Finishing School

October 29, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Maxine Powell died last week after a long career. For almost 60 years, she pursued the kind of work that almost no one is doing today. Powell taught grooming, poise, and the “social graces” to Motown artists before they went out into the spotlight.

How to stand. How to speak and dress. How to keep your cool with reporters and fans. How to make the best impression you could in every part of your life. It was guidance designed to make her students hold their heads up high and feel proud of themselves, so that pride always “came through.”

Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, the Supremes: Powell called them her “diamonds in the rough and her training — along with tough love — aimed to polish their posture, diction, stage presence and sense of self-worth.” That’s how we met most of them. Shiny and unforgettable.

Back then Motown was playing on the same New Haven station (WAVZ) that brought the Beatles and Stones, Dylan and Hendrix to my transistor radio—and what a soundscape it was. You’d hear them, and then try to catch their acts on Ed Sullivan, the Smothers Brothers or American Bandstand. That’s how I saw Motown for the first time: clean cut, all matching suits and steps, smiling harmonies and rhythms that conjure an era big enough for several soundtracks.

For Motown, it was no longer step & fetch it, but stepping out.

Today, we live in an era with lots of marketing but little finishing. We’re often satisfied with surface impressions, what the Temptations were doing their best to get beyond in Beauty’s Only Skin Deep. Powell, of course, was right there with them, reaching through the perfect hair and clothes for the bedrock below.

My friends ask, what do I see in you 

But it goes deeper than the eye can view.

A half-century later, you’d never dare to tell anyone how to walk or talk, or how to behave—not even those you supposedly love. It’s freedom and preoccupation with personal autonomy that we’re left with.

Only I get to make decisions in my space.

There’s not much of a role for a Maxine Powell anymore, or for a love like that. Most of us are on our own when it comes to our finishing today.

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 Regret-Free Encore Career

February 14, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Sometimes regret is what you feel when it’s too late to do much about it—your deathbed, most commonly. But we also feel regret when there’s plenty of time left. All that stands in the way is our reluctance to recover the opportunities that are still out there, waiting for us.

The voice of regret over the road not taken most often has the whine of excuse about it. I couldn’t afford to take the chance. I’m over-extended. I’m too tired. I need to be better prepared. I can’t do this alone. I have too many obligations. My family won’t be on-board. What will other people think?

What if I fail?

By the time the excuses begin, the flirting with the new and unfamiliar has usually passed. You’ve pulled yourself back into the comfortable territory where you started. Your heart rate is back to normal, what you feared is now safely behind you. The only residue that remains is regret around what might have been. What if I had pushed a little farther, taken the chance, grabbed the brass ring when it appeared, trusted my instincts, trusted myself?

I spoke to an accomplished group of senior managers this week. In their fifties and sixties mostly, all were in or between Big Jobs. Some of them were also caught between seeing themselves doing those Big Jobs and, well, just sitting at home not doing them.

These are pretty stark alternatives. The good news is that there’s a way to get to the productive work all of us still need to do, and it doesn’t involve trapping yourself between this kind of all or nothing.

Limiting your future to a corner office is unrealistic if there simply aren’t enough corner offices to either barricade yourself in or catapult yourself back into. Your chances may simply be better elsewhere.

Moreover, if you’re not in that corner office today, maybe there’s a good reason that you’re not, a reason that involves your temperament, your skills, or your inability to read the handwriting on the wall. So why not step back and make a plan for your future work now that squarely confronts your deficits, acknowledges the value of your native talents, and aligns your next job with the best vision that you have of yourself?

Honestly confronting your deficits could mean honing existing skills or mastering new ones. But as often as not it’s learning to be more adaptable to changing circumstances. That is, a lot more resilient than you are today.

If you’re too rigid, you may simply need to become more adaptable. Stated differently, if your Boomer Balloon is filled with too much stale air, it may be time to let some of the stale air out and some fresh air in.

The best way to do so is by throwing yourself into circumstances where you’re not comfortable, where the particular improvements you need to find can only come—one dogged attempt at a time—with failure as your teacher. That’s the path to resilience. The question is really a pretty simple one: Are you tough enough to know when you need to toughen up?

On the other hand, time spent on deficit reduction should never mask what fueled your accomplishment in the first place. Identify the skills that have always given you the most pride when you’ve exercised them, and build your future on the highly transferable talents that have always set you apart. It’s a waste of time being bitter that strangers in the job market aren’t valuing these talents enough, but you’d be a fool to undervalue them yourself.

Finally, while you’re busy being honest with yourself, also consider investing some of the optimism you’ve been mustering as the candidate for the next Big Job around those things you always wished you had done, but were never brave enough or wise enough to have done before.

The land of your regrets is where you think about the grreat job that got away, the kind of work that quickens your heart beat and makes your palms sweat when you think about it, like helping to solve a real world problem, or meeting real needs for different products or better services than anyone else is providing.

There are challenges out there with your name on them. With focus and tenacity, you can figure out a way to not only make a living by confronting them, but also to live more fully and to find a better balance of effort and fulfillment than you have ever enjoyed before.

It’s the time in our lives when age, experience and self-confidence can also be good teachers, when we let them.

The irony, of course, is that once you build yourself a regret-free encore career, you’ll find yourself wondering why you ever spent your time putting all your eggs in the basket of that next Big Job.

A Hero in a Poor Season for Heroes

January 6, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We’re just about done thinking about 2012, but not quite.

As always, there were many small heroes this year, but Groundbreakers? Galvinizers? Healers? Those who stood before us with clear eyes and quiet confidence: there were almost none of them. Perhaps these men and women will come out of their private worlds when we’re closer to bottom, when our need will be great enough to recognize & welcome them & finally decide to stand behind them. This year, leaders like this were leaving us, not striding onto the stage.

Neil Armstrong left the stage he was never really comfortable on for the last time this past August. My post about him was one of the year’s most read, perhaps because it’s not just moths that are drawn to the brightest lights.

Surely, some of it was that his life recalled a different America when we were able to pull together to accomplish something amazing, whereas today we can’t even agree to come together and make sense. But it’s also about a man who took us with him on a great adventure, didn’t get in the way when we got there, and then gave everybody else the credit when it exceeded our dreams.

One way to take the measure of Neil Armstrong—in all his Mid-Western matter-of-factness—is to eavesdrop on an interview he gave in 2001 as part of the Johnson Space Center’s Oral History project. (His interlocutors are historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley.) His thinking is also a good way to clear our heads for another muddled year ahead.

On who gets to be the first man on the moon:

AMBROSE: It is part of the popular perception, I guess, and it appears in some of the literature that the other astronauts have put out, that there was a lot of jockeying for position.

ARMSTRONG: Yes.. . The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do. It’s probably true that I was less inclined to be concerned about just what job I had than some were. I think they’re all different people, they all had different kinds of views on that subject. It wasn’t as obvious to me as some of the stories I’ve read have portrayed it. (49)

Foundation instincts: steady, confident & clear:

AMBROSE: But you made a decision [after serious technical problems] and you got back to Earth. I spend a lot of my life talking to men who have made big decisions, and in this case your life and others’ were at stake…

ARMSTRONG: Well, I can’t make too much of it. I think generally you try to keep going as long as you safely can and try to save the flight, the objectives, and try to put everything back together. At some point you just have to make the decision that, “I can’t take the risk of pursuing my goal further, because I have to go back to the foundation instincts”, which is save your craft, save the folks, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind. (55)

The results also come from:

ARMSTRONG: I think it predominantly is experience over training. Training certainly helps, but having been in flying machines for many years and faced a lot of difficulty, [pilots] become accustomed to being required to solve problems as they arise …, and particularly test pilots who get a higher percentage of things going wrong than normal pilots. And I’m not saying that we did it perfectly in every case; I’m sure we didn’t. But the experience that we’d had in flying a variety of different kind of machines in difficult circumstances certainly enhances your ability to look at a situation, … analyze it and determine what your probable best course is and how much latitude you have to deviate from that best course. It’s not an easy subject to describe adequately, but it seems to have worked. (57)

The important things: the task at hand, the shoulders you’re standing on, and pride in your work:

BRINKLEY: …Apollo 11…was perhaps the most watched event in the history of….the world. [Y]ou didn’t treat it differently mentally at all, [only] as you would…one of your previous missions?

ARMSTRONG: I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could. And, you know, I have no complaints about the way my colleagues were able to step up to that.

AMBROSE: Let me interject here that you share a quality with General Eisenhower. When reporters would come to him during the war and want to get a story, he would always say, “Go talk to [General Omar N.] Bradley. Go talk to [General George S.] Patton [Jr.]. Go talk to a sergeant. That’s where the real story is. This is a team effort,” and he would never allow it to concentrate on him…And you just spoke about the hundreds of thousands of people that have been working for so long to make this happen, and I invite you to make a reflection on the team nature of the Apollo 11 mission.

ARMSTRONG: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. (78-79)

We give heroes our best because they take us with them to a whole new world.

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.

The 10 Things I’m Most Proud Of In 2012

December 31, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve written several times this year about why we need to take time to be proud of our accomplishments. That is, proud of what we’re producing for ourselves–of who we are becoming through our work. And proud too of the services were providing and the products we’re making for others, what used to be called “the fruits of our labor.” (It’s Time To Be Proud of Your Work)

I’ve spent some of this week between Christmas and New Years (a jumble of slightly deflated days between the festivities) trying to decide what I’m most proud of in my work this year. As it turns out, my accomplishments were not money-in-the-bank or shout-from-the-rooftops successes. Instead, they were smaller victories on the path to larger ones.

Thinking about your accomplishments, in this way and at this time, is like stringing together the best pinecones—recovered from where they’ve fallen, and hung up briefly once more—like a salute, or pennant in the wind after a good race. It’s part of what makes the journey worthwhile, this pause: short but necessary, before getting on with it.

So here they are, the 10 things about my work that I’m most proud of this year, in no particular order.

1. Achieving more economy in thought & word. Not that the richness of life, or its best lessons, can be captured in an elevator speech or tweet. But what we have to say can almost always be said more economically. I can see it in these posts. Maybe you can too. I’m proud that I’m getting there.

2. Realizing that editing is a worthy endeavor, in & of itself. Communicating isn’t just about what’s heard or read. Excising the newest favorite phrase or train of thought because they don’t carry your ball effectively is not only essential but also gratifying. Like polishing dull wood.

3. Learning how to tell more of the story through pictures. Pictures engage different parts of your perception, both in the taking and in the viewing. It’s Instagram & Pinterest, infographics & new forms of visual learning. It’s pictures of both altruism and tragedy and our responsibilities as viewers when we look at them. In this supremely visual age, I’m excited that I’ve gotten better at using this powerful toolbox.

4. Recapturing the adventure of great working partnerships. One of the best things about work is who you’re doing it with. When you define your work as broadly as I do, and your collaborations are as far-flung, there can be an amazing spectrum of rewards. It’s been years since I’ve been as open as I am now to cross-pollenizing work that is limited only by the reach of the networks I’m a part of.

5. Plugging in. There is a great passage in Ian McEwan’s Atonement where the woman of the house is lying in the dark connecting to its sounds: the creaking & hissing of a vast building’s central nervous system. For me, it wasn’t dark or just about the sounds, but when I participated in the #140 character conferences last summer I felt connected to a similar throb & pulse. To speak to hundreds while they are tweeting to tens of thousands is an exponential sensory experience with a half-life that keeps on tingling. That the conferences took place at the 92^nd Street Y, where so many thought leaders have climbed the mountaintop, was just the icing.

6. Toning the voice. Almost as important as what you say is how you say it. Words. Pictures. Sounds. A warning. A rebuke. A laugh. It’s the way you assemble them that adds up to your voice. I’m relieved that I can finally stand “listening” to mine.

7. Grounding message in service. It’s more of a rolling wave than a beginning this year, but helping smart & talented people find their life’s work has become an increasingly confident exercise, and therefore more satisfying than ever. Too few of us know how to think productively about what to do with our lives. It’s been great to figure it out together, and have fun while we’re doing so.

8. Seeing yourself in print. I’ve published in other careers, but most of my discussion about worklifereward has been via social media—until this year. An October op-ed in the City’s paper is the first of many forays into the traditional press.

9. Becoming more resilient. I wrote about the book Antifragile recently because one key to success today is learning how to respond robustly to the unexpected challenges the world keeps throwing at us. This is a life lesson I’ve taken to heart this year (and boy does it get easier when you do)!

10. Lightening up. Around a year ago when I started blogging, an old friend told me I was a lot more interesting & fun in person. I had worried about this in my first post, where I said values are serious stuff, but that I’d try to host a discussion “with some bubbles added, to give it a lighter finish when needed.” I’m proud that in much of what I’ve accomplished this year, I’ve tried to include those bubbles.

Cheers!