Bamboo You

Fun on Friday

I meant to post these earlier, as I think I need to make a tradition of more fun on Fridays. But then I guess I was working all day and didn't get to the fun part until now.  At least I got to the fun part.

So . . . some things from Keri Smith who I find inspirational in all ways:

Ways to Shake Things Up

Words of Encouragment

Daring Dice of Transformation

Permission Cards (when I clicked on the bowl, I was given permission to nap. Since this is one of my all-time favorite activites, I was quite pleased to now nap without guilt.)

I've also found it quite interesting and enlightening to go here and find the 2 or 3 or 5 quotes that have the most meaning to me at that point.  (Also interesting to do with others and then share what you picked and why. Of course each person gets their own page of randomness)

This time I came  up with these:

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

"I think the world is run by 'C' students."

Both true for various reasons for me today.

The Space Between

Yesterday I visited one of my favorite blogs. It had been a few weeks, so I scrolled down to see that Barbara had been featured on POV where she'd been interviewed about one of POV's most recent shows, Waging a Living. It was beyond depressing. It forced me to look at the intersection between personal responsibility and society's responsibility. Not that this isn't something I often consider, but lately I've been focused on what we can do as individuals in our career life and this show brought me smack up against some realities of the workplace in which we're operating.

Here's what Roger Weisberg, maker of Waging a Living, says in an open letter to viewers:

Dear Viewer,

Like many of my peers, I grew up believing in the American work ethic — the belief that hard work will invariably lead to economic success. Yet the hard-working low-wage earners we met while making "Waging a Living" felt trapped in poverty by dead-end jobs. Some worried that their earnings were failing to keep up with their bills, while others despaired that they were unable to provide their families with the same standard of living that they enjoyed growing up. They all believed in the American dream but discovered that the ladder out of poverty was steeper than they imagined. .

The percentage of workers trapped in poverty rose 50 percent between 1979 and 2000, and today 30 million Americans — one out of four workers — earn less than the federal poverty level for a family of four. Even more unsettling, most economists believe that families need to earn about twice the federal poverty level to be self-sufficient. One of the most disturbing trends is the rapid growth of income inequality. Between 1979 and 2000, incomes for the top 20 percent of wage earners rose 33 percent while incomes for the bottom 20 percent fell 9 percent. It is a sad irony that a growing number of full-time workers are unable to provide the basics for a decent life in a society that supposedly values and rewards hard work.

Over the past 10 years, I've done a lot of consulting work with federal, state and local governments who serve welfare clients, laid off workers, etc. Most welfare programs sell the story to clients that if they just find a job (usually at minimum wage), that will be their ticket out of poverty. This story makes it clear that that isn't the case. In fact, the wages that the people in this story earn are  "dream" wages for many welfare clients and even for some of the dislocated workers who are "blue collar" and lower skilled. Yet they still can't make it.

The reasons for this are complicated. Some of them have to do with individual choices, lack of skills, etc. But when even those who are college-educated find themselves slipping out of the middle class and into a life of economic volatility, there's something else going on that we need to pay attention to. Says Barbara:

That was the promise of a college education: you get your degree, work hard, get some kind of a white collar job, eventually you might get promoted, and retire with a pension. We all know that's not true anymore. People bounce around. Elaine Chao, our Secretary of Labor, recently confessed that you could expect nine jobs in the course of your career after college — if you went to college, that is.

What's happening is what some economists call income volatility in the middle class, which means people getting battered by layoffs, outsourcing, downsizing. People could be making $100,000 a year and living in a big house on the block, but one day they're suddenly gone, they're not there anymore, because they got laid off, they went through their savings — and even upper-middle class people don't have much savings anymore — and they can very easily end up in exactly the kind of situation as the people profiled in Roger's movie, "Waging a Living." That is, they could be working for $8 or $10 an hour at Circuit City or Wal-Mart or somewhere like that.

What an incredible waste of human potential we have going on here. People who are willing to work hard and play the game, but who don't have the resources to become more highly skilled and,therefore, are trapped in a series of low wage, marginal jobs. And people who DO have the skills, but who can't find work that lets them use those talents. This creates for us a vastly larger underclass, a growing core of underutilized talents and people who will soon lack the financial resources to purchase the goods and services made by the companies that have laid them off.

I feel like I'm dancing around something really huge here--there are so many aspects of this situation to explore and I'm all over the place in thinking about them. This is a story about where personal responsiblity ends and social responsiblity begins and what happens in those spaces in between. It's about how we've gone from a nation that 50 years ago saw investing in its citizens through things like the GI Bill as a critical part of public policy, to a nation that see its workers primarily as an expense. It's a story about inequality, injustice and frustration. It's a cautionary tale about our future and I wish I knew where to go from here.

In the Long Run . . .

For about 10 years after my younger daughter was born, I worked out religiously. Every day (even Christmas!) I would get up at 6 a.m. and either ride my stationary bike or walk for 30 minutes. It wasn't anything major, just enough to get me moving. But it kept me in reasonable shape and combined with my vegetarianism, also kept me slim.

Almost 3 years ago, as my ex-husband and I were divorcing, this routine that had lasted for so long, that had made me healthier and saved me from middle-aged spread,fell by the wayside as I went through so many other changes in my life. There was really no reason for this, as my apartment complex has a decent workout room and a great pool. I work from home most of the time, so my schedule is fairly flexible. I was already in the groove of working out, and it definitely made me feel better. So I'm not sure why it stopped except that I was going through so many changes, NOT working out somehow got added to the list.

I thought of that this morning as I read Jim's post over at Human Being Curious. I've been waking up each morning with a stiff, aching back and my body is no longer the svelte thing it was a few years ago, so working out has been on my mind. But what really struck me was what Jim said about committment:

"The thing you have to remember is that by choosing not to live up to a commitment you’ve made, whether it’s riding a bike everyday, or something else, is that you’re choosing short-term relief over long-term results. You’re choosing the short-term relief of not having to endure the mild pain of the bike ride over the long-term results of getting leaner and in better shape. That’s it. Choosing results over relief is always the more difficult path, and it’s always the most rewarding as well."

"Choosing results over relief is always the most difficult path."  I ask myself, how often am I choosing  short-term relief over long-term result?  It's not just in physical fitness, either. I keep doing work that doesn't make me passionate, nor does it capitalize on my strongest assets but it does pay the bills and help me avoid conflict with some of my clients. I don't do as much to build my business in the longer-term because it's easier to focus on the work that's coming in now. I will often keep quiet about things, avoiding conflict, only to find later that I've made the situation worse by not speaking up sooner. Short-term relief over long-term results. The problem, of course, being that you don't build a very strong future. If I'm always choosing the short term, I don't build a strong long-term for myself. It's a matter of looking at those choices I make and seeing where I should be sacrificing my short-term relief for longer-term gain. Something for me to think about . . .

Where do you need to think longer-term?

When Choice Paralyzes

    My 14-year old daughter can be a study in indecision. Ever since she was old enough to make choices, she has agonized over them. Worse, she has never been able to identify the choices that really matter, putting the same energy into what she should wear to school as she does into how to handle the situation when two of her friends are locked in the mortal combat known only to teenage girls. It's painful to watch her struggle with herself as she seeks to find the "best choice," and her father and I have long wondered what to do to help her through the maze of "important" decisions she makes for herself.I'm beginning to understand her better though, now that I'm reading  The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz.

Here's the problem. We're faced with a million choices every day, and as Schwartz indicates in his book, for a variety of reasons these choices make us LESS willing to choose. There's too much information, too many things to consider, we worry that we'll make the wrong choice or that we won't be able to change our choice, causing us irreparable harm. Many of us end up shutting down completely, refusing to choose. In some cases, no damage is done. If I walk into Old Navy and I'm overwhelmed by my jean options, so I walk out 10 minutes later, so what? But in other cases, refusing to choose can have some major consequences.  It is particularly bad for the people Schwartz calls "maximizers"--those for whom every decision is a search for the perfect solution. For these people, there's always something else to consider, some other piece of information they should look at. As a result, they are usually overwhelmed by their choices and paralyzed with indecision.

In the past 10 years, I've done a ton of work with people who have been laid off. When you talk to many of them, you find out that they saw their lay-offs coming from a mile away. Unfortunately, like a deer in the headlights, they were unable to choose to do something about that before a choice was made for them. I think that part of the reason for that is simple fear and our infinite capacity for denial and self-delusion. But I also wonder if it's not because they are so overwhelmed by other choices on a daily basis that they find themselves unable to identify and focus on the major ones. I wonder if buying a pair of jeans at Old Navy doesn't become equivalent to deciding what to do about the fact that I could lose my job in six months.

Schwartz argues that one of the ways we can become better decision-makers in a world with overwhelming options is by becoming a Chooser:

"Choosers are people who are able to reflect on what makes a decision important, on whether, perhaps, none of the options should be chosen, on whether a new option should be created, and on what a particular choice says about the chooser as an individual. It is choosers who create new opportunities for themselves and everyone else. But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become "pickers," which is to say relatively passive selectors from what is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time to choose more and pick less, we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms and rules to make some decisions automatic."

So when we are able to operate in "chooser" mode, we are able to make better quality decisions for ourselves. Since "choosing" requires more time, however, we would presumable reserve the "choice" mode for our more important decisions, relying on other methods (habits, rules, etc.) to make choices for us in areas that are less important.

It's been my experience, though that many people have not figured this out. I have seen people put more thought into their wardrobe or into selecting a wine to go with dinner than into selecting a career. Ironically, I find that people will use habits, rules and customs to make their career choices, while using the chooser mode to decide where they'll eat tonight. But when people operate as "Pickers" of careers, they are generally unhappy with the choices they've made. They falsely limit their options, using outdated customs like "women dont' work in construction." Or they use rules like "I'm too old to change careers." Rather than becoming choosers, who actively create options for themselves and who put the right kind of energy into a decision that has the power to impact so many other facets of their lives, they become pickers, selecting the "lesser of two evils." And for many people, this means that they are faced with the same career decisions again and again because they pick something that doesn't work for them, rather than choosing something that does.

This is heartbreaking to watch and I spend much of my time trying to teach people how to make informed choices and to break the bad habits of "picking" a career. I keep thinking that if I educate them about how to make good career decisions, maybe they will be able to do that. But now I'm beginning to wonder if I don't have to take a step back and get them to see that this is the kind of decision that requires more energy, get them to see this as a "chooser" opportunity, rather than as a place to pick. 

The trick, of course, is to help them create the space in their psyche for choice. Which means getting them to pick in other areas. But how do I get people to pick a restaurant and choose a career?

(Painting by Beverly Kaye)

The Bamboo Project Manifesto

A few days ago I was cleaning out some of my bookmarks and came across Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. I'm a big fan of manifestos. There's something revolutionary in them that I love. I also dig the idea of making a public declaration of my beliefs. It forces me to really think about what they are.

For several months now, I've been working with a partner, discussing the mistakes we see in how companies manage their people and the kinds of mistakes that people make in managing their individual careers. The world is changing more rapidly than we can really keep up and it seems to us that new things are required for how we all operate.

At any rate, through this blog and its companion, Bamboo Us (written by my partner) we intend to explore the issues that face both individuals and organizations in the 21st century (that sounds a little grand, actually). More to the point, we want to explore the ideas that can help us all work better and make work better in a changing world.

So our manifesto. . .(a work in progress and in no particular order):

1. Life is too short to focus on "overcoming your weaknesses." We have far more weaknesses than we could ever overcome anyway.

2. You should live a little bit of your future every day. Even if you're not sure what that future is, take a step toward it, no matter how small

3.  Life is more fun when you're on the right bus, sitting in your favorite seat.

4. Live your values. Know what they are, revisit them often and always seek to keep your life and your career in alignment with what you believe.

5. Change something small every day. It will help you learn how to take on the big changes. And sometimes it will help you avoid "big" changes altogether.

6.  Stop courting perfection. It's a myth and a lie perpetrated by those who would have you believe that you can control the world. You can't. So give it up.

7.  Build a career from your strengths and find ways to manage around your weaknesses. Then help others do the same.

8.  Embrace your mistakes. They will teach you far more than your successes.

9.  "Do what works. Kill what doesn't. Repeat." (borrowed from Seth Godin)

10.  Know the rules. Then break 'em and make up your own.

11. Let your experiences shape you, like water shapes the rocks over which it flows. Don't try to dam the water or divert it to another course. It will find find you. Let it do its work.

12.  When everything's going right, the universe is trying to tell you something.

13.  When everything's going wrong, the universe is trying to tell you something.

14. For the individual, professional development is a right, not a privilege. For an organization, it's an investment, not an expense. For everyone, learning is the bedrock of success.

The Art of the Zoom

For the past 10 years, I've been waiting for life to settle down. Then about two weeks ago, I was re-reading Seth Godin's Survival is Not Enough and came across this heading:

"Change is the New Normal"

Well, duh. Yeah, it is. Life is NEVER going to settle down because life IS change. I just happen to live in a time when change is happening at warp speed so it feels like I don't even get the chance to breathe. So I accept reality. Now what?

So I read further and another big duh:

"Many employees fear change. Fear of change is rational--after all it can lead to bad outcomes. But now, NOT changing is more likely to lead to a bad outcome than changing!"

OK, so now he REALLY has my attention. Then I read:

"Companies that embrace change for change's sake, companies that view a state of constant flux as a stable equilibrium, zoom. And zooming companies evolve faster and easier because they don't obstruct the forces of change"

And then. . .

Once you train the organization to evolve regularly and effortlessly, change is no longer a threat. . . If your company is too reliant on your winning strategy, you won't evolve as quickly."

So what if I apply this to myself? I've been doing the same kind of work for a while now. I develop some new skills here and there, but I've most definitely relied on a "winning strategy" to keep me going. What if I haven't evolved enough? What if I've grown fat and happy on the stability of my old business model when in fact I need to do something to adapt to a new way of functioning in the world? I like to pride myself on being a life-long learner, but what if I'm wrong?

Says Seth:

"To often, companies organize themselves around one and only one winning strategy and then rely on plan P when the external factors don't pan out. Alas, Plan P is to panic."

And people do the same thing. I've seen it a million times. After 10 years of consulting work with Department of Labor clients, I've been around a TON of laid off people, most of whom didn't see it coming. They'd relied on a strategy that worked for years and then one day it didn't. And they were stuck.

So what to do? How do you evolve so you can zoom?

For me, it's been about starting to play around with things, to experiment. Not just in the work that I do, but outside of the work that I do, too. I love Dan Pink's work and the kinds of skills he says we'll need for the future, so I work at those. I'm also trying to bring in new, surprising elements that shake me out of my old ways of doing things, which in turn help me to evolve. Change one thing a day and soon you've changed a hundred things and you didn't even know it.

But beyond that, for me, is dropping my perfectionism and being willing to make mistakes, to do something new and be OK with it not being perfect.

So I go to Illustration Friday every week and submit a drawing. As someone who was never "good" at art, this challenges my perceptions and forces me to be OK with work that isn't professional or perfect. And seeing other people's work is a wonderful source of stimulation and delight.

I try to do 100 words (although I haven't made it a whole month) because I love the challenge and discipline of trying to say something true and real, even if it's stupid, in exactly 100 words.

I use Keri Smith's ideas to infuse my work with my personality because in doing so, it forces me to go back to my core strengths and values, which in turn makes me evolve and adapt them in new ways as I work with my customers.

And I watch Ze Frank because . . . well, the man experiments. Every day he's saying something bizarre, yet oddly profound, and that's an energy I want more of in my life. And he makes me laugh, which is also a good thing to have going on.

Careers are evolutionary. There's no real planning for them because you simply can't know what lies ahead. But what I can plan for is to evolve and to grow. So I'm focusing on the art of the Zoom.

 

 

What I'm Doing Instead of Going to Bed

Reading stuff . . .

Although I'm a few years away from 50, this article caught my eye. Since baby boomers have shaped everything else about our work lives, I wonder if their desire for flex time, compressed work schedules, job sharing and telecommuting will make a big difference for everyone else?

And this is just a big DUH. What? You mean HAPPY people are willing to work longer? I had NO idea! The article continues:

"Workers who expressed satisfaction at work had substantially better conditions across the board, with easier unscheduled time off, schedule flexibility and better telecommuting options."

So this means that when people have good working conditions, then they enjoy their work more and so they in turn work longer? You mean we don't have to FORCE and CONTROL people to do work? I mean that's just craziness you're talking now. 

I did find the 10 Best Jobs in America pretty interesting, though. . .

How Do You Define Career Success?

At my new favorite blog, they're talking about ways to define career success beyond the traditional "ascend into managment" route. Among other things, Kathy suggests that companies need to seriously consider career "advancement" strategies that reward individual contributors by allowing them to remain individual contributors. She points out--rightly so--that many people are forced to make a trade-off between work that they love and advancement. "How about a Venn diagram, rather than a vertical organizational chart," she asks.

I think that there are actually two threads of thought going on in Kathy's post. The first is "how do organizations define and reward success? "The second is how do individuals define their own career success? Two interesting questions, I think. . .

On the organizational level, I'm brought back to Buckingham and Coffman's conclusions in First Break All the Rules. They ask the old Peter Principle question--Why do we keep promoting people to their levels of incompetence?

My answer is that it's because we insist on believing that managerial skills are just some advanced form of individual contributor skills. That somehow your experiences as a programmer would somehow prepare you to supervise other programmers. Yet time and again we see that this is not the case and that, in fact, the talents it takes to be a good manager often have nothing to do with what it took for a person to be an effective individual contributor. Unfortunately, though, all too often it seems that organizational rewards, respect, and kudos all go to those who "advance" into management.

Now Buckinham and Coffman have a solution to that problem--they say that companies should "create heroes in every role."

"Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession. Many employees will climb the conventional ladder, and for those with the talent to manage others or to lead, this will be the right choice. However, guided by meaty incentives, many other employees will decide to redirect their energies toward growth within their current roles."

Their essential argument is that excellence depends on employees in EVERY role focusing on their individual areas of talent and expertise. They suggest a number of ways for companies to address this issue, including using what they call "broadbanding," an approach to pay that rewards individual performance by creating broad, overlapping bands of pay with the top end of one role overlapping with the bottom end of the role above. One of the benefits, they argue, is that it slows the "breathless climb up," forcing employees to seriously consider if they want to move into a different role within the company because to move to a vastly different role would actually entail a pay CUT.

So from an organizational perspective, for those who choose to be really thoughtful about what they do with their staff and how they use them, there are ways to move out of the traditional definitions of success and create alternative paths for employees. But Kathy's post also opens up for me some thoughts on how we as individuals define success.

She suggests that rather than using money or position as our personal yardstick, we should look at how well our current jobs match what it is we WANT to do. That is, I'm successful if I go to work every day and love what I do, regardless of the status of that job or how much I make.

I couldn't agree more with that sentiment and have lived that career advice for the past 20+ years. But I think that definition should be expanded to include things like:

• Is this work that leverages my particular talents and what I bring to the world? If I'm engaging in tasks that I'm competent to do, but that don't really use my greatest talents, then to me, my career is unsuccessful.
• Is this work that lets me learn new things, meet new people and participate in different projects? Whether I'm an individual contributor or a manager, my ability to keep a job and be competitive in it depends a huge amount on my ability to learn new skills. Given that most of us in full-time employment don't have a lot of time for outside education, work that lets me hone and deepen my skills is part of how I would define my personal career success.
• Is this work that lets me live my most important core values? For me, creativity, independence, integrity, an opportunity to have an impact on my wider world--these values are critical to my personal sense of having lived a successful life. If I engage in work that violates these values, then I don't consider myself to be successful.

Of course, in my perfect world, employers would define and reward success on my terms, developing an organizational culture that supports and rewards these things that I think determine career success. To my mind, both companies and individuals would benefit if we redefined success to mean  helping employees find and feel rewarded by work that is interesting to them, leverages their strengths, allows them to learn and matches their core values. Think about the kick-ass customer service we'd provide if we received THAT kind of support from our employers.

**UPDATE--Fast Company has something to say about lateral moves, too. Of course, most of them mean moving on, but maybe some companies will get the hint.