Don't become a commodity

What does air travel teach us about happy work? In this episode of the Do Happy Work Podcast, Olivier explores why businesses lose their meaning when they become commodities. He argues that a meaningful “why” doesn’t come from the marketplace—it comes from personal truth, curiosity, and the desire to create value that genuinely serves human needs. Using the airline industry as an example, Olivier explains how transactional work creates poor customer experiences and why businesses and professionals need to move beyond commodification to build work that is natural, purposeful, sustainable, and truly valuable.

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I'm your host Olivier and this is the Do Happy Work Podcast where we look at work in a different, more natural, and more peaceful way. I'm in Berlin right now and I'm recording in my hotel room, so apologies for the bad audio quality. But right now, what I want to share with you is an experience that I had just as I got here because it was something that reminded me what happy work is actually about. Airlines, air traffic, international traveling across the oceans, being in the hands of an airline, of a corporation that is supposed to keep you safe, to earn your trust, and you know to take care of you and deploy the value in the very best way. I think a lot of unhappy businesses have become exactly the same way most airlines have become. And what I'm talking about is the why, the reason that is at the heart of a business can be or can come from two different places: an internal place of conviction or then a place that sits inside of a market. So it's either the expression of something that is true to you, that you bring into a marketplace, or the identifying of an opportunity in a marketplace that you then make your own and that you use as validation for your actions. And when it comes to airlines, we have arrived at a place that is not okay. It is not okay for the simple reason because most people pay a fortune to travel, but then their experiences are subpar. Why is that so? Because what these businesses do is they sell you a seat on a plane that goes from A to B. And if you agree with that, it means that you too are now in agreement with the transactional, non-transformative reasoning behind work. It means that to you, value is really just the deployment of a product, but that is insufficient. If you want to do a great job, if you actually want to love what you do because it is what you love for yourself, if you actually want to build a business that represents you, you cannot act in the same way. We have to go back to where airline travel comes from, to where transportation used to come from. It wasn't just about selling a seat on a plane, it was about the magic of exploration, it was about adventure, it was about the possibility to expand your range of what is known, it was about reconnecting or connecting with a new place, expanding your horizon. Nowadays, these businesses only use that as a catchphrase to sell you a seat on their plane. Because they have commodified the magic of traveling to a point where it is just a number. And by default, if in your business your value is just a number, you as a customer become a number. And what do we do with numbers? We treat them just like content in spreadsheets. So you get pushed around, and that's exactly how it feels. You get pushed around from seat to seat, you get pushed around from gate to gate, and it feels that way. The problem is just that because the baseline has become so low, we accept it. But we should not accept it in our own work. Our why needs to be bigger. Our why cannot just exist at the commodity level, it has to exist at the personal level of truth. And I know this sounds like an impossibility, and I have a whole thought nugget and a series of podcast episodes on that topic coming out because people challenge me all the time whether or not happy work is even possible in this day and age. It is, and it is a necessity, but you cannot mimic what the world is doing around you just because those are the experiences that you have. You have to build better experiences that come from your truth. And so, in terms of airline uh traffic, in terms of air travel, it would be about sharing a personal conviction in the shape of an airline. Which, in the beginning days of, for example, Virgin Airlines, that was exactly what was the idea. The personal conviction of Richard Branson, who said that everything can be imbued with magic. Everything about life should be fun, everything about life should be easy, should be not a pain to endure. And so this conviction made its way into a product that later got commodified. But for you, it means that if you want to do happy work, you cannot fall into the trap of commodification. You cannot allow for what you do to become a commodity or to be inspired by a why that is a commodity. The why has to be you serving the world with your truth, but aligning with the need with which you agree. I will keep drilling this down into your heads until it becomes clear at a global level that a why does not sit in a marketplace. It does not sit inside of the commodity of a product, of a shelf item. It sits inside of you and then it gets into the shelf and then it becomes a product, and then it becomes the thing. Because otherwise, all we're gonna have in the future, and I'm talking about the very near future, is commodity at all different kinds of levels in every area of life, and that's not a life worth living because now you are just working to spend on value that is commodified. We need better, we need better, we need better air travel, but we need better uh we need better hospitality, we need better health services, we need better insurance services, we need better food and beverage, and we need better retail, we need everything needs to be drained of this idea that there is success, satisfaction, and sustainable value in commodities. There's not a why is never the reflection of a commodity. Never. A why is a personal statement. It's a statement of you showing up and saying, I have something in me, a curiosity and gifts that I want to share, and I have a need which I know exists outside of me and which will imbue me with this beautiful reason to build something great, to go to full length. Now I know there's a lot of resistance amongst you guys because you think that that's all just dreamer stuff. You think that that's not possible and that's just nice in theory. But we have thousands of examples, and every single client that I worked with is another example, and we have so many businesses around us that are already doing it. And a lot of individuals, the thing is just that we don't hear much about them. We don't hear much about them, not because they're not successful, but because they don't need to brag about it, and because they are not as big as these transactional businesses, of course not. Because when you have a natural, true, good, healthy Y, you grow sustainably and incrementally, but you also grow not for the sake of growing. You don't have inflated numbers, you have good numbers, you have good operations, you have healthy operations, and those don't sound as attractive to share in newsletters and posts and magazine reports and articles as the inflated ones that we hear from the unicorns and the decacorns and what what have you. No, we don't need to brag about our businesses. The bragging is built into the business providing its value. That's all the bragging that's needed. But I I digress, of course, because this is about an experience that I had and that I keep having when I travel internationally with airlines. And it's just such a good reminder that it is your job to keep this world healthy and sane and yourself also sane and healthy because you deserve it and the world deserves it. You deserve to do better than the airlines are doing now or the big hotel chains. Do not copy them, do not take them as examples, do not accept that as a baseline for your why and for the way you express value. Do not look for it outside of you in marketplaces, look inside of you, go back to your curiosity, your truth, your gifts, and how you connect that with the world.