The Michelangelo Project: Making It in the Digital Century Workforce

By Isabel Wu

Is work - or the lack of it - sucking the life out of you?
Has your career stalled? Are you struggling to get your abilities recognised? Do you feel undervalued and unfulfilled at work? Are you concerned about job stability in a rapidly transforming digital century?

For over a century, workers were set up for their employers’ success, not their own. The Michelangelo Project provides a frank assessment of our faulty employer/employee relationship dynamic and empowers workers to unchain themselves from the broken system. Using Michelangelo’s story as a narrative framework, work expert and organisation management specialist, Isabel Wu shows you how to adapt to unanticipated workplace revolutions and thrive in the economy of the future.

In The Michelangelo Project, you’ll uncover:
- The dark secrets of work no one tells you that keep you in jobs even when you hate them
- Your personal definition of success to help you feel confident about pursuing a career that fulfils your whole person
- How to identify your own opportunities and overcome the fear of dwindling jobs
- Why social capital has emerged as the greatest source of economic value in today’s economy and how you can use it to get ahead
- Tips for becoming a self-learner and embracing internal motivation
... and much, much more!

The Michelangelo Project is a unique handbook to help you take control of your career in a digitally amplified age. If you like cutting-edge insights, tactics from an expert, and strategies to improve your value and confidence, then you’ll love Isabel Wu’s transformative manual.

Let The Michelangelo Project open your mind to new possibilities today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Isabel Wu
• Release date: Nov 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780648546931

Isabel Wu

Isabel Wu is a business management practitioner, trainer and coach specialising in the intersection of workers, customers and organisations. She established Meta Management in 2003, a consultancy which today focuses on helping its clients to develop and manage the ‘people parts’ needed to succeed as the future of work emerges becomes a reality. Isabel began her career in the service industry and completed a Bachelor of Business with a double major in marketing and organisation development/organisation behaviour. Over three decades experience in business and management since, she has honed her expertise in the human side of enterprise. The insights she gained along the way led her to write The Michelangelo Project, examining the nature of work in an increasingly automated world.She lives in Melbourne with her husband, their teenage daughter and cat.

Book preview

THE MICHELANGELO PROJECT

Making It in the Digital Century Workforce

ISABEL WU

Published in Australia by Meta Management Press on Smashwords.

ISBN: 978-0-6485469-3-1 (ebook)

Copyright 2019 Isabel Wu

Copyright and Disclaimer

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with others, please purchase an additional license. If you are reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or this copy was not purchased for you, please visit your favourite ebook retailer for your personal copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968. For permissions, contact the author.

Limit of Liability

While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

For anyone who has ever wanted more from work

CONTENTS

Prologue – Out of a Job, Into a Life

Introduction – What is Work?

I INDUSTRIAL

1. Through the Looking Glass

2. Fate & Survival

3. Empire Building

4. Money & Brains

5. Ouroboros

6. The Red Pill

II TRANSITION

7. The Road to Tomorrow

8. Social Production

9. Mass Socialisation

10. The Lego Lesson

11. Models

III DIGITAL

12. Michelangelo

13. Career

14. Work

15. Skills

16. You

17. Success

18. The Project

Epilogue – The Future of Work Challenge

Acknowledgements

About the Author

NOTES

We are at the dawn of management’s second century. It is our challenge to do something great with the opportunity we have been given.

~ Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, 2011

PROLOGUE – OUT OF A JOB, INTO A LIFE

It was 2004 and I was on my way to see what would be the first client of my newly established consultancy. I was in my mid-30s and, having worked for other people since the age of 16, I was ready to do my own thing. On the way to my appointment, traffic slowed to a crawl.

The cause was a group of workers, employees of a major newspaper, protesting the loss of the jobs being shed along with the old machines that were being replaced with digital printing technology. The rolling saga of strikes and lockouts had been playing out against the backdrop of news about the internet’s impact on the future of jobs. On the other side of the world, a company called Facebook was just being established. Little did we know that one day, its algorithms would change not only how we read news, but even what we consider to be news.

It was unlikely any of these soon-to-be redundant workers would have heard of ‘digital disruption’. Harvard academic Clayton M. Christensen had introduced the concept of disruptive innovation in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma¹ and spawned the term ‘digital disruption’ to describe digital technology’s potential to unseat traditional industries and their workers.

Having been responsible for implementing staff lay-offs in the past, I could empathise with the protestors’ feelings of anxiety, distress and loss. Stopped in traffic, I had time to observe them: none looked younger than 50 years old. They were not loud or aggressive. They did not even look angry – they probably didn’t have the emotional energy for anger. According to reports, many had served this same employer for much of their working lives.

Those workers and I had one thing in common: we were, or were about to be, jobless but our situations could not have been more different. They were facing uncertain prospects in an industry undergoing major transition. There would be few newspapers looking for operators of traditional printing presses. On the other hand, I was confident a world of constant change would provide me with regular consulting work.

I had left my last job voluntarily, coinciding with the birth of my daughter. This new stage in my life seemed right to take my skills and experiences into work I – not an employer – would control. After years in management and human resources, I knew that working people parented by leave of their employer. I had administered such systems. Parents’ dilemma was how much they could give to home before it ran up against the limits of company policies and/or their career momentum.

I wasn’t leaving the world of 9-to-5 because I was unhappy or burnt out. In fact, my job experiences had been mostly positive. At the point of leaving employment, I had worked for 12, mainly large, well-known companies. Along the way, many people’s generous willingness to share knowledge, skills and experience enabled me to advance. I also worked with my fair share of those who did nothing for my career, whether because of their own agenda, incompetence or lack of interest. Still, I learned from all of them, and I was leaving my last role as an employee, grateful for all the opportunities and experiences.

A dozen employers in just over two decades may sound like a lot of job-hopping. On paper, my work record would appear unstable to some. Not counting casual or contract roles, I had moved to a new employer, on average, every two-and-a-half years. It wasn’t boredom or lack of progress that prompted the changes, but the reverse. Fortunate promotions, training, special projects and responsibilities came with higher salaries and/or opened new doors. Each move was a natural progression of my developing skills and who I was as a person. Goals, abilities, priorities and interests evolve as you age and it made sense that a person’s work should move in concert.

My parents, however, were puzzled. When, they would ask, did I intend to start my career? In their world, employers provided jobs, and I was leaving employer after employer that had shown a willingness to support my career.

While my parents had hopes of me following a conventional (safe) career path, it was they who laid the foundations of my attitude to work. Their lives echoed those of countless others who migrated from their home country for a new life: start with nothing, establish a small business, give their children the education that guaranteed a good job.

My grandfather was a Chinese district magistrate (the highest office in a district responsible for keeping law and order and representing the government) who served in the dying days of imperial China. His refusal to abandon his post, even in the face of the violent and bloody Boxer Rebellion, earned him many enemies but found favour with the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi (or Cixi). (My grandfather’s experiences leading to his appointment to the position of Purveyor to the Empress are chronicled in The Flight of an Empress: told by Wu-Yung, whose other name is Yu-Chuan.)

My father left China as communism established rule, landing in Hong Kong in 1950. He enjoyed success for a time as a program director for the British-owned Radio Rediffusion. Migrating to Australia in 1960, he made it through the White Australia Policy (laws designed to restrict non-Europeans from settling in Australia) to become an Australian citizen. Being university-educated and fluent in English, he worked first for the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), before being employed by the Australian Government to head up the Chinese School of Language at the Royal Australian Air Force base in Point Cook, Victoria, where he taught an intensive Chinese language program until his retirement.

My mother followed my father to Australia in 1964. She was pregnant with my brother, had limited English skills and knew no one. By the time her third child (my younger sister) started preschool, she was itching to leave her solitary life at home. Having mainly worked as a radio actor in Hong Kong, her job prospects were limited to perhaps cleaning or factory work, even without the White Australia Policy attitudes and restrictions on married women working (the law preventing married women from government jobs may have been repealed in 1966, but attitudes took longer to change). She did, however, have a diploma in, and a talent for, cooking; so, with my father working with her after coming home from his full-time job, they started a restaurant.

As the children of families running small businesses know, helping in the business is part and parcel of growing up. I was six years old when my after-school routine of restaurant chores started. Peeling, cutting, weighing and counting out ingredients, cleaning and washing made up my afternoons until we were sat on the bench opposite my mother to do our homework as she completed preparations for dinner service.

Having both survived wars (my mother had escaped with her family to the Cantonese countryside during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong), setting up a business was no bigger risk for my parents than any they had already lived through. They imbued us with confidence in work and a belief that ability existed in everyone. To them, work was a social equaliser and work ethic its common language.

One story that still amuses my mother concerns a woman they had hired (Anglo of course, because there were no other migrant families around) to wash dishes. My mother welcomed the new hire on arrival, showed her around and gave her an apron, explaining that, as she had to start cooking, her daughter (I think I was seven at the time) would show her what to do. The woman looked at me, then back at my mother, put down the apron, retrieved her belongings, and without another word, left.

Each night after working at the restaurant, my father would retire to his study to take care of the business accounts. We would fall asleep to the clacking sound of his abacus as he tallied up sales and expenses, a task he could do more quickly and accurately than with a calculator.

On Sundays before bed, my brother, sister and I would line up at my father’s desk and, one at a time, recount the chores we had performed that week. He listened to our reports, sat back to consider each one and, perhaps like his magistrate father once did in the cases presented before him, gave his verdict on how much our efforts were worth in pocket money. The exact amount would then be counted into our outstretched hands. To earn more than a dollar was a rare and proud achievement! He always acknowledged our efforts but did not reward every chore with money; we were expected to do our part for the family.

Explaining his decision on whether we had performed ‘paid’ work or played a part as a member of the family helped us to understand work’s discretionary value. Although as children, we were focused on adding to our stash of savings, we would one day come to realise that the appreciation and the lessons in work that accompanied this weekly ritual were the real rewards.

Throughout my formative years, my parents started and ran several businesses. By their actions, they didn’t so much teach us to work hard, although they did that too, they taught us to work true. In 1979 my parents opened a new restaurant. This was still the era of the ‘dim sim’ and the ‘chop suey’ and they had had enough of pretending the food, while it may have been popular with customers, was Chinese cuisine. The food they were serving was uninspiring for my mother to cook, but more importantly, they felt it was disrespectful to their customers and culture. They wanted to give their customers what was promised, that is, Chinese food as it should be.

My mother would read over every order as it arrived in the kitchen. If she found any reason the meal could be less than ideal – too many repeated flavours, for instance – she would send us back out to consult with the table. Dishes were adapted if needed. My parents were protective of their work, not precious.

Quality was paramount, so testing dishes was a regular ritual in our restaurant. Different ingredient brands, equipment and diner feedback could mean recipes needed adjusting. We were all expected to contribute to making the food and menu better. There was none of the kitchen-versus-dining room divides that I would experience in later hospitality jobs.

As I grew older and began to work outside the family business, I learned that critiquing the work of others (particularly when it is not your area of expertise or department) was not only not normal, it was generally unacceptable, if not explicitly, then culturally. Whereas my parents saw good work as something no one did alone, I would learn that organisations treated work as something that belonged to individuals. My parents believed that continuous reviewing of anyone’s work was a shared responsibility with a shared benefit (they had their blind spots too, but that’s a different story); my future workplaces would see it as fault-finding negativity.

Through my succession of job changes, I came to realise that organisations reward progress by measuring results, not the process of getting better. It made honest critiquing of work paper exercises. Even in the organisations that cited values such as ‘striving for excellence’, ‘being the best’ and ‘honesty’, homogeneity of views and cheerleading was the real rule.

My approach to work, instilled in me through my migrant, small business-owner parents, was to be a double-edged sword for the two decades of my career as an employee of other people. At first, employers would appreciate fresh energy and perspective, that is, until they didn’t. They liked the sort of change where most things stayed the same.

The culture of conformity clashed with my bred-in desire to find the source of problems. It didn’t make sense to me that an enterprise thought it could achieve its big vision and mission statements without changing the status quo. I could be popular with management (maybe) if I stopped at the surface level symptoms and ignored their root causes.

I didn’t have to directly challenge people, just the act of moving for change would inevitably lead to someone viewing my intentions as unnecessary meddling or personal criticism. I didn’t see the point of swimming against a tide of indifference or resistance so it could only be one of two outcomes: I acquiesce, or I leave. It never entered my mind to do the former, so (probably to the relief of those I was departing), I left.

By the time I found myself caught up in the protests of the soon-to-be displaced workers that day in 2004, it was probably no surprise that I would end up in organisation design, development and behaviour: the field of management concerned with bringing people together in optimum ways to achieve defined goals.

I believed I could better improve the experiences and performance of employees working at the organisational level. Progressing naturally from employee to contractor then consultant, I used the knowledge gained through a two-decade career to continue in my chosen field of work. Then the unexpected happened.

Just over two years into my independent career, I felt that familiar sense of futility. At first only a vague niggle, then that full-blown sense that I was merely tinkering at the edges, not getting to the real work. It wasn’t that the work wasn’t necessary, it just wasn’t doing the things it was supposed to achieve. Visions and values sounded inspiring, but people weren’t inspired. There were job descriptions but not always job clarity. Workers were trained but not trusted or respected enough to really be held to account. People were physically at work but not necessarily present. There was a lot of communication but not enough useful information.

I had bought into the doctrines and theories that are taught at university and practised in organisations, and which make up the institution of modern management. I had become part of the system that was founded on the belief that job performance is extracted from workers. It was a long way from the lessons I learned from my parents: that work was made worthwhile through self-determination and a sense of agency. It was not just solving problems, but having the autonomy to define the issues to resolve and determine how outcomes could be best achieved. It was the opportunity to contribute to the quality and be a part of others’, not just your own, successes. I had become an instrument for the individualised, standardised, compartmentalised, contrived system we called jobs.

The management industry had tunnel vision; it could see its own success even in the evidence of inadequacy. Skill gaps, leadership failures, management shortcomings, poor communication, talent shortages, lack of successors for important positions, and above all, worker dissatisfaction, had become the norm.

Organisations cared about the problems affecting the workforce, but a lot less about difficulties faced by a worker. They could make significant investments in training and development, while simultaneously avoiding or trivialising individuals’ issues, like stress, burnout, bullying, discrimination and incompetence.

But surely, I couldn’t be the only consultant questioning not just the efficacy, but the humanity, of organisations? I began to dig into the research on the trends and hot topics in management and work. It was not very comforting to see my concerns were, on a lesser or more extensive scale, being widely raised and discussed. An industry worth billions was promoting the business case for better workplaces and better leaders. For all the investment into workplace improvements, it was mostly lip service. It dawned on me that these programs weren’t supposed to fix the problems. The foxes were designing the henhouse.

Once an industry is created, its interests aren’t in making itself irrelevant, but indispensable. There was no money to be made in giving workers the tools to control work to their own satisfaction. We, the management practitioners, set about fixing not the employers but the people. We embedded deficiency into every stage of their careers: try harder, get motivated, learn more skills, work faster. Uninspired or unhappy? You don’t know your passion. Stressed? Learn resilience. Overlooked for jobs or promotions? It’s your lack of will or ambition. Uncertain future prospects? Get another qualification.

To what end did we invent terms such as ‘human resources’ and ‘human capital’ other than to paint a respectable patina over the increasingly targeted ways in which people were being manipulated as factors of production? Jobs were never meant to be concerned with people as emotional and social beings. In fact, they isolated the pieces they could mechanise and carved these out for the organisation’s purposes using a variety of systems and policies, and caring less what the worker did about the rest.

With my broadening view of, and an external consultant’s access to, all levels of organisations, I could see how unsustainable employment as we knew it had become. The more I understood the nature of work, the more I uncovered the source of my own frustrations.

It took my 12 years of practice aimed at bettering work for organisations and the people who worked in them, to fully understand that mechanistic, dehumanising work was not a design flaw. It was deliberate.

I realised the narrow frame of what we universally think of as work, namely the ‘job’, was the problem. The system rewarded people who complied with the employer’s rules. To prevent unrest and eliminate competition for people’s attention, employers diligently bred out humans’ natural ways of working, including individual expression, play, socialising and making meaning – these were treated as anti-work.

For two centuries the world has been convoluted by an industrial system that has succeeded by controlling every resource the earth has to offer including its populations. We have been so effectively sold that we must go and get a job that we listen to anyone who promises them, and willingly overlook their atrocious behaviours or incompetences. From such promises, Hitler exploited Germany’s fear of unemployment and led the Nazi party into power. The lesson hasn’t been learned. We are still wilfully blind to the questionable ethics of anyone who promises jobs.

Jobs and the illusion that wealth is merit-based have blinded us to the fact that jobs are really modern instrument of control, like those controls once exerted by shamans, monarchy and the church. The system doesn’t reward the hard workers; otherwise, teachers and cleaners would be amongst our wealthiest – it rewards those who are best at using the hard work of others.

Workers are disadvantaged by an employment system based on a fiction of equality. Our system gives the illusion of equality, but this is not the same as affording everyone equal opportunity. Take, for example, the process for hiring workers. Ever-more sophisticated recruitment tools are not designed for employers to identify those with the relevant abilities, but to selectively eliminate non-mainstream contenders.

Those in positions of power do little to foster inclusiveness because their world is already an inclusive one. They have become the system that made their success, creating invisible walls for anyone who does not fit the mould. At least blatant bias would give people something to fight.

As digital technology shakes the grip of the industrial system, once again it is workers who must give. The old guard continues to squeeze more out of people (and the planet) to keep their outdated systems going. Preparing to jettison workers is their way of responding to changes ahead. If people booted out of their jobs as the world changes have nothing to go to, it must be their fault. They should have worked harder.

The problem isn’t inherent in the jobs but in a system that doesn’t recognise all work that creates value, such as those who care for dependent family members, only those jobs that can be quantified as productivity by employers. Yet, work isn’t just jobs any more than food is just nutrients. Yes, nutrients will keep us alive, but food does more than feed the body; it feeds human connections. It is not a coincidence that the societies that funnel their citizens into bad jobs are those who suffer poor diets and preventable health problems.² Calories and vitamins can be measured, the pleasures of flavours, aromas, textures, of sharing a meal, of experiencing other cultures through their cuisines cannot. We need more than nutrients to sustain us in the way we need all the work that sustains society. Our problem is a system that doesn’t count all the contributors to healthy, functioning societies like happiness, respect, generosity, tolerance and kindness.

There is talk that we will run out of jobs. Perhaps we will, and that might be a good thing. Certainly, jobs will evolve as machines take over the things people have been doing. Work, however, will always exist; it’s the nature of people that we will always desire to create value and to engage in exchanges to acquire it.

This is the time we should insist on a system that values work, not just jobs, and we need to learn the skills to participate in such a system. We need to start prioritising the work that benefits individuals, not just the ones that allow individuals to toil for others. We need a better system, a superstructure where the dependence of employment is replaced by a marketplace where anyone can trade, value and upgrade their skills. The advent of new technology is making such a world possible.

I wish I knew what happened to the workers who in 2004 were facing the loss of their jobs. Redundancy of labour and skills will always happen and is the nature of progress; but I would like to think that if those workers were to again face such a situation, it would be at a time in the future when they would be on the street, not protesting, but celebrating the prospect of doing something new.

In the almost decade-and-a-half following that brief interruption to my day by protesting workers, I have finally understood the restlessness I experienced was not due to being in the wrong job, but because I was part of a system that goes against the way people do good work. If we all know what good work looks like and how to do it, we will never put up with a bad job again.

INTRODUCTION – WHAT IS WORK?

What do you do?

How many times have you, in completing a form, come to the field marked ‘occupation’? Whether you want