Monday, June 09, 2008

Mein Kampf

So blah blah blah a lot of shit happened and equally true a lot of shit didn't happen while a travelled.
What now, now that I am here, back again in Australia? What to do with my life, this this is my struggle because honestly, more so than when I was travelling I have never been more uncomfortably confronted with myself.
What I mean to say is, I no longer have a comfort zone to cling to at all, I can't pretend I'm idling by waiting for a gradual buildup to happiness. I have to make all that shit right here right now.
Which means for maybe the next three years I will be painfully kicked in the balls again and again as I claw my way from miserable failure to miserable failure, every day I head down to the beach to make sandcastles musculer guys in speedos kick sand in my face. My possessions and lesser extremities are collected by repo men, gangsters take to me with shotguns and I lose my humanity in a new conglomerates attempt to privatise law enforcement.
All of that, or my surefire addmission of defeat is to actually use my decent resume to go get a respectable salaried job and then go back to being a shining example of professionalism and career management and try to claw up the ranks of a corporate ladder.
So in view of that I am 'hanging in there kitty' by living with my folks in my sisters vibrantly unmanly bedroom single and in a suburb I hate in Melbourne after 8 months of sheer dependence on hard currency disguised thinly as 8 months of 'dependence' and whats worse is that my parents really highlight that I have no idea how to articulate my struggle for freedom.
Yes freedom, I want to throw off the chains of oppression, and cast on the chains of social responsibility.
Donald Trump said 'If you are going to think, you may as well think big'
Well let me say, I am thinking now so big that it is a size that can only be called 'inarticulate' which is worse than being labelled incomprehensible because it is implied that the failure is on my part.
And this certainly got no easier as I attempted to 'sketch it out' this morning in a first draft business plan, so I thought 'where do all my inarticulate ideas go' exactly... here.
See my parents being anxious, worry now that I am just completely fucking insane urging them to guide me back to 'reality' with statements such as 'well the reality is tohm that society needs rules' and 'the reality is tohm that you need to be paid what you are worth' and 'the reality is tohm that you need a womb to gestate a feotus' and so fourth.
I unfortunately for me can totally sympathise with their anxiety because I appear to have simply been willing to latch on and espouse any contrarian viewpoint on anything in the world, and can quite quickly escalate to a defensive arguement that could be described as hostile.
I espouse unpleasent words in an effluvium of mole pueblanaesque chocolately richness.
Let me attempt to share some of these dirty words with you in my lexicon of inarticulate business plan. But first perhaps my goal a bizarre starting point of my self imposed struggle to damnation or paradise:

I want to be the best employer in OZ.

Let me make that larger because that is what it is:

I want to be the best employer in OZ.

Which beautifully highlights my first inarticularity* and that is when people go 'So what does your company do?' and here I say 'I don't know' and then try to qualify that statement sometimes throwing out the old 'it doesn't matter' and truth be told there was nothing to stop me from putting into practice most of the measures I would take to become the best employer, ensuring strategic dominance, growth personal and financial, happiness and intellectual stimulation along with a genuine sense of accomplishment and self determination in any company...except that no company in their right mind and more importantly showing legal due dilligence would let me do the strip down and overhaul type of management needed for me to become the best employer in Oz...
No, it seems there's all these pesky things getting in my way to create the kind of business environment for myself that would allow me to reciprocate it for other people, I mean a big corporation it takes a long time to get to the top and a lot of care and caution and smart moves too (something so sadly and oftentatiously ignored by so many people) and sadder still by the time you get there your hands are completely tied and you spend most of your time reporting to A) Head Office or B) Banks representing funds that represent shareholders.
So scratch that, in the first case need to get the rest of the pyramid off my back, in the second I need to keep a vote from those pesky shareholders from diluting the vision. So I determined that I need to start my own company and sadly for me, actually maintain control.
I need to start fascist over my own sad little empire.
Leaving me currently devoid of a context in which case to build from. So I can't honestly answer the question of 'what does your company do?' the answer is 'I honestly don't know yet but I do know how I will do it.' and that is an inarticularity if ever I saw one but it kind of makes sense to me.
Enter the late great Peter Drucker.

You see an important point about an organisation, particularly when you are thinking of starting one is that the owner and the business are treated as seperate enteties.
So here is where I am thus far, I know exactly or at least 90% how I want to run an organisation and have determined I need to start my own. So I reach up into the air and I pluck an organisation out of the air. It has no capital, no employees, no core business yet. But alas it is my organisation. I have created it. It reminds me of a crappy poem:

'Your organisation is not your organisation,
it comes through you but it is not you...'

blah blah, the point being that now on a lonely windswept hill overlooking the city at dusk there is now me, the effervescent tohm, and my organisation hand in hand, but not a union.
This is important, Drucker would know why this is important, it is important because it allows me to pose myself the question 'what does the organisation need of me?' or 'What is the most effective thing I can do for the organisation?'
To look at my organisation it at the moment looks roughly like a dandylion, a mental dandylion, it is a dandylion meme. Touch and it'll all be like 'poof' and shit.
It needs to be fleshed out, and what I need for my organisation is substantiation. This is how I serve it, I must feed it, grow it so that through gravity alone, my organisation can attract new people to it of its own sheer supermassiveness.

So I need revenues, and I need to sure up this organisation, of which really all that exists is how I'm going to organise it and the answer to that is 'not much' but more on that later.
Which means I now have to become a consultant. And this means I have to basically try and earn money by improving other employers employment of employees. Which involves me sneaking them my philosophies of management in manageble doses.
Which means I have to teach my organisations memes to other organisations in slwo gradual implementable memeoplexes.
I am confident with enough artistry this will yeild results, I am not confident I have enough artistry at this stage to do that. It is a good testing ground, and existing companies have money which I don't (well I do, I have enough money to employ someone else for half a month, so in the meantime I am resigned to hit the pavement to dig up more capital) but again I come full circle because I have this dirty vulgar word in my mouth that is the basis of my organisation which sadly my particular brain has been sucked into and fallen down and thought 'this has to be the most effecient period' and it is called, this dirty dirty word 'anarchism'
and this opens up a world of inarticularities, just fucking me up all over the place.
See in my mind I can refer to the cybernetic principle that whichever element in the system has the most choice inevitably controls the system, and then in my mind point to game theory of which one key dimension is scope, and whilst anarchy and organisation seem to be somewhat at conceptual odds, in a larger marketplace the anarchistic organisation that by definition must have more choice will control the market(s) but that's just on a purely theoretical novel...not even...just fucken principle, everything I suppose would have to react to the anarchistic organisation.
On a simpler level it is about autonomy, and I turn once again to Abe Lincoln who said 'Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.' which I take as a challenge, and the easy way to face the challange, just like the easy way to resist peer pressure is to just say 'no' (unless your peers are trying to pressure you out of something) to power one assumes and then immediately delegates.
Because as much as I have learnt that I hate people in general, a real misanthrope if you will, I just cannot be convinced that on the whole the best thinking can ever be done for someone else on their behalf. Sure if they are a retard or something, but frame the game right so people can think with confidence, and they will find a better outcome for themselves than I could any time.
Hence hencely, my goal is to be the best employer, not employee. I just want to set up this anarchanistic organisation to remove the toil of working under direction, to actually pick an intelligent person up off the street, treat them like an intelligent person and pay them like an intelligent person, and there isn't an employer I know that scores 3 out of 3 on those fronts.
And people who fail the power test of basic self determination, well then they will fail bad.
But I am fully prepared for my organisation to turn around and bite me. We are not the same, and you know what, that is what I want, I want an organisation to become a thing of its own, to take on life and make me 'mother' poor neglected mother that never gets visited by its progeny.
But anarchism is alas a dirty word, delegation, development and coaching are all inform buzzwords though and this is how I have to frame my organisation, even though it springs forth from anarchism, like one may say democracy does (albeit a compromised form of checks and balances, and I still haven't gone down the wikipedia article far enough to truly classify my organisation as anarchonistic).
And then fuck, the most efficient and anarchistic system of all, natural selection. Casting my eye forward, what is goal 2? When I have sensible money do I build up and train a bunch of suits to become the best consultancy employer in Oz? Yes and no. I want a large desperate gene pool. I wan't artists. Creative types.

Did you feel that? We just stumbled over another inarticularity.

Here you have to feel low to understand, think back to the last time you were brought low, when you caught your girl or guy on top of your best friend. When your weight problem got out of hand over the summer holidays right when you had to change school. When you crashed your bike into a ditch at nightfall in the middle of creepy former soviet contryside and broke your arm.
Low, really low. This was about how low I was when I went and got counselling a couple of years back. And part of it was that I realised my life was more or less all about me, and it was the most depressing revelation I had ever had.
And fortunately I don't trust myself when mentally unhinged and sought professional help at company expense.
And I found a good and pricey psychologist based right near where I live and went to see him. And I mean, I was struggling through each day at this point. From the exterior it may have looked like I made a big deal out of nothing, but my control, my power had been lost and my hollow shell of a soul just imploded.
But I stepped into the Brunswick Business Incubator and saw in every room there was an idea. The place was a dream factory.
Buying some sustainable $3000 business as income and a chance to try my hand at my own dream is not enough, you see. It was there in those halls, that I knew I needed to invest in dreams. Other peoples. The chance at fulfilling a dream and not a 'I want Jenna Jameson to blow me' sort of dreams, but real 'I want to blow up the moon with a laser beam I developed in my dream' sort of dreams.
Big dreams. I want to employ people to fucking have a tilt at stuff they otherwise would be talked out of. And more than that, it is the place to apply my dream, and make these people, big, business badasses.
I want my organisations people poached from me, I want big companies coming and busting down the door to offer my best people far more than I could ever pay them to take them off my hands.
I want them to say no because here in the organisation they have a remote chance to achieve the dream. I want them to say no because they have grown to comfortable with a flexible and free workplace.
I want them to say no because they are in love, that they go to sleep dreaming of naught but tomorrow.
That is the employer I want to be.
And if I just piss people off and become annoying, I want them to take my money, fire my arse and dump me on the street.
For again as Abe says 'In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free —honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.'

but there's more spanners to throw in my works, if going into business as a consultant on management with no management experience under my belt and a professed belief in the ideal of anarchy isn't enough of a handicap in my struggle, and then wanting to invest all that money in pie in the sky dreams of artists doesn't seem financially suicidal enough, then you have to appluad my desire to put my money where my mouth is for consistencies sake.
I also don't want prices. I believe in transparency. I believe in the market. I believe more specifically both in self set pay, and merit based payment.
What is that to the lay person? I want to extend to my employees the power to say 'This is what I'm worth' and for me to trust them and say 'Okay, that's what we'll pay then, now let's see it' and simultaneously extend to my customers the power to say 'This is how much we value what you do' and me to say 'Then I will gladly take what you think we are worth'
Now one could immediately speculate that there is a gaping hole there somewhere between 'letting employees set their own salaries' and 'letting customers choose how much they pay' that just seems like I am bending over, pulling down my pants, grabbing my ankles and saying 'insert pinecone!' but to me, there is also something beautiful about being samwiched betwixt two glowing pillars of trust. And furthermore, there is a big set of spreadsheets that employees can go and read to see how much money the company can really afford to pay them, and how much money they by default would be taking right out of their colleagues pockets.
And as for customers paying what they value the product at, well there's a device called the market that has been doing that for years.
Unfortunately I have no idea about the legality of this position.

But to summarize, what are my plans? what am I confronted with?
I am at a crossroads, where in one direction lies a job, a suit, a tie, good salary and I am confident I can do well at it. In the other direction is an opportunity to create something completely fucking insane, and draw moths of insanity to the sheer insane glow of the bulb of it, a chance to be burnt up, out and destroyed, to lose what little I have left on a gamble that I make harder along the way.
But if you could see what I see, what stands to be gained down that path, vs the path I could just easily mosey down, and what stands to be lost in a life of comfort and dependability.
What I am confronted with, is more than anything else, just one question: Who will come with me?

*inarticularity - a completely collapsed explanation whereupon the 'event horizon' or the point where the explanation ceases to be informative all further energy devoted to explaning and clarifying also collapses into the infinitely small and infanitely dense inarticularity. They can evaporate through hawkien radiation however the physics is complicated and I don't have space here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tohm.
Fucking beautiful.
A perfect unfolding.

I have every faith in you.

The bigger risk is not doing it.
You have no real choice but to go for it.

I am putting my hand up to help in any way you think I can.

Bryce Ives said...

I agree with Shona.

there are a lot of people who have faith in you Tohm.

Fucken do it.