MythBusters – 9 Myths you should not believe as a young professional.

1.????We are all a family here.?

You may start a family at the office. Sometimes unintentional, beware of office-parties, but work is not a replacement of you family. Your managers may lead you with making you feel guilty and in the end expect you to guarantee their bonuses and well-being in the years to come. Your co-worker’s do support you, unless both of you get caught and then you might end up as a scapegoat very fast. And the owner of the company does real care only for people, who have never been really contributing but expect a big win (shareholders) … OK in the end it may feel like parents, siblings and grandpa but you can walk away from a company, what is never that easy from your real family.

2.????You will be rich in the future

And then? It is a frightening vision for companies to make their employees real rich by solely working, because than you may stop working and leave. So, the goal is, to make you addicted to the IDEA of becoming rich once – so you are a much easier to manage.

3.????Sales is top priority

Well revenue comes from sales, revenue – cost = profit (very simplified) so yes, it is top priority but for whom? Are the earnings invested into creating new and better products and services to open up new areas for sales or are the mainly distributed among shareholders to keep them happy and keep the rating at the banks high so you get money easier … for what?

By the way sales guys are smart. They figured out how to hold back on big deals until the last minutes and then be the heroes and guess what, companies are still NOT incentivising the sales guys on “linearity” therefore corporate culture does create heroes, top priorities and the Idea of becoming rich.

4.????Technicians are not contributing to sales (which is bad).

Why should they? Should they sell products? Technicians are there to either create, implement or support products and services. They may support a sales situation with their very deep knowledge about a certain product or with their deep understanding of customer systems, but measuring them on sales does keep them away from becoming Subject-Matter-Experts on anything else but sales.

5.?? (Global) Marketing works

Have you read about the (funny) instances where world-wide marketing was creating (big) fails campaigns? Go and look for “marketing fails” and you get tons of it. So, marketing may work, but a centralized worldwide marketing is deemed to create “on-size-fits-all” approaches and will often fail. On a subject related so much to emotions and (local) cultural aspects this approach is doomed.?One of my favourite story is that one, of selling a car named “Pajero” in Spain. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/spanish-english/pajero

5.????We get this fixed soon

When you start at a company, you find some areas where the processes need very knowledgeable and very resilient employees are basically crap or nor existing - not only at start-ups. Your manager will quickly tell you, that this will be fixed soon in the future. Guess what? They never will fix it – hey it worked – and companies will introduce half-baked processes in the future too, because, it is less expensive and “our people can handle this”.

6.????Companies are socially responsible

CSR is woke and so everybody has CSR, haven’t they? At least in their shine publications and official presentations. But soon they may define who the society is, they take responsibility for, their shareholder and some executives and influential and interesting people. No, neither the employees nor the average citizen is a member of this eclectic circle.

7.????New technology will save the world

Maybe, but greed and the false beliefs of always growing economy and an unwavering but unjustified faith that we always will balance the good and the bad impacts of a new technology for the best of mankind, has brought us to this point, at the fringe of an abyss. But relax, tomorrow we will have made a step further.?

8.????YOU CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE

Sure, we can. If we don’t belief in myths. If we trust our guts feelings and think about some old wisdom – Nothing is for free in life. We won’t be able to take anything we earned into the afterlife and the only things you regret are those you (planed and) haven’t done.?

9.????Work life balance is key

I have been a big fan of work life balance, but I figured out lately what this is really. The way it is misunderstood as a big bucket (i.e., your life) and you can fill it up with a lot of work and some other stuff you need to to be fit for work. So, if your work requires to you to do more you either can change the ratio between work and not work or you make the overall bucket bigger (what is often the approach - squeeze out some extra seconds of a minute = productivity). The issues is the ONE bucket, where it is hard to draw the line.

The bucket is your life – 24 hours 7 days a week and I don’t know how many weeks left. Therefore, increasing the size of your bucket substantially is NOT an option. Take this more like seesaw TWO buckets one is work and the other one is not work related. On average they should be balanced – it may happen that one of them is heavier for a certain amount of time, but if one is always up and the other one always down the game is no fun at all and probably lethal.

_____________________________________________________________

If you think this is very emotional and you do have an argument about some of these points, tell me. I can explain almost everything from observation and the way to really think through current ways of working, managing people and doing business without the – “we have done that always this way.”

-hfg-