Budgets have been cut, teams restructured and roles changed for thousands of workers in the publishing industry. Are we all clear on what we are doing or are we distracted and constrained by the additional packaging processes we are now burdened with?
I’m reading my second Seth Godin book at the moment, Small is the new big, which contains this post originally made on his blog in 2005. It is entitled “Godin’s Leveraged Effort Curve” and explains how as our career progresses we spend more time on packaging what we are doing and less time actually doing it.
An insightful web designer spends just a few minutes a day actually doing insightful web design.
“The baseline level of talent in most professions is pretty high, and the really exceptional people shine only rarely.
There’s too much overhead. A doctor needs to fill out forms, meet salespeople, answer phone calls, travel from hospital to hospital, manager her staff and every once in a while, see a patient. And most of those patients are run of the mill cases that a medical student could handle.
“As you get better at what you do, it seems as though you spend more and more time on the packaging and less on the doing.”
Seth Godin, 2005
It’s an interesting post and one which I feel I can easily identify with.
With this massive change that has occurred over the past 12 months the amount of packaging knowledge workers have to plough though in order to deliver their valuable insight has grown to the extent at which we are engaged in a game of pass the parcel in which the knowledge is packaged with so many layers when it is finally unwrapped it seems disappointing.
To improve the productivity of knowledge workers in the publishing industry we need to reduce the overheads and ship knowledge with a single layer of packaging which can be easily removed and even recycled.
