The Truth Between You and Others On Your Career Path

September 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, it’s impossible to ignore the unfolding story of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The politics aside, there are two threads in this controversy that affect everyone who interacts with other people while trying to build a career.

It has never been truer than it is today that everything you’ve said and done (or not done) will find its way into your work record—particularly when the stakes are high like they are here. That being said, there is no denying that Kavanaugh has amassed a sterling resume as a lawyer, judge, colleague and community stakeholder. The number of people who have come forward to testify to his good character is remarkable; we should all be so lucky to have this many people we have known stand up for us. But after the testimonials were over, Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct in high school.

Her accusations put Kavanaugh between a rock and a hard place. The job of a lifetime is within his grasp. It seemed that he had already proven his fitness for it “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But in this hyper-political context, there seems to be almost no possibility for any kind of resolution of Ford’s charges.

It’s likely that we’ve all faced “moments of truth” like Kavanaugh’s while climbing the career ladder—where whatever you say or do could jeopardize your reaching the next rung. When your sense of personal responsibility and the uncertain path of forgiveness collide with your fear of letting yourself and those who have vouched for you down, how do you respond?

Much of the answer comes from the philosophy we bring with us to work. The ego and ambition that drives a candidate for the Supreme Court is only different in degree from what motivates us to gain the raise, the next promotion or the coveted office perk. Is the deep-down philosophy “whatever is good for me,” while I keep up the appearances of modesty and collaboration? Or is my drive “to realize my best self though my actions” bound up with “my enabling others to realize themselves through their work too?” These are two, very different orientations.

Of course, it’s never just either/or between our selfish and generous impulses.

To put us (along with Kavanaugh) in the most favorable light, what if our drives have been almost entirely generous towards those who have been touched by our work over the course of our careers? Would an 11^thhour charge of behavior that is sharply inconsistent with the reputation you have built stimulate your long-standing generous impulses or the more selfish ones that have been in tension with them all along, particularly if your’re ambitious and competitive by nature? In the heat of that moment, will you define your character by its lesser angels or its better ones?

A lifetime of good work is almost never called into question by facts or accusations but by how you respond to them. This is why our system of justice is based on regular people (the so-called fact finders) determining whether witnesses who have sworn to tell the truth are actually doing so. Whether it’s a global audience watching on TV or the managers and co-workers in your office, regular people can generally “hear the truth,” so it helps to be able “to speak it” when your character is called into question

What follows are some of the factors that I’ve been mulling over as I get ready to sit in the Kavanaugh jury box with everyone else.

Some Similarities and Differences With Judge Kavanaugh

I have a lot in common with Judge Kavanaugh.

We both grew up in similar towns in the urban corridor that stretches between Boston and Washington. In our lifetimes, many of these zip codes became the breeding grounds for an elite that, according to Charles Murray, would see men and women like us intermarry and establish an aristocracy of education, income and status that increasingly divides America socially and economically. In other words, we are both on the fortunate side of that divide. I’d argue that good fortune like this creates noblesse oblige or a special obligation on the part of its beneficiaries to act in a noble manner—not to justify our privilege but to serve others along with ourselves. In other words, we’re duty bound to act beyond our self-interest.

When I was 14 and 17, I know what I was doing on weekends (and often during the week) when I was in high school. Hormones and drinking never made for a pretty picture. No one here seems to be disputing that Kavanaugh did some partying too.

He and I also profited mightily from our Jesuit educations, which for me at least included a weekend bar in every college dorm to alleviate the academic pressures imposed by the right graduate school and career. Maybe it was some kind of Irish-Catholic rite of passage. All I know is that by working hard and playing hard, Kavanaugh and I ended up at similar law schools.

On the other hand (and at least as far as I know today), Kavanaugh and I don’t share anything like what happened next for me in common. The fellow lawyer I met in law school and later married went on to testify a few years later at the first federal trial in the US that was brought by a female lawyer against a major law firm for sex discrimination. I held my baby daughter in the courtroom during her mother’s testimony. The experience couldn’t help but provoke a great deal of thinking on my part about both Fran’s and Emily’s future prospects in what I increasingly came to realize was a man’s world.

The Moral Education We Had (or Didn’t Have) When You Were Young

This week, I heard a public radio segment called “How to Talk to Young People About the Kavanaugh Story.” Of course, kids and teenagers are following it and thinking about how his story relates to them. This radio piece was aimed at giving parents points of entry into a timely and important conversation.

Part of the dialogue that the piece was urging relates to consent in the exchanges that kids have with one another. For example, your 4- or 5-year old grabs a crayon from another kid. The adult in the room (or you, when you find out about it at home) needs to explain to him that he has to ask for the crayon first, and if the other child says “no,” you need to find another way to get your own crayon. It’s the beginning of consent education, flows naturally into discussions about bodily autonomy, and should always predate conversations about sex later on.

Another point of the broadcast was about our need to have this conversation about consent with boys as well as girls, particularly as the sexes become interested in one another. The fear was that we’re not having those conversations with boys as much as we need to. Here is the part of the segment that included comments from Karen Rayne, a sex educator:

When talking about sexual assault and consent, we often focus on victims, and primarily on girls. But, ‘it’s the people who are doing the sexual assaulting that need a different kind of education and a different kind of support starting from a very young age,’ says Rayne. ‘About things like [what to do] when they’re attracted to someone or interested in someone and that person rejects them. With the right education a young man might be able to say, Oh, you know what? I’ve been drinking too much and I feel like my capacity to make wise decisions is failing me. Or, Hey, you know, when someone’s trying to push me off of them, that’s something that I should take as a cue to get off.’

In 2018, it’s a conversation that many boys are still not having with their parents or anyone else.

Finally, older boys as well as girls are following the Kavanaugh story for suggestions of a double standard. By the end of these Congressional hearings, these kids are likely to learn something about whether adults in power take claims like Ford’s seriously, and whether alerting those in authority about bad conduct results in harsher consequences for those who speak up than for those they are complaining about.

It bears reminding that our kids are part of the public who will be listening for the truth in Kavanaugh’s and Ford’s testimony.

Listening For the Truth in Unanswered Questions

Kavanaugh has already stated “under oath” that Ford’s claims are “categorically and unequivocally false.” On the other hand, it seems likely that Ford will testify that when she was 15, a drunken Kavanaugh held her down on a bed, tried to engage in sexual activity with her, covered her mouth when she protested, feared for her life, and that she only escaped when one of Kavanaugh’s friends who was also present fell on top of them, interrupting his advances.

“The truth” of these accounts will emerge from a couple of directions as questions we have today begin to get answers. The first direction concerns the motivations behind Ford’s assertions and Kavanaugh’s denial.

We already know what Ford has lost (or stands to lose) by coming forward: her privacy, having to relive the incident she alleges, having to relocate her family to maintain their privacy, a disruption of her worklife, hounding by the press, name-calling and condemnation by strangers, harm to her reputation, risks to her safety and her family member’s safety, the longer term consequences for her children and husband, to say nothing of the expense of lawyers, security guards and therapy for months if not years to come. What we have not heard is why she is willing to pay such a steep price for coming forward. This is the as-yet unspoken part of her truth, and if her motives seem political or delusional, most of us who still have open minds will likely be able to tell.

Part of what motivates Kavanaugh’s response to Ford’s charges is substantive (the prize is close and, until now, seemed well-deserved) and part of it is tactical (a flat out denial has a better chance of getting him over the finish line than a more equivocal one). On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder whether just such an equivocal response might have served him better—something like:

I went to several parties in high school and I don’t remember encountering you [Ford] at any of them. If I did and you were injured by something that I did or said, I also don’t recall your complaining about it to anyone at the time or contacting me afterwards to demand an apology. If you had, I would have done everything in my power to make it right at the time and I am still prepared to do so.

A statement like this concedes the possibility that Ford’s alleged injury happened but that Kavanaugh had had too much to drink to remember it. It also offers to address her pain if he can. It’s not about his prospects on confirmation but about her alleged injuries at his hands and a willingness to make amends.

Of course, that’s not how Kavanaugh responded. Where we are today, either he or Ford is lying–and because she is paying more for her accusation than he has paid for his denial, Ford has the presumption of our belief. Moreover, Kavanaugh’s denial to a jury that’s entirely comprised of current and former teenagers will likely leave everyone who still has an open mind with the suspicion that a liar is about to be confirmed to the highest court in the land.

It didn’t have to play out this way.

A Generous Instead of Selfish Response

Suggesting that this Supreme Court nominee might have been better off with a statement like the one above seems like a lawyerly solution to a sticky problem, and to some extent it is. Every trial lawyer begins with what everybody else (i.e. his or her potential jurors) already knows, which is what most teenage boys in high school are like, and to build your defense from there. How can Kavanaugh be “unequivocally and categorically sure” that what Ford alleges didn’t happen in the fog of high school partying?

But if Kavanaugh really has no recollection about what allegedly transpired 35 years ago, there is another, far better reason for an equivocal explanation here.

It’s the possibility that regular people in the court of public opinion (and maybe in the Senate too) could acknowledge your imperfection, forgive a drunken transgression that may have happened before you reached adulthood, and be grateful to have a flawed but human Supreme Court nominee. Under these circumstances, Kavanaugh’s response would have “spoken to” his character instead of merely defending his “perfect record.”

If Kavanaugh had responded in this manner, the shame today is that many would still have politicized it, and many others would never have forgiven him. But far more importantly, at some point in this process Ford might have if she felt his remorse, and others of us who are watching would have been glad for his admission that he might have hurt her. Sadly, he didn’t say that and it’s almost impossible to see how any of us will get to healing from where we are today.

“I don’t remember” opens up possibilities for understanding and forgiveness that “It couldn’t have happened” does not. At the workplace, in the ambition of our careers, in fact in all of our dealings with one another, I’d argue that acknowledging our shortcomings and offering to make things right (at least as best we can) imagines understanding, even forgiveness, and a better way for everyone involved to move on.

Unfortunately, in the selfish rush to protect ourselves and get what we want, it’s easy to miss the opportunity to be generous to an accuser– to have enough confidence, accomplishment and good fortune to also admit that we’re flawed, and maybe in our honesty and regret, still end up with the job.

+ + +

Over the years, several people who have come forward at great personal cost to speak their particular truths to power have been profiled here. These are links to posts about a Yale ethics professor and nun who confronted the Catholic Church over a book she wrote about love, internal whistleblowers in the American security establishment who challenged government surveillance programs, and Edward Snowden. There have also been stories here about admirable public figures who were trying to talk their way past their accusers at the time, including Lance Armstrong Post 1 and Post 2, before he confessed his sins to Oprah Winfrey, and Eric Greitens, who went on to resign as Missouri’s governor last May. Their stories are all similar to Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s.

I believe that the only way to nurture moral leaders and citizens is to talk about these controversies, learn from their successes and failures, and ultimately, to acknowledge that an accused’s response—whether made by a public figure, an institution like the Church or a government—always provides the opportunity for a better future when it’s motivated by generosity instead of selfishness.

This post was adapted from my September 23, 2018 Newsletter.

Your Jobs Feed One Another

September 16, 2018 By David Griesing 1 Comment

(photo by Mindy Schauer at the Orange County Register)

The toolbox we rely upon to make a living often enables the other work commitments that we take on. At the same time, these second and third jobs can reward and sustain us in ways that our first job never could.

You’ve already demonstrated a skill (or constellation of skills) for a paycheck. You’ve experienced pride in what you’ve produced and others have responded, perhaps better than you expected, to your contributions. You’ve actually gotten good at something and wondered: What if I take my game to a different field, or to a different sport entirely, and find out whether I can make a difference there too? It just might open up a brave new world.

If your co-workers or clients were asked today, what would they say makes you shine? Your speaking, organizing and responsiveness, your pitching in, rabble-rousing and getting to the bottom of things, your caring, crisis managing and advocating–or maybe it’s your way of combining all of them. They might even say that your peak performance makes room for them too, a place where they can gain their own spotlight, sense of accomplishment and gratitude when you’re working together.

Even as a kid, these talents have helped you succeed. So what if you brought them to a new challenge, with risks and opportunities that are at once similar and different from the ones you’re confronting today? It’s the small voice that asks whether “there’s even more to me than I’ve demonstrated already” and considers finding out. It’s your irritation or even anger at seeing others getting it wrong when you have the suspicion or audacity to think that you’d get it right. What energy and renewed sense of purpose might you find along the way?

When you’ve already been on both sides of this conversation, you know that some of the best stories come from what happens next.

It’s Having Enough Confidence to Act On Your Frustration

Jose Andres is a James Beard Award-winning chef and the owner of several highly successful restaurants. Andres grew up in Spain, near Valencia, and came to the U.S. after serving as a cook in the Spanish Navy. Among many other things, he is credited with bringing small plate tapas eating to America.

Andres’ father was always cooking for his family and often for their entire community. As a boy, Andres wanted to be more involved in the food preparation but his father always put him in charge of the fire. As he recounted in a Fresh Air interview this week: one day during meal preparation

I got very upset, and he sent me away. They finished the meal. But he came, and he pulled me aside, and he told me, my son, I know you wanted to do the cooking. But I had nobody else to do the fire, and actually the fire is the most important thing.

For Andres, it not only stoked his desire to cook but also taught him about the many essential jobs that add up to a wonderful meal. More than food preparation needs to come together to make the best out of what you have. As he grew up, taking on more of these jobs along with eating with his extended family or neighbors became the most (as he says) “natural” part of him, and Andres came to see places for eating “as the pumping hearts” that sustain communities.

In Washington D.C., where he opened his first restaurant and in subsequent ventures, Andres brought his most valuable skills with him, in particular, his ability to produce conistently wonderful meals despite each kitchen’s complex and ever-changing environment. In other words, he’d mastered the art of improvisation.

As chefs, restaurant people – we manage chaos very well… And what we are very good at is understanding the problem and adapting. And so a problem becomes an opportunity… We’re practical. We’re efficient. We can do it quicker, faster and better than anybody.

Why? Because every night there are people with very high hopes sitting in his dining rooms and waiting to be fed.

With energy and personality, Andres got very good at making the chaos work. But he was also drawn to hungry people in D.C and elsewhere who couldn’t afford his restaurants. Among others, he sought out Robert Eggers for advice. When Eggers opened the D.C. Central Kitchen in 1989, it was the country’s first “community kitchen” where food donated by hospitality businesses and farms became the basis for a culinary arts job-training program. It was also reminiscent of when Andres helped his family cook for their entire community back in Spain.

In his interview, Andres talks about how much he regretted not being one of the volunteers who joined the New Orleans relief effort after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and how horrified he was about FEMA’s bungling. Among other things, he saw the Superdome as a giant feeding station for fans that should have been adapted for the thousands of displaced and hungry people who had huddled there. Five years later, Andres was ready to volunteer when an earthquake devastated Haiti. That was the day when he took on his second job.

I think the turning point for me was in Haiti when I arrived to Port-au-Prince a few weeks after the earthquake. And I began cooking there in different refugee camps. And I created World Central Kitchen…

[W]hat happens is that once you are on the field somewhere, and you know the landscape, and you know how a city or an island works, when a tragedy like this happens, you become very good at solving the problems.

He brought his skill at making chaos work to a devastated community, and he never looked back.

The Largest Restaurant in the World

When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico a year ago, Andres arrived the same day as the first government officials. As summarized in the Washington Post, Andres, along with the volunteers he brought with him and the locals he enlisted on the ground, jumped into the maelstrom and went to work.

Andrés and the thousands of volunteers who composed Chefs for Puerto Rico remained for months, preparing and delivering more than 3 million meals to every part of the island. They didn’t wait for permission from FEMA. They didn’t even wait for FEMA funding (though funding eventually came from the agency). They just started activating restaurants, churches, food trucks and, eventually, the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan. They quickly scaled up their production of sandwiches, paellas, stews and, really, anything that would provide more comfort than the field rations known as Meals Ready to Eat, or MREs, the food often passed out after disasters.

As Andres explains in “We Fed An Island,” which was published this week: “I like to say that a hot meal is more than just food, It’s a plate of hope [while] an MRE is almost hopeless.” He provided additional observations about his months in Puerto Rico in his Fresh Air interview on Monday.

Andres’ “first relief kitchen” on the island was secured through a chef friend of his in San Juan. Shortly thereafter he began to serve doctors and nurses in the hospitals because no one else was feeding them and they were working around the clock. Of course, it was impossible to escape the realization that the entire island was hungry. As he explained in his own brand of English:

It was plenty of food in Puerto Rico. The private sector makes sure of that. What we had to do is organize a logical system to start activating kitchens that will have generators, that will have refrigeration, that will have gas, that will have people to work, preparing those foods. So we had to adapt.

For example, sandwiches are important because you can make them quick. You can make many. You can use all the volunteers that want to help their fellow citizens. So what do we do? We bring bread from the mainland in a moment that the airport is in chaos, and the ports are collapsed? Or do we identify the bread factories who are amazing, and you help them with diesel and fuel to go back up? That’s what we did. We partnered with local bakeries to make sure that those bakeries will be functioning sooner rather than later. We began getting bread. We began getting every single ham and cheese we could get our hands on – mayo. We began making sandwiches day one.

So what else we had? We had rice, yes. We had chicken, yes. Let’s start making rice and chicken. This is something Puerto Ricans love. It’s easy to transport, gets hot very quickly. You can transport for an hour, and the food is going to arrive hot. This is the kinds of things chefs do. We adapt. So in Puerto Rico, we began getting our hands in anything we could get. And we began cooking.

After Maria, his people prepared more meals for Puerto Rico than the Red Cross. At one point, he had 18 kitchens functioning at the same time producing 150,000 meals a day. In the early fall of 2017, he was running the largest restaurant in the world.

The book cover for “We Fed An Island” shows Andres holding a huge spatula and looking like he’s cooking. During his interview, he admitted that he didn’t do much cooking in Puerto Rico because his ability to manage the ever-changing demands was far more critical, “So, yes, my team probably is joking on these photos, saying, OK, the only time you would really cook [is when your picture is being taken].” Instead, his abilities enabled others to lead once he had gathered the raw materials and secured the facilities where they could do so. (“I became the leader, “ he said. “But actually, we had 25,000 leaders.”) As he later wrote:

What we did was embrace complexity every single second. Not planning, not meeting, just improvising. The old school wants you to plan, but we needed to feed the people.

That observation highlights Andres’ mission for World Central Kitchen going forward: to fill a gapping hole in the emergency relief efforts that he witnessed first hand in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Top-down, paramilitary style disaster initiatives are plainly ineffective. What’s needed instead are organizations in specialized areas like providing food, medicine or shelter that “embrace the chaos” that is inherent to crisis, including enabling those who are most affected to use whatever’s available, including idle restaurants, schools and stadiums. He wants World Central Kitchen to be, as he calls it, “a first food responder” in future disasters. As for him personally, there is no question that the most satisfying times to lead are “in the moments of darkness.”

Andres’ personality bubbles out of him, as do his stories and observations, which partly explains his need for an additional job; his first one wasn’t big enough to contain him. But there was another reason too. A need in him to feed his entire community simply couldn’t be met by serving up five-star fare.

This link to the Washington Post story includes a 9-minute video of Andres discussing his months in Puerto Rico and how “even thinking about” running for political office can heighten the sense of responsibility you feel for the welfare of your fellow citizens. It’s funny, visceral and subversive. His Fresh Air interview is a gem too, including how his reinvention of the famous Phllly cheesesteak will change your life forever.

Food Is As Local As It Gets

There’s an Episcopal church less than a mile from me that, through changing demographics, now finds itself in a struggling neighborhood. It’s called St. James the Less, and today most of its notoriety comes from its school, which goes through the middle school grades and is free to boys and girls in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park community.

One of th City’s highest-end food purveyors, Di Bruno Brothers, recently celebrated its 75^thyear in operation with a founding gift of $75,000 to launch what’s called the Neighborhood Kitchen at the St James School. With the Kitchen at the School, students gain “a sense of food security because their lunch is right there behind them.” They learn to set the tables, multi-tasking during set up and clean up, and how to have an interesting conversation while eating family style. As the kids describe in a clip about the initiative, lunch is their “favorite time of day.” I enjoyed some of the food (including jerk chicken and rice) recently and understand why everyone over there looks forward to lunchtime every day.

In addition to the Kitchen experience, the students also have an educational one, care of one of the City’s leading chefs and restaurant owners, Marc Vetri. Through what he calls the Eatiquette Community Partnership, he provides St. James and other City schools with a program of “hands-on nutrition education” that emphasizes “the use of whole foods and whole ingredients” including fruit and vegetables, and how to serve them in delicious ways.

The St James School has 10 to 11 hours of programming each weekday and two Saturdays a month. Its school year extends through the end of July. Some of the 63 students live at the School. Given its small size and high level of backing by funders and the Church’s congregation, it has become a refuge for those who are fortunate enough to attend and an oasis in a mostly troubled education system. (Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate among the country’s ten largest cities.) But like Jose Andres, its backers have stepped into a disaster in their community and have been improvising solutions that are making a difference now, with the hope that they can be replicated later in all of the other neighborhoods that need them.

Like Andres, those with second jobs at the St. James School have paying jobs too. The Di Bruno Brothers and Marc Vetri are using their food and restaurant skills to improvise solutions related to health and nutrition that were lacking until they came along. In the process they’re not just serving their well-healed customers but also an under-served part of their entire community.

They are doing jobs that enrich one another. They are seizing work-related opportunities that exist almost everywhere.

Have you applied, re-purposed or even reinvigorated your skills in a second job? If so, it would be great to hear more about it.

This post was adapted from my September 16, 2018 Newsletter.

Acting On Common Values Makes Change Possible

September 9, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We don’t act on our values at work because we feel hopeless, that the odds are staked against us, that nothing we can do will matter. But are we right about that?

Resignation affects our paying jobs—how we retreat from our priorities in our workplaces—as well as the jobs we do in our communities (say, to support a local institution) or at home (as a caregiver). Since everyone else is only concerned about himself or herself, then maybe that’s all I should be worried about too. Am I right that my occasional impulses to be more open and generous are pipedreams that can never be realized?

A survey taken by the Common Cause organization in the UK in 2016 challenges both what we think about other peoples’ selfishness (as opposed to ther generosity) and the sense of resignation that quickly follows in us. The accompanying report also discusses how we decide on what we value more and value less. It’s not just the convictions that we’re born with. Our priorities are also influenced by what we think other people and the social institutions that we identify with value. It works in the other direction too, with our values and how we demonstrate them influencing these others too. Our values take form and get applied because of a complex back-and-forth.

Think of it as a three-way conversation. But you need to participate in that conversation to have an influence, and Common Cause discovered that your influence is probably far greater than you think it is.

Common Cause UK initiated the survey because, as an organization, it was concerned about the lack of public support for social and environmental changes it was seeking. Its leaders understood that values drive change and wanted a better understanding than it had already about citizen priorities. Those conducting the survey were surprised enough by the amount of common ground they discovered that they went on to propose ways that individuals and organizations (including businesses, non-profits and governments) can begin to overcome the current gridlock.

Here is a link to the survey report (“the Survey”), which I think you’ll find as interesting as I did.

This is the question I brought to it: Is where you “make a living,” try to make a difference in your community and create a better life at home primarily about your “selfish values” or is your work really driven by far more generous impulses? What the Survey shows–in a one-two punch–is how acting on the so-callled “compassionate values” that play a lead role for most of us is likely to be far more consequential than you know.

We Have More Common Ground Than We Think

The Survey defines “selfish values” as wealth, social recognition, social status, prestige, control over others, authority, conformity, preserving public image, popularity, influencing others and ambition. It defines “compassionate” values as broadmindedness, a world of beauty or at peace, equality, protecting the environment, social justice, helpfulness, forgiveness, honesty and responsibility.

The Survey found that nearly 75% of participants placed greater importance on compassionate values–with Survey protocols correcting for the bias that participants were seeking to cast themselves in a better light by downplaying the importance they attach to selfish values. Even more striking was the Survey’s finding that 77% of participants believed that other people were primarily driven by selfish values. The truth is that a large majority of people (three-quarters of the population) believe that their generous motivations are more important and drive them far more often than their selfish ones.

Because people always influence one another when it comes to values, and the priorities of social institutions are shaped in a similar conversation, the Survey’s authors make several recommendations to activate our generous commitments, including these.

Since people are discouraged from declaring their priorities when they believe that most other people disagree with them, accurate information—like that provided here—will not only counter pessimism but also fuel optimism. When it comes to your values, what other people value matter almost as much as what you value “in your heart of hearts”. But it goes beyond your optimism or pessimism. In the course of our work, we can probe other people’s motivations (instead of assuming them) to strengthen our social connections, while also finding enough courage in “the strength of our numbers” to act more generously.

The consequence for you and for others is similar to when you voice your dissent in a group, a back-and-forth exchange that was discussed here a couple of months ago. When you speak from your convictions and are clear about the changes you seek, it enables others to clarify their commitments, even when they’re different from yours, and for the group to move forward. Acting on your commitments also conveys your beliefs about how social institutions (from community groups to the federal government) should operate.

The entire time that our values are at stake, we’re watching and subtly influencing one another, so it’s important to read the social landscape around us correctly. The Survey’s writers ask:

How is a person’s perception of others’ values shaped? A person’s perceptions will be influenced by both what fellow citizens say is important to them and what he or she infers about fellow citizens from the way that they behave.

For this reason, it is very significant if people don’t always bear testimony to the values that they hold to be most important – either in what they say, or what they do…[P]eople often speak and act as though they attach particular importance to values that are actually relatively unimportant to them.

In other words, co-workers, neighbors and even family members may only seem to be acting selfishly. To discover their generous impulses, you may need to watch them more closely or simply ask what drives them in the work that they do.

Your actions and others’s actions speak louder than words to social institutions too. An institution like the US Supreme Court is always “noticing” how the American people are expressing themselves as decision-makers, voters and consumers. Because the men and women who guide these institutions are influenced by the public’s values, our acting generously impacts institutional commitments as well.

Our Commonality Goes Deeper Than Our Political Divides

In America today, it may seem like politics mirrors the debate between generous and selfish values, but it doesn’t.

While Common Cause’s objectives in conducting the Survey were to advance liberal-sounding social and environmental objectives, this Survey isn’t about the liberal versus conservative divide in either the UK or in America, even though one of the Survey’s compassionate values (“social justice”) may have political connotations here that it lacks in Britain. The polarity that the Survey identifies between compassionate and selfish values is different than the struggle between political left and political right.

The Survey’s results plumb something that goes deeper than the “political values” in those debates. That’s because “political values” both here and across the Atlantic are little more than buzzwords aimed at mobilizing one’s political base: red flags like “global warming,” “taxes,” “abortion” and “diversity” that have a high emotional charge but little if any ethical content on the political surface. When you plumb beneath the surface however, most conservatives as well as most liberals are committed to the health of the planet, to paying for our social institutions, to the quality of every person’s life, and to the inherent worth of people who are different from them. Three quarters of us!

Why not start with the values that unite us rather than the buzzwords that divide us?

Consistent with the Survey’s findings about compassionate and selfish values, most peoples’ convictions extend far deeper than will ever be apparent during bouts of political gamesmanship. Moreover, those on their “political sides” are often voting, marching and lobbying for the lesser of two evils (as in the last American election), which further obscures their true convictions. Even when the ethical imperatives that drive a block of voters are reasonably well-known, too little time and effort has gone into identifying the common ground that could unite them with those “on the other side” and break the current gridlock.

In this regard, the Survey provides a glimpse into the majority’s convictions when asked about two key values that are prime motivators for tackling our problems today. A broad-based preference for generous over selfish values provides at least some of the foundation for a collective way forward—and all of us would be seizing an opportunity by taking it. Given the Survey’s findings, the influence that your actions will have on others and on our institutions will likely be considerable and certainly more than you currently think if you’re as misguided as the Survey participants about the selfishness driving others.

Rebecca Solnit whose “Hope in the Dark” was a topic here last week provides a surprising postscript to this argument in her book. Above all, Solnit values grassroots solutions to problems over ideology-driven policies imposed from above. It’s a propensity that has made her flexible when it comes to finding common ground for her activism. In other words, she’s had to go deeper. As Solnit observes:

I’ve often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges of right and left. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalistic, gun-happy and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might have been too weird to be our allies, but they were just the frothy foam on a big wave of alienation, suspicion and fear from people watching their livelihoods and their communities go down the tubes. What could have happened if we could have spoken directly to the people in that wave, if we could have found common ground, if we could have made our position neither right nor left but truly grassroots? What would have happened if we had given them an alternate version of how local power was being sapped, by whom, and what they might do about it? We need them, we need a broad base, we need a style that speaks to far more people than the left has lately been able to speak to and for.

The value that could have driven this unity was the protection of livelihoods and communities (a compassionate value) rather than sacrificing them on the altar of globalism and trade (an ultimately selfish one).

Solnit’s desire for environmentalists and ranchers in the American West to make common cause is similarly astute. Again, she attacks top-down ideological convictions that will never succeed because they always seem to miss the human costs at ground level.

Environmentalists had worked with a purist paradigm of untouched versus ravaged nature. Working with ranchers opened up a middle way [for her], one in which categories were porous, humans have a place in the landscape—in working landscapes and not just white-collar vacation landscapes—and activism isn’t necessarily oppositional.

This time, the common ground that Solnit saw was how environmentalists and ranchers both love and depend on the land, how each cherish different things about it, and how neither wants to harm it (another compassionate value) while the other side’s interest in the land is largely motivated by how much can be taken from it (a selfish one).

One day, the generous values we hold in common will help us to solve the problems that confront us. I’d argue that we should start acting on our generosity today.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 9, 2018 newsletter

Good Work’s Foundations

September 2, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I saw rooms full of models of imagined buildings and cities at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this week. The artist was Bodys Isek Kingelez from central Africa. Pictured above is one of his futuristic building models. They reflect “dreams for his country,” known during his life as the Belgian Congo and later as Zaire. Kingelez said he was envisioning “a more harmonious society” than he saw around him.

Artists are sometimes better at envisioning than the rest of us. It can be even harder for us to bring a better future into our day-to-day work—but when we do, our hopes pull us forward, particularly as we struggle to realize them.

Acting on what we hope for is one of good work’s foundations. So are acting out of our aim for both generosity and autonomy on the job. I’ve been thinking about demonstrations of generosity, autonomy and acting on hope this week from teacher/writer Roxanne Gay, actor/rap artist/omnivore Riz Ahmed, and activist/public intellectual Rebecca Solnit, respectively—3 powerful voices with a lot to say about how we spend our time and talent every day.

Generous Judgment

Generosity is about acknowledging the autonomy or self-determination of others (like co-workers, clients/customers, suppliers, members of your business and non-profit communities) in the course of your work.

You probably know comic Louis C.K. Highly acclaimed, his semi-autobiographical cable TV show Louis and stand-up comedy specials have won 6 Emmy awards, a Peabody, and star-struck interviews at places like Fresh Air. To me, his comedy seemed deep, subtle, smart, and self-aware. Until late last year, when he was “outed” by several women who worked with him, it seemed that Louis C.K. could do no wrong. They accused him of pretty egregious conduct that reminded me of apocryphal stories I used to hear about neighborhood “flashers,” only this time much worse, because he was not the sicko stranger in a trench coat. Instead, several in his reluctant audience had tied their careers to his.

As the story came out (on the heels of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose and others), I was surprised by the “not enough” of his public reactions and the suggestions around them that he had previously tried to bully his accusers into silence. Well this week, less than a year after the revelations first surfaced, Louis C.K. returned to a thunderous reaction “on the come-back trail.” The crowd that felt lucky enough to be at a NYC comedy club for his unannounced performance was reportedly ecstatic.

Clearly, Louis C.K. didn’t know how to handle the “world of hurt” around his abusive conduct when it first came out and was similarly clueless when he concluded “that all had been forgotten” and “it is time for everybody to just move on.” In a New York minute, Roxanne Gay told him otherwise.

It might have been easier for Louis if his comeuppance hadn’t been in the New York Times. But she didn’t just excoriate him. She met him like she acknowledged his intelligence, his talent, his fans who might still learn from what she was about to say. Instead of writing him off as a perverted loser, Gay told him what he (along with others who don’t know but need to hear) what should be done by adults who behave this way. It was a gift he may not have deserved, but it was a judgment that was elevated by the light that she brought to it.

“If Louis C.K. doesn’t know what to do when he’s caused this kind of damage, then I’ll try to explain it,” she seems to say—so he can make it right this time, and others like him can learn what they need to do too. Anger followed by patience in that New York minute was an act of generosity. Indeed, it’s a balance that elevates nearly everything that Roxanne Gay does.

While you should read her entire commentary, this is Gay on Louis C.K.’s “comeback road”:

How long should a man like Louis C.K. pay for what he did? At least as long as he worked to silence the women he assaulted and at least as long as he allowed them to doubt themselves and suffer in the wake of his predation and at least as long as the comedy world protected him even though there were very loud whispers about his behavior for decades.

He should pay until he demonstrates some measure of understanding of what he has done wrong and the extent of the harm he has caused. He should attempt to financially compensate his victims for all the work they did not get to do because of his efforts to silence them. He should facilitate their getting the professional opportunities they should have been able to take advantage of all these years. He should finance their mental health care as long as they may need it. He should donate to nonprofit organizations that work with sexual harassment and assault victims. He should publicly admit what he did and why it was wrong without excuses and legalese and deflection. Every perpetrator of sexual harassment and violence should follow suit.

Moral condemnation is easy but describing the “road someone needs to take back” requires a comprehension of the pain that was caused, the actions that would be necessary to alleviate it, as well as the belief that he could act on your advice. Most judgments fail to include these components, but Gay’s has all of them.

The Christian lesson of the crucifixion is infinitely more powerful because it is followed by the resurrection. We’re expert at crucifying people today—at work, and otherwise—but too often seem to be unconcerned about their ability (and ours) to rise afterwards. It’s not about forgiveness but the hard-won path to change.

The last time I wrote about Roxanne Gay on this page was in January.

Creative Autonomy

Autonomy is actively making the most out of what you have, identifying what is important to you, and putting yourself on the line to achieve it. Autonomy is self-determination.

In the limited series The Night Of (on HBO), Riz Ahmed played two roles: the role of a Pakistani student wrongly imprisoned at Riker’s Island for murder and a role beneath his acting that involved you as a viewer in a separate dialogue. You could feel Ahmed’s intelligence, focus and humanity whispering through his role—his interior life giving the 6 episodes counterpoints beyond the writing, directing and acting. (“Whatever he was saying and doing, he was always simultaneously maintaining a second conversation with you about what both of you might be thinking.”)

A profile with that line and additional suggestions about Ahmed’s perspective was this week’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine. You can sense what’s unique about him from the first impressions that Ahmed made on his profiler about his jobs as an actor and musician, pathfinder, role-model and activist.

It’s not that he doesn’t get animated. He does. Talking with Ahmed can be a little like sparring, a little like co-writing a constitution, a little like saving the world in an 11th-hour meeting. He interrupts, then apologizes for interrupting, then interrupts again. He can deliver entirely publishable essays off the top of his head. He pounds the table when talking about global injustices, goes back to edit his sentences minutes after they were spoken, challenges the premises of your sentences before you’re halfway through speaking. This is what happens when you cut your teeth on both prep-school debate teams and late-night freestyle rap battles, as Ahmed has. He is like someone who wants to speak truth to power but now is power — famous enough, at least, to have people listen to his ideas. He is like someone very smart who also cares a lot. He is like someone who doesn’t want to be misunderstood.

Not surprisingly, much of Ahmed’s edge comes from being a Pakistani-Brit, rising from one competitive lower school to another. Along the way, he felt his separateness as a South Asian but always “believed that the flag of Britain should and would obviously include him.” That is, until Al Qaeda’s attack on Twin Towers, which happened the month he matriculated to university and made it even more burdensome to be a Muslim. It was there that he made a critical life choice.

[H]e found himself at Oxford University, just after 9/11 — a brown kid surrounded by the acolytes of seemingly ancient white wealth, who sometimes did have a way of talking to him as if he were a shopkeeper. Rather than retreating into Oxford, he decided to make Oxford come to him. He started organizing parties that celebrated his music and cultural touchstones, parties where he would get on the mic over drum ’n’ bass records. Soon enough, the event he co-founded, “Hit and Run,” moved to Manchester and became one of the city’s leading underground music events.

What could have been angry rejection and a retreat to the company of other South Asian Muslims instead became his invitation for Oxford to join a broader conversation that he was sponsoring. It was a place where he mashed up Pakistani melodies and rhythms with British rap (just as rap was rising to become the most popular music in the world.) As Lena Dunham observed about him, he combined the bravado of someone in the hip-hop world with the intensity of someone who’s mounted a barricade.

Creating this platform was a singular act of personal autonomy (as well as generosity towards others) that has informed Riz Ahmed’s work ever since. He wants to initiate a conversation that’s big enough for him and for everyone else. It’s a theme that shines through every corner of his remarkable story. I hope that you’ll enjoy digging into more of it.

Living Your Vision

Envisioning is living the future that you hope for through your work.

I read Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” traveling to and from New York City. In a nutshell, it’s about living what’s important to you, even though there is no assurance or even likelihood that the better world you’re working for will get any closer as a result. As her title says, it’s hope in the dark.

Americans in particular tend to want more certainty than that. We’re not accustomed to a continuous struggle for a better world or trying to “live our hopes”–particularly when they may never be realized–every day. Instead, we tend to respond to a crisis/problem/challenge, declare victory or defeat, and go home to wait for the next one to demand our attention. Our responses are generally to emergencies that interrupt the normal flow of our lives. We don’t tend to see struggling for what’s important to us as a daily commitment.

Solnit argues that treating struggles for justice, fairness, freedom, for greater opportunity, self-determination or a healthier planet as isolated emergencies results in abandoning our victories while they’re still vulnerable and conceding our defeats too quickly. When we’re committed to achieving what’s truly important to us, Solnit argues: “It is always too soon to go home.”

She illustrates her point by recounting a story she wrote several years back about pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished. (italics mine)

It is because the struggle is never easy and never done that Solnit quotes the poet John Keats, who called the world with all of its suffering “this vale of soul-making.” While “Hope in the Dark” is mainly Solnit’s call to continuous political activism, her arguments apply equally to declaring what’s important to you though the work that you do, that is, to any kind of acting on your convictions. To borrow the force of her argument, your jobs become “toolboxes to change things,” places “to take up residence and live according to your beliefs,” and, as Keats would say, “vales” where your soul is made because it is where a sense of meaning, purpose and wholeness (as opposed to partial victories or defeats) can be found.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rebecca Solnit, “Hope in the Dark”‘s 100-odd pages would be a splendid introduction. Her “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster” such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina is a beautiful argument that we’re far more and far better than we often think that we are.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 2, 2018 newsletter

Your Values Should Feel At Home In Your Workplace

August 19, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Values grounded in religion are moving into the workplace.

What might have been commonplace a hundred years ago for a church-going public became increasingly uncommon over the past 50 years as fewer people identified as believers and the Supreme Court circumscribed the role that religion had once played in public life. Among other things, that meant that most workplaces became religion-free.

At the same time, the American worker was introduced to so-called “corporate values.” As religious values had before them, the hope was that corporate values would provide commitments that the entire workforce could rally around to realize the company’s objectives. In my experience, corporate values have largely failed to either unite or motivate most employees—which is one reason why companies are reaching for deeper, and more explicitly religious hooks to drive that kind of unity and engagement today.

Another reason is the increasing alignment of “political values” with “religious values.” You’ll recall that discussion here a few weeks back, and it didn’t take long to discover how this development was manifesting itself at a local company.

The underlying business insight—that corporate values have proven shallow and largely meaningless—can’t be denied, but dressing work-oriented values in religious garb seems misguided for any company that ties its success to a workforce with diverse talents and experience. Since every company should be aiming for this kind of workforce diversity, employers should be creating work environments where the value priorities that its employees bring to work as opposed to the business owner’s religious values can be advanced.

Before elaborating, some context about the larger forces that are at play here might be helpful.

An Historical Perspective

Cyclical developments that play out over extended time periods can often help to explain what’s happening now.

Last week’s newsletter was about how change agents at work can take hope as well as practical advice from prior historical events when turbulence (like economic recession) permitted the reappraisal or outright rejection of basic assumptions in the workplace. Organized religion also tends to react to moral decline in predictable ways when viewed from history’s perspective. During times when the public seems to have abandoned its moral foundations, religious forces have always seemed to rise up to re-establish them in the workplace and elsewhere.

For the past 400 years, America has witnessed periodic social movements that were aimed at bringing those who had strayed into “sinfulness” back towards “godliness,” or at least “more upstanding” ways of living and working. Moral decline followed by moral revival is part of who we are.

Some of these movements—like the First (1720-60) and Second (1800-1850) Great Awakenings—spanned decades and altered the public’s perceptions of “right and wrong” before the American Revolution and Civil War. More recently, Evangelical Christianity and its political acitvism have been fighting to restore our moral foundations today. In other words, from an historical perspective it’s almost inevitable that concerns about our moral fitness would eventually find their way back into the workplace.

Religious Values Where We Work

The local news article this week was called “Putting Faith at the Forefront: Burlco’s Productive Plastics Brings Corporate Ministry to Work.” Burlco is Burlington County, New Jersey and Productive Plastics is the company’s name.

Just inside the entrance to the workroom at Productive Plastics Inc., which molds plastic into parts for manufacturing companies, is a place to post prayers.

A sign above the section reads, “Welcome to Our Prayer Wall,” in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, and a notepad and pen hang at the bottom of the space. Tucked into the wall are folded pieces of paper, each left by an employee and containing prayers offered up anonymously.

The company’s goal is an audacious one: To encourage all members of Productive Plastics to pray together for each other.

The prayer wall was discussed at Productive Plastic’s monthly “Caring Team” meeting earlier this month when managers, employees and two “corporate ministers” gathered to share ideas about employee well-being and “ways in which the company can better reflect its core values.

The company is privately held. It’s also “an openly Christian business,” so new employees know its owner’s commitments before signing on to work there. John Zerillo, Productive Plastics vice president of sales describes the company’s focus on its workers as follows: “We’re not there to proselytize. We’re there to care for the needs of the people.” By addressing these needs, Zerillo says the company is no longer losing employees “like we used to.”

The company’s CEO, Hal Gilham, initiated the change. After overcoming some personal challenges, Gilham regretted that he couldn’t extend his faith into his work life. He joined the Philadelphia chapter of C12, a network of Christian CEOs, business owners and executives and made the decision “to extend his born-again Christian values to the way he runs Productive Plastics.”

Beyond the annonymous prayer wall and prayers that employees voluntarily share with one another, each work shift starts with a “Take 5 Meeting.” The first 4 minutes are mandatory where meeting leaders share company notices and manufacturing priorities. The last minute—a short Biblical passage to keep in mind for the day—is optional. Outside its facility, Productive Plastics flies a Christian flag below the American flag. Its four “core company values” lead off with “honor God in all that we do,” followed by develop people, a relentless pursuit of excellence and the need to grow profitability.

Apparently by way of the C12 organization, the company has also hired Lifeguide, a “corporate chaplaincy service” started by Paul and Amy Shumski after years of doing traditional pastoral work. Lifeguide chaplains are available to employees at Productive Plastics who are experiencing work and life problems that affect their jobs and want someone to discuss them with on a confidential basis. Lifeguide charges companies that hire them around $5 per week per employee. According to Paul Shumski’s video presentation at C12, Lifeguide was already working with 7 companies in the greater Philadelphia area by 2017. When interviewed by the newspaper, Amy Shumski said Lifeguard “respects all beliefs” and tries to give employees “skills to help [them] handle their situations” rather than solve their problems for them. The article also indicated that there are at least two non-Christian employees in the company’s workforce.

In digging below the story, one question I had was whether these corporate chaplains also see themselves as missionaries seeking converts to their Evangelical Christianity.

My research couldn’t locate a website for Lifeguide and their ministry referrals may come through the C12 network. Dave Shoemaker, who runs the C12 branch in Philadelphia, introduced Paul Shumski’s corporate chaplaincy presentation in 2017 by saying:

70% of employees do not darken the door of a church. How are they going to find out about Christ?

In the talk that followed, Shumski indicated that he has had over 1800 conversations about spiritual hope in the workplace over the years, that at least 174 employees looked at religious texts during Lifeguide counseling (some for the first time), and how grateful he was for one employee who had “found Jesus” through his workplace ministry.

C12’s website includes a Vision Statement (“To Change the World by Advancing the Gospel in the Marketplace”), a Doctrine Statement (“Jesus Christ is Lord, the whole Bible is wholly true, God has an eternal plan for each believer’s life, and that plan includes their business”), and a library of resources about Christianity and business that appears to be shared by other local C12 groups nationwide.

Some Thoughts

While writing this newsletter, my research didn’t go deep enough to reach conclusions about either Lifeguide or C12, but the story about the rise of Christian chaplaincies in American workplaces did highlight the problem that led me to write my book. Moreover, C12’s and Lifeguide’s approach also differs markedly from the solution I’m proposing.

The Sixties in America challenged traditional authority of every kind. Among other things, mainstream churches lost millions of believers, the objective “truths” of science and social science swamped the more subjective “truths” of religion and the other humanities in colleges and universities, and, for many Americans, values that had been shaped by worshipping communities were replaced by individual perspectives on what is “good” and “bad,” that is, when people bothered to build new moral frameworks at all.

When moral perspectives get watered down or are abandoned altogether—and people become increasingly shallow, materialistic, selfish and self-absorbed— religious revivals like America’s Great Awakenings periodically jump into the void, seeking to restore the nation’s moral compass. The overlapping of Christian Evangelical values with conservative political values is today’s version of this moral revival. It aims to restore the traditional Christian values that many Americans rejected during the Sixties and to give our lives and work a sense of meaning and purpose that they currently lack.

When I started writing WorkLifeReward, I was also concerned that we had torn down the traditional value frameworks and not replaced them with new ones. For many people, morality became increasingly personal and self-contained—private spirituality with little or no public face. Other people seemed to lack direction in life altogether. I was interested in a moral framework that included work because work is about improving more than ourselves. It reflects commitments to others and, more generally, to the world—my internal well-being as well as what I do beyond my selfish concerns.

I was convinced that it would be impossible to “turn back the clock” and restore religious groundings for those who had left them behind. But at the same time, I wanted to identify basic imperatives that would be compatible with traditional beliefs for those who continued to hold them. I also feared the practical consequences of alienating people who could never accept a religious value system; it would exclude too many people who should have the opportunity for a committed and meaningful life but didn’t know how to realize that opportunity. In other words, even if the Lifeguide chaplains aren’t missionaries, they begin their outreach from a moral framework that too many Americans have already rejected as a point of departure when seeking to live their values through their work.

So I took a different approach. I proposed two basic priorities–for personal autonomy and generosity–that can be actively nurtured by non-religious as well as religious people in every kind of work that they do. Moreover a foundation that’s based on these personal values might be able to do a more comprehensive job of filling the moral void that exists today.

My argument—greatly stripped-down here–is that all people at work want to develop and grow in ways that they need to (in terms of competence, collaboration, and aspiration) along with realizing goals that are important to them personally (from bringing well-made products to consumers to improving their community or even the world in some way). This is the value of autonomy that every employee brings to work. Generosity is simply the complementary commitment to acknowledge and support the same drive towards autonomy in others.

These commitments are durable enough to provide the personal meaning and sense of purpose that is lacking today. We don’t “find” these values in the workplace. Instead, we bring these commitments with us when we go to work, hoping to nurture them there as well as in every other part of our lives.

In the same way that it is difficult to be a person who lives (and works) their faith, it takes effort to live (and work) the values of autonomy and generosity. A commitment to individual and collective flourishing is compatible with all traditional religious values, and drives similar levels of motivation and engagement. The first two “corporate values” in every company should be to support their employees’ autonomy and generosity (instead of their boss’s version of them). And when employees don’t experience a commitment to these basic values where they work, they should bring their energy and talent to a workplace that will support them.

Even in America, the revival of moral foundations doesn’t have to be religious in nature.

Note: this post is adapted from my August 19, 2018 weekly newsletter.