Is it all about the chase?

I heard last night that someone I never met, who will likely influence my life and perspective quite a bit, passed away: James Hillman. I found it ironic that someone’s obituary can be posted in the “Health” section of the New York Times, but here his is.

James Hillman, a charismatic therapist and best-selling author whose theories about the psyche helped revive interest in the ideas of Carl Jung, animating the so-called men’s movement in the 1990s and stirring the pop-cultural air, died on Thursday at his home in Thompson, Conn. He was 85.

Part scholar, part mystic and part performance artist in his popular lectures, Mr. Hillman began making waves from the day he became the director of studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1959.

Part of me, I’m sure, would have had a life-moment being in his presence during a lecture. And part of me is glad I don’t get that experience because it increases my personal drive to continue building that presence for myself. I’ve been very, very fortunate to have seen, worked with, apprenticed under some very talented, unique-to-their time leaders during formative times in my personal and professional growth.

In researching his impact on doctoral program, I came across an interview he did in 1998 (I think). He covers many concepts at a high level, some of which touched and interested me, namely his views on: the difference between community and individual focused therapy,  the culture of self-help being largely American, motherhood, and the pursuit of happiness.

I am curious about the deeper aspects of most of what he is laying out…but the end of the interview interested me most. The interviewer makes a connection between Goethe and the premise of Hillman’s book, The Soul’s Code, essentially stating that we are miserable as a culture because many of us have not found our life’s work or calling (our soul’s code). I think there is some truth to that. We leave a large part of our “selves” at the door to whatever factory we work in (Boeing, Microsoft, Tulleys) in order to fit into that culture and capture whatever flag they are after (market share, profit, customers). Do many of us know what our personal flag even is?

Hillman responds with the following:

I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.

Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one’s well-being on earth.

Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:

You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy

What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You’re really happy. Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being. I think it’s the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it’s right here.

You hear that idea all the time. And yet, isn’t that what the nation is built upon? Isn’t that the poetry of our Declaration of Independence? That man has the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness? I think we forget what that means. Eric Lui, whose yearly mentoring conferences are focused on more of a civic nature, writes in True Patriot:

False patriots say that the pursuit of happiness means getting as much for yourself as you can; that accumulating wealth is righteous. True patriots know that the real American Dream is to build legacy that endures, to aspire for your children more than for yourself, and to leave them with truly equal opportunities to live to the fullest of their potential.

What is your pursuit of happiness?

The 99%

Like it or not, both these ladies are in the 99%:

 

From FastCompany article: Will the real 99% please stand up?

Occupy Wall Street is meant to be a leaderless movement. But that hasn’t stopped some people from trying to identify leaders. And some activists charge that organizations are trying to co-opt their message. How can a phenomenon with no central authority exercise authority over its brand?

Over the past two weeks, a group of Occupy Wall Street supporters called “We Will NOT Be Co-Opted” has been working on a statement to declare its independence from any group or political organization.

 

Paper: Tyranny of Structurelessness

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever Nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness — and that is not the nature of a human group.

 

Discuss.

Mob Confusion on the 1%

So, I have to admit that I’m a bit confused by these “I am the %1″ signs on Wall Street. The 1% (I thought) was originally referring to the modern day robber barons. Those guys from Enron, that talented Mr. Madoff and multitudes of white collar criminals that go unpunished for moving markets in their favor, not saving the pensions they promise –with our money.  I thought that was the target.

This young lady has written a nice message and it can be read many ways: someone taking accountability (that’s great), and someone getting in touch with their privilege and socioeconomic rank (self awareness is always positive). Is she really the 1%?

 

 

The Cul-de-sac, For Cars Not People

There is a scene in The Slums of Beverly Hills where the family is driving through the getto side of Beverly Hills seeing signs of Motels entitled “Bella Vista,” “Shangri-La”  and the heroine muses “all were named to give the promise of something better.” But the reality of crusty shag carpet, and torn vinyl furniture for $49 a night never really delivered.

In Richard Florida‘s Cities online-zine, there is a short analysis of how neighborhoods like the cul-de-sac and inventions like the Aurora Corridor came to be:

These communities had what Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, calls “location efficiency,” a rough analogue to the idea of energy efficiency that captures the extent to which your job, your grocery store and your favorite pub are all convenient to you. Around the turn of the century, U.S. cities of all sizes built thousands of miles of railway for streetcars that made the urban grid even more efficient.

“It happened everywhere, it happened brilliantly,” Bernstein says, “and we threw it away.”

Americans lost sight of that tightly knit model when we got into cars and began to envision something else: the Garden City. In the early 20th century, modernists decried overcrowded cities that were synonymous with pollution, slums, and poverty. They wanted to do away with unnecessary streets and give each factory worker and company man his own slice of the country. He would drive there, of course, first along a large arterial highway, then down a main thoroughfare, then a collector road, then a local street pulling into his own private driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac.

That the Federal Housing Authority “published Government pamphlets literally showing illustrations of the two neighborhood designs with the words “bad” and “good” printed alongside them. The FHA never put it quite this way, but what we were really doing was building communities for cars, not people.”

“You make a terrible mistake if you plan a city in terms of buildings and facilities and parks,” Bernstein says, “and don’t look at the space that those things occupy.”

In other words, at the underlying patterns: the way streets and people connect with each other. Now, what intuitively made sense to us a hundred years ago can be justified and measured in foreclosure rates, vehicle miles traveled, and traffic fatalities.

Complete article here.

Walmart’s Amazing Reframe…

Just came across an article on NPR which made an interesting connection between odd things happening, and that they were (perhaps) coincidentally happening at Walmart.

Dispatches from the field: A customer was nabbed by police for sampling raw meat at a Walmart in Pennsylvania. A woman said she had an encounter with a bat at a Walmart in Minnesota. A family of five was living in a car at a Walmart in Florida. A girl had a run-in with a monkey at a Walmart in Missouri. A man was caught in flagrante delicto at a Walmart inLouisiana. And that is just in the past few weeks.

You only need to see the People of Walmart site once to understand what makes Walmart such an easy target. What was interesting to me is Walmart’s response:

Officially, Walmart explains the apparent zaniness this way: “Over the years, Walmart has become a microcosm of American life,” says company spokesman Lorenzo Lopez. “With stores serving millions of customers in communities nationwide, it’s not uncommon for us to see our share of what happens every day in cities and towns all across the country.”

We (all of us)  invite the praise or criticism due us in how we show up and that rule is no different for companies. If companies go into a community and take the money out of the local economy to disperse to shareholders, as is featured in the Story of Stuff video, they invite criticism and become targets for this kind of assumption: in this case, that weird things (have a higher likelihood to) happen at Walmart.

We (all of us) also co create the world we live in. If we didn’t consume so much as a society we wouldn’t enable companies like Walmart to be so big and successful. What happens when we reject what we don’t like in ourselves (that we consume) and place that onto someone or something we find distasteful (companies like Walmart that enable our consumption with low prices) is the perfect codependent relationship: we each see the other as one dimensional. They see us as bottomless pits of consumption, and we see them as crack dealers of cheap merchandise we can’t say no to.

It’s unfortunate that companies like Walmart are no longer seen holistically. Attracting oddness or feeding off the community for more than their share of the community’s resources was not the behavior that them great. What made them an attractive All-American brand was that they coexisted in the community, they had humble beginnings, cared about the customer and their employees–what set them apart was that they did all that and did it efficiently.

On balance, there are plenty of tales of goodness at Walmart, as well. Recently a podiatry clinic in Massachusetts took a dozen students to a Walmart and gave each $75 to buy food for their families. In New Hampshire, a Walmart associate who runs the one-hour photo machine was able to provide swifter service — handing over an envelope of photos — because she recognized a customer from the personal pictures.

And there are other, wacky acts of “kindness” like the story of the man in a cow costume who, police say, stole milk from a Virginia Walmart in April and began handing it out to strangers in the parking lot.

What is interesting to me about all of this is that Walmart and other big chains still don’t really see or want to acknowledge what they are doing to communities. They start off productive members of communities and when the profits enable them to scale, they end up draining them.

“Walmart, long accused of draining the life from the town squares and main streets of small-town America, has gradually become the main square of the United States, replacing the place it has helped put out of business,” says Charles Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works – and How It’s Transforming the American Economy.

Fishman’s assertion is backed up by the company’s official statistics: About 140 million Americans shop at Walmart every week. “That’s half the adults in the country, going to Walmart every week,” Fishman says. “If each shopper only spends 30 minutes at Walmart, on average, that’s 70 million hours of time Americans spend at Walmart each week — that’s kind of incredible.”

In an op/ed in the Financial Times (“Tips from Zappos for America’s broken jobs machine“), University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida noted that low-level service jobs tend to pay about half what manufacturing jobs pay, and that these low-wage positions comprised 45% of American jobs. His proposed solution was two-fold: To focus on service jobs that can’t be offshored or automated, and to ‘upgrade’ the “entire job category” of service industry jobs so that they paid more. Florida wrote,

Mr. Obama should make upgrading service jobs the next step in repairing America’s broken job machine. A national service initiative, bringing together “service innovators” — such as Zappos (AMZN), Starbucks (SBUX), or outdoor clothing retailer REI — would be a good start.

Interesting. Turn Walmart into an experience (a la The Experience Economy, 1999). In The Experience Economy, the authors argue that the service economy is about to be superseded with something that critics will find even more ephemeral (and controversial) than services ever were: experiences. In part because of technology and the increasing expectations of consumers, services today are starting to look like commodities. The authors write that “Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience.”

I don’t get it, wasn’t all this to say Walmart already was an experience?

The Richard Florida theory of reality TV.

For a while now, I’ve wondered what the fascination was with reality TV. In the beginning, I assumed it had a lot to do with the idea that as hard as our days were, they were nothing to the train wrecks happening in these people’s lives. Certainly we would have made different choices than to pull someone’s hair at a dinner party. Certainly we are more in touch with our money than to throw a lavish baby naming shower (in addition to several other baby shower  event which essentially turn the milestone into an ongoing festival). Certainly we have more to do in our lives than to scheme, gossip, and numb out by shopping. Don’t we?

Case in point: After a long hike, I was standing in line at a drug store in Enumclaw, WA (population: 10,669) and overheard a mother-daughter conversation about the Kardashians. They were debating about Kim doing something or other as if they knew them. I was struck with the intimacy they shared, the details they knew…and how it drew them together and it drew them together with the (Kim) character.

The author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Great ­Reset has a theory: “Reality TV (from the Kardashians to the Jersey Shore) is the product of isolation & sprawl.”

Brilliant.

What he’s seen has led him to develop a working theory about the genre. It’s not just that a lot of the shows are set in suburbia—suburban life actually creates the appetite for them. “Reality TV (from the Kardashians to the Jersey Shore) is the product of isolation & sprawl” is how he put it when floating the notion via Twitter (tweets being the new white paper).

It was a jarring encounter with Kim and Khloe Inc. that first gave him this idea. “I was sitting in a hotel room in New York City; my wife was out. And here comes, I don’t know, The Kardashians Invade New York, or whatever it’s called,” he says. “And they made New York look like a mall!” Seeing New York flattened “into Orange County” by the Kardashians’ SUV-­chauffeured, credit-card-powered sack of ­Gotham led Florida to expand his signature critique of atomizing sprawl to include JWoww, NeNe, and the other denizens of reality television’s Monster Island.

But Florida says he’s not trying to stuff burb-based reality TV into a cities=good, suburbs=bad rubric. Instead, he’s tracing a continuum that looks something like: sprawl+isolation=the substitution of televised, crazy-eyed pods of frenemies for actual human communities. “The knee-jerk reaction to reality TV is that it’s dumbification,” Florida says. “But it’s not, and the people watching aren’t dumb. They’re just looking for connection.” Florida uses Cambridge University psychologist Peter J. Rentfrow’s concept of communal consumers to describe reality junkies. “These are people who want stories about people and who used to rely on gossip, or on the little mini-dramas in their community,” he says. “And when you’re isolated in the suburbs, you don’t have that.”

The prospect of having to settle for the sniping of a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills (which has taken on darker overtones following the suicide of a cast member’s estranged husband) in place of a real drama-dishing housewife from down the block is pretty bleak. But such, Florida argues, are the results of picket-fence-bounded displacement. “Think of it this way,” says the New Jersey–bred Florida, setting up a comparison from his own upbringing. “My parents, growing up in Newark, had no need for these types of stories. They could get all the interaction and the drama they needed right there in the neighborhood.”

a bit about the topic of play…

Every now and then I come across a reference or experience something that reminds me of the human condition. I came across a book on the topic of play (Play), and saw a reference in the credits that moved me:

The late Howard Rome, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, who encouraged me to see the human condition and the diagnosis of its pathologies in overall context of each lifetime.

It reminded me that each one of us contains our own perspective, feelings and life experiences and how often those are (mis)judged by ourselves and others.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Other acknowledgments continued and then a reference to the National Museum of Play in NY (of course!). Their blog is pretty interesting. This entry in particular caught my attention: Trial By Board Game.

The box alone is worth trying to find a copy….

Not all law games are created equal, though. Some, like the board game Jury Trial, which simulates the voir dire process of empanelling a jury, are little more than glorified Monopoly games with the goal of getting your client off and amassing the most money in fees. (Jury Trial’s most notable feature may be the box art which features two Florida state senators, one representative, the Broward County commissioner, several corporate presidents and CEOs, and a law school dean.) Other games, like Chicago attorney James N. Vail’s Trial Lawyer (1978), combine the board-game format with actual law. It lets players work their way from indictment and bail all the way through acquittal or conviction using a realistic combination of Constitutional rights, the Federal Rules of Evidence and Criminal Procedure, and relevant case law.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lastly, a video from the PBS Series The Promise of Play:

If play increases our skills and is essential to our development as a species, why is it so hard to maintain a sense of play as we get older? Where along the way do we encourage ourselves and others to lose their propensity to play?

When the going gets tough, we get nostalgic

So I’m reading Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin (one of my favorite authors and permanent dinner party wish list guests). Unlike her other work where her incredible details and fluid writing style truly give you the sense that she just finished a personal interview with Lincoln, Johnson or Kennedy, this recount waxes prophetic on the small town of Rockville, NY in the 50’s. All the elements of a magical childhood are there: sidewalks, knowing all the small businesses by first name, the feeling of safety that comes from knowing members in your community by first name…

“This is also the story of a girlhood in which the great religious festivals of the Catholic church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce a passionate love of history, ceremony, and ritual. It is the story of growing up in what seemed on the surface a more innocent era until one recalls the terror of polio, the paranoia of McCarthyism reflected even in the children’s games, the obsession with A-bomb drills in school, and the ugly face of racial prejudice. It was a time whose relative tranquility contained the seeds of the turbulent decade of the sixties.”

It’s debatable whether or not the 50s were simpler, but repression and cold war psychology aside, there is something about this book that is making me devour it – and it’s the nostalgia. In a climate where even Martha is lightening up, these recent headlines have to make you want to go back to a simpler time…

-          Russia Presses Into 2nd Front in Georgia

-          Man stabbed at Olympics

-          Darfur Withers as Sudan Sells Food

 

 

 

Sunday In Seattle, Sunny Side Up

Today I had the kind of Sunday tired couples look at me longingly – and I really relished being single. I finished with a meeting this morning and got lunch at a local pub. It was sunny out and I ordered a Mojito, a Cuban sandwhich, a copy of the NYTimes (which had been previously rifled through but still complete – meaning, the ink wasn’t fresh and didn’t wear off in my hands) and had the table all to myself! omg, pure bliss. Throw in an accomodating a flirty waiter and I was in heaven.  None of that “what do you want?” “I don’t know, what do you want?” or “What are you going to have?” “I don’t know, what are you going to have?” - Not to say there aren’t great and fulfilling relationships out there and that I hope to be in one one day, but I  just was, and it was nice.

This Sunday’s articles that made me laugh out loud +/or think:

- Frank Rich had a good opinion piece: McCain Can Run, But Bush Won’t Hide starting with a priceless reference to the Godfather which almost made me inhale my drink as well as the most apt comparison of Nixon campainging for Ford -  

“THE biggest gift President Bush has given his party this year was to keep his daughter’s wedding nearly as private as Connie Corleone’s. Now that his disapproval rating has reached the Nixon nadir of negativity, even a joyous familial ritual isn’t enough to make the country glad to see him. The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.”

-Normally I read The Book Review and get one maybe two suggestions, sometimes just 1 or 2 ads pique my interest. This week, the entire section stood out.

• Bag Man stood out, the review was so well written you practically felt as if you went to high school with Tonello and the intro hooked me from the start…”

“The end of the world just inched a little nearer: an eBay seller has written a memoir. About handbags.”       ‘nough said.

• Netherland seems like a Scotish version of Ian McEwan…and not just because McEwan is referenced early on he is described similarly:

“O’Neill, who was born in Ireland, raised in Holland and now lives in New York, seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought, whether he’s writing about dating (“We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically”) or the darker stuff that keeps us awake at night, like the nuclear plant just up the river (“Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name”).”

One passage in particular got to me and makes me want to read the book:

“There’s a moment in “Netherland” involving a father, the son who has been taken from him, and Google Earth that’s among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel. The father hovers over his son’s house nightly, “flying on Google’s satellite function,” lingering over his child’s dormer window and blue inflated swimming pool, searching the “depthless” pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. O’Neill’s novel is full of moments like this: closely observed, emotionally racking, un-self-consciously in touch with how we live now.”

The thought that technology as guardian vs predator, that people hover over loved ones’ locations like guardian angels, really touched me. The other point made in this review made me reflect back on the opinion page (Isreal’s ‘American Problem,’ a little differently) 

“All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket,” he explains. “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. … I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?”

• Counselor also looks good and was commented on in an interview by my favorite biographer, Dorris Kearns Goodwin.

Sorensen describes himself as a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian who grew up in Lincoln. His beloved father, C. A. Sorensen, was the attorney general of Nebraska and a noted Republican progressive, who raised five children almost on his own after Sorensen’s mother was disabled by mental illness.After law school, Sorensen was drawn to public law and Washington. “I picture myself stepping off that train, greenhorn that I was: I had never drunk a cup of coffee, set foot in a bar, written a check or owned a car.” A year and a half later, at 24, he began the long association with Kennedy that was shattered in Dallas.“Counselor” tells many stories about Sorensen’s post-government work as a global troubleshooter for the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, dealing with leaders like Mandela, Sadat, Mobutu, Ben-Gurion, Arafat and Castro. After his stroke, he learned to live with almost no sight, even resuming, remarkably, his practice of walking to work in Manhattan.”

• The Language of Loss for the jobless was an interesting piece – rather tame from the WSJ’s case studies on families who had suffered and are suffering the layoffs of the mid 90s. Still, it’s always nice to give prompts on how to behave among those who have lost jobs. I’ve seen some pretty tactless situations. Though, I gotta say, sorta inappropriate to have that article smack in the middle of the society style and wedding section.
• Lastly, but not least: On Obama by Obama. I was really impressed with his approach, his discipline, his eloquence and his ability to reach out. Not only has he been effective in communicating on a national platform, he did it himself. Never before have I caused, discussed issues in such depth with people of both sides, donated to a campaign – and he’s gotten be to do all three, with the hope of seeing a turning of the tides in November. This country has the ability to be great again.

Bill Cosby & Abraham Lincoln – literary brothers?

I was driving home the other day and heard a 5 minute comedy shtick from Bill Cosby and one of the lines was: “I don’t know the secret to success, but the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.” This resonated in particular with me as I was just sitting in a rather lengthy customer segmentation meeting where we were arguing just that topic. Of course, Lincoln’s phrase came to mind “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

Both read like 4th grade arithmetic problems but clichés are experiments we go through the motions on even though we hope the answer will be different (because it’s “us” trying it this time). Fortune has a feature called The best advice I ever got . 25 well-known people with a picture and a paragraph each. Chairmen and CEOs and celebrities and politicians – complete

with a comment area for the great unwashed masses. Here are some of my favorites.

Espresso Shot Insights what’s this?

• “…some of the most effective leaders don’t make themselves the center of attention. They are respectful. They listen. This is an appealing personal quality, but it’s also an effective leadership attribute. Their selflessness makes the people around them comfortable. People open up, speak up, contribute. They give those leaders their very best.”

AND

• Don’t view your career as a linear progression.” He advised me to take horizontal rather than vertical steps: to try out situations that are unstructured, to learn different ways of working, and to get outside of headquarters and experience different cultures.
  Sam Palmisano, Chairman and CEO, IBM
• His commander suggested he “look for an out-of-your intellectual comfort zone experience” in order to increase exposure to multiple points of view. And “… basic knowledge of political philosophy and economics is a useful grounding for working in developing countries.” Gen. David Petraeus, Commanding general, multinational force – Iraq

Runner Ups

• “…I must have gotten this advice at Salomon Brothers in the 1970s. The advice was, first, always ask for the order, and second, when the customer says yes, stop talking.” Mayor Bloomberg
• Borrowing a page from Adam Smith‘s concept of comparative advantage: “Focus on those things you do better than others.” Peter Peterson, Co-founder and Senior Chairman, Blackstone Group (note: Sarah Endline of sweetriot also agrees)
• “Always be the only person who can sign your checks.” Tina Fey (via an Oprah show)
• “…it’s hard to look smart with bad numbers.” You have to focus on the underlying substance. There’s just no way to disguise poor performance. I’ve tried to follow that advice throughout my career. Deliver good numbers and you earn the right for people to listen to you. Mark Hurd, Chairman and CEO, Hewlett-Packard (being in business intelligence for a living, don’t I know it!)