Confronting the Future of Work Together

October 21, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Some of us believe that entrepreneurs can lead us to a better future through their drive and innovation. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and, at least until recently, Elon Musk fill these bubbles of belief. We’ve also come to believe that these masters of business and the organizations they lead can bring us into the warmer glow of what’s good for us—and much of the rest of the world believes in this kind of progress too. Amazon brings us the near perfect shopping experience, Google a world of information at our fingertips, Uber a ride whenever we want one, Instagram pictures that capture what everyone is seeing, the Gates Foundation the end of disease as we know it…

In the process, we’ve also become a little (if not a lot) more individualist and entrepreneurial ourselves, with some of that mindset coming from the American frontier. We’re more likely to want to “go it alone” today, criticize those who lack the initiative to solve their own problems, be suspicious of the government’s helping hand, and turn away from the hard work of building communities that can problem-solve together. In the meantime, Silicon Valley billionaires will attend to the social ills we are no longer able to address through the political process with their insight and genius.

In this entrepreneurial age, has politics become little more than a self-serving proposition that gives us tax breaks and deregulation or is it still a viable way to pursue “what all of us want and need” in order to thrive in a democratic society?

Should we meet our daily challenges by emulating our tech titans while allowing them to improve our lives in the ways they see fit, or should we instead be strengthening our communities and solving a different set of problems that we all share together?

In many ways, the quality of our lives and our work in the future depends on the answer to these questions, and I’ve been reading two books this week that approach them from different angles, one that came out last year (“Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World” by Robert D. Kaplan ) and the other a few weeks ago (“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas). I recommend both of them.

There are too many pleasures in Kaplan’s “Earning the Rockies” to do justice to them here, but he makes a couple of observations that provide a useful frame for looking into our future as Americans. As a boy, Kaplan traveled across the continent with his dad and gained an appreciation for the sheer volume of this land and how it formed the American people that has driven his commentary ever since. In 2015, he took that road trip again, and these observations follow what he saw between the East (where he got in his car) and the West (when his trip was done):

Frontiers [like America’s] test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money—an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative…[A]long this icy, unforgiving frontier, the Enlightenment encountered reality and was ground down to an applied wisdom of ‘commonsense’ and ‘self evidence.’ In Europe an ideal could be beautiful or liberating all on its own, in frontier America it first had to show measurable results.

[A]ll across America I rarely hear anyone discussing politics per se, even as CNN and Fox News blare on monitors above the racks of whisky bottles at the local bar…An essay on the online magazine Politico captured the same mood that I found on the same day in April, 2015 that the United States initiated an historic nuclear accord with Iran, the reporter could not find a single person at an Indianapolis mall who knew about it or cared much…This is all in marked contrast to Massachusetts where I live, cluttered with fine restaurants where New Yorkers who own second homes regularly discuss national and foreign issues….Americans [between the coasts] don’t want another 9/11 and they don’t want another Iraq War. It may be no more complex than that. Their Jacksonian tradition means they expect the government to keep them safe and hunt down and kill anyone who threatens their safety…Inside these extremes, don’t bother them with details.

Moreover, practical individualism that’s more concerned about living day to day than in making a pie-in-the-sky world is not just in the vast fly-over parts of America, but also well-represented on the coasts and (at least according to this map) in as much as half of Florida.

What do Kaplan’s heartland Americans think of entrepreneurs with their visions of social responsibility who also have the practical airs of frontier-conquering individualism?

What do the coastal elites who are farther from that frontier and more inclined towards ideologies for changing the world think about these technocrats, their companies and their solutions to our problems?

What should any of us think about these Silicon Valley pathfinders and their insistence on using their wealth and awesome technologies to “do good” for all of our sakes–even though we’ve never asked them to?

Who should be making our brave new world, us or them?

These tech chieftans and their increasingly dominant companies all live in their own self-serving bubbles according to Giridharadas in “Winners Take All.” (The quotes below are from an interview he gave about it last summer and an online book review that appeared in Knowdedge@Wharton this week).

Giridharadas first delivered his critique a couple of years ago when he spoke as a fellow at the Aspen Institute, a regular gathering of the America’s intellectual elite. He argued that these technology companies believe that all the world’s problems can be solved by their entrepreneurial brand of “corporate social responsibility,” and that their zeal for their brands and for those they want to help can be a “win-win” for both. In other words, what’s good for Facebook (Google, Amazon, Twitter, Uber, AirBnB, etc.) is also good for everyone else. The problem, said Giridharadas in his interview, is that while these companies are always taking credit for the efficiencies and other benefits they have brought, they take no responsibility whatsoever for the harms:

Mark Zuckerberg talks all the time about changing the world. He seldom calls Facebook a company — he calls it a “community.” They do these things like trying to figure out how to fly drones over Africa and beam free internet to people. And in various other ways, they talk about themselves as building the new commons of the 20th century. What all that does is create this moral glow. And under the haze created by that glow, they’re able to create a probable monopoly that has harmed the most sacred thing in America, which is our electoral process, while gutting the other most sacred thing in America, our free press.

Other harms pit our interests against theirs, even when we don’t fully realize it. Unlike a democratic government that is charged with serving every citizen’s interest, “these platform monopolists allow everyone to be part of their platform but reap the majority of benefits for themselves, and make major decisions without input from those it will affect.” According to Giridharadas, the tech giants are essentially “Leviathan princes” who treat their users like so many “medieval peasants.”

In their exercise of corporate social responsibility, there is also a mismatch between the solutions that the tech entrepreneurs can and want to bring and the problems we have that need to be solved. “Tending to the public welfare is not an efficiency problem,” Giridharadas says in his interview. “The work of governing a society is tending to everybody. It’s figuring out universal rules and norms and programs that express the value of the whole and take care of the common welfare.” By contrast, the tech industry sees the world more narrowly. For example, the fake news controversy lead Facebook not to a comprehensive solution for providing reliable informtion but to what Giridharadas calls “the Trying-to-Solve-the-Problem-with-the-Tools-that-Caused-It” quandary.

Notwithstanding these realities, ambitious corporate philanthropy provides the tech giants with useful cover—a rationale for us “liking” them however much they are also causing us harm. Giridharadas describes their two-step like this:

What I started to realize was that giving had become the wingman of taking. Generosity had become the wingman of injustice. “Changing the world” had become the wingman of rigging the system…[L]ook at Andrew Carnegie’s essay “Wealth”. We’re now living in a world created by the intellectual framework he laid out: extreme taking, followed by and justified by extreme giving.

Ironically, the heroic model of the benevolent entrepreneur is sustained by our comfort with elites “who always seem to know better” on the right and left coasts of America and with rugged individualists who have managed to make the most money in America’s heartland. These leaders and their companies combine utopian visions based on business efficiency with the aura of success that comes with creating opportunities on the technological frontier. Unfortunately, their approach to social change also tends to undermine the political debate that is necessary for the many problems they are not attempting to solve.

In Giridharadas’ mind, there is no question that these social responsibility initiatives “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.” We get not only the Bezos, Musk or Gates vision of social progress but also the further sidelining of public institutions like Congress, and our state and local governments. A far better way to create the lives and work that we want in the future is by reinvigorating our politics.

* * *

Robert Kaplan took another hard look at the land that has sustained America’s spirit until now. Anand Giridharadas challenged the tech elites that are intent on solving our problems in ways that serve their own interests. One sees an opportunity, the other an obstacle to the future that they want. I don’t know exactly how the many threads exposed by these two books will come together and help us to confront the daunting array of challenges we are facing today, including environmental change, job loss through automation, and the failure to understand the harms from new technologies (like social media platforms, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering) before they start harming us. Still, I think at least two of their ideas will be critical in the days ahead.

The first is our need to be skeptical of the bubbles that limit every elites’ perspective, becoming more knowledgeable as individuals and citizens about the problems we face and their possible solutions. It is resisting the temptation to give over that basic responsibility to people or companies that keep telling us they are smarter, wiser or more successful than we are and that all we have to do is to trust them given all of the wonderful things they are doing for us. We need to identify our shared dreams and figure out how to realize them instead of giving that job to somebody else.

The second idea involves harnessing America’s frontier spirit one more time. There is something about us “as a people” that is motivated by the pursuit of practical, one-foot-in-front-of–the-other objectives (instead of ideological ones) and that trusts in our ability to claim the future that we want. Given Kaplan’s insights and Giridharadas’ concerns, we need political problem-solving on the technological frontier in the same way that we once came together to tame the American West. It’s where rugged individualism joins forces with other Americans who are confronting similar challenges.

I hope that you’ll get an opportunity to dig into these books, that you enjoy them as much as I am, and that you’ll let me know what you think about them when you do.

This post was adapted from my October 21, 2018 newsletter.

There’s Bodily Harm in Our Moral Divisions

October 7, 2018 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Matisse cutouts as cover art for the Verve Review

On Wednesday, I met with my group of 10 and 11-year olds who have recently lost parents or other caregivers. We gathered in small groups, huddling around a sheet that the staff provided. It was a simple page with the outline of a person on it. The kids’ aim was simple too. To write words associated with grief (like sad, angry, relieved, frustrated, lonely) on the part of the body where you experience those feelings most strongly. Surprisingly, one of the suggested words was “happy,” and B who was sitting next to me wrote it on one of her legs. I asked why and she said: “Because my mom is in a better place now and that makes me feel like dancing.”

The boys in the group were more interested than the girls in making the line drawings look like them. Superheroes are a big part of their worlds and larger-than-life always leaks into their self-image. Two boys insisted that they “couldn’t put their words in” until “they looked right.” One accomplished his personalizing simply by drawing the line of a cape behind his figure. One got busy coloring all the necessary details. Another took the relationship between the empty figure and what he feels about grief more literally. He drew in what looked like a central nervous system, a kind of “everywhere feeling” that was demonstrated by ganglia and synapses instead of words.

Presenting each kid with a physical container to fill up with their feelings did even more to stimulate conversation about what they’re feeling today. The kids are rarely this talkative about anything so heart-felt and personal.

One reason they come to the center is to spend time with other kids their age who have suffered the same kinds of loss. Just knowing you can talk about what you’ve gone through with somebody is its own relief, making this a refuge from all the other places where no one seems to know or be that interested. While their shared experience of death and its aftermath is what brings them together, most of the time few if any get around to talking about it. But today is different…

Maybe because it has them looking at their feelings, this line drawing launches a blizzard of conversation that’s so pent-up and overlapping it’s impossible to catch everything they’re are saying about themselves or to one another. Maybe because their focus was the grieving body, their conversation also got physical pretty fast.

R told a story about his dream last night where his mom “appeared” in order to “warn” him about some threat I couldn’t catch because he’d already launched into a dance move from Fornite that H, who was sitting across from him in her hijab, immediately tried to show everybody too—R shamelessly insisting all the while that his moves were a lot better than her’s. The gusher of disclosures and the physicality that punctuated them brought us someplace that was even more elemental than the word choices around grief that we’d started with.

They all started talking about how “unsafe” and “afraid” they feel almost all the time, and it was not just because they’re trying to cope with a terrible loss in their lives. Every one of them felt that the outside world is elbowing itself into their lives and unsettling them to the core almost every single day.

They literally fell over one another talking about people they knew who had been shot, how the police never seemed to be around when you needed them, how much they worried about white police officers hurting black people, about conflict in the news, name-calling and blame, about how America’s leaders aren’t interested in protecting them either, and why “everybody’s fighting” makes them think that they need to lash out too to in order be heard.

Deaths in the family had put these kids one-step closer to everything else in the world that could harm them. Key insulation between them and the street was lost when their parents succumbed to illness and violence. It caused them to fear their conflict-ridden country. A dance move from Fortnite is all that tells them that they’ve fended off the threat, or at least the video game version of it.

The only time that I felt unsafe in America was in the wake of 9/11. Her mother and I protected Emily (a similar age to these kids at the time) from our anxiety, from the continuous media coverage, from our endless conversations about it, although I suppose it was hard to hide our alarm and what must have seemed like everyone else’s alarm from a child who was that perceptive. On Wednesday, these kids were describing that same kind of fear, with too few (if anyone) providing enough of a buffer between them and the anxiety that keeps “getting in” from “out there.”

In looking into their faces this week, I recalled that many of the most unequal and segregated places in America also happen to be the most “liberal” and “progressive”—and that Philadelphia where we meet, is even more so on both accounts. (See Richard Florida’s The New Urban Crisis.) Philadelphia tells the rest of the country that it’s a sanctuary city for immigrants and refuges, but seems like quite the opposite to kids like mine who were born here. It wasn’t bad politicians from somewhere else who created the mess in this city or have failed to clean it up, but you can’t tell that from the outward pointing anger of our politics.. These kids internalize some of that too.

This week, a new study was released with the finding that the second biggest predictor of a child’s life outcomes (after family income) was whether he or she came from a single parent household. The study findings were profiled in the New York Times, and by using the study’s toolbox you can key into neighborhood maps across America to predict the likely outcome for a child who is born there. The study’s authors collected data points from people born in the early 1980s and followed them into their 30s. In an interesting coincidence, the Time’s profile begins with a map that includes the East Falls neighborhood where I live and meet with my kids after school. Of course, some of them would be lucky to have even a single parent in their lives.

Vulnerable kids are also impacted by the fear and anxiety that raises their stress levels. A different kind of long-range study (this time in genetics) has been finding that a child’s environment not only causes certain genes to be expressed while others remain dormant, but can also change how the expressed genes work.

For example, these researchers have discovered that high levels of personal stress actually alter the genes that help regulate our responses to environmental pressures. Study participants who were abused or neglected as children were found to have different cells around this stress-regulating gene than children who were more protected and nurtured. In other words, stress changed these kids ability to respond to the world around them at a cellular level. (Some of those findings are summarized here.) Related research has been focusing on whether altered genes in stressed-out children can, in turn, be passed on to their own children. At the very least, damage from the stress of “what’s happening around us” can cause lasting if not permanent bodily harm.

This week, as I sat with my kids and listened to their fears, I couldn’t help but think back to my feelings and Emily’s after 9/11 and about how the two of us would feel about America today if we could both be that much younger again. The fearful kids who danced with false bravado on Wednesday were all born a decade ago in the wake of 9/11 and into the poisonous politics of the Iraq War. They rode the downward spiral of economic recession with fewer resources, and now see a kind of naked hostility at nearly every level of public exchange. “A brutish and short” America is the only one they have ever known and their anxiety in the face of it is palpable.

My kids’ life prospects are already poor. Their genes may already be altered forever by stress. I wonder: are they merely at the extreme end of vulnerability in America, or are they also canaries in an increasingly toxic coalmine, telegraphing to us with their bodies that we should also be afraid.

+ + +

It was great to hear from several of you after recent posts about defending your reputation “as a good person” when it’s challenged. Thanks, as always, for reaching out and letting me know what you think.

This post was adapted from my October 7, 2018 newsletter.

Your Jobs Feed One Another

September 16, 2018 By David Griesing 1 Comment

(photo by Mindy Schauer at the Orange County Register)

The toolbox we rely upon to make a living often enables the other work commitments that we take on. At the same time, these second and third jobs can reward and sustain us in ways that our first job never could.

You’ve already demonstrated a skill (or constellation of skills) for a paycheck. You’ve experienced pride in what you’ve produced and others have responded, perhaps better than you expected, to your contributions. You’ve actually gotten good at something and wondered: What if I take my game to a different field, or to a different sport entirely, and find out whether I can make a difference there too? It just might open up a brave new world.

If your co-workers or clients were asked today, what would they say makes you shine? Your speaking, organizing and responsiveness, your pitching in, rabble-rousing and getting to the bottom of things, your caring, crisis managing and advocating–or maybe it’s your way of combining all of them. They might even say that your peak performance makes room for them too, a place where they can gain their own spotlight, sense of accomplishment and gratitude when you’re working together.

Even as a kid, these talents have helped you succeed. So what if you brought them to a new challenge, with risks and opportunities that are at once similar and different from the ones you’re confronting today? It’s the small voice that asks whether “there’s even more to me than I’ve demonstrated already” and considers finding out. It’s your irritation or even anger at seeing others getting it wrong when you have the suspicion or audacity to think that you’d get it right. What energy and renewed sense of purpose might you find along the way?

When you’ve already been on both sides of this conversation, you know that some of the best stories come from what happens next.

It’s Having Enough Confidence to Act On Your Frustration

Jose Andres is a James Beard Award-winning chef and the owner of several highly successful restaurants. Andres grew up in Spain, near Valencia, and came to the U.S. after serving as a cook in the Spanish Navy. Among many other things, he is credited with bringing small plate tapas eating to America.

Andres’ father was always cooking for his family and often for their entire community. As a boy, Andres wanted to be more involved in the food preparation but his father always put him in charge of the fire. As he recounted in a Fresh Air interview this week: one day during meal preparation

I got very upset, and he sent me away. They finished the meal. But he came, and he pulled me aside, and he told me, my son, I know you wanted to do the cooking. But I had nobody else to do the fire, and actually the fire is the most important thing.

For Andres, it not only stoked his desire to cook but also taught him about the many essential jobs that add up to a wonderful meal. More than food preparation needs to come together to make the best out of what you have. As he grew up, taking on more of these jobs along with eating with his extended family or neighbors became the most (as he says) “natural” part of him, and Andres came to see places for eating “as the pumping hearts” that sustain communities.

In Washington D.C., where he opened his first restaurant and in subsequent ventures, Andres brought his most valuable skills with him, in particular, his ability to produce conistently wonderful meals despite each kitchen’s complex and ever-changing environment. In other words, he’d mastered the art of improvisation.

As chefs, restaurant people – we manage chaos very well… And what we are very good at is understanding the problem and adapting. And so a problem becomes an opportunity… We’re practical. We’re efficient. We can do it quicker, faster and better than anybody.

Why? Because every night there are people with very high hopes sitting in his dining rooms and waiting to be fed.

With energy and personality, Andres got very good at making the chaos work. But he was also drawn to hungry people in D.C and elsewhere who couldn’t afford his restaurants. Among others, he sought out Robert Eggers for advice. When Eggers opened the D.C. Central Kitchen in 1989, it was the country’s first “community kitchen” where food donated by hospitality businesses and farms became the basis for a culinary arts job-training program. It was also reminiscent of when Andres helped his family cook for their entire community back in Spain.

In his interview, Andres talks about how much he regretted not being one of the volunteers who joined the New Orleans relief effort after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and how horrified he was about FEMA’s bungling. Among other things, he saw the Superdome as a giant feeding station for fans that should have been adapted for the thousands of displaced and hungry people who had huddled there. Five years later, Andres was ready to volunteer when an earthquake devastated Haiti. That was the day when he took on his second job.

I think the turning point for me was in Haiti when I arrived to Port-au-Prince a few weeks after the earthquake. And I began cooking there in different refugee camps. And I created World Central Kitchen…

[W]hat happens is that once you are on the field somewhere, and you know the landscape, and you know how a city or an island works, when a tragedy like this happens, you become very good at solving the problems.

He brought his skill at making chaos work to a devastated community, and he never looked back.

The Largest Restaurant in the World

When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico a year ago, Andres arrived the same day as the first government officials. As summarized in the Washington Post, Andres, along with the volunteers he brought with him and the locals he enlisted on the ground, jumped into the maelstrom and went to work.

Andrés and the thousands of volunteers who composed Chefs for Puerto Rico remained for months, preparing and delivering more than 3 million meals to every part of the island. They didn’t wait for permission from FEMA. They didn’t even wait for FEMA funding (though funding eventually came from the agency). They just started activating restaurants, churches, food trucks and, eventually, the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan. They quickly scaled up their production of sandwiches, paellas, stews and, really, anything that would provide more comfort than the field rations known as Meals Ready to Eat, or MREs, the food often passed out after disasters.

As Andres explains in “We Fed An Island,” which was published this week: “I like to say that a hot meal is more than just food, It’s a plate of hope [while] an MRE is almost hopeless.” He provided additional observations about his months in Puerto Rico in his Fresh Air interview on Monday.

Andres’ “first relief kitchen” on the island was secured through a chef friend of his in San Juan. Shortly thereafter he began to serve doctors and nurses in the hospitals because no one else was feeding them and they were working around the clock. Of course, it was impossible to escape the realization that the entire island was hungry. As he explained in his own brand of English:

It was plenty of food in Puerto Rico. The private sector makes sure of that. What we had to do is organize a logical system to start activating kitchens that will have generators, that will have refrigeration, that will have gas, that will have people to work, preparing those foods. So we had to adapt.

For example, sandwiches are important because you can make them quick. You can make many. You can use all the volunteers that want to help their fellow citizens. So what do we do? We bring bread from the mainland in a moment that the airport is in chaos, and the ports are collapsed? Or do we identify the bread factories who are amazing, and you help them with diesel and fuel to go back up? That’s what we did. We partnered with local bakeries to make sure that those bakeries will be functioning sooner rather than later. We began getting bread. We began getting every single ham and cheese we could get our hands on – mayo. We began making sandwiches day one.

So what else we had? We had rice, yes. We had chicken, yes. Let’s start making rice and chicken. This is something Puerto Ricans love. It’s easy to transport, gets hot very quickly. You can transport for an hour, and the food is going to arrive hot. This is the kinds of things chefs do. We adapt. So in Puerto Rico, we began getting our hands in anything we could get. And we began cooking.

After Maria, his people prepared more meals for Puerto Rico than the Red Cross. At one point, he had 18 kitchens functioning at the same time producing 150,000 meals a day. In the early fall of 2017, he was running the largest restaurant in the world.

The book cover for “We Fed An Island” shows Andres holding a huge spatula and looking like he’s cooking. During his interview, he admitted that he didn’t do much cooking in Puerto Rico because his ability to manage the ever-changing demands was far more critical, “So, yes, my team probably is joking on these photos, saying, OK, the only time you would really cook [is when your picture is being taken].” Instead, his abilities enabled others to lead once he had gathered the raw materials and secured the facilities where they could do so. (“I became the leader, “ he said. “But actually, we had 25,000 leaders.”) As he later wrote:

What we did was embrace complexity every single second. Not planning, not meeting, just improvising. The old school wants you to plan, but we needed to feed the people.

That observation highlights Andres’ mission for World Central Kitchen going forward: to fill a gapping hole in the emergency relief efforts that he witnessed first hand in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Top-down, paramilitary style disaster initiatives are plainly ineffective. What’s needed instead are organizations in specialized areas like providing food, medicine or shelter that “embrace the chaos” that is inherent to crisis, including enabling those who are most affected to use whatever’s available, including idle restaurants, schools and stadiums. He wants World Central Kitchen to be, as he calls it, “a first food responder” in future disasters. As for him personally, there is no question that the most satisfying times to lead are “in the moments of darkness.”

Andres’ personality bubbles out of him, as do his stories and observations, which partly explains his need for an additional job; his first one wasn’t big enough to contain him. But there was another reason too. A need in him to feed his entire community simply couldn’t be met by serving up five-star fare.

This link to the Washington Post story includes a 9-minute video of Andres discussing his months in Puerto Rico and how “even thinking about” running for political office can heighten the sense of responsibility you feel for the welfare of your fellow citizens. It’s funny, visceral and subversive. His Fresh Air interview is a gem too, including how his reinvention of the famous Phllly cheesesteak will change your life forever.

Food Is As Local As It Gets

There’s an Episcopal church less than a mile from me that, through changing demographics, now finds itself in a struggling neighborhood. It’s called St. James the Less, and today most of its notoriety comes from its school, which goes through the middle school grades and is free to boys and girls in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park community.

One of th City’s highest-end food purveyors, Di Bruno Brothers, recently celebrated its 75^thyear in operation with a founding gift of $75,000 to launch what’s called the Neighborhood Kitchen at the St James School. With the Kitchen at the School, students gain “a sense of food security because their lunch is right there behind them.” They learn to set the tables, multi-tasking during set up and clean up, and how to have an interesting conversation while eating family style. As the kids describe in a clip about the initiative, lunch is their “favorite time of day.” I enjoyed some of the food (including jerk chicken and rice) recently and understand why everyone over there looks forward to lunchtime every day.

In addition to the Kitchen experience, the students also have an educational one, care of one of the City’s leading chefs and restaurant owners, Marc Vetri. Through what he calls the Eatiquette Community Partnership, he provides St. James and other City schools with a program of “hands-on nutrition education” that emphasizes “the use of whole foods and whole ingredients” including fruit and vegetables, and how to serve them in delicious ways.

The St James School has 10 to 11 hours of programming each weekday and two Saturdays a month. Its school year extends through the end of July. Some of the 63 students live at the School. Given its small size and high level of backing by funders and the Church’s congregation, it has become a refuge for those who are fortunate enough to attend and an oasis in a mostly troubled education system. (Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate among the country’s ten largest cities.) But like Jose Andres, its backers have stepped into a disaster in their community and have been improvising solutions that are making a difference now, with the hope that they can be replicated later in all of the other neighborhoods that need them.

Like Andres, those with second jobs at the St. James School have paying jobs too. The Di Bruno Brothers and Marc Vetri are using their food and restaurant skills to improvise solutions related to health and nutrition that were lacking until they came along. In the process they’re not just serving their well-healed customers but also an under-served part of their entire community.

They are doing jobs that enrich one another. They are seizing work-related opportunities that exist almost everywhere.

Have you applied, re-purposed or even reinvigorated your skills in a second job? If so, it would be great to hear more about it.

This post was adapted from my September 16, 2018 Newsletter.

Acting On Common Values Makes Change Possible

September 9, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We don’t act on our values at work because we feel hopeless, that the odds are staked against us, that nothing we can do will matter. But are we right about that?

Resignation affects our paying jobs—how we retreat from our priorities in our workplaces—as well as the jobs we do in our communities (say, to support a local institution) or at home (as a caregiver). Since everyone else is only concerned about himself or herself, then maybe that’s all I should be worried about too. Am I right that my occasional impulses to be more open and generous are pipedreams that can never be realized?

A survey taken by the Common Cause organization in the UK in 2016 challenges both what we think about other peoples’ selfishness (as opposed to ther generosity) and the sense of resignation that quickly follows in us. The accompanying report also discusses how we decide on what we value more and value less. It’s not just the convictions that we’re born with. Our priorities are also influenced by what we think other people and the social institutions that we identify with value. It works in the other direction too, with our values and how we demonstrate them influencing these others too. Our values take form and get applied because of a complex back-and-forth.

Think of it as a three-way conversation. But you need to participate in that conversation to have an influence, and Common Cause discovered that your influence is probably far greater than you think it is.

Common Cause UK initiated the survey because, as an organization, it was concerned about the lack of public support for social and environmental changes it was seeking. Its leaders understood that values drive change and wanted a better understanding than it had already about citizen priorities. Those conducting the survey were surprised enough by the amount of common ground they discovered that they went on to propose ways that individuals and organizations (including businesses, non-profits and governments) can begin to overcome the current gridlock.

Here is a link to the survey report (“the Survey”), which I think you’ll find as interesting as I did.

This is the question I brought to it: Is where you “make a living,” try to make a difference in your community and create a better life at home primarily about your “selfish values” or is your work really driven by far more generous impulses? What the Survey shows–in a one-two punch–is how acting on the so-callled “compassionate values” that play a lead role for most of us is likely to be far more consequential than you know.

We Have More Common Ground Than We Think

The Survey defines “selfish values” as wealth, social recognition, social status, prestige, control over others, authority, conformity, preserving public image, popularity, influencing others and ambition. It defines “compassionate” values as broadmindedness, a world of beauty or at peace, equality, protecting the environment, social justice, helpfulness, forgiveness, honesty and responsibility.

The Survey found that nearly 75% of participants placed greater importance on compassionate values–with Survey protocols correcting for the bias that participants were seeking to cast themselves in a better light by downplaying the importance they attach to selfish values. Even more striking was the Survey’s finding that 77% of participants believed that other people were primarily driven by selfish values. The truth is that a large majority of people (three-quarters of the population) believe that their generous motivations are more important and drive them far more often than their selfish ones.

Because people always influence one another when it comes to values, and the priorities of social institutions are shaped in a similar conversation, the Survey’s authors make several recommendations to activate our generous commitments, including these.

Since people are discouraged from declaring their priorities when they believe that most other people disagree with them, accurate information—like that provided here—will not only counter pessimism but also fuel optimism. When it comes to your values, what other people value matter almost as much as what you value “in your heart of hearts”. But it goes beyond your optimism or pessimism. In the course of our work, we can probe other people’s motivations (instead of assuming them) to strengthen our social connections, while also finding enough courage in “the strength of our numbers” to act more generously.

The consequence for you and for others is similar to when you voice your dissent in a group, a back-and-forth exchange that was discussed here a couple of months ago. When you speak from your convictions and are clear about the changes you seek, it enables others to clarify their commitments, even when they’re different from yours, and for the group to move forward. Acting on your commitments also conveys your beliefs about how social institutions (from community groups to the federal government) should operate.

The entire time that our values are at stake, we’re watching and subtly influencing one another, so it’s important to read the social landscape around us correctly. The Survey’s writers ask:

How is a person’s perception of others’ values shaped? A person’s perceptions will be influenced by both what fellow citizens say is important to them and what he or she infers about fellow citizens from the way that they behave.

For this reason, it is very significant if people don’t always bear testimony to the values that they hold to be most important – either in what they say, or what they do…[P]eople often speak and act as though they attach particular importance to values that are actually relatively unimportant to them.

In other words, co-workers, neighbors and even family members may only seem to be acting selfishly. To discover their generous impulses, you may need to watch them more closely or simply ask what drives them in the work that they do.

Your actions and others’s actions speak louder than words to social institutions too. An institution like the US Supreme Court is always “noticing” how the American people are expressing themselves as decision-makers, voters and consumers. Because the men and women who guide these institutions are influenced by the public’s values, our acting generously impacts institutional commitments as well.

Our Commonality Goes Deeper Than Our Political Divides

In America today, it may seem like politics mirrors the debate between generous and selfish values, but it doesn’t.

While Common Cause’s objectives in conducting the Survey were to advance liberal-sounding social and environmental objectives, this Survey isn’t about the liberal versus conservative divide in either the UK or in America, even though one of the Survey’s compassionate values (“social justice”) may have political connotations here that it lacks in Britain. The polarity that the Survey identifies between compassionate and selfish values is different than the struggle between political left and political right.

The Survey’s results plumb something that goes deeper than the “political values” in those debates. That’s because “political values” both here and across the Atlantic are little more than buzzwords aimed at mobilizing one’s political base: red flags like “global warming,” “taxes,” “abortion” and “diversity” that have a high emotional charge but little if any ethical content on the political surface. When you plumb beneath the surface however, most conservatives as well as most liberals are committed to the health of the planet, to paying for our social institutions, to the quality of every person’s life, and to the inherent worth of people who are different from them. Three quarters of us!

Why not start with the values that unite us rather than the buzzwords that divide us?

Consistent with the Survey’s findings about compassionate and selfish values, most peoples’ convictions extend far deeper than will ever be apparent during bouts of political gamesmanship. Moreover, those on their “political sides” are often voting, marching and lobbying for the lesser of two evils (as in the last American election), which further obscures their true convictions. Even when the ethical imperatives that drive a block of voters are reasonably well-known, too little time and effort has gone into identifying the common ground that could unite them with those “on the other side” and break the current gridlock.

In this regard, the Survey provides a glimpse into the majority’s convictions when asked about two key values that are prime motivators for tackling our problems today. A broad-based preference for generous over selfish values provides at least some of the foundation for a collective way forward—and all of us would be seizing an opportunity by taking it. Given the Survey’s findings, the influence that your actions will have on others and on our institutions will likely be considerable and certainly more than you currently think if you’re as misguided as the Survey participants about the selfishness driving others.

Rebecca Solnit whose “Hope in the Dark” was a topic here last week provides a surprising postscript to this argument in her book. Above all, Solnit values grassroots solutions to problems over ideology-driven policies imposed from above. It’s a propensity that has made her flexible when it comes to finding common ground for her activism. In other words, she’s had to go deeper. As Solnit observes:

I’ve often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges of right and left. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalistic, gun-happy and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might have been too weird to be our allies, but they were just the frothy foam on a big wave of alienation, suspicion and fear from people watching their livelihoods and their communities go down the tubes. What could have happened if we could have spoken directly to the people in that wave, if we could have found common ground, if we could have made our position neither right nor left but truly grassroots? What would have happened if we had given them an alternate version of how local power was being sapped, by whom, and what they might do about it? We need them, we need a broad base, we need a style that speaks to far more people than the left has lately been able to speak to and for.

The value that could have driven this unity was the protection of livelihoods and communities (a compassionate value) rather than sacrificing them on the altar of globalism and trade (an ultimately selfish one).

Solnit’s desire for environmentalists and ranchers in the American West to make common cause is similarly astute. Again, she attacks top-down ideological convictions that will never succeed because they always seem to miss the human costs at ground level.

Environmentalists had worked with a purist paradigm of untouched versus ravaged nature. Working with ranchers opened up a middle way [for her], one in which categories were porous, humans have a place in the landscape—in working landscapes and not just white-collar vacation landscapes—and activism isn’t necessarily oppositional.

This time, the common ground that Solnit saw was how environmentalists and ranchers both love and depend on the land, how each cherish different things about it, and how neither wants to harm it (another compassionate value) while the other side’s interest in the land is largely motivated by how much can be taken from it (a selfish one).

One day, the generous values we hold in common will help us to solve the problems that confront us. I’d argue that we should start acting on our generosity today.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 9, 2018 newsletter

Ready To Leverage Rapid Social Change

August 12, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Because of innovations in technology, the near-instant availability of vast stores of knowledge and a random web of expanding connections, we’re in a period of rapid social change today.

With rapid change comes an opportunity to re-think, well, almost everything we believe has been etched in stone. It’s a chance to return to fundamentals, to the underlying value-propositions that drive our most basic decision making.

– Does society have to be organized this way?

– Does every channel of government have to aim at maximizing some peoples’ wealth?

– Is our society’s aim of producing more stuff at cheaper prices (and the instant gratification that it brings to us as consumers) more valuable than having better jobs and additional leisure time?

– Should the price of human consumption today be the destruction of the natural world?

We might be able to allocate our social resources differently if we got back to basics. We might make different trade-offs. Periods (like this) of rapid change come with the realization that “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

At times like this, there are opportunities to harness key drivers of change so that when you come out the other end, the world is better off. For this, it helps to have a vision of the future that you want to live in. In prior newsletters, John Seely Brown and Jed Purdy were “thinking out loud” about their visions for that better future and, as a practical matter, how we can get there. Deeply humane ideas like theirs can help us to maximize the advantages of change in the “good work” that we’re trying to do, both in our paying jobs and outside of them.

This week the news story is about how to learn productive lessons from times of rapid social change in the past. Over the last few years, some forward thinkers in the UK have been creating educational materials for anyone who is interested in seizing the opportunities of a world in flux to produce a better tomorrow. Theirs are ideas for the classroom, the workplace, the community—wherever imagination has real problems to solve in a “white water world.”

History Gives Us Hope

One reason to believe that tangible, positive change is possible today is because it’s been possible during similar times in the past.

A group of scholars who are clustered around the University of Sussex have been presenting some of those history lessons along with their arguments for “seizing the days” that we’re in. The image that they use in their educational materials is the butterfly because it represents a point in the arc of change between chrysalis and taking flight. As teachers, they’re saying something about the potential of these times, but they’re also referring to us as individuals and the opportunities we have to “take wing” instead of drifting in complacency or thinking that whatever we do won’t matter.

The Sussex scholars know that their first task as teachers is to get their students to engage. As such they remind us that during other times of rapid social change, people just like us achieved real progress. Because history shows that humanity can learn to do things differently, adapting on the fly, we can do the same while bringing others along.

The Sussex scholars also have the real (as opposed to theoretical) world clearly in view. Their aim is to engage us in what they call “living exercises” to tackle The Problem as they see it today.

We are currently locked in to a high-carbon global economy by multiple factors. They include energy-intensive infrastructure, high-consumption culture, unequal distribution of political power within and between states, and an economic system dominated by finance that fails the poorest, takes infinite growth for granted, and resists reform, however broken it becomes.

This is the challenge they designed their teaching for, but the approach they take would likely succeed if you defined The Problem that we face today differently. That’s because:

‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than a change to the current economic system.’ And yet, as it also says in Proverbs (29:18) ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ Visualising what can be done, inclusively and progressively, to bring about a sustainable society is therefore our challenge …Only in this way might we overcome the ironic maxim of medieval historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, that: “History teaches us nothing but just punishes us for not learning its lessons.’

History Provides Working Models

Promotional image for the booklet “How Did We Do That?”

The following historical examples are cited in a booklet the Sussex scholars compiled in 2016 and you can download here.

The examples that they discuss all involve (1) responses to a radical change in circumstances that would/could not have been possible in a less disruptive time, (2) rapid adaptation by the public, and (3) longer-term improvements thereafter, some expected and some surprising. Despite the length of the following quotes, I thought these authors needed to teach their history lessons in their own words.

IN THE WAKE OF RECENT ECONOMIC RECESSIONS, WORK WEEK & OTHER JOB-RELATED CHANGES

“Responding to a recession in the early 1990s, the public sector in the Netherlands began offering a four-day week to staff to save money. Since then it has spread and become common employment practice, with the option offered to workers in all sectors of the economy. As a result, job-sharing has become the norm in the health and education sectors. It is common to have part-time surgeons, engineers and bankers making the much hyped work-life balance in modern industrial economies a practical reality. One in three men either work part time or compress their hours, working five days in four to enjoy a three- day weekend. Three quarters of women work part time. The popularity of the different pattern is such that 96 percent of part time workers do not want to work longer hours.

“It’s not just liberal Northern Europe that’s seen the benefits of shorter working weeks. In the United States, in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008 – faced with recession, rapidly rising energy prices, growing lines at food banks, rising unemployment and mortgage foreclosures – instead of simply bringing a knife to public spending and pushing austerity measures, Jon Hunstman, Utah’s Republican Governor, surprised people with an experiment to save money. At only a month’s notice, 18,000 of the state’s 25,000 workforce were put on a four-day week and around 900 public buildings closed on Fridays. The impact of the scheme was studied. Eight out of ten employees liked it and wanted it to continue. Nearly two thirds said it made them more productive, and many said it reduced conflict both at home and at work. Workplaces across the state reported higher staff morale and lower absenteeism. There were other surprises. One in three among the public thought the new arrangements actually improved access to services. It wasn’t the main objective, but at a stroke the four-day week also reduced carbon emissions by 14 percent, a huge annual, climate-friendly saving.”

INSTEAD OF PRESERVING ITS BANKS, A COUNTRY RE-INVENTS ITSELF

“Iceland was at the heart of financial crisis in late 2008 and nearly destroyed by it. It built its economy around speculative finance but, after the meltdown, a ‘pots and pans’ revolution led to a process to draft a new citizen-drafted constitution, engaging half the electorate. Rather than making the public pay for the crisis, as the Nobel economist Paul Krugman points out, the country, ‘let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net’ and instead of placating financial markets, ‘imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to manoeuvre.’The constitutional exercise proposed a new approach to the ownership of natural resources for public good. Iceland now gets all its electricity and heat from renewable sources.

“The crowd-sourced constitution ultimately fell foul of legal technicalities and the Supreme Court, but that didn’t stop the new mood creating lasting conditions for change and the desire for new economic approaches. Where other countries largely let banks off the hook, in 2015 Iceland’s Supreme Court upheld convictions against bankers at the heart of the crisis. Finance is now so sensitive that when the Prime Minister was caught up in revelations from the release of the so-called Panama Papers, he was forced from office.”

WE COULD ALSO HAVE INVESTED IN A DIFFERENT FUTURE DURING THE GREAT RECESSION

“The notion that you can’t ‘buck the markets’ was turned on its head by the 2007–2008 crisis when financial markets realised they couldn’t survive without a massive public bailout and long-term support…The novelist and observer of modern banking, John Lanchester, made this observation in his book about the financial crisis, Whoops!: ‘The amount of state intervention (in the banking system) in the US and UK at this moment is at a level comparable to that of wartime. We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system.’

“Lanchester was referring to the amount of money created by central banks and pumped into the financial system. It was used to recapitalise the banks after the financial crisis had destroyed money and the banks’ balance sheets. The method was given the technical term ‘quantitative easing’, but it was in effect printing money. In the UK the sum reached £375 billion…To put that figure into context, it is about double the UK’s combined health and education budget in 2017. In the United States between 2008 and 2015 a breathtaking sum of $3.7 trillion was mobilised. Meanwhile, across the European Union, the European Central Bank has been injecting €80 billion per month to stimulate the economy, a figure which only fell in 2017 to €60 billion….

“There was…a missed opportunity [here]… The alternative was highlighted by a report called the Green New Deal, published in 2008, which estimated that the annual spending needed in the UK to set the country on a path to low carbon transition was around £50 billion.That was not simply a ‘cost’ as it would have an economic multiplier effect, generate economic activity, creating jobs and tax revenues. It’s a sum coincidentally similar, in proportion to national income, to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme in the United States.”

In other words, the £50 billion investment in “a low carbon transition” should be contrasted with £375 billion invested in the U.K.’s banking industry. Moreover, given the “wartime level” of social investment by the UK, the US and Europe a few years ago, stabilizing the financial system and a low carbon transition did not have to be mutually exclusive.

What else could America have invested in with portions of the $3.7 trillion that was mobilized to bail out this country’s banks? A 4-day workweek for every working age American? Universal health care? Whatever the trade-offs, when they are “thought through” beforehand, they can be considered and even implemented during times of rapid change when their advocates (and supporters) insist upon having that debate. In other words, we can leverage the lessons of history if we’ve learned them beforehand and strike while the iron is hot.

The radical circumstances that leaders and countries responded to above were all deep and unexpected economic events. It’s only fair to ask: how can we leverage continuous change (involving technology, the unprecedented availability of knowledge, and a world of random interconnection) to implement our visions for a better future? In this booklet at least, the Sussex scholars don’t say. But it would surely include leveraging the changing states of mind of citizens in democratic societies. They might include:

–alarm over the privacy of information—with the possible result that personal information is recognized as “personal property,” including the protections and value that come with private ownership;

–fear of massive forrest fires burning homes and communities—with its consequences for changes to climate-related policy; and

–revulsion over another mass shooting—with new priorities impacting the availability of guns and their ownership. In this regard, here is a video that effectively uses humor to describe Australia’s movement towards greater gun control after public revulsion following a mass-shooting incident.

A shift in the popular mood can combine with similarly disruptive social forces to precipitate change when enough people are envisioning and debating the better future that they want after the change.

Teachers Showing the Way

The Sussex scholars are motivated by values (like fairness and the pursuit of intangible “goods”), preferences (like collaboration) and insights (like seeing opportunity in new limitations and during times of crisis). They end their booklet with 12 “observations” that function like recommendations. Here are four of them, explained in light of The Problem as they see it:

– Fairness matters: Demonstrable equity matters for the public acceptability of rapid change. This is especially true if and where there is any perceived sacrifice to be made for the greater good.

– Working together works and creates new possibilities: The experience of acting collectively to solve common challenges itself creates self-reinforcing possibilities for further transformative action, often unanticipated.

– Accepting boundaries triggers innovation: Setting new parameters around consumption – such as introducing safe limits on the burning of fossil fuels – can unleash innovation and reveal great, nascent adaptive capacity. Businesses, societies and whole economies adapt to new ‘rules of the game’ remarkably quickly.

– Value experiences, not ‘stuff’: Material consumption of ‘stuff’ in rich industrialised countries can be substituted by spending on experiential activities that benefit well-being.

Even if you define The Problem that needs solving differently than they do, these 4 basic “observations” can serve anyone who wants to be an agent of change.

The people who are behind the booklet are principals at the STEPS Centre and the New Weather Institute. STEPS stands for “Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability.” The Centre describes itself as “an interdisciplinary global research and policy engagement hub” at the University of Sussex. The New Weather Initiative describes itself as “a co-op and think tank” that was formed:

to accelerate the rapid transition to a fair economy that thrives within planetary boundaries. We find, design and advocate ways of working and living that are more humane, reasonable and effective.

Our associates work through projects involving debate, thinking, trend-spotting, community, arts and culture. This means they are:

– organizing debates and seminars on how to think and do things differently to make rapid transition possible;

– publishing books and pamphlets about a future that works to make it more imaginable and achievable;

– talking to local government about using scarce resources more democratically and creatively for fair and planet-friendly economic transition;

– learning the lessons of history and applying them for successful, contemporary rapid economic and cultural change;

– bringing attention to what works, and how and where in the world a more fair and ecological economy is already growing;

– working with communities to discover what creates resilience, and about ‘the sort of environment, colours and patterns that give them identity’

– talking to businesses and services about re-imagining the human efficiency of involving employees and users;

– bringing together organizations and people with experience of doing things more effectively; and

– helping organizations re-discover the lost arts of using the judgment, honesty and loyalty of staff and customers.

While these organizations might inspire you, they might also be a resource in your own work given their desire to:

enlarge the conversation about rapid transition, and ensure that its best insights are brought directly to bear on how we live and make decisions – from the home, to local life, the workplace, to governments and international institutions.

If readers are aware of organizations that define The Problem differently than the Sussex scholars do here (or Purdy did last week)—namely, from an ecological perspective—while also providing a competing vision of the better future that they want to inhabit, I hope that you’ll drop me a line so that I can consider their work for an upcoming newsletter.

A Living Exercise

A couple of final observations.

The men and women I’ve called the Sussex scholars are noteworthy because, as they describe it, they are offering “a living exercise” in their rapid-change booklet and elsewhere. In other words, they want an engaged public to “live” their lessons with them as they struggle to leave a positive imprint on the future. I hope you’ll follow their work, as I do.

Unfortunately the teaching of history (like the rest of the humanities) is in decline. But it’s still possible to imagine a history course on incidents in the past where “change provided opportunity,” including examples like those above, others included in their booklet, and many other social transitions. A course like this would connect stories from history with the stories that kids (as well as the rest of us) want to write into our futures. How exciting would that be!

Because the best learning always gives us the chance to take the boldest flights we can imagine.

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This post derives from my newsletter this week. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe along with recommending it to friends. To receive these posts weekly, you can follow the link to your right.

See you next week.