Can you control what your employer does, how they run their business or what decisions they make?
I don’t think so.
I worked for General Motors for 15 years. I was an hourly employee. During those years many of us looked at the way the company was run in complete disbelief!
There was unbelievable waste, poor market decisions, a disregard for quality and an arrogance that was astounding. We complained about it, but who would listen.
I remember am older guy I worked with that told me that he thought that GN would be out of the car business in the future. Everybody laughed, The biggest company in the world, out of business?
But as I earned my master’s degree in organization development (how he’s down four times based on four times organizations work and how to make them better) I really began to understand that it was just possible, but almost inevitable!
Do you know anyone who worked at GM who has recently lost their job?
Are you in fear of losing yours?
You see, what I learned in my degree was that there are markets, balance sheets, productivity and efficiencies that determine success and failure. These are things that my fellow workers would talk about, that seemed like common sense, even though we didn’t have the actual real science, theories and models that supported it.
Things like:
- Having a budget
- Having systems that were linked and worked together
- Looking at what people actually wanted to buy instead of thinking you are so smart that you can dictate what people want
- Future modeling to determine what the next few years would hold that would influence the market (like climate change and peak oil)
We didn’t have access to that, but we all knew that producing big cars, gas guzzling trucks and having duplicate brands (Chevrolet/Pontiac, GMC/Chevy Trucks, Buick/Oldsmobile) was a bad idea.
What’s my point?
Even though we knew the company was making lousy decisions, we were powerless to influence what was responsible for putting food on our tables and a roof over our families’ heads.
This is what I did:
- Get my education
- Find out what I love to do
- Found out what it took to do it
- Worked my butt off to make it happen
And this is exactly what I am suggesting you do as well if you want to have a life you love and feel like you have some control over your destiny.
Trust me; this really is a good news. Good news if you apply it.
