Erik Baker

And there's this idea that workers who are entrepreneurial are not just better able to withstand economic disruption, but they're actually happier and more self-actualized and more fulfilled.

And there's this sense that

It's a kind of win-win because this kind of creative, constantly innovative work, people who are working in that way, they're putting themselves into their work.

They're kind of using all of themselves.

They're channeling their passions and their interests and their kind of deepest drives.

And so this is ultimately a more

kind of human way of working.

And this is the promise that managers make, that sort of buying into this more intense culture of work, it's less boring, it's less monotonous.

Even though you're an employee in this big organization, in some sense, you actually are like the heroic founder, charismatic executive running the firm.

You can be that way too, if you buy in.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, I mean, there's nothing, there's certainly nothing wrong with creativity.

You know, it would be fantastic if everyone was able to spend their lives being creative, but that's clashed with the economic system that we have, a system that's

oriented fundamentally around production for profit isn't going to be one that spontaneously happens to allow people to express themselves creatively in their work on a day-to-day basis.

So then there's a real cynical dimension to a lot of this, this strategizing for how to make people almost gaslighting workers into thinking that this plainly uncreative work is in fact equivalent to being an artist.

Yeah, and so this is part of how these ideas first get into the management consulting and sort of business school world.

These management experts realize that if they're able to convincingly draw this kind of equivalence between ordinary workers and entrepreneurs, then so they hope a lot of the causes of worker dissatisfaction can be addressed without needing to actually empower workers in any kind of substantive way.

I mean, everything you said is exactly right, but then you can kind of see how the flip side then becomes, if you aren't successful, then it's because you aren't being adequately entrepreneurial.

It can also be scaled up to the group level, and so you can explain that.

various discrepancies in wealth or income by saying, well, this group of people is just inadequately entrepreneurial.