I can’t remember who posted this, so apologise for not attributing, but the podcast name is in the image so I’m hoping that’s enough. I really like Joe’s takes. He’s a very sharp strategist and Quality Meats do great work. A person with opinions who can actually back them up. An extreme rarity on the oft-performative plane of dribble that is LinkedIn.

In my early 20s I worked for a large corporation, a bank, in a call centre. Some of the software we were using was so ancient it was likely used to launch Apollo 11. Fred Flintstone was probably in a room somewhere running on a treadmill just to keep it going. It was always comforting to know that, behind the golden veil, the economy was being desperately held together by a Commodore 64.

Anyway, we used to get hammered for how much time we spent ‘off the phones’, which was usually just us finalising a sale in the system, even though it was the speed of the shit software that determined how long it took. This thing would sit there and spin its wheels if you so much as moved the mouse too quickly, a pixelised arrow sending it into a sudden state of shock because it moved a few inches. It was like running Crysis on a Pentium 586. So myself and another guy in the team decided to try to build our own sales tracker in MS Access. And we did. Which is hilarious in hindsight. Two call centre dudes managed to build a more effective piece of software than a bank. (And from what I can see, he went on to launch a successful startup. Good on him.)

We briefly got a lot of praise from our direct managers who wanted to then spruik it to the wider business - and that’s when the wheels fell off. It was very quickly shuttered and hushed, because a bunch of middle managers and analysts were responsible for the existing system which apparently cost a gazillion dollars. Much like those dudes you hear about inventing hydrogen-powered cars or jet engines that can run on avocado oil or something, we were swiftly silenced and told to just toe the line and not mention it again. To be fair, when you think of it that way, maybe I’m lucky to be alive. (Thank christ I didn’t work for Boeing.) This was the kind of thing that made me leave the corporate world, but it’s quite symbolic of where things might be heading in general.

Because, as taboo as it might be to point out, much of the white collar world revolves around falling in line and keeping your head down. Having an independent thought is often a sin. Questioning the status quo is heresy. Everything is the way it is and you just have to go with it, or else you’ll be kicked outside to clean the window of the silo.

I’m sure many people reading this have been described as ‘disruptive’, someone that ‘needs to fall in line’, a ‘troublemaker’, an ‘informal leader’ (derogatory), it’s something I’ve carried for much of my life and only started being seen as a strength once I found agency life. But even then, you find different versions of the same thing. When the digital wave hit, and agencies suddenly became submissive asset factories - I saw the writing on the wall. If all we do is take orders and make stuff that a client could eventually internalise, we’re rendering ourselves redundant. If we don’t have an opinion, if we don’t create work and make leaps that they can’t, we’re pointless. Again, I was labelled an antagonist for raising it, but I was right. All that work vanished, and with it, the clients.

Because, as quoted above by Joe:

“You can’t just get by doing what you’re told anymore. There’s a big machine that’s going to do it better and cheaper and never needs sleep.”

If you’ve made a career out of just quietly doing someone’s bidding, whether you agree with it or not, then this is a very uncomfortable truth. Modern management structures aren’t always built to deliver strong outcomes, but strong compliance. And those who previously enjoyed surrounding themselves with ‘Yes Men’ can now more easily surround themselves with AI agents. So the only human voices that might offer anything of value may suddenly be the ones saying what the machines aren’t.

So, now’s the time to spend some more time looking within. How do you really feel about things? What is your gut really telling you? What is your intuition saying? If you’ve been neglecting it, I’d be getting back in touch with your taste and your heart and mind and what makes you see the world differently from others.

Does this mean we might be entering an age of the iconoclast? Is questioning the status quo exactly what we need to break the rhythmic patterns of the machine? Are sacred cows finally on the menu?

They might have to be, because you can’t out-robot a robot.

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