Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference

May 23, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What we value is as different as we are. Our basic goals and commitments—indeed the fundamental ways in which we view the world—are as different as our individual life experiences. So it should come as no surprise that in seeking work that has personal meaning, the approaches we take to finding itare different too.

In recent commencement addresses this month, Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney recommended two very different approaches for graduates entering the workforce. Wherever you find yourself as a worker—just starting out, trying to improve your experience in the trenches, or thinking about a second or third act in your working life—their recent remarks can help you when thinking about your own “next steps.”

Romney watches proceedings during the commencement ceremony at Liberty University in Lynchburg — Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger compared their messages in A Tale of Two Commencements. Henninger clearly preferred Mr. Romney’s. But rather than “either/or,” I see their approaches as speaking to broad (and sometimes overlapping) segments along a procession of worthy vocations: from personal service as a quiet witness to political struggle as an agent for change you can believe in.

As we search for purpose-driven work that can bring us genuine satisfaction, there’s a place that’s right for each of us somewhere along this continuum.

Mr. Romney’s address was at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian school in America. Lincoln’s “doctrinal statement” says, in part:

We affirm that the Holy Spirit indwells all who are born again, conforming them to the likeness of Jesus Christ. This is a process completed only in Heaven. Every believer is responsible to live in obedience to the Word of God in separation from sin.

In other words, Mr. Romney was speaking to individuals who had already committed to living their lives in a particular, value-centered way. Most if not all in his audience already understood that transforming the world begins (and ends) with transforming yourself.

For Mr. Romney, your work in the world is not dictated by the social problem to be solved.

The great drama of Christianity is not a crowd shot, following the movements of collectives or even nations. The drama is always personal, individual, unfolding in one’s own life. . . [Here] men and women of every faith, and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a purpose-driven life.

“What we have, what we wish we had — ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed; investments won, investments lost; elections won, elections lost — these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us,” he continued. Those things happen within us. For Mr. Romney, making the world a better place through your work is the result of “conscience in action,” and the never-ending commitment that it takes to always be ready for it.

As many of you already know, Mr. Obama spoke last week to my daughter’s graduating class at Barnard, one of the colleges making up Columbia University.

obama barnard — Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

His speech was a different from Mr. Romney’s as his audience.

For the President, the application of your values to your work is similarly self-defining. But while your career may lead to internal changes, his approach to work focused almost exclusively on value-driven engagement in the external world of politics. In other words, it is by transforming the world that you transform yourself.

The graduating women of Barnard have their own commencement as well as a larger ceremony with the other university schools. Until recently, Columbia College graduates received apples with their diplomas to symbolize the “core” curriculum they had studied. That is until someone removed the fruit because year after year Columbia men delighted in pelting Barnard women with their apples. Barnard women understand the politics of gender on their campus, and Mr. Obama connected with this understanding when talking about how values should inform their working lives.

“Remember, making your mark on the world is hard,” the President said. You need “to fight for your seat at the table.” Only by doing so will you be able to “earn equal pay for equal work,” and “fully control decisions about your own health.” Somebody told Labor Secretary Hilda Solis that she wasn’t smart enough to go to college, but she didn’t let others hold her down, and you shouldn’t either. There will always be “those who oppose change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo [and] have always bet on the public’s cynicism or the public’s complacency.” [D]on’t accept somebody else’s construction of how things ought to be.”

In their commencement addresses, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama offered fundamentally different marching orders to those approaching the work of their lives. In their starkest forms, one approach is about internal transformation, the other, external struggle. Think about these differences as you examine the work you have, and the work you want.

In his Journal column, Mr. Renninger found “less tooth and claw” in the Romney speech than in Obama’s. I think it depends on your worldview, and where the animals that need your taming reside.

Just Plain Funny #1

May 15, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

This is the first in an occasional series of stories that bring a smile to my face (even in the re-telling), and may do the same for you.

As many of you already know, I’m in the throws of my daughter’s-graduation-from-college-week in New York City. While there have been several noteworthy aspects to it, having the President of the United States as your only child’s commencement speaker was certainly one of them.

Of course he doesn’t just stroll in and provide a little inspiration. You line up hours before. You too get the opportunity to meet members of the secret service up close and personal. Snipers gaze down on you from the rooftops. You get to deposit your water bottles, umbrellas and other weapons in trash cans outside. But despite it all, there are amazingly palpable feelings of expectancy as the pomp & circumstance builds to a presidential salute of your daughter’s Class.

(If you’re lucky enough to have the combined firepower of Barnard College and Columbia University contributing to logistics—as we were—you also are delighted to discover that there are only a handful of functioning port-o-potties for a couple thousand people to share during roughly 7 hours of secure confinement on the commencement grounds. Emily being a psych major and all, I was sure it was some kind of experiment involving a control group’s sense of urgency, attempts to suppress irritation, and on-going ability to sacrifice painfully for a college education.)

Barnard has been the women’s college at Columbia since 1889, and not surprisingly usually features a distinguished woman as its commencement speaker. Indeed, the President’s immediate predecessors in the speaking slot were Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg, who is Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer.

In describing the tradition he was stepping into, I don’t know whether the President was relying on his own speechwriters or came up with the hook that follows on his own (it was really hard to tell), but there’s no question that his timing was perfect, and his relish in the embedded why-not-just-call-it-like-it-is almost sublime.

“You set a pretty high bar [here] given the past 3 years,” the President intoned. “Hillary Clinton. Meryl Streep. Sheryl Sandberg. These are not easy acts to follow. But I will point out that Hillary is doing an extraordinary job as one of the finest Secretaries of State America has ever had. We gave Meryl the presidential medal of arts and humanities the other night. Sheryl is not just a good friend, she’s also one of my economic advisors.

It’s like the old saying goes: Keep your friends close, and your Barnard commencement speakers even closer.”

Base of Operations

May 11, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Thinking differently about your work means thinking about different kinds of work.

We all know what we’ll to be doing today. But where are the people passing us on the street going to work, and what will they be doing when they get there? Wondering about it, talking about it with some of those people, maybe even tagging along with them for a day can blow out the walls when thinking about what you should be doing with your own work life.

cuzco-twelve-corner-stone-1 — TWELVE CORNER STONE – CUZCO

Unfortunately, our “wondering” tends to be pretty timid. That’s because our focus usually gravitates to people who look a lot like us (are they more successful, making more money?), or who seem higher up the ladder (are their lives easier and more satisfying than mine is?). But what about looking less timidly, so that it’s not simply confirming what you already know, but about building your thinking around entirely different foundations?

I heard Charles Alan Murray speak at Bryn Mawr the other night. Among other things, he illustrated how the bubbles we inhabit with all our preconceptions are fortified by the ways we live.

In many of our neighborhoods, nearly everyone is, for all intents and purposes, the same. The education we’ve had. The cars we drive and stores we shop in. The TV shows we all watch (or don’t watch). The sameness of our surroundings bolsters the image we have of ourselves. But it can be pretty thin gruel after awhile.Aren’t we confident enough to open the windows around our certainties, allowing our lives to be enriched by what can be learned by living and thinking a little differently?

Murray talked about looking, years ago, for a place to locate his young family around his research job as a political scientist in Washington D.C. The usual suspects were the affluent, inner ring suburbs like MacLean Virginia, where the well educated and upwardly mobile were looking for “good schools” and a mirror of their hoped-for success. Murray made a conscious choice to look elsewhere, choosing a small town of a couple of hundred people in rural Frederick County. He did so because he wanted to school his children around people who worked with their hands, ran small stores, didn’t have degrees from Harvard and MIT like he did. “More enriching for me and for them,” he said.

Murray was also scrambling the expectations others had about him.

Earlier in my career I helped run a civic organization with a board that was up to its neck in prominent Philadelphians. I got to know many of them well, and thought they were learning something about me too. They knew I lived with my own young family in the City, but despite telling them that our home was in East Falls (a part of town with a near-perfect slice of Philadelphia’s demographic, from projects on up), none of them could accommodate that I lived anywhere other than the one or two City neighborhoods they knew best. So wedded were they to where “I belonged,” I just stopped correcting them after awhile.

The prison I’m talking about is one that you, as well as others, busily maintain for you.

I recently had a candid conversation about this kind of straightjacketed thinking with Timothy Rub, 2½ years in as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As he’s discussed elsewhere, the museum director’s challenge is to bring the past into “fruitful conversation” with the present so that it’s possible to imagine different futures. In this, a great museum’s “present purpose” is to be “the foundation stone, indeed the catalyst for innovation and creativity” in the community. But in this (as in so much else), it comes down to the people involved: to his stewardship and to those who hold that trust with him. How, he wondered, can we breathe new possibility into great institutions when so many of our stewards seem unwilling to think differently?

art museum — THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART by irraa@Flickr

There’s little to be lost, and the promise of a better world gained, when you re-open basic questions you thought you’d answered—once and for all—a long time ago.

Broadening your base of operations can support better work, a richer life, and more consequential futures.

It’s time to start thinking outside your box.

Open the Door

April 30, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Discovery results—as often as not—from our ability to combine the familiar with the unexpected into a new way of doing things. It’s as true about the challenges we face at work, as it is about figuring out what kind of work we should be doing in the first place.

If you want to start seeing your work differently, there is no better way than to break down your preconceptions about yourself as a “worker,” and put everything back together with the leavening agent of new information.

Shake it up. See new possibilities in familiar territory. Recognize how ideas that seem to have nothing in common (like “producing social benefits” and “profit-making”) can be brought together in an exercise of the imagination to provide you with work that is as productive for you as it is for others.

But what if we’re so ensconced in our little worlds that unexpected combinations—the raw materials for insight—can rarely, if ever happen?

That many of us choose to live in a limited world when we have an unlimited world at our fingertips, at first seems to make little sense. Our smart phones give us near-instant access to almost everything. But instead of using that outlet as an opportunity to learn new things and to grow, too often we use the most powerful tool we have ever held in our hands to do little more than validate what we already know.

Much of it is fear—a key by-product of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock.”

Barraged by more-information-than-ever that risks confusing our most cherished beliefs, there is a strong pull to retreat into our comfort zones in order to (as we see it) feel more in control and function more effectively.

But how effective are we (either for ourselves or for others) when everything we think about and do is dictated by our preconceptions about what is “real” and “true,” and what is not?

Making the glut of available information manageable doesn’t require closing ourselves off from conflicting information. To do so confines us in a too-small world, because it’s precisely this kind of information that contributes the most to insight and change, to personal growth and tolerance.

Jonathan Swift, the great English author of Gulliver’s Travels, famously said: “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

It’s not easy to be bold and try something new. It certainly required an altered state for me to dive into that first sushi platter 30 years ago with my friend Mitch, eager to give me a taste of what he was learning from his Japanese clients. But once you start opening doors, your days huddling around “the old and settled” seem limiting and lifeless. It’s about stepping out and being fully human.

You can get a powerful glimpse of the thrust to evolve and fling open the doors to possibility in schools committed to innovation, like the Institute of Design (or “d-school”) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. These learning centers get students out of their silos of specialization by making all courses interdisciplinary, so that unexpected combinations start taking form. The goal at such places isn’t getting good grades or parroting the “right” answers, but risking the “stupid” question, learning from your mistakes, and sometimes entering a new frontier.

Of course, reaching boldly through reluctance or fear and towards possibility can have benefits everywhere.

If you think of your work in the same old ways, you will have the same old work. When you believe only what you’re accustomed to believe and tune out the rest, how could it be otherwise? You’re living in an echo chamber.

You don’t have to be like everyone else, stuck in conventional ways of thinking about your work.

It’s not just about finding “a job,” but finding “the right job for who you are.”

It’s not just about making money, but getting a better mix of rewards from your work—including a sense of purpose.

It’s not just about products and services the market already demands, but also about creating new markets.

It’s not just about someone else giving you a job; sometimes it’s about creating the right job for yourself.

If you’re not open to new (and better) ways of thinking about your work, you will never be able—step by step—to breathe life into them.

Open that door.

I am a Work in Progress

April 22, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

How you introduce yourself has everything to do with how you see yourself.

I am a writer. A speaker. A company starter and a dispute resolver. But that’s not all that I am. How others see me, and even more importantly, how I see myself, is contained in the words I use to describe myself. These words should include all the things that you are, including what you’re working to become: the dynamic as well as the static parts of you.

All of us are works in progress, tadpoles becoming frogs.

That’s probably why it’s so limiting when people are summed up with adjectives that speak only to their former glories. Academy award nominated actress. Nobel prize-winning economist. President Clinton. What we hear is that you’ve already come and gone. Summed up, and no longer becoming.

Over-simplified packaging (even to honor) probably derives from our survival instincts. A stranger approaches: is she friend or foe? As we start learning more about her, we put her in one category or the other. Where is she in my pecking order, and where am I in hers? Today it’s no longer safety we’re most concerned about, but meeting the expectations we have for ourselves, and that others are busy imposing upon us.

What I’m talking about is scrambling those expectations in the ways that are best for you as soon as you start talking about yourself.

Doing so changes everything: the way you see your work, the way you think about your life. Because these are the words you are choosing to define yourself.

Social media has made tagging ourselves the very springboard for conversation. This wasn’t the case “in the olden days” where self-description was limited to more specific occasions (Resumes. A few lines in a yearbook. A short bio when someone was introducing you someplace).

Today, we are constantly introducing and branding ourselves. When there is truth in our marketing, these kinds of tags can move our expectations (and the expectations that others have about us) to the rich-with-promise places where they need to be.

I have a friend who describes himself as “the home inspector lawyer, professional speaker, and raconteur.” His promise is that he’ll help you with your home inspection problems, and that you’ll have fun while he’s doing it. Joe is many things, but first and foremost he’s an entertainer: happiest when he’s making you happy.

I am collaborating with a woman who describes herself as an “empire builder.” Whose empire, you might ask? The stated goal is that it’s mine, but (in truth) some of the best energy in our collaboration also comes from being a part of what Amy’s building for herself. And then there’s the software developer at a client’s company whose bio begins with “puzzle piecer.” When I read this, I see my fragmented jigsaw puzzle sprawling over a table and Jonathon’s getting a charge by helping me find that recalcitrant piece.

People like this who involve other people in what they’re doing—and with who they are—are influential people. There are even meters for tracking their influence (like Klout; PeerIndex; Appinions; and PeopleBrowsr, the creator of something called Kred). The endorsements of influential people are important precisely because there are all of us out here who want to be involved with them and learn from the choices they’re making.

Mark Schaefer, a Rutgers marketing professor, has put his finger on the way that influencers are creating buzz with their followers in social media today.

This is an entirely new marketing channel, and when’s the last time we had one of those? Done well, it can be enormously effective because you’re getting this advocacy [for whatever it is you’re offering] organically.

But organic marketing is really only part of it.

It’s not the reflected glory from past accomplishments that influential people are providing, but future promises. In the words they use, each of them is involving our expectations with theirs. Not by offering a static summary of who they are, but by opening a door that invites you into a shared experience you begin creating together: truly, a springboard into the future.

Think about defining yourself this way.

It’s more than just words, of course. But the right ones invite others into your work-in-progress—while putting your best foot forward.