Woody Guthrie on Work

November 20, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

There’s been a lot written and said about Woody Guthrie lately. But even so, there’s nothing better than hearing the man in his own words.

My life bridges Woody’s time (1912-1967) and ours. I remember his voice “blowin’ in the wind” of the folk music and protest songs I grew up on. But it’s not so much his rhythms that have stayed with me, as what he kept saying—every single chance he got—about how hard it can be to work in America, and how much the men and women doing all that work deserve encouragement.

That’s never been truer than it is today.

We’ve also been hearing a lot from Woody because a comprehensive catalog of his songs just came out. It was his music more than anyone’s that captured the Depression-era exodus from Dust Bowl to California. Even if you don’t know his name, you know “This Land is Your Land,” the song that has become our unofficial national anthem. Woody’s best known for that kind of simple everyman wordplay paired with a catchy melody you’ll still be humming tomorrow.

In his writings, like Bound for Glory and Born to Win–and in all that singing and strumming—Woody celebrated the men and women who go to work everyday in that unforgiving part of our country we often sweep under the rug. It’s the 47% that were grist in the recent presidential campaign, the half of America almost no one champions anymore. It is their blood, sweat and tears that pushes the nation forward. They’re the folks Woody Guthrie wrote about.

I worked in your town

I worked in your farm

My hands is blistered

From the elbows down.

I sing the songs of the people that do all of the little jobs and the mean and dirty hard work in the world and of their wants and their hopes and their plans for a decent life.

For I’ll take your words and use them not to rip you down, but to squeeze you up against the wall in ways that will put new life in your old pots

Your old pans,

And new grease, honey, in your old washy dishrag.

I’m out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, you can take pride in yourself and in your work.

I write what I see

I write what I’ve seen

I write things that I just hope to see

Somewhere farther along.

An uncle of mine taught me to play the guitar and I got to going out a couple of nights a week to the cow ranches around to play for the square dances. I made up new words to old tunes and sung them everywhere I’d go. I had to give my pictures away to get anybody to hang them on their wall, but for singing a song, or a few songs at a country dance, they paid me as high as three dollars a night. A picture—you buy it once, and it bothers you for forty years; but with a song, you sing it out, and it soaks in people’s ears and they all jump up and down and sing it with you, and then when you quit singing it, it’s gone, and you get a job singing it again. On top of that, you can sing out what you think. You can tell tales of all kinds to put your ideas across to the other fellow.

And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about.

Some people liked me, hated me, walked with me, walked over me, jeered me, cheered me, rooted me and hooted me, and before long I was invited in and booted out of every public place of entertainment in that country. But I decided that songs was a music and a language of all tongues.

I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.

As through your life you ramble

Yes, as through your life you roam

You won’t ever see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

Now we stood in the rain and cackled like chickens, absolutely lost and buffaloed. Never before had I had anything quite so damn silly happen to me. Our clothes were on crooked and twisted; shoes full of mud and gravel. Hair soaking wet, and water running down our faces. It was a funny sight to see human beings in any such shape. Wet as we could get, muddy as the ground, we danced up and down through puddles, ran around in wide circles and laughed our heads off. There is a stage of hard luck that turns into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in laughing that turns into fight.

This Thursday, Woody’s son Arlo will be singing “Alice’s Restaurant” on the radio, like he’s been doing as long as I can remember. His dad is all over it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

It’s Time to Be Proud of Your Work

November 8, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Part of deciding whether to stay or leave your job should include thinking about the quality of the products or services your company provides. When your productivity is aimed at meeting “real customer needs,” you are likely to feel you’re working at something worthwhile, giving you a powerful motivation to keep on doing it. The case for staying becomes even stronger when what you’re making or doing is aimed at actually improving your customers’ lives.

Unfortunately, we rarely think about the value of what we’re doing at our jobs. Big mistake. When your time and effort is going into producing something that’s worthwhile, you feel a sense of personal accomplishment that’s missing when you’re just “pushing it out.” On the other hand, feeling ownership and being proud of the fruits of your labor is a key ingredient in fulfilling work.

Being a part of the hamster wheel of our consumer society doesn’t give you a sense of fulfillment. Endless consumption has one goal: convincing people that they have needs they never thought they had, and then selling them something to fill the manufactured void. It’s Mad Men advertising of “the new and improved” because it will somehow make your life cleaner, brighter, faster, better. The goal is to get you to “I want it” without ever pausing to consider “whether you truly need it at all.”

It’s the same when it comes to services. Do you really need an accountant every time you’re facing a column of numbers, an attorney every time you have a disagreement, or a doctor every time you have some discomfort? The answer is: probably not.

Whether you really “need” something is a question you should be asking before every purchase that you make, but the parallel question about work is also worth asking. Is what you’re making or doing at your job merely fueling the consumption wheel, or are you producing something people truly need to make their lives better? In other words, is your work about something you’re convinced is worthwhile?

Start by considering whether YOUactually need whatever product you’re making or service you’re providing: that’s perhaps the most revealing Q&A of all. Is your company actively striving to delight its customers—by always improving basic quality and how service is delivered—or is its commitment to innovation less apparent? What real value is it adding to what’s out there already?

How does your company conduct its business? Do your co-workers, your company’s suppliers, and the local community benefit from the way your business operates? Is the smiling face your company presents to the world part of its public relations campaign or part of its DNA? Given these and similar factors, are you proud of being a part of your company or not?

Many of us assume that having a critical perspective about our jobs begins and ends with answers to the following questions? Is the job helping me pay my bills? Is it convenient to get to? Are they nice to me when I’m there? What I’m saying is that you should be getting far more from your work than a paycheck, a convenient commute and a non-threatening work environment. To settle for so little is like being a frog in water that’s slowly coming to a boil—all the life will be cooked out of you before you realize it.

A fellow blogger recently began his discussion about employee engagement in the following way:

Every day the spirits of millions of people die at the front door of their workplace. There is an epidemic of workers who are uninterested and disengaged from the work they do, and the cost to the U.S. economy has been pegged at over $300 billion annually. According to a recent survey from Deloitte, only 20% of people say they are truly passionate about their work, and Gallup surveys show the vast majority of workers are disengaged, with an estimated 23 million ‘actively disengaged.’

He goes on to make several useful observations about what managers can do to improve workplace morale. But as I’ve agued here and in prior posts, the most fundamental remedies for being disengaged from your work have to do with what you can do for yourself instead of what a manager or boss can do for you.

You can and should bring new knowledge and expertise into your work at regular intervals—whatever your work is—so that what you’re accomplishing makes you feel continuously energized. (Work That Produces Continuous Reward). And you should ensure that you’re proud of, and therefore empowered by the work you’re doing, even if that means leaving the job you have now and finding the right one.

Energized. Proud. Empowered: this is how you’ll feel when your work provides added value.

Neil Armstrong on Work

August 28, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

Neil Armstrong, American astronaut and first man to set foot on the moon died this week. Many have eulogized him for his capability, his tenacity and his reluctance to seek out the spotlight. He certainly had all of those qualities.

Because of who he was and what he did, people listened to what Neil Armstrong had to say over the years, especially about what it was like to be part of the American space program in the 1960’s. Much that he said was recorded, and this is what he had to say about the work ethic of the tens of thousands of men and women who helped to extend our footprint into the new frontier of space during that era. (The quotation is from NASA’s Oral History Project):

Neil Armstrong

When I was working here at the John Space Center, then the Manned Spacecraft Center, you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was, because those people didn’t leave at quitting time in those days. People just worked, and they worked until whatever their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o’clock or seven o’clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and then they went home. So four o’clock or four-thirty, whenever the bell rings, you didn’t see anybody leaving. Everybody was still working.

The way that happens and the way that made it different from other sectors of the government to which some people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which everybody involved was, one, interested, two, dedicated, and three, fascinated by the job they were doing. And whenever you have those ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a retail store, you’re going to win.

Those Space Center workers were “interested” because they were part of something bigger than themselves, “dedicated” because they were working for something they believed in deeply, and “fascinated” because they couldn’t believe their good fortune to have jobs that brought them both.

That’s the kind of work I’m writing about on these pages—work that all of us can do and should do, but usually aren’t doing.

Why do you think that’s so?

Is 21^st Century America so different?

Why aren’t more of us working for our hopes and dreams, fascinated by the possibilities?

And what does that says about our future?

What Work Is

June 5, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m not afraid of poetry, but I don’t read it as often as I should. Somebody mentioned What Work Is, a poemby Philip Levine on the radio today.

I read it, then heard him read it, then wanted to share it with you for what it has to say about the work we do. Here it is:

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is–if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

You can also hear Philip Levine introduce his poem and then read it.

Levine is a Pulitzer prize-winning American poet, who is currently the poet laureate of the United States. He frequently writes about life in working class Detroit. His life story left me thinking about a different era in American life, of dustbowls and Woodie Guthrie and photographs by Dorothea Lange. About waiting for work and the opportunity to be productive.

We are in our own hard times. There is no less nobility in the work that we’re doing, and waiting to do.

Yale Student Blues

December 2, 2011 By David Griesing 7 Comments

It was like ice-water-in-the-face when I recently read a hundred, mostly negative responses to Yale student Marina Keegan’s thoughtful New York Times piece called “Another View: the Science and Strategy of College Recruiting.”

Ostensibly, her article was about how sad she felt that her classmates had come to New Haven with dreams about changing the world but, 3 ½ years later, had found themselves with something far less than that, like jobs in “consulting” or the banking sector.

What her article was really about was how difficult it is for Keegan and many of her peers to find their way to work with meaning and purpose.

It was the ostensible part of the article that garnered Keegan most of her negative responses. Comments ran the gamut from how spoiled and naïve she is after prep school and now Yale (so take off your rosy glasses), how many students have no job prospects, let alone high-paying ones (so quit your whining), and what great “real world” skills you can build by working in jobs like banking (so seize the day you’ve been given and stop finding fault with it).
But most of the venting missed the truly provocative question Keegan was asking: for those in her generation who want to make a difference in the world, how can you get a job that will enable you to start doing so?

Keegan had done an informal survey of her fellow students before putting her ideas out there, findings she had reported earlier in the Yale Daily News. Later in the Times piece, she said:

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think most young, ambitious people want to have a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s through art or activism or advances in science, almost every student I spoke to had some kind of larger, altruistic goal in life. But what I heard again and again was that working at J P Morgan or Bain or Morgan Stanley was the best way to prepare oneself for a future doing public good.

Keegan also was effective at describing the basic challenge (how to go about finding a job, any job) and how easy it is to get diverted from finding the right one.

What I found was somewhat surprising: the clichéd pull of high salaries is only part of the problem. Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be. Representatives from the consulting and finance industries come to schools early and often – providing us with application timelines and inviting us to information sessions in individualized e-mails. We’re made to feel special and desired and important.

I know what she means because it was much the same when I was finishing law school, and only the big corporate law firms came to recruit. Both the professional success they seemed to embody and the attention they were paying to me triggered a range of reactions: I was flattered, relieved at how simplified my job search had suddenly become, and how approving “the world” would be if I took the high-paying road that was opening up before me. I was attracted, and then hooked.

In 1981, it required deliberation, first to counter the lure of easy choices, and then to find alternative roads, particularly meaningful ones. It is much the same for new workers 30 years later.

Keegan’s hopes for meaningful work belong to many, if not most in her generation. Unlike mine, squarely confronting the challenge may produce more positive results.

This past week, there was an article about two local kids who had been awarded Rhodes scholarships, a high honor conferred on only 32 American college graduates each year. In talking about what he hoped to make of this opportunity, Zachary Crippen, who is in his last year at the Air Force Academy, said he hoped to study the place in our society where ethics, politics and the law come together and use that information to build a career. Nina Cohen, at Bryn Mawr College, said almost the same thing. Her plans are to study political theory, in particular, how ethical beliefs can be reconciled within a liberal democratic framework

After spending a couple of years in England thinking about these issues, will Crippen and Cohen gain for themselves more information than Keegan seems to have now about how to find the work of their lives?

Others at Yale have thought about the quality of the information we need when making the most important choices in our lives. One is Anthony Kronman, who makes a persuasive argument about developments in higher education that contribute to the deep-seated uncertainty graduates feel today, and what needs to be done about it. He presents that argument in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007).

In the past 50 years, Kronman argues that our institutions of higher learning have largely abandoned their role providing students with “the accumulated wisdom of our civilization.” College students no longer study the West’s great minds who, throughout the centuries, have thought long and hard about lots of things that all educated people should know something about, including how to live a meaningful life. I whole-heartedly agree with his case for the return of a core “humanistic” curriculum, and will talk some more about why in a later post. I also think that our newest Rhodes scholars are on to something by deciding to take a closer look at both their ideals and how they can play themselves out in the rough and tumble of a political culture.

What I’m afraid of is that they may be the lucky few. For the rest: A weak economy. A need to pay the bills and gain some personal independence. An unfocused, scattershot education. Unhelpful college career services. And will more education and better information to base decisions upon be enough, even for them?

How does a generation that wants to make a difference find itself the right kind of work?