John Edwardson Talks about Work, Rejection, and Learning
by Ann Therese Palmer
The Chicago Tribune
[Former United Airlines CEO] John Edwardson, 54, is chairman and chief executive of Vernon Hills-based CDW Corp. When he was 12 years old, he read an article in the Standard Oil of New Jersey employee magazine that changed his life. “The article was `A Day In The Life of The Treasurer of Standard Oil of New Jersey,’” Edwardson remembers. “It was riveting–borrowing money in the capital markets, negotiating insurance coverage for drilling rigs and oil tankers, and managing revenues in multiple currencies. After reading that article, my objective was to work for a large company like that.”
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The Rebranding of Jobs
As long as we’re talking about outsourcing, here are a couple of book-ends to my last post that will add some context and clarity: First, a short interview with Tom Friedman is enlightening for his take on the outsourcing of white-collar jobs. If you think that it’s just the overpaid tech folks that are being hit with the blunt end of the trend, guess again:
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The Outsourcing of Outsourcing
The New York Times published an interesting piece on September 25 concerning globalization and the outsourcing of jobs. Things have now come full-circle: The outflux of tech jobs to Indian companies like InfoSys, Tata, and Wipro is beginning to outstrip the firms’ ability to staff positions using Indian labor, resulting in the re-outsourcing of jobs back to local centers that can provide both lower labor costs and special proficiencies:
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The Flip Side: Bad Bosses, Miserable Jobs
The Google-sifting for this post started innocently enough by turning over the web rocks of a relatively benign topic, “employee disengagement.” My intent was to present counterpoint to my post about the business model and employee-centric culture at Southwest Airlines, but my searching quickly devolved into a torrent of depressing content about concepts like “bully bosses” and “desk rage.”
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Southwest Airlines: “Put Your Employees First”
My favorite, and perhaps the most famous concept from Jim Collins‘ Good To Great is the Hedgehog Concept:
Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
The gist of this parable is that the fox, with all of his cleverness, speed, and agility, has no tactical advantage over the dowdy hedgehog, whose “one big thing” is knowing how to curl up into a needlish ball when the craftier fox tries to eat him for lunch.The hedgehog’s advantage is that he knows his one big thing, and stays true to this innate gift rather than trying to outfox a fox.
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