Running Into the Future of Work

January 13, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Future of Work– August 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. AI and Us– September 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.         The Making of a Modern Elder – October 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Flourishing in Every Job

November 25, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(I know, pretty philosophical for an economist.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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