Vonnegut Wisdom

Quote of the day:
“Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”
--Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network, describing America’s energy policy in today’s New York Times.

Quote of the day no. 2:
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
--Kurt Vonnegut

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am guilty. I do this. I admit it.

This is to be distinguished from mea gulpa, which means “I drink my beer too fast.”

“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” This is played out in all kinds of ways.

At our jobs, we try to do just the fun staff--planning, researching, “strategizing”--and farm out the real work to those who work for us. Let the assistant do it. Then the assistant can hire an assistant to do it. Welcome to government work.

If we have to do too much everyday stuff, or if we can’t move up in the organization, we get bored.

At home, we want to continually change things and remodel. When it comes to just taking care of what we have, it’s yawn city.

A fascinating corollary to this is spending weeks and lots of money to fix up a room or a back yard and then only using it a couple hours a month. This boils down to spending more time preparing it and taking care of it than enjoying it.

There may be a direct analogy to the theological cliche “everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.” Then again, maybe they just sound the same.

The more-appropriate theological analogy may be the being/doing comparison in stories such as that of Mary and Martha. Martha couldn’t stop busying herself when Jesus was around, while Mary simply was there.

Something to think about. Or not. Whatever. I’m bored. Time to go mess something up so I can rebuild it.

America's Number One Issue

Quote of the day:
“Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.”
--Bob Herbert in yesterday’s New York Times.

Quote of the day no. 2:
“When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.”
--Bill Gates

Education is one of our “been there, done that” issues. We hear statements like those of Bill Gates and columnist Bob Herbert and we think, “Yeah, yeah, ok. We’ve heard this before about a gazillion times. I guess we just can’t do anything about it.”

And it seems we really can’t. We just keep getting stuck in the political mud. Significant change in our schools requires both more funding and consensus. Both of these have proved impossible so far.

More funding is impossible because there is nowhere for that funding to come from. There are too many other urgent spending priorities, and raising taxes is politically unpopular.

Consensus is impossible because of long-standing entrenchment of three groups: reform-minded administrators, teachers and activist parents.

The only way any of this will change is if we can free ourselves from the mud in which we are stuck.

What is the mud? It is us. It is our apathy and indifference.

If we were to simply insist on change and take responsibility for it, things would begin to change. There are a number of examples of successful schools that can serve as models.

We can look to them for leadership and help, or we can face the consequences.

All the Candidates are Good

Quote of the day:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
--George Orwell

For the sake of sanity and perspective, I want to just make a quick list of positive attributes of each of the presidential candidates. This is not about issues or politics, but rather my judgment of the two unique qualities of each of them. You may have a very different list.

Barack Obama
Very articulate, eloquent and charismatic.
Delivers a healing message of the vital need for unity.

Hillary Clinton
Very hard worker and detail oriented.
Deeply passionate about improving people’s lives, and that government can be a powerful force for good.

John McCain
Has coauthored and cosponsored with Democrats several important and controversial pieces of legislation.
Is gregarious, open and speaks his mind, especially with the press.

As I say, you may have a very different list. But the point is that each of the three candidates brings something very important and very positive to the presidency.

I agree with and relate to one of them more than the other two, and I sometimes find myself feeling very strongly about it.

But when I step back a bit and really think about the realities of our world right now, I begin to realize that each of them has a good shot at being an effective president.

Ideas and Responsibility

Quote of the day:
“Diversity in friendships serves the exact same purpose as diversity in investments--to keep one blip from upending your entire world.”
--Carolyn Hax

Columnist William Kristol recently wrote about the difference between discussing ideas and proposals and actually governing. He suggested that Democrats are good at the former, while Republicans are good at the latter.

While I don’t agree with the party distinction, I think Kristol makes an important point.

It is far easier to criticize and make supremely reasonable proposals from outside any organization that it is from inside. This is especially true for government and other highly political organizations.

I’ve worked at several levels inside two such organizations. That experience leads me to question the sanity of those who run for public office.

Public officials at every level are blasted by someone no matter what they do or don’t do. There are critics everywhere with different points of view, and many of them let their thoughts be known, sometimes in impolite ways.

Those who don’t have to deal with this relentless criticism--from within the organization and well as without--have no problem joining the chorus on one side or the other. Those who don’t have to face near-impossible budget decisions--such as whether to layoff teachers or police, or whether to raise taxes--have no problem making the decisions, often with just their own interests in mind.

Things are always easier to run from the outside. From there the answers are clear. Maybe if we say them or shout them enough, the boneheaded mayor/president/leader/manager will finally do something, we say.

Abuse of Marketing

Quote of the day:
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
--Oscar Wilde

Here’s a follow-up to my screeds on marketing and conformity.

It seems that everyone knows something about marketing. Example: does anyone not know what a focus group is?

The use of focus groups used to be part of the mysterious and revealing magic of marketing. Now everyone has one or is in one.

Some people have boasted of being able to tip the process toward their point of view, which would defeat the purpose of market research.

Focus groups and research techniques have certainly been abused. Sometimes it is by companies trying to selling us something.

Most notoriously it is by unscrupulous political campaigns who conduct seemingly-benign surveys or assemble seemingly normal focus groups, for the purpose of deceitfully pushing a candidate or point of view.

Conformity and Marketing, Part Two

Quote of the day:
“The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.”
--Bill Nye

Among consumers, the need for increasing precision in marketing creates an obsessive anxiety, centered on always needing to be better and needing to have more. This feeds our perfectionism--our vague but strong sense that there is a special, joyous place we are heading for.

Of course, this perfectionism can never be satisfied, resulting in an infinite loop of distraction, dissatisfaction, anger, depression and other illness.

Among producers, the need for increasing precision in marketing results in an ongoing stream of increasingly-specific and disposable research and consulting, conducted by young, finely-tuned, highly-paid MBAs.

Some brands are able to succeed marvelously at precision marketing. We can think of the exemplars of both consumer and producer conformity, and how they are held up as idols, with extraordinary value beyond the intended purpose of what they represent.

Hummer, Bose, Abercrombie and Fitch, Viking, and Rolex are a few examples. So is a particular vision of America.

Conformity and Marketing, Part One

Quote of the day:
"I don't write about victims. They just bore me to death. I prefer to write about somebody who can pick themselves back up and get on with their lives."
--Terry McMillan

The pressure to conform has vastly increased over the last 40 years. Each of us must fit in to an ever-more-specific mold of a productive consumer and, secondarily, happy patriot. It has become a required identity.

We all both produce and consume, and extremely well-funded market science enables us to do both with increasing precision and for increasingly-sophisticated ends.

We “produce” into ever-narrower psychographic niches. Efficiency is pushed and pushed to levels where slight, unnecessary head or hand movements become the obsession of the day.

We also consume to fit into more- and more-specific psychographic groups. Because, after all, we really don’t want to belong to any group that would have us as a member.

Daily, we claim both unique individuality and membership in the most-vital marketing target of the moment.

The marketing goal from the consumer point of view has become how to be a consumer and fit into an unbelievably cool niche without appearing to.

And the “not-appearing-to-be-in-a-niche” is a niche into which we are all fitting.

The Office

Quote of the day:
“Sixty percent of evangelicals think that Jesus was born in Jerusalem.”
--Stephen Prothero

I love “The Office.” It’s such a right-on caricature of life in an office. As I watch, I often find myself feeling a sort-of diffuse deja-vu.

As in: I’ve worked with someone like this before. I’ve encountered a situation like this before.

One of the plot lines on this week’s show involved Phyllis going to a seminar to learn how to deal with difficult people. Naturally, there are several people in “The Office” who might accurately be labeled “difficult.”

One them is Angela, who is the second-most officious person in the office. The most officious is Dwight, whom Angela is secretly having a romance with. Dwight is so deliciously deluded and over-the-top, you may feel like giving the Dwight in your own office a big hug for not being so Dwight-like.

On three or four occasions during this week’s episode, Angela makes a demand of Phyllis, who responds with her newly-learned, canned techniques for dealing with difficult people. As you might expect, in each instance, this just makes the situation much worse.

I especially enjoyed this. In my working life, “working with difficult people” was one of the many training sessions I went to. Indeed, I came away with three or four specific techniques--only one of which was a bit effective.

And it only worked for a while, if at all. There was an unreality, a phoniness to it

I remember a coworker going to an assertiveness training seminar. When she came back, her favorite word was “let’s.” Instead of saying “we need to get the program log filled out completely,” she would say “let’s get the program log filled out completely.”

For weeks, every idea or argument she used began with the word “let’s.” It got to be comical.

If you’ve spent time in an office environment, or gone to training seminars, you realize the limited effectiveness of most management training.

I’ve been through training in collaborative supervision, MBO, management through excellence, the seven steps, and several others that I can’t remember. Each had its merits.

But everything really comes down to a few simple ideas: be honest, treat others how you wish to be treated, and listen well. At best, all these systems are ways of understanding and implementing these ideas.

With the demands and stress of everyday work, we often stray from these ideas, and our effort to find our way back through new “systems” can be quite absurd.

That’s why “The Office” is so terrific. It’s an odd, joyful and hilarious show with a resonant thread of reality through it.

Going Forward Indeed

Quote of the day:
“The deification of Jesus as well as Buddha is not surprising, but strikingly shows the enormous valuation that humanity puts upon these heroes, and so upon the development of personality.”
--Carl Jung

Pet peeve. Exactly when did the use of the ridiculous phrase “going forward” begin to indicate superior management acumen? I have been patiently waiting for this disease to go away, but it has become an epidemic.

It has become insufficient to make a mere declaration that “we expect sales to grow in the fourth quarter.” No, no no! Or, as the French would say, “non, non, non!”

If you are truly informed, current and authoritative, you MUST say “Going forward, we expect sales to grow in the fourth quarter.”

Is that inane or what? If this expression is not regularly employed, will we begin assuming “we expect sales to grow” actually might mean going backward?

I don’t get it.

Coming soon: the metrics of the business of metrics. Going forward.

Still More on Leadership

Quote of the day:
“Among politicians and businessmen, ‘pragmatism’ is the current term for ‘to hell with our children.’”
--Edward Abbey

U.S. News has published a list of ten “Steps to Becoming a Great Leader.” Yesterday I suggested that the very highest priority is an almost-obsessive attention to the first step:

“Envision yourself as a leader in your own image. Assess yourself and mold your leadership style to emphasize your strengths….”

The next part of it reads “...then plan to outsource or delegate the rest.” Again, this is true for both organizations and individuals. Life will be richer and your organization much stronger if you have people close to you whose strengths are different from your strengths.

When one person’s strengths complement another’s, a very productive synergy develops. This is true in both work and personal situations.

The second step is “Hire cleverly. Nothing is more important.” I wouldn’t use the word “cleverly,” because it connotes manipulation or deception. My word would be “wisely.”

The real truth is is in the second sentence: “Nothing is more important.” These days, hiring and supervision are often delegated way down the organizational chart. Often the people hiring and interviewing are not very experienced, and mistakes happen.

The most-common mistake I’ve seen is too-close a focus on pure resume qualifications. People are chosen because they have a bit more training, experience or education than the next person. The total person, job fit and personality are minimized.

Yet over and over again it has been shown that the factor most contributing to performance problems is not lack of proper knowledge, training or experience. It is rather personal qualities, like the ability to get along with a wide variety of people.

Leadership Part Two

Quote of the day:
“Instant gratification is not fast enough.”
--Suzanne Vega

An interesting list has just appeared in “U.S. News.” It’s called “Steps to Becoming a Great Leader.”

It’s an excellent list--at least the beginning of it is. For some reason there are ten steps. Maybe whoever wrote it had to have a round number. Having so many “steps” weakens the list, because it distracts and detracts from the vital importance of the very first step:

“1. Envision yourself as a leader in your own image. Assess yourself and mold your leadership style to emphasize your strengths….”

I’m stopping in the middle of this first step because it’s critical. It’s so critical that you might do everything else on the list but still be miserable and fail because you gave this short shrift.

Assess yourself. Be honest with yourself. Then focus on your strengths (NOT your weaknesses), and find ways of leading from your strengths. This is true for organizations as well as individuals.

The thing is, it usually doesn’t happen this way. For example, it is very common for churches to fret about something missing in their programs. Often it is a youth program or outreach to young adults and families.

Typically the church had some success with one of these programs at some point in the past (maybe far in the past), and has made many failed attempts to bring back the former glory. There is great concern because “all successful churches must do these things well.”

But amid all the fretting, meetings, and planning related to addressing the church’s weaknesses, the church’s strengths (and all churches have at least one) are just there, with little appreciation or special attention. They may even languish.

Imagine what might happen if all the work devoted to doing something the organization is not good at was instead focused on what it is good at. The church would have the potential to be really outstanding in a specific way, and would gradually become known for that.

The key part of this first step is understanding, accepting and embracing the reality that you or your organization simply is not good at some things. And that’s why you don’t have the heart for them at the moment.

This is OK, and the result of fully accepting it is a clear direction toward your authentic passion and strength. Which will ultimately result in the appearance of additional passions and strengths.

Leadership

Quote of the day:
“The language of American politics increasingly resembles an Orwellian monologue.”
--Christopher Lasch

The statement about management that sticks with me more than any other came from the titan of all management experts, Peter Drucker. It goes something like this:

“Management consists mostly of finding creative ways to make it more difficult for people to do their jobs.”

This came to mind as I thought about the current focus of the California-Pacific Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Just like many church bodies across the U.S., our conference has fretted for years about loss of membership. And that fretting hit a fever pitch in the last year as it became clear that the rate of loss was accelerating.

In all the study and research about what to do to reverse this decline, the one need that came up much more often than any other was a need for leadership training--for ministers, staff and lay people.

It’s terrific that the conference has come to consensus on this. It’s terrific when the conference comes to consensus on anything.

I’m a little concerned that a possible consequence of the leadership focus will be to impose standardized “tactics” or plans for success. While it is possible for such tactics and plans to make a difference, any change will not stick unless there is fundamental, basic change in our openness to, and understanding and expectation of, success.

The standard, repeating pattern in churches and other organizations is for hope to be placed in some new technique (or, worse, some new buzzword). Some church leaders become very excited and, as a result, some other church members get excited.

But the excitement gradually dissipates as it becomes clear that nothing is really changing. And so all the videos and Powerpoints and leader’s guides are filed away and forgotten.

The reason that nothing changes is because nothing has changed. The change needs to be at the beginning of the process, not a result at the end. And the change needs to be at the most-basic and fundamental level.

One suggested change: to fully appreciate and lavish attention and resources on the places where the church is already growing (translated “leading”).

For example, if a church has an exciting and well-attended youth program, provide significant additional resources and support (money and/or people) to encourage the growth to continue. If a church has a successful hands-on mission program, send resources to help it continue to grow and expand.

The only way the church will grow is when we can accept, embrace and support how it is already growing.

The dirty little secret is that many churches simply want to stay small or shrink. They don’t put it that way. But that is where their hearts are. It is understandable and it is not necessarily a bad thing.

But it is unfortunate if we have become unable to accept, celebrate, nurture and support authentic and real growth, wherever it may be happening in our communities.