It Only Takes One to Take a Stand

August 17, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

There was a remarkable photograph in the papers on Thursday, taken as Egyptian troops were leveling the encampment of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo. It depicted a solitary woman standing between a military bulldozer and a wounded man on the ground.

We’ve seen this all before, but it never gets old.

There was a similar confrontation in Tiananmen Square in 1989, with a lone protester blocking a column of Chinese tanks. That picture still speaks to the courage of saying: “Stop.” “No, you cannot do this any longer”—even when no one else is standing with you.

On its anniversary this year, China’s leaders continue to suppress any discussion of the uprising of the human spirit that took place 24 years ago. It is a continuing exercise in “thought control” aimed at ensuring that those who were alive then start to forget, and those who came after never manage to find out. But some of the power in pictures like this is that they won’t go away, and in their permanence will always call to those who can recognize a part of themselves there.

Indeed, I think we linger over images of solitary personal courage because we hope that someday we’ll be up to doing the same. We keep looking because the individuals depicted are standing in for the best part of each of us too. We wonder:

Will I have the courage to seek out the circumstances,

and when those circumstances require it, stand up for what I believe in,

even when there’s no one else is around?

The “thousand words” in these pictures speak about a life force that won’t be pushed down any longer. It caused a woman in Cairo and a man in Beijing to leave the relative safety of their homes behind so they could speak their particular truths to power. It’s what many children do with far greater ease than us grown-ups: the ones who know what’s important to them and don’t fear the consequences of putting themselves on the line.

Maybe we have such children, were such children.

However what experience has taught us over the years is how to protect ourselves from risks & confrontation, to sidestep & keep our heads down. Our experience teaches us almost nothing about taking a stand for what’s essential in our lives and work.

That’s some of what these pictures do.

They help us find the power of a child, when playing an adult’s game.

Why Read?

July 20, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m Russell,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

School is for Learning How to Live and Work

June 16, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Fewer students are pursuing humanities degrees today because of concern about their value in the marketplace. Indeed, the issue has become a political football, with North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, among others, arguing that states should stop subsidizing certain humanities programs at pubic institutions because they don’t lead to jobs.

Colleges & universities are reacting to this kind of cost-benefit analysis with sharper arguments about the ways their offerings contribute to post-graduate life and work. Unfortunately, beyond all the arguments, the basic changes that are needed will only come when the custodians of higher education acknowledge how they’ve helped to make a liberal arts education irrelevant for most students. There are glimmers of hope, but there is little to suggest that these basic changes will be happening anytime soon.

For example, Harvard published a report last week that attempted to respond to concerns about fewer humanities majors and their poor prospects in the job market. The report said that its English and other humanities departments should “market themselves better” to undergraduates before they declare their majors while “improving their internship networks.” A Wall Street Journal article tried to bolster these modest proposals by noting that Harvard has been “for centuries a standard bearer of American letters” while, in a sidebar, identifying humanities graduates who went on to successful careers, including media magnate Sumner Redstone (Classics & Government) and Goldman Sack’s chair Lloyd Blankfein (Social Studies).

Proponents have also been more vocal about how the ideal humanities degree prepares you for the working world. One classics professor highlighted the core career competencies identified in the 2013 Job Outlook Survey from the National Association of Colleges & Employers, noting that they “correspond very strongly with the content and skills acquired through a liberal arts education,” namely: communication, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and organization.

University of Chicago’s president Robert Zimmer responded to students dropping out of college and going directly into business by noting that “[a]t their best, colleges and universities are themselves hothouses of innovation, a natural site and climate for translating ideas into application.” (In prior posts, I’ve also talked about when experience is the better teacher and the university as innovation hothouse.)

Wesleyan’s Michael Roth further bolsters the case by seeing higher education as “a catalytic resource that continues to energize and shape your life.”

Many seem to think that by narrowing our focus to just science and engineering, we will become more competitive. This is a serious mistake…

[I]nnovation in technology companies, automobile design, medicine or food production will not come only from isolated work in technical disciplines. Effective vaccine delivery programs, for example, require technical expertise, but they also require cultural understanding, economic planning and ethical reasoning. . .The growing field of animal studies, for example, brings together interpretative and analytic skills along with contemporary scientific research.

We should look at education not as a specific training program for a limited range of mental muscles but as a process through which one will generate some of the most important features in one’s life. It makes no sense to train people as narrowly as possible in a world going through cataclysmic changes, for you are building specific strengths that leave you merely muscle-bound, not stronger and more flexible.

We should think of education as a kind of intellectual cross-training that leads to many more things than at any one moment you could possibly know would be useful.

OK, so it’s not only skills but also qualities of mind like imagination, flexibility and the ability to grow that are the hoped-for byproducts of a liberal arts education. But is this what a humanities degree really provides today?

The same article announcing Harvard’s new report barely mentioned Wake Forest (in Governor McCrory’s most interesting state) and its integration of “personal and career development” into its curriculum. For several years now, I’ve been eavesdropping on what Wake and its champion on the issue, Andy Chan, have been up to. As it turns out, they seem to be getting at least half of it right.

Andy Chan, Personal & Career Development at Wake Forest

At Wake, what they’re aiming for in terms of personal & career (life & work) development isn’t a service department, like a guidance counselor you have to sit down with just before you leave, but what they call an “ecosystem.”

Individual career services departments cannot shoulder the burden of educating, advising and supporting students on their own. It is crucial that other constituents (faculty, staff, parents, alumni) are trained, encouraged and motivated to help students in a variety of ways – as advisors, connectors, influencers, and mentors.

In class, in one-on-one meetings, in internships, and other interactions, these constituents are encouraged to help students to grapple with a sequence of 4 questions: “Who am I?” “What shall I do?” “How will I get there?” and “Once there, how will I be successful?”

So far, so good. It’s about the entire college or university community helping their individual students to think about, so that they can connect in an effective manner with, the post-graduate world. It’s a different focus than having faculty off on celebrity book tours or alumni looking to have buildings or basketball courts named after them. In an ecosystem like this, “constituent payback” is assisting rising generations to successfully launch.

But community isn’t enough without the right course of study.

Most humanities departments have thrown out a core curriculum based on Western thought in favor of a smorgasbord of victim studies, self-directed projects, exercises in political correctness, and field trips. Job qualities like imagination and flexibility are more likely to spring from a more comprehensive knowledge base than this, and 40 years ago a liberal arts education provided it—along with some of the raw materials for living a life with meaning and purpose.

In the cafeteria plan of higher education today, most students don’t know enough to pick what will ultimately be “good” for them. So the issue is whether the ecosystem is also willing to provide a menu “with healthier choices” that includes comprehensive exposure to our civilization’s greatest ideas and stories. It’s precisely what Anthony Kronman urges in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

Artes liberals or liberal arts means “the skills of free person.” It’s a course of study that can be the ticket to a satisfying job and a fulfilling life. It’s what those in the forefront, like Andy Chan and Anthony Kronman, are proposing. Unfortunately, most of higher education is not even close to providing it.

What We Don’t Know Can’t Change Us

May 15, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Even with a death toll that now exceeds 1100 from the clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh, it is far from clear that consumers of “fast fashion” are pausing before they make a beeline for the cash registers. Sure they feel bad about what happened and don’t want to support sweatshops in unsafe factories—at least in theory. But when the trade-off is foregoing the trendy jeans or sweater that will make them look good, desire overwhelms hesitation every time for most shoppers. Two studies seem to prove it.

At least some of it is because the concrete trumps the abstract nearly every time. What does this shirt or those shorts that I’m holding in my hands have to do with a thousand deaths I can’t even imagine in someplace called Bangladesh? What we don’t know simply doesn’t “hurt us enough” to make us change our behavior.

Thinking about how work can be more fulfilling starts with your own work. Are you proud of how it’s done, of what it accomplishes? It’s thinking that gets us wondering about whether our own consumption of energy or food or “fast fashion” has a dehumanizing impact on other’s people’s work. (“Do unto others. . . .”) But our wondering will never be enough as long as the “dehumanizing effects” are just platitudes or abstractions at odds with our convenience, our vanity, or the thrill of a bargain. In other words, it takes more information.

It’s a fact that women are literally dying to make “fast fashion” in one place so that women in another place can enjoy it. Women comprise 90% of the workers making clothes in Bangladesh. No other industry in that country (or in many others) absorbs as many female workers with little education or skill. Poor women make, rich women take.

Walmart label “Made in Bangladesh”/Photo: International Labor Rights Forum

Per capita income in Bangladesh is currently $850, while in the clothing sector it is almost half that: $456 a year or $38 a month. Not surprisingly, the Rana Plaza factory collapse has prompted talk about raising the minimum wage in this sector, but even without better pay Bangladeshi women will continue to make these clothes for the simple fact that no other jobs are available. Most of these women left male-dominated villages, where they had few opportunities to support themselves, for seven days of work, 8 to 12 hours a day, at clothing factories in the cities. Still, they barely make enough to live.

This week, a Wall Street Journal article quotes one woman who was injured in the factory collapse:

Sometimes I have to borrow to get to the next payday. But in the village I’d have to starve.

No alternative, no living wage, but she went on to say:

I’ll go back to work as soon as I get better. Not all buildings will collapse.

The “fast fashion” industry is built on indentured servitude, not so different than slavery. That is what it is: with outlets at a mall near you.

There have been some changes this week, like Western retailers signing on to finance safety audits and to pull their work from factories that don’t pass them. However, real progress will only come when we (as consumers) are more aware of the harmful effects of our consumption. Like the drug trade, as long as there is unfettered demand the supply will continue, much as it is today.

The “fettering” of our demand begins with knowledge about the consequences of our actions. In one of the studies referenced above, it is not surprising that shoppers interested in more expensive items (better educated, with better jobs themselves?) were also better at imagining the consequences of their purchases, and willing to pay more for a “sweatshop free” label.

As Jedediah Purdy noted in For Common Things, it is essential for us to grasp the often complex interconnections between what we buy here and what happens over there. To do so, we need:

an educated imagination, able not only to understand general principles through local efforts, but also to perceive local events as they are caught up in much larger schemes of production, exchange, and political and economic power.

It’s not just simply “getting as much as possible of a good thing” like low prices, “when in fact we are choosing where and whom to sacrifice for it.”

If understanding requires education, then maybe what the “fast fashion” retailers need to be doing is educating, both in their advertising (why I mentioned Benetton’s ads in my last post), and at the point of purchase. It could be pictures of women making clothes for other women. It could be pictures of women who died in 2013 making clothes like these. It could be asking shoppers: would you be willing to pay 10 cents more so that these women who are making your clothes could take home “a living wage”?

“Fast fashion” retailers need to start believing, as Sy Syms once said, that “an educated customer is our best customer.” Change in this industry will only come with improved customer knowledge.

Almost everyone can learn, when someone steps up to teach.

Workers Who Understand What It Means

April 14, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We are collecting more data about our products, services and the reactions to them than ever. But how good are we at understanding what this information is saying? Who is interpreting it all? What training, what habits of mind do you need to “make the data speak” so that you and others can understand and learn something from it? Who is responsible for finding that meaning?

In their new book called Big Data, Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier argue that we no longer need to find the underlying motivations that were once suggested by limited information. Today, we can do almost all of our interpreting by looking at the vast reams of data themselves. In marketing, for example, this glut is removing the need to delve into customer psychology or analyze social pressures to understand why people are buying our product or service, or declining to do so.

In a big-data world…we won’t have to be fixated on causality; instead we can discover patterns and correlations in the data that offer us novel and invaluable insights…[D]ata is about what, not why.

While the question does seem to be changing from “why” to “what,” there is no question that human beings remain at the nexus between the data and its meaning. As Cukier noted in a recent interview:

[I]t’s really important that you take in as much information and come up, using your judgment and wisdom … come up with a decision based on that.

In the final half hours before sleep, I’ve been breezing my way through the collected works of popular writer David Baldacci. All of them offer a dark perspective on the American intelligence establishment, with orphaned teenagers, fringe types and odd couples pulling us back from the catastrophic edge. In other words: his storytelling is perfect for my final moments of consciousness after a long day. I’m currently on my way to the final battle of good versus evil in The Sixth Man: a titanic chess match involving a pawn called “the Analyst.”

All of the pre-processed and un-processed information from surveillance satellites, spies, informants, governmental and non-governmental agencies, security cameras at sensitive facilities—you get the idea—an unimaginable glut of information everyday, flashes across a single screen in a secret government facility. The Analyst sits in front of it, making connections and gathering meanings that elude individuals with much less information, on the one hand, or that any computer can crunch, on the other. His mind is wired to retain everything he’s ever seen and to find resonances within this vast trove of information to enable the defense establishment to protect America. His is a god-like role.

In a tough jobs climate for graduates (indeed for all workers) over the past 5 years, a lot of aspersion has been cast at the value of a liberal arts education. In essence, if you can’t make money from it, why study it? That’s where the lessons of an idea book and a work of popular fiction come in.

As I’ve said before, there is a quality of mind that is nurtured in English and History and Philosophy departments that is aimed at finding the meaning in our books, our past and our ideas. This may be today’s single most valuable skill. With our machines giving us more to chew on, we need the men and women who can tell us what the patterns and associations buried within all the information means.

Every company in America, from the smallest mom & pop to the global behemoth needs this capability. They all need workers who can dip into the information pool to pull out the expected and unexpected connections, and enable their products and services to meet real needs, deepening the value of their customer, supplier and community relationships.

As a worker in this knowledge economy, just as you needed to learn how to use a library at school, there are data gathering and analytics tools to master first. But once you do, there is something of the godlike Analyst waiting to step to the fore in every humanities major.