Problem Solving That Affects the Quality of Your Work

February 3, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

People complain that their working lives would be better and more satisfying if only they had at their disposal a ready-built way to solve some of the problems that they see on the job.

With noses closer to the ground, it may be a persistent problem with product or service reliability; with managers who never get back to others inside and outside the company; with the big supplier who always sends a couple fewer than you ordered. Or more broadly, it may be how one of the minerals we use in our technology leads to a hazardous waste problem for end users, how we’re always promising more service than we can deliver at the price quoted, or how our company is sucking all of the high-skill workers out of the broader community and the pipeline is running dry.

Each of these problems has wider implications. They speak to the quality of big and small relationships we have at work and the issues of responsiveness, honesty, over-selling, environmental impact, and local citizenship that affect them. Moreover, each imbalance in these work-based relationships decreases our satisfaction on the job and adds to its shortcomings as long as it festers.

Is there a way-in for us to help address these imbalances from wherever we sit in our organizations?

The problems we know best tend to be the ones we encounter every day and dream about solving, not because we’re visionaries but because we’d enjoy our jobs more if we could make some headway in solving them.

On the other hand, someone above us in the hierarchy may be failing to address them, creating a potentially awkward problem about how we’re viewed in the organization if we raise our voices. But there is a daily cost in our silence too.

We’re always more engaged in our jobs when we believe that our efforts are contributing not only to company objectives but also to personal goals that are important to us. Our goals most commonly overlap with our employers’ objectives when it comes to building stronger working relationships within the organization and outside of it with co-workers, clients, customers, suppliers, and the communities where we work,

Why is our finding ways to help re-balance these relationships so important?

In decades of industrial work studies, one key indicator of job satisfaction has always been locus of control, or believing that you have enough latitude to influence the quality of your work experience on a regular basis. When that ability is stifled in key areas, it’s like putting blinders on the ways that you go to work, narrowing the range where you feel you can make any kind of positive difference. When that narrowing continues, it leads to resignation and disengagement. Instead of presenting opportunities to exercise your autonomy, going to work begins to seem like “going through the motions.”

There are several different responses to that kind of drift on the job, but I’d argue for one in particular: your sponsoring an invitation to a broader conversation that involves every constituency affected by a particular problem at work, both within your organization and outside of it.

It’s you taking the lead in bringing a particular problem into the open and offering everyone with a stake in its resolution an opportunity to find a better way forward. You’d:

-pick the problem whose solution would provide the greatest benefit to the organization, and make your best case for all of its stakeholders coming together to solve it.

-offer to help with outreach, with organizing the conversation, and with leading the eventual process.

This conversation may not solve the problem quickly but could be a fruitful way of bringing those with the most to gain and lose together while they explore longer-term solutions. In the meantime, your actions have declared that your job satisfaction is not something you take for granted or expect to be given to you. Instead, it’s a work reward that’s important enough to put your own stake in the ground by trying to improve the quality of key relationships that make you want to go to work everyday.

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At a time when more Americans are opting out of the blood-sport of national politics, it is no coincidence that there are increasing numbers of initiatives to gather input and solve common problems more locally. Many of us are fighting against feelings of disempowerment and resignation where reasonable discussion is still possible. That is often around an organization that is important to us as an employee, customer, supplier, or user.

For example, when tech companies like Facebook and Twitter (through their platforms) and Google (through YouTube) were challenging the ways that individuals like Alex Jones were using them to promote what they judged to be “detrimental messaging,” an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal recommended convening “a content congress… to shape content-moderation policies in a more transparent and consistent way” than these platforms making what seemed to be arbitrary decisions barring a user’s access. Because these are public platforms run by private companies, the authors argued that their users (and not just their internal content moderators) needed to “hash out best practices, air grievances, and offer rebuttals.”

Such a body should not be a legally binding authority but an arena for transparent coordination, public representation and human engagement in an industry dominated by algorithms and machines. Companies want feedback; government wants more insight into decision-making; and people want to be heard.

Working groups in such a “content congress” could consider how to deal with videos showing violence or death for example (should they be available when they show police brutality but not when they depict executions by extremist groups?) or the line that social media celebrities like Mr. Jones should be prevented from crossing when they’re egging on potentially violent followers.

In making their case for content moderation by all of the stakeholders, the op-ed’s authors highlight similar, broad-based problem-solving in other areas.

-Icann, the non-profit organization that administers the domain-name system for internet addresses, has always relied on multiple stakeholders (representing businesses, other nonprofits, activists and governments) to maintain fairness and transparency.

-The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority or FINRA increasingly addresses problems like the volatile, high-frequency trading that is automatically triggered by investment algorithms with stakeholder assistance. Instead of seeking new government regulations, FINRA has convened the groups that are most impacted to implement the necessary fixes.

Multi-stakeholder initiatives are rarely the quickest or most efficient ways to understand problems or try to solve them. But they are often preferable to “black box” solutions that seem arbitrary or government regulation from outside the industry groups that are most affected. Moreover, these cooperative attempts at problem-solving often have a positive impact on those who initiate them when they get to participate in the problem-solving itself.

An Invitation to Come In & Broaden the Conversation

I looked at some of the benefits of stakeholder problem-solving in a post eight months ago, but not as a proactive way to address issues that are important to engagement on the job or one’s satisfaction at work.

That post included a discussion about “cooperative work” that is not compensated with a paycheck. Some things that you do at work are within your job description and paid for accordingly, while other things like playing on the company’s softball team or contributing to potluck events are not, but you participate in them for their non-monetary rewards like improving affiliation and camaraderie.

I’d argue that sponsoring stakeholder problem-solving falls within this second, more voluntary category. It is not something you are supposed to do or expect to be paid for. Instead, you take the initiative because it’s important to your continued engagement with the job and to your overall work satisfaction. Your initial “compensation” is calculated in enhanced autonomy, improved engagement, and greater satisfaction as problems that affect the quality of your work begin to be addressed. Because the organization also stands to gain from the stakeholder process that you sponsored, your initiative may result in a raise or bonus, but that’s not why you initiated the discussion in the first place.

My May, 2018 post looked at “cooperative endeavors” like freely contributing to the base of general knowledge in Wikipedia and to the open-source programming of software like Linux, that provide additional unpaid compensations merely by being involved in them. According to an essay about Commons-based Peer Production (or CBPP), these contributions allow us to develop our capabilities to work together collaboratively “in ways that had previously been blocked… by chance or design.”

CBPP allows contributions based on all kinds of motivations such as the need to learn or to communicate. However, most importantly, a key incentive is the desire to create something mutually useful to those contributing. This also generally means that people contribute because they find it meaningful and useful, and they believe the resulting product worthwhile. Wikipedians and hackers primarily want to create something useful for themselves, and for other people, not for the market or for short-term profit. (the italics are mine)

This discussion highlights the independent rewards that come from bringing people together to solve common problems, like the joy of collaborating with others to do something that is mutually useful and beneficial.

It seems to me that “satisfaction from work” is not something that a job necessarily “gives us.” A paycheck covers our time and effort whether we were satisfied spending that time and effort or not. To at least some extent, that makes us is responsible for the satisfaction we derive from our jobs, and sometimes requires us to step outside of our job descriptions in order to secure it. We affirm our autonomy by taking control of our job satisfaction. When we sponsor a stakeholder conversation around a festering work-related problem, we stand to enhance our unpaid rewards from work even further, by collaborating on mutually beneficial solutions that can strengthen our key relationships on the job.

Our work isn’t merely our response to demands and responsibilities that have been put on us. It is also initiatives that we undertake without pay that benefit us as well as others who are impacted by the work that we do.

It’s acting like an owner of our work and not merely an employee. Sometimes that involves turning on the light on your front porch and inviting those in your community of work to sit around your table and help to make your shared experience better than it is today.

This post is adapted from my February 3, 2019 newsletter.

A Winter of Work Needs More Color

January 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past week, it’s been cold here, then warm, and now cold again. But one of the constants has been how this season seems to drain the world of its color.

It strikes me as a fitting metaphor for what has been happening to the nature and quality of our work in this economy. Choices have been made, and continue to be made, by policymakers on the left as well as right that are draining the color out of work for many, if not most Americans. To restore some of work’s dignity—its life force if you will—we need to make some different choices in the future than we are making today.

In recent newsletters, I’ve been considering how we landed in this increasingly barren place and what we might do to get out of it. Today, we’ll mull over the bold solutions that Oren Cass offers in his new book The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Cass argues that for the sake of our families, communities and individual wellbeing, we need to make some difficult choices about what is good for us as a country and what is not. Before turning to his arguments, here’s a quick review of the discussion we’ve been having recently about the declining prospects for the future of our work.

An immediate challenge is the impending loss of our jobs to machines that can work more efficiently than we can. In an economy that champions “making the most of everything as cheaply as possible,” many of us will simply become too expensive and, at the same time, unable to retrain fast enough for the few jobs that will be left for us to do. My post a couple weeks back considered where opportunities might remain at the “scaling edges” of business today, how an aging workforce can maintain its value during this period of rapid transition, and perhaps most importantly, how government policies that support workers need to be implemented if we want America to continue to capitalize on its human resources.

Around Thanksgiving, I wrote another post about “the mass flourishing” that America enjoyed through much of the 19^thCentury and deep into the 20^th. During the century and a half when the economy flourished, the workforce generally flourished as well. American leaders celebrated the human values of thinking for yourself, working for yourself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making your mark. On the other hand, for the past 50 years as policy makers have tried to mitigate every kind of modern risk with regulations and safety nets, the psychic rewards that once came from “the rough and tumble working world” were gradually replaced by a different economic promise, one of ever greater material well-being. Edmund Phelps and others argue that this trade-off has undermined “the mass flourishing” we used to enjoy. Instead of worker satisfaction coming from working, the economy is being driven to produce more and more stuff for the workforce to consume when they’re not in order to keep them happy. Unfortunately, the promise of ever cheaper and bigger television sets and faster gadgets cannot meet the “non-material” needs that used to be satisfied for many by working.

Both of these posts assume that work has inherent value—that it is not merely the means that gets you more money, stuff, influence or time off. By giving us an opportuniy to demonstrate our capabilities, work allows us to realize our potential, be proud of our abilities to provide for ourselves and our families, be similarly proud of what we’re making or doing, and be more confident when facing the future because we feel that we have a stake in it and that it is not merely “happening to us.” When enough individual workers flourish like this, Phelps argues, an economy overall flourishes.

Cass’s argument in The Once and Future Worker assumes this too, before he documents how working families and communities are currently in jeopardy across America. What follows are highlights from his book, from a half-hour talk he recently gave to a group of policy wonks, and from some of the reactions to his value judgments and original proposals.

For Cass, the crisis for the American worker is evident from several unassailable facts: that wages have stagnated for a more than a generation while reliance on entitlement programs has grown and life expectancy has fallen due to addiction and obesity. He is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving economic growth over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view. He argues that if:

a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity, so it should be the central focus of our public policy.

When it comes to work, Cass is convinced that working—and the social benefit it provides—is more satisfying to individuals than being able to consume bigger and cheaper stuff. He is particularly concerned about the human toll, reliying on studies that say workers never recover economically from unemployment; that men only form families when they have work that can provide for them; that unemployment is a trigger for divorce; and that children have better outcomes when at least one parent is working. Moreover, communities where people are working are more vibrant and tend to attract more investment. In other words, communities filled with workers are good for those living there and good for everyone else too.

In addition, Cass cites time-use data indicating that men who are not in the workforce are watching TV or sleeping, not engaged in other productive activities. Making products or providing services that other people want is also satisfying to many who are doing so every day. Where people aren’t working, they (in Cass’s phase) “export their needs” instead, resulting in a massive transfer of payments from taxpayers to meet those needs–the Left’s band-aids. On the Right, a relentless drive to grow the economy with pro-business policies so we have more to consume at the lowest possible price not only overrides other priorities, but also makes the false assumption that short term material gratification will provide long-term economic health and stability. Whatever is satisfying consumer whims in the moment is not necessarily good for any economy long term.

So what can be done about this?

A slice of winter color by the cold Schuylkill River

With the co-dependent (but effectively dead-end) positions of the Left and the Right providing no sustainable way forward, Cass has several ideas.

In addition to questioning many of our investments in growth or safety nets, Cass challenges other allocations that America is making with its wealth, some that I agree with and others less so.

Challenging both sides’ longstanding preference for the elites, Cass would sharply reduce government subsidies for college degrees, noting that most Americans don’t even attend a community college today. These subsidies supposedly produce economic growth because the best students become the most innovative workers. But he argues that a better and fairer result would be less “college prep” and more “vocational training” for the vast majority of students who will never be going to work for a tech company in an innovation hub.

In terms of trade policy, Cass wonders why America has (at least until recently) promoted unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world instead of creating new jobs here that are equivalent to the ones that were lost through globalization.

He argues for a reduction in environmental investments because (again) they are focused on consumer welfare instead of other considerations. To Cass, the cost of, say, clean air or water is not merely the cost of the equipment that’s needed to produce it but also “the costs” of all the other things that we could be doing for our citizens if we weren’t so preoccupied with environmental safeguards. In his cost-benefit analysis, he’d weigh the costs of subsidies for alternative energy and complying with more EPA regulations with the benefits of more jobs or higher wages. I think weighing, balancing and considering different investment strategies is always a useful exercise, but would question whether environmental investments are “short-term” consumer welfare benefits instead of longer-term, life-sustaining ones.

While admitting that labor unions in America have been overtaken by the politics of the Left, Cass argues that stripped of this influence, we should all be excited by workers who are organizing. He references several initiatives here and in Europe that are challenging pro-growth policies on the Right and championing pro-worker issues that have very few advocates on either side of the political divide.

Cass’s most warmly received proposal has been to take some of the funding for programs that currently support non-workers and give it to low-wage workers in the form of a salary boost, providing them with a supplemented income that can better sustain them and their families. (Think of the vulnerability of many federal employees after recently losing a single paycheck.) Cass notes that we let the government take money from our paychecks (like taxes), why not put additional dollars into them for struggling workers on a regular basis? In addition to encouraging work instead of idleness, such a policy change would be revenue-neutral by moving monies from programs that support non-workers into a new one that bolsters the most vulnerable end of the workforce.

Cass’s bottom line is that investments that help all working families and communities to thrive will sustain our long-term prosperity more effectively than most government investments today. As taxpayers who finance and citizens who vote for the future that we want, he invites us to throw many of our current social expenditures on the table and consider whether they are more (or less) important to the future than enabling all of America’s families and communities to thrive—particularly when much of the country is already missing out on America’s prosperity today. Given the fools bargain we have all accepted, Cass wants us to “try on” his work-based ethic and help to decide whether our country should be embracing very different priorities than it has for the past five decades.

Two prior posts, on June 3 and 10 last summer, argued that whenever a dissenter from the prevailing wisdoms like Cass takes a principled stand, he is inviting those who are unclear about their priorities to clarify them and those who disagree with them to speak up. Principle-based dissent and the conversation that follows almost always makes our “next steps” as stakeholders more assured. To facilitate that forward movement by putting Cass’s ideas into a broader context, here is one helpful reaction to his priority-of-work arguments that also manages to echo what several others have been saying.

Winter color for families and the rest of the community at a playground in Bella Vista

After Cass’s book came out, Ross Douthat wrote a column in the New York Times about the struggle amongst the members of “a small church” of moderates “to claim a middle ground between left-wing pessimism about the post-1970s American economy and right-wing faith in the eternal verities of Reaganomics.” Given the similarity between how they and Cass saw the problem, Douthat summarized some of the issues that he and other moderates have with Cass’s proposed solutions.

[A] common thread is that Cass’s diagnosis overstates the struggles of American workers and exaggerates the downsides of globalization, and in so doing risks giving aid and comfort to populist policies [like Trump’s] — or, for that matter, socialist policies, from the Ocasio-Cortezan left — that would ultimately choke off growth.

Not unlike Edmund Phelps, who would also favors largely unencumbered profit seekers, Douthat initially puts more faith in the continued vibrancy of a growth economy than in the need to make as many new investments in our families and communities as Cass advocates.

On the other hand, Douthat allows that America may have made as much progress as it can along its current path, and that the dead-end many (including me) are feeling may already be here.

[I]s the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?

He concludes with what I’d call a fork in the road. If you tend towards the pessimistic view from the perspective of America’s working families and communities then pursuing some of Cass’s proposals may be the only way to preserve at least some of the American economy’s growth prospects going forward.

Perhaps the best reason to bet on Cass’s specific vision is that the social crisis he wants to address is itself a major long-term drag on growth — because a society whose working class doesn’t work or marry or bear children will age, even faster than the West is presently aging, into stagnation and decline.

At the same time, Douthat also notes (with some of Cass’s other critics) that working America’s challenges may be “cultural” instead of economic. I imagine that he’s thinking of factors like declining commitments to organized religion, marriage, community life and even participation in democracy itself, along with greater self-absorption with our devices and crises like opioid addiction. Encouraging work and redirecting the fruits of growth for the sake of thriving families and communities won’t help if what ails working America can’t be cured by larger investments.

I don’t happen to agree with this last possibility—but there it is.

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One of the reasons that I write this newsletter is because much of the discussion about work and work-related policy, to the extent that it occurs at all, happens below the radar. I’m convinced it’s a discussion that needs to be heard (and chewed on) more widely.

I’m also convinced that good work is of vital importance to those who are doing it as well as to the health of their families, their communities and to the country generally, and that our policy-makers are not grappling at all today with good work’s rotting underbelly.

My hope is that thinking with you about Phelps’ “flourishing economy,” about proposals to survive the future of work, and about Cass’s ideas on work-based investments in families and communities might help to open a wider policy debate as we enter the long, painful slog towards choosing our leaders again.

This post was adapted from my January 27, 2019 newsletter.

Running Into the Future of Work

January 13, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We’ve just entered a new year and it’s likely that many of us are thinking about the opportunities and challenges we’ll be facing in the work weeks ahead. Accordingly, it seems a good time to consider what lies ahead with some forward-thinkers who’ve also been busy looking into the future of our work.

In an end-of-the-year article in Forbes called “Re-Humanizing Work: You, AI and the Wisdom of Elders,” Adi Gaskell links us up with three provocative speeches about where our work is headed and what we might do to prepare for it. As he’s eager to tell us, his perspective on the people we need to be listening to is exactly where it needs to be:

“I am a free range human who believes that the future already exists, if we know where to look. From the bustling Knowledge Quarter in London, it is my mission in life to hunt down those things and bring them to a wider audience. I am an innovation consultant and writer, and…my posts will hopefully bring you complex topics in an easy to understand form that will allow you to bring fresh insights to your work, and maybe even your life.”

I’ve involuntarily enlisted this “free-range human” as my guest curator for this week’s post.

In his December article, Gaskell profiles speeches that were given fairly recently by John Hagel, co-chair of Deloitte’s innovation center speaking at a Singularity University summit in Germany; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz speaking at the Royal Society in London; and Chip Conley an entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “disrupter” speaking to employees at Google’s headquarters last October. In the discussion that follows, I’ll provide video links to their speeches so you can consider what they have to say for yourselves along with “my take-aways” from some of their advice.

We are all running into the future of our work. As the picture above suggests, some are confidently in the lead while others of us (like that poor kid in the red shirt) may simply be struggling to keep up. It will be a time of tremendous change, risk and opportunity and it won’t be an easy run for any of us.

My conviction is that forward movement at work is always steadier when you are clear about your values, ground your priorities in your actions, and remain aware of the choices (including the mistakes) that you’re making along the way. Hagel, Stiglitz and Conley are all talking about what they feel are the next necessary steps along this value-driven path.

1. The Future of Work– August 2017

When John Hagel spoke about the future of work at a German technology summit, he was right to say that most people are gripped by fear. We’re “in the bulls-eye of technology” and paralyzed by the likelihood that our jobs will either be eliminated or change so quickly that we will be unable to hold onto them. However, Hagel goes on to argue (persuasively I think) that the same machines that could replace or reduce our work roles could just as likely become “the catalysts to help us restore our humanity.”

For Hagel, our fears about job elimination and the inability of most workers to avoid this looming joblessness are entirely justified. That’s because today’s economy—and most of our work—is aimed at producing what he calls “scalable efficiency.” This economic model relentlessly drives the consolidation of companies while replacing custom tasks with standardized ones wherever possible for the sake of the bottom line.

Because machines can do nearly everything more efficiently than humans can, our concerns about being replaced by robots and the algorithms that guide them are entirely warranted. And it is not just lower skilled jobs like truckers that will be eliminated en masse. Take a profession like radiology. Machines can already assess the data on x-rays more reliably than radiologists. More tasks that are performed by professionals today will also be performed by machines tomorrow.

Hagel notes that uniquely human aptitudes like curiosity, creativity, imagination, and emotional intelligence are discouraged in a world of scalable efficiency but (of course) it is in this direction that humans will be most indispensible in the future of work. How do we build the jobs of the future around these aptitudes, and do we even want to?

There is a long-standing presumption that most workers don’t want to be curious, creative or imaginative problem-solvers on the job. We’ve presumed that most workers want nothing more than a highly predictable workday with a reliable paycheck at the end of it. But Hagel asks, is this really all we want, or have our educations conditioned us to fit (like replaceable cogs) into an economy that’s based on the scalable efficiency of its workforce? He argues that if you go to any playground and look at how pre-schoolers play, you will see the native curiosity, imagination and inventiveness before it has been bred out of them by their secondary, college and graduate school educations.

So how do companies reconnect us to these deeply human aptitudes that will be most valued in the future of work? Hagel correctly notes that business will never make the massive investment in workforce retraining that will be necessary to recover and re-ignite these problem-solving skills in every worker. Moreover, the drive for scalable efficiency and cost-cutting in most companies will overwhelm whatever initiatives do manage to make it into the re-training room.

Hagel’s alternative roadmap is for companies that are committed to their human workforce to invest in what he calls “the scalable edges” of their business models. These are the discrete parts of any business that have “the potential to become the new core of the institution”—that area where a company is most likely to evolve successfully in the future. Targeted investments in a problem-solving human workforce at these “scalable edges” today will produce a problem-solving workforce that can grow to encompass the entire company tomorrow.

By focusing on worker retraining at a company’s most promising “edges,” Hagel strategically identifies a way to counter the “scalable efficiency” models that will continue to eliminate jobs but refuse to make the investment that’s required to retrain everyone. While traditional jobs will continue to be lost during this transition, and millions of employees will still lose their jobs, Hagel’s approach ensures an eventual future that is powered by human jobs that machines cannot do today and may never be able to do. For him, it’s the fear of machines that drives us to a new business model that re-engages the humanity that we lost in school in the workplace.

I urge you to consider the flow of Hagel’s arguments for yourself. For more of his ideas, a prior newsletter discusses a Harvard Business Review article (which he co-wrote with John Seely Brown) about the benefits of learning that can “scale up.” A closely related post that examines Brown’s commencement address about navigating “the white-water world of work today” can be found here.

*My most important take-aways from Hagel’s talk: Find the most promising, scalable edges of the jobs Im doing. Hone the creative, problem-solving skills that will help me the most in realizing the goals I have set for myself in those jobs. Maintain my continuing value in the workplace by nurturing the skills that machines can never replace.

2. AI and Us– September 2018

Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz begins his talk at London’s Royal Society with three propositions. The first is that artificial intelligence and machine learning are likely to change the labor market in an unprecedented way because of the sheer extent of their disruption. His second proposition is that economic markets do not self-correct in a way that either preserves employment or creates new jobs down the road. His third proposition—and perhaps the most important one—is that there is an inherent “dignity to work” that necessitates government policies that enable everyone who wants to work to have the opportunity to do so.

I agree with each of these propositions, particularly his last one. So if you asked me, the way that Stiglitz was asked by a member of the audience at the end of his talk, about whether he supported governments providing their citizens with “a universal basic income” to offset job elimination as many progressives are proposing, his answer (and mine) would “No.” Instead, we’d argue that governments should be fostering the economic circumstances where everyone who wants to work has the opportunity to do so. It is this opportunity to be productive—and not a new government handout—that rises to the level of basic human right.

Stiglitz argues that new artificial intelligence technologies along with 50 years of hands-off government policies about regulating business (beginning with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK) have been creating smaller “national pies” that are shared with fewer of their citizens. In a series of charts, he documents the rise of income inequality by showing how wages and economic productivity rose together in most Western economies until the 1980s and have diverged ever since. Labor’s share in the pie has consistently decreased in this timeframe and new technologies like AI are likely to reduce it to even more worrisome levels.

Stiglitz’ proposed solutions include policy making that encourages full employment in addition to fending off inflation, reducing the monopoly power that many businesses enjoy because monopoly restricts the flow of labor, and enacting rules that strengthen workers’ collective bargaining power.

Stiglitz is not a spellbinding speaker, but he is imminently qualified to speak about how the structure of the economy and the policies that maintain it affect the labor markets. You can follow his trains of thought right into the lively Q&A that follows his remarks via the link above. For my part, I’ve been having a continuous conversation about the monopoly power of tech companies like Amazon and the impact of unrestricted power on jobs in newsletter posts like this one from last April as well as on Twitter if you are interested in diving further into the issue.

*My most important take-aways from Stiglitz’ remarks were as follows: since I care deeply about the dignity that work confers, I need (1) to be involved in the political process; (2) to identify and argue in favor of policies that support workers and, in particular, every worker’s opportunity to have a job if she wants one; and (3) to support politicians who advance these policies and oppose those who erroneously claim that when business profits, it follows that we all do.

3.         The Making of a Modern Elder – October 2018

The pictures above suggest the run we’re all on towards the future of work. What these pictures don’t convey as accurately are the ages of the runners. This race includes everyone who either wants or needs to keep working into the future.

Chip Conley’s recent speech at Google headquarters is about how a rapidly aging demographic is disrupting the future workforce and how both businesses and younger workers stand to benefit from it. For the first time in American history, there are more people over age 65 than under age 15. With a markedly different perspective, Conley discusses several of the opportunities for companies when their employees work longer as well as how to improve the intergenerational dynamics when as many as five different generations are working together in the same workplace.

Many of Conley’s insights come from his mentoring of Brian Chesky, the founder of AirBnB, and how he brought what he came to call “elder wisdom” to not only Chesky but also AirBnB’s youthful workforce. Conley begins his talk by referencing our long-standing belief that work teams with gender and race diversity tend to be more successful than less diverse teams, which has led companies to support them. However, Conley notes that only 8% of these same companies actively support age diversity.

To enlist that support, he argues that age diversity adds tremendous value at a time of innovation and rapid change because older workers have both perspective and organizational abilities that younger workers lack. Moreover, these older workers comprise an increasingly numerous group, anywhere from age 35 at some Silicon Valley companies to age 75 and beyond in less entrepreneurial industries. What “value” do these older workers provide, and how do you get employers to recognize it?

Part of the answer comes from a changing career path that no longer begins with learning, peaks with earning, and concludes with retirement. For nearly all workers, your ability to evolve, learn, collaborate and counsel others play roles that are continuously being renegotiated throughout your career. For example, as workers age, they may bring new kinds of value by sharing their institutional knowledge with the group, by understanding less of the technical information but more about how to help the group become more productive, and by asking “why” or “what if” questions instead of “how” or simply “what do we do now” in group discussions. Among other things, that is because older workers spend the first half of their careers accumulating knowledge, skills and experience and the second half editing what they have accumulated (namely what is more and less important) given the perspective they have gained.

When you listen to Conley’s talk, make sure that you stay tuned until the Q&A, which includes some of his strongest insights.

*My most important take-aways from his remarks all involve how older workers can continuously establish their value in the workplace. To do so, older workers must (1) right-size their egos about what they don’t know while maintaining confidence in the wisdom they have to offer; (2) commit to continuous learning instead of being content with what they already know; (3) become more interested and curious instead of assuming that either their age or experience alone will make them interesting; and (4) demonstrate their curiosity publically, listen carefully to where those around them are coming from, and become generous at sharing their wisdom with co-workers privately.  When we do, companies along with their younger workers will come to value their trusted elders.

* * *

This has been a wide-ranging discussion. I hope it has given you some framing devices to think about your jobs as an increasingly disruptive future rushes in your direction. We are all running with the wind in our faces while trying to get the lay of the land below our feet in this brave new world of work.

Note: this post is adapted from my January 13, 2019 newsletter.

Men At Work

December 2, 2018 By David Griesing 1 Comment

What makes your work worthwhile?

Last week economist Edmund Phelps got me thinking about some of the possibilities. Is you mindset at work to expand your capabilities, to become your “better” self by confronting risks on the job for the possibility of even greater rewards—the fuel of entrepreneurs and everyone else who works to advance their own accounts—OR is it to pursue greater security in your life, accumulate more savings, and earn more time away from work? OR maybe instead of working for yourself, you are striving to build solidarity with others through the services you provide: to strengthen the social fabric instead of just your strand of it.

Phelps also argued that competitive, entrepreneurial work produced tremendous success in the economy overall, while efforts to divert that energy into engineering a more secure, equal and just society has not only caused people to derive less satisfaction from their work over the past 50 years but also for the economy in general to stall. Phelps chose the values of rugged individualism over more collective social values when making his argument about pursing a good life through work.

Over the past week while I was mulling over some of your reactions to Phelps’ thesis, I discovered Harry’s Masculinity Report for 2018 on Twitter. In an era where gender roles in the American workplace are clearly in flux, what could “a masculinity report” possibly contribute? Was it a company’s marketing ploy or something more than that? Would it champion the rugged individual at work or somebody else entirely?

Harry’s is an on-line company that has carved out a highly successful niche for itself by selling men high quality razor blades and other shaving products more cheaply than market leaders Schick and Gillette. The write-up I caught said that its Report had:

surveyed 5,000 men ages 18-95 across the US, weighted for race, income, education, sexual orientation, military service, and more. The respondents were asked about their happiness, confidence, emotional stability, motivation, optimism, and sense of being in control. They were then asked how satisfied they are with their careers, relationships, money, work-life balance, physicality, and mental health, and also about the values that matter most to them.

The results showed a clear trend: The strongest predictor of men’s happiness and well-being is their job satisfaction, by a large margin—and the strongest predictor of job satisfaction is whether men feel they are making an impact on their companies’ success.

This measure, the study finds, is influenced by whether men feel they are using their own unique talents at work, whether they are surrounded by a diverse set of perspectives, how easily and often they can chat with co-workers, whether they feel their opinions are valued, and whether they’re inspired by the people they work with.

The Report itself seemed a bit thin after all that build up, but there were still some nuggets in it. The first was their data-supported effort to re-brand their customer base at a time when “how men act” and “what men want” has been broadly criticized. Another take-away came from seeing how Harry’s portrayed “the American man” it discovered in an ad campaign the company launched around the same time that the Report came out. And finally, the Report used some interesting words and phrases to describe the most significant component of male satisfaction.

According to Harry’s polling, American men are happiest when they are working.

Men at work are men at peace: everything else flows down from satisfying employment. Men who have high job satisfaction are more likely to feel optimistic, happy, motivated, emotionally stable, in control and confident. Job Satisfaction is by far the strongest predictor of positivity, being around three times higher than the next strongest predictor in every region and across the US overall…This is not primarily about wealth, but a sense of making a difference, being part of something bigger and more meaningful… Job satisfaction and the dignity of labor fulfills men’s desire to provide and protect.

Polling found that “Health” was the second driver of male positivity, while “Income” was the third.

I was initially dubious when the Report said Income was only important because of men’s desire “to provide [for] and protect” their loved ones. In my experience, many men (as well as women) want to make as much as possible so that they can consume as much as possible–or at least more than their neighbors. But the observation gained some legitimacy from how men described the central role that work plays in their lives. Martin Daubney, one of the Report’s authors, found that self-determination was far more important than making money for the majority of men who identified work as their primary source of self-esteem. He noted how frequently “autonomy – such as being a consultant or self-employed – was associated with increased job satisfaction.” On this point, Harry’s Report is both consistent with and different from Edmund Phelps’ assessment. It acknowledges the self-defining satisfaction of entrepreneurial labor but seems to reject the lure of financial reward beyond its ability “to provide and protect.”

In addition to re-branding its customers with this Report, Harry’s also wants to influence American policy makers. After all, this is an era when automation is eliminating many middle class jobs, robotics and artificial intelligence will replace even more of them, and post-industrial parts of America (like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia) are struggling with high unemployment rates among mid-career men as well as the epidemics of addiction that seem to be associated with feelings of uselessness. In this regard, Harry’s Report wants to change the policy-making focus from a negative to a positive one.

When service providers seek to engage men, whether in health, education, community, voluntary activities or any other front of social policy, there is often a temptation to address either the problems men have, at best, or the problems men cause, at worst. Our findings strongly suggest that the values which men aspire to most are traditional, moral frameworks. Men want to think of themselves as honest, reliable, dependable and fair-minded and it is perhaps those traits which agencies should emphasize when they wish to earn the trust and co-operation of male service users. Much previous research into masculinity has negatively focused on the problems men cause, often through the nefarious concept of “toxic masculinity”. This has never been more so than in this post-#MeToo landscape and after every mass shooting or domestic terrorist incident.

Lately, the dialogue has expanded to include the problems men have: such as the male suicide epidemic, depression, anxiety and addiction, while offering scant few solutions.

But Harry’s wanted to progress this dialogue forward, by flipping the telescope and focusing on what gives men a positive outlook. We wanted to find out which American men were the most positive and content, then look at the core values and behavioral attributes that nurture these men’s mental wellbeing. (the emphasis above is mine)

Consistent with Phelps’ predilections in Mass Flourishing, Harry’s Report seems to dictate a jobs-focused approach to addressing our economic problems. Creating new jobs and re-investing in old ones can often tap into a man’s natural motivations to make a positive contribution for himself and for those who are depending on him. This Report makes a powerful argument that every man in America who wants a job should have a job–because a man is a terrible thing to waste.

Consistent with its “accentuate the positive” view of masculinity, Harry’s launched a provocative new advertising campaign earlier this year. A female reviewer writing in GQ had this to say about it:

Selling men razors and shaving accessories often relies on the fact that it’s a rite of passage for men and a symbol of masculinity. That usually means beautiful women, severe cheekbones, and model-grade abdominal muscles [Schick and Gillette again]. Harry’s newly released “A Man Like You” ad doesn’t entirely stray from that tradition, but its statement about manhood feels refreshingly modern. The video follows a boy as he teaches a space alien what it means to be a man: how to walk, dress, and of course, shave. In the process, the kid—who’s got a mysteriously absent maybe-astronaut father—comes to the realization that, actually, “there’s no one way to be a man.” The fact that—spoiler alert for a commercial here—the boy appears to be imagining the alien out of grief or longing for dad adds up to a serious tear-jerker of an ending. Razor advertising has maybe never been softer or sweeter than this.

Harry’s ad is well worth a look because it presents an earnest if unexpected view of what men are growing up to be today.

Philosophers and social scientists talk about human nature, but easily as influential (and maybe even more so) are advertisers, playing with our emotions to make their points about who we are and what we’re like.

We already know about the dangerous side of marketers who are using the data collected from our social media exchanges (Facebook), shopping sprees (Amazon), and information searches (Google) to target us in increasingly precise ways. Harry’s ad is an instance where influencers are using our data to show us our best, or at least our better selves in the course of selling us their products.

Portraying a positive masculinity, their ad feels timely as well as necessary. It simply says: this story about men is real too and overdue for some attention.

This post is adapted from my December 2, 2018 newsletter.

Flourishing in Every Job

November 25, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Taking greater satisfaction from your work may be your goal, but it seems that it’s hardly the government’s or the economy’s goal. Not so long ago it felt differently, that those goals were all more aligned—and maybe they could be again–but only if we gain a better understanding of how that alignment came about in the first place and the choices we can make in the workplace and at the ballot box to support it again.

Economist Edmund Phelps provides a powerful argument for how the American worker’s wellbeing and capitalism’s productivity became intertwined in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. His aim in writing it (I think) was to remind us that there used to be more of an alliance between how good we felt about ourselves when we were working and the benefits that our good work produced in the economy at large.

Phelps makes several proposals to restore that sense of equilibrium. But in a wide-ranging argument that relies on history, philosophy and quantitative analysis, his primary objective seems to be an ethical one: to get us thinking about what is important about our work and how to advance those priorities in the choices we make about the quality of life we want to be working for.

When his book came out, Phelps (who teaches economics at Columbia) gave a lecture with the related title: “Mass Flourishing: How It Was Won, Then Largely Lost.” It summarized several of his book’s arguments in a highly accessible format. Most of the quotations below come from that lecture. It is only a few pages long and well worth your time to read it in full.

Phelps’ thesis is that modern American capitalism created a culture of innovation, which refers to each worker’s entrepreneurial mindset as well as to the broader economic and social benefits that mindset produced. For the individual worker, this culture fostered:

a spirit that views the prospect of unanticipated consequences that may come with voyaging into the unknown as a valued part of experience and not a drawback.

In other words, at the same time that an innovation culture produces economic growth, it also gives rise to the experience of human flourishing as workers become more powerful and capable both as explorers and creators of the new world where they’ll be living.

According to Phelps, it was the Industrial Revolution (around 1800) that ushered in a period of individual and countrywide thriving that continued in America through at least the 1960’s. It was an explosion of individual and economic energy that would not have been possible without the Enlightenment values that took root, particularly in America, during an overlapping historical period.

The impetus for high dynamism, my book argues, was the modern values arising in Jacques Barzun’s Modern Era – roughly from 1490 to 1940 – particularly the values we associate with individualism and vitalism. They include thinking for oneself, working for oneself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making a mark. The courage to express one’s self by creating or exploring the unknown and the gumption to stand apart from community, family and friends are also modern values. The thesis is that these values stirred a desire to flourish; they shaped a modern conception of the life to aim for – the good life. A prevalence of these values in a nation tends to generate an economy that offers work gratifying those desires – an economy that delivers flourishing.

How these values changed individual workers and the economy around them may be Phelps’ central insight. The standard argument has been that capitalism or “free enterprise” merely took advantage of discoveries and innovations that had been produced by science. Phelps argues that competition between workers in order to prosper contributed at least as much to individual and economic advancement—that capitalism creates innovation instead of merely feeding upon it. For him, it is the Enlightenment values that we brought to work for more than a century and a half that made “the good life” possible.

As quoted in a Thanksgiving article from a few days ago, this is the vitality and ambition that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed when he traveled across America in the 1830’s, with its grassroots “religious, moral, commercial and industrial associations” standing in for the nobility and bureaucracy that limited European progress. It is what Lincoln was talking about when he observed that in America, “every man can make himself,” as illustrated in a speech he gave in 1859:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This… is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

But then says Phelps, starting around 1970 and extending into the present day, the values of “free labor” have been constrained or overtaken by other values. In the wake of the New Deal of the 1930’s and even more so of the Great Society of the 1960’s, “traditional” social values have increasingly challenged what used to be our “vigorously individualistic” ones, including the current preference for “solidarity, social protection and security.” Among other things, these society changing priorities gave rise to “a vast canvas of entitlements… [and] to thickets of regulation” that impeded and sometimes overwhelmed the culture of innovation.

Instead of driving an economy that championed a good life from the ground up for individual workers, American policymakers began to manage the economy from the top down so that it would be what they conceived of as good for everyone. For Phelps, the satisfaction that came from realizing yourself through your talents at work along with the explosion of productivity that accompanied it in the economy—a century and a half of “mass flourishing”—was increasingly constrained by the parallel pursuit of other, well-meaning priorities. We tried to do two things at once, with a number of unintended consequences.

For one thing, the personal pride and psychic reward that were yours when you seized the opportunity “to make yourself” through your work were replaced by the promise of material wellbeing. Realizing your potential and learning new things about yourself while you overcame challenges in the rough and tumble working world were increasingly exchanged for the security of income and savings and for your leisure time away from work. According to Phelps, this trade-off no longer serves the individual worker’s “non-material experience” at all, draining work of everything that had once made it so satisfying.

These [recent] formulations overlook the world of creation, exploration and personal growth. Gone is the conception of the good life as a wild ride through an economy with an open future, an economy offering challenges with unimagined rewards. In this climate, young people are not likely to grow up conceiving the good life as a life of Kierkegaardian mystery, Nietzschean challenge and Bergsonian becoming.

(I know, pretty philosophical for an economist.)

Unfortunately as a result, work today has not only become the 8 hours you have to “get through” on your way to a paycheck and a week of vacation, but it also accounts for the startling pull-back of national productivity over the past 50 years. If we accept his thesis, “mass flourishing” has been replaced by widespread worker dissatisfaction, a decline in economic opportunity with few “haves” and many “have nots,” and an overall economy that seems to have run out of gas.

According to Phelps, the creative competition inherent in grassroots capitalism and the Enlightenment values that allowed it to thrive are essential to an innovation culture that brings prosperity at the same time that it makes work engaging. For him, Washington and the decision makers in other Western governments may believe that they can create more orderly and just societies by regulating, taxing and reducing economic growth, but by doing so they have nearly killed the golden goose.

When the values of the corporate state overtake the values of an innovation culture, the result is slower wage growth, reduced productivity in the economy, greater inequality among the nation’s stakeholders, less inclusiveness in promises like “the American Dream,” a sharp reduction in individual job satisfaction, and workers who have lots of stuff at the end of the day but little sense of personal meaning in their lives. One of the great virtues of Mass Flourishing is that it backs its arguments with the kinds of statistics that you’d expect from a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Phelps.

Artist Saul Steinberg imagines today’s workers, out to recover what they’ve lost

What Phelps does not provide are any statistics that quantify the loss of individual, work-related “meaning” over the past 50 years. But to me at least, his conclusion seems bolstered by the findings of a Gallop Poll that was taken around the same time that Phelps’ book came out. Its data proved the sorry state of worker engagement both here and elsewhere, as measured by an employee’s “psychological commitment” to his or her job as well as worker disengagement due to a “lack of motivation” and the disinclination “to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.”

Among North American workers, the Poll determined that 71% of the workforce was disengaged, while globally the level was an even more alarming 87%. Moreover, a substantial subset of checked-out workers was found to be “actively” disengaged. These individuals were not only “unhappy and unproductive,” but also “liable to spread [their] negativity to coworkers.” That all four corners of Phelps’ argument are evidence-based makes it particularly compelling food for thought.

As a result, his thesis challenges my sometimes belief (or is it arrogance?) that greater justice, equality, etc. can be achieved by enlightened government policies, even though experience tells me that there never seems to be a large or robust enough majority to produce real change. Does a tried-and-true system like Phelps “grassroots innovation,” with its mix of individual and system-wide incentives, have a better chance than well-meaning political agendas of producing “a good outcome” for both workers and the country’s economy?

Unfortunately, many of Phelps’ proposals for recovering what’s been lost seem impossible in today’s America. One of them still appeals to me however. It would mandate that members of Congress be people who have done more with their lives than practice law or connive in politics. Phelps’ proposes that all of our legislators be workers who have experienced competition first hand and, therefore, have been forced to innovate on the job. They would bring what they know about flourishing at work to Washington before returning, after term limits, to their highly productive lives.

Today, at the end of 2018, there is still grassroots innovation in America, and not just in the garages of Silicon Valley. When your work goals are in line with Enlightenment values like thinking for yourself, enjoying competition and overcoming obstacles, while experimenting, creating and exploring the unknown, you’ll find the opportunities for innovation at work. But these days, you may need to make a more deliberate effort to find them.

This post is adapted from my November 25, 2018 newsletter. Subscribe today.