Against ambition

In his speech to the Labour conference yesterday, Gordon Brown urged us to "embrace this new age of ambition" where "what counts is not how high up you start, but how high you can reach."
Include me out. I'm with John Stuart Mill:

I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.

My problem isn't just that elbowing people aside in a scramble for illusory power over others is morally and aethestically repellent. Ambition is counter-productive for those who possess it, and for the economy generally.
It's counter-productive because you'll never find happiness or fulfilment in reaching higher up a corporate ladder. Ambition condemns you to the hedonic treadmill. Promotion to deputy assistant manager (sales) will not satisfy you, nor will promotion to assistant manager, nor manager, and so on. You'll always think that the next step will give you what you want, and you'll always be disappointed. A common reaction of people who, after years of striving, become partners in law or accountancy firms is: "is this it?"
Instead, happiness consists in freedom. And this means finding ways to unshackle yourself from the chains that tie you to hierarchy. Which means renouncing ambition.
For me, this has meant finding a job that will allow me to work from home. On learning of my plan to do this, a colleague this week said: "if you're never in the office, you'll have no chance of getting promoted." Which is precisely the point.
I have two bits of advice to any young person with ambition. First, go and work in the City. This'll satisfy your ambition for money. Second, learn a musical instrument instead. This''ll channel your desire for steady incremental improvement into a more satisfying direction.
Ambition doesn't just warp individuals, though. It's economically dangerous.
One reason for this is that it leads to an over-supply of general skills and an under-supply of specific technical ones even if hierarchy is efficient, as this paper shows.
Imagine you're a young ambitious worker at the bottom of the hierarchy. You were hired for your specific technical skills. How do you progress? In many cases, it'll be by letting those skills decay, in favour of developing more general ones. There are three reasons for this:
1. The justification for hierarchy is that we need bosses to coordinate assets. This requires general skills - the ability to bang heads together - rather than (just) narrow technical ones.
2. The managers who'll promote you are better at recognising skills they are familiar with, and people over-rate the qualities of folk who are like them. So your chances of promotion are greater, the more your skills resemble your bosses. Which requires you to invest in general management skills, not specific technical ones.
3. The better you are at your job, the greater the loss if you're promoted. Managers might figure: "If we promote him, we'll lose a great programmer. We might as well promote the duffer instead. It's cheaper than sacking him, and he'll not rock the boat."
The upshot is that ambition can kill off important skills. I'll bet the people in your firm who are best at their jobs are those who have abandoned ambition. That's no accident.
The costs of ambition don't stop there, though. Ambitious people will be suspicious of colleagues - fearing they are as ambitious as themselves - which undermines teamwork and collaboration. And they suck up to bosses, thus reinforcing their overconfidence.
And ambition underpins support for hierarchies when these are inefficient. The ambitious regard hierarchy not as a barrier to business efficiency, but as an opportunity for them to "progress."
All this raises a question. Might Brown's endorsement of ambition and the inefficiency of his administration be more closely connected than generally thought?
A clarification: I've nothing against ambition in the sense of wanting to be the best possible engineer/writer/musician or whatever. There's much to be said for wanting to master a genuine skill. But Brown's talk of "how high you can reach" suggests he's thinking of ambition in the sense of wanting to climb a hierarchy, which is where I have a problem.

Comments

[John East]

Brown is a first class example of someone who has reached one level too high. Many (not me) would say that he was OK as Chancellor but is now floundering as PM.

Good luck, by the way, with your home job. I did the same 7 years ago, and I'm now as happy as a pig in.....

[Mark Harrison]

Chris,

I'm not normally someone who would defend Gordon Brown, but have you READ the speech from which you are selectively quoting?

"... I want our children and their children to say that in the first decades of the 21st century there lived a generation that built a Britain, where the talent you had mattered more than the title you held.

Imagine if together we build a Britain where counts is not how high up you start, but how high you can reach.

A Britain where every parent of every child born today can watch them as they sleep and dare to believe that nothing is beyond them realising their potential..."

To me that reads a lot more like the kind of things you are arguing for.

I agree wholeheartedly that NL is overly managerialist, but I fear that, on this one, you're filtering everything they say through a managerialist-coloured set of glasses.

Oh, and I did trade off then "hierarchy points" for "working from home" after my first child was born. I could be a notch or two higher on the greasy pole, but absolutely made the right decision.

It's a shame to see the good points you are making hidden in anti-NL rhetoric that may, for once, not entirely be justified.

[jameshigham]

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, on half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Nice piece, Chris - do you mind if I steal it for Tuesday? H/T of course.

[tom s.]

On your clarification, you may want to look at a piece from the Wall St Journal about Leonard Bernstein and the dangers of "importantitis", or trying too hard to do something self-consciously important. Quoted in 3 Quarks Daily here: http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/02/importantitis.html

'Time and again he dove head first into grandiose-sounding projects, then emerged from the depths clutching such pretentious pieces of musical costume jewelry as the "Kaddish" Symphony and "A Quiet Place." In the end he dried up almost completely, longing to make Great Big Musical Statements -- he actually wanted to write a Holocaust opera -- but incapable of producing so much as a single memorable song."

[The Tory Troll]

I think Alan Watt put it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4

[Laban Tall]

Thomas Hardy describes a christening party in 'The Three Strangers' :

"Absolute confidence in each other’s good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever — which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale."

[dearieme]

If a man may quote his wife "Careers are over-rated".

[Dipper]

On this occasion Chris I think you've missed the target and the wider interpretation of his comments is exactly what I would hope to hear from a labour prime-minister.

Don't fret. On current record another better opportunity will be along shortly

[James Schneider]

Chris, its alright for you. I assume that you made quite a lot of money (enough to be comfortable) and are in the privileged position of being about to follow JSM's advice. I take your point philosophically but ambition is often a necessity (at least in the short to medium term) to facilitate greater future freedom.

[Mike Woodhouse]

As it happens, I'm a pretty good programmer (they tell me) and stepped out of management (at which I did not particularly excel) about 12 years ago, which was nice. I seem to have survived, although home-working remains a nice-to-have still.

"We might as well promote the duffer instead."

Sign of bad management right there. The correct approach is to sack the duffer and hire a great manager, which won't happen because the management is already bad. I think I've had maybe three really great managers in thirty years. Hmmm. Make that two.

[kinglear]

People are always promoted beyond their abilities, apart from a very few. And unfortunately those few end up getting big-headed and arrogant, think they can walk on water and end up dropping a real clanger. Lord Browne of BP springs to mind... And GB one level too high? No I think several. As I've argued before he has no understanding of Economics or Markets

[reason]

I can't believe noone mentioned this, but this is just a rehash of the Peter Principle. One of the most important books ever written. "Everybody rises to their level of incompetence".

[Dipper]

reson - yes agree completely on the Peter Principle. the only book I've read that explained the reality of the various organisations I've worked in over the years.