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.

Admiration Means You Must Be Doing Something Right

March 10, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

What the Chinese are thinking about us is no laughing matter if we’re listening to experts talk about how they are holding America’s mortgage with one hand and stealing our most valuable secrets with the other. But our worries could become more realistic if we also considered just how much the Chinese admire us and the way of life they think we have going on here.

There is always something valuable to be learned when others are both coveting and admiring what you have. As La Rochefoucand famously said: “Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.” Thinking about what we like and don’t like about how many of the Chinese people view America today has some interesting things to teach us about ourselves.

I had the chance to visit China a couple of years back.

I’m glad I went when I did and probably wouldn’t recognize much of the place today. It was a few months before the Beijing Olympics, and the country was moving so fast you could almost feel the wind. But what I remember most was how excited regular folks—particularly young people—were that we had come all that way to see them.

They tried out their English on us and surrounded us for pictures. We were their chance to sample America, in the same way that they were already sampling KFC and Polo Ralph Lauren. At the time, analogizing their admiration to eating or wearing did not seem entirely misplaced.

This inkling got some support when I came upon a piece about “architectural mimicry” in China. While the copycat buildings that are springing up there aren’t always American buildings, easily the most duplicated structure in China today is the White House.

The building serves as the model for everything from seafood restaurants to single-family homes to government offices in Guangzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai, Wenling and Nanjing.

There are duplicate Chrysler Buildings and other Manhattan skyscrapers too.

That “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is certainly part of it. But it’s more than this, and has many antecedents in this ancient civilization. Emperors regularly built parks with an Epcot Center of facsimile structures from remote lands. Both then & now, it is a pretty straightforward effort to enhance their legitimacy by demonstrating China’s de facto appropriation of the known universe.

Today, the Chinese are trying to swallow other aspects of the American way of life as well.

Much of the dynamism you can feel in China today results from a billion people embracing capitalism all at once. It was a forest of timeless bamboo scaffolding clinging to a mountain range of 21^st century construction projects that really brought this home to me when I walked around Beijing. Since almost everybody in China wants to become the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, it is hardly surprising that the American rags to riches fantasy has also been made available for mass consumption.

It’s been turned into the equivalent of a fortune cookie.

The Chinese love short motivational phrases even more than Americans do, if that’s possible. They have been a vehicle for transmitting community values from Confucius to Mao, and they are still in active use today. Only now it’s so-called American values that are being conveyed, and what’s being shared has a lot more to do with individual fortune than collective harmony.

Evidence of this comes from the apparently spontaneous rise of 20 or so “allocutions” or commandments that many people in China today believe are written on the walls of Harvard’s library. These commandments speak to the commitment, diligence and self-denial that are supposedly bolstering their counterparts’ remarkable performance here in the States.

One says, “Happiness will not be ranked, but success will—at the top,” while another envisions a slightly different, though related reward, “If you study one more hour, you will have a better husband.” Struggling through exhaustion to get where you’re going is key in this messaging: “Nodding at the moment, you will dream. While studying at the moment you will come true,” and similarly, “Most great achievements happen while others are dozing.” Perhaps most succinct of all is this commandment: “Please enjoy the unavoidable suffering.”

Wherever it comes from, this distilled wisdom about American motivation clearly haunts the Chinese imagination. In an article about the phenomenon by Robert Darnton, Harvard’s university librarian, we learn that:

the allocutions took root in China’s educational system and were widely used in primary schools, in English courses, on exams, and even in interviews for admission to Beijing University. They have appeared on bulletin boards, in newspapers, on telecasts, on a website of China’s Ministry of Commerce and on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Above all, they have reached millions through the Internet, thanks to endless transmission by blogs, including one that registered 67 million hits.

As a result, it should come as no surprise that the most numerous queries on Harvard’s “Ask the Librarian” web page are about these allocutions, with many of the questions originating in China. When informed that no such commandments appear on the walls in any of Harvard’s 73 libraries, Mr. Darnton records the following responses: “Well my teacher has been using this fooling me,” and “Are you kidding? We grown up with these mottos.” Or even more interesting: “Thank you for liberating us” and “When I know the truth I can’t stop crying.”

Of course, there are both comforting and disquieting things about tokens of flattery like this, as well as the fact that Chinese people will probably be eating fried chicken in a mock-up of the White House later today.

For example, we may like it that the Chinese think we’re this successful, but disquieted by their distortion of us into sleep-deprived automatons. It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt’s ambivalence about one of her tributes: “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

The good news about admiration is the often accurate perception that there is something about us worth admiring.

Even when it is somewhat alarmingly expressed, flattery indicates that somebody out there still thinks you’re ahead in the big game.

But there can be another message too.

Whenever there’s a gapping hole between what’s being hungered for and what is actually true, it may be time to torque up that big game of yours before it’s too late.

(On this last day of the Chinese New Year, great prosperity to all!)

Trial & Error

January 29, 2013 By David Griesing 6 Comments

Whenever I do something over and over again until I figure it out, I think of my first video game called MYST. The goal of the game was to wander around an otherworldly feast of an island until you “figured it out.” I still can’t believe how much time I spent there, totally immersed. It doesn’t surprise me at all that MYST is now called “a classic,” a “first.”

Twisting dials, wandering off the path to check out that glimmer over there. Detecting patterns, finding keys (or clues to keys) until the door opened or the book closed or the light finally came on. All you needed was your cursor, some bandwidth, and a stretch of time. It was the embodiment of trial & error, and you kept at it because with ingenuity and tenacity, you were always rewarded—sometimes delightfully.

My work everyday involves figuring things out. For example, my aim in talking about values and work is to find that slightly different angle that allows you to finally “see” how fulfilling it can be to feel proud of what your doing at work and clear about why you’re doing it. So I keep spinning the dials and pushing the levers until I think I’ve gotten it right, or at least better than I got it the last time.

Trial & error is what made some of the Goats such an inspiration (Just Plain Funny #2). They kept at it, got it well enough, grabbed the finish line, and were (I think) a lot better for the effort than those who glided or stumbled over it.

Gaining mastery at your work takes lots of trials and nearly as many errors. You’ve got to want to keep coming back, over & over again, and taking another shot–maybe 10,000 shots. But as we lay down new tracks in our brains along the way (check out Daniel Coyle’s wonderful book The Talent Code about these new tracks) mastery will not only come. It will feel like a breakthrough. New territory.

Because that’s what mastery feels like. A whole new world.

What Good is My English Degree?

November 25, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What kind of job are you going to get with an English degree (or a degree in History, Classics, Religion, Music, Art History, Anthropology, Philosophy or French)? You’re wondering. Maybe your parents are too.

Or then again: you studied the humanities and now you’re 10 or 15 or 25 years out of school. But every workday, you feel like you need a crash course in technology, social media, marketing, engineering and accounting? Why does what you studied seem to have so little value? Why do all these other things seem so important?

What you learned by studying the humanities does have value—tremendous value. But there are many reasons you might not think so, and a brief look at some of them might be helpful before discussing how the humanities can bring the greatest value to your job today.

The Industrial Revolution kicked off an explosion of technological advancement that has only accelerated in our lifetimes. (It’s x amount of memory on that chip today, twice as much tomorrow, and so on.) At the same time, advances in science created an experiment-based way of explaining the world that clashed with—and has now largely overtaken—a faith- or story-based worldview, at least in so-called “advanced societies.” (It’s less church attendance and more individualized spirituality, when faith remains a part of our lives at all.)

In their upward trajectory, technology and science were also vastly improving our standard of living. At the same time that questions of meaning and purpose became more personalized, many of us were also feeling that we no longer needed the humanities to improve the quality of our lives. Technology and science were attending to our material comfort along with our wellbeing.

Or so we thought.

Several writers have lamented the sidelining of the humanities. For example, Anthony Kronman has argued that as the arts have lost their prominence in our schools, we have almost lost the ability to develop an important dimension in our lives.

Where education used to mean exposure to a canon of Western thought to help students determine “how I should live my life,” that canon has increasingly come under attack. Some viewed it as propaganda from a group of white, Eurocentric oppressors, while others challenged these texts for presenting “subjective” interpretations of reality instead of the “objective” (and therefore more reliable) view that science and technology provides.

So in the face of this powerful onslaught, where is the value in your English degree?

Its value is to give you something that science and technology never can: a personal story that gives your life as well as your work both meaning and purpose. Despite our human flaws and ultimate mortality, the story you’re writing recounts how you can make a difference for yourself and others in your community by what you chose to do everyday. Through the humanities, you have lifelong access to role models and ideas that help you to live a good and fulfilling life.

It is the insight gained from these stories that business needs the most today.

In his “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities,” Michael S. Malone notes that since the best products and services aim at meeting real human needs and making our lives better, the best way to bring them to market is with stories that resonate in people’s lives.

Given the dominance of science and technology and its associated impacts today, fewer people know how to find what’s meaningful on their own, and fewer still can deliver it to them. Asked what made his company special, Steve Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Think about it. It’s not what the product is that makes you buy it, or how you use it, but why it makes your life better. (Simon Sinek’s much-viewed TED talk is about just this point.) Your humanities degree has economic value precisely because it enables you to understand “the why.”

Where the English major is needed is at the intersection between the company and its customers. Having studied “humanity,” you have the ability to focus your company on meeting basic human needs in ways that neither science nor technology ever can. It is a priceless perspective that is needed in marketing, sales, and customer service, but also at every stage of product development and design. Again: Apple ads, Apple stores, and Apple products satisfy Apple customers as much as they do because of Apple’s English majors.

Malone concludes his “Bonfires” article by noting that in the future the market advantage will go to companies like this:

that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

The humanities have been undervalued and shunted aside, but what they have given us is more essential in the best jobs than ever. Far from putting you at a disadvantage in the workforce, they give you a powerful advantage. And the places where you should want to be working know it.