Monthly Archives: March 2013

Throwing out baby und bathwater

It is easier to hold one thought firmly in mind than to have contradictory thoughts active in the brain.  The nature of reality is complex, the nature of human opinion: simple.  The human mind has been programmed to respond to slogans.  It’s easier to rally under a banner with a few bold words on it than under one with a complex of equally true facts. 

Joey Reiman (see Purpose)  has a private jet he bought, presumably, because he is excellent at what he does and well-paid for it.   He advises the richest businesses in the world about how to become richer, while having a work force that believes it is doing something to make the world a better place.   He advises big business how to convince the public it is doing work to make the world a better place.  This makes the world a better place and it also increases the profits of the company that does this well.

I struggle with bitterness sometimes, even with the several things I love to do and the good health I generally enjoy to do them in.  Even in the face of slow, but great, forward progress of my dream from idea to reality, a certain malaise hovers.   I have neither private jet nor any pay for what I do, however well I may be doing it.  I have built no organization.   I live on diminishing savings, unable to shift my focus from this dream long enough to figure out how to bring in more income.  My thoughts tend to darken at times as I dream of things most people consider too abstract to shoehorn into their busy schedules.   The darkness remains even as I realize how little I care about the details of what other people do for a living, and that this unpaid work I’m doing is also my livelihood and why should I expect others to be engaged by that?   Time is money, after all, so if it’s not fun, or at least exciting, it better pay me something for my time.  

Reading Reiman’s book I allow my distaste for Win-Win Kissinger and McDonald’s (though their products are, in my formerly carnivorous opinion, and in the opinion of billions served, tasty)  to color something more complicated and important– how does one carry out a dream and where does one get help learning that difficult thing?

And Reiman has concrete recommendations– make a short, emotional one-minute purpose film that inspires people with your vision.   Bring in outside experts to energize your organization.   He points out the folly of expecting someone from inside an unworkable workplace to be able to fix the problems of that workplace.  This is also basic common sense.  If the people you have don’t care, find people who care.  It may be easier to do when you can pay the expert consultant her enormous fee, but it needs to be done nonetheless.  My program is designed for poor people and is all about workarounds, I have solved a dozen problems already, a dozen more await.  There is a workaround for each one.

I ran a meeting recently, thinking it was very snappy and productive as I went from one agenda item to the next, succinctly, leaving space for discussion, nodding sagely at every criticism, no matter how slapdash, wrapping up precisely when I promised I would.   I presented a lot of information, laid out immediate goals and challenges and succeeded in everything but recruiting anybody to help me in any facet of the work.  Or even getting anyone to respond to a series of subsequent emails about it.  When I got home, still energized by what I thought of as a productive meeting, I had an email from one of the directors.

“When you’re feeling overwhelmed”  was the subject line.  Under it was a long forwarded email about the many exertions the successful, well-to-do business woman turned energetic social entrepreneur had ahead of her in coming days; proofing the new product, expanding the line to Canada, exploring cheaper production of the product line in Canada, hiring a new North American liaison and raising the money for her salary, breaking in a new secretary, meeting with the powerful partner social entrepreneur from India, accepting another award from the Prime Minister.  The email, intended to give me the inspiring idea that I wasn’t the only one with a lot of work ahead of me, was forwarded to me, I noted, (not without a bitter aftertaste), at the exact epicenter of the meeting, when this tired director was reading her friend’s email and forwarding it to me from her Blackberry.

You can see dynamic speakers at TED talks speaking eloquently of the need for a program exactly like the one I am running on a small scale, in one school, with ten kids.   They talk about the need to allow children to experiment, follow their imaginations, create, problem-solve and collaborate.  The model of schools in our grim, divided, fearful, murderous society is a holdover from factory days when industrialists needed millions of literate High School graduates who could follow instructions, repeat those instructions in unison, if prompted.  

No Child Left Behind, a program with a stirring slogan/name with unintended irony as great as the old Arbeit Macht Frei sign worked in metal atop the gates of an infamous death factory, is a remnant of this factory school mentality.  (OK, this comparison might be unfair, there is no evidence the Nazis didn’t intend the irony of their slogan, they were famous, after all, for practical jokes with a big punchline.  I should also give the designers of No Child Left Behind the same presumption of irony.)  

Like all visionary programs to deal with longstanding problems, the basics of No Child Left Behind (since rebranded as Race to the Top) were clear and simple.   You give standardized tests that measure how every student compares to every other student, you do this often, focusing the children’s attention on the importance of these tests and how to do as well as possible on the tests.  If a kid fails, force them to learn the stuff the second time around, the third time.  If the teacher fails, fire that teacher.  If the school fails, close the school and let a private outfit run it better.  Clean and easy to monitor, just hand out boxes of number two pencils and fire up a bunch of computers to do the scoring and tabulating.

If you watch the TED talks of Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Sugata Mitra and others you will wonder how, in actual practice, we carry out the ideal of having public education where children, motivated by their imaginations, reach for things considered impossible in a society that values things only in terms of its market sale value.  Externalities like the world’s largest prison population, no decent jobs for most graduates, a dispirited electorate who don’t even bother voting for the corrupt politicians that represent our democracy, well, these are just things to get over, eh?

Here’s another thought to keep in your head at the same time:

Every positive vision of the future began as a dream in somebody’s head, spread because it was a good idea that flowered in other people’s imaginations.   Every organization promoting such ideas began with one or two people.  What luck it must be to have a second person!  But the fact remains, we are set here briefly between two dates, one that we celebrate every accelerating year and one we do not know, unless we are sitting on Death Row, our last appeal denied, date set.  Better, I am thinking to myself alone, and for a clear reason, to be a small light someone might some day read by than another hissing passerby, rushing headlong in the darkness.

All to say, I’m making my way through the rest of Reiman’s book.  He’s a smart guy, no matter how stupid some of his examples and quotes are (e.g., Henry Kissinger as the ultimate win-win guy), and I need all the help and inspiration I can get at the moment.

It’s your problem, pal

“I’m sorry you’re upset about what you think happened to you.  I really am, but now, for the sake of all of us, and I’m asking you nicely, please shut the hell up, you don’t have to go on and on trying to make me understand what you’re upset about, like you always do.  I understand– you’re upset.  I told you I’m sorry you’re upset because you think I did something that I didn’t actually do.”

The look on your face might not convince the other person you accept the apology, so they might feel compelled to add:  “and don’t tell anyone we had this conversation, it is nobody else’s business what we talk about.”

“Look, I’m sorry I don’t have your money I promised to repay today, I know it puts you in a tight spot.  And I’m sorry I won’t be able to pay you back any time soon, because I owe a lot of other people money too, and I’ve owed it to them longer so I have to pay them first.  Once I finish paying the boss back we can start talking about when I’ll be able to start paying you.  Don’t mention this to the boss, or to anybody else.”

If you agree to stay silent, or if you go right in and complain to the boss, the outcome is likely to be similar.  There are people who will urinate on your leg and tell you it’s raining.  This is, sad to say, part of the Human Condition we sometimes hear about.

“Be mild,” you tell yourself, “anger helps no-one, but be direct”.

“Don’t be direct,” a nervous person will tell you.  “Look, I admit I lied, and I know you feel it put you in a bad spot, but there was a good reason, a reason I can’t tell you because you always judge me.  I am not a liar, by the way, though I know you think I am because of that one untruth, but it was an emergency and I had to say something fast.  Who knew it would be a lie?  I didn’t plan to lie, and it was the only time in my entire life I ever did, and I wish we could be done talking about this, I don’t know why you insist on talking about it.  I already told you: I admit I lied, now I’ll tell you I’m sorry it friggin’ bothers you so much, even though it’s none of your business and had nothing to do with you.  And now, for the love of God, get over it and stop frikking bringing it up.”

The problem will be yours to deal with as best you can, don’t expect help from the people who put you in the middle of it.  After all, you’re the one with the problem, not them.

“Look, I know you think it put you in a difficult position, but all you have to do is keep your mouth shut.  The lie doesn’t even involve you, and, really, it wasn’t even a lie.  I don’t even know why we’re still talking about it, why you’re so hellbent on discussing it.  You are so judgmental, you always have been, that’s why I can’t talk to you.  I don’t judge you, even though you do plenty of bad things and constantly judge everyone else.  You’re the only person in the world who would keep bringing something like this up.  You have some kind of agenda and no freakin’ shame.”

“So you had to go talk to the boss, I see.  You couldn’t work this out like a man, you had to go talk to the boss, like a little boy with a poopy diaper.  Nice.  Very freakin’ nice.  Imagine how much of a hurry I’ll be in now to pay you your stinkin’ money back.  People like you, all you care about is money, and crying about it.”

The rain continues to pound down your leg, soak into your sock, your shoe.  It doesn’t smell like water.  What they hell?

“You want people to share in the blame for your problem, but it’s your problem, you’re the one with the problem, deal with it.  Don’t tell anyone about this, or, so help me God, I will dig up your father’s skeleton and do shameful things to it.”

Now, wait a second, what kind of sick idea….

“No, you wait a second.  The sick idea comes from you, pal.   That’s right, if you could have kept your stinking mouth shut I’d never have had to come up with methods to make you keep your mouth shut.  You know, you’ve got a lot of problems, my friend.”

A host of problems, yes indeed.  Unreasonable expectations.  They started young.

“Quit staring at me from that crib with those big accusing eyes!” said the man in the bed.  I couldn’t answer, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but I was too young to speak.  I had no idea what my father was talking about, truly.

“Oh, sure,” my mother called out, “make it sound like it was his fault, like he was the one staring at you with that challenging, angry expression.  The pediatrician said you were having a temper tantrum at ten weeks old.  Ten weeks old!  You think we are making this up?”

“I think a good pediatrician might have tried to determine what was making a ten week old infant so upset, rather than concluding that the kid was just an irrationally angry baby.  Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

They never told me if the pediatrician was a human or a jackass.  He laughed like a jackass when he saw the baby rigid, red, fists clenched and screaming.  “Wow, I’ve never seen it so young, this infant is having a temper tantrum!” and his long ears went back and he honked out a good jackass laugh.

“Oh, sure,” the ghosts of my parents as young parents would have said, “You’re the only one who’s not a jackass.”

Though I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way, they did make a reasonable point, at least between me and the pediatrician.

My only advice when people try to make something into your problem that is not your problem– shrug that mess off of yourself and go somewhere where people don’t urinate on your leg and insist you tell them it’s raining.  

Many times every day people urinate, and  it often rains, but when it’s on your leg, and it’s body temperature, and it stinks and is some shade of yellow or brown, it’s not really that hard to know the difference, though it can take many years to learn the most productive reaction.

The Cull

During a restful day Sunday I stretched out on the bed in the dim light and listened to Christa Tippet in the middle of a conversation with a woman whose life’s work was listening to and studying the songs and habits of the whale, and more recently, the elephant.   A fascinating woman with a real love for life and a great capacity for study and learning.  She ended by talking about the enormity of the ocean, how being on a small boat is like clinging to a cork bobbing in the vastness of it, and how the largest creatures in the world swim in it, singing.  Human knowledge, she said, is not at any pinnacle, it is only now beginning.  There is so much to learn, for sure, before the lights wink out forever.

This blessed woman got to know several elephants, by their voices, their looks and their personal habits.  Who knew elephant individuals were so different, one from the other?  She suggested there is more individuation among elephants than among people, or at least as much.  Do you think you could put a human being on a space ship and send him to another planet to accurately represent us all?  

You could do it, I guess, but you’d be an idiot to think he or she could represent you as well as me, as well as someone on a continent we’d never visited, someone living a life we cannot imagine.  Where the perfect representative of mankind might have no fear , you and I would be crippled by it; where the perfect representative was grim, we might be cracking jokes.  Where the perfect representative could dance pretty well, she could not invent spontaneous, manic dances the way you can, or draw like I can.  It makes sense, if you think about it for a moment, that there might not be a typical elephant.

Anyway, the famous memory of elephants is also not something someone just made up one day.  She tested it by playing a recording, to a group of elephants in a zoo, of a long-dead matriarch vocalizing in her distinctive voice.  This female had been gone several years, many of the elephants who knew her had still been calves, or whatever young elephants are called.  To an elephant, they perked up their ears, became agitated and started making a racket.  They clearly recognized this voice and knew it was their departed leader, even the youngest ones seemed to know it.

Anyway, don’t take my word, or hers, as your spaceship hurtles toward the distant galaxy where you will be the ambassador for all of us.  You can go to the NPR website and scroll through for Tippet’s recent shows, find the one I’m talking about, listen to it yourself, follow the links to associated scholarship, read up on it.   I’m writing about this to make a point.

After spending a long time observing and learning about several individual elephants she went home, where she did the other part of her work, probably raising money for her research so she could return to the land of elephants.  When she got back there, and began looking for some of her old elephant friends, she learned they’d been culled.  

Culling is a word, like the neutral phrases ‘collateral damage’, or ‘friendly fire’, that, by a marketing-style legerdemain, changes killing into an abstraction that is easier to deal with.  These elephant individuals had been subjected to the natural process of culling, thinning the herd by shooting certain individuals to cull them.  There were too many elephants where there were now too many people, problems were arising and it was necessary to cull the pachyderms.  Nothing more complicated than that.

Learning that these individuals she’d looked forward to spending time with had been culled was crushing to her.  She went into a depression.  All she could do, she reported, was write a book, which turned out to be a very good thing.  When I went into a depression all I could do was write and record songs late at night, not a bad thing, but not really a very good thing, either.  Writing and publishing the book helped her make some sense of her torment, allowed her to pass from depression back into productive action.  I imagine its a book worth reading and I salute her.

I had something else to add, another track, but, as I looked away it seems to have been culled, like a big, extroverted elephant with a loud voice, a direct individual who looks you right in the eyes, and then is gone like smoke in the wind.

Purpose

I dive in today with a sense of purpose, to describe an odd coincidence and a book I will probably never read much more of, in spite of it being one of the best books ever written on the subject.

Sekhnet occasionally brings home books she thinks I might be interested in, or that might be useful to me.  Most she finds at work, where publishers send them in hopes of getting the author on TV for some invaluable free major network publicity.  

The ones that reach Sekhnet no longer have such hopes, having found their way into the crew room, where they are largely ignored by technicians who come in to check email or fall asleep, open-mouthed, in front of the constantly droning TV mounted on the wall.  One such book was The Story Of Purpose: The Path to Creating A Brighter Brand, A Greater Company and A Lasting Legacy.   Since I am trying to get a purpose-driven business off the ground, she thought I might find it interesting.

I read three paragraphs into the introduction before I made my first bracket in the margin:

Purpose is both a financial and a humanitarian force.  Purpose-driven organizations create more good in the world, which begets greater profit, which allows them to then create even more good.  It’s a virtuous, never-ending circle. 

Leading this virtuous, never-ending circle of more and more good in the world, it turns out a few pages later, his close friends the executives at McDonald’s (improving the world one Happy Meal at a time), Procter & Gamble, a major bank or two and several other hugely successful highly profitable organizations dedicated to greater good and greater profit. 

I turned to the back flap for the author bio, after reading this description of Henry Kissinger, who one of the author’s CEO friends calls “the ultimate win-win guy” before describing the “epic meeting between Kissinger and Zhou-Enlai in which the statesman Kissinger tells the premier, ‘let’s not shake the world, let’s build it.'”   Kissinger might be the ultimate win-win guy to the no-nonsense CEO of a Fortune 500 company that is deforesting the Amazon rainforest to make delicious burgers for happy kids, but to many of us, Kissinger’s the ultimate scumbag war-criminal winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Could they not have exhumed the stinking carcass of Hermann Goring and given his rotting cadar the prize this year instead?” thought the ghosts of hundreds of Cambodian children murdered under Win-Win Kissinger’s policies during an illegal, secret bombing campaign on non-combatants in a country the US was not at war with.

But as is often noted, one man’s Nobel Peace Prize winner is another man’s Hall of Fame War Criminal.  It all depends on your perspective, really.  Morality is a fluid thing in our world of Purpose-Inspired Leadership.  One man’s genius pioneer of branding and marketing (Josef Goebbels) is another man’s Nazi bastard.  You know, you just have to pick the right heroes, choose the purpose that best drives your particular vision of a world-improving business.

Reading the back flap I learn that the author, Joey Reiman, is:

Founder and CEO of the global consultancy, BrightHouse, a company whose mission is to  bring purpose to the world of business.   Reiman has emerged as the leading expert in the area of purpose-inspired leadership, marketing, and innovation.  His breakthrough purpose methodology and frameworks have been adopted by top firms, including Procter & Gamble, The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Nestle, MetLife, SunTrust, Michelin and many more Fortune 500 Companies… 

I shake my head, close the book, put it back on the tank behind me and flush.  I decide that writing a few words about it some day is probably in order.

A few months pass, I am standing on a hill, next to the headstone I had chiseled with my parents’ epitaphs.  My uncle is being laid to rest on a cold day in Peekskill.  After the small funeral, Sekhnet and I go to a diner with two cousins I see only at such occasions.  Sadly, I’ve lost track of them, both lovely women I always enjoyed spending time with over the years.  I have only dim, distant memories of their several children, their grandchildren.  The family has moved around the country, I have a hard time recalling all the names in my head.

Over lunch one cousin is recounting a recent birthday party, a milestone of some kind, where the kids flew in from all over to celebrate her.  One of her children, her son Justin, a very successful copywriter, with a great job in marketing in Atlanta, had trouble getting a flight.   Joey Reiman had him flown up to the party in the private jet.  Justin had an important purpose in getting to his mother’s party, it was only fair that the guru of purpose-driven things would make sure he got there to read the clever lines he’d composed in mid-air.

“Joey’s a great guy,” said Sheila.

I’m sure he is, I thought, smiling broadly for what probably appeared to be no good reason.

Lucky Bum

Stop me if I’ve told you this one already.

Babe Ruth was always coy about whether he actually called that famous home run in the 1932 World Series.  The pitcher, he insisted, had quick pitched him– illegal but the ump called it a strike–strike two.  Charlie Root, the pitcher, smirked, the bench jockeys screamed and howled and Ruth stepped back into the batter’s box, steaming.  Ruth points his bat over the pitcher’s head (or directly at Charlie Root’s head, depending on your POV) into the hooting Chicago crowd in the bleachers and hits a tremendous home run right there on the next pitch.  
 
There’s a great shaky 30 second film of it on youTube and an 80 year debate on whether he was pointing his bat at the pitcher or at the spot where he hit the famous called home run.  It was the last of the long-time record number of World Series homers the great Ruth hit during a mythical career.  (Consider it took Hank Aaron almost 7 full seasons of at bats to eclipse Ruth’s career total, Bonds only had an extra 1,448 at bats.  Not to mention that no great hitter ever had the brilliant pitching career [94-46 2.28 ERA] 
Ruth did before turning to hitting full time.) 
 
A sportswriter friend of his, shortly before Ruth died, said “Babe, if you won’t clear up whether you called that shot, at least tell us what you were thinking as you rounded the bases.”
 
“I was thinkin’ ‘Babe, you lucky bum, you lucky bum!'”  And one imagines the hoarse laugh of the cancer-wizened Babe at the end.

Mark But This Flea

Back in an early writing course at City College the professor, a young, dynamic guy with the torso of a stocky man and the lower body of a powerful goat, read John Donne’s famous poem The Flea.  His eyes glittered during his excellent reading of the flirtatious poem, as he no doubt took a survey of the new young women in his class.  He explained to his impressed students that he was originally an actor, had become a novelist and then a college professor.  He was an inspirational teacher and a great reader, and he brought the wooing words to memorable life as he began:

“Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which thou deniest me is”

The line rings in my head today as I ponder how little the smallest things we deny each other actually are.  Invisible to the naked eye, these tiny, crucial things.

The Oshpah Pit

I don’t know the exact meaning of “aspah” (phonetically OSH-pah), but I can tell you about the Ashpah Pit.    It was in the woods, at the end of a long muddy road that would shine with small puddles after the rain.  It was lush there, and smelled of earth and trees, until you got close to the pit that guys with a bulldozer and a dump truck had dug.   This pit was huge, the size of an amphitheater, and filled with the summer time garbage of a small community of a few hundred people.

It was at the end of a long dirt road cut through the trees.  For days after it rained it was impossible to walk as far as the ashpah pit without getting your feet wet.  Your clothes would be damp too, the air was always moist and clammy under those dense trees.  It was paradise for the mosquitoes who bred, thirsted and lived their short lives there.  Born at dusk by the millions, and feeding, courting, mating and dying throughout the night, they were looking for whatever action they could get as time ran out.  

These mosquitoes were so voracious, and so desperate, that they would land on you as you slapped at them, sometimes five or more at a time, the others hovering, singing their horrible songs of desire.  And they were tenacious, these strapping young mosquitoes.   You could slap at one, narrowly miss, and the insect would do a little somersault, literally turn a tiny circle in the air, land back directly on the arm, or neck, or your face.  Meanwhile, another would be sucking lustily at the back of your neck, near your earlobe.  You could try to keep them away by smoking, and back then many of us did smoke, but it was best to complete the business at the ashpah pit quickly.   Dump the garbage and get back down the road.

There’s the famous story of how I met my old friend Meefs, a story for another time and another place, the story about his deadpan slyness and those two long walks to the ashpah pit and back.  But what I want to point out is that the mosquitoes at the ashpah pit are the strongest examplars I know of that fierce, wildly energetic desire to live, and somehow dominate, in a world of death where the odds are a billion to one against you living out the night.

Doesn’t mean I’d invite any of them to my house.