Griesing Post Transitions To A New Home

NEIL YOUNG (in caricature by Sebastian Kruger)

As favorite rocker Neil Young once remarked, “You can’t control the back end of the donkey,” but you do have a shot at figuring out where the front end is going. In that spirit, I’ve been making some changes that you’ll all see in coming days at Griesing Post.

The blog is moving onto a stronger foundation that will support its expanding reach and enable me to do a better job of keeping current with you. In that regard, here are some suggestions going forward:

-Are you are already subscribed and getting Griesing Post in your mailbox? You don’t need to do anything. You will continue to receive it as you do now. 

-Did you bookmark Griesing Post, mark it as a favorite, or save it in your browser, on your desktop or in an email? If so, delete the old entry and add this new one: http://www.griesingpost.com

-Are you a new reader? Continue to find the great content you’re looking for at http://www.griesingpost.com and make sure to subscribe so that new posts will come to you directly.

When you visit Griesing Post you will notice some immediate changes, as well as some new ones that will gradually be introduced in coming weeks. You will also see that Griesing Post is now part of a larger site that hosts not only the blog but also information about my other writing, teaching and speaking.

Check it out, and continue to let me know what you think of it!

Thanks for following me here, and on Twitter @worklifereward.

On Having Courage & Dignity Under Fire

You pursue work that matters because you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. By doing so however, you inevitably run afoul of those who want to keep everything more or less like it is.

Attracting controversy also pushes you into the spotlight. With the lights in your eyes and a welter of voices clamoring around you, the heat of the moment calls upon you to say and do things that can either advance your goals, or set them back.

How you’ll respond at such times is important. It’s helpful to think about it, start visualizing how you want these moments to play out before they arrive. 


While there are many who have handled these situations badly, there are also those who have summoned up the kind of amazing grace we can learn from. This past week brought just such a lesson.

Margaret Farley is a nun, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and the emerita professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she has taught for 40 years. Throughout, she has been a celebrated teacher as well as the author of numerous books and articles, including Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York, 2006).

Last week, after concluding an investigation that had lasted 3 ½ years, the Vatican’s Magisterium (or Teaching Office) condemned Just Love, because it “affirms positions that are in direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality” and therefore “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling or formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”

In other words, the views Margaret Farley expressed in her book put her outside the boundaries of her faith. Her teaching itself—through argument and discussion in her book—was found to be an improper path for believers to follow in seeking either truth or understanding.

A half century ago, Margaret Farley chose to commit her life to a religious vocation of teaching within the Church. Since then, her work and her life have been united by this spiritual purpose.


Given her choices, the judgment she received last week is different than the rebuke of an employer, on the one hand, or the criticism of vested interests you are challenging, on the other. In each instance, what she has faced is more extreme. 

The leaders of her own community of believers have publically found that her work is incompatible with those shared beliefs. They have defined her as standing separate and apart from them. For a citizen, the word would be “traitor.” In a community of believers, it is usually “heretic.” Imagine standing where she stands today.

My aim here is not to take a side in this controversy but to comment on how Margaret Farley has conducted herself and continued her work in the midst of it. It is her courage and dignity—not her scholarship—that is teaching us today.

Her response was: Simple. Straightforward. Clear. Amidst a blizzard of media commentary (including in the New York Times and Washington Post) Margaret Farley issued one statement and gave one interview. She said her book was never intended to express “official Catholic teaching" but rather to help people "think through their questions about human sexuality." It was an effort to move away from “taboo morality” and bring “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources” into the discussion.

Not Angry or Contentious, but Disappointed about issues never addressed and opportunities lost. The Church said: "Sister Farley either ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others." She, in turn, asked: "Should power settle questions of truth?"

If we come to know a little more than we knew before, it might be that the conclusions we had previously drawn need to be developed, or even let go of. [To say that wasn't possible] would be to imply that we know everything we need to know and nothing more need be done.

Not Seeking the Spotlight, but Standing her Ground once she was in it. Because the Church "is still a source of real life for me, it's worth the struggle. It's worth getting a real backbone that has compassion tied to it."

Margaret Farley was my teacher at Yale. I know her as humble and earnest: engaged like the best teachers, careful like the best scholars. I sense enormous reluctance in her notoriety: for her to be taken as a champion for divorce or gay marriage, or even as a spokesperson for believers who are drifting from their Church because of its difficulties addressing questions of gender and sexuality. But her reluctance does not preclude her resolve—and this is where we find her today.

Once Margaret Farley was thrust into the spotlight, she knew what to do.

What Work Is

          I’m not afraid of poetry, but I don’t read it as often as I should. Somebody mentioned What Work Is, a poem by Philip Levine on the radio today. 

        I read it, then heard him read it, then wanted to share it with you for what it has to say about the work we do. Here it is:

       We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is--if you're

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

You rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it's someone else's brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, "No,

we're not hiring today," for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who's not beside you or behind or

ahead because he's home trying to

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you're too young or too dumb,

not because you're jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don't know what work is.

      

       You can also hear Philip Levine introduce his poem and then read it.

       Levine is a Pulitzer prize-winning American poet, who is currently the poet laureate of the United States.  He frequently writes about life in working class Detroit. His life story left me thinking about a different era in American life, of dustbowls and Woodie Guthrie and photographs by Dorothea Lange. About waiting for work and the opportunity to be productive. 

We are in our own hard times.  There is no less nobility in the work that we’re doing, and waiting to do.

Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference

          What we value is as different as we are. Our basic goals and commitments—indeed the fundamental ways in which we view the world—are as different as our individual life experiences.  So it should come as no surprise that in seeking work that has personal meaning, the approaches we take to finding it are different too.

        In recent commencement addresses this month, Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney recommended two very different approaches for graduates entering the workforce. Wherever you find yourself as a worker—just starting out, trying to improve your experience in the trenches, or thinking about a second or third act in your working life—their recent remarks can help you when thinking about your own “next steps.”

                                                                                                Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger compared their messages in A Tale of Two Commencements. Henninger clearly preferred Mr. Romney’s. But rather than “either/or,” I see their approaches as speaking to broad (and sometimes overlapping) segments along a procession of worthy vocations:  from personal service as a quiet witness to political struggle as an agent for change you can believe in.

As we search for purpose-driven work that can bring us genuine satisfaction, there’s a place that’s right for each of us somewhere along this continuum.   

Mr. Romney’s address was at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian school in America. Lincoln’s “doctrinal statement” says, in part:

We affirm that the Holy Spirit indwells all who are born again, conforming them to the likeness of Jesus Christ. This is a process completed only in Heaven. Every believer is responsible to live in obedience to the Word of God in separation from sin.

In other words, Mr. Romney was speaking to individuals who had already committed to living their lives in a particular, value-centered way. Most if not all in his audience already understood that transforming the world begins (and ends) with transforming yourself.

        For Mr. Romney, your work in the world is not dictated by the social problem to be solved.

The great drama of Christianity is not a crowd shot, following the movements of collectives or even nations.  The drama is always personal, individual, unfolding in one’s own life. . .  [Here] men and women of every faith, and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a purpose-driven life.

“What we have, what we wish we had — ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed; investments won, investments lost; elections won, elections lost — these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us,” he continued.  Those things happen within us.  For Mr. Romney, making the world a better place through your work is the result of “conscience in action,” and the never-ending commitment that it takes to always be ready for it.

         As many of you already know, Mr. Obama spoke last week to my daughter’s graduating class at Barnard, one of the colleges making up Columbia University.

                                                                                        Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

His speech was a different from Mr. Romney's as his audience.

         For the President, the application of your values to your work is similarly self-defining. But while your career may lead to internal changes, his approach to work focused almost exclusively on value-driven engagement in the external world of politics. In other words, it is by transforming the world that you transform yourself.

         The graduating women of Barnard have their own commencement as well as a larger ceremony with the other university schools.  Until recently, Columbia College graduates received apples with their diplomas to symbolize the “core” curriculum they had studied.  That is until someone removed the fruit because year after year Columbia men delighted in pelting Barnard women with their apples.  Barnard women understand the politics of gender on their campus, and Mr. Obama connected with this understanding when talking about how values should inform their working lives.

        “Remember, making your mark on the world is hard,” the President said. You need “to fight for your seat at the table.” Only by doing so will you be able to “earn equal pay for equal work,” and “fully control decisions about your own health.”  Somebody told Labor Secretary Hilda Solis that she wasn’t smart enough to go to college, but she didn’t let others hold her down, and you shouldn’t either. There will always be “those who oppose change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo [and] have always bet on the public’s cynicism or the public’s complacency.”  [D]on’t accept somebody else’s construction of how things ought to be.”

         In their commencement addresses, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama offered fundamentally different marching orders to those approaching the work of their lives.  In their starkest forms, one approach is about internal transformation, the other, external struggle. Think about these differences as you examine the work you have, and the work you want.

         In his Journal column, Mr. Renninger found “less tooth and claw” in the Romney speech than in Obama’s.  I think it depends on your worldview, and where the animals that need your taming reside.

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.