Why it’s a good idea to work yourself out of a job

I am reminded by this thread at sitepoint why I think it’s a good idea to work yourself out of a job. I’ve worked myself out of a number of good jobs in the past. In 1995, for example, I was working for the Harvard Management Company overseeing their foreign investments. A big part of my job was just verification that the securities that the fund managers wanted were actually purchased and put into the correct account. So, I’d call Deutche Bank (or one of the other half-dozen that they dealt with), get a report sent to me and manually verify that all the securities were present in the correct amount. It seemed stupid to me to do all this work manually, so I worked with one of the programmers on staff to create an automated system to complete this task. It took several months to develop it, but finally it came to a point where we got the banks to submit a file instead of hard copy and could run the file against the fund’s database to verify security positions and you’d instantly have a report showing anything that didn’t match up. Other parts of my job there were easily shifted to other employees, and there was nothing left for me to do. I could have came up with 100 reasons , hemmed and hawed, stonewalled or a thousand other things and kept the job for years to come, but it just didn’t make sense. The only way I could feel good about what I was doing is when I was doing what I considered the best thing, and adding value to the company. The price of keeping the job, my integrity, was far too high to pay. The correct choice is always to do your best job and be honest to yourself and your employer.

Progress toward my end year goal

I haven’t had much time to post to this blog in the past couple weeks, even less than usually, as I’m working day and night to meet my year end goal. The goal is 100 presentable websites. More precisely I will have ten forums, twenty-five content sites, and seventy-five micro-sites. Yea, more than a hundred, but it’s a nice round number. One of my latest is The Lemon Laws a content site about consumer protection and auto laws. Many more to come.

The Sharper Image = Bad Corporate Citizen

In this season of thanks and gift giving I think it would do us all well to consider to whom we bestow the honor of our business. It is my personal philosophy that corporations are equally responsible for conducting themselves in a manner for the betterment of humanity. When it comes to my attention that a corporatiion has not been conducting itself in a manner which I consider proper, I will then choose to not reward them with future business.

I recently read that The Sharper Image has been conducting itself in a manner in which I would consider to be very harmful to the welfare of our nation. Specifically, last year they brought a lawsuit in California against Consumer Reports seeking to silence that publication. Consumer Reports had rated their ‘Ionic Breeze Quadra’ as “ineffective” and The Sharper Image sued.

There are many better ways The Sharper Image could have reacted to this report. They could have followed the example of Tylanol who pulled their products off the shelves when they were found to be harmful. They could have done nothing. They could have simply sought to improve their product. Sadly, though, they proved to be a bad corporate citizen.