The Jobs Project Revisited

August 10, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The movement of our work was captured by a troupe of gifted Philadelphia dancers in a performance last May called The Jobs Project. When I first posted about it, I promised footage of the ensemble when it became available. Now it is. You can follow this link to the current RealLifePeople(in)Motion newsletter, which includes a video excerpt.

According to the program notes, the dancers’ movements were “in a conversation with” recorded comments by an assortment of local workers about what they do, and remarks from the dancers themselves about their gainful commitments beyond dance.

I was behind one of those interview voices, and can tell you this: while there’s nothing quite like sitting in a darkened theater and suddenly hearing your voice coming through the speakers, the experience jumps several levels when highly accomplished performers start responding to what you’ve just said.

At the time of my interview, I’d just written a post called I am a Work in Progress. It was on my mind that day and the gist of it was captured in one of my recorded comments during the performance. It was these words, along with those from several others, which provided the counterpoint to moves you can now get to see for yourselves.

The medium of voice, music & dance was the message–and a very powerful one at that.

The Essentials of Productive Work

August 1, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

(1) Productive work provides people with goods and services that actually improve their lives.

(2) It provides adequately for your needs and for the needs of your loved ones.

(3) Productive work makes you more capable while you’re doing it, and your labor more valuable.

(4) A primary goal in any community should be to help ensure that productive work is available to everyone who is willing & able to do it.

On this page, these 4 essentials have been my grounds for attacking un-productive work (such as contributing to the churn of consumer products no one needs), and challenging economic forces that inhibit or eliminate productive work (wherever that work is being done). Examples include these recent posts: Who Bears the Cost of Low Prices? and How Everyday Low Prices Hurt Us All, about why it’s in our interest for employees at the big-box stores we shop in to make “a living wage,” and What We Don’t Know Can’t Change Us, about how our consumption of “fast fashion” links us to recent manufacturing tragedies in Bangladesh.

It’s the essentials you commit yourself to—whatever they are—that drive not only your point of view but also the decisions you make about important issues.

It’s where you take a stand.

It’s where changing your life and work starts.

Andy Goldsworthy - Japanese Maple Leaves — Andy Goldsworthy – Japanese Maple Leaves

Affirming the essentials–our collective priorities–is equally important as we emerge from the economic setbacks of the past 5 years and try to regain our productivity as communities and as a nation. It is necessary too for great but crippled institutions that are trying to seize the future with clarity and purpose. This is why his bold affirmation of the essentials was the most significant part of the pope’s visit to Brazil last week.

Francis was thinking out loud about the foundations of the Catholic Church when he spoke to Brazil’s bishops last weekend. (The full text of his remarks can be found here.) He was trying to uncover the rock the Church was built on, buried beneath sex scandals, bureaucratic turf battles, and too many unhelpful words. His aim was to turn the tide on the Church’s increasing irrelevance.

Perhaps the Church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from [people’s] needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions; perhaps the Church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age.

He advocated a new “grammar of simplicity” to address universal human needs, such as:

the loss of a sense of life’s meaning, personal dissolution, a loss of the experience of belonging to any ‘nest’ whatsoever, subtle but relentless violence, the inner fragmentation and breakup of families, loneliness and abandonment, divisions, and the inability to love, to forgive, to understand, the inner poison which makes life a hell, the need for affection because of feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness, the failed attempt to find an answer in drugs, alcohol, and sex, which only become further prisons.

And he gestured to the natural world of Brazil’s Amazon Basin, urging:

respect and protection of the entire creation which God has entrusted to man, not so that it be indiscriminately exploited, but rather made into a garden.

It is here, in a simple dialogue with these essentials, that “God always enters clothed in poverty, littleness.” (An earlier, related post about Francis’own simplicity can be found here.)

To recover faith, to find productive work, to live a fulfilling life: all begin by declaring the essentials.

Meaningful change never happens unless you start here.

Why Read?

July 20, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Both working and living are better when a good book gives you a different, and often unexpected way to look at things.

Here’s what my recent source material looks like: Zero Day, called “a paranoid thriller disguised as a murder mystery,” by David Baldacci, Contagious, “an infectious treatise on viral marketing” by Jonah Berger, and Growing Up, “a fine and true book about American life” by Russell Baker. Good storytellers like these always give you something worthwhile to take-away with you.

There was at least one snicker when I announced that I’d started reading the collected works of David Baldacci. His formula features villains in our shadow government and an unconventional assortment of heroes: perfect for the last wind-down before sleep.

Zero Day is set in a West Virginia town stunted by a domineering company that’s blasting the tops off the surrounding mountains to get at the coal. I’d worked in energy, so I knew about the little v. big guy tactics while the land & its people get sicker. What I knew less about was desperation’s byproducts in tumbledown communities few of us will ever visit outside of a book.

When word spreads of a resident dying in Baldacci’s coal town, yesterday’s neighbors become tonight’s scavengers, picking over what the dead widow or slain policewoman is no longer there to protect. Even pulp fiction can make you care enough about characters to start imagining places in America where you have to “put a notice up on the front door declaring that anyone attempting to scavenge anything from the premises would be hunted down by the U.S. Army… with extreme force if required.” It’s a small but resonating detail about personal space.

Jonah Berger is a Wharton professor who asks: “What makes people share an idea or talk about a product over & over again?” Aimed at raising the profile of just about everyone’s work, Contagious tells a couple dozen stories that reveal the magic in recent marketing tricks, and even better, help you recognize why you’d share the information in one message over another. This book discusses how some information makes you feel good when you’re sharing it, why tying your message up in emotion and narrative carries your sales pitch, and how built-in associations remind you (often unconsciously) to either share or do something you wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Marketing your ideas often includes persuading people to take your advice. This year, my hometown took on the sugar drink industry over concerns about childhood obesity. A local ad features a mom looking at her chubby son cradling a soda and saying, “I just didn’t know,” after the voice-over that links sugar intake with overweight kids. With its nurturing content, this ad might influence moms to restrict their kids’ beverage choices. But Berger asks: why not target every soda drinker directly with an unforgettable message that’s got not only emotion (this time disgust) but also high social currency & practical value? You can judge for yourself whether this alternate approach is more effective here. By vividly illustrating the psychological and social factors behind viral marketing, Contagious shows us how it’s the message not the messenger that makes a difference.

The take-aways from a good book can be personal too.

For example, there’s a particular art to using an excerpt from your life to make your point. “Too much information” or taking it all too seriously will leave readers cold every time. The aim is to avoid these pitfalls while arriving at your destination with the sun in your face and the breeze in your hair. Great writers can navigate even harsh terrain and still stoke the light in our hearts. Russell Baker is one of them.

Baker wrote a widely read newspaper column about politics and American life for twenty odd years. Then he wrote his autobiography, Growing Up. Awarded a Pulitzer for his columns and another for this book, it was Baker’s funny & telling details that gave his stories their pulse. As a writer, I was particularly interested in how he handled the not so easy truths about being a son, husband and father. He told me right from the start, with these lines about his mother’s dementia:

At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

“Where’s Russell?” she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

“I’m Russell,” I said.

She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.

“Russell’s only this big,” she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife with chickens in the backyard and a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.

While I’m sure that my take-aways from reading these 3 books hardly “make the argument” for reading in general, more emphasis on the pure enjoyment and practical information to be gained from sitting down and reading a book can only help.

A 2007 study from the National Endowment for the Arts found that nearly half of Americans between 18 and 24 read only what’s required in school, and never for pleasure. With the increasing dominance of visual & social media in our lives, the percentage today is likely even higher. (A teacher’s recent op-ed, called “The Young & the Bookless,” provides his own particular lament.) But it’s not just young adults. I suspect that fewer of us at any age are reaping the regular rewards that can come from reading a good book.

There are lots of implications in this, but none more unfortunate than what the non-readers are missing. It’s all the take-aways (big & small) that make work easier or better, and life more interesting.

To make the joy of reading books contagious, I think that readers need to start talking more about their take-aways.

The Ecology of Work

July 14, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There’s an ecology around work that’s like planting a garden.

A garden thrives when your growing things are suited to the sun and rain that’s available, and when there’s already a rich enough soil in place to build upon. A healthy garden welcomes the insects that share its patch of ground (the bees for pollination, the spiders and wasps for security), and can withstand the rest with a little help. A garden shouldn’t need too much protection or encouragement. It thrives when it fits or belongs where it’s located.

A garden also serves its gardener. You willingly bring your energy to it because it provides the harvest you’re after: pride as it becomes established, joy when it blooms, and satisfaction when it fills your table. Maybe it’s also the hummingbirds and fireflies that celebrate its success with you by visiting regularly. Or the buzzing sounds of life that surround it when it talks back to you everyday. There’s a particular exchange that each gardener is after.

Work worth doing is like a garden. It fits your abilities and engages your particular interests. It brings you together with natural allies, and weathers the challenges that come with its territory. Work worth doing can be hard, but doesn’t ask for more than you can reasonably provide. This kind of work teaches you something practical everyday, and makes you more capable tomorrow. Your rhythms and its rhythms are compatible.

Work worth doing also brings you a sense of accomplishment when the workday is over; you may be tired, but you’re proud of how your energy was spent. Work worth doing provides you with “a living” (it covers your needs) but it also “brings you to life” (it furthers your aspirations). Maybe your work meets needs that are unmet in the marketplace, providing genuine value. Or it heals what you feel is broken or changes things as you see them for the better. You take its daily harvest home with you at day’s end, and recall the best of it the next morning—so it enriches the rest of your life.

When it fits into its place, summer is the time when a garden’s yield becomes apparent. Otherwise, summer is the gardener’s season of punishment and likely surrender.

Similar messages are delivered (though not always received) during this season of work. The slowing tempo through August offers chances to consider our fit with our work and the sufficiency of its rewards—a window of opportunity before September’s stepped-up pace.

Summer may be the most natural time for thinking about the ecology of our work.

The Job of Sorcerer’s Apprentice

July 2, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Some of the most necessary & satisfying work can be helping everybody else’s work to go smoothly. At its best, it’s nearly invisible. As orchestration, it can be akin to wizardry.

This time last year, I met two people clearly thriving on this sort of work. One was a “volunteer,” in the middle of helping an event with a thousand moving parts to go smoothly. The other does it full time. For each of them, you could feel just how much their chosen work fit.

I caught mid-stream magic being performed by Geo Geller at the #140edu Conference, a gathering of wired educators that was held last summer at the 92^nd Street Y in New York. A minister with nearly all portfolios, Geo was tracking down speakers, adjusting the lights and air, helping with taxis and luggage, coordinating with the Y’s staff, and untangling technology, that is, managing by wandering around. It was hot and I was decompressing from my time up, so for me it was some jokes, Geos’ finding me the T-shirt that came with the gig, and finally, just watching him work.

I met Dave “Pics” Bradley the night before the conference. Dave’s a hall monitor at a high school in Toronto. His day begins with tweets about the weather or the day’s schedule and ends with pictures he took of the school day in motion.

In his daily walkabouts, Dave sees first hand what teachers and administrators miss in the capillary action between classes and scheduled appointments: plots foiled, celebrations captured, bullies interrupted. Or it’s a friendly word on a lonely day from a friendly guy with a big hat and a camera. How essential is the job he’s doing? Check out what the Toronto Star thinks, along with Dave’s interview & video clip.

MAYBE IT'S THE BEARDS — MAYBE IT’S THE BEARDS

There can be a lot of satisfaction in work that makes everything else that’s going on…work. Here’s to Geo, Dave and all the other magicians who are actually doing it.

It’s a position that every workplace should want.

It’s a hat you might consider trying on.