Thanks to ROAD and the nice people who attended the Seattle event this evening. We had a lively discussion and some drama - a young man fainted during my reading. Not sure if it was the description of Jonathan getting connected to the various wires and tubes at QualLab or just a little low blood sugar, but after a few minutes he was fine. Fortunately an excellent doctor and acupunturist, Dr. Becky Su, was present and able to assist. I think I'll read a different passage in the future.
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Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Shop till you drop. In a down economy, merchants and economists are welcoming the excitement around all the consumer activity in the wake of my favorite holiday. I think all that is fine. Stuff gets made, stuff gets sold, people buy stuff, trade stuff, it’s the major engine of our economy and without it, we wouldn’t be able to function as a society.
Then there’s the other part of the story. A man in West Virginia collapses at a Target store and people step over him to get at their Black Friday bargains. He dies. A woman at a Walmart in California pepper-sprays fellow shoppers to clear a path to the Xbox console she wants to buy. Yes, you have to allow for human frailty or mental illness or whatever. At the same time, these cases point to the challenge a society faces when people don’t feel a human connection to their neighbors and colleagues. If our sense of caring isn’t stronger than our greed or indifference, the simian part of our brain becomes dominant and we do shameful things. This isn’t a political problem. It’s a human problem. I grew up in Montreal and used to spend summers at a boys camp in upstate New York near Saranac Lake. So a story about that small town in this morning's paper caught my eye. Apparently, the only store selling clothing and other essentials closed down recently, part of a national chain downsizing, and the community decided to take matters into its own hands. They pooled resources and opened The Community Store.
I like this story for several reasons. First, it shows people finding creative solutions to a problem. Second, it demonstrates the power and centrality of community in commerce. Finally, it gets us back to business at a human scale. Faced with a challenge - nowhere to buy underwear without driving 50 miles - the good citizens of Saranac Lake invested in themselves. They didn't wait for an outside megastore to come in and save them. In fact, when Wal-Mart explored the idea of moving into the area, they were rebuffed. People chose a creative, entrepreneurial track, taking their destinies into their own hands. Global corporations have deep pockets to promote their "brand", they can hire local people and provide support for community events, but they are never really "of the community". They are visitors, investors who hope to benefit from their local affiliation. A community resource puts community before profits. It is there to serve the community rather than seeing community service as good PR in the service of maximizing profits. Profits will follow for an organization that provides a needed service, but maximizing profit at the expense of a community doesn’t make a business “better”, just richer. With principled, skilled leadership, the new Community Store could be a model for other communities around the country. I'm not suggesting that all business has to be small and local. I am saying that a small business that provides a needed service and grows from within the community knows that serving the community is essential to its survival. Such enterprises are more likely to be responsive, responsible and resilient. It's how early capitalism looked, before the evolution of massive, global enterprises. It's finding a positive path to profits without negative exploitation. Perhaps the future of business can be found in its past. Nothing wrong with that! http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016756087_saranac14.html Have you noticed that when someone criticizes the growing imbalance in American incomes, and especially when the subject of excessive compensation of top executives comes up, the mantra you hear is that such thoughts are anti-business, or anti-capitalist? I find this curious. It equates business and capitalism with runaway greed. Does that have to be the case?
Businesses can be creative, productive, and important contributors to the health of a community. They can generate ideas and products that make our lives better. They can provide an environment in which people work and generate value for their communities. This is the kind of business people usually have in mind when they defend capitalism. Businesses can also be rapacious, monopolistic, abusive, dishonest, and even criminal enterprises. They can rape a community’s resources, foul the environment, squash creative new enterprises that threaten their hegemony, weaken the economy, manipulate governments at all levels, and generally do a great deal of harm. This is the kind of business people usually have in mind when they criticize the excesses of capitalism. If you believe in the Gordon Gekko creed that “Greed is Good”, that greed is the only honest emotion, and if you subscribe to the pseudo-Darwinian view that “superior” people, society’s cream, will naturally rise to the top if government will stay out of their way, and inferior people would be best off accepting their status and allowing their betters to run things, you are likely to conflate these opposing views of capitalism and business, and see them as two sides of the same coin. You can’t have creative, positive business without greed and abuse. On the other hand, if you have tremendous faith in government and no confidence in businesses of any kind, if you have been so burned by private enterprise, or are so jaded by the pervasive Wall Street style greed you see described in daily reports of massive bonuses being given to mediocre corporate titans with failing businesses, you may tend to see all business as bad, and look forward to a day when governments run everything. Most of us eschew both of these extreme views. We know there are good, creative, supportive businesses that care about the communities they serve and want to act responsibly. These organizations have enlightened leaders who are motivated by a drive to do great things, to help others, to create the most innovative solutions - not to own six homes, two yachts, three private planes and a huge personal collection of priceless art. We also know there are the other kinds of businesses - predatory, unproductive, vampires that suck the life and resources out of communities and are led by egomaniacs who believe the world owes them - everything. No matter how much they have, it is never enough. They are gluttons with insatiable appetites, and they will suck their businesses dry. Is it so hard to develop economic and political policies that reward the one while controlling the excesses of the other? Surely there are leaders out there somewhere who aren’t in the pocket of the vampires. Why are they so hard to find? Just watched "Inside Job", the Academy Award winning documentary on the roots of the global financial collapse. Terrifying film, in part because there is very little sense of hope for a meaningful change that will keep us from repeating this economic insanity over and over. With both political parties in the pocket of a handful of corporate financial giants, university economics departments corrupted, and regulators doing anything but regulating, where do we turn for the kind of leadership we need to establish some kind of balance between the power of a tiny minority whose limitless greed keeps sinking the economy, and everyone else. Where will we find the vision and values we need to move forward? Certainly not from the Obama administration, which rewarded the same sleazy Wall Street players who got us into all this by re-appointing them into positions of power. The cast of characters leading Congress and seeking the Presidential nomination on the Republican side are even worse. So who?
http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/ Like most states, Washington State is in a financial crisis. The governor, a Democrat, is recommending severe cuts in all services, including prisons, education, and healthcare. This is on the heels of an earlier round of cuts that saw public education spending, including on higher education, slashed. It’s one thing to say we need to live within our means; it’s another to start talking about letting prisoners out early and making education unaffordable. Healthcare support is the biggest issue. Since the President and Congress dropped the ball on a true universal healthcare system, opting to expand the existing mess, we’re facing the prospect of ever more people without access to basic care. In Washington, a program that provided basic healthcare for those with no other access and limited financial means is set to be eliminated. Does anyone see a problem with all this? What do we value if not the education of our children, public safety, and our health?
Just heard Kevin Oakes speak about his new book, "The Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management". Kevin is an amazing guy, a longtime leader in his field, and an excellent speaker. The good news from both his book and the presentation: there are a lot of executives out there who have made developing the abilities and careers of their employees a core value of their organizations. The bad news - they represent a small minority. Most employers, whether public or private sector, still see the people who build their organizations as a resource to be exploited at best, an expense and a source of friction and trouble at worst. In all cases they are probably right, but the reason, as Kevin and his collaborators point out in the book, has more to do with the organization itself than the people they are hiring. That one company can develop a culture that is dynamic, exciting, and supportive while another in the same industry is punitive, closed to new ideas and drives their best people away is both a source of hope and frustration. It's a leadership challenge that the best out there will continue to take up.
I had an opportunity to speak with a book group that read "Virtually Yours, Jonathan Newman". What a wonderful experience! The conversation was insightful and their enthusiasm for Jonathan's family and story was very gratifying. I also learned a lot from their questions and observations, all of which will inform the sequel, expected out in the spring of 2012.
This group had been meeting monthly for seventeen years. That means they've discussed over 200 books! What a gift it is for a writer to be able to discuss his or her work with a group of people who have shared that kind of literary experience. Which leads me to a new addition on the robertrosell.com site. I'm adding a Book Group page. If you are part of a group that is reading VYJN, I'd be happy to meet with you. If you're in the Seattle area, I can join your conversation about the novel in person. If you're elsewhere, I can be a virtual participant by phone or other "communicator". I'll do as many of these as my schedule permits and look forward to exploring the world of Jonathan Newman with you. I just read a fascinating NY Times Magazine article on character education in schools. Written by Paul Tough (the name is wonderfully appropriate), the story focuses on the work of Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania as applied at two NY City schools, one an elite private school in Riverdale, the other a charter school serving New York's poorer communities.
The bottom line, and what struck me, was their argument that it is character development more than academic prowess that is the best predictor of success. Further, they maintain that the character traits required to overcome adversity, embrace opportunity and live a fulfilling life can be learned at school. Read the article for details (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html), but what I take away as most useful for myself and my kids, is the conclusion that a fulfilling life is one that is happy, meaningful, and productive. As parents, we sometimes focus on the first of these, often at the expense of the other two. Finding what is meaningful is a process of trying, failing, getting back up, and trying again. Being productive can mean doing things that, at first, we're not very good at. Once again, we need to learn to overcome failure to arrive at productivity. An education that doesn't allow for failure, that doesn't celebrate the value of falling down and getting back up, doesn't prepare us for the realities of a fulfilling life. As parents we sometimes try to shield our children from the pain of failure. At those moments, if we ask ourselves how we're impacting the development of our child's character, we might choose to allow them their moment of failure, and focus on encouraging them to get back up. This is an article I wrote ten years ago for Training Magazine. I found it both fascinating and frustrating to look back at how much has changed, and how little...
I was supposed to fly to Chicago today, but my flight was cancelled. On the plane I was going to write an article about how people treat each other at work, the frequent incidents of disrespectful, inappropriate, even cruel behavior. I had intended to use today’s newspaper, citing examples to make the point. Look what can happen on a normal day in America. It’s Tuesday, September 11, 2001. It’s not a normal day. My children were subdued as I drove them to school. We quietly discussed what had happened over the past few hours: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon. They wondered who might feel justified killing thousands of innocent people. What could possibly make them feel entitled to cause so much harm? This colossal act of violence has taken our society’s collective breath away. Yet the anger at its core is not unfamiliar to us. You don’t need to look at the Balkans or the Middle East, Ireland or Indonesia. We see it in incidents of harassment and bullying every day. It shows up in gay bashing and religious intolerance. It permeates relations between people of different races and cultures. It is indicative of a fundamental lack of respect, and it’s visible in most workplaces. It seems to be part of how we, as a species, treat each other. We are not, sad to say, born kind and tolerant. Survival instincts still push us to fight or flee, dominate or submit. Just watch children at play. The good news is we’re trainable. We learn our behaviors. We can develop different ways of interacting. We can be taught to play nice. Workplaces have joined the home and school on the front lines of this kind of learning. This has not primarily occurred for altruistic reasons. Organizations that are wracked with conflict and intimidation tend not to be very productive as employees focus on surviving rather than on their work. Turnover is high, loyalty is low. Add the fear of litigation and employers have found all the motivation they need. In most cases, disrespectful behavior stems from two root causes: the abuse of power (I hurt you because I can) and what psychologists call the “victimization/entitlement syndrome” (I feel you’ve hurt me and therefore I must hurt you back). In the first case people are expressing dominance and control. In the second they are searching for justice and trying to right a perceived wrong. Either way we end up with incidents of harassment, bullying, and intimidation. We see sabotage, the spreading of malicious rumors, and in the most extreme cases – acts of physical violence. Isolated incidents of these behaviors are unavoidable. When they occur we must deal with them promptly, using each incident as an opportunity to reinforce the organization’s values and to demonstrate commitment. Where there is widespread disrespectful behavior in an organization however, we are likely dealing with deeper cultural issues. In those cases, the leadership of the organization has usually signaled that bullying, harassment, etc. are acceptable and perhaps even encouraged. Conditions in these organizations are not likely to improve until the leadership moves beyond paying lip service to a set of values and begins to model and enforce the respectful behaviors it claims to support. The battle against senseless violence and the struggle for respect in human relationships is closely intertwined. There is so much anger, hatred, and distrust to overcome that at times it can seem overwhelming. But like any long journey, this one needs to be taken one step at a time. Families and schools each have an important role to play. So do our workplaces. Learning to develop respectful relationships at work is perhaps the most important work related skill we can develop. It’s right up there with developing respectful relationships in our homes and communities. Our successes will be a measure of how far we’ve come as a society. Our failures will end up as headlines in your morning newspaper. |
AuthorHave you read any of the Civitas Rising series? Please share your thoughts about the Great Change, the impact of technology on our lives, healthcare, the role of government, and anything else the books got you thinking about. Archives
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