He illustrates innovation by improvising on a piano. He plays the standard transcribed melody to an old standard and relates this to business process. The result sounds wooden and lifeless. Then he improvises around the transcription and the result is transforming.
He plays a random series of notes, explaining that while this 'melody' might well be creative, it's not satisfying. Satisfaction... in both innovation and music ... requires respect for a few basic rules of construction, principles of harmony, rhythm, and tone. The manager's job involves letting go, removing barriers, and helping people believe in the objective.
There's probably no better way to undermine the present than to stick your head far into the future. Time spent focusing upon there is necessarily time spent not being present here. We live only in the present.
Yesterday, I was negotiating with a potential client and discovered (again): the notion that we somehow manifest our future based upon how well we envision it is nothing like a universal law. The engineering class of manifesting might be enabled by accurate, attractive envisioning, but other classes are undermined by it. In a work context, insisting upon clear requirements and measurable completion criteria as a prerequisite for approving pursuit causes at least as much harm as good, and probably more. Anyone satisfied receiving just what they expected often finds their partner dissatisfied by the very same thing. Sometimes, in retrospect, we discover that our insistence on pursuing what we believe we must achieve causes no end of suffering all along the way. So much suffering that even fully achieving the objective can't extinguish the awfulness of the experience.
We are always creating our present while we chase our future. The great tragedy at the end of a pursuit, the end of a project, happens when we realize that while we achieved or even exceeded what we said we wanted, at the end, none of us want to do another one anything like that one together again. Our success destroys our ability to succeed together again because we ignored our present, not because we failed to achieve our future.
One of the Tarot cards advises to consider how you want it to feel, not just what you want to achieve, to avoid hollow victories. This counsel also might help avoid hollow failures.
Last week, I took a short trip to visit some in my community. As a possible sign of our times writ small, no one I visited with expected to be employed full time a year from now. Most are currently unemployed or underemployed, but even those employed full time were facing the certainty or high likelihood of layoff, slowdown, or shutdown in the near future.
One friend owns a twenty year old rare book business. Volume fell 50% this year. His wife, who has held the stabile, non-entrepreneurial job in the family, works for Washington Mutual and will be made redundant by next September. Another, the Chief Technology Officer for an e-business, will be laid-off this month. His wife has been unemployed the past year and has so-far experienced several bait-and-switch job offers, where the advertised position was downgraded between offer and acceptance.
Yet another, an experienced event planner, can't find any but volunteer work. Her new husband, a successful contract data architect, learned last week that his contracting firm was downsizing him out the door. An attorney admitted he was helping a friend structure a buy-out, but beyond that, no work looms on the horizon. Another couple, world-class consultants, have no idea what they will be doing after the first of the year.
Just this morning I learn that a friend with decades of executive experience in the Pharma industry, who transferred to a spin-off start-up, will lose his job this month.
None of these folks predicted --- or could have predicted --- any of this. None of these people can or could collect unemployment or pass muster to receive food stamps. Most of them have some equity in their homes, and some are already trying to maintain their lifestyles by bleeding value from underneath the roof over their family's heads. Each understand that this strategy is even less sustainable than they believed their former success was.
So, we can live in dread of the future, it seems, or hold on tight through these troubles. To the extent that we focus upon the apparently certain future, we might miss the gifts our present brings and disable the value our presence might bring. The rules change. When the paycheck no longer appears, do we stop doing our work? Our work is complicated by the absence of the familiar financial reinforcement, but not---unless we insist---eliminated by it.
This posting is the first in a series focusing upon a new phenomenon in our culture, where systemic unemployment is not centered on the industrial working class, the under-educated, or the traditionally disenfranchised. The new bread line cannot be satisfied by bread alone. Our national empathy might increase as a result. We might find reason to hold on even tighter to each other than we ever found reason to hold on tight before. Our choice?
Gardner mines the eternal argument between gut and brain, between what seems reasonable and what science shows isn't. When afraid, we are prone to jump out of the frying pan into a conveniently-located conflagration rather than extinguish the fire. This isn't crazy, just human.
Two weeks ago, the executives of our big three automobile companies hopped their private jets (having been ordered by their boards to travel by private jet) to shake their tin cups before Congress. Sent back to Detroit to produce plans to return to profitability, they returned with those plans a week later in hybrid cars.
A week to produce plans for returning to profitability after years of similar plans that only dug deeper holes? What's the likelihood that these plans, produced under extremity, will be more successful than the ones they produced last year or the year before?
The science of fear suggests that these plans are probably much worse AND will seem much better. We will see reflecting back at us from within them our hopes for a salvation from situations that could have no discrete path to resolution.
Planning might be our strangest response to fear and uncertainty. We are strangely comforted when we hear Obama propose a trillion dollar infusion into thousands of infrastructure development projects, each requiring much more than bucks and backhoes to succeed. The announcement amounts to Mickey Rooney turning to Judy Garland, saying, "I know, we could put on a show!", when the bank threatens to foreclose on Grandpa's farm.
There will be many complications between proposal and project, and even more between project initiation and delivery. These will be among the most complicated efforts imaginable. While they will be spawned to deliver infrastructure improvements, their purposes will conflict as each also intends to employ the unemployed (and sometimes the otherwise unemployable), spur local economies, satisfy regulations, find someone—anyone capable of auditing and overseeing their effort, while meeting hastily-concocted milestones and deadlines to avoid front-page accusations of cost-over-runs and malfeasance.
In the past, these conditions have resulted in massive malfeasance. Read The Confessions of an Economic Hitman to learn the sad story behind our attempts to spark Third World economies with infrastructure improvements. How money sold as economic improvement passed right through the target economy into the bank accounts of the multi-national development firms, leaving expensive infrastructure that simply crumbled under the inability of the local economy to maintain it or was managed by yet another US-based multi-national firm, charging heavy fees to the locals. Our Iraqi reconstruction effort attempted to follow this well-trod path, but failed. Ditto our reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.
Haste clearly makes waste, but what's an economy to do when haste seems essential? Science suggests that we might seriously consider doing whatever seems unreasonable at these times. Hasten slowly, the ancient Romans suggested. The dismal science of economics screams for instant massive infusions of cash. Doing that, we recognize that we might have more mindfully considered the territory just beyond the infusion, when the way it's been asserts how it's always been done to start building a road to nowhere, a bridge back to a past that has already gone.
The big A&E firms are poised to make a killing. Whether the economy gets encouraged will be secondary unless we remember the purpose of these projects is not the medium we must use to achieve that purpose. We will not be simply building roads and bridges, but reconstructing an economy ravaged by self-serving abuse. You can bet the same old players are lined up just as if this were just another trough. And it might well be.
The plan ain't the thing. We will need to meld science, engineering, and inspiration to do this well. Our guts will be screaming throughout, insisting through our fear that we'd better hurry, time's-a'wastin', and we're already far behind. There is always at the beginning, a big suckin' hole just aching to be dug. We're rarely better off when we start frantically digging.
