The Jobs Project Revisited

August 10, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The movement of our work was captured by a troupe of gifted Philadelphia dancers in a performance last May called The Jobs Project. When I first posted about it, I promised footage of the ensemble when it became available. Now it is. You can follow this link to the current RealLifePeople(in)Motion newsletter, which includes a video excerpt.

According to the program notes, the dancers’ movements were “in a conversation with” recorded comments by an assortment of local workers about what they do, and remarks from the dancers themselves about their gainful commitments beyond dance.

I was behind one of those interview voices, and can tell you this: while there’s nothing quite like sitting in a darkened theater and suddenly hearing your voice coming through the speakers, the experience jumps several levels when highly accomplished performers start responding to what you’ve just said.

At the time of my interview, I’d just written a post called I am a Work in Progress. It was on my mind that day and the gist of it was captured in one of my recorded comments during the performance. It was these words, along with those from several others, which provided the counterpoint to moves you can now get to see for yourselves.

The medium of voice, music & dance was the message–and a very powerful one at that.

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.

The Pause That Refreshes – Part 2

June 23, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The work we do is full of people. To escape into green & blue spaces, where the conversation is between birds or waves, and the scents spring from the earth or sand, can be like a necessary breath. In his talk about living and working, Alain de Botton calls nature “a retreat from the human anthill.”

That’s what seasons like summer are for.

My friend Nick teaches literature in New York City, where sometimes the retreat has to be sponsored by the imagination. Perhaps with this in mind, he shared a poem by Carole Ten Brink about finding the space to look more deeply. Here it is.

The Visionary Scientist Speaks

Spy a little closer on any space you know
and you will become a stranger here.
Your chair is a sea of energy.
Ions acquire charge in your soup.

Your footprints plant heat on the seashore
and the sea absolves your negative charge.
Your hands swarm with atoms dancing
while the suns leaves fire on your head.

We sink our prehensile toes into earth
and heads will clear like green light.
Folded inside the lines of our faces.
a wondrous darkness is seeding.

See how the iris poises sword-shaped leaves on air
and the whale sifts her plankton all day.
When toads leap by the water spicket
they are grand and selfless as eagles.

Our velvet fingers distinguish each rain drop.
All our senses spew memories into the sky.
Existence throws itself constantly in the void
and comes down again, slippery as a newborn babe.

(I am leaving for Wyoming on Friday.)

The Pause That Refreshes

May 26, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Energy and work have a complicated relationship. When we’re firing on all cylinders, we’re burning energy but creating it too—with no net waste in a productive cycle. But sustaining a focused hum also requires giving your mind a break and letting it drift for a few precious minutes or hours. Concentration can be recharged by allowing yourself to get lost in a different rhythm.

Close your eyes to pick out the sounds or smells: how composer John Cage found the music in New York City, how you can catch a whiff of perfume or of the clean from someone’s morning shower. You also let the wave float you back to shore by opening your eyes really wide and drinking in the natural world.

My neighbor, Leigh Marsh, has been a veterinarian for almost 60 years, still working until ten or eleven most nights, although a concession of sorts is his setting out a bit later than he used to most mornings. Leigh’s veterinary practice began in a prosperous part of town, and stayed when all the money got up and went. He’s there for the dogs, cats and people who keep them, and thrives on the community that he helps to preserve. Whenever I ask Leigh “How are you?” he says: “Great, as long as I can keep working.”

He wouldn’t call it hard work, but it is.

He’d tell you he doesn’t have a secret, but he does.

I was in my front yard yesterday when I noticed Leigh and Jane (his daughter in for a visit) scanning the ribbon of grass between the street and the sidewalk in front of his house. They walked back & forth, fully engaged, with heads bowed. Maybe a lost earring, I thought. They went inside eventually, but Leigh was out again soon, scouring that strip of ground. “Do you need another pair of eyes?” I called, walking over. Barely looking up he said: “There are four and even five and six-leaf clovers here,” giving those he’d already found a quick wave to demonstrate the truth of it. “And this here is a particularly good patch.”

Psychologists have known for over a century that there are two kinds of attention: the directed attention we use when we’re concentrating, and the involuntary attention that requires no mental effort at all. A recent article in the Atlantic traces the distinction to William James, who said it is “[s]trange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.” that attract our attention involuntarily.

It’s attraction that comes with a slew of salutary benefits.

In a recent study, portable EKGs traced the brainwaves of people walking in heavily trafficked urban areas, in parks and in the spaces in-between to see if there were discernible differences. In an interview after the study, lead researcher Jenny Roe noted that the walkers became “mentally quieter” in more natural places. “Natural environments still engage” the brain, she said, but the attention demanded “is effortless.” Environments like these “hold our attention while at the same time allowing scope for reflection.” They elevate our abilities to sense and to wander while putting our minds at ease.

Of course, psychologists also couldn’t resist naming “the replenishing part” of involuntary attention. According to Adam Alter in the Atlantic piece, they gave it the appropriately poetic acronym ART, for attention restoration theory. Here it is in a nutshell:

[U]rban environments are draining because they force us to direct our attention to specific tasks (e.g., avoiding the onslaught of traffic) and grab our attention dynamically, compelling us to “look here!” before telling us to instead “look over there!” These demands are draining — and they’re also absent in natural environments. Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they’re still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we’d like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resources.

In this, the man-made, urban environment is synonymous with the workplace.

Getting lost in nature for a few moments relieves the workplace stresses too. The harder we work the more we need to get lost in it, and all the other strange and moving, bright and pretty things that can take us away for awhile and return us to the tasks at hand refreshed.

In other words, it’s knowing when to stop and pick the clover.

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.