Blockchain Goes to Work

May 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week I’ve re-worked a post from last August in the first of a two-part consideration on the future of work. Today, it’s envisioning a workforce where more of us will be working for ourselves, selling increments of our time and talent in what amounts to a series of paying jobs. While it’s a response to the loss of “traditional jobs” to automation, it also holds the promise of greater autonomy, abundance and prosperity if we choose to value the right things by standing up for and safeguarding our human priorities along the way.

The future of work is being designed today. Perhaps the most exciting part is that each one of us has a role to play–is part of a broader negotiation–about how that future should unfold.

1 An Optimistic Vision

The future of work has never looked more abundant, although many don’t see it that way.

Some are busy projecting job losses from automation and brain-replacing artificial intelligence, telling us we’ll all be idled and that much poorer for it. Or they’re identifying the brainpower careers that will remain so we can point ourselves or our tuition payments in their direction. For these forecasters, the future of work is at best the pursuit of diminishing returns.

Some of the most pessimistic (or politically ambitious) among them have been formulating universal income plans to replace today’s more limited safety nets. They tell us that a stipend like this will liberate us to pursue our passions since new government checks will cover our basic necessities. This seems misguided to me. As George Orwell noted, some utopians simply cannot “imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain.”

An alternate vision focuses on innovations that could enable us to do more and better work while unlocking greater prosperity.

One of the enabling technologies that is already ushering in this future is blockchain. Like the protocols for transmitting data across digital networks led to the Internet, blockchain-based software applications could fundamentally change the ways that we work.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most commonly with no central monitor or regulator. The technology enables every block in the chain to record data that can be seen and reviewed by every other block, maintaining its accuracy through its security protections and transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in a digital ledger or transaction log. The need for and costs of a “middleman” (like a bank) and other impediments (like legal and financial gatekeepers) are avoided. Unlike traditional recordkeeping, there is no central database for meddlers to corrupt.

Blockchain technology supports the sale and use of digital currencies (like bitcoin) and just as importantly, “smart contracts” that enforce the rules about how value is exchanged by parties when they reach agreement. Ethereum utilizes its blockchain platform to host most of the projects that attract, manage and pay for time and talent in decentralized ways today. Tantalizing glimpses into this future are also available at the social network Steemit and on the payment platform Bitwage.

Steemit’s uses a digital currency called Steem that you can redeem for cash for your contributions to the social network’s “hivemind.” For example, users are paid for posts, for the number of people liking their posts, for how quickly you spot another post that becomes popular, that is, for the value of your contributions to the network. Users are funding jobs like travel blogging while they crisscross the world and, reportedly, one early adopter has already earned more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In more traditional buying-and-selling transactions, Bitwage’s payment application allows employees or freelancers to receive their wages in bitcoin without requiring either their employers or clients to use a digital currency exchange.

For work-based ecosystems built on blockchains to evolve further, they will need to become faster and more scalable without sacrificing the security and decentralization that are their hallmarks. In this pursuit, Ethereum and a raft of competitors are experimenting with a protocol called Lightening that can settle millions of digital currency transactions more quickly and cheaply but that needs “to go off the blockchain” in order to do so. These companies are also exploring structural changes to basic blockchain technology. The prize that drives them is an online platform that is durable enough to support a global marketplace where every kind of work can be bought and sold.

Let’s call it a work2benefit exchange.

Because your time and talent has value and is in limited supply, you could sell it in a market that’s vibrant enough to buy it. A blockchain-based exchange might easily handle transactions that involve very small as well as larger, project-oriented jobs. Because you have capabilities that you’ve sold before and others that you’ve given away because there was no way to be compensated, an exchange like this could help secure prior income streams while providing you with new ones. Such a marketplace would easily dwarf Walmart’s in size without the downsides of a company middleman taking his profits, making you keep his work schedule, commute to his place of business or contribute to his overhead.

Previously unrealized income streams—even small ones—will be particularly welcome.

Suppose you’re asked to provide 5 minutes of feedback on your recent doctor’s visit. Your scarce resources are the time and judgment that you might not provide if you weren’t being paid for them. Their one-time value might be modest, but as the demands for your input keep coming, payments for it will add up. A blockchain exchange could pay you for editing a resume in 20 minutes or designing a company’s logo in 2 hours; providing traffic-cam information on heavily traveled routes you are already taking; matchmaking acquaintances with service providers that have something they need; selling your personal data to marketers who want you to buy their products; maybe even a government incentive for completing your tax returns or voting in the next election. Similarly, when I need the benefit of someone else’s work, this marketplace could connect me to it, even if the time and talent is half a world away.

Work2benefit exchanges that can handle incremental transactions like these haven’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough buyers and sellers to make them viable—but they’re coming. You’ll still need your judgment, vision and hustle, but before long it will be possible to make a living in a marketplace where you (and maybe billions of others) will each be blocks in a global blockchain. Many people will continue to work in groups. Offices and factories won’t vanish. But traditional jobs that once came with pensions, health benefits and provable credit will become increasingly scarce. The stripped-down, “independent contractor” work that’s left will almost certainly be supplemented by new ways of getting paid for your human resources.

Blockchain and related technologies will unlock new categories of personal wealth and autonomy. They could fill the future of work with greater abundance for us to share with one another. Tomorrow’s challenge won’t be finding enough work to make a living but reimagining and re-bundling job securities like health care and creditworthiness around all the new jobs we’ll be doing. Next week, I’ll introduce you to some of the people and companies that are helping to build these protections around our increasingly autonomous workforce.

2. The Future Begins With a Vision

A vision should linger and inspire for long enough that it fixes in the minds eye where it becomes part of the imagination, a cause for hope, and fuel that’s needed to overcome the obstacles that will always stand in its way. Here, in brief, are some of the challenges that a bold-enough vision will need to see us through, starting with the inevitable turf wars and technology challenges:

-There is resistance from the mainstream banking community to digital currencies and the exchanges that convert them into cash for gig economy paychecks. For example, a story in today’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the banking controversy that has already embroiled one digital currency exchange. Some of the current banking industry will need to be disrupted so that new “fin-tech” mechanisms can take their place.

-There are technology challenges to making digital platforms large enough to handle the smart contracts that will bring all these new buyers and sellers of work together. The ecosystem of applications will need to be robust enough to attract, manage and compensate the sale of goods and talent in a global marketplace. To meet these challenges, new applications are being developed outside of blockchain’s architecture (with its attendant security risks and middleman costs) while some of the fundamentals behind blockchain technology itself are being reconsidered. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, more about blockchain’s “scalability” hurdles can be found here.

-Managing yourself to a stable, reliable income from many jobs in a way that meets your needs and your family’s needs requires its own expertise. The freedom to decide when to work and how often to work is liberating, but as the recent strikes by Uber drivers illustrate, it isn’t easy to cobble a patchwork of compensated time “into a living” while also selling your services at “a market price.” We’ll all have to learn more about how to put our livelihoods together while finding new ways to bargain effectively for what we need from each one of our work-based exchanges.

-Not everyone is naturally suited to be an entrepreneur, so we’ll have to learn how to embrace additional parts of our entrepreneurial spirit too. Working for yourself involves not only doing your paying jobs but also functioning as your back and front offices by doing your own marketing, accounting, taxes, establishing and monitoring your co-working relationships, maintaining your skill levels, and determining the prices for your goods and services. Most 9-5 jobs didn’t require you to do all these things, but as jobs like this disappear, you’ll be doing more of them yourself—with both the upsides and downsides that new opportunities for growth and mastery can bring.

Thinking through the hurdles hopefully reminds us of the promises. We’ll thrive with greater freedom, convenience and efficiency by working where, when and how we want to. We’ll be paid for increments of our time that we used to give away for free. We’ll increasingly stand both behind our work and out in front of it in ways that will make “what we do” an even more powerful demonstration of who we are and what is important to us.

This future of work is being written today.

We’re building it with our ideas and conversations as new ecosystems gradually evolve around it.

What comes next will be exciting and daunting, both creative and destructive, as the familiar is replaced by something that few of us have experienced before.

This future can have a human face, an opportunity for workers, families and communities to flourish, as long as we don’t leave the ideas and conversations about how that can happen to someone else.

This post was adapted from my May 19, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Writing Your Thinking Down Enables High Level Problem-Solving

February 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is where Jeff Bezos comes in.

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

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

1. On Writing Your Thinking Down Before You Share It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was adapted from my February 10, 2019 newsletter

Rewind and Get It Right This Time

August 6, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Whenever my face hits the mud of a first mistake, I’m usually surprised by how many people seem to be watching and wondering: What will he do next? What’ll he say? What does he really mean? Has he accepted responsibility for what’s happened? Said he’s sorry?

Assume that your mistakes will always attract a crowd, especially at work. When you’re busy (or overwhelmed) it’s surprisingly easy for one knee-jerk reaction to compound your next one, until you’re doubling-down while everyone else is wondering why you’re so intent on making a bad situation even worse.

An audience that expects little from you

Work mistakes are rarely private moments. And that’s actually the interesting part, because a mistake that’s out in the open gives you a chance (sometimes repeated chances) to say something courageous and totally unexpected about yourself, to start-over in front of a surprisingly large audience that’s close to writing you off.

There were two news stories this week with just this kind of ending.

Everything about them speaks to a crowd that’s even larger than those who were already following because we don’t get to see anyone rewind and start over very often, and secretly hope (at least I think we do) that when the moment arrives, each of us will have the character to do the same.

I got into writing about values because I’m convinced that most people want to act morally but few actually know how. There are several reasons for this today, including:

a decline in institutions that once saw themselves as custodians of our social values, such as churches;
the reluctance of other institutions (like schools and parents) to pass their own values on to new generations; and
a preference for lazy cynicism (in politics, in the media, and in our interactions with one another) instead of forging deeper commitments.

As a result, even when you want to act morally, you are increasingly “on your own” to figure out how.

Even when you want your work to mean more than a paycheck, you have to figure out how to find and do work that can engage your mind and heart like that.

And outside of traditional religion, almost no one is offering help to those who are groping for these answers today—which is another reason why these stories seem so compelling.

The first is about a message T-shirt that Frank Ocean wore at a recent concert, and the second is about a twist in the admissions policy at the University of California at Irvine. So in case you missed them. . . .

I was already a Frank Ocean fan. (If you don’t know his music, you can get a taste of it here.) He has also been a hiatus from touring, so when Ocean reappeared recently in New York City his fans were already watching. But it was his T-shirt that caused a sensation.

The T-shirt featured a tweet from an 18-year old named Brandon Male that asked: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” Both the sentiment and the bid to “just be quiet” are very Frank Ocean, but Mr. Male had a different reaction when he found out about it. His tweet was suddenly selling even more T-shirts, and the sellers still hadn’t bothered to reach out and say: “Thanks man.” This time, Mr. Male couldn’t let it go.

Kayla Robinson, also 18, runs the on-line company which sells the T-shirt. It calls itself the Green Box Shop. Mr. Male had already contacted the company last January, after somebody known as @lustdad posted an image of himself on Twitter wearing the same T-shirt and saw his post retweeted 87,000 times and liked by 191,000 people. (To put this in context, the most retweets or likes my posts have ever gotten is around 5.)

Anyway, Mr. Male thought this was valuable promotion too, but when he contacted the Green Box Shop, someone who was not Ms. Robinson pretty much blew him off. “They told me I needed to calm down and said they credited me on Instagram one time,” he said. He was prepared to let it slide, but then Frank Ocean out the T-shirt on.

Following the concert, Mr. Male took his complaints to Twitter directly and received an outpouring of support (“give him his coin!”), some of which finally got Ms. Robinson’s attention. Apparently, she doesn’t handle the social media side of things, but realized that something was happening, that is, something beyond her company receiving 5400 more T-shirt orders than it received on a typical weekend. Ms. Robinson sent Mr. Male $100 and added a link to his tweet on her product page, but if she thought this would put the matter to rest. . . . As Mr. Male told the New York Times: “They threw me $100 and told me to go away.” By his calculation, $100 was less than 1 percent of the new revenue the Green Box Shop pulled in over those two days alone.

Of course, this is where it gets interesting.

While great legal minds were speculating on whether the use of someone else’s tweet can result in monetary damages (It’s yet to be decided), Ms. Robinson admitted that hers was “an impulsive decision. I hadn’t looked at the number of sales [and] it does look like I was just throwing money at him to keep him quiet.”

She also said something else that’s far more noteworthy. “It would be pretty irresponsible of me to just take [his words]. Being a creator myself, people have copied my shirts before, I totally understand Brandon.” Then she reportedly called him to apologize and to set up a time to talk numbers. Where Ms. Robinson could have re-trenched, instead she rewound while the skeptical were watching.

The second story follows a similar arc.

When the University of California at Irvine admitted its new freshman class, 800 more applicants than it could “feed and house” said: “Yes!” Irvine has long been a popular destination for first generation college applications, and it was no different this year. This is what a recent applicant pool there looked like:

Accurately forecasting an incoming class is often a problem because calculating the “yield” on admissions is little better than guesswork. (When I was a college sophomore, so-called “overflow freshman” were put up in a local motor inn where, among other things, they were rumored to enjoy much better food.) Anyway, because Irvine’s lawyers informed them that an admission letter is only a “conditional offer” (based on satisfactory completion of high school, submitting paperwork on time, etc.), the university eventually withdrew 500 of its acceptances as applicants failed to meet one or another of its requirements like: “No deposit check by May 1 and you’re out.”

You can read a newspaper account of the gnashing of teeth that ensued, reactions that prompted the university’s next misstep. Even though it had never once rescinded admissions because of late checks, Irvine insisted that it was just “following policy” when it acted as it did. (Who knows what its lawyers were advising at this stage.)

Once again, the seemingly most clueless point is where things get interesting. Was it press involvement? Still other lawyers threatening to sue? We don’t know. But from a public letter shortly thereafter, it’s clear that Irvine’s chancellor, Howard Gillman, had a change of heart.

“We are a university recognized for advancing the American Dream, not impeding it. This situation is rocking us to our core because it is fundamentally misaligned with our values. The students and their families have my personal, sincerest apology. We should not have treated you this way over a missed deadline.”

Just like we don’t know how much Ms. Robinson agreed to pay Mr. Male, there’s still some uncertainty at Irvine as this goes to press. 300 applicants who simply missed a paperwork deadline have been re-admitted, but another 200 are still in limbo because of other conditions on their admission. What is clear is that prior mistakes were acknowledged, a more generous spirit was expressed, and two people declared to everybody who was listening that doubling down on a bad idea doesn’t have to be the last word.

It is always better to think through the ramifications of work decisions beforehand and act accordingly, but in the real world, it sometimes doesn’t happen that way—particularly when a seemingly “bigger” opportunity or problem is confronting you.

That’s when the “ramifications” of one bad decision compound, just like they did here. But what really matters comes next. These stories have a moral that says: even when you’ve doubled-down, it’s never too late..

Job Training for Yourself

September 1, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The on-ramp into a better job isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when you show up and get trained to do what the boss expects from you. In other words, if you can’t demonstrate that you’re qualified to do the job on the day that you start, you probably won’t be hired in the first place. (“Companies want workers to arrive job ready.”)

In a weak economy, jobs continue to go unfilled because fewer employers are teaching the skills they require in training programs. Of course, when employers limit their hiring to people who are already doing that job, they narrow the pool of potential hires “to almost no one.” You face this kind of constraint whether you’re looking for your first job, want to advance within a company, or to find a job somewhere else. Increasingly, you’re expected to learn the skills required on your own dime in on-line courses, unpaid internships, or community colleges, in short wherever you can find or pay someone to show you the ropes.

As hard as it may sound, an even bigger training hurdle may confront you after you find a job. The challenge is to remain sufficiently engaged in what you’ve been hired to do that you never stop wanting to advance by improving the skills that you’re gaining.

Unfortunately, your co-workers probably won’t be helping you out here. In Gallup’s most recent State of the Workforce Study, 70% of all employees in North America are “disengaged” in their jobs, which it defines as “lacking in motivation” and being “less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.” Working on auto-pilot and waiting passively for training instead of maximizing the opportunity that every job presents, will confine many of those who are in the workforce with you to jobs that barely seem worth doing.

On the other hand, when being engaged in your work (and refusing to become disengaged) is a personal priority, you have a chance to discover the parts of your job that bring you satisfaction as well as value in the marketplace. It’s a foundation (however small) that you can build on to move up to something better.

With this kind of mindset, you also seize whatever opportunities are available to become more proficient in the work areas where your satisfaction and marketability intersect. When no training opportunities are offered, you still go out and find them for yourself. That’s because they are personal investments that are tied to your feeling both productive and valued. It is partly about career advancement, but even more about self-worth. It is actively avoiding the deadening effects of opting out at work.

Among other things, this requires looking more closely at the components of your job. For example, what are you doing when you feel most proud of yourself at work? Is it when you’re presenting, selling, convincing, organizing, writing, learning new things, mobilizing people, being creative, or helping others? It is whatever makes you shine.

What gives you the greatest feelings of accomplishment? Solving a problem before anyone else, earning the praise of someone you respect, providing real value to a customer, improving a process, or doing more with less?

In your field (and related fields), what is the value of the skills and experiences that you’re gaining? What are the job descriptions where you might use the foundation you’re building for an even better fit? In a work environment like we have today, it is always time to think like an entrepreneur and do more research to understand the job market that you’re in.

When you’re continuously looking for opportunities to improve your pride, sense of accomplishment, and value in the workforce, training becomes less about what employers happen to be providing and more about the kinds of returns that you want for yourself in terms of growing capability, continuous satisfaction, and the ability to shape your own future.

Moreover, when these are your qualifications, it becomes easier to move from one job to another. Your natural allies become the men and women who made the same kinds of investments and share the same work priorities, even though they happen to be one or two rungs above you on the job ladder. Your way into conversation with them is your common interests, talents, experiences and rhythms of work. They will hear your commitments when you have them, feel your engagement when you are engaged. They will tell you whether you can find what you’re looking for in their jobs or industries, or where you should be looking if it’s somewhere else.

Conversations like this can also be your best guides through the unending thicket of job training. Those who see some of themselves in you are also more likely to give you sound advice about the training you’ll need to do their jobs, as well as the best places to find that training. The connection you make with them can sometimes be powerful enough that they offer to bring you on and train you themselves. That’s how much you’ll stand out in today’s workforce.

Knowing the most marketable and satisfying aspects of your work—along with why you need your work to be engaging in the first place—are always the keys to a better job.

The fact that employers are providing less training today will never stand in your way as long as that way of thinking is your guide.

Characters Find a Theme

June 27, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello wrote the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” A half-dozen actors show up in the theater as incomplete characters looking for someone to finish their stories. In this absurdist masterpiece, the completion they find is disavowal, suicide, an accidental drowning, a great deal of confusion, and the playwright’s wondering why he ever agreed to get involved in the first place. Who would have thought that unfinished characters showing up today could find a more meaningful sense of completion in the most mundane of life’s details, but the characters in a pair of one act plays called “Sweating” and “Sleeping” (staged as part of Philadelphia’s on-going Solofest) did just that.

Steve Gravelle has hyperhidrosis, a condition characterized by excessive perspiration. We learn that one in 20 individuals is a chronic sweater, but Gravelle didn’t find anyone else who would admit to the condition until well into adulthood, so he mostly bore the stigmata of near-constant wetness alone. That kind of humidity can do something to you.

Standing in a basement under a cluster of blazing stage lights, he told us just what it was like in a series of funny, sad, profane, and revelatory vignettes, each concluding with his changing his shirt. As our own moisture gradually merged with his, it became like a crowded sauna down there, brilliantly setting the stage for Gravelle’s description of his time in a sweat lodge with a group of Quakers who had taken the ancient Indian ritual for their own. Gasping from breathing in and being nearly consumed by the intense heat, the experience ultimately produces a calm euphoria—a visceral arc that each of us got to travel with this very physical actor.

The sweat lodge story may have been the first time that sweating was good for Gravelle, but in a further advance towards acceptance, his marriage ceremony became another. In Philadelphia, the end of July better come with air-conditioning if you’re going to host a wedding reception here. But in a laugh from the gods that was aimed directly at him, electrical transformers exploded, turning the reception hall into its own kind of sweat lodge.

Instead of resignation to the absurdity, Gravelle had wrestled with his flowing pores for so long that (in this most sacred of life-moments) he ended up accepting his fate in an abandon of joyous dancing. My only regret was that he didn’t do more to show us his abandon in a rhythmic whirl of cast-off droplets, like a congregation’s blessing during Asperges.

Sara Nye is Gravelle’s wife, and the angle she claimed to illustrate her life was the tendency to fall asleep at the most inopportune, embarrassing and occasionally appropriate times. These one act plays were staged in a South Philadelphia brownstone, and for “Sleeping” the audience repaired from cellar to upstairs bedroom with chairs arrayed in similarly claustrophobic manner, this time around an ample bed. Nye is a dancer and collaborator in the creation of spoken soundscapes that envelope a dancer’s movements. The recording of her soft-spoken narration here was underscored by lilting, almost hypnotic music, dotted (at least in the beginning) with strange exclamations and cries, presumably from somewhere in her unconscious.

Nye used the bed the way painter Francis Bacon locates his figures—as a stage for tremendous physicality. She gyrated, tented herself beneath the sheets, draped her torso over a corner, cosseted herself like a queen in the comforter, thrust her legs into the air, and caressed the sleeping pillow of her husband: all to illustrate how whatever she’s doing can be so easily overtaken by the oblivion of sleep.

While Nye’s precision was always supported by her gorgeously mesmerizing soundtrack, her reach was particularly assured when she read passages from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, only to have his beautiful cadences repeatedly broken off in mid-sentence by the doze that everyone who has taken freshman English knows only too well. In a nearly sublime conclusion that echoed the recent wedding epiphany below, the last time that Nye falls asleep, Gravelle tiptoes in to (quietly & tenderly) escort everyone but his sleeping wife out of the darkening room.

We’d all like a theme to make better sense of our lives. What did these unexpected viewpoints tell us about living, or tell the performers about themselves?

Sweating and sleeping in these ways set the players apart from the social norm, left them no choice but to see themselves as singular and slightly askew, and the places where they are supposed to belong differently. In tribal cultures, it is a common rite of passage to go out into the wilderness alone for a time, to think about your new role (as adult or wife, a recent hire or holy man) and what it will be like for you when you return. Each of these plays was a similar act of meditation. A deeply personal way to go out, so you can come back in and have it all make a little more sense.