Just Plain Funny #1

This is the first in an occasional series of stories that bring a smile to my face (even in the re-telling), and may do the same for you.

As many of you already know, I’m in the throws of my daughter’s-graduation-from-college-week in New York City. While there have been several noteworthy aspects to it, having the President of the United States as your only child’s commencement speaker was certainly one of them.

Of course he doesn’t just stroll in and provide a little inspiration. You line up hours before. You too get the opportunity to meet members of the secret service up close and personal. Snipers gaze down on you from the rooftops. You get to deposit your water bottles, umbrellas and other weapons in trash cans outside. But despite it all, there are amazingly palpable feelings of expectancy as the pomp & circumstance builds to a presidential salute of your daughter’s Class.

(If you’re lucky enough to have the combined firepower of Barnard College and Columbia University contributing to logistics—as we were—you also are delighted to discover that there are only a handful of functioning port-o-potties for a couple thousand people to share during roughly 7 hours of secure confinement on the commencement grounds. Emily being a psych major and all, I was sure it was some kind of experiment involving a control group’s sense of urgency, attempts to suppress irritation, and on-going ability to sacrifice painfully for a college education.)

            Barnard has been the women’s college at Columbia since 1889, and not surprisingly usually features a distinguished woman as its commencement speaker. Indeed, the President's immediate predecessors in the speaking slot were Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg, who is Facebook's Chief Operating Officer.

In describing the tradition he was stepping into, I don’t know whether the President was relying on his own speechwriters or came up with the hook that follows on his own (it was really hard to tell), but there’s no question that his timing was perfect, and his relish in the embedded why-not-just-call-it-like-it-is almost sublime.

“You set a pretty high bar [here] given the past 3 years,” the President intoned.  “Hillary Clinton.  Meryl Streep.  Sheryl Sandberg.  These are not easy acts to follow.  But I will point out that Hillary is doing an extraordinary job as one of the finest Secretaries of State America has ever had. We gave Meryl the presidential medal of arts and humanities the other night. Sheryl is not just a good friend, she’s also one of my economic advisors. 

It’s like the old saying goes:  Keep your friends close, and your Barnard commencement speakers even closer.”

Base of Operations

Thinking differently about your work means thinking about different kinds of work.

We all know what we’ll to be doing today. But where are the people passing us on the street going to work, and what will they be doing when they get there?  Wondering about it, talking about it with some of those people, maybe even tagging along with them for a day can blow out the walls when thinking about what you should be doing with your own work life.

         Unfortunately, our “wondering” tends to be pretty timid. That’s because our focus usually gravitates to people who look a lot like us (are they more successful, making more money?), or who seem higher up the ladder (are their lives easier and more satisfying than mine is?). But what about looking less timidly, so that it’s not simply confirming what you already know, but about building your thinking around entirely different foundations?

TWELVE CORNER STONE - CUZCO      

         I heard Charles Alan Murray speak at Bryn Mawr the other night. Among other things, he illustrated how the bubbles we inhabit with all our preconceptions are fortified by the ways we live.

In many of our neighborhoods, nearly everyone is, for all intents and purposes, the same. The education we’ve had. The cars we drive and stores we shop in. The TV shows we all watch (or don’t watch). The sameness of our surroundings bolsters the image we have of ourselves. But it can be pretty thin gruel after awhile.

Aren’t we confident enough to open the windows around our certainties, allowing our lives to be enriched by what can be learned by living and thinking a little differently?

        Murray talked about looking, years ago, for a place to locate his young family around his research job as a political scientist in Washington D.C.  The usual suspects were the affluent, inner ring suburbs like MacLean Virginia, where the well educated and upwardly mobile were looking for “good schools” and a mirror of their hoped-for success. Murray made a conscious choice to look elsewhere, choosing a small town of a couple of hundred people in rural Frederick County.  He did so because he wanted to school his children around people who worked with their hands, ran small stores, didn’t have degrees from Harvard and MIT like he did. “More enriching for me and for them,” he said.

        Murray was also scrambling the expectations others had about him.

        Earlier in my career I helped run a civic organization with a board that was up to its neck in prominent Philadelphians. I got to know many of them well, and thought they were learning something about me too. They knew I lived with my own young family in the City, but despite telling them that our home was in East Falls (a part of town with a near-perfect slice of Philadelphia’s demographic, from projects on up), none of them could accommodate that I lived anywhere other than the one or two City neighborhoods they knew best.  So wedded were they to where “I belonged,” I just stopped correcting them after awhile.

 

       The prison I’m talking about is one that you, as well as others, busily maintain for you.

       I recently had a candid conversation about this kind of straightjacketed thinking with Timothy Rub, 2½ years in as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As he’s discussed elsewhere, the museum director’s challenge is to bring the past into “fruitful conversation” with the present so that it’s possible to imagine different futures.  In this, a great museum’s “present purpose” is to be “the foundation stone, indeed the catalyst for innovation and creativity” in the community.  But in this (as in so much else), it comes down to the people involved:  to his stewardship and to those who hold that trust with him. How, he wondered, can we breathe new possibility into great institutions when so many of our stewards seem unwilling to think differently?

                                                                                                                                      irraa@Flickr

THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

         There’s little to be lost, and the promise of a better world gained, when you re-open basic questions you thought you'd answered—once and for all—a long time ago.

Broadening your base of operations can support better work, a richer life, and more consequential futures.

 It’s time to start thinking outside your box.

Open the Door

Discovery results—as often as not—from our ability to combine the familiar with the unexpected into a new way of doing things.  It’s as true about the challenges we face at work, as it is about figuring out what kind of work we should be doing in the first place.

If you want to start seeing your work differently, there is no better way than to break down your preconceptions about yourself as a “worker,” and put everything back together with the leavening agent of new information.

Shake it up.  See new possibilities in familiar territory. Recognize how ideas that seem to have nothing in common (like “producing social benefits” and “profit-making”) can be brought together in an exercise of the imagination to provide you with work that is as productive for you as it is for others.

But what if we’re so ensconced in our little worlds that unexpected combinations—the raw materials for insight—can rarely, if ever happen?

         That many of us choose to live in a limited world when we have an unlimited world at our fingertips, at first seems to make little sense. Our smart phones give us near-instant access to almost everything. But instead of using that outlet as an opportunity to learn new things and to grow, too often we use the most powerful tool we have ever held in our hands to do little more than validate what we already know.

         Much of it is fear—a key by-product of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock.”

Barraged by more-information-than-ever that risks confusing our most cherished beliefs, there is a strong pull to retreat into our comfort zones in order to (as we see it) feel more in control and function more effectively.  

But how effective are we (either for ourselves or for others) when everything we think about and do is dictated by our preconceptions about what is “real” and “true,” and what is not?  

Making the glut of available information manageable doesn’t require closing ourselves off from conflicting information.  To do so confines us in a too-small world, because it’s precisely this kind of information that contributes the most to insight and change, to personal growth and tolerance.

        Jonathan Swift, the great English author of Gulliver’s Travels, famously said: “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

It’s not easy to be bold and try something new. It certainly required an altered state for me to dive into that first sushi platter 30 years ago with my friend Mitch, eager to give me a taste of what he was learning from his Japanese clients. But once you start opening doors, your days huddling around “the old and settled” seem limiting and lifeless. It’s about stepping out and being fully human.

        You can get a powerful glimpse of the thrust to evolve and fling open the doors to possibility in schools committed to innovation, like the Institute of Design (or “d-school”) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. These learning centers get students out of their silos of specialization by making all courses interdisciplinary, so that unexpected combinations start taking form. The goal at such places isn’t getting good grades or parroting the “right” answers, but risking the “stupid” question, learning from your mistakes, and sometimes entering a new frontier.

        Of course, reaching boldly through reluctance or fear and towards possibility can have benefits everywhere.

If you think of your work in the same old ways, you will have the same old work. When you believe only what you’re accustomed to believe and tune out the rest, how could it be otherwise? You’re living in an echo chamber.     

        You don’t have to be like everyone else, stuck in conventional ways of thinking about your work.

It’s not just about finding “a job,” but finding “the right job for who you are.”

It’s not just about making money, but getting a better mix of rewards from your work—including a sense of purpose.

It’s not just about products and services the market already demands, but also about creating new markets.

It’s not just about someone else giving you a job; sometimes it’s about creating the right job for yourself.  

If you’re not open to new (and better) ways of thinking about your work, you will never be able—step by step—to breathe life into them.  

Open that door.

I Am a Work in Progress

          How you introduce yourself has everything to do with how you see yourself.

        I am a writer. A speaker. A company starter and a dispute resolver.  But that’s not all that I am. How others see me, and even more importantly, how I see myself, is contained in the words I use to describe myself.  These words should include all the things that you are, including what you’re working to become: the dynamic as well as the static parts of you.

        All of us are works in progress, tadpoles becoming frogs. 

Fold to Assemble

That’s probably why it’s so limiting when people are summed up with adjectives that speak only to their former glories.  Academy award nominated actress.  Nobel prize-winning economist. President Clinton. What we hear is that you’ve already come and gone.  Summed up, and no longer becoming.

        Over-simplified packaging (even to honor) probably derives from our survival instincts.  A stranger approaches:  is she friend or foe?  As we start learning more about her, we put her in one category or the other. Where is she in my pecking order, and where am I in hers?  Today it’s no longer safety we’re most concerned about, but meeting the expectations we have for ourselves, and that others are busy imposing upon us.

        What I’m talking about is scrambling those expectations in the ways that are best for you as soon as you start talking about yourself.

        Doing so changes everything: the way you see your work, the way you think about your life. Because these are the words you are choosing to define yourself.

        Social media has made tagging ourselves the very springboard for conversation. This wasn’t the case “in the olden days” where self-description was limited to more specific occasions  (Resumes. A few lines in a yearbook. A short bio when someone was introducing you someplace).

        Today, we are constantly introducing and branding ourselves.  When there is truth in our marketing, these kinds of tags can move our expectations (and the expectations that others have about us) to the rich-with-promise places where they need to be.

        I have a friend who describes himself as “the home inspector lawyer, professional speaker, and raconteur.” His promise is that he’ll help you with your home inspection problems, and that you’ll have fun while he’s doing it. Joe is many things, but first and foremost he’s an entertainer: happiest when he’s making you happy.

         I am collaborating with a woman who describes herself as an “empire builder.” Whose empire, you might ask?  The stated goal is that it’s mine, but (in truth) some of the best energy in our collaboration also comes from being a part of what Amy’s building for herself.  And then there’s the software developer at a client’s company whose bio begins with “puzzle piecer.” When I read this, I see my fragmented jigsaw puzzle sprawling over a table and Jonathon’s getting a charge by helping me find that recalcitrant piece.

         People like this who involve other people in what they’re doing—and with who they are—are influential people.  There are even meters for tracking their influence (like Klout; PeerIndex; Appinions; and PeopleBrowsr, the creator of something called Kred). The endorsements of influential people are important precisely because there are all of us out here who want to be involved with them and learn from the choices they’re making.

         Mark Schaefer, a Rutgers marketing professor, has put his finger on the way that influencers are creating buzz with their followers in social media today.

This is an entirely new marketing channel, and when’s the last time we had one of those?  Done well, it can be enormously effective because you’re getting this advocacy [for whatever it is you’re offering] organically.

But organic marketing is really only part of it.  

It’s not the reflected glory from past accomplishments that influential people are providing, but future promises. In the words they use, each of them is involving our expectations with theirs.  Not by offering a static summary of who they are, but by opening a door that invites you into a shared experience you begin creating together:  truly, a springboard into the future.

Think about defining yourself this way.

It’s more than just words, of course. But the right ones invite others into your work-in-progress—while putting your best foot forward.

I am (not) my job

             We’ve all had the feeling in the pit of our stomachs.  Somebody asks you “What do you do?”  They seem to think they’ll learn a lot about you by asking, but you’d rather they never had.

 Maybe your job needs too much defending or explaining. Or you’d rather not have to think about “what you do” when you’re not doing it.  Maybe you don’t have a job to talk about. Maybe it’s just an inadequate measure of who you are. 

  It doesn’t have to be.

“What do you do?” is usually a stranger’s second question. (The first—“Where are you from?”—is just an icebreaker, before getting down to business.)  As he sums you up, he can already see your age, sex and race, and how well you present.  Your job provides all the remaining information he thinks he needs for his snapshot of you.

Because it’s a demonstration of your worth.  It gives him your rung on the social ladder. He thinks he’ll learn something about how hard you’ve worked and how smart you are when you tell him. You don’t have to let the question sum you up so easily.  

Never just say: “I work at ___,”  “I’m a ___,” or “I’m studying to be a ___.”

                                                            

Tag yourself differently. Take the opportunity this question presents to define yourself in the ways that you want to be defined.

            I was struck the other day by a column about work in my local paper entitled “It’s Not All That We Are.” The writer had been watching her co-workers, who had lost their newspaper jobs, leave for the last time. They got some final applause when they left the newsroom from the employees whose jobs—like hers—had been spared. Then she wrote:

         "When the applause ends, a dreadful silence sets in."

In this moment-after, when you could hear a pin drop, the importance of a job like writer or copy editor “takes on mythical proportions.”  Indeed, when it’s gone the void can seem so huge that it’s hard to find what’s left of the person who held it.

At times like this, a job can seem like all that we are.  The dread hangs in the air over those who have been left behind, silently wondering what the applause would sound like for what remains of them.

            It’s not just that our work is too important in our lives. It’s that the other things that are important about us are not more front and center—holding their own with our jobs as essential and obvious parts of who we are.

It’s those things about us that can’t be taken away when a job is.

While the question “what do you do” is looking for a quick summary of your utility in the world, your answer should always speak to your contributions and your value in broader ways.

Your answer should no longer be a label or a tag, but a very short story. 

It should speak to your present but also your future.  (I am this, working to be that.)  It should speak to your commitments.  (I write or draw or raise dogs, I travel, sing or climb, I help my elderly neighbors, I march in parades.)  It should speak to your spirit. (I live for the silence after a snow has fallen, or for the roar of twenty thousand baseball fans.)  You need to put this kind of information out there too.

A very short story in 3 parts that says:  my job is only part of “what I do.”  

Recipe

We all like feeling rewarded for work that makes things better.  Many of us are finding this kind of satisfaction in social benefit games.  At the same time, we’re also learning how to bring transformative change into the world by getting some practice first.  

Your rewards include feeling good about yourself because of all you’re accomplishing and the abilities you’re developing while doing so.  In social games like WeTopia, you reap other rewards too.  There is pride in the growing productivity of your community, empowerment from your ability to support those in need, and your own increasing prosperity.

Games like this also bring the best ingredients of the for-profit and non-profit worlds together.

They give you the virtual experience of work where you can do well by doing good.  They stir your imagination, and get you thinking about new kinds of work that you could be doing right now in the real world.

On the other hand, it’s disquieting to feel that someone is “behind our screens” watching us and gaining insights about human behavior because of how you, me (and millions like us) are playing these games. These social scientists and marketers are looking at how we respond to different sounds, colors and kinds of movement. They are even changing the variables we encounter in these games while we’re playing them to see if we do things differently or faster or better.

What’s going on here, and where is the upside for us in this kind of scrutiny? 

 Kristian Segerstrale is an economist and co-founder of a company called Playfish that makes on-line games.  In an interview, he described the difficulty social scientists have traditionally had gaining reliable information from behavioral experiments because they can’t control the variables that exist in the real world.  By contrast, in virtual worlds:

the data set is perfect. You know every data point with absolute certainty. In social networks you even know who the people are. You can slice and dice by gender, by age, by anything.

Segerstrale gave the following by way of example. If your on-line experience requires buying something, what happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? "You can conduct any experiment you want," he says. "You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that's just not possible to discover in the real world."        

What this means is that people who want to sell you things or motivate you to do something are now able to learn more than they have ever been able to learn before about what is likely to influence your behavior. 

Being treated like ingredients to be “sliced and diced” has risks for us, but also possibilities. 

         None of us want to relinquish our freedom and become automatons, manipulated into doing what others want us to do.  We do well to remember national experiments in social engineering, like the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in China and the choreographed death spiral in North Korea.

  

But we also need to recognize the potential in this brave new world for good.

         The behavior of millions of men and women whose voices had never been heard before was changed by lessons learned on-line, ultimately producing the Arab Spring.

The behavior of individuals facing repression every day in places like Iran and Syria is fortified by the virtual support of those who are struggling with them. 

Your behavior, and the behavior of millions of people who are playing these social games, is being shaped and reinforced in similar ways.  It is a training ground for changing the real world with new and better kinds of work.

Social benefit games are giving us a recipe for transformation—and the ingredients are getting better all the time.

  

Playground, Imaginarium, Laboratory

         You really want to know what it feels like to be rewarded for work that makes the world a better place.

Where’s the job that will pay me “a living wage” for producing social benefits?

Where’s the job that will leave me feeling proud of what I’ve accomplished—both for myself and for others—when my workday is over?  

There’s nowhere you can think of where you can bring your energy and talent to a job and get these kinds of returns.

         Sure, there are plenty of opportunities “to give your time away.” Places to volunteer. Worthy causes. You can knock on doors.  Call strangers up at dinnertime for donations. Play your guitar in a hospital room. There are many things good people do “after work” in your community.

That is, after they do what they have to do.

Because they’ve got to put food on the table, pay the bills, keep the wolf at the door. They want, and you want your work to have an impact, but how do you “make a living” and also accomplish something worthwhile?

Can you really afford to do work that makes a difference?

You never thought it was possible that your work in the store or office, in your car, on the phone or behind a counter could be about healing the world and, just like any other job, that you’d be paid well for your time, your effort and your talent.

You always thought it was “either/or.”

There was charity and there was business, but not the business of doing good.

         The world you can preview in a social benefit game like WeTopia is neither a non-profit nor a for-profit world.  It’s a mixture of both.

It’s surprising how fulfilling it can be to see your work combine with your friends’ work to help not just one child, but a whole school full of children. You’re surprised at how satisfying it can be—even in a game—when work that’s this fulfilling also comes with a paycheck, a home, and a happy community.

It’s the virtual experience of a business model for a better world.

As such, social benefits games like WeTopia give you a glimpse of something that may be difficult to find where you live and work.  Games like this fire up your imagination with new possibilities, and get you thinking about blueprints for different and better kinds of work. Work you can do solving real problems that are crying out for solutions right now, all around you, where you live.

         Beyond the learning-by-doing discussed in my last post, this is an additional promise of a game like WeTopia.

To imagine your work differently.

It’s a promise that the sponsoring advertisers, the sellers hocking virtual goods, and those IPO-hungry Facebook investors are all helping to bring to your interactive screen.  And in the final analysis, that’s not such a bad thing. Because when all is said and done, the merchandising is really pretty benign.  It won’t impair your enjoyment or diminish the game’s virtuous effects, and it’s easy to navigate around (if you want to) on your way to having fun.

No, all the selling and buying is not where we’ll find the greatest danger, or the greatest promise for that matter, in this brave new world.   

         Think for a minute of that showstopper in The Wizard of Oz where (of all things) it’s Dorothy’s little dog Toto who triggers an at-first thundering but-then almost conversational:

“Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”

(That’s Toto down there in the lower right.  Yes it required lots of dog biscuits, but it produced his biggest scene.)

And just like it was in Emerald City, there is a man behind the curtain in most of these social benefit games.   

Of course there is.  We couldn’t live in this age and not suspect.  But who is he exactly, and what is he doing there?  

He’s a social scientist who has never had more real time information about how and why people behave in the ways that they do (not ever) than he can gather today by watching hundreds, sometimes even millions of us play these kinds of social games.

Why you did one thing and not another. What activities attracted you and which ones didn’t.  What set of circumstances got you to use your credit card, or to ask your friends to give you a hand, or to play for 10 hours instead of just 10 minutes.

There’s a lot for that man to learn because, quite frankly, we never act more naturally or in more revealing ways than when we’re at play.

(“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”)

So what could possibly be in it for you, for me, for any of the lab rats?

It’s certainly not the thrill of being analyzed when we’re at our most unsuspecting.

At play and under a microscope.

(“Run Toto, run!”)

(Well not just yet.)

         We’ll take a brief look at the downside, and then try to find the real upside together—next time around.