Preface

You can earn more, learn more, and go further by moving up the value chain. What do I mean by value chain? Well, it’s a broad term that represents the way in which your skills widen and deepen over time. When children begin to develop a sense of humor or irony they are moving up the language value chain. A chess player moves up the value chain by progressing beyond a basic knowledge of the rules and starting to understand the importance of strategy and tactics. Investors move up the value chain by learning to look for potential bargains, often doing so by leveraging their own special knowledge. In the workplace, you move up the value chain by acquiring and applying relevant new skills and knowledge, and then using them to rapidly solve difficult problems. A good rule of thumb is that when someone makes a complex task look easy, he has moved up the value chain.

Operating low down the value chain is very apparent. When jobs are left incomplete or done to a poor standard of quality, the worker is operating from a low point in the value chain. This is a growing problem as organizations strip out managerial layers and adopt a flatter hierarchy. There is often less expertise in the organization to check that quality requirements are fulfilled. This is illustrated by the old expression that most of the work is done by 30 percent of the staff. As organizations become more geographically dispersed and staff learn to live with the new(ish) notions of outsourcing and offshoring, the problem of work results coming from low down the value chain is likely to grow.

The notion of the value chain says nothing about the monetary value of a given job. An emergency department doctor or nurse may operate from high up the value chain by efficiently saving lives. However, a plumber, electrician, or engineer may also operate from high up the value chain delivering work that is safe, high quality, reasonably priced, and performed in a timely fashion.

A central theme of this digital Short Cut is that each one of us can decide to operate from high up the value chain. The exact nature of your work matters little—there is always scope for moving up the chain. The motivation for making the change is an interest in doing the best job you can. This pays dividends in that you will also learn new skills and acquire a broader outlook, which can in turn help guide your future decisions. In short, once you decide to move up the value chain, it is likely to positively affect most aspects of your life.

This digital Short Cut aims to help you do seven main things:

My focus is on the area of paid work, but the principles of moving up the value chain can be extended to pretty much any sphere of activity.

Recently, I read in the newspaper that it’s now commonplace in the United Kingdom for people to work 70-hour weeks. U.K. workers apparently put in the longest hours as compared to workers in any other European country. The article remarked on the buzz that goes with putting in such long hours. This got me thinking: 70 hours over 5 days is 14 hours per day. I don’t believe anyone in the world can maintain full focus for 14 hours day after day! So, these workers either have superhuman energy levels or they’re not very good at time management or are not especially productive.

Of the reasons why people might feel compelled to put in such long work hours, we can’t underestimate the effect of peer or managerial pressure. The important point is that a 14-hour workday is simply not sustainable; it leaves essentially no time for anything other than work. Over a longer period, it’s likely that such long hours are deleterious in other ways, possibly leading to lower-quality work output, personal relationship problems, and even ill health. In this digital Short Cut, I show you how I developed skills that enable me to avoid “working” such long hours and yet still do a good job.