When it rains it pours, so how about hiring and not firing?

On the 8th of July this year Britain suffered the heaviest rainfall since records began in 1865!

rain fall

I was in London that day and this was the view (or lack of!) from my living room window!

rain

It was like nothing I had ever seen before!

Earlier this year another record number was announced, this time by the World Health Organisation (WHO). 259,000 people were made redundant in the last quarter of 2008, this being the highest number since the organisation started compiling such statistics in 1995. I can believe it since hardly a week goes by without a friend, or a friend of a friend, being made redundant. Again this is like nothing I have ever seen before.

Lying in bed last night, I remembered something I read once, something that had a deep effect on me (and since then I have desperately tried to find who said it…)

“Laying people off, that is easy, creating jobs…now that is hard!”

Pause for effect and have a proper think about what I just said…Laying people off, that is easy, creating jobs…now that is hard.

Can you remember the last time we were in the business of creating jobs? I can’t… Maybe during the Internet bubble (when we were not too busy creating fancy Power Point presentations of course!).

One thing is for sure, business school, and especially MBA’s, are not there to teach us how to create jobs, they are there to teach us how to be efficient, they are there to teach us about ROI, they are there to teach us about management accounting and productivity, and that that is how you make a profit (I know I suffered through it for a year).

Bearing in mind that the people graduating from these schools are supposed to become the leaders and CEO’s of today, no wonder very few people, and organisations, are concerned about creating jobs, no wonder there is no reward for the amount of people you hire (while remaining productive of course)!

I’m all for being efficient and competitive (in fact I’m ALL about being competitive)…but I wonder sometimes if we asked ourselves a different question, would we get a different answer. I wonder what would happen if we asked ourselves “What can I do today to create a new job?” what effect would that have on the decisions we make?

How would changing the goal from decreasing the number of hires to increasing them (with the right control mechanisms in place) affect the way we do business? What would happen if instead of saying “Times are tough, we need to lay people off”, we would say “Times are tough, what can we do to keep people on, or even hire people?”

What if this would get the creative juices going? What if it would make everyone step up and generate amazing ideas and solutions? What if it would lead to creativity and innovation?

I have an idea, why don’t you set your senior managers a challenge, why don’t you ask them to find ways to hire people instead of laying people off? Just to see what they come up with! You may be surprised, it may be some of the most creative ideas, or innovative things you will have heard in a long time!

Go on, help me find the answer to the question “I wonder what it would be like to live in a world that is about creating jobs?”!!!

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