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Tomorrow’s Jobs Will Be Created By Money Making Memes
It has always astounded me, how bratty, uncooperative and perverse new workers could be.
I would show them exactly what to do to succeed with customers in their jobs. If they wanted to sell, here’s what you say, when to say it and how to say it, I would point out with great specificity.
And sure enough, if they followed directions, they succeeded, earning nice paychecks, and keeping life and limb together.
The same thing applied in customer service and technical support applications. Follow my directions, indeed, imitate me, and you’ll do well. Customers, I said, will respond to you in predictable, reliable ways, and when they don’t here is how to address the exceptions.
To me, as a worker, manager and consultant, the best thing in the world is being told EXACTLY what to do to achieve one’s objectives. After all, it is madness to reinvent the wheel, right?
But that’s where the story has shifted in the last few decades.
If I told you there are people that would rather fail their own way than to succeed someone else’s way, would you believe me?
Possibly, there are generations of them, folks that have been coddled and worshipped by their parents, whose teachers believe learning is more about letting something come out instead of putting something inside, to begin with.
Colleges, whose stated purposes have been to help people to think for themselves have produced millions of individuals that won’t listen to advice or follow instructions. They’re too qualified to learn the ABC’s of anything, wanting to skip the alphabet of worldly success, altogether.
Now, even in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the question is being asked: Are too many of the wrong people going to college?
Wouldn’t they be better off in vocational school or apprenticing in one of the skilled trades?
The short answer is, of course!
Vocations and trades employ accepted methods for achieving results. In construction, we erect structures to certain standards, following building codes established by folks that know a lot about the physics of structural integrity.
We don’t encourage trainees to “Use any size nail you wish!” or to “Be creative!” when installing roof shingles, or when walking on them, for that matter.
“Do it this way” we say.
Utter that same declarative sentence inside an insurance company or a software firm and you’ll get a “Don’t tell me what to do!” glare.
Recently, I uncovered a number of books that discuss MEMES. These are defined as “Basic units of cultural transmission.” They are repeated words, phrases, instructions, tunes, ideas, popular clothing, jingles, and even gestures.
Anything that can be replicated or imitated can be a meme.
“The Call Path for Customer Service” that I conjured up, wrote, and disseminated, is a meme. By my admittedly imprecise metric it has been repeated with success in about one BILLION conversations.
Memes, I suppose, are proof that not only monkeys see and monkeys do; but people too.
The problem is, outside of these meme-happy books, the idea of IMITATION is derided and actively ridiculed.
If you imitate someone else’s prose in your college writing class, you might be accused of plagiarism. You are following a good and worthy model, a template for success, might be your rationale.
To the teacher, those paragraphs are property not belonging to you and what you’ve perpetrated is an academic theft.
ORIGINALITY is stressed, especially in higher education. Yet most folks, I daresay, are not capable of it. For their sake and society’s, we would do better to teach them the value of deliberate IMITATION.
But that presumes we that have come before them know the recipes for success, have followed them ourselves, and are capable of transmitting them, of transforming our trade skills into memes.
A restaurant owner in Toronto had his school-aged son help customers during vacations. Dad kept a list of his best patrons behind the register and he matched names with faces so the boy could recognize them, greet them, and quietly give them a free cup of coffee along with their meals.
“These people are paying for your education!” Dad pointed out, in one of the best practical lessons in the importance of customer service that I’ve ever encountered.
“When they come in, we do this!” was the meme, the instruction for replication, time and again.
Colleges and universities are in crisis. Graduating students and alumni, more than ever are asking, “How can we make a living with our degrees?” and the schools that issue them are scrambling for answers.
Internships, even unpaid ones, are becoming super-competitive and harder to obtain.
Internships are apprenticeships for those that have training that hasn’t been turned into money-earning routines, or “money-memes.”
Given the struggling economy and the paucity of jobs for new and experienced workers, it might be the right time to focus once more on the basics, on prescribing exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
The creation of job opportunities might depend on memes, on imitating routines that have proven themselves to work.
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