Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

Let’s say you’re the boss, the guy with the map, the person generating jobs and taking profits. You have a business model that allows you to hire people to manipulate data or make sales or do some other task that you can write down in a manual. An exceptional performer earns you $30 for every hour he works. A good employee is worth $25 an hour, and a mediocre worker can contribute about $20 an hour in profit. If you can’t tell who’s mediocre and who’s exceptional when you do the hiring, and you want to pay everyone a standard rate, how much should you pay? Well, other than “as little as possible,” the answer is certainly less than $25 an hour. Probably less than $20 an hour. You want every employee to make money, even the mediocre ones. Which means that all your other employees are getting paid less to make up for the ones who contribute the least. The exceptional performers are getting paid a lot less, which is why they should (and will) leave. Exceptional performers are starting to realize that it doesn’t pay to do factory work at factory wages only to subsidize the boss.