Lately I have been following quite a few blogs that discuss sustainability and minimalist living. One of the sites I follow posted an interview with a young man named Tyler Tervooren. Tyler has recently launched a new e-book titled Take This Job and Shove It. I downloaded for three reasons:
- You never know when a good situation is going to turn sour. Like your cool small company with a free form style of business being bought by a large mega conglomerate. Yea, I am dealing with that one at the moment. Everything is fine so far, but you never know when it is going to head south.
- Tyler is a marathoner and into mountaineering. I run marathons on occasion, and very much enjoy backpacking — similar to backpacking just with lots of snow, ice, and high altitudes.
- I love Johnny Paycheck and his famous song.
Last night I read it — it is short enough to finish in less than an hour — and really enjoyed the read. Several of the ideas are obvious if you have ever entertained the idea of flying a double bird salute and running out the door. A few of the topics Tyler covers I never would have thought of. One that sticks out is how me managed to use the credit card system to make $300 with very little effort. That is not something I think I will try, but it is extremely cleaver.
If you find yourself disgruntled, or not 100% happy with your current career path read the book. It is worth the effort.
Earlier this year I started rebuilding bicycles, and since then I have become fairly good at it. To that end, I also started rebuilding too many and created a surplus. During this time I also started coming up with ideas for innovative new bicycle products. Add all of that together and it starts to sound like a business plan.
So…I give you Drew Gracie Cycles. Right now it is just a website with information about some of my bicycle overhauls. In the future it will be so much more. I plan on rebuilding old bicycles and making them better than they were originally. I am also going to finally put some of these ideas rolling around in my head into actual products. Stay tuned for more.
While you wait, go read about my 1980 Schwinn Continental Single Speed Conversion.
I have been keeping something under my hat for a while now…my new broadcasting network. I have been doing the hiking videos for almost a year and about six months ago I decided I wanted to do more; so I built the site and started shooting more video.
I am working on a few new series that will be released in the next few months; one called Suburban Green the other is named Teardropin. They will be out soon but for now everything I have is out there.
I have also toyed with the idea of creating a network for Arkansas specific content, but I need help and that is hard to come by. Any takers?
A few years ago a friend and I tried to start a software company. We did not get very far for several reasons, but we did discuss how we wanted to run the company. The time we spent talking about how we were going to run things was well worth the entire endeavor.
The one topic that I always go back to was how we were going to mange the time of the workforce. We had decided that we would have a building (a really nice, airy, as green as possible building) where everybody could come and work if they chose to, but we were not going to make them come in. We were also not going to have any vacation time, in the proper sense. Basically the entire workforce could work from anywhere at anytime. The only thing we cared about was getting the work done. We realized there may be problems and we were not exactly sure how we would make everything work, but that is how we wanted to do it.
This morning I came across this article that said exactly what we were thinking. It goes on to mention that Best Buy corporate office actually implemented a system exactly like what we wanted, and it worked (the creators of the program are publishing a book about their system). I am sure Best Buy was doing this long before my friend and I thought about it; I am just glad to see it in the flesh.
My favorite bit from the blog entry was this:
I would argue that the organizations and leaders that find a way to build freedom (freedom from the time clock, freedom from the cube, freedom from the org chart, freedom to create) into work will be the winners in the future. Freedom is a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control; freedom is about what you can unleash. And, increasingly, freedom isn’t something you pay your dues to earn so much as a basic human right of all working adults. Sounds pretty obvious, but most organizations today would have to go to drastic extremes to make that a reality. And some are.
It is just plain awesome. Most people have to work to get buy and I think that is a good thing, but the system needs to change. And this is the beginning of what we need more than anything in our world — absolute freedom from everything.
I am a young white male, if you did not already know that. I have friends from all walks of life; I am not a bigot, racist, or any other socially incorrect moniker that is usually bestowed on people that fit my description. So I find it interesting that I am now in the minority on a particular issue — workers that cannot be fired at will.
An article in the April 23rd of Business Week titled Untouchable Nation points out that I fall into a group of workers that can be fired without issue. My group makes up less than 16% of the American work force. I am in this group because I am not a recognized minority, over 40, female, disabled, gay, foreign-born or a veteran. Now I do not mind being in this group, frankly I do not care. What does bother me is how hard it can be to get rid of an employee that cannot do a particular job just because they have special interests. I am not saying that people should be fired because they have a special interest, quite the opposite actually. I am for affirmative action and equal hiring practices; always hire the best candidate no matter what. I think job performance should be the most important factor when keep/fire issues arise.
I would not be so bothered by this if I had not seen this injustice first hand. I use to work at a large company that is notorious for yearly layoffs. There were two big ones while I was there, I left for greener pastures shortly after the second. The first one happened right after I started so I did not notice the changes too much. The second one was a different story. There were several people that I thought should have been let go, a few were, most were not. The ones that were not let go that should have been fell into one of the “untouchable” groups. When I asked for an explanation I was given the “Things were out of my hands” line from my manager. I later found out that all cases were because of special interests.
If the world were perfect everything would work out and every employee would always do a great job. As things stand, the world is far from perfect and that is okay, but sometimes corrections need to be made. The moral of the story, if there is one, is do your work up front and hire the right person for the job and you should never have to deal with any of this.
