Tag: perspective-taking

The Bucket List of Frank Marchand

Introduction

I know Frank Marchand because he has been my plumber and neighbor  for many years. He has always had a soft spot for going the extra distance. Now after eight continuous years of working and fighting stage four colon cancer full-time, he’s bringing his community into that same extra distance. Frank conceived, wrote, directed, and starred in Now I Can Die Happy, an original performance that Frank summoned to life at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls MA on August 30th. Too close to home to be theatrical. Too elevated a theme to be slice-of-life. Now I Can Die Happy is lived out on the most personal terms in the most revealing of ways.
Plumber Frank Marchand, of Whately, Massachusetts, takes off his hospital bracelet while working a job. He had just come from a chemotherapy appointment.

Frank doesn’t say. But I imagine he was first visited by the idea of a one man autobiographical show in a long, contemplative moment. Perhaps during chemo? 

Many chemo trips removed from the original diagnosis, Frank has outlived many of the crew in the same Cooley Dickinson treatment program. This includes former teachers, customers, and local folks that had been receiving their infusions alongside Frank. 

This prompts Frank’s insertion of the “why me” directed to a higher power. You don’t need religion or infusions to appreciate the pay grade above where this question lands.

Frank answers back his why me voice without anger, guilt, defiance, or passive acceptance. His response is an ardent and clarion call to action. He has given himself over to the world of need. A world that defines tangible need as the privileging of one’s own concerns. 

Big Digs in Own Backyards

Here’s the Frank I knew in B.C. (“before cancer”) times: A guy who took his professional calling seriously. Himself? Not so much. His work ethic was insatiable. Big jobs, small jobs. His answering machine played the same steadfast loop for decades: “I pick up my messages every hour.” He promised to return every new request by the end of each work day. Didn’t matter how overbooked he might be.

On the job, he was a swirl of activity and patter. The channeler of once troubled waters into the basin of stability. A chatterbox of wisdom. Behind every valve and fitting – a story and sometimes… a lesson.

The dedication, the range of problem-solving, and the self-effacing humor all conspired to build trust that Frank would unscramble whatever our steeply-pitched 150 year-old Victorian home could spray his way. It was a down payment. Not for curb appeal but infrastructure. Now our rickety Victorian would see an engine room facelift. Preventative medicine. Newly assembled sets of permeating radiators and plumbing bones. Nothing much had stirred under its floorboards until Frank descended into the foundation. Now our matronly manor was going to see another fifty years.

He emerged weeks later, a six foot mole caked in the abrasions of his craft. Our own bonafide big dig under Chestnut Plain Road, adjacent to the recently relocated Whately Milk Bottle edifice and neighbor Frank’s home. It was a pathway adjoining the 19th to the 21st centuries over the protestations of the accumulated neglect of past owners. Of course I wrote that check to Frank. Of course it’s the biggest check I ever wrote to another individual before or since. I took his word on every itemized entry in that invoice. And why wouldn’t I? I trusted the iron works and the PVC in the architectural details to the master cobbler of heating systems. My friend and neighbor, Frank.

Divorced Dads Night Out

Fast forward to 2000. Frank and I are sharing some bowls of All You Can Eat popcorn in South Deerfield before the waitress at Wolfie’s appears with our orders. We both find ourselves in the league of divorced dads with visitation weekends. It’s not exactly in our respective road maps of where our lives were once headed in the sleepy hamlet of Whately Center. Frank tells me of another neighboring family that’s split since: “Must have been in the water,” he reckons.

It was that hazardous backstretch around the turn to forty. So, so many marriages never make it past those bends. We see the stranger across the table from us and what have we got besides our vows, debts, and a shared history? The empty miles that distance us from the future we once called family.

Years later Frank tells Karen Brown that it was his ability to correct misbehaving water flows at the age of 12 which drew him into plumbing. Ms. Brown is both a Frank customer and an NEPM reporter whose radio portrait of his survival saga goes viral on national NPR. However, this form of troubled water was nothing Frank could fix. I clinked his beer glass to reaffirm my own limitations in this area. We go back for popcorn refills. Our unwritten chapters are no longer blank slates.

Full-time Schedule

I’ve been remarried, twice actually, since our last dinner date. My fourth marriage in 2015 coincided with Frank’s cancer diagnosis. He delivered this news the following year when I rang him in to prep a bathroom for the pending sale of my wife’s home. I can’t say it surprised me at all that Frank was dug in for the fight of a lifetime. What threw me off at first was the realization he was fighting what sounded like a war on two fronts. 

At first I didn’t understand how his trade was actually an ally in this battle. Rather than attempting to protect his marshaling forces, he refused to draw any distinction between Frank the plumber and Frank the cancer patient. Others may have retreated into the shadows, of rejection and denial, or an even wholesale withdrawal from the business of living. Frank doubled down on it. His greatest nemesis wasn’t the disease or the prognosis. It’s the number cancer does on an idle mind preoccupied with the harm-seeking disruptions that lie ahead.

Rather than catastrophize, Frank chose to inhabit the solution-seeking sanctum of his problem-solving nature. He opted as Paul Simon described in song, “to dominate the impossible in his life.” That chemo treatment was another slot to fill in an already answered-for calendar of running toilets, clogged pipes, and vanity installations.

But the jammed calendar was never just to remain in motion. In “I Can Die Happy Now,” Frank implores us to step back from our own autopilots. He wants us to absorb the bigger picture so we can take in what’s truly life affirming in our daily practice. There’s nothing stoic or guarded or kept in reserve for later going on here. But the pep talk isn’t coming from fevered piety of sweeping judgments. That’s what we’re used to: Painted on thick with the broadest of brushes.

Smiling Statues

On a summer evening, my wife and I went to see Frank’s show at the Shea Theater. It stars its director, writer, and stage manager Frank. It co-stars Frank’s secret friend. There is no show program. But if there was, it might have been a single urgent message: Spend down our emotional debts.

As my Uncle Stephen Pollan wrote in Die Broke: A Radical Four Part Financial Plan, the last check you write should be to the undertaker. And it should bounce. From very different angles, Frank and my Uncle are imploring us to empty our pockets of regrets. But emotional debts, come again? These are the I.O.U’s that carry us through our daily graces. We come to know this as the kindness of strangers. Paying it forward. But Frank turns the tables. What if we’re the strangers and the kindness must come from us?  

Frank isn’t evangelizing from his throne. He’s locked in battle. We’re the ones fleeing the scene and he’s the one calling unsolicited attention to this. Our strength as a community comes from engaging, from the providing and receiving of kindness and empathy. Not the protective shell we often grow to seal us in from the suffering all around us. Not the veneer of privacy that insists on scheduled interventions only.

Frank’s not having that. He pushes on the margins of emotional availability. On its fringes labors the panhandler who carries the shame of pity over the unfilled isolations that hold the awkward dread between the haves and the what-have-you-gots: I admit it, Frank. I haven’t any more to give.

And yet. And yet!

Knowing the pulse of gratitude that brims over Frank, we sense a towering waterfall of connection. A reservoir of feeling waiting to be shared. “Waiting for what exactly?” the man at stage four for the last eight years is asking us. As if we’re asking for our souls back from the places we’ve been hiding them. We can’t hide from Frank at center stage. 

The Curtain Comes Down

The crowd is one part sorry-it-had-to-be-you, Frank, and another part frozen smiling statues. That’s when Frank goes one step further. He introduces back to his secret friend, a.k.a. alter ego that’s arrived to comfort and cajole him through the trials of his life. The secret friend has seen Frank through the perils of his solo missions. In the first act, the friend provided a comic foil when young Frank couldn’t get out of his own self-imposed obstacle course. 

The friend is also cast as the keeper of Frank’s own bargaining with his maker. It’s an existence of light and energy that can only be shaped into action and outcomes in the fleeting expanse that this natural force inhabits a human body. The desire to bend events in our favor requires the gripping of hands, the stepping of legs, and the flexing of muscles commanded through our vast neurological circuits. Where our heart stops is not a curtain call. It’s not a thunderous ovation. It’s musical chairs where the music cuts out. That’s the theme song of Frank’s requiem.

Frank is not engaging us around the protective custody of angels and bugle corps. He’s bargaining with us where we live. At ground level. That’s where we leave no sincere praises on the table. We spend lavishly and don’t wait for Frank’s funeral. Or our own.

Think about it. The eulogy is off-limits to unkind words. There’s safety in the protection of legacy. It’s as timeless as the keeping of the flame. But what would happen, I hear Frank saying, if we let these praises escape through the mundane discourse of an ordinary day? Then we wouldn’t wonder if the dead could hear because they would bear actual witness to the appreciations they inspire. They would actually come to know the meaning of the lives they’ve touched in these overlapping lifetimes.

That is a world we can share. This is the do-it-yourself instructions for saving your own soul. No waiting is required. You can go right in. And thank you, Frank Marchand, for helping me to see and live that.

The Botched Democracy Offensive in Philly

Biden’s case for democracy was too grouchy, partisan, tone deaf to Trump, and an underestimation of his own strengths.

“Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, 
you will never be defeated. 

When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, 
your chances of winning or losing are equal. 

If ignorant, both of your enemy and of yourself, 
you are sure to be defeated in every battle.”

– Sun Tsu, The Art of War

Last week at Independence Hall I wasn’t expecting eloquence. I was hoping for a spirited defense of democracy from the Commander-in-Chief. But the speech lacked inspiration along with an effective understanding of his adversary.

It was especially painful to hear the focus-group tested applause lines against his opponent’s gift for authentic speech. The sense that his predecessor is incapable of reading a room through a teleprompter because his gut can process in real time. It’s uncanny how the former President can access the darkest recesses of our animal spirits with the slightest sneer of accusation. 

The simple act of calling out Donald Trump puts President Biden at an immediate deficit. That’s how fast Trump can deflect a punch and tank the voice of reason.

Flashback to September 29, 2020 and the debate stage in Cleveland. 1.2 million ballots have been cast. Biden is scribbling some zingers outside the margins while Trump flaps his predatorial wings and pounces on the dead air of Biden’s hesitations. His facts are inventions and his opinions never stay in one place long enough to be his. But it’s all personal. From the constant interruptions to the name-calling, who could doubt the sincerity of his own self-regard? What could be more convincing than that?

Nothing changes after the shouting ends. There is no advantage in scorecarding the lies or slow-rolling the swamp hypocrisies. That fans more oxygen for feeding his bull-charging aggression. It certainly doesn’t come from wresting the national stage away with investigations and court rooms. His own insatiable preening for fame remains to be paraded at a time of his choosing. 

All the more solemnity here for the moment two years later when Biden goes on the offense. It falls flat. His rejection of “MAGA Republicans” sounds canned, shrill, and yes, divisive. He comes out swinging with the Labor Day bravado of a machine boss. He manages a left hook at the inviting target. It lands nowhere and connects to no one.

Why? 

The Speech That Missed Its Mark

First there was the defense of democratic ideals. Biden’s delivery was devoid of the semantic honesty of democratic-republic ideals. It may not be true majority-wins democracy. But it the actual audience Biden was trying to reach with his affirmation. It is the system worth defending.

The grandeur of a national address was undercut by the melting pot of deplorables Biden was inclined to frame: Our fellow American opposition. There were no bargains being struck, bargains being weighed, or channels cleared opened. Was this yet another “let’s-just-be-reasonable” overture from the political center/left? Was democracy-or-bust a white flag shot full of holes?

There was no middle ground when Obamacare passed the Senate in 2010 without a single GOP vote. There was no prior expectation of a public healthcare system, so “reasonable” was never on the table. And how did that work out for us? How did his opponents respond to Obama’s assertion that universal healthcare is the right thing to do? Did they propose a truce? Aahhh … nope. They called in the calvary.

A dozen red states rejected Medicaid expansion as if those federal funds were minted in Act Blue donations, and not Treasury greenbacks. In fact, the free and fair elections of 2010 and 2014 suggest otherwise. Democratic voters sat on their hands while the Tea Party seethed, the dark money flowed, and the Federalist Society played the long game. 

Remember the midterm shellacking that elevated Mitch McConnell to Senate Majority leader? Biden’s memory is challenged in this way: McConnell’s obstruction strategy was the procedural expression of a status quo-rejecting red wave that made little distinction between its radical fringes and mainstream figures.

All this was but preamble. Elevator music. It was the trailer before the theatrical release of the main feature. Cue Trump’s step onto Golden Escalator for a rough and tumble ride into an America hellscape of black crime, brown illegals, freeloading Western allies, and unguarded borders. The other GOP candidates were soon swallowed, stage makeup and all, by the imposing pulpit-shaped mouth of America’s leading personal brand influencer. 

Many Americans may harbor strong feelings about Biden’s Presidency – while remaining somewhat indifferent to the many himself. Trump, on the other hand, has developed a personal relationship with every voter. So strong, that many may have been non-voters in the Bush and Obama years. No one turns voters out quite like Trump.

No one’s making the case that there’s no point in voting since they’re all the same. The point may be obvious but it’s rarely acknowledged: Having a personal relationship with Donald Trump is not based on reverence or contempt of the former President. It just is.

– God’s wrecking ball?

-Dumpster fire in a suit?

Either way, two aspects of the Trump Presidency stand out: 

Superpower: His ability to crowd reporters, arguments, and adversaries off the political stage is unprecedented. No neutral referee will dim the limelight on Trump’s facial highlights. Who invited them anyway? The cameras are his escorted guests. They gawk up this explosive spectacle. First his grievances. Now close-up on his rapid-fire condemnations, soaring above a thick, convulsing cloud of gaslighting. The monster truck of all debating strategies.

Achilles heel: His unfitness for the Presidency is only more true today than when the Electoral College rolled the dice in his favor six years ago. He had a full term to grow into the stature of the office and he diminished it. He went from being unqualified and ticked off, to clueless and livid, and ultimately, to a disengaged, chaotic, and ineffectual leader. He was by all accounts from competent members of his own branch, a colossal administrative failure. 

The Speech Biden Should Have Made

Why Biden decided to call out Trump with no acknowledgement of his foe’s considerable strengths and weaknesses is unpardonable.

He could have played the greatest sucker punch known to the waging of all winning campaigns – the charm offensive. Once showing himself to be the more respectful, calmer, and reasonable of the two geriatric adults, Biden could play to his own strength, landing a blow where Trump is least equipped to counter-punch. Why? Because there is no defense for his record at the helm of a centralized government as its unitary executive. Unless… your goal is to do irreparable harm to that institution. 

Here’s what Biden could have said:

Donald Trump is a reality TV star that used his run for office in 2016 to elevate his brand. His skillful use of broadcast and social media led to his unexpected win over Hillary Clinton. It was a victory that Mr. Trump himself did not see coming. During his time in office he continued to dominate headlines, talk rings around his opponents, and ran his White House much like his own business operations. 

To this day he never quits. His tenacity is awesome. He remains a tireless fighter. For his own interests. Priority number one for our elected leaders are to enact policies and programs that help our fellow citizens. Priority number one for this guy isn’t pay forward. It’s payback. It’s retribution. It’s about settling scores with any elected official on either side who places the act of effective governing above personal loyalty to him.

81 million Americans expressed this through the power of the ballot. They understood that he was not interested in their healthcare, their safety, their roads, and their future. Policies and programs bored him to tears. Serving all Americans was off the table. A reality TV superbrand and influencer did what all showmen do. He put on a show. And I think we can all agree. It was a remarkable performance.

To this day, many of our citizens find Mr. Trump a dazzling performer. There are numerous platforms capable of hosting Mr. Trump and reinforcing the strong connection with his many followers. That arrangement, my fellow Americans, has nothing to do with running a country. And we would be well-advised for Mr. Trump to express his influence as a star entertainer, not in the conduct of an office he was never prepared for, or even interested in assuming.

Joseph R. Biden,
46th President of the United States

Could a more gifted orator still disarm Trump with some softer rhetoric? Railing public support against future fascist-like leaders may enlist arguments that can bypass pride-constrained men like Trump completely. Who knows? With some poise, and some pauses to anchor us, we could arrive at the obvious but unstated defense Biden was mounting:

I’m that guy. I’m that competent, boring head of a bureaucracy who can deliver us back to the cadences of stability. Not because the future is docile and predictable. Not because I even know what to say but because I know how to listen. I have the capacity to change minds, including my own. And the conflicts we face are not to be conquered but brokered by someone who understands when the government steps in and when it stands down.

This Political Moment

A more subtle defense of democracy could connect with some of those MAGA Republicans who reject Biden’s terms and choices, but share the same collective concern. The wrong track we’re on is a collision course. The winners have no use for losers. That’s the sound of one side vanquishing the other. We we needed to hear was a call for a renewed patriotism. It is not a campaign pledge.

They say that to know yourself and your enemy is the surest way to victory. But how many of us have the perspective-taking to do that work? How many of us have a studied and reflective understanding of what our opponents are trying to achieve? It’s hard to pull off. Especially when we’re always tuning into our own wants, needs, and the anxieties of having our buttons pushed. 

Who has the mental capacity to hold opposable thoughts, let alone opposition desires that reflect their actual ambitions? It might be even harder than it looks. It’s only a 50/50 chance if we know ourselves and not our opponents. We’ve been living in 50/50 land for the balance of the 21st Century with claims on a leadership that feels as distant as any form of national unity.

These are not passing considerations. They’re defining and they are binding.

Polite Media Part II– The Reemergence of Corporate Social Networks

A Three Part Series on Reimagining Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion

PART II: Employee Engagement Finds its Voice

Part two of our three part series on workplace-based social media addresses the use cases and tangible benefits of its adoption. Key to that success are the underlying trust factors. It’s this sense of belonging that enable participants to contribute in both their work roles and as members within these communities. Employee retention tops all success factors.

A Three Part Series on the Reimaging of Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion
A camera on the meeting screen is now a seat at the table. (c) yektafurniture-com

3. Scaling the Firewalls

Before the pandemic, the choice was simply toe the line or leave. There was no shared social history that lived outside the data fortress of the corporate firewall. Anyone attempting to step outside it was greeted with the same studied ferocity as those greeting the hacker-invaders attempting to break-in. This false equivalency criminalized the notion that a corporation be held externally accountable for its own internal actions.

There still is no safe public harbor for the trading of these untold white collar war stories. A half-century of employment laws and workforce reductions are not to reverse course in deference to the opening of our local chapter of corporate Facebook. In fact, management’s legal stranglehold on corporate labor is one of the galvanizing forces for instilling civility and cooperation in ways completely alien and largely absent from advertiser-driven social media.

In fact enterprise social networking is a valuable opportunity to reimagine the social media conversation. Shedding the conflict-seeking grandstanding of the agitator is both good for bonding and the bottom-line. Realizing the limitations of social media for resolving disputes is another part of that rethinking. Locking horns on screen is another reason to close potentially explosive and incendiary posts so that cooler heads intervene, arriving at an “offline” resolution.

Finally, the toxic mingling of obsessive behavior and competitive bargaining is another regrettable piece of recent social media experience. Its removal is supported by the need for greater cross-enterprise cooperation. No vanity-induced campaigns for the most winks or fewest unsubscribes.

Promoting a healthy participation rate includes generous helpings of member counts and feed interactions specific to the full potential of each group. No need to pit them against one another or in side-by-side comparisons. Remember, social metrics that support cooperation are not those sports league betting formulas used to measure external success.

4. Where Is the Conversation Headed?

What happens when the voice of the employee gets a seat at the table?

Whether limited to encryption keys or scripted for applause lines in town halls, all of these stories are siloed at the discretion of top management and their container-keepers. What you say here stays here. What you see here never happened if it didn’t go down as planned. What you hear later is a stilted reconstruction of rationales used to justify the impact of events no one saw coming.

So why rock the boat now? Who was ever naive enough to suggest that corporate playbooks are open secrets? That their appetites for growth and the conflicts of interest posed by this solitary purpose should be scrutinized and confronted? We call for investigations and expect our public institutions to weigh transparency against a fair return on shareholder capital. Why not the workers who generate those same results behind the muffled seclusion of the firewall?

So, who is our expert witness here? Who can speak to both power and the need for open discussion? If you want extra helpings of candor and credibility, don’t ask a current employee about the employer you’re considering. Ask a former employee. Someone with no skin in a game they once played to win under the same rules you’ll soon be learning.

They’re under no obligation to side-step the problem personalities, undue hardships, or plain dumb stuff that passes for standard protocol when: (1) the blame gets assigned, while (2) the underlying problems go unaddressed when your firsthand witness decides to jump ship.

Maybe in a pre-jaundiced view of social media, there would be a pooling of internal webs. This is a rally cry for collective action to scale the firewalls not high enough to hold us in.

Here are three such expressions of this initiative:

a) War Stories:

Develop success cases told around a communal fire through open discourse and courageous debate.

b) Knowledge Metrics:

Use enterprise social networking analytics to quantify the involvement of network communities in opportunity gains and cost containment, i.e. employee self service.

c) Process Guidance:

Provide support to energized and often less-seasoned colleagues who wish to leverage guidelines and sequential learning in the practicing and mastery of new skills.

(c) blog.hubspot.com

5. We’re Waiting for the Desks to Settle

The long sidelined promise of social media is when it’s conducted within the decorum of what used to pass as polite society: Keep your politics, religion, and money separate from your daily discourse with others. From a First Amendment perspective, we’re treading into ulcer-inducing territory. It’s a form of personal discretion best left to AI-guided robots.

The argument goes like this.

In an age where visceral anger meets instant gratification, the noise of the mind has replaced the din of the public square. Therefore we humans are too authentic to suck it in a reserve of uncomplaining stoicism. In fact, emotional repression has never fallen out of favor inside the corporate realm. What’s more, a shared belief in a reliable pay check inspires the self-regulation missing from the toxic undersides of Facebook and Twitter. This politeness factor breeds big trust under a big tent, consisting of tens of thousands of employees. All with access to their colleagues’ posts, likes, and follows.

Perhaps the ultimate business value of a trusting social network is that the benefit of the doubt is extended to people we’re meeting on social media for the first time. These are no longer complete strangers. They’re former teammates of a current colleague. They’re newly hired to plug a hole we’re tired of fixing. They overheard that we’re onto something and it sounds a lot like the missing piece in their pursuit of what comes after the problem we’re resolving:

Degree of separation meets self-organizing teams.

A Three Part Series on the Reimaging of Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion
(c) ideas.ted.com

This was always the promise of a network effects. Now it’s landing squarely in the post-pandemic wheelhouse of the distributed workforce. It’s a workforce that could just as easily move to some other enterprise should they not feel included in this one.

Next week: The Reckoning

Polite Media Part I: The Reemergence of Corporate Social Networks

A Three Part Series on Reimagining Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion

Introduction

(c) Philip J. Britann

The notion of polite society has been pilloried in all directions. Since time immemorial, it summons an elegance and privilege shielded from the commoners and working classes. These refined rules of etiquette faded with our regard for elites and institutions. They fell in a heap, ringing down the privacy curtain that separates first-class passengers from coach.

Now, add social media to the mix. The language of the street became the vernacular of the screen. We gain gratification and followers. We sacrifice the temperance, discretion, and decorum of pen to paper, and spoken word as the primary expression of interpersonal communication.

Skip ahead a generation. Within the sanctuary of corporate networks, employees are now told that their companies reflect the virtues of a benevolent gatekeeper. Business success is no longer measured by profit alone but by private sector contributions to the greater society.

Re-enter social media. This time it’s not a destination app but a two-way communications channel:

    • The assignment? Pry open a dialog. Keep it civil in tone. Who’s involved? Everyone who wants to be.
    • What’s at stake? Shared perspectives across office, remote, and hybrid workplaces.
    • What’s being shared? Best practices, common interests, event launches, shout-outs, and no shortage of selfies.
    • How do we know they work? Look at cooperation levels between office, departments, and business lines.

Is this the workplace you remember vacating in March 2020? The shifting answer suggests that we have an opening for you well ahead of your return.

PART I: The Case for Enterprise Social Media

The opening argument in Part I addresses the crossing paths of social media with the virtual workplace and the unprecedented return to office of a largely homebound workforce. The social media factor turns on this key question. Can the same medium that bred widespread misinformation and distrust be used to build community and cohesion in post pandemic work environments?

A man holding a face mask and a woman reach to shake hands
(c) The Atlantic, 2021

1. The Socializing of the Remote Worker

I’ve met an unexpected and rewarding twist in my career as an adapter/survivor to the ways of keeping both feet in the gainful camp of the salaried corporate middle manager. The twisting is not the endless contortions made to remain employed in professions with insatiable appetites for awards, honors, certifications, and credentialing I’ve never possessed.

This world has been tone deaf to the many skills accrued in the weathering of the hire/fire rhythms that shadow its more famous boom/bust cycles. What does it mean to attain the title of Certified Cloud Practitioner? For some, it’s the beginning a rewarding corporate IT career inside an Amazon-centric ecosystem. For others, it’s the cost of staying employed. The exam answers are as perishable as last year’s jargon will be to your next passing score.

It’s a curious thing. Before the pandemic we listened in our commutes to podcasts about business, politics, public policy, culture, entertainment. What did we learn from our drive-time audio excursions? That once you go beyond the news, sports, and weather, you get a contest of wills. Not just who wins but who gets to define what victory even means. In any fathomable category of human endeavor there’s a shared and disputed history of how we got where we are. With one notable exception.

It’s where many of us listeners spend the majority of our waking hours when we’re not tethered to our headphones. It’s the history off-limits to anyone outside our employers, and even beyond the reach of many of our peers. When we sign our employment contracts at-will, we are never more than one bad work day away from termination.

In a tightened labor market those same management controls that breed conformity and reticence are keeping a lower profile. Open debate with superiors? Whoa! No one said the open floor plan extends to a hybrid workforce of mostly full-time remote middle managers and operations staff. Speaking truth to power? Yep, still the same career-limiting move we never left.

2. On the Clock and Off the Cuff

(c) karencortellreisman.com

But the rise of the social media feed is a new form of employee expression that diverges from the top-down command-control of corporate communications. No, this isn’t an infomercial or even scripted. Neither, as the social marketers would pitch you, is it an all cast production number. True, it is a dialog across departments, regions, and subject domains.

But it’s not yet anything as tangible as a territory, or a job family, or a set of performance review and promotion-worthy metrics and achievements. It is however a warm medium that permeates cold dollar calculations. It also holds the balance between a simple cost benefit analysis of remaining with one employee or taking the promotion in pay from the higher bidder next door.

Simply put, corporate newsfeeds, a.k.a. enterprise social networking, is the glue that holds those intangibles together. It’s not just about puppies, kittens, and paranormal geeks. Channeling our personal side into teams and projects is not about bloviating. Quite the opposite. It’s involving the moving inter-dependencies of groups unified by common interests.

The result isn’t self-promotion. It’s a shared outcome of working together, regardless of rank, location, or reporting structure. With increased engagement comes a stronger sense of community. This is cohesion that gives recognition, bonding, and personality to the often faceless calculus of complying with guidelines, engineering solutions, billing, purchasing, packaging, and keeping our heads down doing these things.

It’s interesting. I serve on a panel that approves, declines, or redirects requests for new communities. At the outset, we expected two things: (1) lots of pent-up demand for groups, and (2) lots of on-the-fly learning about what constitutes a new group and what doesn’t.

Six months later both assertions are both correct and misguided. (1) The demand has yet to recede. (2) We’re still learning. In fact, it’s gotten harder to negotiate when a proposed community is unique and universal, or, when it’s too focused on a group or issue best addressed as a topic or theme.

Next week: Employee Engagement finds its voice.

Hampshire is Back

50th anniversary scenes and takeaways of Hampshire’s return from the brink.

The College Turns 50
and Learns What It’s Grown Up to Be

Mounting the comeback without staples.

Last weekend my wife Patty (F78) and I attended Hampshire College’s 50th Anniversary celebration. We live one town out from where we first laid eyes on the future, long before we realized our marriage is what that future needed to be fully lived in. We went expecting some chance encounters with a few peripheral acquaintances and a newly untangled neck lanyard. What we left with was the renewal of hope that the future not only required but could insist on the continuation of Hampshire College. The grandiosity was unexpected. But there is much to celebrate.

We arrived with guarded, pensive questions:

    • Is the existential crisis of prepandemic times only visible in the rear view? Is Hampshire back for good?
    • At age 50, is Camp Hamp ready to declare itself the institutional grown-up in a crowded room of fat elites, insulated by their liberalism?
    • Does such emancipation lend authority to the traditional school fight song? The one calling out the injustices that now masquerade as the business of the usual?

Davis Bates F73 retells the story of the Div Free Bell: “You go out into the world and Division 4, 5, and 6 will find you.”

Paraphrasing President Ed Wingenbach here, few colleges can fall back on its social justice legacies without resting on its quixotic laurels. The Hamp he inherited didn’t have that financial luxury. What it did have was a devoted alumni community that considered Hampshire their academic soulmate. Not some option on a roulette wheel of school rankings but the only choice for them. An improbable mix of trust fund spoils, interdisciplinary modalities, and the pioneering spirit of the self-initiated.

By the Skin of Our Whims

Where else could you build a degree based on the skin of your whims? Where else could you demonstrate the value of your education was not clocked to your classroom hours but to the more expansive view of independent study. Not learning for its own sake, but for putting it to work — the fruits of your Hampshire labors.

The culmination of this remains the Division III — a thesis-like concentration anchored by academically-chaired committees and assembled by …

the Hampshire student as both messenger and focus of their purgatorial scrutiny.

Hampsters in contemporary habitats.

The committee assessed the merit of the proposed Div III contract against the abstracts of the thesis. Often within the experience of delivering their realization through scientific, literary, musical, cinematic, and theatrical expression.

It’s fortunate for the college and our community that these yardsticks for graduating Hampshire remain in place 51 years later. It’s this blending of freedom, support, and guided trial that binds the real-world fortunes of alumns to their original and enduring premise for attending Hampshire. It’s true that the process still carries this dogmatic insistence:

1 Div III completion = one liberal arts degree

Perhaps that’s the price for being left in our post graduate bassinets at the entry ramp of the professional freeway? But at least the generosity inspired by these rites of passage allows us to host these spirited disagreements for another day.

Hit the Ground Solving

There were the four schools that bracketed Hampshire’s academic offerings across the liberal arts spectrum of its founding: Cognitive Communications, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. The portfolio was reshuffled with the great re-imagining of Hampshire’s relevance and differentiation from other endowment-challenged small liberal arts colleges.

This urgency pares the precarious state of four evolving social problems with Hampshire’s own comeback from the abyss of the dim ‘Mim days of F18-S19. In practical terms this means that the first arrivals no longer dabble in Div I level flirtations. They jump into the furies of the current spasming century with both skidding feet, be it…

    • Confronting climate change,
    • Escorting white supremacy out the door, or
    • Defining truth in a post truth world.

Average White Male Band

The supremacy part of hitting-the-ground was especially apparent in reliving the grainy splendor of Hampshire Video. The only hue starker than the black and white test patterns was the white maleness of the crew and cast. At the time I think most of the Infinity crew considered themselves more as outcasts — even by Hampshire freak-flagging standards. But fast forward to today and it’s undeniable. That’s not a reason to pay an apology forward. What would today’s Hampshire students want or do with such a misdirected misgiving?

A more sincere gesture would be to mentor these new voices and encourage their own shaping and discovery. That we were afforded the same pathways is the institutional memory that bears preservation — not the memories themselves. I thought of that when I heard Lisa Napoli’s virtual presence of her eighties curation segment. Lisa was lamenting the loss of her Hampshire video legacy. I almost interrupted her virtual voice by challenging her familiar lament with actual evidence.

Recently I excavated a sketch where I cast Lisa in her future real-life role of reporter on the antics of Wind Shields. The interview concerns celebrity journalism and the fortunes of Brooke’s fictitious younger sister. In retrospect, the script is sophomoric. Like so many Infinity sketches, it deserves an obscure death. But at least I was trying to venture out of my hermetic maleness. And never had such inside baseball risen this close to the surface of my personal Infinity history.

Roger Mellen (S72) introduces John Bruner (F94) who guides us through a virtual tour of today’s Studio G.

Once and Future Infinity

My favorite 50th Anniversary ceremony was the Infinity & Beyond viewing and discussion of Hampshire Video. Full disclosure: I had no hand in the assembling of the program or curating of the artifacts. Yet I got scooped into the eighties reels like so many unwashed sweaters with their drying cycles set to a mod kitchen microwave:

    • Former spouses,
    • Long dried-up mod spills, and
    • Distant combustions of drug-induced creative angst.

All living in one throbbing continuum of a continuous metallic oxide salvage mission. What could be more legacy than that? A big pile of donations, that’s what!

Failing big windfalls of liquidity, John Bruner is the proud and capable keeper of the Infinity flame. The torch he carries was passed to him by the legend known as Gunther.* We learned from Bruner that it was John Gunther (F84) who executed the monk-like preservation of Studio G as a streaming channel on YouTube. **

* Also, thanks to John Gunther for looking the other way when those of us on security detail let interrupted the slumber of the editing suites in the early morning off-hours. As my Div III collaborator Andy Morris-Friedman (F80) attests: "Maybe you could crank out a 3 minute rock video within your 3 hour allotment. But not a feature-length documentary."

** As a second footnote, Bruner provided some homework to the time-rich and cash-strapped Infinity partisans. It's assigning times, places, collaborators, titles, etc. to the smoldering collection of orphan videos now stored in this YouTube-hosted vault. Please contact John for the QR scan you'll need to access.

Many alumns I remain pals with harbor a lost treasure buried in the metallic shadows of this vast, untamed archive. I look forward to providing the door, secret handshake, and instructions for crowdsourcing this reconnaissance mission.

Tom Giovan (78F) shared the insight that Infinity itself was always about the framing, the queuing, and the segues. He figured the folks who wanted their mugs to appear on Intran would emerge from the shadows as the weekly “programming” destination. It was the “glue” between segments that the Infidiots that anchored whatever submissions had gathered in the backlog. I can confirm from the era immediately proceeding Tom’s that the glue formed its own standalone destination, whether it was introducing the news, entertainment, or bastard of both.

Unwritten Histories

The existential flash point of Miriam Nelson’s ten interminable months as the school’s president may have been the shock to the system that we never got from prior leaders. Maybe her predecessor would sooner fall on his sword than his board to balance capital improvements with lagging enrollments and budget realities. In either narrative, “Mim” held the carving cleaver in the role of the grim reaper. In the overtures to her would-be suitors, she saw in Hampshire’s buildings, property, and infrastructure something that no graduate could envision or tolerate: the seeds of an extractive business.

Februry 2019 | Cole Science Center: The winter of our discontent and the seeds of our revival.

The collective rejection of this was on full display at this weekend’s celebrations. $10 million in federal rescue funds have yet to be touched. Plan B is in place and may not be needed. Is this Hampshire’s books we’re talking about? We’ve got the vision thing and the business side playing on the same team? Amazing!

Curiously, there were teary-eyed farewells to former President Jonathan Lash curated in the 2010s reel. Yet there were no postcards from the predatory aggression or student-led brush-back against the administration in the dim, grim Mim times. John Bruner explained this as so much footage trapped in so many phones that never found its way to an arching meta treatment of this epic and ultimately heroic battle.

Any alumn Netflix producers out there?

A vulture capitalism carve-out script awaits only your filming rights. Either way, the diffuse nature of digital artifact collecting is a major challenge to a technology that remembers singular images contained in a visual lock-box in the casing of a SONY videocassette.

Next Chapters

We all left campus with a pocketful of sounds, pictures, a crumpled enrollment packet, and the exuberance that comes with believing the is a vital force for social change in a world gone to shit on our watch.

    • Can Hampshire cure climate change?
      • No and sorry but wrong question.
    • Can we nudge it back to health?
      • Better question.

Patty and I will soon depart our unglamorous work lives as salaried people. We will exchange commutes and Tupperware with a surplus of time and experience and shower them on a Hampshire community that supports the future as a nurturing place. One supporting its inhabitants on the earnings of their humanity alone. A market at the service of its citizens. It starts with a generosity still scarce in these times of perceived loss and imposed transition. Tomorrow’s Hampshire is the nesting place.

No empty nests near the Johnson Library.

References:

Ed Wingenbach Letters and Speeches

Me and God at Hampshire

Plausible Disinformation Belief

It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy? Meet video game.

What Happens When The Escapists Are Greeted As Liberators?

Inside the House chamber, lawmakers, staff aides and journalists were told that tear gas had been deployed and to grab an emergency hood from under his or her chair. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Prolog

Much has been said about America’s mud wrestling with media disinformation and political dysfunction. Much has been debated about the competing versions of what America stands for and what she stands against. This clash of narratives is nothing new. It comes straight from central casting and sucks your news feed dry.

What is new is a switcheroo between two competing versions of how Americans view themselves through the social histories that form of our American identity.

One is the ideal of the American dream. The other we’ll call the American hallucination. The willful removal of context from the telling of dark, American stories. Those are tales where backwards thinking slips out the back door. Casting retroactive judgments on moving pieces of the human chessboard is not just some parlor game. It’s what’s on the news menu. It’s the future of entertainment.

Retrofitting a movie ending around changing attitudes is one way to explain the wholesale rejection of the moral codes at work guiding their time-appropriate behaviors. Another is to say this is what happens to a culture that witnessed the death of the American dream. On our watch die she did. We grew up in the promise of an American dream that was within potential reach. Of which reachers? That would be the upwardly mobile as-in … anyone with modest means and slightly immodest ambitions. We all knew the dream was both imagined, and as real as our devotion to it.

Yes, it was a marketing ploy. Not everyone would rise accordingly. And yet, shouldering those hopes would nurture our stamina. We will endure this recession. We will break out of this bust cycle. We’ll reach the point where it’s our money that’s being borrowed. The ultimate payback! Such were the trailers for the American dream that fired our young, professional imaginations. A generation later, that hope has dimmed if not extinguished for millennials gaping at mountains of student loan debt. Didn’t we get ourselves through school? Wrong question to be asking, Buddy.

They don’t root for the little guy because they know first-hand their chances of taking on Goliath or selling him their start-up is nil. Instead they’ve escaped to a world where the entire power structure is questioned. The elites and the brokers and the deciders are all accountable for the corruptions wrought by their abuse of this power.

It’s a power they neither earned nor amassed but simply inherited, thus bypassing any of the accountability associated with traditional channels of leadership and trust through public dialog. It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy. Meet video game.

Smell Testing Standards

Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill on her morning commute.

Like you, my wife and I watch our share of streaming escapism. Like you, sometimes we’re Googling while we watch to determine empirical fact from artistic license. Recently we traveled back to our formative professional adult times and streamed the movie Working Girl (1988) starring Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver.

If your post boomer curiosity is unaroused, I guarantee there’s no spoilers worthy of your alerting. The implausible resolution of a lurching plot twist rests on a wobbly bed of screwball comedy formulas. These wacky, zany, turns of narrative have long since thinned out on the expired belief they could pass the smell test. There were three bands of smell test results:

      • Sweet success (first and foremost): that an audience could invest its betting money in a series of improbable events coming true.
      • Scent of a popular B movie (next and likeliest): that the guy gets the girl (or in this case) the girl gets the gig and that conviction could lift the emotional prospects of its audiences.
      • Cheap cologne grade (last and least): that the silver screen could suspend enough disbelief to make them forget their off-screen troubles. Sometimes for longer than the film. Imagine! Are your movie muscles still limber? Can you still go the distance?

The final elevator scene has more sleights of hand than a fire-eating juggler of vanishing card tricks. And yet the world surrounding that bank of corporate elevators is grounded in the same plausible backdrop that would greet any movie-goer on their commutes the following work day. The change that director Mike Nichols is foisting on us lives between the hearts and minds of a repentant but worthy protagonist. Melanie Griffith’s hometown character is in a double destiny reversal with her antagonist boss. A worldlier and coddled arch-rival played by Sigourney Weaver. Who do we root for? Nichols makes the decision for us.

Crowd Scenes of Today

Is It Safe to Go to the Movies? Tara Santora, Fatherly, September 14, 2020

In 2021’s collective mental landscape, snootiness is not only in. It’s the cost of even entering the one remaining form of advancement. Self-promotion is the last resort of scoundrels and ambitious claims on climbing today’s corporate, political, and cultural ladder. Our seething anger can’t be directed at the privileged few cutting the line of our promotion. We were never up for one in the first place. And we still have jobs. Even if it’s a full time job just figuring out how to hold the one we have. Besides, no one is especially interested in our inability to rise in station or settle a personal workplace score.

However, aiming our invective at the tribe who cut the line? Sublimating my shame with healthy dollops of contempt for the success I’ll never be? Now you’re talking. Permission to uncork, sir? It is the contagion that knows no flu season. Our addiction to indignation is transmitted via smart phone notifications. No surgical strike implied when the car drives over the curb. Nothing pedestrian about these protesters.

Wait! How did we get from the crowd scene shot in a lower Manhattan office lobby a generation ago to the white supremacist march on Charlottesville in 2017? What do our current political upheavals have to do with screwball comedies, cultural smell tests, or the aerosols dancing off our phone sceens?

    • Everything, if you’re streaming wholesale retakes of historic tragedies like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
    • Plenty, if you’re rewinding to episode one of anything Ryan Murphy revisits on his $300 million tab from Netflix, or what Midge Maisel doles out to the knuckle-dragging GI Joe Schmoes in the smokey take-my-wife clubs .
    • A whole new backdrop to the Cold War once the viewer inserts heroine Beth Harmon into the cardboard cut-outs of gobsmacked prodigy bros and inscrutable Russians.

Bridge Construction Ahead

Tools of obliteration.

The point is to guide the viewer’s lust for justice to the obliteration of the bullies who tormented us through the 20th Century. The bridge leading back there is a fabrication that bypasses victims, heroes, and all history books that stand-in for the psychopathic reality hosts that set civilization on its heels.

    • Is a bridge back to the Twentieth Century the way to throw the cold water of reality on a Dorothy who mistakenly thought herself in Kansas …
      but that Kansas prohibited free and fair reproductive rights services?
    • Is it a bridge back to the Minutemen when San Francisco schools throw Paul Revere on the tinder of so many Confederate flags because of his mistreatment of Indians?
    • Is it a bridge back to the time when a white man’s country was his shining castle and everyone else new their respective roles and places? Who needs cancel culture when you can delete entire decades of coalition-building and consensus-making?

Does the retelling require the wholesale re-staging of our revisionism? A post racial past where open hearts and independent minds upstage inheritance, tribal rites, and skin tones?

Is that how social justice wins over individual liberty?

Is that how merit transcends birthright?

Are we sure we’ve persuaded our libertarian friends this is the way, past our open intolerance for one another?

And can 71 million Trump voters be fully culpable for their own alternative realities?

These are weighty deliberations for the most reasoned of actors and the most sensible of cultures. For the winner-take-all USA, it is a bridge too far for anyone expecting to meet solid ground upon its crossing.

2020 as Hindsight

In the screwball past, the audience could indulge in the implausible outcome, so long as the good guy was believable. Maybe a little more faith would enable us to fight the good fight long enough to prevail in our own reality series. But at least we had to power to change for the better.

That was the known quantity after the credits had rolled. Our current indulgence for these flights of historic fancy is the outcome of losing that faith. That expectation of a future we can have a hand in shaping, not just a present we’re preoccupied with enduring.

In the narrative, this was once centered on the change and growth of the protagonist. These days you don’t need to identify with the star. In fact if you stage an anti-hero your plot can beat up on the larger society without needing to identify with the star, as-in…

    • I don’t condone Walter White’s crimes in defense of providing for his meth empire family
    • I don’t sanction the use of waste removal consulting services for packing Tony Soprano’s adversaries in garbage bags
    • I don’t approve of Cersai Lannister’s power grab as much as I respect her dealing of bargaining chips. Would I despise a man any less?

But I do indulge with imposing my 2020 hindsight on the 1970s world — the same painted cloth of unyielding circumstance that hung behind the characters of my coming of age. The idea of switching out the social norms was no more conceivable than redirecting the crowd scenes in Working Girl off lower Manhattan. And into the East River.

Reality departures don’t mean that the reality keepers own the landing rights of reality’s return. It means that we must change and grow past where our own despair pacifies our anger and appeals to the notion of running out so many clocks. That would be the ultimate fiction and the breaking in the arc of histories yet to be written.

Talk is cheap. But shouting is even cheaper. Especially when it drowns out the opposition — the expense of listening.

And the cultural war prop room never closes for business.

Part Four: What Needs to Come Sooner

(If There is to be a Later)

Scenes from Last Episode

When we were last together in our third installment of episode three: (“Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good — What Comes Next”) we tried some perspective-taking. We slipped on the Gucci loafers of Senate Republicans to understand their resistance to helping the unemployed through the fall and winter of our pandemic discontent. We looked through the lens of Senator Rick Scott of Florida who argued that the hardball negotiation by Senate Republicans was a feature, not a bug, of keeping American labor lean, hungry, and ready to resume where it left off.

Senator Scott’s pumping on the economic relief brakes is understandable. The wealthy underwrite elections, the parties protect their donors and in Mr. Scott, we’ve got a two-for-one sale displayed proudly in the C-SPAN store window Remember that return on investment in GOP majorities a.k.a. The Tax Reform Act of 2017? Turning the clock forward to the pandemic zone shot us clear past the final solution:

1. Neutering and defanging the federal government.

2. Turning the clock back to a world of unrestrained capital

3. Fleecing, before fleeing the republic, for which it stands.

No Life Boats in Coach

Of course, once the plane crashes, fixing the auto pilot is a luxury for the survivors. Even those survivors in first class who can float their own way to safety. Even recovery of the flight recorder is a distraction to the stranded hoards in coach. Would the most unfit be voted off the island by the libertarians watching at home? What would women and children first look like to the crew piloting this rescue plane?

Wake up from the scripted nightmare and a cold splash of aspirational reality could revive us. According to former Treasury Richard Rubin, federal revenues were already running a full two points below normal when the pandemic hit. Compared to the glory days of the dot.com heyday and tax revenues are now 16.5% of GDP, compared to 20% in the late nineties.

My point? A narrow post-contested victory this November still brings the of wiggle room needed to reverse the 2017 tax holiday for those likeliest to make it a working vacation. That consequential first step has the public, and history on its side.

Confidence in paying for what exactly?

  • The freedom for taxable income to do the most good for the most salary-dependent people.
  • The priority shifting from American Color War to a national obsession with a shared precondition called economic insecurity.

That’s where capital in search of a home goes. Not its reflexive old normal routine: the highest return on the hoarded investments of insistent shareholders. That’s the bottom-line for the underwriters at the crash sites of broken auto pilots.

U.S. is Them

There are limits. Soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. We all need skin in the game. Even the self-dealers and self-makers who think they can redirect highway funds to repair their imperial driveways. It can’t fall on the losers of a prior election. We need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The concussive bluster of who gets to govern returns to the mutual respect of governing effectively. The new adversaries are not those in disagreement but dissolution: the enemies of compromise.

Here are the counter-arguments to Senator Scott’s tough winners-don’t-negotiate love from Rubin himself, a former Goldman Sachs-plated lion of Wall Street, and the furthest voice from the Bernie Bro Choir of any corporate-respecting Democrat:

Prediction #3 — The economy as a manageable problem to solve in a plausible way…

There will be ample room to increase revenues, on a highly progressive basis, for example, by increasing corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, repealing pass-through preferences and imposing a financial transactions tax. — Robert Rubin, Bringing the Economy Back to Life, 4.17.20, The New York Times

The calculation extends to health coverage:

We should also pursue universal health care coverage, preferably through a public option, while at the same time reducing  our system’s overall costs, which far exceed other developed economies’.  Ibid.

And that credit card balance!

Addressing our debt/G.D.P. ratio is in our longer-term economic interest and also benefits us in the nearer term, as greatly increased debt could impede the recovery. Ibid.

Some of these resentments began spilling into the public square over the summer. The backlash against systemic racism for starters. Remember that post racial society that Chief Justice Roberts used to justify the gutting of key provisions in the Voting Rights Act?

Perhaps those same rose-colored blinders are what justified the left’s lethargic turnout during off-year Obama era elections. Either way, that pendulum swing is in full counter-punch. Pendulum whiplash. Darkest midnight to highest noon.

A Petition to Replace Faster, Better, Cheaper

Why is it that economic inequality is not a bug of an unjust society? It’s a feature of a smoothly-running free market economy. For me, the answer is personal and simple. I feel lucky to have a job. And it’s not just any job so I double down on gratitude. I experience feverish gratitude that the job pays enough to sustain a family and a modest retirement savings. Head over heels on a slow day, really.  My appreciation reflects the precipitous fall from office to service worker. Concepts like recognition, generosity, or even job performance do not factor into this equation. Income flow for most of us is a precarious thing. There is no actual bump in pay for superior effort. Maintaining income flow is reward in itself.

Performance reviews aside, a former colleague summed up his amazement at another widening gap. It’s the one between

… How stubbornly we defend our pocketbooks against scams, knock-offs, and mark-ups… versus …

How cheaply we discount our own value to a contracting labor market. 

The connection here is more than personal. When every labor is justified as an exchange of assets, the cheaper the transaction, the more marginalized the laborer. We get this theoretically for buying cheap T-Shirts and jeans from Pakistan. Does that rationale find its way home when it’s our work product that finds its ways into the software code, legal contracts, marketing collateral, or even health care coverage consumed by our employers?

The corona-infested economy may well in fact settle for a continuation of faster, better, cheaper; especially if we don’t find a replacement for the race-to-the-lowest reduction-based logic. That’s a return to the humming along economy that dropped us like a stranded passenger that forfeited their free Two Day shipping flight home from planet Amazon.

It’s not enough to blame the status quo for this predicament. We need to intercept faster, better, cheaper at the factory gates before escorting it out of the board room. We need to knock innovation off its trajectory enough to factor the greater good into the disruptions to come. Only then can we justify a future that includes us in business-as-usual. Three next chapters have yet to be written. Blame their stripped-down open-endedness on the allure of alternative arrangements and these bloated time bubbles:

    • What’s an economy for? This is not the question that comes to mind in the reinsertion of the prior default settings of manufacturing and distribution. Plug and play makes sense to the owners of capital than the holders of debt, let alone the 50% who were a few off weeks from belly-up when the prior economy was purring along. How do we get from a trillion dollar cash injection to more of it actually circulating as we enter that tentative, post coma rehab phase?
    • What’s our collective sense of security? Is it to beat back the advancing hordes of the bad hombres? Perhaps it’s no longer about who’s: (1) labeling who the terrorists or, (2) determining the greater of two evils … global, or homegrown (you pick ’em!) Perhaps it’s about an America first that favors the nationalizing of the medical necessities we’ll need as more of us are victimized by changing climates, dissipating resources, and heavy hand of the unforeseen to come.
    • What’s the role of the individual in all this? Prioritizing what brings us together in shared sacrifice was a pipedream before this pandemic. It becomes almost graspable if we can re-establish the guiding clarity of the greater good. That’s no drug-induced high. That’s corona phoning in a sick-out from the Oval Office last evening. But that begs the biggest-picture question looming on the great post-pandemic horizon. How to see each other as individual contributors to that greater good, and not its dilution.

Will the pivot back to a road ahead be engineered outside the exclusionary interests of the muscular capital elites? Until offshore means: (1) a full-time residence in a private island tax haven, or (2) different planet to occupy, we have a shared outcome in a mutual controlling interest.

A Poverty of Professions

Part of that mutual interest is to occupy the time on earth of those whose needs suddenly outpace the capital formation of their labors. A paucity of wealth-providing trades and professions is a seldom mentioned scarcity in the recently completed run of the bull market. It’s also curious that our oligarchy-favoring leadership decides that throwing unregulated profits at corporations is the shortest distance between record-setting unemployment and mission accomplished.

What future economy will open the door of career choices for the able-minded people of an entering workforce?

Prediction #4 — Amazon needs workers until … they don’t

In 2020, they’re arriving into workplaces where their labor is both urgently needed and conspicuously treated as a problem to be eventually solved.” — John Herrman, Amazon’s Big Breakdown, The New York Times, 5.27.20

Easy access to short bursts of cash works out great for the connected and the corrupted. For the rest of us, writing the rules requires a new way to tie three laudable goals long buried under an unsustainable pile of Better, Faster Cheaper: compensation, merit, and stability. OK, merit cuts both ways and the current steadiness in direction is taking us to some pretty unstable territory. How about if stable keeps merit honest? That leaves an open slot for “better” to climb back in… so long as we unmoor it from the  greasy downslide to the cheap farm that globalization wins no matter who’s racing.

You Don’t Have to Worship a Dollar (to Go to Work Everyday)

I’m a part-timer nanny who drives for a ride-sharing service when I’m not pinch-hitting for a local caterer.

How many gigs are you holding up? Are they even consistent enough to be counted the same from one pay period to the next?

What if the social contract wasn’t bleed-me-dry in exchange for a chance of a promotable event in some foreseeable future? What if there was an actual dependency between the personal fortunes of the big tech elites and my take home pay? What if the downstream impact of decisions were felt firsthand by the folks who make them? Would they make those same decisions if they had to live with those decisions?

Returning to Senator Scott’s cautionary “do better someplace else” tale on the Senate floor, when was the last time you personally were moved to refuse the terms of your employer? That’s the leverage needed for economic recovery. And it’s not a return to work or the ethic of hard work. It’s the dignity of work that provides for the workers and their managers. Not simply for owners and shareholders.

The dignity of work: Step one in our long national recovery to come.

The Black Hole of Blindspots

Part One:
Primping in Front of Smoke and Mirrors

I am an unreliable witness to my own existence.

― Russell Brand

In our last post we explored our metaphorical nose for sniffing out the evidence that doesn’t quite smell right: Keeping Your Nose Clean: BS Detection in a World of Fake News and Real Threats. Recognizing and acting on the stench of social media infused misinformation is not an elective but a mandatory requirement for maintaining an informed citizenry in a 21st Century Democracy. Fair enough.

But what about when we’re the messengers of our own research? What happens if our own personal biases compromise our findings? What does it matter if we’re connecting events, matching patterns, calling out questionable behaviors, and assessing the exposure of search targets in our case outcomes? Why show at the presentation if our research methods are not beyond reproach?

In this dispatch we reflect on fine-tuning the information filters that pass through all of us and onto those around us. These are the signals picked up through our words and actions that undermine our ability to investigate and compromise the success of our investigations.

In Part One, we’ll get acquainted with the blindspots — the self-defeating intuitions buried right under our noses (and our stars).  I believe that researchers and consultants have a special relationship with blindspots. It’s us agents of knowledge who need to test the limits of our own self-awareness. It’s at the root of our reputations and effectiveness. Only through a growing and continual pulse-taking of our unintended selves can we see our investigations through to the promise of resolution, justice, and a greater understanding of past events by the future histories we’re called on to inform.

On the Merits

Professions all have rites of passage. From passing the bar, to the CPA exam, to the laminated medical license in the exam room, there are a myriad of milestones and certifications to validate the quality of service delivered by a certified professional. There is no such credentialing for professional investigators. Our work must stand in place of any formal degree or accreditation process. It must stand on its own merits:

        • Doubt on the investigation’s sources and methods
        • Suspicion on the investigator’s motives for conducting it

There is one self-imposed quality check at the disposal of the investigator. The probing for one’s reflexive judgments or blindspots is the researcher’s equivalent to “Doctor, heal thyself.” More than one’s personal loyalties or internal biases, blindspots are the shadow elements that cast…

It’s not a passing coincidence that these two criteria are non-negotiable. They are the deal-breakers for producing credible recommendations drawn from sound research: The two gold standards from which hinge the independent judgment of the investigator.

Can You Look Bad Breath in the Face?

We are rarely the first to notice our own unadorned scents and odors. All but the closest friends and family are loath to let us in on this most universal of blindspots.  This private humbling packs some additional positive takeaways besides the need for breath mints. That’s when we exercise our sniffers as a form of entertainment.

There’s nothing escapist or recreational about getting closer to our own blindspots. Yet removing our own self-serving natures is essential for confronting our own limitations in:

A. Imagination: What’s being talked about in the discussions I’m excluded from? What’s my capacity to write a gossip column: (1) about me, and (2) without access to primary sources?

B. Perspective-taking: How am I being engaged in ways that bring optimal benefit to the other parties? Am I an emissary, broker, pawn, or stooge?

C. Wish-fulfillment: Where am I missing the subtext or nonverbal signals that deny or pushback on what I believe to be reasonable, deserved, or warranted? Can I remove my sense of how things should go from how they actually went?

All three play starring roles in the writing and production of plot twists we never see coming but the audience can sense from a mile away. Call it an overestimation of our talents. Overconfidence in our powers to influence. A tendency to get in our own way — even when walking a straight line. There’s no warm welcomes, smooth landings, or YouTube replays.

How else to explain our insatiable appetite for non-fictional crime stories? Do we believe the characters? Does it seem more or less likely that the well-reported narrative actually went down in the manner depicted in the Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon series? More times than not, it comes down to the frailties — to that realm of human weakness also known as a surplus of pride, a lack of self-awareness, and the shock ending that leads to the tragic fall of our antagonist. Why? A black hole of blindspots, that’s why.

There is, however, a deeper appreciation for the humility needed to endure and learn from the muted glare of blindspots. That living classroom lesson is easily transported to our role as researchers — a role that calls out for self-control, attentive listening, and not playing a starring role in our own insular narratives. These aren’t just codes of conduct and decorum. They are the very ambitions for truly excellent investigators to build on.

(Keep on Playing Those) War Games

While many of our own biases are exposed in our politics and expressed behaviors, blindspots land below the surface. They are the unknown-knowns. Their arrival time is also unknown and their blindsided landing zone is of little solace to the methodical and well-prepped. Well-resourced organizations have as much to protect as they have to imagine about the agents of surprise and disruption.

Some dedicate entire control centers and war rooms just to role play emergency attacks or adverse events that could expose a closely-held secret or compromise a key competitive advantage. These simulations are run in the name of risk management. Really what the participants are trying to do is anticipate the improbable harm that comes to organizations without the capacity to imagine these catastrophic off-the-radar scenarios.

Most war room maneuvers never live out beyond the darkest fantasies of their executioners. A few become false alarms. Some are legitimate enough to impose new fire drills or precautions needed to keep a lid on the potential dangers. All of them change the thinking of the risk professionals, competitive intelligence managers, and top executives who run through these paces. They improve their perspective-taking.

These exercises force them to look at the world from the outside and contentious views of those with much to gain from disrupting that world. We might not be stirred by the altruistic path of empathy when walking in the shoes of an enemy or adversary. But it is a critical to our own safety and preservation in conflicting, often hostile conditions that we can see them as an us. When we objectify our own positions we can better understand, relate to, and ultimately address those who wake each morning with the incentive to find and exploit our blindspots.

In our next installment, we’ll explore the more personal level of coming to terms with our blindspots: What that looks like in the context of “business as usual.” How we can take our own shortcomings on-board in order to raise our game as researchers. In our cases, this means…

          • Speaking with greater presence about events we didn’t attend,
          • Delegating to collaborators whose strengths include sparing us the investigative roles we’re not best suited to perform, and
          • Developing empathy for persons of interest who we may share little more than a unique assortment of blindspots.