Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand

October 14, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Nature has a big problem.

Too few of us believe that climate change will happen here or will affect us personally if it does. But these misperceptions are only one aspect of the problem.

Too many decision makers–and too many workers caught in the cross-hairs of the debate–still believe that the costs of changing how we consume, digest and expel the world’s resources are too high for the benefits that might be realized once we start paying for them. They don’t see “the benefit of the bargain” I see (and maybe you see) so clearly, only their share of an unacceptable price tag.

And indeed, the high costs of changing how we do things today tend to crop up everywhere in the climate change debate.

If we want to stop over-fishing, there are the costs to the livelihoods of the fishermen. If we want to reduce our reliance on carbon-based energy, there are the impacts on those who build and maintain today’s energy infrastructure, and on the communities that depend on those workers and suppliers. It’s dismantling one economy—the lost jobs and abandoned investments—for a new one whose economic upsides often seem to be worth less than the high costs of changing how we do things now.

In market-based economies, the challenge is proving that these transition costs will be justified by the long-term economic gains. A rough apples-to-apples type exchange between likely benefits and likely costs needs to be argued, presented and accepted by enough stakeholders for “the human family” to “voluntarily” undertake the expensive steps that are necessary to confront climate change.

Put another way: will the “value” of a healthier planet tomorrow cover the “costs” of ensuring it today? Perhaps the biggest challenge facing those of us who are alarmed by climate change is filling in the “quotation marks” in this cart-before-the-horse equation so we can convince the many hold-outs who still need convincing. But until now, we’ve mostly failed to do so.

Only quite recently have the number crunchers begun to calculate the cost benefits of a healthier planet that will, over time, offset the costs of ensuring it today. It’s the dollar-spent for dollar-earned scenario that is essential if we’re to turn climate change advocacy into meaningful action.

In the places where we work, most supporters that we’ll need to realize our visions start out skeptical if not flat-out opposed to the better worlds we can often “see” so clearly, so we need to translate our versions of both the problems and solutions into stories they can understand. Like it or not, that’s usually the economic story where we trade tangible costs for tangible benefits as we undertake the often painful changes that will be needed along the way. It works almost every single time, but until now that story has not been properly told in the struggle to confront climate change.

Well the time to start telling it is now.

The Economic Benefits of Whales Versus the Lobstermens’ Costs to Protect Them

According to a recent story, there’s been an on-going showdown between lobstermen and environmentalists off the coast of Maine. The point of controversy is right whales that environmentalists argue are dying when they get caught in the lines that secure local lobster pots. The whales are threatened with extinction. The lobster industry, which is already undermined by warming waters, will be further crippled by putting down fewer pots or otherwise reducing the number of lines that secure them.

Is there a way that the value of having more whales in this ecosystem might cover the high costs that lobstermen, their families and their coastal communities will have to incur to protect them?

Until quite recently, I would have said “no.” But before finding a better answer, it might help to have some additional background about the Gulf of Maine controversy.

The right whales got their name because they were the “right” whales to push towards extinction with our commercial activities, first with the harpoons of whaling boats and more recently by accidentally slaughtering them with boat propellers, fishing nets and lobster pot lines. These bus-sized mammals are slow moving and “built by evolution to be oblivious forage feeders,” according to a NOAA Fisheries’ official. It makes these whales unusually susceptible to getting ensnared and killed.

NOAA estimates that today’s population of right whales is only about 400, with fewer than 95 breeding females remaining, which means that the entire population is jeopardized by a single death each year. But more than 30 of these whales have been found dead since 2017. While the reason for these fatalities isn’t always clear, it does not appear that they are dying from natural causes according to investigators.

To address the problem, NOAA has proposed new regulations to clear fishing lines from the whales’ path. While the regs will cover all New England waters, Maine lobstermen, who “dangle more than 800,000 lines from buoys to ocean-floor traps in their busiest months,” clearly have the most at stake. To satisfy the proposed standards, they will need to remove at least half of those lines from the water. Says one lobsterman in blunt response: “We don’t want to go extinct either.” In addition to 4,800 harvesters working these waters, the lobster industry supports thousands more jobs on shore while contributing $1.5 billion a year to the state’s economy.

During the rule making period that we’re in today, scientists will be arguing about whether the proposed regulation goes far enough to protect the whales while those alarmed by its likely impacts will be making their case for reasonable accommodations or to reject the new restrictions altogether.

As tensions escalate, and opponents refine the dollar amounts that are likely to be lost if NOAA’s regulation goes into effect, it seems a useful time to ask whether anyone in that debate is calculating the economic benefit that is provided to Maine (and indeed to all of us) by the survival of these whales.

Is anyone enabling an apples-to-apples comparison of costs and benefits so that both sides in this controversy are (more or less) in the same ballpark, with the opportunities for tradeoffs and compromises that “speaking the same economic language” might allow?

And beyond that, is there a way that the “value” of preserving these whales can cover the costs that will have to be borne by these communities if they can ever come together to protect them?

The Startlingly High Value of a Whale

In the past week or so, I came upon another whale story. This one involved a team of visionaries at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As is often the case, I overheard bits of the story in a Morning Edition segment on NPR, which took me to a story that had been published that day in National Geographic, and eventually to a much deeper analysis in an IMF publication. It was worth getting to the bottom of the story.

As far as I can tell, what the IMF team discovered about whales and ended up proposing for the sake of both nature and industry was not in response to the Gulf of Maine controversy, but it could certainly help to resolve it.

The IMF’s approach considered all the whales in the world’s oceans. Because of its boldness and breadth, it could make a significant enough dent in species degradation, at a rapid enough pace, to reduce the number of ocean-based harms that we can no longer repair. At the same time, its approach would utilize the whales’ enormous environmental “value” to help compensate the global fishing and transportation industries for the costs of adopting “whale saving” practices. Here in a nutshell is their argument (although I urge you to read the entire IMF article and to enjoy the visualizations they’ve included in it).

Essentially, the IMF team realized that a whale’s economic value comes from its extraordinary ability to capture and then sequester carbon. “When it comes to saving the planet,” they write, “one whale is worth thousands of trees.”

In building their economic analysis, the team relied on 2014 research about how whales remove (and help others to remove) carbon from the environment as well as upon international programs that have developed mechanisms to fund the preservation of carbon capturing eco-systems. The team’s signature innovation may be focusing on a particularly helpful as well as beloved animal to support this kind of cost-benefit analysis on a truly global scale.

According to prior research, a whale sequesters as much as 33 tons of carbon dioxide per year on average compared to only 48 pounds per land-based tree. Whales eat phytoplankton, which not only contribute at least 50 percent of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere but in doing so also capture 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide or 40 percent of the entire amount that is produced globally each year.

Whales have what the IMF team call “a multiplier effect” on the phytoplankton when they eat them and produce waste products (primarily iron and nitrogen) because these waste products are precisely what is needed for more plankton to grow. As they dive and rise again to the surface, whales “pump” these minerals to the surface across their vast migration patterns, increasing both the amount of plankton and the whale populations that feed on them as long as the whales can do so in relative safety. Moreover, when whales die, the carbon they have sequestered in their enormous bodies from eating plankton in the first place descends to the ocean floor and (according to the National Geographic’s coverage of the IMF plan) “is taken out of the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, a literal carbon sink.”

Of course, whale populations would need to recover significantly to produce the greatest benefits. Continuing their “if-then” analysis, the IMF team notes:

If whales were allowed to return to their pre-whaling number of 4 to 5 million—from slightly more than 1.3 million today—it could add significantly to the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans and to the carbon they capture every year. At a minimum, even a 1 percent increase in phytoplankton productivity thanks to whale [pumping] activity would capture hundreds of millions of tons of additional C02 a year, equivalent to the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees. Imagine the impact over the average lifespan of a whale, more than 60 years.

(To put these benefits in a slightly different context, National Geographic cites economists’ calculations showing that these great whales alone could either capture or help more plankton to capture 1.7 tons of C02 per year, which is more than the annual carbon emissions of Brazil today.)

The question, then, is how to restore whale populations to pre-whaling levels. Those causing the current threat include nations that still allow whale hunting, industries (like fishing and ocean going transport of people and goods) that jeopardize migrating whales, as well as the actions of individual fishermen. Without covering the very real costs of changing these practices, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the necessary changes will be undertaken voluntarily.

With the aim of meeting these costs, the IMF team made “conservative estimates” of each whale’s value. For the largest so-called “great whales,” they used science-based estimates of how much CO2 each one sequesters directly or indirectly in its lifetime along with CO2’s market price. To this base number, they added value for a whale’s other economic contributions, including fishery enhancement and ecotourism. The IMF team concluded that the value of the average great whale is more than $2 million and that the current value of the global stock of great whales alone “is easily over $1 trillion.”

By using this “value” essentially as collateral for raising the necessary funds, monies would become available (from environmentally oriented companies, non-profits, consumers and even countries) to compensate those who are likely to suffer economic losses by changing their current business practices to protect the whales. “For example,” the team notes, “shipping companies could be compensated for the cost of altered shipping routes to reduce the risk of [whale] collisions.”

What is perhaps most noteworthy about the IMF team’s “good work” is the change in mindset that their cost-benefit analysis invites to help resolve one of our most challenging global problems: the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between nature and industry until now. The team recognized that the necessary changes will never be made unless those incurring those costs can be paid and the world can unite around sufficient compensation mechanisms to ensure that they are. Finding new ways to “value” and “leverage” nature (or “earth-tech,” as they call it) is the key they have identified.

+ + +

What the IMF team proposes doesn’t fit into a tidy package as yet, and a myriad of details still has to be worked out. In other words, the economic benefits from nature and the costs to industry of protecting it are not quite apples-to-apples yet. But this proposal boldly offers a new approach to balance the needs of both nature and industry on a global scale.

While it’s a financing mechanism that’s aimed only at whales, it introduces a framework for thinking about other carbon-rich ecosystems like sea grass beds or the forest elephants of the Congo River basin.

Proposing an earth-tech solution instead of an artificial, man-made one is inspired for another reason. When I worked in the energy industry, I studied carbon sequestration plants that were being developed at the time and know first-hand about both the technology challenges and the prohibitive expense of these man-made solutions. By contrast, nature can perform much of the same work “naturally,” if only we’d let it.

And for the on-going battle between the right whales and the lobster industry in the Gulf of Maine, there is now a rudimentary framework that, with imagination and a sense of urgency, may actually be able to serve both of them.

Good work often achieves its loftiest objectives by finding new ways to confront the dollars-and-cents obstacles that are right in front of it.

This post was adapted from my October 13, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Next Crisis Will Be a Terrible Thing to Waste

September 30, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

(photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com @pixels)

We are moving into less settled times both here and in the rest of the world. Several different storms are gathering along the waterfront today:

– in politics, with gridlock both breaking down and intensifying over impeachment and the future course for America, in the UK over its relationship with the rest of Europe and what it wants for itself, in the battles between populists and traditionalists elsewhere;

– in economics, with weakening global prosperity and the likelihood of a financial pullback that will affect almost all of us as the fundamentals weaken;

– in the environment, with increasing alarm over the current effects of global warming, the longer-term outlook for the health of the planet, and state actors’ halting efforts to respond to the challenge;

– in the world order, with a rising China, a demoralized and divided West, and a handful of nations around the edges that are both willing and able to take advantage of the uncertainty; and

– in the prevailing spirit, perhaps the most impressionistic of these storms but potentially the most powerful, as pessimism, alarm, hysteria, backlash and hostility get reduced into urgency in their boiling cauldron—a drive to do something, anything to move off the dime.

The silver lining is that chaos, confusion and uncertainty also provide opportunities. When you’re clear about the priorities behind your work, your chances to advance them are always greatest when the storms finally break as long as you’re ready to rebuild the storm-tossed world in the ways that you want. Now is the time for getting ready, because the chances to address our most pressing problems–and the rewards for us and others that can flow from that–may never be greater.

When the work we do helps us realize our priorities, it becomes more purposeful and satisfying.  As I argued here last week, in many of our jobs it is both possible and desirable to align our priorities with that job’s broader objectives. Improved health. Greater fairness. A more sustainable way to live.

In other words, it’s tying what you want yourself to almost every job’s higher purposes. Not only does the alignment reduce friction between you and those impacted by your work, it can also produce an esprit de corps with your bosses, co-workers, customers, suppliers and members of the broader community as they support your efforts. You’re experiencing the shared benefits of a productive community while taking home both the pride and satisfaction that comes with it.

Of course, another essential of “good work” is its future focus: anticipating circumstances that might enable you to take bigger-than-usual strides towards realizing common priorities. It is being aware of the obstacles and opportunities today so you are ready to act when the storms break and the lay-of-the-land shifts, weakening those obstacles and providing those with a vision of the future a path for realizing it. That’s because everyone who has weathered the storm wants to put the pieces back together and is unusually receptive to putting it all back together in some better way.

Realizing your particular work ethic in times of crisis has almost nothing to do with luck but everything to do with your mindset and plans. It’s having a vision of the better future that you want, keeping your eye on that goal line as the game degenerates into chaos, and, when everyone is finally able to listen, inviting your fellow survivors to help in rebuilding something that you’re convinced will be more durable and sustainable than all of you had before. At such times, aligning your personal priorities with a higher, common purpose will not only be satisfying for you, it can also make changes that seem impossible today, possible tomorrow.

My priorities (in search of this broader resonance) would include the following:

Thriving workers, families and communities.  Most of us have jobs as citizens of democratic countries with capitalist economies. We regularly make our preferences known by choosing leaders who share our priorities. As citizens during unsettled times, what kinds of change would we support and priorities would we pursue?

In large part because “thriving workers” are the foundation for other kinds of positive change (such as reducing income inequality, gaining affordable health-care and safeguarding the environment in our communities), I’ll be looking for leaders with the courage to say they are foregoing other “hot button” reforms to invest in retraining today’s workforce for a more automated world; to support trade buffers so that workers here don’t lose their jobs to cheap foreign labor when they’re compensated more fairly or work under safer conditions; and to support new public policies like bolstering the economic security of low-wage workers by supplementing their incomes through payroll deposits, thereby encouraging their continued work and improving their chances to start building wealth for their families and communities.

We don’t hear politicians making hard choices between costly alternatives.  Or willing to make the engines of capitalism more democratically-driven by ensuring that working men and women have a larger seat at the table with business owners. In the wake of the economic storm that’s coming, there will be many citizen-driven opportunities to support leaders who are eager to rebuild the future on the backs of thriving workers, while admitting that to realize that goal means putting many other goals on a back burner. It should also be a bi-partisan issue. As citizens, our focus and support can help them to accomplish this one important thing as the political process bottoms out and it struggles to identify new, common goals.

Environmental stewardship. As Alain de Botton argues persuasively (and often amusingly) in The Pleasures & Sorrows of Work it can be difficult to understand the wide-ranging impacts of your paying job given the global supply chains that feed it and the distribution networks that bring your “goods or services” to consumers. Difficult yes, but hardly impossible.  Among many other things, De Botton invites us to learn more about the consequences of our work, both for better and for worse. I’d argue that when we do, we’ll be able to see “how we can work better in the future” in a common light that includes “greater environmental stewardship.”

Is the product I’m selling or helping to sell, is the service I’m providing and the ways I’m providing it, improving the health of the planet or reducing it? Raising consciousness in the workplace about an issue like environmental stewardship provides opportunities for alignment with others–including bosses and even owners—who may share your concerns. The accelerating storm of today’s climate debate and the quest to find our way out of it will likely present many opportunities to change business practices (and even nudge them in groundbreaking directions) where we work.

Righting the balance between people and profits. Connecting your paid work to its wider-world impacts is not just limited to environmental stewardship. As global economies get roiled and we begin to look beyond these upheavals, we can be thinking now about how our jobs can provide greater benefits to us and our communities and not simply about how we can assist business owners in becoming profitable again. To ensure that you and I are not merely helping to restore the profit-dominated status quo after the next recession, we could be learning now how to connect our labor to “more of its fruits” than higher corporate dividends.

As I argued last March, administrators of a global education test are using that test to assess independent thinking, collaborative problem-solving and building better communities. On the theory that we “treasure what we measure,” students globally are now building these aptitudes in their classrooms because they will ultimately be tested on them.

By the same token, employers could assess (and reward) their employees–and be assessed themselves–for “aptitudes” beyond profit-making, including their success at tying company productivity to greater community benefits. For example, workers could push their companies to retain them (even with reduced hours) instead of firing them during economic downturns because policies like this maintain stable communities, or to take less profit from a product or service if it will keep a job here instead of losing it to a foreign worker. Moreover, employees who can demonstrate that they have strengthened the company-community bond would be rewarded for doing so.

The groundswell for this broader focus needs to come from forward-looking employees as well as executives and owners, and the time to be thinking about more community-oriented work assessments and broader exercises of corporate responsibility is now.

After we’ve weathered the next downturn, are looking for better ways forward and desiring greater corporate accountability for common problems—that’s when you can stand up with your new way to determine economic success.

That’s when you can argue that what’s good for the company needs to be good for the community too, and that the economic fallout might be reduced next time if the broader community were part of the equation from the start.

That’s when you can gain even more pride and satisfaction than is usually available when you help to solve common, work-related problems, because now you’re helping to humanize the foundations of democratic capitialism itself.

+ + +

We are far enough today from the economic recession that began in 2008 to gain at least a measure of historical perspective. Two new books are arguing that Barrack Obama was so eager to restore economic stability and the health of the American banking industry that he failed to “use” this crisis (as FDR had used the Depression) to seek fundamental—and to these authors—necessary changes to the country’s economic policies.

For example, in the course of re-building America’s way out of the last recession, they observe that Obama (like Clinton before him) never challenged the economic imbalance between the corporations and ordinary working people that had been a hallmark of the Democratic Party from the 1930s through the 1980s. When it came to punishing wrongdoing, Obama refused to insist that the bankers who had profited from the bubble they had created in the housing market be held accountable. When it came to economic initiatives like the Affordable Care Act, he favored market solutions over government policies and direct interventions (unlike the alphabet soup of initiatives during the Thirties or The Great Society programs of the Sixties).

According to Reed Hundt’s Crisis Wasted (out last April) and Matt Stoller’s Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (coming in mid-October), Obama sought to preserve the pro-business status quo rather than rectify the economic imbalance that disadvantaged workers, families and communities while benefiting the American business owners who held (and continue to hold) a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth.

I agree with them that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and that the last one was a string of opportunities neither taken nor pursued. None of us should be willing to waste the next one.

+ + +

I’m defining a “crisis” here as a ground-deep unsettling of prior certainties. A political/economic/environmental/moral crisis tends to prove that “the ways we used to do it” are no longer working and, for a brief window of attention and opportunity, regular people are willing to explore (and even support) both different and better ways forward. It’s why from the perspective of our work, we need to be ready with arguments, data, plans, hope and visions for the better world that each of us wants when that window finally opens.

We don’t need to agree on the changes. (The bold-faced objectives above just happen to be some of mine). But I’d argue that all of us need to be active parts of the conversation, even when it’s full of anxiety and has a fevered pitch. Because it’s when your work really can “change the world” and when the personal satisfactions and sense of purpose that come with it can be similarly transformative.

In 2016, a group of forward thinkers who were clustered around the University of Sussex in the UK created educational materials for anyone who is interested in seizing the opportunities of a world in flux. Those materials begin with powerful examples from history where:

– radical changes occurred in disruptive times that would not have been possible otherwise;

– to nearly everyone’s surprise, immediate changes were accepted by the public fairly rapidly; and

– longer-term improvements followed, with some expected and others exceeding expectations.

The Sussex materials also describe how, in a host of practical ways, change-agents can capitalize on the opportunities crisis presents and maintain forward momentum.

There is a broader discussion of their approach and a link to additional materials here. If you’re interested in readying yourself to take full advantage of the opportunities after our gathering storms break and the re-building begins, I think you’ll find their approach empowering.

Our work can always be aligned with deep motivations and high purposes, but the rewards are never more satisfying than when you’re helping to build a better world out of one that may be ending.

This post was adapted from my September 29, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Making Our Jobs as Big (or as Small) as Possible

September 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We bring our priorities into our work–making it more purposeful and satisfying–by using our capabilities more deliberately and by demonstrating our values when we do our jobs.

Our basic “capabilities” include our personal autonomy (or the drive to realize our gifts) and our generosity (or encouraging the autonomy of others who are touched by our work, from co-workers to bosses, customers, suppliers and the broader community that supports our efforts).

Our “values” are moral intuitions (or feelings) that frame our experiences and help us decide how we should respond to them. Examples include freedom, fairness, equality, personal security, an ordered life or the sanctity of living things. For each one of us, some values more than others provide quick, intuitive signals that guide us as we try to figure out how to interact with the world around us.

Work is more satisfying when it engages our capabilities and serves our values, because they are among our most basic priorities.

When talking about these ideas, people often ask me: “On a practical level, how do I align my priorities with the work that I do everyday?” It’s often followed by a second question: “What if my employer’s priorities are different from mine—won’t this put us at odds with one another?” My quick answers are as follows.

Alignment of personal priorities with job priorities usually comes down to your mindset: how you see yourself in that job. Is it doing the bare minimum, “staying within your lines” and keeping your eye on the clock so you can leave for home after you’ve put in your time OR do you pour yourself into that job, finding opportunities for your priorities either within or right along side the priorities of whomever you’re working for? In other words, how hard are you trying to find more satisfaction in every job that you do?

Sometimes these alignments are nearly impossible, as in my recent post about gig-economy workers at Uber and Amazon. At each of these companies, the capabilities of their ride-hailing and delivery drivers are being exploited instead of respected. Uber’s and similar companies’ business models depend on offloading as much risk and cost onto their workers as possible. These workers’ recourse? They have to look to governments (like California’s) to safeguard their basic priorities on the job, leave those jobs altogether, or tamp down these basic drives because their economic necessities override the personal costs.

On the other hand, in many jobs it is both possible and desirable to align your priorities with those of your employers and others who benefit from your work. It is what organizational psychologists have called “job-crafting.” When you bring a suitable mindset to your job—when you ask, “how much instead of how little can I make out of it?”—many jobs become opportunities to build more satisfaction, and even fulfillment, into your hours spent working.

After elaborating on job-crafting and my own take on it, I’ll share some fateful testimony from two practitioners of “this highly practical art” from an interview I overheard while on the road earlier this week.

The Opportunity to Job-Craft More Rewards Into Your Work

Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale’s School of Management was talking about job crafting on a terrific podcast called Hidden Brain this week. I hadn’t heard this episode, but a regular reader wrote me about it (thanks Joe!) and listening reminded me of how long so-called industrial psychologists (who study our behaviors and expectations around work) have been tinkering with the boundaries of our jobs and the perceptions we bring into them.

Take (as Wrzesniewski did) a janitorial job cleaning a hospital. Let’s also assume two different men filling that job: I’ll call them J and B. Both were hired to show up at regular times and keep the floors and available surfaces in their parts of the hospital clean. With the tools and working hours available, they can clean everything they’re responsible for in their 5-day workweeks. The following Monday, J and B each start the same circuit over again.

Let’s assume that J always does what’s expected of him without complaint, but rarely does more than is required. Viewing his job as a paycheck, he’s hardly fulfilled by it. Instead of satisfaction at the end of a workday, he’s more likely to feel a tinge of resentment, that it’s beneath him to clean up after other people, but he needs the income so he puts up with the indignity and has done so for twenty years. J rarely interacts with the hospital staff or patients, although he understands that keeping the place clean contributes to the overall mission of the hospital, which is to help people to stay alive and hopefully get well.

B couldn’t see his job more differently. Feeling that he’s part of a team improving patient outcomes, B regularly makes a point to give a cheerful word to patients he’s noticed have few visitors, will go the extra mile to clean parts of his area that no one else seems to be getting to, and gives staff members he’s known for much of his working life words of encouragement when he senses that they’re feeling down. Unlike J, B connects his job to something bigger than himself—promoting the health of everyone who is around him everyday—and goes home with both satisfaction and pride that he’s contributed to the hospital’s mission along with a paycheck from it.

B accomplished this by “job-crafting” the way he sees his work and the importance of it in the broader scheme of things. From my perspective on work, he has also engaged both his capabilities and his values when it comes to service and community in order to gain additional rewards from it. As podcast host Shankar Vedantum put it, there are people who quit their jobs when they win the lottery and others who still want to work. B might keep working because the rewards he brings home aren’t just monetary ones.

After 25 years of studies in the psychology journals—from scholars like Arnold Bakker, Maria Tims and Justin Berg as well as Wrzesniewski—there seem to be three different approaches that workers take when “crafting their jobs.” Sometimes they rearrange how they characterize their job responsibilities, emphasizing certain aspects over others. Is a chef simply cooking a meal that her customers will keep paying for or is it far more important to her that she’s creating plates that are pleasing to the eye and producing delightful experiences for friends who keep coming back? One is a successful economic exchange while the others are more than just that.

A second approach focuses not on the end product but the interactions that help to produce it along the way. Instead of B deriving meaning from making the floors shine, he finds it in those interactions with patients, visitors and staff along the way.

The last approach is how you see yourself on the job. J would say, “I am a janitor” or define himself apart from this job altogether if asked “what do you do?” B on the other hand might say proudly, “I am an ambassador for the university health system, creating an environment that promotes the healing process,” and really mean it.

In a post from last February, I made an argument that uses terminology from economics and ethics instead of psychology to try and prove a similar point. When you take responsibility for your job satisfaction and don’t expect somebody else to provide it, you act like a stakeholder instead of an employee. Because job satisfaction is important to you, you collaborate to solve work-related problems that involve everyone (co-workers, suppliers etc.) and everything (like the communities and environments) that your work impacts. The compensations that follow are always more than the paycheck attached to your job description, because you’re consistently investing your effort into yielding a more satisfying job experience by addressing what’s important to you and to others.

I’m Bringing You More Than Tomorrow’s Weather

In a week that was dominated by students demanding that older generations take bolder steps to ensure that they have a livable planet in their future, it’s worth noting that most people still fail to recognize that rapid global warming is one of the most important problems confronting them. Until a proper majority engages with this problem politically, policy makers will simply avoid taking the necessary actions. Perhaps no American workers see the need to engage more of the public—while also having the ability to engage people effectively–than the men and women who bring tomorrow’s weather to millions of people who have little scientific background or knowledge in their communities.

When I overheard on the radio a conversation with two meteorologists a couple of days ago, it was clear that these weather reporters (along with increasing numbers of their colleagues) are engaging the public on the imperatives of climate change by grounding their daily reports or 5-day forecasts in statistical evidence that goes back (or extends forward) 20 or even 100 years where they and their viewers live.

They might ask: how many unusually hot days did we use to have in July or unusually destructive storms in September, and how many are we having now–before providing the relevant numbers. These men and women are accustomed to explaining climate-related information to non-scientists—so they’ve already developed more skills and gained more trust than perhaps anyone, in any other line of work, when it comes to placing the recent developments involving weather and climate in a meaningful, scientific context. Moreover, by sticking to hard data and avoiding political “calls to arms,” they are building audience knowledge and engagement while maintaining their impartiality.

When these meteorologists make the deliberate effort to locate today’s weather in a much larger story (instead of just sticking with whether their listeners need to bring umbrellas to work tomorrow), they are “job crafting” or “taking responsibility for common, work-related problems” far beyond the media contracts that they’ve negotiated. In other words, they could easily “get by with less” but refuse to do so. Both interviewees made clear how much providing a broader context for their weather reports was enhancing their job satisfaction. It was also clear how much of an impact they and a growing number of their colleagues are having when they engage the public with a problem that has long been too difficult for most non-scientists to understand.

Mike Nelson, the chief meteorologist at ABC 7 in Denver, and Amber Sullins, in the same role at ABC 15 in Phoenix, both see themselves as providing this bridge. Each realized that they needed to locate their weather reports in a climate-change context when they were confronted with new generations (Sullins having a daughter and Nelson a grand child). Nelson explained that even with only a few minutes on air, telling a broader or deeper story than tomorrow’s weather “is not as difficult as you might think.” If he knows in advance that his producer has a story about the fire season or current drought, he can work in an “explainer” about the 2-degree increase in temperatures in Rocky Mountain National Park over the past century or how ,at this rate of increase, the “climate in Denver in the next 50 to 70 years will be more like Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Sullin does much the same for her viewers when she explains the 115 degree day today by noting that prior to 1960, there were only 7 days this hot every 20 years, while in the current 20-year period, there have been 42 of them. They’re providing viewers with some relevant facts and leaving it to them to figure out what to do about the picture they paint.

Nelson says there is occasional blowback even though he sticks “to physical science instead of political science.” But he adds that for every complaint or attempt “to bully him,” there are 20 audience members expressing their gratitude. Since people are inviting him into their living rooms, he feels it’s “his responsibility” to tell them the whole story. Sullins also feels she is building an additional level of trust with her audience, explaining how the positive feedback she gets from emails and Facebook posts are continuing and broadening the conversation. As viewer’s grapple with the issues, she sees “more wheels spinning in their heads” and their pursuit of even more information. Both Nelson and Sullins are actively working with new meteorologists too so they can learn how to provide this broader context in their weather reports and avoid having their new careers derailed by a political backlash. More than “weather reporters,” Nelson and Sullin see themselves as “educators” of both their audiences and their younger colleagues.

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In a post of mine last May called “How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate,” much of the answer seemed to depend on how much those hearts and minds trusted the messenger who brought them the information. According to one poll I cited, that need for trust comes from the fact that only 60% of Americans think that global warming will affect the US, only 40% believe that it will affect them personally and 2/3rds never talk with anyone else about what lies ahead. Addressing climate change is still not on most people’s list of priorities, but letting trusted people “in their living rooms” to talk about it could change that.

As long as a group trusts you enough to ‘give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,’ you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.

Meteorologists are “job crafting” their weather reporting and “taking responsibility” for educating their viewers who have found “what’s at stake” and “what can be done about it” difficult to understand until now. They are bringing their already trusted voices to a broader definition of their current jobs because it’s filling them with pride and they know that by doing so they could be making all the difference in the world.

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Notes: I just started publishing some of my weekly posts on Medium, an on-line opinion network, and my recent post on Uber drivers and Amazon packages was featured by its Business and Economy editors this week. Stories on Medium are usually available behind a paywall, but it you want to see my post or check out the site, here is a link that will get you there for free. (Of course, it would be much appreciated if you give it a quick read and check out the new pictures when you visit!)

This post was adapted from my September 22, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

We’re All Acting Like Dogs Today

July 29, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* January 12, 1976

I recently read that dogs—through the imperatives of evolution—have developed expressions that invite positive interactions from their humans like “What a good boy” or a scratch behind the ears whenever, say, Wally looks me in the eye with a kind of urgency. There’s urgency all right, because he’s after something more than just my words or my touch.

The reward that he really wants comes after this hoped-for interaction. It’s a little squirt of oxytocin, a hormone and neuropeptide that strengthens bonding by making me, and then both of us together, feel good about our connection.

As you might expect, Wally looks at me a lot when I’m working and I almost always respond. How could anyone refuse that face? Besides, it gives whatever workspace I’m in a positive charge that can linger all day.

Social media has also learned that “likes”—or almost any kind of interaction by other people (or machines) with our pictures and posts—produces similar oxytocin squirts in those who are doing the posting. We’re not just putting something out there; we’re after something that’s both measureable and satisfying in return.

Of course, the caution light flashes when social media users begin to crave bursts of chemical approval like Wally does, or “to feel rejected” when the “likes” aren’t coming fast enough. It’s a feedback loop “of craving to approval” that keeps us coming back for more. Will they like us at least as much, and maybe more than they did the last time I was here? It’s the draw that always makes us stay on these social media platforms for longer than we want to and always keeps us coming back for more.

Social scientists have been telling us for years that craving approval for our contributions (along with not wanting to miss out) causes social media as well as cell-phone addiction in young people under 25. They are particularly susceptible to its lures because the pre-frontal cortex in their brains, the so-called seat of good judgment, is still developing. Of course, the ability to determine what’s good and bad for you is also underdeveloped in many older people too—I just never thought that included me.

So how I felt when I stopped my daily posting on Instagram three weeks ago came as a definite comeuppance. Until then I thought I had too much “good sense” to allow myself to be manipulated in these ways.

For the past 6 years, I’ve posted a photo on Instagram (or IG) almost every day. I told myself that regular picture-taking would make me look at the world more closely while, at the same time, making me better at capturing what I saw. It would give me a cache of visual memories about where I’d been and what I’d been doing, and posting on IG gave me a chance to share them with others.

In recent years, I’d regularly get around 50 “likes” for each photo along with upbeat comments from strangers in Yemen, Moscow and Beruit as well as from people I actually know. The volume and reach of approval wasn’t great by Rhianna standards, but as much as half of it would always come in the first few minutes after posting every day. I’d generally upload my images before getting out of bed in the morning, so for years now I’ve been starting my days with a series of “feel good” oxytocin bursts.

Of course, you know what happened next. My “cold turkey” from Instagram produced symptoms that felt exactly like withdrawal. It recalled the aftermath of cutting back on carbs a few years back or, after I was in the Coast Guard, nicotine. Noticeable. Physical. In the days that followed, I’d find myself repeatedly gazing over at my phone screen for notifications of likes or comments that were no longer coming. Or even worse, I’d explore identical-looking notifications for me to check other people’s pictures and stories, lures that felt like reminders of the boosts I was no longer getting. I felt “cut off” from something that had seemed both alive and necessary.

It’s one thing to read about social media or cell-phone addiction and accept it’s downsides as a mental exercise, quite another to feel withdrawal symptoms after quitting one of them.

Unlike the Food & Drug Administration, I did’t need anything more than my own clinical trial to tell me about the forces that were at play here, because at the same time that IG owner Mark Zuckerberg is engineering what feels like my addiction to his platform, he is also targeting me with ads for things (that I’m sorry to say) I realized I was wanting much more frequently. That’s because Instagram was learning all along what I was interested in whenever I hovered over one of its ads or followed an enticing link.

In other words, I’d been addicted to soften me up for buying stuff that IG had learned I’m likely to want in a retail exchange that effectively made both IG and Mark Zuckerberg the middleman in every sale. IG’s oxcytocin machine had turned me into a captive audience who’d been intentionally rendered susceptible to buying whatever IG was hawking.

That seems both manipulative and underhanded to me.

It’s one thing to write about “loss of autonomy” to the on-line tech giants, it is another to have felt a measure of that loss.

So where does this leave me, or any of us?

How do lawmakers and regulators limit (or prevent) subtle but nonetheless real chemical dependency when it’s induced by a tech platform?

Is breaking the ad-based business models that turn so many of us into captive buyers even possible in a market system that has used advertising to stoke sales for more than 200 years? Can our consumer-oriented economy turn its back on what may be the most effective sales model ever invented?

To think that we are grappling with either of these questions today would be an illusion.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has just fined Facebook (which is IG’s owner) for failing to implement and enforce narrow privacy policies that it had promised to implement and enforce years ago. The FTC also mandated oversight of Zuckerberg personally. Unlike the CEOs of other public companies, because he has effective ownership control of Facebook, his board of directors can’t really hold his feet to the fire. But neither the fine nor this new oversight mechanism challenge the company’s underlying business model, which is to (1) induce an oxytocin dependency in its users; (2) gather their personal data while they are feeling good by satisfying their cravings; (3) sell their personal data to advertisers; and (4) profit from the ads that are aimed at users who either don’t know or don’t care that they are being seduced in this way.

Recently announced antitrust investigations are also aimed at different problems. The Justice Department, FTC and Congress will be questioning the size of companies like Facebook and their dominance among competitors. One remedy might break Facebook into smaller pieces (like undoing it’s 2012 purchase of Instagram). However, these investigations are not about challenging a business model that induces dependency in its users, eavesdrops on their personal behavior both on-site and off of it, and then turns them into consumers of the products on its shelves. The best that can be hoped for is that some of these dominant platforms may be cut down to size and have some of their anti-competitive practices curtailed.

Even the data-privacy initiatives that some are proposing are unlikely to change this business model. Their most likely result is that users who want to restrict access to, and use of, their personal information will have to pay for the privilege of utilizing Facebook or Google or migrate to new privacy-protecting platforms that will be coming on-line. I profiled one of them, called Solid, on this page a few weeks back.

Since it looks like we’ll be stuck in this brave new world for awhile, why does it matter that we’re being misused in this way?

Personal behavior has always been influenced by whatever “the Jones” were buying or doing next door (if you were desperate enough to keep up with them). In high school you changed what you were wearing or who you were hanging out with if you wanted to be seen as one of the cool kids. Realizing that your hero, James Bond, is wearing an Omega watch might make you want to buy one too. But the influence to buy or to imitate that I’m describing here with Instagram feels new, different and more invasive, like we’ve entered the realm of science fiction.

Social media companies like Facebook and Instagram are using psychological power, that we’ve more or less given them, to remove some of the freedom in our choices so that they, in turn, can make Midas kingdoms of money off of us. And perhaps their best trick of all is that you only feel the ache of dependency that kept you in their rabbit holes—and how they conditioned you to respond once you were in them—after you decide to leave.

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* November 16, 1968

Maybe the scariest part of this was my knowing better, but acquiescing anyway, for all of those years.

It’s particularly alarming given my belief that autonomy (along with generosity) are the most important qualities that I have.

I guess I had to feel what had happened to me in order to understand the subtlety of my addiction, the loss of freedom that my cravings for connection had induced, and my susceptibility to being used, against my will, by strangers for their own, very different purposes.

By delivering “warm and fuzzies” every day and getting me to stay for their commercials, Instagram became my small experience of mind control and Big Brother.

Over the past few weeks, I see people looking for something in their phones and think differently about what they’re doing. That’s because I still feel some of the need for what they may be looking for too.

It gives a whole new meaning to “the dog days” this summer.

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I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a similar experience with a social network like Facebook or Instagram. If we don’t end up talking before then, I’ll see you next week.

This post was adapted from my July 28, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Writing Your Thinking Down Enables High Level Problem-Solving

February 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Gathering your thoughts, working them out on a page, and sharing that page with others is the spur for high level, creative problem-solving and the best (most productive) conversations. Instead of “winging it” by making up what you think, want and propose as you go along, the discipline of writing your thinking down first makes a remarkable difference.

It’s more than laziness that gets in the way of our doing so, although laziness and the smug belief that our wits will be enough is certainly a part of it. There is, after all, a long tradition of not thinking too much “while going with what we believe and feel” in American culture. The great historian Richard Hofstadter wrote AntiIntellectualism in America in 1964, and others like Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason (2008) have picked up the thread more recently. Anyone viewing the political maelstrom today can see a ton of beliefs and emotions for every ounce of careful thinking.

So our reluctance to think through the issues beforehand is nothing new. And our suspicion of “intellectuals” who actually do helps us to confirm our general unwillingness to read about, consider, write down our thoughts, learn how to dissent from others’ thinking, and really converse with one another. There are several contributors to this reluctance, and I guess I’m working my way back through the list, having already discussed the emotional bars to political conversation (or how “The Danger of Absolute Thinking is Absolutely Clear”) and the generative quality of dissent (about Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers) on this page.

So what does writing down our thoughts before sharing them with others have to do with living and working? As it turns out, quite a lot.

As a group, Americans clearly don’t believe that the act of thinking (for itself) is as great as all those intellectuals keep telling them it is. As a people, our reaction is kind of: show me what’s so good about it and then I might try thinking-about-it-more if I’m convinced that it might actually be useful.

Among other things, this skepticism was the subject of another recent post about Robert Kaplan and his Earning the Rockies. Kaplan notes that Americans “washed” all the philosophizing that had trailed them from Europe in their vast frontier, reducing that thinking and ideology into something that they could actually use to build a new way of life. “Show me how all of these ideas can help me to solve the problems I face everyday, and then, maybe I’ll take them seriously.”  It’s no mistake that Missouri, the gateway to the American frontier, is also called the Show-Me State.

What Americans found on the frontier (and translated into a national way of life) was that ideas are useful when they help us to improve our hard-working lives and, in particular, to make more money while we’re at it. I suspect that this makes us unique as a country and a people. Unlike the intellectual elites of Europe who argue ideas, our favorite “intellectuals” are of the practical variety. They show us how to live and work better (entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk) and to make more money while doing so (Warren Buffett and Vanguard’s Jack Bogle).

Which is where Jeff Bezos comes in.

In a week that saw him fighting with the National Enquirer about nude pictures that he exchanged with his mistress—more on that later—we also know Bezos as the founder of Amazon, which has become one of the largest companies in the world and made him the world’s richest man in only 20 years. Like Jobs, Musk, Buffett and Bogle, there has been a great deal of intellectual rigor, with highly practical outcomes, behind Bezos’ and Amazon’s remarkable success.

While I’ve been talking for months about Amazon’s anti-competitive and job-killing behaviors, it also seems fitting to recognize one of the insights that Bezos has used to drive Amazon’s dominance–and how you might profit from it too.  All that is necessary is overcoming the laziness of easy answers and some of our native suspicions about thinking too much.

1. On Writing Your Thinking Down Before You Share It

To build one of the largest companies in the world in two decades took several really good ideas, and even more importantly, several really good ways to turn those ideas into solutions for the legion of problems that every new company faces. Many of those solution-generating approaches were applied by Bezos, and one of them, in particular, has been a key to Amazon’s supremacy as an on-line retailer and to its leadership in related industries, like cloud-based data solutions.

In his excellent 2-5-19 post on what he calls Bezos’ “writing management strategy,” Ben Bashaw gathered the underlying documentation and made several of the observations that I’ll be paraphrasing below. He starts off by noting:

There’s probably no technology company that values the written word and produces written output quite as much as Amazon….

Bezos is Amazon’s chief writing evangelist, and his advocacy for the art of long-form writing as a motivational tool and idea-generation technique has been ordering how people think and work at Amazon for the last two decades—most importantly, in how the company creates new ideas, how it shares them, and how it gets support for them from the wider world.

(How, how, how instead of why, why, why are questions that practical intellectuals ask.)

As a manager, Bezos grew impatient with meetings as brainstorming sessions early on. He came to appreciate what the behavioral research tends to prove: that individuals are better at coming up with new ideas on their own, while groups are better at recognizing the best ones and deciding how to implement them.

But he also appreciated that for groups to engage quickly, a new idea needed to be delivered “in high resolution detail” by the individual who had come up with it. The insight led to a June, 2004 email that banned the use of powerpoint presentations at Amazon and insisted that people with ideas tee-up the meetings that would receive them with tight, well-structured and reasoned narrative texts.

The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.

Bezos banned powerpoint presentations company-wide because he knew that to generate new ideas consistently, a business needs better processes it can repeat every time. He was also convinced that writing your ideas down clarifies your thinking about them and improves the chance that your ideas will be good ones because you’ve thought nearly everything through beforehand.

When composing a detailed narrative, logical inconsistencies are no longer hidden but acknowledged and (if possible) addressed. To set up “a deep debate of the idea’s costs and merits,” these 4 pages are designed to be “a full logical argument” by the idea’s sponsor that includes a narrative about the issue; how others have attempted to address it before; how the sponsor’s approach differs; the advantage of the new idea to the company; a defense to potential objections; and attachments that include the relevant data. In other words, in drafting the memo, the idea’s sponsor has considered it from every angle he or she can think of before it’s presented.

A link that Bashaw includes in his post references first-hand group responses at Amazon after the sponsor provided his or her written narrative. Discussion is “very focused” around the proposal; meeting participants are “incredibly sharp” and “you can expect the meeting to be among the most difficult and intellectually challenging that you will ever attend”; “data is king” and had better be well-researched and assembled; and how Bezos would “consistently surprise” the idea’s sponsor with at least one question about “the big picture” that the sponsor had never considered before. No more rambling brainstorming meetings where powerpoints create the illusion of depth but fail to engage the participants productively. It is one practical reason why Amazon has grown as quickly and boldly as it has.

What may be most interesting here is how drafting a tightly written narrative that contains your full logical argument can stimulate engagement with groups and others that you need to engage on any issue that is truly important to your life and work. It is taking a full stand about something, declaring yourself in a way that immediately invites respect and collaboration. It is a demonstration that you’ve thought about everything you can think of already—including what these others stand to gain—on whatever issue you are raising. The work that you’ve put behind it makes you an immediately credible partner to explore the next steps.

In an aside to this basic wisdom, it’s hardly surprising that Bezos used his customary approach to narrative writing when he accused the National Enquirer of blackmail this week. The Enquirer threatened to publish nude pictures that Bezos took of himself during an extramarital affair if he refused to abandon prior legal claims that he had against the gossip page. (If you have not read Bezos’ refusal to bow to these threats because–as it turns out–he was willing to publish the photos himself, here is the link to “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker”.)

What I found interesting enough to share with you was the following: (1) how many other people, both in and outside business circles, take Bezos’ writing seriously and (2) how one subsequent commentator actually provided a tongue-in-cheek critique of his “think of everything” writing style a couple of days ago. Jenni Avinns, a writer for Quartz business news, led off with the observation that Bezos’ post “clocked in at fewer than 1500 words” or, by my calculation, the four pages that launch all good ideas at Amazon. Then she gave some additional observations on how Bezos writes down his thinking, including his willingness to:

Embrace the poetry
If pictures of your penis are at the center of the confrontation and the person threatening you is David Pecker, don’t shy away. (Even if your blue-chip private security consultant is de Becker and it rhymes.) Put that Pecker right in the headline. Put a “Mr.” in front of it to emphasize the indignity: “No thank you, Mr. Pecker.” …

Make up Words
If the English language isn’t complex enough to provide the word you need to describe how your ownership of a national media outlet complicates your dealings with other powerful people [including the President], make one up. “My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me.” People will know what you mean, and even appreciate that you didn’t permit a tedious copyeditor to question you, though you clearly employ some.

Make fun of their words with “scare quotes” and repetition
“Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our [i.e. the Post’s] investigation” of his company’s relationship with the Saudi government, wrote Bezos. Apoplectic is a strong word, and honestly makes this person sound kind of hysterical and unhinged. If someone says they’re apoplectic, turn it around and say it again, like it’s a medical condition: “A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. “ …

Just [provide] the facts: I’m Jeff Bezos, and you’re not
If someone attempts to question your business acumen, school them:“ I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world.”

But act relatable
… “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”

Once again, great narrative writing skills always translate when you are trying to solve important problems at work or in private life. Unfortunately, they can rarely explain away incomprehensibly poor personal judgments. Perhaps it’s no accident that the last time I imagined pictures like this, they were taken by somebody who was (improbably and poetically) named Mr. Anthony Weiner.

On the other hand, and practically speaking once again, whether his post succeeds in solving Mr. Bezos’ immediate problem with the Enquirer is something I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

An Image of How Tight Narrative Writing with High Resolution Details Might Actually Look

2. How I’ve Used This Kind of Narrative Writing Recently

An important problem ahead of me is attracting interest in my first book.

I want to make sure that its disparate parts (arguments, short stories, etc.) hang together; that they reinforce one another nicely and enhance the freshness of my thesis; that likely questions about the approach I’ve taken are asked and answered by me; and that the benefits to readers in my approach are clearly in mind throughout.

Moreover, these problems are closely related to another one, because what will attract a publisher most is a well-considered and organized book with fresh ideas that meets readers’ needs to take more satisfaction from their work.

These are precisely the kinds of problems that “tight narrative writing with high resolution detail” can package for everyone who faces me down the line, including agents, publishers, retailers (like Amazon) and, of course, the readers themselves. In other words, it’s not just about your book but how you tell the stories that need to be told to others about it.

For the past several months, I’ve been working on the written materials that serve up my book to everyone outside of my book writing process. Without handing out the book itself and expecting people to read it, these are the shorthand essentials: descriptions of key concepts and how they operate, along with demonstrations of my ability to persuade with an argument, tell a good story and understand who might be interested in them. In other words: tight narrative writing with high resolution detail.

Quite frankly, it has been a lot of work, but its almost done. I’ve been amazed by the foundation it has provided to promote my book and how much the book itself has changed (and improved) from my efforts to capture it in its own narrative.

I had also taken this approach before I learned that Jeff Bezos had been taking it at Amazon too. It’s a great idea that’s long been out there waiting to be picked up and put to good use. But best of all, anyone can take the same approach to face a challenging and skeptical world with a maximum of confidence when trying to solve an important problem.

This post was adapted from my February 10, 2019 newsletter