What Is The Meaning?

“When David Fahl worked for an energy reseller, which bought and sold energy from generating companies, he noticed that getting things done right wasn't always as high a priority as making deadlines, meeting deliveries or being on budget.

“‘You can get all those things done without doing any good work,’ he says. It wore on him and didn't give him a sense of accomplishment. ‘Not even the marketing people could come up with a plausible explanation for why the company existed,’ he says.

“In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets done. In the past, people could see the fruits of their labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can't even leave your mark on a document in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. That may explain why to-do listers write down tasks they've already completed just to be able to cross them off.

“‘Not only is work harder to measure but it's also harder to define success,’ says Homa Bahrami ... ‘The work is intangible or invisible, and a lot of work gets done in teams so it's difficult to pinpoint individual productivity.’

“She says information-age employees measure their accomplishment in net worth, company reputation, networks of relationships, and the products and services they're associated with -- elements that are more perceived and subjective than that field of corn, which either is or isn't plowed.

“Companies should create meaningful short-term goals. Instead, ‘managers create all sorts of surrogate measures that they can measure, like PowerPoint slide counts and progress charts,’ says consultant Tim Horan. ‘The person doing the landscaping has a better sense of accomplishment.’ …

“These days, we're one step further removed from the finished product. Employees have to wait for the gratification that comes with seeing a goal finally realized. ‘The average delay is much, much longer for the average worker today,’ says Robert Frank... And behavioral science notes we have difficulty with a reward delayed.”

(“A Modern Conundrum: When Work's Invisible, So Are Its Satisfactions.” Jared Sandberg. Wall Street Journal: February 19, 2008. pg. B.1)

ALL WORK is human, and all strategies rest upon humanity. So, regardless of the ingenuity of a plan, culture, ethos, and meaning are the hinges upon which it all turns.