Culture war wrangling has unfortunately become a key element in my consulting. It is now the 4th, and youngest manifestation of bullshit jobs.

Bullshit jobs evolve in one of 4 ways: automation, outsourcing, trumpification, and now: wokification. Only the first 2 are survivable

Automation: job becomes automatable, human incumbents desperately add “ineffable human” bullshit, get laid off anyway.

Trust me: this is the best outcome. If you’re an executive, try your best to solve management problems this way. Especially with middle managers.

Outsourcing: the main benefit of a cheaper location may not be obvious to you. It’s the ability to strip away bullshit added to justify high first-world salaries. Hungrier people willing to work for less tend to cut away performative bullshit. Low cost is justification enough.

Trumpification: When an ethnic group consolidates labor power and “captures” a labor market so strongly it can induce protectionism. Bullshit signifiers get added as “essential” to the bullshit job. Example: people around the world deal with cattle. Cowboy hats are not essential.

Wokification: the newest kid on the block. Arcane academic theories get operationalized as inscrutable HR it us impossible to not be in violation of, and nobody can dislodge it because the jobs in question are bullshit and lack grounded ways of measuring performance.

Managerial literacy now includes skill at preventing the last two cancers from taking root, and being a humane but firm proponent of the first two. Yes I’m an unrepentant neoliberal shill. I believe bullshit jobs should be automated immediately if possible, and outsourced if not.

Leadership now means being an oncologist. If your middle managers have failed to prevent cancerous trumpification or wokification, your job as an executive is to point to the writing on the wall: companies that outsource or automate will beat yours, *despite* trade barriers.

In general humans should be employees of last resort for any job. The less a job actually needs high-end human abilities computers can’t provide, the more humans will fill the gap between “essential” and “fulfilling” with identitarian bullshit to make it fulfilling.

You think that’s the hard part? Dream on. Preventing and/or curing cancer is just the opening act. The problem is, the more you automate or outsource (which is automation-lite or pre-automation for a variety of reasons) the more the remaining humans matter.

Divide your company market cap or gross revenue by number of employees. The higher that number the more each one matters. Now take the reciprocal of number of employees and multiply by 100. That’s percent HR weight of an individual. If both are high each employee is a huge risk.

Why? Because each employee has HUGE leveraged influence on the product or service. You’ve heard of opinionated design perhaps. The fewer and higher value each employee the more their opinions are a *product feature*. And the more you need each to be exceptionally wise.

Not just smart or skilled or talented.

*wise*

Like sage-wise. Philosopher-wise.

As in not a sophomoric weed-session way. Or reddit nerd-groupie way. Or insecure cult-leader-seeking child way. This isn’t about brain power. It’s about genuine curiosity about hard questions.

Trumpification and wokification are the exact opposite of sagification.

Trust me: if you can’t stop these processes from metastasizing your company will die. If they take over a sector, the sector will die.

Neither trade wars, nor fine-grained regulation can stop it.

You can’t fight economic gravity with human identity.

What’s more, you *shouldnt*.

It’s unethical for a manager or leader to “pad” a job with performative identity elements to make it faux-fulfilling. Humans do not flourish as 20% genuine challenge, 8p% pieces of flair.

As an employee (or hell, a free-agent self-employee) you should be ahead of your bosses/clients on this. If you aren’t continuously looking for ways to automate or outsource yourself you’re hiding from your own maximally expressed humanness.

Thus has been creeping up me. 9 years ago when I went free-agent it was not even a thing. For managers/leaders everywhere, automation and outsourcing were real hard competencies to develop. Dealing with trumpification and wokification was just an easy compliance chore.

Now this stuff is everywhere. And we all have to learn to manage and lead (and consult) in live minefield conditions. Perhaps we deserve it for sweeping these problems under the rug for so long. But well, they’re here now. And the incentives to solve them wrong are strong.

The wrong way is to avoid these problems by gratefully delegating them to the first people who seem to want to deal with them. *These are exactly the wrong people*. Anyone volunteering to work on this thankless shit is 90% likely to be a grifter, 10% likely to be a saint.

The right person to deal with this stuff is not a special interest group grifter or HR careerist but CEOs and senior execs with P/L or product responsibility. People who will be hurt on comp and reputation by the wrong solutions. Culture war navigation is now job #1 for you.

Cultural safety is to 2020 what workplace physical safety was in the 1800s, when industrial accidents from boiler explosions, falling objects and crap was threatening to derail industrial growth.

If you can’t ensure baseline cultural safety for *all* (plural) in the workplace, your business strategic acumen, product genius, marketing mono, and customer obsession *don’t matter*

Your company won’t last long enough to realize the value of those higher order competencies.

Oddly enough falling physical safety is a deep symptom of bullshit-jobification. If you need workers to be in physical danger to do their work, one of 3 things is true:

a) You live in 1890
b) You fun a military or police org
c) You’re failing to automate/outsource well in 2020

Why do Tyson meats factory workers have to risk Covid on insane 130-birds-per-minute slaughter lines working 2 feet from each other? It’s not 1890, it’s not a military job.

Same: healthcare workers, many service workers. Painful to admit but right answer is: automate/outsource

Note: despite perceptions of sweathshops and Foxconn, outsourcing done well *increases* worker safety relative to jobs lost in high-cost geographies.

Low cost basis means you can achieve same output with better treated employees. Precarious wages here are princely elsewhere.

Same with white collar workers.

You don’t have to be a woke ideologue to accept that workplace minorities shouldn’t have to be 2x as good for 0.5x reward relative to majority mediocrity

You don’t have to be alt-right to accept that extreme speech policing kills a workplace

These problems have good managerial/leadership solutions *so long as the jobs are not bullshit jobs*

If they are bullshit jobs. There’s no solution.

If they aren’t both are easy. Real recognize real. Output quality shows. Trusted bonds form that accommodate unpoliced speech.

So seriously, to get ahead of culture war cancers before they arrive at your org, automate, outsource the bullshit out of the jobs ggressively, create physical and cultural safety by grounding everything in quality shipped output and the high-trust bonds they catalyze.

Like I said, this stuff has crept up on me as well. It’s not stuff I enjoy consulting on, but over the years it has migrated from minor annoyance in peripheral vision to footnote to other items, to “oh, one more thing” agenda item in sparring sessions with clients to item #1

I’d *much* rather work with clients on tech roadmaps, org structure, product vision, innovation management, market modeling, branding/positioning, OODA loops... all the fun stuff. The growth of this other stuff almost makes me want to quit consulting and bet on writing full-time.

I still might. If I find myself spending more than 30% of my time helping clients navigate this stuff, it’ll be time to quit. And possibly invest in a bunker or sailboat.

The enterprise today is where internet culture was in 2013: on the cusp of descent into internet of beefs madness. If you thought that shit has been toxic in the 7 years since, wait till we get to the intranet of beefs. It will be utterly awful. I’m seeing 2013-level signs now.

In 2013 I underestimated both speed and magnitude of the internet of beefs exploding and shaping mainstream public life. I don’t want to make a similar mistake with the enterprise edition. We haven’t yet had the enterprise edition of something like gamer gate. Let’s try not to.

Covid is a HUGE shock to the business world and has accelerated the reckoning with this stuff. Soon, like in 1-2 years, the window of opportunity to do the right things (cut bullshit out of jobs) will close. Not only will only wrong solutions be available, they will be mandatory.

Covid is to the private/business world what Trump was to the public culture war: a virus that precipitates cascading rapid change in the environment as pent-up dams burst. If you’re a BTFSTTG happy at the prospect you’re either rich or an idiot. Possibly both.

To survive Trump we went cozyweb.

The corporate intranet is the OG cozyweb.

What are you going to do when it goes up in flames?

If your title is VP or higher it’s your job to answer that question.

If the answer saves bullshit jobs it’s the wrong answer.

I’m going to refer back to this thread in 2024. If I’m right — and I hope I’m not — the business world will be in as much of a meltdown by then as the public world was in 2017. Those who saw it coming and acted in time will see their businesses/orgs survive. The rest will die.

Coda: I’ll turn 46 this year. I finally have enough experience across enough gigs that I’m fairly confident about my instincts on this stuff. Unfortunately I also have enough experience to not want to touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole.

This is not what I was hoping my midlife career would be about. In 2011 the plan was to gradually do less consulting and more fun writing and making more money with less work based on a couple of decades of experience with “normal and fun” business problems.

I now charge about 3x per hour as I did when I first started out. And I think I add more than 3x as much value per hour — if I’m having fun.

Big if.

That if is increasingly not true in culture-war consulting. The years of experience don’t matter if you dislike the work.

Fingers crossed that the business world sees this looming and acts to steer it down a better path. Otherwise my next 4 years will be increasingly miserable, and my 50s, which I’d hoped would be 3-4 hours lucrative consulting and 30-40 hours fun writing, will be very different.