Lying With Your Job

March 11, 2014 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Recent weeks and months have provided several reminders of how often people lie with their jobs.

Priests, lawyers, policemen, doctors, parking enforcers, tax collectors: guardians of ethical and lawful behavior, with power that comes from standing over the rest of us in their appointed roles. The obvious disconnect between what our supposed guardians tell us to do, but don’t manage to do themselves, can be either tragic or comic.

The problem (I’m afraid) is when we stop being surprised by confrontations like this. When they no longer make us either laugh or cry–or even matter.

The part of the world where I live—the malodorous Northeast Corridor—produces more than its share of “now you caught me’s.”

Of course, punishing commuters from a place where the majority of voters didn’t vote for you by complicating their commutes (As governor, I will perform the duties of this office faithfully, impartially…) is currently getting the most press. But others compete “like hell” for the ink.

Hermit Gosnell (whose oath as a physician included having the “utmost respect for human life from the beginning”) was recently sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for systematically killing babies born in his West Philadelphia abortion clinic, and the priests of the Philadelphia diocese who preyed for years on altar boys, their brothers and occasionally sisters (after vows of chastity) are regularly profiled as they traipse through our justice system.

Of course, there are plenty we can snicker at when they lie with their lesser jobs too, a hook that a cable network recognized several years ago when it started broadcasting “Parking Wars,” a real life comedy about the men and women who ticket and tow our cars here. Each one of these “enforcement officers” is like a bank for the Philadelphia Parking Authority, writing several times their annual salaries in violations each year: but that speaks more to their motivation and our resentment.

Last month, it was Mwanamke Jordan, (at least until recently) PPA’s Deputy Manager for Ticket Enforcement, who gave the still suffering public here some comic relief. As profiled in our newspaper of record, Deputy Jordan recently had her own car “booted” (a dreaded device that disables you from driving your car until you pay all the parking tickets and penalties that you’ve accumulated). Her picture here is from an earlier newspaper profile which began: If Mwanamke Jordan’s love life were a reality TV show….”

Last but hardly least in the Comic Division is Richard Cosentino—not for what he did, but for his picture when he got caught. Cosentino, a former NYPD sergeant received more than $200,000 after claiming that he was allegedly “too depressed to go outside” after the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. In January, he and 81 other ex-cops, firefighters and corrections officers were busted for allegedly soaking taxpayers for $21.3 million for stress-related injuries they fabricated so they could collect disability payments. Allegedly.

Richard Cosentino 553x369 — COSENTINO AND HIS TUNA

Does the non-stop perp walk of these stories and pictures (and all the others like them) deter us? Deter me or you? Is there any moral dimension left in them at all?

At this point, I’m reminded of that timely update of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in Quentin Tarrantino’s Inglourious Basterds. It comes in the very last scene, where the Gestapo’s Hans Landa (who goes from exposing Jews “like rats” to “ratting out” the Nazi leadership to the Allies) is now about to get his reward: a nice little place “on Nantucket” for all his help. It’s the moment right before his freedom, where Lieutenant Aldo “The Apache” Raine takes out a ridiculously big knife and carves a swatskika on Landa’s forehead. Why? Because you just shouldn’t get to change “your clothes” so easily afterwards.

It might be different for the oath breakers and job hypocrites if others could see it on their foreheads too, like soot from Ash Wednesday.

Different for all of us.

Tallying Up

December 28, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s the time of year to tally up what we’ve accomplished and what we haven’t, what we might have done differently, or not at all.

Perhaps because of that, Todd May contributed an op-ed to the New York Times a few days ago in which he pondered the notion of good years, best or “peak” years, and years when you’re simply rolling downhill toward your final whimper.

For me, I’d like to think that I’m on an upward trajectory, that I’ll continue to engage and grow, and that tomorrow will be better than today. But it’s more than my optimism and sense of purpose. A lot of it also has to do with how the world engages back.

photo by Susan Melkisethian — (photo/Susan Melkisethian)

Everyone will agree that Edward Snowden had something of a peak year in 2013.

Yesterday, when Professor May was interviewed on NPR about his op-ed, John Hockenberry mentioned Snowden in his introduction, noting that he may never have “another change the world moment” like he had in 2013. But when he got into his Q&A, Hockenberry thought it was at least “conceivable” that Snowden could “acquire an influence that could give him as big a year, say in 10 years, as he had this year.” May disagreed, noting that the American government will never let it happen, a point he elaborated upon in his op-ed.

Snowden’s actions, regardless of whether one supports them or not, have had a prodigious impact on the debate about privacy in the United States and will likely continue to do so. They have had roughly the impact that Snowden wanted them to have. That is, they have altered how many of us think about our relation to the government and to our own technology, and because of this, they infuse this period of his life with a luminescence that will always be with him. He will not forget it, nor will others.

There is an assumption I would like to make here, one that I can’t verify but I think is uncontroversial. It is very unlikely that Edward Snowden will ever do anything nearly as significant again. Nothing he does for the remainder of his life will have the resonance that his recent actions have had. The powers that be will ensure it. And undoubtedly he knows this. His life will go on, and it may not be as tortured as some people think. But in an important sense his life will have peaked at age 29 or 30.

I don’t know about that.

Like many of you I am “at 6s and 7s” about Edward Snowden, and like most of you l viewed his “Alternative Christmas Message” this week in the hope that it would help me sort through my impressions. I realized that while I had seen his picture a thousand times, I had never heard his voice. Indeed, almost no one had.

Was his message “Hyperbole? Self-marketing?” Hockenberry wondered in his interview. Well, maybe. But then again, maybe not.

The part of me that believed Snowden had spoken a kind of truth to power that no one else had dared to speak could find both sincerity and conviction in him and in his words. That part of me believed him when he said that he repeatedly raised his concerns about the extent of surveillance with his superiors. Only when they did nothing, did he turn to the press to find out whether the rest of us would see the stakes involved in the same way that he did.

So as we hear Edward Snowden’s voice and tally the costs (if any) of 5 months of asylum on his face, it’s equally hard to believe that he’s already begun his slow descent into irrelevance. We will keep talking about how much privacy we are wiling to sacrifice to be safe because it is one of the great conversations of our age. More than anything, it is Snowden’s continuing willingness to contribute to that conversation and our continuing engagement with his thoughts and actions that will determine the pitch of his trajectory.

Was it a good year, a peak year, or a way-station to irrelevance? It comes down to the same two factors for all us: our willingness to keep raising our voices and the connections we forge with others by doing so.

As I watched Edward Snowden’s counterpoint to the Queen’s Annual Christmas Greeting, I was pretty sure of one thing:

He, for one, doesn’t think that his peak year is behind him.

Fierce Generosity

September 22, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Focusing on what you stand to gain—like getting the next buck or increasing your influence—is the wrong path when it comes to sustaining your best work. A better way may be forming relationships through the generosity of your giving and the vulnerability of your asking.

Customers and clients can always smell your hunger (or desperation) when all you’re after is their business. They’d much rather share in an exchange with you that’s mutually satisfying—collaborating to solve a problem, finding just the right product to meet the need, while also learning who you are, why you do what you do, what makes you happy or keeps you up at night, and how they might help you in return.

It’s an exchange based on giving not wanting, asking not telling, a dynamic that presents opportunities to meet one another’s needs while you both stand on a relatively level playing field.

Pie-in-the-sky? I don’t think so.

In 2007, the band Radiohead deepened the relationship it already enjoyed with its fans by offering its In Rainbows disk for whatever you wanted to pay for it, or for nothing at all.

The point wasn’t making money on the disk or even breaking even, it was about things like the band’s gratitude for loyal listeners, their confidence in their music, trust in their fans, and drawing attention to political causes that were important to them. In the randomness of opportunities they opened here, maybe you downloaded the album for free, but were drawn to support a cause the band believed was important. Giving and asking multiplied as well as strengthened Radiohead’s ties to its audience. (Frontman Thom Yorke just happens to be in my hometown this week as part of the Atoms for Peace tour.)

The bounty that comes from helping without expectation of return is the subject of Adam Grant’s book, Give & Take, which came out earlier this year. The following is from a story about the Wharton professor in the New York Times last spring:

’I never get much done when I frame the 300 e-mails [that are asking for my help every day] as ‘answering e-mails,’ Grant told me. ‘I have to look at it as, ‘How is this task going to benefit the recipient?’ Where other people see hassle, he sees bargains, a little work for a lot of gain, including his own.

For Grant, giving as well as asking for help is the motivator that spurs greater productivity on both sides of every exchange.

Another case for work-based reciprocity is currently being made by Amanda Palmer.

Palmer is a singer and instrumentalist who once made music with a duo called the Dresden Dolls (in her words, “a cross between punk & cabaret”) and now fronts an ensemble called the Grand Theft Orchestra. I love her music, her ferocity when she’s delivering it, and her thoughtfulness about the communication channels she’s playing with, particularly when it comes to giving and asking.

By making powerful expressions of generosity and vulnerability, she has ripped through the membrane between herself and her fans, and they in turn have reciprocated by holding her up when she has asked them to.

One way her fans have said, “No, we thank you,” was by crowdfunding her current album. Crowdfunding has been a regular topic on this page, most recently a few months ago. Social media involves strangers as well as friends in your story, while crowdfunding gives them a stake in your quest.

Palmer had been abandoned by her record label, was giving her music away, and couldn’t afford to make another record. As she explained in a video interview (which Palmer starts with a gorgeous song that’s neither punk nor cabaret), she asked for $100,000 on Kickstarter and received $1.2M, giving nothing to her contributors in return but the joy of helping and the promise of more free music. A few months later, in a TED talk called “The Art of Asking,” she elaborated on why she thought she had received more contributions than anyone in the music business had ever received before from a crowdfunding platform.

It’s a gem.

Palmer analogized the vulnerability of asking for something you really need to “falling into an audience and trusting” that you’ll be caught—a type of fan connection that was once a staple of every punk rock concert. Trusting in the kindness of strangers, what Palmer calls “random closeness,” when she asks for a bed to sleep in or the use of a piano in a strange town, led her to put her entire career into the hands of her audience.

Once again, it’s not a one-for-one type of exchange. Palmer shares music and asks for whatever she needs to continue making it. “When we really see each other, we want to help each other,” she says.

This may seem like a young person’s game, but Palmer is 37.

Over the past couple of years, her giving and asking has brought her a million followers on Twitter, the ability to produce her own music, a TED talk, a Brainpickings’ interview, and more than 15 minutes of fame for her songs and ideas. As an artist, she knows that all you need is “a few people loving you up close,” even though she may never know their names or recognize their faces. Will these digital networks of trust and reciprocity be enough to support her and her work at 57, or 77?

Do the relationships that Palmer (and others like her) are building give us the outlines of a new paradigm for sustaining yourself and your loved ones while working at what you love?

Is this a way for us to return to greater productivity where we live and work?

Can enough of us ever trust again this much?

The Essentials of Productive Work

August 1, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

(1) Productive work provides people with goods and services that actually improve their lives.

(2) It provides adequately for your needs and for the needs of your loved ones.

(3) Productive work makes you more capable while you’re doing it, and your labor more valuable.

(4) A primary goal in any community should be to help ensure that productive work is available to everyone who is willing & able to do it.

On this page, these 4 essentials have been my grounds for attacking un-productive work (such as contributing to the churn of consumer products no one needs), and challenging economic forces that inhibit or eliminate productive work (wherever that work is being done). Examples include these recent posts: Who Bears the Cost of Low Prices? and How Everyday Low Prices Hurt Us All, about why it’s in our interest for employees at the big-box stores we shop in to make “a living wage,” and What We Don’t Know Can’t Change Us, about how our consumption of “fast fashion” links us to recent manufacturing tragedies in Bangladesh.

It’s the essentials you commit yourself to—whatever they are—that drive not only your point of view but also the decisions you make about important issues.

It’s where you take a stand.

It’s where changing your life and work starts.

Andy Goldsworthy - Japanese Maple Leaves — Andy Goldsworthy – Japanese Maple Leaves

Affirming the essentials–our collective priorities–is equally important as we emerge from the economic setbacks of the past 5 years and try to regain our productivity as communities and as a nation. It is necessary too for great but crippled institutions that are trying to seize the future with clarity and purpose. This is why his bold affirmation of the essentials was the most significant part of the pope’s visit to Brazil last week.

Francis was thinking out loud about the foundations of the Catholic Church when he spoke to Brazil’s bishops last weekend. (The full text of his remarks can be found here.) He was trying to uncover the rock the Church was built on, buried beneath sex scandals, bureaucratic turf battles, and too many unhelpful words. His aim was to turn the tide on the Church’s increasing irrelevance.

Perhaps the Church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from [people’s] needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions; perhaps the Church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age.

He advocated a new “grammar of simplicity” to address universal human needs, such as:

the loss of a sense of life’s meaning, personal dissolution, a loss of the experience of belonging to any ‘nest’ whatsoever, subtle but relentless violence, the inner fragmentation and breakup of families, loneliness and abandonment, divisions, and the inability to love, to forgive, to understand, the inner poison which makes life a hell, the need for affection because of feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness, the failed attempt to find an answer in drugs, alcohol, and sex, which only become further prisons.

And he gestured to the natural world of Brazil’s Amazon Basin, urging:

respect and protection of the entire creation which God has entrusted to man, not so that it be indiscriminately exploited, but rather made into a garden.

It is here, in a simple dialogue with these essentials, that “God always enters clothed in poverty, littleness.” (An earlier, related post about Francis’own simplicity can be found here.)

To recover faith, to find productive work, to live a fulfilling life: all begin by declaring the essentials.

Meaningful change never happens unless you start here.

School is for Learning How to Live and Work

June 16, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Fewer students are pursuing humanities degrees today because of concern about their value in the marketplace. Indeed, the issue has become a political football, with North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, among others, arguing that states should stop subsidizing certain humanities programs at pubic institutions because they don’t lead to jobs.

Colleges & universities are reacting to this kind of cost-benefit analysis with sharper arguments about the ways their offerings contribute to post-graduate life and work. Unfortunately, beyond all the arguments, the basic changes that are needed will only come when the custodians of higher education acknowledge how they’ve helped to make a liberal arts education irrelevant for most students. There are glimmers of hope, but there is little to suggest that these basic changes will be happening anytime soon.

For example, Harvard published a report last week that attempted to respond to concerns about fewer humanities majors and their poor prospects in the job market. The report said that its English and other humanities departments should “market themselves better” to undergraduates before they declare their majors while “improving their internship networks.” A Wall Street Journal article tried to bolster these modest proposals by noting that Harvard has been “for centuries a standard bearer of American letters” while, in a sidebar, identifying humanities graduates who went on to successful careers, including media magnate Sumner Redstone (Classics & Government) and Goldman Sack’s chair Lloyd Blankfein (Social Studies).

Proponents have also been more vocal about how the ideal humanities degree prepares you for the working world. One classics professor highlighted the core career competencies identified in the 2013 Job Outlook Survey from the National Association of Colleges & Employers, noting that they “correspond very strongly with the content and skills acquired through a liberal arts education,” namely: communication, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and organization.

University of Chicago’s president Robert Zimmer responded to students dropping out of college and going directly into business by noting that “[a]t their best, colleges and universities are themselves hothouses of innovation, a natural site and climate for translating ideas into application.” (In prior posts, I’ve also talked about when experience is the better teacher and the university as innovation hothouse.)

Wesleyan’s Michael Roth further bolsters the case by seeing higher education as “a catalytic resource that continues to energize and shape your life.”

Many seem to think that by narrowing our focus to just science and engineering, we will become more competitive. This is a serious mistake…

[I]nnovation in technology companies, automobile design, medicine or food production will not come only from isolated work in technical disciplines. Effective vaccine delivery programs, for example, require technical expertise, but they also require cultural understanding, economic planning and ethical reasoning. . .The growing field of animal studies, for example, brings together interpretative and analytic skills along with contemporary scientific research.

We should look at education not as a specific training program for a limited range of mental muscles but as a process through which one will generate some of the most important features in one’s life. It makes no sense to train people as narrowly as possible in a world going through cataclysmic changes, for you are building specific strengths that leave you merely muscle-bound, not stronger and more flexible.

We should think of education as a kind of intellectual cross-training that leads to many more things than at any one moment you could possibly know would be useful.

OK, so it’s not only skills but also qualities of mind like imagination, flexibility and the ability to grow that are the hoped-for byproducts of a liberal arts education. But is this what a humanities degree really provides today?

The same article announcing Harvard’s new report barely mentioned Wake Forest (in Governor McCrory’s most interesting state) and its integration of “personal and career development” into its curriculum. For several years now, I’ve been eavesdropping on what Wake and its champion on the issue, Andy Chan, have been up to. As it turns out, they seem to be getting at least half of it right.

Andy Chan, Personal & Career Development at Wake Forest

At Wake, what they’re aiming for in terms of personal & career (life & work) development isn’t a service department, like a guidance counselor you have to sit down with just before you leave, but what they call an “ecosystem.”

Individual career services departments cannot shoulder the burden of educating, advising and supporting students on their own. It is crucial that other constituents (faculty, staff, parents, alumni) are trained, encouraged and motivated to help students in a variety of ways – as advisors, connectors, influencers, and mentors.

In class, in one-on-one meetings, in internships, and other interactions, these constituents are encouraged to help students to grapple with a sequence of 4 questions: “Who am I?” “What shall I do?” “How will I get there?” and “Once there, how will I be successful?”

So far, so good. It’s about the entire college or university community helping their individual students to think about, so that they can connect in an effective manner with, the post-graduate world. It’s a different focus than having faculty off on celebrity book tours or alumni looking to have buildings or basketball courts named after them. In an ecosystem like this, “constituent payback” is assisting rising generations to successfully launch.

But community isn’t enough without the right course of study.

Most humanities departments have thrown out a core curriculum based on Western thought in favor of a smorgasbord of victim studies, self-directed projects, exercises in political correctness, and field trips. Job qualities like imagination and flexibility are more likely to spring from a more comprehensive knowledge base than this, and 40 years ago a liberal arts education provided it—along with some of the raw materials for living a life with meaning and purpose.

In the cafeteria plan of higher education today, most students don’t know enough to pick what will ultimately be “good” for them. So the issue is whether the ecosystem is also willing to provide a menu “with healthier choices” that includes comprehensive exposure to our civilization’s greatest ideas and stories. It’s precisely what Anthony Kronman urges in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

Artes liberals or liberal arts means “the skills of free person.” It’s a course of study that can be the ticket to a satisfying job and a fulfilling life. It’s what those in the forefront, like Andy Chan and Anthony Kronman, are proposing. Unfortunately, most of higher education is not even close to providing it.