It should be about the work

"According to a recent study by Spherion, a Florida-based recruiting and outsourcing firm, workers are already gathering at the doors of many companies. The study found that 51% of the 3,000 workers interviewed wanted to leave their jobs, and 75% said they were likely to leave within one year. Both percentages are substantially higher than the numbers from Spherion's 1997 study."

Alan Webber, founding editor of Fast Company Magazine, writes about the fallout that will occur in corporations accross the country once the economy has fully bounced back. Firms will pay when workers make escape

What's most interesting to me about the article isn't that people are taking buyouts and early retirement after feeling slighted by their corporate employers. What's interesting to me is that the cycle continues. The lessons of the dot-com bust aren't learned.

When I entered college, my peers were graduating with multiple job offers, choosing between stock option packages and company cars. There was a sense of entitlement among even the freshest faces in corporate America - regardless of how hard I work or what kind of results I produce, I deserve to get paid as much as possible.

Of course, the inevitable downturn occured, as it always does. My fellow graduates were left out in the cold, begging for jobs they didn't want at salaries far below what they could have commanded only a few years earlier. And now we have signs of heading back to where we were before - not at the same level of ridiculousness, but with a similar sense of entitlement.

What's consistently left out is the work itself. We focus on the number of jobs that are available, on the trend towards outsourcing, and we blame the government or some large corporation for our problems. We rarely stop to consider that the product we're selling - ourselves - is mediocre at best. We don't realize that if we spent our time as individuals focusing intensely on results, we'd never have to worry about losing our jobs; we'd either be fielding offers from headhunters or leaving the company to start our own business.

Regardless of the economy, a superstar is always in demand. If we became a country of individuals who got rid of our sense of entitlement and instead based our professional worth on ideas and results produced, we'd finally understand that it doesn't matter what President is in charge or what economic cycle we're in.