Archive for the ‘philosophy of work’ Category
The Bare Facts about Freelancing
“The life of a plant is harder than it seems.”
In this case, the plant truly is our hero.
Noah and the Other: A Hump Day Story
Here’s your Bible story for today.
Occupy Midweek
Once upon a time there was a man named Noah. He enjoyed a good conversation. He also had a sense of wanting to do the right thing as he walked upright through a strange time.
And he walked through a very strange time. Noah lived among superheroes, when the sons of god walked the earth, sexing the hot chicks (OK, the text says “they married,” but there is meat-market sense to it) and producing a super race. Men of renown. It’s all in the Bible—Genesis 6. But it was also a time of great violence. And Noah was the last man standing uncorrupted—so the story goes (except for the problem with new wine, a bit further in the story). But mostly Noah was blameless and faithful as he did the right thing. Noah’s way of living had something to do with the conversations he had.
Noah had cultivated a sensitivity unlike anyone else: he was conversant with the Being that created everything. The Bible calls this being “God” and the story that Genesis unfolds seems predominantly God’s story, though steadily unfolded through people who interact with Him and His creation. When God saw how bad things had become on earth: violence pouring from the evil thoughts that ruled every person’s heart, He said he would wipe out the whole thing. Then He said it again. To Noah. Along with a few instructions that preserved Noah and his family. You know the rest of that violent story—which is really no kids’ story at all.
“Corrupt and full of violence.” I hope that does not describe your work place today, though it is a theme carried out through the entire story of God’s interaction with the earth. But no matter how it feels today, Noah’s story is about pursuing and preserving conversational moments that move toward freedom from the violence and evil that so easily infects all we do. Living above the fray—not by willpower but by deeply connecting with this mysterious being.
It’s a strange story and not at all polite or nice. It raises all sorts of questions and highlights unsolvable mysteries we rarely speak of—a perfect story to occupy midweek.
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Image Credit: Bechet Benjamin via Iconology
Occupy Everything: Every Group Forms Around a Promise
Anarchists organize for anarchy while pacifists plot their war on war. A church may promise a club-like space where everyone knows your name or it may work out the day-to-day look of those ancient texts that call for justice, mercy and rightness with the Creator.
Optimist/Activist Professor Reich
At the moment, Occupy Wall Street is a BYOP (Bring Your Own Promise) event. But commentators and talking heads are showing up to frame up their version of the promise. Also showing up: opportunists, would-be pornographers, and anybody with a beef. Robert Reich took to the bullhorn Wednesday at Occupy San Francisco with his version of the promise: “I really do believe we are on the cusp of a fundamental change,” Reich said.
Maybe so.
Maybe Occupy [whatever] is this generation’s 1968 moment. Maybe the greedy will be shamed into… what? Backing away from the system that hands out checks for the way they risk other people’s money? Maybe we are simply shining light on the scurrying rats of a corrupt and corrupting financial system. We also shine the light on our own culpability in a corrupt and corrupting system
The single, binding promise has yet to emerge. But certainly our conversation is different today. And that feels like progress.
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Image Credit: SF Examiner
Jeff Nunokawa & People-Centric Scholarship
A recent New Yorker Talk of the Town feature showed Jeff Nunokawa practicing his scholarship on Facebook. Rebecca Mead’s article “Earnest” compared Dr. Nunokawa writing his first book in a windowless basement with the way he connects today with his Princeton students. His “meditations” get read because they are brief, accessible and located exactly where his audience spends their time—Facebook.
“…I like the social-media element—I want it to be sociable. It’s not that I don’t want to be a scholar, but this is how I want to be a scholar.” (The New Yorker, July 4, 2011, 19)
Something good is happening here. And the good thing is not that scholarship is dumbed-down or going away. Tightly controlled, peer-reviewed articles using insider-only language will continue as a means of advancing scholarship. But this good thing is a fresh emphasis on accessibility: making the connections so more people can get pulled into the excitement of understanding. You may call it low-hanging fruit. But this copywriter sees it as a ministry to the human race.
At the moment, the academy doesn’t reward this: popular retelling of scholarship is often not tenure-track stuff. But the institutional gatekeepers will not have the last say, as more people join these ongoing conversations.
Something good is happening. Something new. I welcome it.
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Image credit: Scott Dadich
Steve Jobs: “…you have to trust the dots will connect in your future.”
File Under “Memorable Speeches”
Check out Steve Jobs speaking at a Stanford graduation in 2005. Favorite moment (~5:35): “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will connect in your future.”
Thanks to Bob Collins at MPR News Cut for the link.
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A meditation on living in chesed
My friend and I both worked for a long time at a very stable medical device company in Minneapolis. We both eventually left to form our own companies. About this up and down adventure of working on your own, she liked to say “the universe will provide” because her experience was exactly that: interesting clients sought her out with interesting work, she had opportunities for growth coupled with the opportunity to learn and earn for herself and her family. I had to agree that opportunities popped up all the time—especially with the eyes-open approach of a consultant.
My question has more to do with naming the source of these opportunities. Recognizing “the universe” sounds too happenstance. Don’t get me wrong: I am all for whimsy and also a great believer in serendipity. I just want to name the source. Why? Out of joy. Out of wonder. Also because naming the source honors the source. So I credit God as the originator of opportunity.
I’m a beginner at living in dependence on chesed (God’s lovingkindness).
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Open Your Pie Hole: #1 in the Dummy’s Guide to Conversation
Talking can feel like a leap.
Do you remember the conversations that changed your life?
Decades ago a guy gave a talk at our church. This guy had made a career change from working as a medical device executive to becoming a leader in the denomination. In a quick conversation after his speech, I mentioned my interest in the medical device industry. He gave me a name to call. I called the guy that week and caught him at a generous moment—despite being an executive himself he spent 30 minutes telling me what he loved about the industry, the company and how helping people provided meaning for his workday. Then he gave me Dave’s name, said I should call Dave and drop his name.
I did that.
Dave turned out to be the best boss on the planet.
The conversation followed by the conversation followed by the conversation turned into decades of writing for the medical device industry, starting with Medtronic. The point of the story is that conversations can take us places we might have wanted to go to but had no idea how do get there. Of course, conversations don’t always work like that, but it happens more often than we might realize. In fact, I think simple conversations change our life every single day. That’s my premise as I write “Listentalk: How simple conversations change your life every day.”
Those conversations start with the courage to share what is going on inside—sometimes deep inside. Using words. Out loud.
Can you remember a life-changing conversation? Tell me.
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Are Words Always as Powerless as They Seem?
When we preach, our words often drop like stones from an overpass. And by “preach” I mean anyone who launches into a speech without a deep regard for her listeners. Pastors and priests can do it, but so do marketers, bosses, friends, even spouses. The guy at the party blathering on about his accomplishments—he’s preaching—and people walk away accordingly.
But our words need not fall like lead sinkers.
In 1955, the Oxford philosopher J.L Austin, gave a series of lectures at Harvard that became his book “How to Do Things with Words.” Austin proposed that there is a side to language where words actually cause stuff to happen out in the world. His famous example was with wedding vows: when the groom and bride say “I do,” and when the pastor/priest says “By the laws of the state of Minnesota, etcetera, etcetera, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” At that very point, something has changed in the world. Something changed because of the words spoken. Sure, those words gathered power from the context: the bride and groom, for starters. They agreed to get married. The priest or pastor officiating the deal contributed: the ordination process granted legal authority (at least in the eyes of the state) to pronounce these official words and have them mean something.
J.L.Austin
Why does preaching produce more leaden words than other kinds of talk? Again—not talking just Sunday sermon here. Corporations preach in their print ads and commercials and press releases. They collect a bunch of statements that are purposefully free from conversational context (you recognize this stuff by reading a brochure aloud. That’s when you realize no human talks like this). That kind of preaching that is more like wishing: wishing the world was a certain way. Wishing the reader was different from what he or she really is. The kind of preaching that tells others what to do or what the world is like, but is a lazy kind of talk that bears no resemblance to life. We all resort to this kind of talk that is unmoored from the people around us. Oh sure, we occasionally dress it up with an authoritative tone and we think we’ve accomplished something. But we haven’t.
Is there a way to get off our lazy butt of preaching and start saying things that make a difference in the world? Using words that instigate change? Is there a way to believe in the change our words signal?
I was reading the Gospel of Mark today, Mark 1, where Jesus starts the whole project. His first recorded words in Mark’s gospel are preaching: he preached the kingdom of God and invited his listeners to repent and believe (1.15). The rest of the chapter shows him, well, doing the stuff he preached. His talk about preaching and repenting and believing were not churchy words, meant only for the hour of the week where people piously peer up. No. His words demonstrated power by healing the sick. And the possessed. His were not empty sayings about a far-off God. They were words of invitation to taste something real. He was not just talk. He was walk.
Much more walk than talk.
How about your speech? Are you preaching to an audience who knows you are just mouthing empty words? Press release talk. Or are you saying things you can demonstrate? As a copywriter, am I doing this? And what kind of people do we need to be to deliver on the words we send out?
Makes me wonder.
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Is Freelance Writing a Career?
[I’m reposting this from about a year ago when I posted it on The Official Blog of Kirkistan, where I’ve stopped writing. This issue just keeps coming up.]
Before you say “Yes. Of course!” (with proper righteous indignation), consider that a career seems to move a person toward increasing levels of responsibility, toward tasks that require more maturity, toward more money (one can dream). Pick any company and follow the career path of say…well…how about a communication specialist? The communication specialist will write, manage projects, take care of details. They do well, so they are promoted to communication manager. In that position, they do some of the same tasks, though in lesser quantities, plus they manage people. They do well and graduate to director. In that position they have no project work, write only memos and emails, sit in meetings discussing what they’re teams are doing, aren’t doing and should be doing. And so a career proceeds until stopped at the individual’s level of incompetence.
This management person who was (possibly) a writer is now not writing at all and is instead directing others who carry out communication tactics. To many that is a satisfying, perfectly reasonable trajectory. And even for those who write or love to create, they can find opportunities in those positions to use their creativity to positively influence others. I’ve known some creative folks who have risen to management positions and done very well at creating imaginative and loyal teams and organizations.
But for others, this career path represents gradual movement away from craft, and away from the heart of what made work fun in the first place. A career presupposes that new skills are developed even as vision widens, which lands a person in a different job. But that is not quite the case for freelance writers. They often entertain dreams of, well, writing. It’s what they want to do. And so a career path for a freelance writer is less about successive positions (especially since freelancing is by definition outside typical corporate structures with their fixed paths) and more about finding work and the work itself.
The work itself is the career path for a freelance writer. Where there is joy in completing the work, where there is curiosity about how communication tools can fit to new situations and how those tools can resolve substantial problems—those are the milestones on the freelance writer’s career path. And over time, the writer finds herself or himself accomplishing a set of tasks with maturity and grace (one can hope). And looking back, the craft that helped accomplish tasks and assignments will have the distinct look of a career.
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Facebook at Work—A Both/And Approach
Whole people go to work
Employers are of two minds when it comes to Facebook at work. One view is that it is a great time-waster and should be removed to an employee’s personal time. That view has much traditional merit because workers are paid for productivity. Productivity is part of the social compact we agree to when stepping across that corporate threshold.
Another view is to encourage employees to use their relationship-building tools to advance the cause of the corporation—much like United Health Group invited their employees to lobby congress (mind you, on a “completely voluntary” basis) against reform which could hurt the company’s bottom line. Of course, spouting company talking points in a Facebook news feed sounds even more plastic and lifeless than it usually does in a news article.
Is there a third-way, an alternative that lies somewhere between an outright ban and a manipulative directive? I put this question to a class of college juniors and seniors studying writing in organizations—people who swim in social media all day every day. One woman suggested the typical 5-10 minute coffee break as an opportunity for social networking. In fact, that has always been the traditional purpose of that break: connecting with people over a cup of joe. Generally those breaks have not been work related. Facebook and Twitter and the like mean that now those breaks are taken with friends scattered across the planet rather than colleagues in the next cube.
Of course employees access Facebook and Twitter all day without approval from their employers. But this third way suggests these conversations and relationship-building activities can be good for the company. Not only does limited corporate approval give a nod to employees as whole people who bring their whole selves to the workplace, it also recognizes that connections and communication are life-giving interactions that help a person deal with difficulty—wherever that difficulty happens to come from.
Granted, not every job can allow this. I’d rather my air traffic controller not check Facebook while we’re flying through a crowded airspace. But a lot of jobs have room for connections and communication. Let’s publicly recognize that connections and communication are a good thing.
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conversation is an engine 