The Man and the Moat

The perils of trading on a licence

Greetings from the valley of the squinting windows. It’s a long weekend here in Ireland, which means I had time to get some things done around the house. Yesterday, I fixed a toilet seat, banked the side of a pond, started a compost heap, and installed a security camera – not bad for a gentleman of leisure. Today I am back on the laptop and this week’s entry is about the kind of work which requires a licence, or credentials of sorts, in order to practice.

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Gentle Reader,

It crossed my mind during one of these grey October days that there are two types of workers: accreditees and non-accreditees.

The accreditee requires credentials in order to do his work. For example, as a medical doctor, I rely upon the credentials given me by a university, and accredited by the medical council. Similarly, accountants are licenced to submit tax returns on behalf of clients, and lawyers can draft documents which carry legal status.

The non-accreditees are generally of the managerial class, or they work in operations or sales, or they are entrepreneurs. In short, anyone who does not require a licence to do their type of work.

On the face of it, the distinction seems very pragmatic, but it is also philosophical – the former works in an atomised manner, while the latter has the potential to work in a more leveraged and holistic way.

I became aware of the distinction when I worked for a time in the C-suite of an organisation, where I witnessed with startling transparency how the upper echelons of the company viewed the employees, many of whom were accreditees, as units to be moved around like wooden blocks on a jenga board.

There but for the grace of God.

Of course, senior management does this to everyone, but it was the accreditees who had no way out, as they were pigeon-holed in their roles, and their utility was a double-edged sword which incarcerated as much as it empowered them. This experience made me reflect on my role and skills very broadly.

The accreditee

Being an accreditee isn’t problematic per se. In fact, such work is often stable and consistent, but many accreditees often come to rely upon their credentials which provide a ‘moat’ around their practice – any given person with the same level of knowledge and expertise still can not do what they do, because they don’t have legal permission.

This legal permission however forces the accreditee into being a highly-machined cog in a refined system, into self-atomisation, something which is anathema to the nature of the human.

This super-specialisation is unnatural, but the worker may be fooled into thinking it is important because he has become effective, and his skills are in demand. In reality, although he is excelling, his ability to truly self-actualise is hampered, which is a recipe for melancholia. This is the same rationale that explains why many successful executives, doctors, lawyers, etc, are unhappy, despite impressive accomplishments at work.

In contrast to atomisation, truly great work is a function of generalism; it stems from the broadest and deepest well-springs within us, and it follows from the fundamentally generalist nature of the human. By ploughing too narrow of a furrow, the accreditee has denied his own nature.

Imagine if you instruct a (somehow literate and numerate) caveman 5,000 years ago to do nothing all day except add numbers, or read documents. It should be explained that if he does a good job, he will be allowed to charge more for adding numbers or editing documents. Does this sound like a good recipe for becoming a rounded and happy worker?

The worker in this instance has no leverage, and his outputs are in direct proportion to his received inputs. The only means of leverage for our educated caveman is to raise prices, which risks undercutting unless provide a markedly superior service compared to the others in his trade, the acquisition of which generally requires undergoing a lot of training, all in the name of sub-specialisation.

In fact, the headwinds of trading on a licence are many. If your licence is revoked for whatever reason, you are left with essentially nothing, as many people in this category don’t have transferable skills and are therefore at the mercy of regulatory changes or, quite frankly, bad luck. If you are not at the mercy of the regulator, you will be probably be at the mercy of a manager, whose job it is to derive as much profit as is possible from the work that you do with your licence. In this case, he sees you and your fellow traders as commodities to be exploited and he bears no interest in seeing you develop laterally, or in facilitating your more integral development as a human (and therefore as a worker).

Good companies understand this: they develop their workers broadly, they see them not as machined cogs but as plants which, in the right substrate and conditions, can flower, fruit, and prosper, benefitting the company along the way.

Whither, worker?

The non-accreditee

The non-accreditee profits from a mentality of not seeking permission, a common ailment amongst the accredited class. His or her worldview is consequently broader and more integrated, which makes a change of career, or moving into a new field much easier, career moves due to the transferable nature of generalist skills.

Amongst this class there is the potential for greater variety, as moves in the chain of command often involve different streams of work. For example, if you work in investment banking, you start off doing relatively unskilled and perhaps monotonous labour. You are then handed tasks and responsibility by degrees and, if successful you might eventually become a managing director, with leverage, responsibility for strategic planning and powerful executive capacities.

Whether you agree with this career arc or not, and it is flawed, it takes a broader view of life than the more vertical path of the doctor who, even when rising through the ranks, is still always doing the thing (no leverage), rather than managing people who are doing the thing (leveraged), and whose work cannot deviate from well-defined parameters. The doctor can generalise, but it often requires networking, speaking at events, promoting himself as an authority on certain topics, allowing him to segue into corporate work. The skills required to do this don’t come naturally to those who are used to working in blinkered conditions, in narrow confines which demand strict adherence for promotion to the next grade, in a work environment with a pre-set pathway and ladder. We see that the accreditee is rewarded for compliance, whereas the non-accreditee is rewarded for finding a way.

The downside for the non-accreditees is that, even if their skills are more transferable, they are essentially more disposable in times of strife. If the company is performing poorly, the accreditees whose fundamental tasks are necessary if not sufficient for the business to survive, will generally be kept, whilst those soft-skilled managers who make hay in good times tend to also suffer or get laid off when the bottom line is unfavourable.

Crossing the moat

As I stated above, the credentials aren’t the problem – the problem is only relying on the credentials, and being typecast. If you are an accountant and you decide that you want to get into sales, or another more generalist discipline, you might find that you risk death by drowning if you try to cross the moat on a shaky raft.

The accredited class are therefore recommended to dabble in unaccredited waters, to learn the ways and soft skills of the generalist. After all, if it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to a more narrow way of working. If it does prove successful, the specialist who can generalise (a rare breed) proves a potent weapon, and always carries with him the niche knowledge which remains obscure to the generalist.

The man who learns to cross the moat, who makes of it a leisurely paddling pool rather than a devilish blue sea, is powerful. He can cross over and back as he pleases.

Consider again our caveman ancestor. His survival depended not on excellence in a single domain but on competence across many: hunting, gathering, tool-making, shelter-building, child-rearing, storytelling. The specialisation inherent to modernity which defines modern professional life would have seemed not just alien but dangerous and entrapping to him.

The modern accreditee, often a specialist worker, is sometimes not wise to the trap. He thinks the water is deeper and more turbulent than it is, as he is anaesthetised by a need for stability and a debilitating lack of imagination. Although he works with tools more advanced than anything his caveman predecessor ever dreamed of, he is in many ways the more primitive of the two, by dint of his narrow and siloed existence. He need not abandon his specialist skillset, but he can find ways to reintegrate it and to complement it with a broad variety of skills which allow him to swim in different waters, and which reflect his fundamentally generalist nature, as a human being first, and as a worker second.

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