Linchpin

One of Seth Godin's most powerful books is Linchpin. 

Some thoughts from this profound and meaningful work:

"We’ve been taught to be a replaceable cog in a giant machine. We’ve been taught to consume as a shortcut to happiness. We’ve been taught not to care about our job or our customers. And we’ve been taught to fit in. None of these things helps you get what you deserve."

"The experience could have been merely ordinary, merely another bit of good-enough. But it’s not. It’s magical. It was created by someone who cared, who contributed, who did more than he was told. A linchpin."

And his definition of the word comes here, among other places:

"I grew up in a world where people did what they were told, followed instructions, found a job, made a living, and that was that. Now we live in a world where all the joy and profit have been squeezed out of following the rules. Outsourcing and automation and the new marketing punish anyone who is merely good, merely obedient, and merely reliable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a wedding photographer or an insurance broker; there’s no longer a clear path to satisfaction in working for the man. The factory—that system where organized labor meets patient capital, productivity-improving devices, and leverage—has fallen apart. Ohio and Michigan have lost their “real” factories, just as the factories of the service industries have crumbled as well. Worse still, the type of low-risk, high-stability jobs that three-quarters of us crave have turned into dead-end traps of dissatisfaction and unfair risk. The essence of the problem: The working middle class is suffering. Wages are stagnant; job security is, for many people, a fading memory; and stress is skyrocketing. Nowhere to run, and apparently, nowhere to hide. The cause of the suffering is the desire of organizations to turn employees into replaceable cogs in a vast machine. The easier people are to replace, the less they need to be paid. And so far, workers have been complicit in this commoditization. This is your opportunity. The indispensable employee brings humanity and connection and art to her organization. She is the key player, the one who’s difficult to live without, the person you can build something around. You reject whining about the economy and force yourself to acknowledge that the factory job is dead. Instead, you recognize the opportunity of becoming indispensable, highly sought after, and unique. If a Purple Cow is a product that’s worth talking about, the indispensable employee—I call her a linchpin—is a person who’s worth finding and keeping."

In Socks, I wanted to present a fictional exposition of what it means to be a Linchpin within a large company, rather than the easier-to-conceptualize lone entrepeneur. I also wanted to take this concept even further. We have been trained- read brainwashed- to believe that employees exist at the pleasure of the companies they work for. The company is the entity that matters, and all the human beings who work for it are parts of the whole, none indispensible because "the company could go on without any particular one of us." You've heard that before, no?

Well. What if the truth is actually quite the opposite? What if all these companies and corporations and even governments exist primarily to give the Linchpins of this world the chance to do the unique, individual and meaningful things that only they can do? What if humanity's largest, most powerful structures really exist to provide the opportunity for us to be at our most... human?

Join me then as I explore Seth's concept of a Linchpin. The main events of this passage really happened; I weaved my characters into them. And Richard Smith D.D.S. was my childhood dentist who did fly P-47s in the war; only putting him into the Battle of Britain as a volunteer first was a stretch. He was a kind, brilliant and inspiring man and I honor him.

Read on. And never settle for being less than a Linchpin yourself.

In early 1953, just after New Year’s Eve- still, and paradoxically for a brewer, not at all his favourite holiday- Gack took the to The States for a business trip on which he planned to meet with a number of American independent brewers. They were few and far between in that Land of the Hit, as he sometimes thought of America and its penchant for mass marketing nearly everything, much of which would certainly have remained better off if it had stayed a Niche. However, he was a brewer, not a philosopher or social scientist, and he didn’t try too hard to figure out the Yanks’ similar, yet oh so alien, culture. He also had arranged to spend some time with his old Yank squadron mate, Richard Smith D.D.S.

Gack and Smith left Boston, where he had had a number of fascinating meetings with innovative Yankee brewers, late in the evening of January 14, 1953, on Train #173, the "Federal Express". Its destination was Washington, DC, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration, which Smith planned to attend.  Gack was along for the ride with his old squadron mate, and his plan was to go on and speak to some brewers in the American South as well.

A sticking brake caused their train to stop in the charmingly named Kingston Swamp, Rhode Island. After repairs, the train highballed on to New Haven where its diesel was changed for a New Haven Railroad EP-4 electric locomotive. Arriving late at New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, the locomotive was again changed, to Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 #4876. Gack was fascinated with these graceful yet immensely powerful Art Deco locomotives, elegantly dressed in Brunswick Green and golden “cat’s whiskers’ five-stripe accents, and managed to chat briefly with the engineer, Harry Brower, whilst standing on the platform adjacent to the cab.

The trip went quite routinely and the two old friends, the dentist and the brewer, chatted deep into the night about the times they had shared in 210 Squadron and the comrades they had known, as well as all the splendid things that their lives had brought to them in the meantime. They finally slept for a few hours, passing asleep through Smith's hometown of Philadelphia and waking shortly before eight as their train neared the nation’s capital. Two miles from Washington's Union Station, right on the mark, Harry Brower reduced his throttle and applied the brakes- and nothing happened. He then calmly set the emergency brake, which he expected to halt his train very quickly indeed, but, again, nothing happened. Well, almost nothing. He could feel that the locomotive’s independent brake had applied, and perhaps the brakes on the first few cars, but somewhere there was a break in the air line that had drained the air brake system completely, and the massive force of at least thirteen fully loaded passenger coaches was pushing on his train as free rolling weight. His train was now running downgrade at 80mph directly towards the bumper stops of Washington Union Station and there was nothing in the universe he could do to stop it.

In the finest tradition of the PRR, Brower stayed at the controls of his magnificent GG1 to give his passengers and crew what little chance they had, and blew its horn to warn away as many of the occupants of the crowded passenger station as he possibly could.

The tower operator at Union Station heard the horn blasts and felt ice in his veins, and probably in his arteries and nerves as well, as he realized that there was a runaway headed at high speed right into his terminal. He phoned the stationmaster and implored him to clear the station concourse.

Number 4876, brave Harry Brower, and all the passengers and crew of Train #173 crashed through the buffer stops and wall, smashed through the now-vacant stationmaster's office, eliminated the main news stand from its corporeal existence in a fraction of a second, and skidded across the now empty main concourse toward the waiting room. At this point the floor gave way under the 475,000 pound locomotive and 4876, along with two of her cars, fell right through into the basement baggage room. Much later, a broken clock that was found in the debris set the time of the crash with precision at 8:38 AM on Thursday the 15th.

Gack and Smith were in the third car, the one that teetered over the brink of the immense hole that had been torn in the floor by their runaway. They were shaken, of course, but after flying in the Battle of Britain, they had retained a certain firmness of spirit that made recovery from such a shocking episode rather more rapid than would be considered normal for a human being. Aloysius managed a laconic, “Rather reminiscent of the way you landed your ridiculously oversized P-47, what?”, to which Richard relpied, “Gack! And I’m not sure if I mean that as your name, or an exclamation!” They saw to it that none of the stunned fellow passengers in their car was injured severely, and then they walked out of it as if this were a normal business day and, picking up the pace on what remained of the concourse, hit the stairs at a run in order to offer their assistance to the passengers and crew in the basement below.

Astonishingly, there were no dead in or about the sprawling wreck. Later on, the tally was found to be eighty-seven injured, none fatally. Harry Brower and his crew- who Aloysius and Richard later made time to visit in hospital- had prevented an untold number of deaths by their actions, which certainly had slowed their train to far less than the speed at which it would have hit the station wall if they had decided to jump off and abandon their bounding monster.

Later, in hospital, when questioned by Gack about his actions, Brower said to his visitors, “I was just doing my job, doing right by my passengers and the company I work for.”

Aloysius thought for a moment and then, making firm eye contact with the injured engineer, answered him thus: “No, my good man. You have it quite backwards, I have to say.”

Brower gave him a quizzical look.

“You, sir, are the company. The company, your great ‘Standard Railroad of the World’, massive corporation that it may be, exists for two reasons- to serve its passengers and freight customers, and also, and perhaps even more importantly, to give men like you the chance to be… to be the Linchpins that hold it all together.”

And it turned out that Harry Brower was not the only Linchpin that the PRR had in its employ. The Presidential Inauguration was only days away, and the mess had to be cleaned up quickly. By the next morning the two fallen cars had been lifted out and carted away. The GG1 was left where it was in the baggage room for now. A temporary concourse floor was built right over her. Washington Union Station was open for business just three days after the accident.

Even more remarkable, the 475,000 pound 4876 was cut into three pieces and sent to the PRR’s Altoona Shops. She was then rebuilt and returned to service.  Gack had the immense pleasure of riding behind her with Smith many years later, before she was withdrawn from service for good. They invited a retired Harry Brower along too, and this man who was forged tough as steel wept openly with the strong emotion of being presented with a special brew in his honour from Gack&Bacon Ltd.

It was named “Full-Bore Through-The-Floor Brower Brunswick Ale.” And it was sublime.

-From The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks, the 1953 chapter, by Rick Wilson

Comments

[Joel]

I will, in fact, drink to that. Amazing.

[Freight Broker]

Nice story. Reading help me relieve stress and this one is a good catch.

[Rick Wilson DMD]

Thank you so much for reading, Freight Broker. If it was the railroad references that led you to find my bloog, stay tuned! My main character Aloysius is a pilot, so there are lots of filght scenes. But I also celebrate these magnificent machines that ply our rail networks, and some British locomotives and routes are woven into my story as well.
Harry Bedwell would be proud.