The Future of Success (17 page)

W
IDENING INEQUALITY
, then, spurs hard work, both because people near the bottom have to work harder than before to have a decent level of income, and because people near the top have to make a bigger sacrifice than before if they
don’t
work hard. This seems to be the pattern in other nations as well. Looking at data from different countries, Professors Linda Bell of Haverford College and Richard B. Freeman of Harvard found that how hard people work is related to the extent of income disparities. Where the disparities are wide, such as in the United States, people put in more hours of paid work each year than do people in countries where the disparities are narrower, such as Germany.
³²

Bell and Freeman’s finding is confirmed by a survey that asked workers from different nations to choose which of the following three statements best described their feeling about their job: (1) “I work only as hard as I have to,” (2) “I work hard but not so much that it interferes with the rest of my life,” or (3) “I make a point of doing the best work I can
even if it interferes with the rest of my life
” (italics added). In the United States, where income disparities are widest, more than 60 percent agreed with the third statement. In Germany, where disparities are among the smallest, only 37 percent chose the third statement. In Britain, where income disparities aren’t as wide as in the United States but are much wider than in Germany, 55 percent chose the third.
³³

WORKING HARD AND LIVING WELL

As I noted in the introduction, the British economist John Maynard Keynes, writing during the Depression, predicted that in 2030 England would be far better off economically and its people would work far less.
³⁴
Most likely he will be right about the former, but not about the latter.

This is not to argue that we
couldn’t
simplify our lives a great deal. The current fashionable word for it is “downshifting.” I know a number of downshifters who seem perfectly happy with their new downshifted lives. I downshifted out of a fifteen-hour-a-day job in Washington to a nine-hour-a-day job near Boston, and couldn’t be more pleased. The purpose of this chapter isn’t to argue about what people could do or should do. It’s to explain why most people haven’t, and probably won’t, as long as things are organized the way they are.

Downshifters are in the distinct minority. I’ve come across a number of polls in the last few years in which most Americans say they want to work hard for pay. Similar polls, from longer ago, show less proclivity for hard work—suggesting that Americans’ preferences have shifted. A researcher looking at the long hours American families now work, as compared to decades ago, might conclude that this must be the case. But surely what most Americans say and how they act depend on the circumstance they find themselves in. Americans want to work hard
given
that their future incomes are less predictable than they used to be, that competition is more intense, and that income disparities are wider. Were paid work organized and rewarded differently, they might “want” to work less.

In the most recent international survey of attitudes toward work for which data are available, only 8 percent of Americans said they would prefer fewer hours of work and less earnings. But 38 percent of Germans said they’d prefer fewer hours and less earnings, as did 30 percent of Japanese, and 30 percent of British respondents.
³⁵
It is of course possible that these differences are attributable to a unique genetic endowment that makes Americans into workaholics, or to a cultural commitment to work and to consumption that is overwhelmingly greater here than elsewhere, but I doubt either hypothesis. If you’ve followed the logic of this chapter, the easiest explanation is found in the differences in how work is organized and rewarded.

Americans are not working harder because they “want” to in some deeply psychological sense, but because they’re directly up against a dynamic market. We can rise very high in it, or fall very low; we have no way of knowing how high or low we’ll go, or of predicting what opportunities will come along, and when; we know only that we have to push ourselves very hard to take advantage of all of them. Europeans, Asians, and everyone else on the planet are becoming part of the same system. In time, they, too, will probably “want” to work harder.

The deeper questions are not asked on standard surveys, because they’re probably too difficult to put into them, and the answers would be too difficult to decipher: Do we want to live and work according to these new incentives? What’s the price we’re willing to pay for prosperity?

CHAPTER SEVEN

W
ITH YOUR INCOME UNPREDICTABLE
, and facing the possibility of earning a whole lot or a very little, you have every incentive to work hard. But how do you make your hard work pay off? After all, you’re unlikely to be promoted up through the ranks of a large organization any longer, because most organizations are flattening into networks of alliances and contracts. So who exactly gives you a promotion? You. Increasingly in the new economy, the only way up is to promote yourself.

At midcentury, the self-promoter was shunned because he threatened social stability. The “organization man” aimed to fit in. His greatest aspiration, wrote William H. Whyte, Jr., was to be “obtrusive in no particular, excessive in no zeal .         .         . the man in the middle.”
¹
The eagerness with which he conformed to the organization’s demands appalled social commentators of the era, who had recently witnessed the horrors of totalitarianism. “[T]here has been an enormous ideological shift favoring submission to the group,” warned sociologist David Riesman in 1950. “The peer group becomes the measure of all things; the individual has no defenses the group cannot batter down.”
²
The challenge, these social critics thought, was to keep hold of individuality. “[T]he peace of mind offered by the organization remains a surrender, and no less so for being offered in benevolence,” concluded Whyte, urging his readers to “
fight
The Organization.”
³

When few individuals could succeed outside a large organization, the admonition to fight it may have invited heroism but not promotions. Careers started at the organizational bottom, where you “paid your dues.” After displaying sufficient diligence and appropriate obsequiousness, the organization steadily conferred upon you more responsibility. From then on, you owed your career to the organization. Its success was your success.

Now you owe your career to yourself. Financial success depends on how well you sell
you.
Selling yourself can be a full-time job.

WHY PERSONAL CONNECTIONS MATTER EVEN MORE

The sale of the self begins with the right connections. Connections mattered in the old economy, too. “It’s who you know and the smile on your face. It’s contacts, Ben, contacts!” the salesman Willie Loman tells his brother.
⁴
But the gradual disappearance of organizational ladders has made connections even more important, both for people seeking to sell themselves and for potential buyers seeking to hire.

If you lack a college degree, you’ll have trouble selling yourself, but even if you do have one the sale’s just beginning.
⁵
A degree doesn’t mean as much as it once did. In 1960, only 8 percent of adult Americans had a four-year college degree; now it’s 25 percent, and rising quickly. Two-thirds of high-school seniors are continuing their education beyond high school. More than half of America’s newly employed young people now have at least a two-year college degree, and almost a third have a four-year degree. The trend toward more years of education is appropriate in an advanced economy. Learning skills enable a person to identify and pursue good ideas. But as the numbers of degree-holders mount, the mere possession of a college degree is less useful as a selling tool.

A degree from a prestigious university is helpful, but not as much as many ambitious parents assume. As has been noted, the emerging economy confers its highest rewards on talented geeks and shrinks—people who are creative and original, and who possess insights into what others might want. Prospective employers know that young people with an abundance of these attributes don’t always migrate to the most prestigious universities. Nor do these qualities readily reveal themselves on university transcripts, or lend themselves to easy quantification. A recruiter for a major investment bank told me he no longer bothers to interview straight-A students from the Ivies because he figures they’re the sort who have spent their whole lives jumping obediently through every hoop placed before them and are too intent on pleasing others. He wants young people who are out to beat the system—who are innovative and aggressive. He says he’s had the best luck with athletes from middle-sized universities who major in math and have B+ averages, but he’s trying many other combinations, too. In the emerging economy, financial success turns more on motivation and creativity than on elite credentials.
⁶

Here the truth can be told. The real value of a college education to one’s job prospects has less to do with what is learned than with who is met. The parents of one’s classmates, and the friends of their parents, provide connections to summer jobs and first jobs, then later to clients and business customers. Loyal alumni offer further leads. The more prestigious the university, the more valuable such connections are likely to be. To the extent that an Ivy League education has superior value, that value has less to do with the grandeur of its libraries or the cleverness of its professoriat than with the superiority of its connections.
⁷

Businesses looking to hire are placing greater reliance on referrals from people they trust, for the same reason that trustworthy brand-portals are becoming more important to buyers who are drowning in information and need guidance as to what’s good. Even in a tight labor market, the sheer volume of résumés in circulation at any moment is beyond the power of employers to process. Entire galaxies in cyberspace will soon be taken up with Internet job boards deploying millions of electronic résumés, from young people entering the job market as well as others who want better jobs. Several of my students already have mastered the art of filling résumés with “scannable” keywords guaranteed to be picked up by every digital résumé-management system in the civilized world. They’re also “blast-faxing” their credentials to thousands of additional employers, and combing Internet databases for more addresses. One student told me proudly that she’d sent more than 5,000 “personalized” résumés, each highlighting aspects of her education and experience most likely to be attractive to a particular target.

Most new hiring is by smaller enterprises that can’t possibly afford to screen hundreds of thousands of “personalized” electronic résumés, and are looking for qualities that elude simple measurements. These enterprises can’t afford many mistakes in hiring, because they know their “human capital” is their most important asset, and they have only a limited number of hires. So increasingly, they rely on the recommendations of knowledgeable friends and associates.

Think of junk mail, a larger pile of which seems to arrive in my mailbox every day. The only envelopes I now open (apart from bills and checks) are addressed to me by hand, and I’ll get to them right away if I recognize the name in the return address. Similarly with my e-mail, which has expanded to the point where I have to delete most messages without reading them; the only ones I’m sure to read come from people I know. And my wife and I just put a contraption on our telephone that alerts us to where the call is coming from before we answer it. Here too, a familiar name will do the trick. Personal job referrals are like letters, e-mails, and phone calls from familiar names in this era of communication overload. They’re convenient filters.

TRADING ON CONNECTIONS

Although the best connection is someone who knows the person who’s doing the hiring and can put in a good word directly, thus placing the hirer only “two degrees of separation” away, three degrees of separation might also suffice, sometimes even four. Recently I came across an Internet company called sixdegrees.com. You enter the names of all friends and acquaintances, and the software charts a personal pathway to anyone else you might want to meet. If you want to get a message to Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and the most powerful man in America, this software tells you that your friend Herman knows a person named Muriel who knows Lester who knows Penelope who knows Charles, who is a good acquaintance of Alan. So it’s theoretically possible for you to enlist Herman to ask Muriel, and so on, all the way to Charles asking Alan if he’d take your call, or at least send you a smiling photograph. Sixdegrees.com may not work this well every time, but it does capture, in exaggerated form, how the new system works.

The idea that we’re all connected to within six degrees goes back to experiments conducted by Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. Milgram’s device was a kind of chain letter, sent randomly to 160 people living in Omaha, Nebraska, and containing the name of a stockbroker who worked in Boston. Milgram asked each recipient to send the packet to a friend or acquaintance who they thought would get it closer to the stockbroker. As the packet meandered across America, each recipient along the way sent the packet on to someone who they, in turn, thought would bring it closer to the stockbroker. In the end, most packets reached the stockbroker in five or six steps.
⁸
Hence the term “six degrees of separation.”

But not all connections are equal, as anyone engaged in personal sales quickly discovers. In Milgram’s experiment, certain people along the way were far better connected than others. Half the packets delivered to the stockbroker came by way of just three people. The lesson for anyone looking to make a personal sale is to find highly connected people with fat Rolodexes.
⁹

A few years ago, a woman named Marcia Lewin used a political connection to help secure a job for her daughter. Lewin contacted her friend Walter Kaye, a retired insurance executive from New York, who was a major donor to the Democratic Party, having enriched its coffers by between $300,000 and $350,000. Not incidentally, Kaye was a friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the First Lady.
¹⁰
With the help of Kaye, Marcia’s daughter Monica got a job as a White House intern, and the rest, sad to say, is history.

One of the major economic values of college internships comes in the connections they offer. So, too, with professional associations, conferences, conventions, World Economic Forums, and Renaissance Weekends. Throughout the economy, there has been a boom in such Rolodex-enhancing events. The convention industry, among the fastest-growing service sectors in America, lives off them. Any self-respecting city has built or is now building a convention center designed to be a connection center.

Ten percent of the undergraduates at Beijing University are now members of the Communist Party, up from 5 percent in 1991, and applications continue to surge. Upwardly mobile Chinese students have not grown noticeably more enthusiastic about communist doctrine, but they have become more interested in access to exciting and potentially lucrative jobs in China’s marketizing economy. The Communist Party has become China’s preeminent job network. One young party member in her thirties explained to a reporter for the
New York Times
that being an “outstanding worker” did not in itself guarantee a good job; it was also necessary to stand out. “And [the party] is the only thing you can join to get any recognition.”
¹¹

POLITICAL CONNECTIONS

Political connections are not much different from any other kind, although they often have more dire consequences for our democracy. Their economic value can be measured fairly precisely on K Street in Washington, D.C., in the increasing earnings of well-connected lobbyists and the flows of campaign contributions. As with other connections, competition for access to powerful Washington ears has intensified in recent years as a result of advances in communication, transportation, and information technologies, which now inundate the offices of the powerful with faxes, phone messages, e-mails, and even live constituents. People who can break through the clamor and actually whisper into the powerful ears are thus in greater demand, and their rewards are rising precipitously.

Former members of Congress can reach powerful ears by virtue of their past associations. At last count, 128 former members of Congress are paid lobbyists. Some began lobbying after being defeated for reelection, but an increasing number have left Congress voluntarily in order to trade on their connections. According to one survey, more than one out of five former members who left Congress in the 1990s has turned to lobbying, up from a much smaller fraction of congressional retirees before.
¹²
Congressional aides also trade on their connections on increasingly profitable terms, which partly explains why the average length of tenure of high-ranking aides has been dropping. Even relatives of members and former members are busily trading on their valuable names.
¹³
Rather than viewing this as yet another symptom of moral decay in our nation’s capital, we could more accurately see it as the consequence of intensifying competition for access. The potential income a member of Congress, or aide or relative, sacrifices in
not
becoming a lobbyist makes the decision to pursue an alternative line of work exceedingly expensive.

Someone with a great deal of money can gain direct access to the powerful. Political corruption in modern America rarely takes the form of outright bribes, or even campaign contributions expressly linked to particular votes. It is more subtle. Money does corrupt politics, and the current system stinks, but to think about it in terms of purchasing specific policies or pieces of legislation misses the real corruption.

Here’s how it works. A wealthy individual receives an invitation to have coffee with the President or, say, the chairman of a congressional committee. The invitation may have come about without any effort on the part of the wealthy individual, or the wealthy individual may have solicited it. In either case, the real value of the event to the individual is that it confirms the impression to others that he is capable of commanding the attention of a President or another powerful person in Washington. The photograph memorializing the coffee chat, complete with signature, hangs by no means discreetly on the person’s office wall. The personal thank-you note to the wealthy individual that arrived from the politician is slyly shared with others. Word spreads of a subsequent invitation to golf.