Jobs: Home Owner vs. Renter?

I'm currently renting a two-story, three bedroom, one bathroom house with four other guys. Living here and reading The Seven-Day Weekend (a fantastic book and a must read) has spurred my thoughts into the realm of renting versus owning a house. Think about the differences:

*an owner invests in his home vs. the renter maintains existence in the house
*an owner feels freedom to improve his property vs. the renter simply leaves the house in whatever state he found it
*an owner is spurred towards improvement by their ownership vs. the renter works to do the least amount to the house - damage or improvement, walking on invisible eggshells
*an owner does not ask for permission to make changes/improvements to the home vs. the renter must ask his landlord to make even small changes to the property

The contrast continues on in other areas - responsibility, long-term commitment, changes, profit margin when leaving, etc.

A job possesses a strong parallel to this owner vs. renter contrast. A manager, owner, or vice president of a company "owns" the company and thus has a vested interest in it's growth, development, improvement - and has the power and authority to make these changes or improvements. Most often, employees underneath higher management level positions are simply asked to fulfill their duties. They aren't given any opportunity to significantly change or develop the business.

Therefore, it's no surprise that "great ideas from the little man" are highlighted as novelties in the news, as if they were that rare diamond that's found among coal. I believe that the truth is that every employee has talents, intuitions, ideas, creativity, and thoughts that create the potential to significantly benefit the company they work for. However, most businesses treat their employees as renters - simply requiring them to show up, pay their dues, and leave - not as owners, empowering them as movers and changers, but simply renters.

It's a mentality like this that drove Gillette to spend $600 million dollars to decide to make the Mach 3 - simply an addition of one blade to their previous model. An idea that perhaps two dozen floor workers might have suggested on their own. It's the reason that floor employees observe machines that are beginning to fail, but without the "ownership" to do anything about it, the company suffers production loss and possible injury to the employee when something finally goes wrong.

So, what about you? Does your employer treat you as an owner or a renter? Do you have the freedom to leave your job better than you found it? Investing in it and passionately pursuing the things you love about the business? Or, like the majority of people, are you simply a "renter" - showing up to put your 40 hours in a week and do what the company asks of you, without ever being given the power, expected, or asked to enact change, growth, or development?

Ricardo Semler, owner of the $212 million Semco company in Brazil and author of The Seven-Day Weekend, argues that for the sake of control, businesses and employers fail to serve their employees and fail to tap significant resources and ideas in them by keeping their employees as renters.

Here's some questions to think about:
Are you currently in a job? Are you a renter or an owner? Which would make you more likely to get up in the morning excited about work?

Managing people? Are they simply renting from you, the "landlord" who makes all the decisions, or are you empowering them to be owners and thus bring added benefits to your team and projects?

Looking for a job? Unless you enjoy working at what I call a "McDonald's" job (meaning, you simply show up, do your checklist and leave, never having an opportunity to change things), what would it look like to choose and pursue a job that you could be an owner in?

In a job that keeps you as a renter? Can you stir the water and see if ownership might be a possibility? If you're paid more than to be a "machine" that processes what is input and provides output, it means your paid for your contribution to the company. If the company values you as something more than replaceable, I hope they give you ownership.

Life Lessons from Sailing

Sailing today with dad, David, and Marshall was great. I've decided that's it's one of the few really relaxing, wonderful, no stress ways to disconnect from the busyness of life and slowdown. Dad and David were great sailors and Marshall's a good teacher. One of the things he said as we were headed out this morning was that there's a lot you can learn from sailing and it's true. For example:

You can do everything possible to be ready for when the wind fills your sails, but you can't create the wind. Much of sailing can be simply waiting for a wind to pickup and you're completely out of control.

This parallels our lives in so many ways. Spiritually, we can only be ready for opportunities to share Christ with people, we can't create those opportunities. In careers, we can't create jobs, but we can be ready to handle the job we'd like to have when we have the opportunity. In education, we can only prepare for the school we'd liek to be a part of, but we can't create the university or create the automotatic "in". You can continue to cross apply this through lots of different aspects. The only thing we are really in control of is whether or not we're ready for the opportunities we're hoping for/anticipating.

There's a lot of other things you can learn from sailing - teamwork, bearable levels of stress, critical thinking, etc. In other words, if you get the chance...

...go sailing. :-)

Sailing :-)

My dad and brother drove into town tonight and we're going sailing with Marshall Orcutt tomorrow. I'm pretty excited! I've only gotten to go once with Marshall and this time I get to do it with my dad and brother. Yeah! :-) It should be a fun day - my dad grew up next to the ocean, but he's never been sailing. I think he has the potential to love it - so it'll be fun to watch him tomorrow.

Word of wisdom for the working world - don't wait till the day before you want to take a day off to ask your boss. Kim's cool and was okay with it, but it puts him in a really sticky situation for me to say "Hey, my dad and brother are coming up to go sailing tomorrow. Can I take the day off to go with them?" I really messed up when I forgot to ask him at our one-on-one on Monday. At the same time, I'm big on not asking my interns to do something I wouldn't do and that any expectation that is placed on them should also be on me. So, I feel doubly horrible since they're really good about letting me know ahead of time that they're going to be taking time off and then I totally botched it today and didn't let them know till the day before.

So, today was a day that went okay, but also a day of not necessarily doing things right...

...I'm thankful that with a new sunrise comes a new day.

Grad Schools :-)

So, here's where I'm at in Grad school applications:

Partial Apps Completed
University of Nottingham
University of Manchester
University of London

Apps Not Started
Cambridge University
University of Oxford

Both of these two - I guess because they process so many applications - don't let you apply until 13 months before their programs - so I'll have to wait until September or so. Ahh!

It's exciting to be working on this stuff though - I can't wait to get off to Grad school. It's really intimidating at this point and I psych myself out - but I keep reminding myself that even though I wasn't in Alpha Chi or the top of my class, a 3.6 meets all the GPA requirements for all the schools, including Cambridge and Oxford. Unfortunately, I'm 3 hundreths of a grade point shy for the Marshall Scholarship (it would pay for my entire graduate program), but I'll apply anyways. What the heck, why not! :-)