Corporate Dictator

JP Castlin | Quiet Coasting? | Not Enough Desks.

Jan 19, 2025

If you are the kind of leader who believes that strength lies in not allowing failure, not tolerating uncertainty, and not hesitating to let go of underachievers or under performers, then you are guaranteeing that you will never get the full story, the accurate picture, or the complete range of possibilities at your company’s disposal. Everyone games the system. Being a corporate dictator ensures that they do so to survive, not thrive. The implications for innovation, risk management, and decision-making, are as massive as they are obvious.

| JP Castlin, The one list of 30 aphorisms

Quiet Coasting?

Mark Eddleston wrote a disquieting post recently, which I think has the wrong title. It’s Is the New Ways of Working Movement Built on a Blind Spot?, but would be better titled as Quiet Coasting?. And I use ‘quiet’ in the ‘quiet quitting’, ‘quiet working’ sense: doing as little as possible and adopting camouflaged behavior to make it work.

He tells the story of (supposedly) an actual friend of his who shared an epiphany, which I’ve recast as a litany of small insights:

I realised if you just roll with the bullish!t, you can get away with anything.
I decided to say yes to every optional bit of bullish!t training, courses, internal groups.
(Regarding a ‘high profile national panel’ he was asked to join): I don’t do f*ck all on it, apart from the annual away day.
I realised some time ago that you can completely coast your way through a corporate career by occasionally saying the right thing and not being an @rsehole. And being OK at your job, but personable. Being halfway sound goes a long way.

Reminds me of the Woody Allen line: 80 percent of everything is showing up.

Eddleston’s conclusion:

This mindset is not unusual. These folks are not outliers. Most organisations are full of people just like them—not because they’re incapable, but because work, for many, is a means to an end. People have families, responsibilities, and lives outside the office/spare room. So, why put in more effort than needed? Sure it might be unfulfilling, yet to many, this just isn’t too much of a problem.
This isn’t about passing judgement. It’s about recognising the reality of modern work. Most people aren’t trying to change the world in their 9-to-5—they’re just trying to make it through the day with as little stress as possible. And really, who can blame them? We weren’t supposed to spend our days alone in our spare room/kitchen staring at a screen for 8 hours.

He’s tacitly agreeing with his buddy, and all the others like them. Eddleston goes on to ponder the way that he, and others seeking to help companies adopt new ways of work, may be missing something big, since at least a sizeable minority of people are going ‘quiet’ or have been for years.

From my view down here on the carpet, I see a system that, even if it bounces back to “normal,” I have no interest in rejoining, a system that is beginning to come undone.

Perhaps no one has captured this situation better than Cassady Rosenblum, who looked at the ‘lying flat’ movement in China a year ago and found she was looking in the mirror:

It’s not just Chinese millennials who are figuring out that work is a false idol. I should know because I’m lying flat too, holed up in my parents’ house in West Virginia. Earlier this year I quit my job producing an NPR program in Boston, and I haven’t been able to stomach rejoining the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle. I’m far from the only one: A recent tweet that proclaimed “i do not want to have a career” racked up over 400,000 likes. Instead, proclaimed the tweeter, @hollabekgrl, “i want to sit on the porch.”
Here in the hills, the new silence of my days, deepened by the solitude of the pandemic, has allowed me to observe the state of our planet in the year 2021 — and it looks to be on fire, as our oligarchs take to space. From my view down here on the carpet, I see a system that, even if it bounces back to “normal,” I have no interest in rejoining, a system that is beginning to come undone.

The quiet movement is driven by the sense that 'the system' -- with its aggressive speed and false certainties -- is coming undone.

To be clear, there is immense privilege in lying flat. But it’s worth noting that Mr. Luo [the original ‘lying flat’ guy] acknowledged the necessity of making a living, and @hollabekgrl didn’t say she never wanted to work at a job or hone a craft; she said she doesn’t want a “career,” a corporate-flavored word that conjures images of PowerPoints and power suits. While jobs are sustenance, careers are altars upon which all else is sacrificed.

Or else you can ‘sit on the porch’ at the office, like Mark Eddleston’s friend, and quietly blend in. Just go quiet, do your work, and find your joy elsewhere. And don’t be an asshole.

In Office vacancies hit a record high despite RTO push, Emily Peck reports on the immediate impact of five-day return-to-office policies:

Some companies have called workers back without having enough office space for them.
AT&T workers told Business Insider that there weren't enough desks and parking was hard to find now that everyone is required to be in the office five days a week. Amazon reportedly had similar problems.

A few alternative explanations:

They sold off the furniture when everyone was working remotely. Likewise the whiteboards.
The leadership of AT&T, Amazon, and other companies do not know how many desks they have, and they never thought to ask.
Those company leaders expected — hoped? — more of the working-from-home would quit (which plays into the ‘passive layoff’ by RTO meme — which is what I think is really going on — since most evidence shows productivity is higher in hybrid work setups). Then there would be plenty of desks.
They counted the seats in the conference rooms, but then don’t allow people to work there?
They expected employees to bring chairs from home?

…

PS U.S. office vacancy rate hit a record high in 2024: 20.4%, per Moody.