What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”?

From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire.

Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as a new development, that maximizing shareholder value isn’t motivating to most employees. Wow. Where have these people been since, oh, the dawn of the industrial revolution?

Folks have been talking about meaning at work, and looking for meaning at work, long before this recent ‘crisis of meaning’.  

True, we’ve used different terms over time.

• We’ve talked about alienation and estrangement to describe being cut off from meaningful work.

• We’ve talked about commitment and engagement, as attitudes towards organizations that ought to have meaning but usually don’t.

• We’ve talked about “leadership” as the process of creating meaning, even if only through charisma, from the top of the organization’s food chain.

• And, we’ve talked about vision and mission, knowing that meaning was in there, somewhere, among all the BHAGs.

There is nothing ‘new’ about the desire for meaning at work.

Just yesterday, Luis Suarez wrote a great post about meaning, in which he shared a vlog from Roger Martin, Dean at Rotman School, about “The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce“. Luis unpacks why any of us, knowledge workers especially, might feel a lack of meaning. He clarifies that meaning is an issue for every generation of workers, and that each of us needs to do something about refocusing business so that it meets human, social needs. (Read his whole post, it’s great.)

So my question is not whether we need meaning. The question is:

Why is our desire for meaning positioned this way?

Why do so many (like Dan Pink) position “meaning” as something “new”?

• Are we trying to avoid recognizing that meaning is something we’ve always wanted, but perhaps never felt permitted to ask for in polite business company?

Why do so many (like Roger Martin) position “meaning” as something others desire, but not us? Or that we desire for others, but not for ourselves?

• Are we talking about “Millenials” and “their” needs for meaning so that we can take care of ‘them’ while avoiding taking responsibility for ourselves?

• Are we trying to look ‘objective’ so that we don’t look demanding, or ungrateful? Do we have to make meaning a ‘business problem’ so that we can take meaning seriously?

I recognize that for many, it’s become a “crisis of meaning” because there is so little left to promise workers, in terms of job security, career development, gain-sharing, and ownership rights. Maybe after all these other kinds of ‘motivations’ have been eroded by the twin beasts of corporate profit-taking and work intensification, there is nothing left that we can truly count on to take our minds of the paycheck, and so we turn to meaning.

In good times and bad times, people have always wanted meaningful work. People have always wanted – and still want–to work in organizations that serve a larger purpose, where individual and collective efforts create meaningful products, meaningful services, and meaningful experiences.

Why do we treat this as a surprising truth?

See also:
The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose by Deb Lavoy

Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
Is your organization flourishing or withering?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

[(As I prepare for teaching the first class of the Business Technology Consulting Practicum, I've been reflecting on how to encourage the students to identify the unique gifts that they have and to consider how they'll bring these gifts to the teams and the projects they choose this year.  It's only fair, I think, for me to pony up my own 'gift' -- and that's that I love to ask questions and lure people into conversations where they can rethink & reframe their work, and then have a renewed energy for it.  So, for my students & co-learners, here's the rest of the story.   (Reposted from Jan. 4., 2010. )]

I love sticking my nose into other people’s business.

There, I’ve said it. It’s true, if a little odd. I think it sometimes embarrasses my family, this interest in other people’s business.

If you ever run in to me at a dinner party, or picking up kids at Tae Kwon Do, or walking to the train, probably the third thing I’ll ask you about (after yourself and your family) is what’s happening with your business.

If I can, I’ll ask you about the direction your business is taking, how healthy (or not) your organization feels, whether you are inspired, and how you’re trying to make a difference there.

I’m not so much interested in whether that accounts receivable issue is under control again (although I can talk about strategies for that) or whether it really makes sense in this climate to take on extra debt to invest in a new laminating technology (although I can pose tough questions about that too).

But I can- and will – talk about your strategy, your boss, your employees, your big picture, your enterprise perspective, or even your own hopefulness about your new direction, if you’ll let me.

People often find my favorite line of inquiry a little surprising.

I imagine that people are surprised because, while we often want to talk with our friends about how ‘work’ is going or what’s up with our careers, it’s not often that someone asks us about the mood in the company, about our views of leadership, and about how our organization is being authentic or not.

And, some people seem surprised when questions like these come from a woman.

Especially when I meet someone new (as I did at that New Year’s Day brunch last week, when we were talking about the threat of content farms to the magazine industry) I feel like I need to mention that I have a PhD from a business school, that I’ve taught MBA students and execs for years, and that I work with organizations and managers to establish strategies for aligning their actions and their purpose. As much as I hate to think it, sometimes new acquaintances assume that I’m your stereotypical work-from-my-home-office mom with a blog who “writes” and “consults”, and who has more to say about PTA fund-raising than about the motivational effects of various programs for re-pricing employee stock options.

And thus, sometimes people are surprised when I start to stick my nose into their business.

But, once we get past that possible implicit barrier, here’s what I usually discover:

• Most people quickly warm to the idea of talking about their business.

• They are actually delighted to have someone to listen to them talk it out, to bounce ideas off of, and to ponder alternative perspectives. Once they get going, they can unfold some pretty sophisticated concerns, and they do enjoy looking closely at the big picture.

• People secretly want to talk about their business, and just don’t get asked to do it often enough.

The best part? Sometimes I can even ask a question that helps people reframe the situation in a way that feels more hopeful, in a way that helps them see how they can make a difference. That’s actually my favorite part.

I am not quite sure why we don’t talk invite ourselves to talk with each other about our businesses, more often. It’s fun, really it is.

So forgive me if at first I seem nosy, asking you about your business.

I’m not trying to drum up another consulting gig (though, I’ll be here should you need me). I’m curious. I just want to know more about your business.

I’m pretty sure you’ll have fun telling me.

Photo: Wake up and smell the flowers from nualabugeye on Flicker

It’s too easy to overlook great business books.

Even with sites like 800-CEO-Read, authors’ own promotional activities, and reviews by thoughtful & prominent business bloggers, many terrific books languish on Amazon’s shelves.

Of course, I may be a little — shall we say undisciplined — in the ways that I come by my books. Recommendations from business people and savvy management faculty, gifts from colleagues, publisher’s newsletters, and even solicitations from PR firms bring books to my doorstep. Not to mention, the quick trigger of Amazon 1-Click.

Even granting the serendipity and the idiosyncratic set of interest graphs that bring books to my attention, I do take notice of “Best Business Books” lists. And, I notice that some of my favorite books never seem to be on these lists.

So when I saw that 800-CEO-Read listed Amazon’s Best Business Books of the year (so far), I wondered again:

Where are those great business books that I’ve read this year?

I tweeted that thought, and Lucy Nixon challenged me to put together my own list.

Before you check out the list, note that the books aren’t ranked. I don’t believe that one is necessarily better than another– it depends on the kind of ideas you need to inspire you. And, I won’t pretend that this list is “definitive”. By definition, a definitive list is finite– it assumes an objective authority and a scarcity that, in the world of ideas, I simply don’t believe in.

6 Terrific Business Books That Deserve Your Attention

Giving Voice to Values: How to speak your mind when you know what’s right, by Mary C. Gentile.

If we could do one thing better as organization members and business people, it would be to learn how to speak our truths to power, especially when they are relevant to the (work) situation at hand. We talk a lot about values– what they are, how has them, etc. but how about putting your values into practice?

Gentile’s book is not so much a ‘how to’ as a ‘how, what, when, where and why-to’. Starting assumptions that masquerade as simple premises help you anchor yourself in your truth, and then the exposition in the chapters helps you understand how to take action. Want to learn how to be a leader? This is the book to imbibe and enact.

No Excuses: 9 Ways Women can change how we think about power , by Gloria Feldt @gloriafeldt

We all want to be influential, and to make a difference. Sometimes though, after too much resistance to our change efforts (and to our authority) we give up. Heck, some of us even give up before we try. Thus, we stay in a place of power-less -ness. We fail to use the power that’s available to us.

Feldt explores our resistance to power, and give us four steps to taking power, while approaching the entire concept of power differently. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Feldt’s perspectives and personal experience are profoundly feminist. Thus, from the very first page, the explicit goal of using your power is to liberate, not to control, yourself and others.

Note: Men might pass by this book, thinking that it’s for girls. It’s not; it’s a book for for leaders.

The Whuffie Factor: Unleashing the power of social networks to build your business, by Tara Hunt @missrogue

Hunt’s book absolutely did not get the spotlight and broad respect it deserved when it was published two years ago. Yet, her arguments and ideas have been picked up and repeated by many social media gurus — often without the soul and the subtleties Hunt brings from her entrepreneurial, business-building experiences.

While ostensibly The Whuffie Factor is about creating strong relationships with customers and creating great customer-community experience, it’s really (in my mind) all about why you should found your business on kindness, generosity, meaning, and mutual respect.

Artistry Unleaded: A Guide to pursuing great performance in work and life, by Hilary Austen.

Mastery, originality, knowledge, experience, and enigmatic problems. Yum. Perhaps the best left-brain approach to the right-brain’s territory that you’ll ever read.

The ideas are dense, and the concepts sometimes feel esoteric, until you take a deep breath and let the wisdom seep it. I know I haven’t really absorbed the wisdom yet, but I keep going back to pages 176- 178, where Austen outlines “What true artists know that the rest of us need to learn”, to remember how to reorient myself.

The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy, by Nilhofer Merchant. @nilofer

Nilofer is an HBR blogger and and an inspiring twitter presence who is probably best known for her practice of “Murderboarding”. Murderboarding is not quite the opposite of brainstorming, but it is the step that whittles lots of ideas down to the chosen one.

For people full of possibilities, that one practice might be enough to recommend this book. But Nilofer’s exploration of the steps and connections critical to collaboration that is ‘strategic’ can be used on challenges big and small.

Different: Escaping the competitive herd , by Youngme Moon

Different is nominally a book about marketing, about developing product and brands that are distinctive, compelling, and meaningful.

I read it as a treatise on organizational identity and distinctiveness– obviously, my own lens. But any manager or organization member could be inspired and appropriately reoriented by using Moon’s ideas to reconsider what’s “meaningfully different” about their product, service, skill set, organization, personal brand, team, organizational vision– you get the idea.

6 Books– Not a Cop-out, But a Beginning

When I started this post, the title was “10 Books …” but I realized that 6 might possibly be enough to tempt you as you gather pleasure reading for your summer vacation.  And, I have a row of 25+ other great books on my windowsill, all of which deserve more attention and blog posts of their own. So, I’ll do another set in a few months.

In the meantime, if you have books to recommend that deserve our attention, please add the below. Oh, and send me a copy. ( grin)

I’m getting a bit weary of talking about “women” and having some people assume that I’m only talking about “women”.

Recognize that when I use the term “women”, I am consciously talking about “women” on the far side of complexity.

The Far Side of Complexity

The “far side of complexity” is one of my favorite concepts. Contrasting “simplicity” with “simplicity on the far side of complexity” helps us recognize how we often use the same word to label two very different understandings of a category, variable, element, or system. And, it helps us recognize how easy it is to assume – wrongly – that someone is being simplistic and not complex in her thinking.

I find this problem of assuming the wrong side of complexity coming up again and again as I participate in online and face-to-face conversations about applying feminism to the business and social world.

Who do you assume “women” are?

Sometimes, when I use the word “women” on this blog, on other blogs, and in conversation, some people assume that I’m referring only to “women” who are white, able bodied, cisgendered, US-based, and upper-middle class. They assume that I am ignoring the racioethnic, class, orientation, ability, and other dimensions of human difference that also compose a sexist system.

Worse, when someone assumes that I’m using the term “women” simplistically, they also assume that I am coming from a blind, unacknowledged, place of unearned social privilege. They assume I am only in the feminist conversation to help myself and women just like me. Then, they pounce on me for being inauthentically feminist, and tell me to stop talking. At which point I want to say, WTF?

Was that feminist?

This dynamic is not just happening to me; I see it happening to other conversants too. But here let me just talk about my own experience. And, let me note that this doesn’t happen often– but when it does happen, it can be profoundly painful.

Presumptions and Assumptions

I expect that this assumption is made because I “present” as (or “look like”) a white, cis-gendered, upper middle class, able bodied woman. A woman with this kind of social & economic profile is just the type of woman who’d supposedly make the categorical mistake of taking her own experience as a woman to be representative of all women’s experience. (Indeed, this type of woman is the kind of woman who historically did make that mistake.)

But, if we assume that a woman, any woman or a woman of a certain type, is automatically sexist in a certain way simply because of the categories she seems to inhabit, that’s actually a form of (anti-feminist) stereotyping. And, it engenders a dynamic that stops feminist conversation and social change in its tracks.

“Gotcha” Feminism

Anti-feminist stereotyping of other women, and the presumption of their lack of feminist enlightenment, inspires a dynamic in feminist conversations that I think of as “gotcha feminism”.

Gotcha feminism is a conversational posture that’s focused on catching someone being wrong and then turning the conversation to focus on her wrongness and her lack of adequate feminist consciousness. It’s a conversational posture that is rarely instructive but always punitive. It is a dynamic that prevents connection, thwarts alliance building, and stops our collective progress.

Gotcha feminism is a ‘holier than thou’ dynamic that aims to tell some women that they are not good enough to participate in the feminist conversation.

“Not feminist enough”

The idea that someone is not feminist enough suggests two other assumptions that inhibit social change. The first assumption is that there are defined levels of feminism -- that there is some progression where you are a better person and more valuable to the conversation if you are somehow further along on your journey.

While there may be different “stages” of feminist consciousness, there is no single path through them that is more valid than other paths.

The second assumption is that everyone is starting from the same place. Each person starts from her or his own place in the world (or standpoint), and branches out from there. Some people will begin their journeys from concerns that aren’t explicitly about gender dynamics and sex-based distinctions. They may frame their social justice understanding in terms of racial injustice, ableism, colonialism, social class, or hetero-”normativity”, just to name a few.

However, it doesn’t matter where you begin, or where you are. It matters that you’ve begun and that you are still on the journey.

If we believe that a feminist perspective is something we learn, we must expect that different people will be at different places in their own authentic journeys.

Commitment, not category, is what matters.

I also notice that the people making this assumption, that a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, upper-middle class woman only thinks of “women” as including people like herself, are more often than not relatively new to their own feminist journey, and are also more likely than not younger than me. No offense intended to my younger, super-aware and firmly committed colleagues — it’s just a correlation, not a cause.

Personally, where the age thing matters is not where you are coming from but instead where you think I’m coming from. Don’t you think that after 40 plus years of identifying as a feminist, I might have learned a thing or two about feminism in general and my own privilege in particular? Or about who “women” are, in all our complexity?

At the very least, if I’m going to be stereotyped by what I look like or how I present, the visible indication of my age should trigger a different assumption about where I might be on my journey of social consciousness.

More importantly, though, is that we take each person’s entry into the conversation as an indication of their interest in – and maybe their commitment to – learning more about making our work, home and world more just.

• Instead of getting ready to pounce, we should be ready to support.
• Instead of being primed to criticize, we should be prepared to learn.

We should encourage everyone who genuinely wants to participate, not act like self-appointed arbiters of who’s good enough to play.

The Feminist Conversation is Changing

At one point in our US feminist history, the idea that “women” should refer to more than one subset of “women” was an ‘aha’ for a large & influential group of active self-identified feminists. These days, though, if you’ve spent any time in the feminist conversation, one of the first things you learn is that “women” is not just some small group of women who are all alike (and all like you or not like you). You get this lesson in Women Studies 101, by week two if not sooner.

I wonder if too many feminist conversants are mired in the past, taking our analysis of the wrongs of “first and second wave” feminism and re-inscribing these dynamics on a different current world. Even before the term “intersectionality” was coined in the late 1980s, the feminist conversation was moving to embrace the complexity of “women” — how women are different and what “women” share.

Now, we should enter our conversations with each other understanding that ‘women’ is a broad, meta-category — a category on a farther side of complexity.

This is not to say that everyone ‘gets it’ and uses the term “women” intentionally to refer to all “women”. And, it is not to say that we no longer need to learn how our own experience is neither universal nor exclusive. But it is to say–

Let’s put the Gotcha Feminism aside. Let’s start from a different place.

Extend a generous interpretation. Wait until some other (feminist) actually demonstrates racism, classism, parochialism, or some other form of blind or claimed privilege before you impute it to her.

There’s simplicity. And there’s simplicity of the far side of complexity.

Let’s stop assuming that “women” is used in a simplistic way. Let’s start giving each other credit for understanding the complexity of the work we are doing together.

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

See also: The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament

If women had designed Facebook, maybe it wouldn’t feel …

So cold.
So rectangular.
So static.

So emotion-less.
So linear.

So blue.
So hierarchical.
So rigid.

So ego-centric.
So boring.

If women had designed Facebook, maybe it would be:

Warmer.
More welcoming.

Flexible.

Expressive.
Inclusive.
Emotional.

Aesthetically inviting.
Personalizable.
Collaborative.
Dynamic.

Intimate.
Engaging.
Flow-y.

Maybe there would even be some music.

Reflecting on Facebook’s underlying values

Have you ever thought about why Facebook doesn’t quite do it for you? How, as a platform, a structure, and procedure for “connecting”, it doesn’t quite create for you the feeling of being ‘with’ your friends, psychically and emotionally?

As a person who seldom, if ever, gives a ‘thumbs up’   when a virtual hug is what’s needed, I often wonder what’s missing from Facebook.

Design reflects values.

Everything ever designed reflects the worldview, the values, and the priorities of the people who designed it. Technology, and software in particular, reflects the implicit values of the people who design it. If designers value speed over warmth, economy over richness, or squares over circles, the software reflects these values.

Design recreates values.

Software also recreates in our social world the values its designers put into it, because the design of the software shapes and constrains the ways that we use it.

Facebook was designed for a particular purpose. If you are to believe the spirit ( if not the true story) behind the founding of Facebook, as shown in the The Social Network, Facebook was designed to replicate online the social experience of some socially maladroit male geeks.

So, we should be concerned about how the implicit values, social arrangements, and social solutions that are literally built into the Facebook software itself continue to influence how we interact across that platform.

It’s not just a question of design space that isn’t explored, although that’s part of my concern.

More,  I’m wondering how online social interaction might be different, and in so many ways better, if social media platforms we commonly use were intentionally designed to reflect feminist, collective, liberatory, inclusive, socially-justice oriented, values.

Imagine a feminist Facebook. An “Alt-Facebook”.

If we had software designed to reflect a different set of values, ‘Alt- Facebook ‘ might be:

– Less Spock and more Kirk.
– Less like Powerpoint and more like “UnPresenting“.
– Less about “me” and more about “Us”.

I don’t have a full picture of what a social networking site that reflected a different world view might look like. I need some help imagining what it could be.

What kind of online community would we create for ourselves, if we started with a different set of values?

Stay tuned: Monday’s post addresses Design by Feminists vs. Designing for Women: Politics vs Marketing.

Be Sure To Read this terrific analysis/review of The Social Network by Melissa Silver at Women and Hollywood !!

See Also:
Facebook for Women vs. Facebook Designed by Feminists: Different vs. Revolutionary

The Feminist Business Bloggers’ Lament
When will Social Business become Social Change business?

Interwoven 28 image, Some rights reserved by gurdonark

(This story was originally posted in September of 2009, and is slightly revised here.)

You will read many stories today recounting the heroism and the losses experienced nine years ago. We know now how many individuals and organizations rose up to help victims of the WTC & Pentagon attacks, and how individually and collectively our responses to the 9/11 tragedy revealed important goodness deep within us.

Every year at this time my friends, neighbors, and I remember who we lost, and what we lost, on 9/11. (I live just outside NYC in a community hit hard by the WTC attacks.) Some of us lost big things – best friends, family, colleagues, organizations. Others lost smaller things, like briefcases, laptops, and family photos.

What I want to share today is the story of how two different organizations – business schools- responded to a 9/11 loss experienced by one of their alumni.

A small-ish material loss

On 9/11, this alumnus lost many important people whom he could never replace. He lost a large part of a job and an organization he loved.

He also lost some material things, among them his business school diplomas. They hung on the wall of his office in one of the towers, and were destroyed in the attacks.

A few months after 9/11, when this alumnus was moving back into a new office, he decided he wanted to replace his diplomas. He contacted the two business schools where he got his BBA and his MBA, told them how he lost his diplomas, and asked if he could get replacement diplomas.

Two different responses

How these two different business schools responded to his request for replacement diplomas tell us something interesting about the values of each school.

School #1 showed that they cared about his loss.

School #1, where this alumnus got his BBA, went to great lengths to replace the diploma with something as close to the ‘real’ thing as possible.

Not only did the business school print a diploma with the correct names and dates, but also this school tracked down both the Dean of the Business School and the University President who had signed the original diploma. (Both of these men had moved on to other positions). This alumnus got a replacement diploma signed by the academics who led the school while he was a student there. And, they sent the diploma to him in an elegant frame.

School #2 showed something else.

School #2, where this graduate got his MBA, responded differently. When they made diplomas for the spring graduating class, they printed and signed an ‘extra one’ and sent it to the alum.

A few weeks later, they also sent him a bill for around $200. To pay for replacing the diploma destroyed on 9/11.

True values showed through

Can you imagine which diploma has more positive meaning to this alumnus now?

My bet is that it’s the diploma of the school that actually cared about him. The school that recognized his greater losses and his lesser material losses, and tried in its own way to help him with both.

And a reflection

This story is true, and it in no way captures the depth or meaning of this alum’s loss.

This particular piece of this person’s experience is almost trivial when held next to other losses and other responses that this person and others experienced that day. For this reason I alone wondered whether to share the story.

Also, I know from my own experience that the closer a person was and is to this tragedy, the less likely you can imagine or predict how it feels now and how it felt then, and then know how best to bear witness to their experience. Sometimes, too, the more public reflections on this day encroach upon the experiences of people whose grief is more direct, more personal and more private.

Why organizations must bear witness to our losses

Bearing witness to loss, as individuals and organizations, is a way to reflect on what matters most to us. When we acknowledge what someone lost, we acknowledge the value of that loss to the person. We show that we understand what mattered, and what might now be missing. And, we demonstrate that we value that person.

My sense from this story is that one organization but not the other was able to bear witness to a small, small part of this alum’s loss, and in that way to affirm its values through its actions.

That’s one headline for it. Another one might be:

“How to make a table of women with graduate degrees cry.”

I could spend a bit of time trying to set the scene to give you some perspective, but let me cut straight to the chase.

Sitting at a table, talking with my female friends– some MBAs, some JDs, all of us wives — we were discussing how again this year, the HBS reunion programming seemed to ignore overlook the (female) MBA alums and MBA partners who were working to ‘on ramp’ back into full-time, full energy, full size career paths. We started to pool the advice we’d heard at various presentations and panel discussions. Work-family balance, redefining successes, green business opportunities, blah blah blah.

None of it new, except for one zinger from the panel on Entrepreneurship in Digital Environments.

No, it wasn’t the comment about how digital entrepreneurs underestimate the physical, material elements of building an organization, or thoughts about whether Facebook’s understanding of privacy is too anchored in one generation’s view.

No, it was the nearly throwaway comment by one of the female panelists (Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook), in response to a question about the personal demands of being an entrepreneur. She said:

The most important business decision a woman makes is
who she marries.

The panelist appeared to be referring specifically to female entrepreneurs like her self, but we knew who she was really talking to:

Us.

Yo, Harvard MBA running the suburban PTO! Editor of The Michigan Law Review, at home full time with 4 boys! Baker Scholar turned part-time executive coach! She’s talking to us. (??)

We made bad decisions. We married the wrong guys.

Which is actually kind of hard to believe, if you look at the guys we married. We married the kind ones, the not too terribly selfish ones, the ones who joined the Peace Corp before returning to Mc Kinsey, the ones who took jobs in Detroit so we could finish our degrees, the ones who knew better than to talk about market capitalization at the Montessori PreK picnic.

We married good guys. But, for our own careers, this was supposedly the wrong decision.

Because, if we’d chosen different men or not to marry entirely, we might be running Facebook, or the natural beverage division of a multinational food company, or the private equity firm that just closed its latest fund when it hit 5 billion dollars.

Is that really how it works?

I don’t think the issue is whether or not we made a bad decision when we got married. The issue is how very much that decision influenced what we have been able to do, and what we have subsequently “chosen” to do, with our careers, within our marriages.

Where do we go with a ‘truth’ like this?

We can go in three directions to interrogate a statement like The most important business decision a woman makes is who she marries.

1. We can ask in what ways that statement is true.

Because it is true. Any partnership constrains some choices and enables others. We might each be on bigger career paths, with big W2s and even bigger carries, if we’d chosen different partners. The partners we chose reflected our hopes and expectations for how work & life would be. Back when we all were more naive, and when changes seemed imminent.

2. We can ask why this advice is given to business women, because this advice is and has always also been true for men.

Male MBAs’ achievement of big careers is almost always supported by some other adult taking on full responsibility for the domestic front.

Thus, our spouses are having the careers that they are having, in no small part because of the careers we wives are *not* having.  Just as She gets to run that start-up because He’s home with the 3 kids, He gets to run that start-up because She’s at home with 3 kids.

3. We can ask why partner choice– and choices within the partnership– are only as far as the advice goes.

Why is the importance– and thus the blame– placed on who you marry/ partner, and not on why MBA, JD, and so many other careers are set up so that full-on, big time success is possible only for one partner?

Why doesn’t the advice focus on changing the organizations and the structure of the career paths themselves?

Why isn’t the advice: The important business decisions we can make are those that transform our organizations so that, in more if not most situations, both members of a marriage or partnership can have big careers?

The Decisions at the Table

I’m getting all curmudgeon-y and grumpy here are I write this … I know I’m responsible for my decisions. At the same time I’m unhappy, appalled and frankly angry at the limited set of choices and at how these choices have played out.

If you’d told us in 1990 that our choice of spouses was the most important business decision we’d make, we’d have laughed. Scoffed, even.

We were sure it was going to be different. Our educations and our career ambitions were bigger than our mothers’. Our spouses were more enlightened than our dads. Our business futures were brighter.

Sure we’re happy. We love our spouses. We love our kids. We feel strongly that our priorities are in order. We know that we actually did make these choices, and that other choices might have made us less happy in the end.

And, we hope know that it’s not over yet.

So we can sit there, at the banquet table at the Harvard Business School 20th Reunion, with our MBAs, our JDs, our PhDs, and our ambitions, sharing our dismay and a few tears.

Because we get it. For each of us at this particular table, the most important decision we’ve made has been about whom to marry, and from that decision what partnerships to build, what families to create, what values to live.

We just weren’t ready to treat this as a business decision.

And, apparently, it was.

And that, girlfriends, was the horrible work-life truth I learned at the Harvard Business School Reunion.

Image: Messages by RobyneGay

Here’s a little story, compelling in its simplicity, about an organizational situation that raises issues of loyalty, commitment, and engagement.

When I heard about the initial situation, I had an immediate reaction. My analysis was quickly followed by a few recommendations for the employee involved.  [ Of course, as an ENTJ, I am quick to come to conclusions -- and I try to balance that by quickly re-opening to new interpretations.]

Turns out, my analysis was completely wrong. So, I’m interested to hear your interpretations of what could be going on here.

The story:

This recent MBA grad works as the communications/ public relations/ social media/ odds ‘n ends person for a small-ish tech start-up. The start-up’s team is composed of full-time employees, some Hr- & accounting-ish folks loaned to them part-time by their investors’ other companies, and a few of the investors themselves.

A few weeks ago most of them participated in a meeting where they talked about their product development plans for Q4. Their market and their products have been changing rapidly; they have several new and revised product ideas and were tossing around some potential names. A few of the names were really great combinations of their main product’s name and these new features, and seemed like winners.

The day after the meeting, while thinking about social media opportunities for these new products, this manager thought she’d run a (Google) search on some of the proposed names.

Should she have been surprised to discover that three of these possible product names had been registered as domain names, that very morning? Not by her, not by the product manager, not by somebody’s staff attorney, but by somebody.

Oh, yes, and these domain names were up for sale.

Coincidence? Conspiracy? Coordination problems?

If you were this employee, how would you have reacted to your discovery? Then, what would you do?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.   And, I’ll share the rest of the story tomorrow in the comments.

[I can't really find a link between these ideas and concepts of authenticity, but I had to write this anyway. So go easy on me with this one…]

My recent visit to Pompeii offered me a great example of an organization that isn’t working.

Cultural Organizations Must Work on Two Dimensions

Every organization has to work on two dimensions– it has to create a decent “product”, and it has to sustain itself well.  Cultural institutions have to produce ‘culture’ that meets certain aesthetic, expressive and pedagogic values, and these organizations have to reflect these values as they get things done. Cultural institutions have a unique kind of authenticity challenge.

Whenever I go to a cultural institution — a museum, a performance, an historic site — I experience them on each of these distinct dimensions. First, I experience their product/ions as a guest, patron, consumer, enthusiast and/or student. I expect that the goal of any cultural institution is to influence its patrons, to move them or change them or educate them, and so I open myself to this experience.

I’m there to absorb whatever it is that the cultural institution exists to share with me. I read the program notes, I use the acoustiguides, and I ask questions on the docents’ tours. I stay awake during the second act.

But, and often to my family’s dismay, I also experience cultural institutions as having central aesthetic, pedagogic and expressive expectations regarding the ways that they get things done. I experience cultural institutions not only as a patron, but also as an organizational analyst.

Given my penchant for “sticking my nose into your business“, I always want to understand the organization that surrounds, supports, and creates the cultural experience. I want to know how they do what they do, what works, how they express their caring, how they manage competing pressures, stakeholder and publics. I think about how their café or gift shop extends the institution’s mission. I chat with the docents, the guides, and even the other patrons. (This is what usually causes my family’s dismay.)

I want to figure out how the cultural institutions do what they do, and why. I want to understand how they ‘work’.

“Pompeii”, as a cultural organization, does not work.

As I mentioned in my previous post on the re-branding of Pompeii, my family recently visited Venice, Rome, and Pompeii during spring break. As a mom and a tourist, the trip was all about learning and enjoying. As an organizational analyst, the trip was all about — well, let me just say, it was interesting.

At Pompeii, I was disappointed disturbed by what I experienced as an almost complete absence of curatorial effort.

Curatorial effort includes two things:

(1) caring for and protecting the ‘culture’ that is being shared, and
(2) presenting the ‘culture’ in a way that helps to shape the visitors’ experience so that they do more than look, buy a snack, and complain that their feet hurt.

At Pompeii, I saw little curatorial effort, either of the caring kind or the presenting kind. (Note caveats at end of post.)

The Absence of Care

Pompeii is a world historical treasure, but it doesn’t seem to be treated that way. At Pompeii, I saw no guards, no security equipment, few if any cordons, barriers, or covers to protect the frescoes or mosaics. I saw no signs to indicate how not to treat the site.

Instead, in the absence of obvious efforts by the “organization” behind Pompeii, what I saw were people grinding out their cigarette butts on the 2200-year-old mosaic thresholds, students scraping their backpacks against the frescoes on the walls of the ruins as they roughhoused during a class trip, and visitors pushing aside makeshift barriers so that they could step up to the frescoed walls, take flash pictures, and actually touch the paintings themselves.

There was graffiti scraped onto a few walls. Trash, cigarette butts, and chewing gum randomly littered the ruins themselves. Perhaps the most disheartening thing that I saw were candy wrappers that had been thrown behind the plexiglass wall around the row of plaster casts of dead citizens, tucked away in the corner of the garden.

[I wanted guards like the ones at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, who shushed the noisy family into submissive whispering, and blocked the camera lens of that guy who insisted on using his flash- his flash! - to take photos of tapestries. ]

The disrespect broke my heart.

The Absence of Curation

Given that Pompeii is a “world heritage cultural site”  I expected that there would be a lot going on at Pompeii. Ranging from day-to-day life in the Roman Empire, the events of Mt. Vesuvius, the discovery of the site itself, and the social & physical science of the excavations themselves, there is a lot to learn here.

Moreover, we were visiting during the annual Cultural Heritage Week, so I anticipated some special events, like maybe extra tours or special signage.

What we found instead was city that felt as advertised: dead.

Pompeii, laid out before us, was inert. Passive. Empty. Silent.

Despite admission being free this week, there were few visitors, and no guided tours (either public or private).

There were no historic interpreters, no displays of interiors, no artifacts, no museum-like displays, no 3-D models of what the city might have looked like, no diagrams of neighborhoods, no placards or descriptive signage.

Nothing. Nada. Niente.

Armed with a map presented only in one language (Italian) the average visitor was looking at a bunch of stone foundations, a few frescoes, a street grid, and the very impressive chariot ruts on the paved streets. Once again, it was the acoustiguide and my kids who saved the day with a few interesting details.

What was Pompeii there to create?

I couldn’t tell if the curatorial strategy was “old-fashioned” or “postmodern”.

If the strategy was old-fashioned, I guess I was supposed to have used my Baedecker to educate myself (just like in A Room With A View). My bad.

If the curatorial strategy was supposed to be postmodern, I should have inferred whatever I wanted from the metathemes that I discerned.

Then again, the curatorial non-presence might have been due to the site’s organization being completely and horribly underfunded. If that were the case, I’d have expected an explanation and a donation box.

But really, what I missed was on-site, interactive explanation. I missed someone or something that could address the range of questions that we had.  I wished for available WiFi so that we could Google.it. *

There were so many themes, so many possible tours, so many places you could have put a nice little sign, so many opportunities for volunteer docents… I have a few friends who are curators/museum professionals, and I wondered how they might analyze the Pompeii experience… was there something that I lacked, as a tourist, that the site was expecting?

I admit that my expectations of curatorial effort have been shaped by visits to Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, and hometown favorite Monticello. These privately owned sites are well cared for, well curated, interactive, educational, & interesting.

I found myself wandering around, wondering:

What kind of organization needs to be here, to take care of Pompeii and to curate an experience that would influence visitors, teach them, move them, change them or inspire them?

I was open to the experience, but I wanted to experience something in addition to the emptiness.

Some Caveats:

• Maybe I was expecting something that was/is “too American” or “too bourgeois” to be found in Italy.
• Maybe the government just doesn’t have the funding.
• Maybe there is no private foundation that would support Pompeii.
• Maybe there are no retirees willing to serve as docents.
• Maybe we were there on a bad day.
• Maybe I was inadequately observant, and I missed something.

I would still count the visit to Pompeii as a highlight of our trip… oddly enough … because the emptiness really pushed me as a parent to initiate a conversation among our family about what we could learn and what we could appreciate, given the limits of what we were able to see.

* (Get the joke? We were in Italy, so “.it”. My girls thought that was funny.)

I have decided that this Cognitive Bias Video Song video is a YouTube sensation, despite its having only 1,046 hits as of this writing and the subsequent (and temporary) absence of social affirmation of its sensation-ism.

This song about Cognitive Bias was made salient to me by Mediation Channel, an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) blog written by Diane Levin. Since I write so often about specific forms of bias like discrimination, and since inauthenticity is its own special kind of cognitive dissonance, I thought that some of you might enjoy this song.

While it’s true that mediation has nothing to do with my areas of professional expertise, and that some would think I should be reading other things, to that I say: “Whatever. I don’t need to justify my decision. I know that my judgment is supported — even enhanced– by a host of cognitive biases.”

I think that this video is a sensation, and you should agree with me (or not).
Why? Refer back to those biases.

You could try to guess which cognitive bias(es) lead me to think that this song is a sensation….Is it:

– The recency effect?
– The choice supportive bias?
– Déformation professionnelle (a bias that is (1) professionally relevant, (2) a pun!, and (3) the title of an obscure German glitch-electronica ‘song’)?
– The well-traveled road effect?
– Plain vanilla self-affirmation bias?

Or, my personal fave, the all-purpose Fundamental Attribution Error?

Listen to the song, remember your Psych 101 lectures, and then decide. In an unbiased way, of course.

.

This video, a study aid for students preparing for their AP Psychology exam, was created by and features Arundel (Maryland) High School teacher Bradley Wray.

Diane Levin found this video through her colleagues at the Bias and Belief blog, which is now another blog I’ll be reading. (How can you not love a blog that has “Crackpotology” as one of its categories? Pleeze.)

I’ll just have to justify these blogs as being relevant to my work.

Hmm, which biases might I use to do that?