

My perspective on the entire rant/essay/insight/whatever is that it is
summarized by its last line. If you want to take credit for your organization
when times are good, you cannot hide behind your powerlessness when times are
bad.

When I worked for K- G---- way back in the day, we built a hit product. I
milked that success for years. Imagine if I had stayed on board and things had
gone poorly after a few years. Could I later say, "I only work at KG, I don't
make decisions, the problems were elsewhere?"

My take on Seth's point is that I can't wear KG's success like a mantle while
weaseling out of association with its failures with talk of "I only worked
there, other people make the bad decisions."

It's ok to just punch a clock and do a job. But if you're going to try to
associate yourself with your organization during good times, you have to live
with the lumps during bad times.

JM2C, you may have read something else in this.

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Tichy
On the one hand I agree, on the other hand most people only work to earn
money. They don't consider themselves to be part of a huge, cool machine and
they don't see it as their sole reason of existence to enhance their employers
public image.

The real question would be how to make one's employees care about the company.
It's not trivial to set up a system where every employee can affect every
other's employee's actions - you don't want to encourage blame shifting and
mobbing, after all.

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prakash
I think this is a very important lesson for startups. Most medium & big
companies behave this way. Fix a customers problem, don't make excuses about
it not being part of your job, or someone else didn't step up.

~~~
adamc
I mostly agree, but the reason most medium and big companies behave this way
is that most employees are in fact wage slaves with little influence outside
of their direct purview. This is one of the inherent advantages of small
companies where a relatively high fraction of the work force has equity, and
where the bureaucracy is not yet powerful.

~~~
timwiseman
Very true and an excellent point.

Even so, I would expect a conscientious employee to at least make the effort
instead. At a bare minimum, instead of saying "That's not my job." they should
say, "I am sorry, I cannot help you with that, BUT the person who can is...."

~~~
undees
Exactly! I've worked for big companies that have done dumb things, and my
bosses and co-workers have consistently taken the attitude of, "I'm sorry this
has happened. I'm forwarding the information about this problem to so-and-so."
Then they've followed up a couple of weeks later with, "Did so-and-so get back
to you? Were they able to fix the problem?"

It's a nice example to try to live up to.

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tokenadult
"Do you really think someone who worked for Bernie Madoff will go far with
this line? 'I'm not Bernie, I just worked with him every day and took a great
salary when times were good...' Not sure what the difference is."

To answer the question I see posted in other replies to this interesting
submission (what brand is this?), I think Seth Godin is saying that people who
work for companies who feel that they, or their co-workers, can't work
ethically have to SPEAK UP to as many layers of management as possible, to let
management know that there is a problem, and that customers, suppliers, the
press, and other stakeholders are noticing.

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dmor
"It's a management problem..."

"It's a big company problem..."

No! It's YOUR problem if you are starting a company, building a brand, or
serving customers. It's not necessary a big company issue - it's a
"mentality". I've worked for a Fortune 500 where employees were too proud of
the culture to ever "pass the buck" and a startup where employees had a "big
company" mentality and thought it was okay to leave features broken for
customers for months (to the ultimate peril of the company). _If you're a
founder coming out of a big company beware of this potential blind spot._

Good company culture, good brand, happy employees - those things aren't
accidental or simply the result of a lot of money and freedom, you have to
cultivate it - and brand destruction or toxic culture starts with the little
things, like saying, "I just work here".

In my opinion, employees who contribute nothing more than "punching the clock"
should be the _best_ at towing the company line, because let's face it - if
you just punch the clock your are easily replaced, especially in today's job
market.

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mattmcknight
I see it as a problem with the company, not the just individual. If I walked
into the Nordstrom shoe department and said there was an error on my store
credit card bill, I bet the salesperson would get me on the path to fixing the
problem, not say, "I just work here."

I also see a problem with the individual. She is failing the basics of the
sales process. She calls up a person, someone obviously influential, as she
knows who he is, and asks him for something- time at the least. In return,
she's not willing to offer him anything? Even the phone number of the person
in the department that handles that stuff- someone in marketing that would
probably like a chance to speak to Seth Godin, even if it's a chance to get
some feedback from him?

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apowell
Who is Seth addressing? Is he talking to the individuals who 'work here'?

If so, why should they care -- they have good jobs, go home at night to their
friends or families, and leave work at work. They're supposed to care about
the company, brand, and 'big picture'....why, exactly?

~~~
brk
_why, exactly_

Because if they take an indifferent attitude it shows through to the
customers, who will take their business elsewhere, which will cause the
company to fail, which will cause the workers to end up jobless.

~~~
dasil003
It's a management failure. The employees are not going to magically get
excited and proactive about PR just because some out-of-touch Internet
marketing celeb thinks they should. It's management's job to make sure people
are trained properly in how to handle these situations, and also, more
importantly, to provide the clear vision and incentive that _makes_ people
care. Finally, if employees are hurting the image of the company, it's
management's job to fire them.

If a random employee starts taking up issues caused by other people in the
company, and there is no culture of communication or escalation procedure then
one likely outcome is that they are going to _waste their time_ and not get
their job done. That doesn't mean an employee shouldn't be proactive or
whatever, but just that in a large organization the solution can not come from
the bottom up.

------
dasil003
Anyone else get the feeling he's talking about Yahoo?

~~~
spolsky
I suspect it's the New York Times.

------
Ardit20
So this guy is a marketer. His posts are no longer than 500 words. So he sits
on his computer for 20 minutes has a rant and he gets on the front page of
hacker news. Has he said anything?

Oh I just work here, he sounds like a 10 year old kid having a rant about his
friend.

Let me refute him. I used to work in a call centre. Some people there were
pretty irresponsible, like not taking someone off the list when asked. I just
did my job and got paid, so if someone wanted to be taken off the list and not
be called I was glad to do it. So, I am me, I am not my company, I am an
individual, and I take responsibility for my own actions, not the companies
action, unless I am the CEO.

Now, what can be done about these marketers?

~~~
Confusion
Godin isn't writing about some call centre. He isn't writing about people
working at some random company. He's writing about people working at a
_brand_. And he provides a reason for why that brand may be failing. For
anyone working to establish or consolidate a brand, this is a valuable
insight: your employees are an important part of your brand. Make sure they
care.

This partly holds for any company: if a colleague of mine delivers bad work,
people will throw nasty glances at me when they hear I work at the same
company. Now you can go all "they shouldn't do that" on me, but that's just
sticking your head deeper in the sand and refusing to acknowledge this
reality, in which you live with people that think and judge that way.
Therefore, I will criticise any colleague whose work isn't up to par.

~~~
koepked
I could picture this comment chain almost as soon as the story was posted. I'm
with Ardit20, had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed
as a rant, but when people see sethgodin.typepad.com, it becomes a _valuable
insight_.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant_

And that would have been a mistake, because this isn't really a rant. Its
formal _structure_ is that of a complaint, but in fact it is a short essay,
_in complaint form_ , about the nature of branding and company culture.

Why doesn't this count as a rant? There's no hard and fast rule. But one sign
is that the company is unnamed and unidentifiable. There is a very good chance
that it is fictional, or that it is a composite archetype that doesn't
correspond to any specific company. None of which would change the meaning of
the essay in the least.

~~~
netsp
In fact, I think that on HN a sethgodin post is more likely to piss people
off.

BTW, I think that it's a bad sign how quickly these shallow dismissive
comments rise to the top here. If you prefer arguments to be presented in a a
logical form fine, but the information remains the same. It's not patentable,
but it's worth thinking about if you feel like thinking about that sort of
thing. Here's the translation:

 _A brand is presented as a brand. A way of of thinking about a collection of
things (people, products, procedures, history) as a single thing. It is the
psychological equivalent to a legal entity. A kind of Anthropomorphism. You
can say: "Apple (the brand) did X" when obviously the reality is that a bunch
of people or policies 'do'. This is a useful metaphor for letting customers
interact with you. When you leverage a brand, you are working this metaphor to
your advantage. But you can't say we (the brand) have excellent customer
service & still say they (individuals making it up) are responsible for that
bad product._

