Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

Letting people in the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper—but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude. Which is the attitude of a linchpin.

So, if this is what the boss really wants, how come the stars in the company don’t follow these three rules? How come the people who get promoted and get privileges and expense accounts and are then wooed away to join other companies and get written up in the paper and have servants and coffee boys . . . how come those guys aren’t the ones who do this stuff?

What the boss really wants is an artist, someone who changes everything, someone who makes dreams come true. What the boss really wants is someone who can see the reality of today and describe a better tomorrow.

We exist in a corporate manufacturing mindset, one so complete that anyone off the grid seems like an oddity. In the last few years, though, it’s becoming clear that people who reject the worst of the current system are actually more likely to succeed.

Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.”

mediocre obedience is certainly something we’re capable of, but if we take initiative and add a little bravery, artistic leadership is something that’s equally (or more) possible and productive.

“We teach people to take initiative and become remarkable artists, to question the status quo, and to interact with transparency. And our graduates understand that consumption is not the answer to social problems.”

I’ve been lucky enough to meet or work with thousands of remarkable linchpins. It appears to me that the only way they differ from a mediocre rule-follower is that they never bought into this self-limiting line of thought. That’s it. Perhaps they had a great teacher who lit a lamp for them. Perhaps a parent or a friend pushed them to refuse to settle. Regardless, the distinction between cogs and linchpins is largely one of attitude, not learning.

Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they’ve discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance. Classrooms become fear-based, test-based battlefields, when they could so easily be organized to encourage the heretical thought we so badly need.

Decades of school have drilled that into us—fear, fear, and more fear. Fear of getting a D-minus. Fear of not getting a job right out of school. Fear of not fitting in.

Well-intentioned teachers don’t want to do this, but the system often gives them no choice. The work of creating positive change in a classroom is daunting, and without enough time and support, it’s a tough slog.

The thing is that we need a school organized around teaching people to believe, and teachers who are rewarded for doing their best work, not the most predictable work.

Only two things: 1. Solve interesting problems 2. Lead

Schools can teach us to be socially smart, to be open to connection, to understand the elements that build a tribe.

The linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.

Is there anyone in an organization who is absolutely irreplaceable? Probably not. But the most essential people are so difficult to replace, so risky to lose, and so valuable that they might as well be irreplaceable.

essential individuals who are worth h...

Your business needs more ...

You are capable of becoming a linchpin.

what about that great guy down at the vegetable stand? You know, the one who makes it worth a special trip past the (cheaper and more convenient) supermarket. If he left, the place would go downhill and you’d stop going. All the rent, all the inventory, all the investment—they’re worthless if he leaves. As far as you, the customer, are concerned, he’s indispensable.

What about the way it makes you feel when you walk into an Anthropologie store, or unwrap a piece of Lake Champlain chocolate, or send a package using FedEx’s Web site? The experience could have been merely ordinary, merely another bit of good-enough. But it’s not. It’s magical. It was created by someone who cared, who contributed, who did more than he was told. A linchpin.

Anthropologie has a buyer, Keith Johnson, who spends six months a year traveling the world, visiting flea markets and garage sales, looking for extraordinary things. Not to sell, perhaps, but to beautify a store.

Uh dream job???

Imagine an organization with an employee who can accurately see the truth, understand the situation, and understand the potential outcomes of various decisions. And now imagine that this person is also able to make something happen. Why on earth would you ever begin to consider the possibility of firing her? Inconceivable.

Doesn’t matter if you’re always right. It matters that you’re always moving.

The law of linchpin leverage: The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. In other words, most of the time, you’re not being brilliant. Most of the time, you do stuff that ordinary people could do.

It might take a lot of tinkering or low-level work or domain knowledge for that brilliance to be evoked, but from the outside, it appears that the art is created in a moment, not in tiny increments.

Bricks need to be moved, of course. Understand that you don’t have to be the one moving them as long as there’s someone cheaper and more replaceable you can hire to do the moving. And if you’ve got no choice but to move the bricks, your opportunity is to think hard about how you do even this mundane task, because almost any job can be humanized or transformed.

Anyone could have done it, but anyone didn’t. They did.

It takes art. Our economy now rewards artists far more than any other economy in history ever has.

A great salesperson might deliver a thousand times as much productivity as a mediocre one. It’s the great salesperson who opens an entire region or an account in a new industry, while the ordinary one merely goes down the call list, doing quite average work.

very good senior programmer (who might get paid $200,000) gets paid about the same as a great programmer, who delivers $5 million worth of value for the same price. That’s enough of a difference to build an entire company’s profit around. Do it with ten programmers and you’re rich.

Organizing around the average, then, is too expensive. Organizing around average means that the organization has exchanged the high productivity of exceptional performance for the ease and security of an endless parade of average performers.

Not only do organizations benefit from linchpin employees, but employees also benefit once they become linchpins.

Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You can work only so many hours, fret only so much.

It’s impossible to do the work at the same time you’re in pain. The moment-to-moment insecurity of so many jobs robs you of the confidence you need to actually do great work.

On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.

This.

Organizations that are centralized, monopolistic, static, safe, cost-sensitive, and far-flung should hire drones, as cheaply as possible.

Hire cheap drones that you can scale, replace, and disrespect.

I have no issue at all with this as a business strategy. But I don’t expect that it will lead to growth or significant customer loyalty, particularly in times of change.

Wikipedia and the shared knowledge of the Internet make domain knowledge on its own worth significantly less than it used to be.

Depth of knowledge combined with good judgment is worth a lot. Depth of knowledge combined with diagnostic skills or nuanced insight is worth a lot, too.

It’s easy for an outside source to be seen, in artist Julian Schnabel’s words, as a “tourist.” A tourist may have significant technical skill, but if she doesn’t know the territory—your territory—then the skill isn’t worthwhile.

His biggest concern? “Ford is a place where they wait for the leader to tell them what to do.”

Instead of hiring someone with deep domain knowledge who knew exactly what to do, Bill Ford hired someone who knew how to train people to live without a map.

Rick Wagoner lost his job at GM because he told everyone what to do (and he was wrong). Far better to build a team that figures out what to do instead.

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth.

Emotional labor is the hard work of making art, producing generosity, and exposing creativity. Working without a map involves both vision and the willingness to do something about what you see.

You get paid to go to work and do something of value. But your job is also a platform for generosity, for expression, for art.

Every interaction you have with a coworker or customer is an opportunity to practice the art of interaction. Every product you make represents an opportunity to design something that has never been designed, to create an interaction unlike any other.

There are essentially an infinite number of choices, endless degrees of freedom.