Oprah Winfrey, Confessor

January 15, 2013 By David Griesing 23 Comments

I wrote about Lance Armstrong in early October and later that same month for a couple of reasons that relate to the work we do.

When you make mistakes that affect your ability to continue working & your reputation, you need to “speak for yourself about what happened” if you hope to regain your productivity. First off, it’s looking in the mirror and owning your mistakes so that you have the chance to be trusted and have influence again.

Coming to this acceptance also involves seeking the counsel of wise people around you—if you’re fortunate enough to have them. It’s only after “the owning” and “the reflecting” that you tell those you’ve affected what you did, why you did it, what you’ve learned, and how you’re going to do things differently in the future.

Each step hard, but necessary.

While its taken 3 months (or at least as many years since the allegations against him started to build), on Thursday Armstrong is promising to come clean to Oprah Winfrey. In an intimate television kind of way, her backstory is joining with his. Afterwards, we’ll draw our own conclusions.

We care about all of this because we need role models in our work—people to show us how—and for many of us, Armstrong fit that bill. Disciplined. Motivated. Triumphing over hardship. We were fortified by his example.

We also care about this because we know that the moral training we have today often comes from such “teachable moments” (as the president once reminded us)—that is, as long as we take them.

So we’ve followed the arc of Lance’s story. It was hard to absorb the allegations about a doping conspiracy he masterminded, to see him fired as the spokesman for products we buy, and finally to watch him have to break ties with his LiveStrong foundation. We were saddened by his apparent betrayal and surprised by his retreat into silence. Was it embarrassment? Was it shame?

In recent weeks, there have been some odd, Armstrong-initiated pop-ups. A surreal picture of him reclining in his den below his victory jerseys with the remark “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” Rumors that he was figuring out what he had to do to get back into the competitive sporting circuit, and how admissions he might make would impact the lawsuits & investigations still swirling around him.

The picture and its tag-line suggested denial. The rumors suggested the machinations of lawyers and media advisors instead of soul-seekers.

We’ll see.

Because what he’s looking for from Oprah is not merely a stage that’s big enough for him and his story, but also for a confessor who will help to change our perception of him. Facilitate our forgiveness. Lance Armstrong’s goes to Oprah’s mountaintop in order to be healed in our eyes.

When our turns come it won’t be about teams of advisors or media blitz, and maybe not even about a catch in the throat when you get to the hard parts. Because it’s not about orchestration. It’s just about telling the truth and being genuinely sorry.

Otherwise you shouldn’t bother.

A Hero in a Poor Season for Heroes

January 6, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We’re just about done thinking about 2012, but not quite.

As always, there were many small heroes this year, but Groundbreakers? Galvinizers? Healers? Those who stood before us with clear eyes and quiet confidence: there were almost none of them. Perhaps these men and women will come out of their private worlds when we’re closer to bottom, when our need will be great enough to recognize & welcome them & finally decide to stand behind them. This year, leaders like this were leaving us, not striding onto the stage.

Neil Armstrong left the stage he was never really comfortable on for the last time this past August. My post about him was one of the year’s most read, perhaps because it’s not just moths that are drawn to the brightest lights.

Surely, some of it was that his life recalled a different America when we were able to pull together to accomplish something amazing, whereas today we can’t even agree to come together and make sense. But it’s also about a man who took us with him on a great adventure, didn’t get in the way when we got there, and then gave everybody else the credit when it exceeded our dreams.

One way to take the measure of Neil Armstrong—in all his Mid-Western matter-of-factness—is to eavesdrop on an interview he gave in 2001 as part of the Johnson Space Center’s Oral History project. (His interlocutors are historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley.) His thinking is also a good way to clear our heads for another muddled year ahead.

On who gets to be the first man on the moon:

AMBROSE: It is part of the popular perception, I guess, and it appears in some of the literature that the other astronauts have put out, that there was a lot of jockeying for position.

ARMSTRONG: Yes.. . The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do. It’s probably true that I was less inclined to be concerned about just what job I had than some were. I think they’re all different people, they all had different kinds of views on that subject. It wasn’t as obvious to me as some of the stories I’ve read have portrayed it. (49)

Foundation instincts: steady, confident & clear:

AMBROSE: But you made a decision [after serious technical problems] and you got back to Earth. I spend a lot of my life talking to men who have made big decisions, and in this case your life and others’ were at stake…

ARMSTRONG: Well, I can’t make too much of it. I think generally you try to keep going as long as you safely can and try to save the flight, the objectives, and try to put everything back together. At some point you just have to make the decision that, “I can’t take the risk of pursuing my goal further, because I have to go back to the foundation instincts”, which is save your craft, save the folks, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind. (55)

The results also come from:

ARMSTRONG: I think it predominantly is experience over training. Training certainly helps, but having been in flying machines for many years and faced a lot of difficulty, [pilots] become accustomed to being required to solve problems as they arise …, and particularly test pilots who get a higher percentage of things going wrong than normal pilots. And I’m not saying that we did it perfectly in every case; I’m sure we didn’t. But the experience that we’d had in flying a variety of different kind of machines in difficult circumstances certainly enhances your ability to look at a situation, … analyze it and determine what your probable best course is and how much latitude you have to deviate from that best course. It’s not an easy subject to describe adequately, but it seems to have worked. (57)

The important things: the task at hand, the shoulders you’re standing on, and pride in your work:

BRINKLEY: …Apollo 11…was perhaps the most watched event in the history of….the world. [Y]ou didn’t treat it differently mentally at all, [only] as you would…one of your previous missions?

ARMSTRONG: I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could. And, you know, I have no complaints about the way my colleagues were able to step up to that.

AMBROSE: Let me interject here that you share a quality with General Eisenhower. When reporters would come to him during the war and want to get a story, he would always say, “Go talk to [General Omar N.] Bradley. Go talk to [General George S.] Patton [Jr.]. Go talk to a sergeant. That’s where the real story is. This is a team effort,” and he would never allow it to concentrate on him…And you just spoke about the hundreds of thousands of people that have been working for so long to make this happen, and I invite you to make a reflection on the team nature of the Apollo 11 mission.

ARMSTRONG: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. (78-79)

We give heroes our best because they take us with them to a whole new world.

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.

Woody Guthrie on Work

November 20, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

There’s been a lot written and said about Woody Guthrie lately. But even so, there’s nothing better than hearing the man in his own words.

My life bridges Woody’s time (1912-1967) and ours. I remember his voice “blowin’ in the wind” of the folk music and protest songs I grew up on. But it’s not so much his rhythms that have stayed with me, as what he kept saying—every single chance he got—about how hard it can be to work in America, and how much the men and women doing all that work deserve encouragement.

That’s never been truer than it is today.

We’ve also been hearing a lot from Woody because a comprehensive catalog of his songs just came out. It was his music more than anyone’s that captured the Depression-era exodus from Dust Bowl to California. Even if you don’t know his name, you know “This Land is Your Land,” the song that has become our unofficial national anthem. Woody’s best known for that kind of simple everyman wordplay paired with a catchy melody you’ll still be humming tomorrow.

In his writings, like Bound for Glory and Born to Win–and in all that singing and strumming—Woody celebrated the men and women who go to work everyday in that unforgiving part of our country we often sweep under the rug. It’s the 47% that were grist in the recent presidential campaign, the half of America almost no one champions anymore. It is their blood, sweat and tears that pushes the nation forward. They’re the folks Woody Guthrie wrote about.

I worked in your town

I worked in your farm

My hands is blistered

From the elbows down.

I sing the songs of the people that do all of the little jobs and the mean and dirty hard work in the world and of their wants and their hopes and their plans for a decent life.

For I’ll take your words and use them not to rip you down, but to squeeze you up against the wall in ways that will put new life in your old pots

Your old pans,

And new grease, honey, in your old washy dishrag.

I’m out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, you can take pride in yourself and in your work.

I write what I see

I write what I’ve seen

I write things that I just hope to see

Somewhere farther along.

An uncle of mine taught me to play the guitar and I got to going out a couple of nights a week to the cow ranches around to play for the square dances. I made up new words to old tunes and sung them everywhere I’d go. I had to give my pictures away to get anybody to hang them on their wall, but for singing a song, or a few songs at a country dance, they paid me as high as three dollars a night. A picture—you buy it once, and it bothers you for forty years; but with a song, you sing it out, and it soaks in people’s ears and they all jump up and down and sing it with you, and then when you quit singing it, it’s gone, and you get a job singing it again. On top of that, you can sing out what you think. You can tell tales of all kinds to put your ideas across to the other fellow.

And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about.

Some people liked me, hated me, walked with me, walked over me, jeered me, cheered me, rooted me and hooted me, and before long I was invited in and booted out of every public place of entertainment in that country. But I decided that songs was a music and a language of all tongues.

I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.

As through your life you ramble

Yes, as through your life you roam

You won’t ever see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

Now we stood in the rain and cackled like chickens, absolutely lost and buffaloed. Never before had I had anything quite so damn silly happen to me. Our clothes were on crooked and twisted; shoes full of mud and gravel. Hair soaking wet, and water running down our faces. It was a funny sight to see human beings in any such shape. Wet as we could get, muddy as the ground, we danced up and down through puddles, ran around in wide circles and laughed our heads off. There is a stage of hard luck that turns into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in laughing that turns into fight.

This Thursday, Woody’s son Arlo will be singing “Alice’s Restaurant” on the radio, like he’s been doing as long as I can remember. His dad is all over it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Getting Beyond Our Failings to Something Better

November 15, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

This season has been a harsh one for heroes. When you bring your values into your work, the example of others who have done so matters. So a season like this takes its toll.

Lance Armstrong was pulled down first by his win-at-any-cost rush for glory, and finally by his inability to reach beyond his grimace for a grace note. There’s a time for everything, and even Lance knows that it’s probably too late for him to say anything meaningful now. So instead this week he posted a picture of himself basking in the glow of all those yellow jerseys with the “passive/aggressive” caption: ““Back in Austin and just layin’ around…” One tweet (“Smug and deluded”) captures some of the reaction. For those of us who hoped for better, “Sad” would also be true.

Today it’s David Petraeus. His contrasting exit from the stage spoke of personal honor, the way a man should act when he’s disappointed himself and others. But in our need for role models, are we selfish to want something more in this instance too?

David Petraeus’ contributions in war were even more critical to this country’s interests than many of us realized given the failings of the generals he has had to push aside to bring a measure of competence to our expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the just published The Generals, there appears to be American blood on the hands of far too many of Petraeus’ high-ranking colleagues.) So amidst a startling shortage of Pentagon talent, Petraeus stepped up for his country both on the battlefield and in the corridors of power.

But his extraordinary record of service and character also begs the question: Wasn’t there a better way to reach a productive future than for David Petraeus to withdraw from public life: a better way for him, for America, and for the rest of us?

There may be troubling facts around the Petraeus downfall that have not yet been made public. But given what we know today, I find myself wishing that his bosses had helped him find a way to not only take responsibility for his lapses of judgment but also to keep on making his unique contributions. Shouldn’t what has happened here be about more than one man’s conclusion that he let himself and his country down? Doesn’t David Petraeus seem to be the kind of man who could redeem whatever disgrace he feels today though more hard work on behalf of his country?

Heroes are human. Caught between heaven and earth, we handle their earthbound parts badly. Isn’t there a way to approach personal failings that includes, among its many options, a path that promises redemption after penance is done?

In 2008 Barrack Obama gave millions hope they could believe in, but four years later that hero has also been brought down to earth, tarnished by limitations that a slim majority found less troubling than the other guy’s. Obama could never have met the expectations his campaign created in 2008, or that many foisted upon him. But here, what troubles the most is that the president never took responsibility for what he promised but failed to do. He never said:

“I chose to take the helm when the ship was floundering. I wasn’t up to it then, and as a result I didn’t get us to clear water. You know it and I know it. But the buck stops here. I didn’t get it done. This is where I failed, and over here too. But this is also what I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I will struggle mightily not to make them again. Remind me when I’m not being bold enough. This is a big job. I need your help everyday—and God’s too—to find the courage we need to move forward from where we are.”

The president never said this to us. Instead his excuse seemed to be that his predecessor and his opponents were even smaller men. Maybe so, but you can’t move beyond your own failings until you own them. Unfortunately for him and for us, we’re all in an unproductive future with him this November: from the hero of 2008 to the lesser of two evils in 2012.

This week Lincoln comes to a movie screen nearby. Hollywood or Steven Speilberg or both may have seen an arc extending back from our first black president to the man who emancipated our slaves—and seen timeliness in this. But Lincoln’s life is timely now for a different reason. Almost alone among our American heroes, he was singularly focused on trying to describe how meaning could be found beyond the tragedy, sacrifice, and his own personal limitations.

The humility, sadness and struggle to reach a better future are all captured in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. It was 1865. America was exhausted by an on-going war with bitter losses. Lincoln didn’t speak about having righteousness on his side. He got down into the moral mess of it, acknowledged while also struggling to look past the war’s unbearable costs to the forgiveness and rebuilding beyond. This is what he said.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.

. . . Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

The pathway to something better that Lincoln spoke of in his time seems barely visible today.

It is grounded not in arrogance, but in humility and forgiveness.

Because we need to find the path again, it seems fitting that Lincoln will fill our fields of vision in what has been a harsh season for today’s heroes.

We have much to learn from him.

Can There Be Redemption in Armstrong Tragedy?

October 18, 2012 By David Griesing 6 Comments

Who do you turn to for advice when your integrity is called into question? Is it a spouse, a trusted friend, a professional advisor? Is it a stranger who might tell you the truth that others aren’t telling you, because they’re too close, too afraid, or too self-interested?

As the Lance Armstrong saga unfolds, I continue to feel sadness for this falling hero, and as I wrote a couple of days ago, for many of our falling heroes. But today it’s also worth asking who these heroes call upon—indeed who any of us reach out to for guidance when our darker side has put us between a rock and a hard place, and we’re trying to find a way out back out while still holding our heads up.

Armstrong announced yesterday that he was stepping down as chair of the Live Strong Foundation that he founded as one cancer survivor supporting other cancer survivors. While the Foundation needed greater distance from its controversial founder long before this, there are reasons it stuck with him. Live Strong saw a big spike in contributions last summer immediately after Armstrong announced that he would no longer defend the doping charges that were accumulating against him. But it was about more than just the money.

We support you, Lance. We’re with you while you tough it out—one more time!

But today, after so much damning evidence, what do these supporters–and indeed all of us who believed in you—want to hear you say?

The USADA’s doping charges, bolstered by the confessions of many of his teammates, are swamping the boat where Armstrong still sits, protesting his innocence. When you’re rich and famous, there are plenty of people on hand to talk to about your press releases. But who, if anyone, is Armstrong talking to about what he should do next to replenish his soul?

© 2008 Robert Seale Robert Seale Photography www.robertseale.com 832-654-9572 — photo by Robert Seale

Is the next act a cornered Armstrong admitting to the flashing cameras that “you finally got me,” or can it be something more consequential than that? He’s given powerful lessons to other cancer survivors. Maybe he can find a way, is trying right now to find a way to give us something we can learn from him about this battle too.

Is that too much to hope?

In all probability, Lance Armstrong will only be able to look us in the eye again if the people he’s talking to, and bringing into his internal dialogue, are helping him to reach a note of genuine redemption from his current struggles. At best, they will not only help him to face his particular truth but also the find the most productive ways to respond to it.

There are times in our lives when we all need to have these kinds of conversations, but find ourselves with no one to talk to.

I hope that the protean survivor in Armstrong has those people, that he has enabled himself in this way too, and that they are helping him today.

For the rest of us, it’s really much the same.

Wisdom is making sure that we all have the right people to talk to when we need to find a redemptive way to move on after being trapped by our own tragic flaws. They are relationships that truly matter.

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