Feels Like Resistance
Serena Snoad | Go On, Take A Damn Vacation | Bayer, Revisited | Greenland
Rest feels like resistance in hustle culture.
| Serena Snoad via Bluesky
Go On, Take A Damn Vacation
If we are supposed to be resisting, we’re doing a terrible job.
The U.S. wins the award for taking the smallest proportion of vacation time in 2024.
The average worker in the U.S. is offered 12 days per year of vacation, and winds up only 10.5 days. In what other ways are we crazy? Expedia’s Vacation Deprivation Report 2024:
Compared to the rest of the world, Americans are nearly twice as likely to go a year or more between vacations (32% vs. 18% globally).
Of the 53% of Americans that didn’t use all their time off last year, the top reason why was “life is too busy to plan or go on vacation.”
We should demand more time off. A lot more.
If rest feels like resistance, what are we resisting? We are still living in the shadow of the pandemic, and this from 2021 by Farhad Manjoo still seems apt:
In its sudden rearrangement of daily life, the pandemic might have prompted many people to entertain a wonderfully un-American new possibility — that our society is entirely too obsessed with work, that employment is not the only avenue through which to derive meaning in life and that sometimes no job is better than a bad job.
“The pandemic gave us a kind of forced separation from work and a rare critical distance from the daily grind,” Kathi Weeks, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, told me. “I think what you’re seeing with people refusing to go back is a kind of yearning for freedom.”'
Weeks, the author of “The Problem With Work,” is among a handful of scholars who have been pushing for a wholesale reappraisal of the role that work plays in wealthy societies. Their ideas have been dubbed “post-work” or “antiwork,” and although they share goals with other players in the labor market — among them labor unions and advocates for higher minimum wages and a stronger social safety net — these scholars are calling for something even grander than improved benefits.
They’re questioning some of the bedrock ideas in modern life, especially life in America: What if paid work is not the only worthwhile use of one’s time? What if crushing it in your career is not the only way to attain status and significance in society? What if electing to live a life that is not driven by the neuroses and obsessions of paid employment is considered a perfectly fine and reasonable way to live?
Manjoo, and to an extent Weeks, are still sidestepping the adversarial power relations of work, that we have little or no power to negotiate how much time of we get. Employers don’t want to hear about your pursuit of art, or how you want to spend more time with your kids. So work is — by default and because of th ecost of living — full-time, and with little vacation time.
What if people rejected the supremacy of the institution of work, and the compelled commodification of our labor, sold by the hour, week, and month, and where the growing proportion of that economic value is siphoned of by the economic machinery? And they won’t even give us four paid weeks off.
But the stats don’t lie: Americans don’t even take the 12 days they get. We are enslaved to workism.
Bayer, Revisited
In April 2024, I wrote at some length about Bayer, the maker of Alka Seltzer, Claritin, and the eponymous aspirin — as well as innumerable agricultural and medical products — was attempting a top-to-bottom rethinking of their organization and operations. As I wrote then,
The company acquired Monsanto, the agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology company and maker of toxic weed-killer Roundup, in 2018, for the astonishing price of $63 billion, and Bayer is now valued at only $28 billion, having lost 50% of its share price in the past year. The company will soon have to contend with billions of payouts for lawsuits related to Roundup.
In the year since, Bayer has reported a $4.1B net loss, and adjusted profit forecasts negatively: a great many economic challenges remain.
What about the restructuring of the business?
Bayer’s plan to remake Bayer was startling in its scope and ambitions. Bill Anderson, the CEO, started by slashing 50% of management roles, worldwide. His approach was laid out with great fanfare, and seems to have arisen in a close partnership with Michael Lurie, a former McKinsey analyst, who came aboard Bayer as ‘chief catalyst’ (which is a wonderful title).
Lurie, while at McKinsey, wrote a very serious paper, published in 2023: 5 key shifts to redefine leadership for sustainable growth with Aaron De Smet, Arne Gast, and Johanne Lavoie:
For decades, organizations were designed and managed for an industrial environment. They were geared toward preserving stability, scale, and predictability with a focus on maximizing earnings for shareholders, and they paid little attention to the broader—often unintended—impact of their actions. Not anymore. Many organizations have recently decided that this approach is ill-suited to today’s complex challenges, and especially ill-suited to the host of societal demands companies must now consider.
In its place, a new form of organization and management has been slowly emerging. We believe this new approach is at a tipping point where more and more companies will join the pioneers who are already riding this wave. Organizations such as Allianz, Haier, Microsoft, and Nucor are transforming their industries with a new organizational approach that seeks to be open, fluid, and adaptable; unleashes the collective energy, passion, and capabilities of its people; reimagines strategy; and focuses on delivering greater value to all stakeholders. This new model focuses on a powerful aspiration: creating sustainable, inclusive growth. The companies leading the way are developing new architectures featuring collaborative networks of self-managing teams that operate in rapid cycles and focus on creating value for their stakeholders. Their cultures support a more open, collaborative, and emergent way of working. And the shift to this new kind of model changes the way businesspeople must lead.
Now, almost a year later, things have gone better than might have been anticipated. They’ve transitioned to a model of self-managed teams with high degrees of autonomy — called Dynamic Shared Ownership, or DSO — working in 90-day sprints, with 5,500 management positions cut.
Chris Westfall reports:
Nicole Hayes handles media relations from Bayer’s U.S. headquarters in New Jersey. She points out that employees have rallied around Anderson’s new design - a part of the story that’s not reflected on Wall Street. Via email, Hayes says the moves weren’t just focused on cost-cutting, but empowerment. Employees are very supportive of the changes even if the market doesn’t feel the same - yet. “Our employee survey last year showed that 90% of employees are proud to work for a company with a mission like ours. However, only 10% believed that our former system allowed for decision-making at the right level.”
Employees are on board with self-direction. And for a company with 95,000 employees, that’s saying something. Alignment is the first step in driving new results. “Enabling faster decision making is a fundamental reason why we are now working in smaller, self-managed teams with a clearer focused on our customers and products,” Hayes shares.
What about the fundamental question: even if all the managerial and organizational changes 'work' -- in the sense of rationalizing operations and motivating managees -- what if market forces, unchanged by the internal reorg, are larger than the outcomes from the reorg? Is it enough?
Anderson’s push for autonomy may yet be the hero of this story.
The exogenous forces of the marketplace generally have a much larger impact on company success than internal restructuring… at least in the short term.
But Bill Anderson has the support of the company, and has begged patience from investors. Even with the drop in stock value, the investors are at best willing to not dump all their holdings. Can Anderson make this difficult transition, and turn the situation around? I never want to use this line, but here it’s totally appropriate: only time will tell.
Greenland
Two factoids
Because of warming temperatures, an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past three decades, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Massachusetts. That has huge implications for the entire world. If the ice melts completely, Greenland could cause sea levels to rise as much as 23 feet, according to NASA.
[…]
Ship traffic in the Arctic has surged 37 percent over the past decade, according to a recent Arctic Council report, as sea ice has declined. More melting could open up even more trade routes.