Fantastic read. Please forward this to anyone involved in government labor offices.
The secret of professional happiness is to have no staff. It has taken me forty years to discover that.
I used to have 120 staff. Now I have none whatever. I don’t need any and I don’t want any. I’m happy as I am, on my own.
I was very fond of my staff. I selected them and trained them. I respected them for their skills and rewarded them for their creativity, imagination and enthusiasm. I paid them well.
They moved on when they got married or moved away. In my entire professional life I employed only six secretaries. I delegated to them and, in effect, they ran me. I saved a fortune in recruitment and training costs by having a stable staff.
I employed twice as many women as men, at all levels. That was not a deliberate policy. It just happened. I employed, paid and promoted on one criterion alone: talent.
I had no concept whatever of teamwork. It doesn’t work. I prefer to be a benevolent dictator. Teams reward incompetence and self-opinionation. I saw myself in a comparable position to that of a constitutional monarch. The crucial factor was not so much the power that I had but the power that I denied to anyone else.
I had a wonderful professional life and I am delighted to be in touch with most of my former employees.
Many have said that they would like to work with me again. But I don’t want that. I shall not employ staff ever again in the present political climate. Not one.
This entrepreneur is on strike. The interference by government has gone too far. I have every intention of working for another twenty years but I have no intention whatever of allowing myself to be controlled ever again by state-funded jobsworths.
With no employees, I am below their radar. I do not have to formulate policies and procedures and monitoring systems for them to inspect. I do not have to listen to the lectures and pontifications of people who have never created or run anything in their entire lives. I do not have to go on courses that have no value whatever to me but simply enable bureaucrats to tick their boxes. I’m free of all that.
Most of all, I value being free from the sense that I was contributing to political ideas that I do not support. Even in the fully private sector, my work supported the State. It was my taxes, and those of staff in jobs that I created, that kept the State in funds so that it could waste them on projects that I do not believe in.
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