Our Weirdly Random Employment System

Serendipity plays such a starring role in our lives that we never stop to ask ourselves whether we ought to accept it. A random event, especially one that turns out to be your "big break," becomes a charming story -- even though, really, such happenstance is an indictment of a system that is no system at all.

Donald Sutherland, The New York Times noted in his recent obituary, "first came to the attention of many moviegoers as one of the Army misfits and sociopaths in 'The Dirty Dozen' (1967), set during World War II. His character had almost no lines until he was told to take over from another actor. 'You with the big ears-you do it!' he recalled the director, Robert Aldrich, yelling at him. 'He didn't even know my name.'"

Wait -- if the other guy hadn't messed up, we'd never have gotten to know this brilliant actor?

James Kent, a chef and restauranteur who died June 16 at the age of 45, launched his career in a similarly random way, according to the Times: "In 1993, when Mr. Kent was a 14-year-old growing up in Greenwich Village and already working at a restaurant, his mother made him knock on the door of their building's newest resident, the celebrity chef David Bouley. The young man asked if he could spend time in Mr. Bouley's kitchen. Mr. Bouley said yes. James spent the summer working at Bouley, the chef's TriBeCa mainstay. Before long, he was also working at famed New York City restaurants like Babbo, Jean-Georges, Eleven Madison Park and NoMad, where he became the executive chef." If his mom had been shy, what would have become of him?

Random twists have defined my career too. Looking to pass the time after I missed a bus, I came across an early alt-weekly newspaper on the bench and decided to send a few copies to its editor, who became my first client. While visiting the president of my newspaper syndication company, he took a call from a chain of radio stations looking for on-air talent that ultimately hired me. A quarter century later, I still do talk radio.

These stories are spookier than they are cute. If I'd caught that bus, I might have given up on cartooning and stuck to banking. If I'd gone to the syndicate office in Kansas City a week sooner or later, I probably would have missed that opportunity. And I'm good at radio.

Leaving employment -- the activity to which we spend most of our lives -- totally to chance is insane.

The job market excepted, every major economic activity is governed by constantly evolving attempts to rationalize it toward higher efficiency and increased output produced by smart imaginative people who study detailed data and deploy sophisticated technology like computer algorithms to make the most of that information. Advertisers and marketers collect everything about everyone to assess how to promote goods and services. Defense contractors consistently improve the efficiency of their killing machines while taking care not to create or expand so many conflicts that they significantly reduce their customer base. Retailers and shippers track every part of every product from conception to manufacture to assembly to distribution to sale, and beyond into recycling and reuse, ceaselessly searching for ways to reduce labor and the cost of goods. Bankers and speculators squeeze every last basis point out of every dollar, ideally borrowed below cost, developing innovative financial products with one goal in mind: increasing profits.

All this capitalistic activity begins with basic employment. Bosses pay workers, workers create added value on the job. Salaries drive our consumer-based economy.

Human potential is the foundation of the system -- yet there isn't the slightest attempt to maximize it so that society extracts as much productivity as it can from as many employees as it can. Corporations call their personnel offices "human resources" while they squander those same assets.

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