Let’s take a simplified scenario of the mechanics underlying the remuneration relationship between a corporation and an employee in the knowledge economy.

The corporation pays a white collar employee a certain salary and benefits. The corporation in turn charges its clients for the work performed by said employee a much higher rate, double or more (!) what the equivalent cost of the employee’s salary and benefits. This difference pools into a so-called “overhead” budget. The overhead budget covers things such as facilities’ rent, but by far, the largest chunk goes to indirect labor, i.e. executives. They in turn are supposed to make life better for everyone: customers – innovative products and services -, employees – job security -, shareholders – profit.

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Emotions – sometimes they save the day, and at other times are the source of embarrassment or outright disaster. Whether regarded as an initiator of success or source of failure, emotions are necessary. That is because emotions provide the illogical response necessary to address that portion of reality that is non-deterministic. When reality exceeds our ability to make sense, in lieu of emotions, we would behave like computer algorithms, stuck in infinite compute loops. For humans, emotions represent an effective mechanism for dealing with high uncertainty and complexity circumstances that would otherwise constitute veritable traps of logic. Quite simply, we have been able to get where we are today more based on our ability to ignore logic than follow it. Every leap of faith that preceded a ground breaking innovation had an emotional impulse behind it. Progress is in effect humanity’s recurring impulse to cut the Gordian Knot.

Since the dawn of human civilization, every time a new technology gets invented, enthusiasts claim that the world will never be the same. And yet, from a societal and human experience point, it always is.

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Many knowledge firms sell skills, embodied by the omniscient subject matter expert. While this may seem like a robust business model, it in fact scales quite poorly. Revenue being directly coupled to the number of “heads” or the firm being held hostage by star “primadonnas” are just two such examples.

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