Gary Monro’s blog

Fastcompany magazine suggests working long hours is not the same as working hard at all. Working hard has little to do with hours spent in the office.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.

Hard work is about facing difficult situations, going beyond your comfort zone, risking rejection. Which, to me, means it’s about personal development as much as about anything else. This requires that one has qualities, of course, but it seems that the qualities required aren’t the ones you’d normally expect.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.

As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.

This all makes sense. It’s those that work long hours in frustrating conditions (such as, being responsible to customers for the poor work of others without having any influence over the poor workers) who die earliest. The further up the tree you get the less ‘hard’ work you really do. I’m not sure the top dogs are going home earlier than the rest of us but they certainly aren’t facing the same pressures.

From a Conservative Party member, these comments would be condemned as evidence of our nasty, cruel, dismissive attitude of all those ‘less fortunate’ than us. From Blunkett they are reported in The Guardian as if they were as sensible as looking both ways before crossing the road:

The work and pensions secretary, David Blunkett, today urged hundreds of thousands of people on incapacity benefit to stop watching daytime TV and start looking for work.

He insisted those who needed long-term care would be comfortably provided for. But for others currently on the benefit, Mr Blunkett said getting back to work “will overcome depression and stress a lot more than people sitting at home watching daytime television”.

Blunkett points out a disgraceful statistic without either him or The Guardian wondering how this came about:

There are four times the number of people claiming incapacity benefit than there were on invalidity benefit 25 to 30 years ago, Mr Blunkett said.

“Health has got better, medical science is improving by the day, technology has changed the nature of work so that people can work part-time,” he said.

Surely the facts of increasing health technology and yet more people on invalidity benefit requires further digging? Why don’t we do that? Afraid of what we might find..?

Blunkett then garbles a bit but makes enough sense to sound like Norman Tebbit:

Echoing Norman Tebbit’s famous phrase, Mr Blunkett said: “We are not actually talking about saying to people we will give you benefits but it is entirely up to you to get on your bike and do this.”

So a government minister tells people to get on their bikes. Ooh, the brute. Good job he’s not a Conservative. There’d be no mercy shown then.

How do we feel about David Cameron ousting Ken Clarke for second place (behind David Davis) in the Conservative Party leadership contest?

My personal preference is Davis and Liam Fox in the final - a result that will have me celebrating for a week (scheduling the hangover into my diary even now). But Davis and Cameron means it’s not Davis and Clarke.

Although it’s a pity that one speech in a Party conference can have so much bearing on a leadership outcome - particularly when it seems that it was presentation skills wot won it rather than content - the silver lining must surely be that we hopefully won’t be electing our own version of Tony Blair.

But what if Cameron won…?

From today’s Daily Telegraph:

Cast your eye over some of the stories in today’s newspaper. Cars are to be installed with chips making it easier to incriminate their drivers. Fluoridisation is to be extended to most of England. Smoking may be banned from pubs and restaurants. Work is going ahead on an identity card scheme in anticipation of parliamentary ratification. A law lord says the Government’s anti-terrorist laws are exorbitant and unnecessary. Employers will be forced to grant paternity leave to their staff. A Bill outlawing religious hatred is about to go before the Lords.

As the writer points out, taken individually, one can make a case for each of these new pieces of legislation. One can also make a case against them. But what each one represents in itself is the steady drip drip of our freedoms being eroded and the state winning more influence, more legislated control over the stuff of our lives.

The writer quotes JS Mill:

“If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great jointstock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this country free otherwise than in name.”

For so long as the British public prefer security (such that it is) to liberty - and so long as Her Majesty’s Opposition is not actually opposing - this steady erosion will continue.