Category Archives: Career

The Dream Works Only if the Team Works

Posted on by under Career, Connection

In the past couple of years, several of my colleagues have simply vanished from the workplace.

No announcements made. No fond farewell. Just gone — some of them temporarily, some of them permanently.

I have to resort to alternative means of finding out what’s going on. Are they still in our email directory? Are they still on LinkedIn? Because asking direct questions of management or coworkers is discouraged, arouses suspicion, and often results in getting no meaningful information.

Two people’s workspaces were left as-is for months, as if they were going to return. They never did. (Finally someone was assigned to box up their personal effects and ship them home.)

Here’s the thing: we are directed by the company to think of ourselves as part of a team. Managers are even called “team leads” rather than “managers.”

But this is no way to run a team. Because teamwork requires a reasonable, bi-directional flow of information.

Imagine being a member of a sports team. One day, you show up for practice and ask “Where’s John?”

Everybody shrugs.

You ask your coach. “I can’t tell you,” he says.

Game day rolls around. “Where’s John?” Nobody knows, or nobody is talking. And this continues for most of the season.

It’s creepy and it’s unnecessary.

And it undermines trust.

Trust, of course, is essential to teamwork. To continue the sports metaphor, if you pass the ball to a teammate, you trust that they will make the effort to receive it with the overall goal of winning the game. You trust that your teammates are watching out for you to avoid injuries and pull off the win. You trust your coach to not be giving you bad advice or dangerous substances (although trust in coaches has been diminished by some very serious abuses on recent years).

In the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, the writer Sebastian Junger explains that the essence of trust and connection is the belief that the individual is willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the group and the group is willing to sacrifice for the individual. It is a reciprocal understanding.

Here, that ain’t happening.

Which leaves me to wonder what is behind all this secrecy. Laws and regulations? Company policy? Distrust of employees? Wanting to keep employees unsettled and always guessing?

Because of it were just a matter of simple human decency, there would be more information, not less.

Books That Will Go Unwritten

Posted on by under Career, Dreams

I think I could write a book.

It probably wouldn’t get accepted by a publisher, and even if it did probably no one would read it.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I am fairly certain that I could write a book. As in, I have the knowledge and the skills and the discipline to complete the project.

But I have not actually written a book and it seems unlikely that I ever will. There are several reasons for that.

One is my career and my ability to make a living. Early on, my career was satisfying enough that it was all I really needed. I didn’t engage much in hobbies or side projects. But after I was laid off in 2009, my professional work lost its appeal and it was then that I began to think about putting my energy elsewhere (like into this blog for instance).

A related issue is my inability to find a way to write the kind of book I want to write while not going broke or starving to death. To do justice to the ideas that I have would require significant investments of time and money. I just don’t see how I could keep my job and write a decent book. Nor do I see myself financing the effort from my savings and expecting to have the cost reimbursed from the publishers and from book sales.

Many published writers in the past few decades have not had to make that kind of choice. A discussion of women photojournalists–while talking about photographers and not writers–nonetheless sheds some light on the business of publishing: “The business has been taken over by a younger generation, many of which have alternate sources of funding, such as trust funds…. [E]ditors have sought out these self-funding talents. They had little choice. The new photographers didn’t mind, they needed the validation the publications offered and in the case of trust-funders, they didn’t need the money.”

For me it would mean quitting my current job and taking a leap of faith on a project with a very small chance of success. I’m not that much of a risk-taker.

Another is that I’m only recently figuring out, late in life, what kinds of topics I  am so interested in that I’d be willing to devote the time and energy into making it a full length book. For many years I was very focused on only a few ideas that frankly had done already by other writers, and I wasn’t  expanding into anything new. I could probably do it now but few writers find success late in life and the odds are against me.

There are actually three people who I know or have known through the normal course of life who have written and published books. One is Charles Bock, with whom I went to college. Another is Ellen Prentiss Campbell, a former neighbor and someone with whom I spent a few years in a writers’ group, reading some of her early work. The third is Andrea Jarrell, another neighbor and friend. They’ve been able to get their writing out there. I’d love to find time to pick their brains about it.

Back when Great Literature and Great Journalism were being written, the market for such things was almost assured. People had few options for leisure activity but to watch TV, see a movie, listen to radio, or read a book or magazine. The publishing houses thrived on high quality material and were always needing more of it. Bookstores were commonplace.

Today the tables have turned. Lots of people write or claim to want to write, while we have fewer and fewer places where this writing will be seen. As noted above, old models of success no longer apply. And if you have a decent bookstore within 10 square miles of you consider yourself lucky.

Which has me wondering: how many books are out there living as an idea inside someone’s head that will never see the light of day because the basic pathways of writing for publication have collapsed?

Sad to think, but it could be hundreds of thousands.

Fighting the Battle, Losing the War

Posted on by under Career, New Economy

The international bestselling Italian author Umberto Eco once addressed this question: why is it that Superman, the most powerful being on the planet, spent his time combating petty criminals?

His answer was that Superman exists not to change the structures of a society based on representative democracy and capitalism. Rather, he serves as a morality tale for the masses who must live their daily lives within those fixed structures. He is an example to be emulated but not a champion for changing the way our world is organized.

Thus, Superman uses his phenomenal superhero powers in what is essentially hand to hand combat in the trenches, rather than trying to stop the war.

In the same vein, it seems to me that a majority of employment law and labor management has been built from and centered around what could be characterized as petty disputes between employee and immediate supervisor. In other words, complaints and conflicts and lawsuits over workplace issues deal most of the time with the friction that occurs between a manager and the people being managed.

But isn’t the real villain bigger than that? Isn’t it the work that people are being asked to do, and the company employment policies, and the income disparity between managers and workers? Isn’t it capitalism itself?

In my career, I have been both a middle manager and a non-management employee. I’ve seen things from both sides and I can say that both sides are constrained by the systems within which they must operate. Sometimes the strain between an employee and their manager is just a manifestation of a manager having to implement poorly considered policies, or an employee acting out due to problems at home.

I can envision a way where the petty interpersonal frictions would be eased with the application of broad systemic reforms. Things like better access to mental health care. Or single payor health care that is independent of one’s employment. Or less systemic racism. Or universal basic income.

If successful, I would expect that the number of little bickering disputes would decline, along with a decline in the number of lost work hours, lost productivity, and people holding bitterness and grudges against each other. Instead of litigants duking it out in a court of law day after day, year after year, time and effort could be put toward making the world a better place for everyone.

For all our feelings of having made progress and living in an age of advanced development, we are still very much a reactionary species, where we fight the next skirmish and never seem to spend too much time wondering why the conflicts never end.

Kids These Days

Posted on by under Career, New Economy

We have a problem. There is a generation of young people, now entering the workforce, who have become disillusioned with the largely unrealized lofty ambitions of Big Tech.

Yes, these young people have been raised with this technology and accept it as part of daily life. But for them it holds neither magic nor promise.

Increasingly, many of these young people want to free themselves from Big Tech and it’s demands of loyalty. They want a life lived more on their own terms, working with physical materials and time honored processes. They want to grow food, weld metal, make things with their hands.

But Big Tech is a hungry monster. It insists that young people enter STEM careers. It demands that they use established platforms and no others. It tries to make sure they don’t think for themselves, that they just become more bricks in the wall.

It’s a problem.

There will be a backlash. Those who are willful enough will resist the demand to enter a STEM career. They will become artists, musicians, farmers. Big Tech will complain about how there are not enough trained workers, that America will lose its business edge.

Whether society chooses to make these free thinking young people feel bad about their choices, or instead embraces their aspirations — that is up to us.

Tucker Carlson is a Miserable Human Being

Posted on by under Career, Critical Thinking

It is widely known by now that one of this country’s most awful people, Tucker Carlson, was fired from Fox News.

My first thought was that it should have happened sooner. Why it didn’t says a lot about Fox News and the people who run it.

What I only just learned is that Carlson, born in 1969, is only a few years younger than me. In other words, he is a member of Generation X.

This I find shocking and sad.

Why? Because I generally think that Gen Xers are better than that. I look back on the events that brought me to where I am today and I feel that I was shaped by those events. These are what the Pew Research Center calls “period effects” and they are the social changes, economic circumstances, technological advances, or political movements of a period in time and how people react to them.

My response to those period effects made me turn out to be socially liberal, fiscally conservative, a critical thinker who feels that diversity and inclusion are good things, and that all people deserve to be treated with a certain amount of baseline dignity and respect as a result of our shared humanity.

Carlson ended up completely different. He ended up as an egocentric self-promoter who cares more about money than he does about other people. He apparently thinks that diversity in America is a weakness, not a strength. He is someone who feels no remorse over peddling abject falsehoods, under the disguise of “scholarship” and “journalism,” for his own personal gain.

He somehow missed the lesson on shared humanity and has instead arrived at middle age as miserable human being.

Carlson it appears, is the evil twin of Eric Garcetti. Garcetti may also have an outsized ego, since many politicians do. But he devoted twelve years of his professional life to steering Los Angeles, a large and diverse city–home to more people than the entire state of Wyoming–in a positive direction. One cannot do that by peddling division and discord.

I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Carlson. But wherever he pops up next, I can guarantee it will be bad for America.