Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

by Seth Godin

Both great social economists said the same thing: There are two teams, management and labor. Management owns the machines, labor follows the rules. Management wins when it can get the most work for the least pay, and the more controlled the output, the better. Smith thought this was a good thing. Marx saw this as a lousy deal for labor and insisted that the entire structure be forcibly abandoned. What if there were no longer only two sides? Not just capital versus labor, but a third team, one that straddled elements of both? I think there’s a huge opportunity for a third kind of participant, a linchpin, and now there is an opportunity to change all the rules that we’ve lived with all our lives. There is a shortage of this third kind of worker, and that shortage means that the market needs you desperately. The con game is ending, at least for people passionate enough to do something about it.