Author: NYCO

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An unfortunate lesson that many people learn too late in their careers is that “who you know” is sometimes — or often — more important than “what you know.” This lesson comes painfully, and often at just the wrong time, for people who aren’t schmoozers by nature and who were raised to believe that if you work hard, remain loyal and play by the rules, you’ll get ahead. We live in a society that pretends to be largely a meritocracy. About the only concession we make to the reality of schmoozing is what we tell college students: Network, network, network. Most ambitious students do this dutifully; but I’m not sure they understand why they must, or that they have to keep doing it, not just to initially get a job, but to survive on-the-job politics.

In the workplace, this isn’t a reality we can easily escape. But it’s also possible to get too cynical about it based on your experience in one environment. It is possible to be in a workplace where the veneer of meritocracy has completely broken down, and has been replaced by a great deal of excessive chumminess or even nepotism (sometimes in the name of very high goals). In such situations, there’s not much you can do if you’re on the thin end of the political stick except seek employment elsewhere, or “wait for the thud” from upstairs.

What can eat away at the stability of companies can also be seen eating away at governments. We are not so naive not to sense that our democracy, like meritocracy in the workplace, is more of an ideal than a bedrock principle. Replace “meritocracy” with “democracy,” and then step back and take a look at what’s happening to the Bush Administration (and what we know has been happening in Albany). The opposite, the enemy of democracy is not communism, socialism, terrorism or any particular religious worldview. The opposite of democracy is cronyism.