I'm Taking Massive Action and It's Great

I'm not about to commit myself to Karoshi but I am taking massive action.

I was talking to a software engineer at the Daresbury Innovation Campus in Cheshire this morning and he told me of his eye-opening experience a couple of years ago when he was working in Korea.

He explained how graduates were effectively presented with a simple choice in their first employment - either they would go into the army for a period of national service, or they would be expected to work incredibly long hours for one of the country's giant integrated conglomerates.

Whilst he himself saved up enough money from his overtime during his brief few months there to buy his first UK home, even though he was putting in 70-odd weeks, he was being out-worked routinely by newly employed staff on an absolute fraction of his pay.

We got to talking about the kind of corporate culture which not only permits but in fact actively encourages the use of newly qualifieds as ultra-low cost grunt labour.

Whether it is viewed as an early career necessary sacrifice for the national good (in a similar sense as compulsory military service), or a flagrant abuse of human rights and/or an abusive manipulation of competitiveness within the international trading markets, is certainly moot.

The human costs of such a culture are, however, manifestly clear in the Japanese word Karoshi - meaning death by overwork - which describes the sad situations where people literally give their lives to the service of their company.

Some of this is cultural - in the more individualistic West, such behaviour, when it is one's own interests, is usually viewed as a badge of entrepreneurial honour.

I know from my own experience that I have recently been taking massive action - and I'm loving the pace and momentum that are entering the business as a result. Today started considerably before dawn reading through material for my Ph.D, which has to be finished by next Easter. I was then up and out to the event at Daresbury - a great place in which to become involved, incidentally, if you are based in the North West or North Wales. Then it was on to meet a chamber of commerce with which we are doing some speaking engagements. Then it was back to the office.

Blogging now is a working break - and then it will round off with a little more PhDing later. The David Lloyds, for the last half hour before 11pm.

This is exactly the kind of behaviour which earlier in this article I was implicitly criticising as forced overwork. When I think about it, I am not for one moment doing this because I have rationally considered that this is the way I wish to live my life.

No, I am doing it because it is what is expected of me as entrepreneur. Steve is working away behind me, web design deadlines to meet - never a complaint, just a brief break for yet another ultra-coffee a sign of the commitment. Madeleine is off somewhere, probably a dark corner of the university library, massively over-delivering as usual on a research project.

And you know what? We might be products of our culture - but we love it. Take massive action yourself - it's great: it both creates and validates the great things we have goingl.