Thursday Mashup: Ideas Worth Chewing On

"His story is an odd one. It’ll be worth telling one day."--Winesburg, Ohio

Stories of Note for 7 March 2019

On March 5 in 1616, the book De Revolutoinibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) was banned by the Catholic Church.

Written by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, the book revealed a theory that we now know to be true: that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Copernicus postulated that the Sun was the center of the universe — a theory that directly challenged the religious philosophy that man was the center of all creation.

(Today, we know that both of these claims are false. Neither the Earth nor the Sun is the center of the universe… but the Earth does revolve around the Sun.)
--The above originally opened a story on The Mission eNewsletter Tuesday

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Arts Sector Contributed $763.6 Billion to U.S. Economy—More Than Agriculture or Transportation, New Data Shows
Most people are unaware of the economic impact of the arts. Isaac Kaplan's article offers up stats that will surprise you.

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The Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman zeroes in on the deceptive way online advertisers gain support for violating our privacy. The piece is title More Elephant Advertising. He can be pretty scathing at times, but his straightforwardness is refreshing. He does not pull punches.

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This AEON article about Maslow's Hierarchy is interesting. 
It's titled Do you have a self-actualised personality? Maslow revisited

The first paragraph reminds readers of Maslow's "needs hierarchy" and then digs into what contemporary psychology has to say on the matter of self-actualization. Despite being short on actual data for his theories, Maslow was amazingly perceptive.

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My story about clickbait got published in The Writing Cooperative. Read it here:

Personally I Find Clickbait Headlines More Than Just A Little Annoying

Here are 7 examples (And I especially hate #3)

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Probably the scariest story here today:
Nebraska county owes $28M for wrongful convictions

No DNA tests, covered up testimony, and forced confessions. 

The taxpayers will pay the damages.

Here's the story: Six people were arrested and wrongly convicted for the rape and murder of a Nebraska woman. After serving a combined 75 year behind bars it was learned through DNA evidence that they were innocent and had been railroaded in an effort to get the case resolved. Once proven innocent they sued Gage County and won a settlement of $28 million. The Supreme Court refused to overturn the decision and now the county must pay up.

The lawsuit alleged that law enforcement officials recklessly strove to close the case despite contradictory evidence and coerced false confessions. The three people who gave false confessions all had histories of psychological problems. One of the six, Joseph White, died in a workplace accident in Alabama in 2011.

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Meantime, life goes on... all around you.

The No-Boss Business Model Is Flawed

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

This morning I came across an interesting article at Aeon that struck a chord with me titled No Boss? No Thanks. It brought to mind a bad experience I had between 15 and 20 years ago dealing with a very flat organization that had no bosses. Everyone in the company was a "boss" sort of. The opening sentence hooked me in as did the lines that followed:

Management thinking is notoriously faddish. One week, the gurus, star CEOs, pundits and professors are talking about downsizing as the solution to corporate bureaucracy and inefficiency. The next week, the bandwagon has moved on to knowledge-management. Then to empowerment. And so on – sometimes in cycles, such that old ideas are revived, dressed up and resold to a gullible audience. Serious thinkers might pooh-pooh all this as guru talk, driven by media hype and ‘thought leaders’ hawking their latest books.

What is interesting is when one idea is pushed from the top down as the way to proceed and then the following year a new approach is propagated that directly contradicts the first. The ideas a pushed by "authorities" whose books become bestsellers and therefore the ideas must be good, right?

After giving several examples of fads (a few of which I experienced at one time) Nikolai Fossi and Peter Klein, authors of the No Boss? No Thanks piece, proceed to discuss the super-flat organization.

The concept is, in essence, a reaction against the dehumanizing effect of corporate culture. It is also an attempt to empower everyone in the organization. The problem comes when you make the company so flat that no one is in charge. There is no leadership. "We're all leaders here."

Sounds good in theory, but what happens in practice? What about decisions regarding company direction? Or when customers are mis-handled?

I was responsible for the advertising and signage at our local airport when a new vendor was selected to manage the interior design space there. The company was a "flat" organization with everyone on the same level. Each was a boss or supervisor or whatever. The contracts were created with someone who seemed capable, but when it came time to execute the plan problems ensued.

Before long I had a different rep. There were unresolved issues and I wanted to speak to her supervisor to address the way our account was being handled. That is when I learned the problem of flat organizations. There was no one higher up the chain of command. When I tried to address the issue by speaking with others in the company it was always bounced back to the problem person.

As the Aeon article's authors observe, "Someone needs to be held accountable for the firm’s actions – the buck has to stop somewhere."

If I recall correctly, Peter Drucker addresses this issue in The Effective Executive by pointing out that when there is a fire, someone has to dictate, "OK, everyone run this way and head out that exit."

Leaders don't have to micromanage every dot and tittle, but when the occasion calls for it, someone has to take charge and make a decision. Drucker emphatically states that making decisions is the key responsibility of leadership.

The bottom line here, again citing Aeon, is what you might expect: "As should be clear by now, we think that the bossless-company narrative has been badly oversold by its proponents."

I'm not suggesting that there is a perfect way to run an organization. Let's face it, businesses are made up of persons, people who are also struggling with issues of meaning, concealing areas of incompetence, pride and insecurities.

When all is said and done, this article is a pretty darned-good read. No Boss? No Thanks.

Here is the URL should the link be dead:
https://aeon.co/essays/no-boss-no-thanks-why-managers-are-more-important-than-ever

Does Holding Down a Job and Paying Your Bills Mean You Sold Out Your Dream?

This morning's eNewsletter from AEON began with an excellent article by Thomas Maloney titled, The Creed of Compromise: Don’t throw in the day job to follow your dream. The subtitle elaborates the them: Join the bifurcattors who juggle work-for-pay and their work-for-love.

The article is directed toward every person who has ever wondered if they should quit their day job to follow their passion.

You know the issue. You have talent. Maybe you're an artist or writer, an actor or musician. You feel like you're selling yourself short by not going after your dream. Then again, you look at the numbers and you know you need the money to pay the bills.

Maloney's article is directed directly at people in this situation. In his case he's a writer, but it could be someone who wants to start his or her own business. Part of the article deals with the dilemma.

The problem has many facets. One of them has to do with what kind of employment path to take to pay the bills. "Some choose a job that corresponds with higher dreams," he writes. "Others work in a disparate field for the money so as to not contaminate their passion."

Maloney chose to work in at a hedge fund. I myself pursued a career that utilized my skills, landing a job as a writer and building on that to a career in advertising. For both Mahoney and myself it was a compromise, but one we accepted. We also each felt fortunate that we had jobs that were sufficient to take care of our needs. Not everyone is so fortunate, as he notes here.

"What’s certain is that not everyone has the opportunity to do a stint in a well-paid but mildly perplexing job, even if they wanted to. Many school-leavers and graduates face a choice between several uninspiring jobs that are all badly paid, and a passion that pays nothing at all."

Maloney's article explores all the facets of this issue, like a jeweler examining the faces of a gem from multiple angles. When it comes to the matter of moonlighting he writes that "moonlighting is undoubtedly an uncomfortable business. By dividing finite time and energy between two endeavors, bifurcators inevitably feel they aren’t doing either as well as they could."

Further on, he places another aspect of the matter on the table. Whichever path your pursue, the dream or the job, you can still end up experiencing regret.

Advocates of dream-following, of commitment and career leaps of faith, often say: ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t.’ They might be right about that (actually, they almost certainly are). But here’s the rub: regret is not the sole preserve of the cautious compromiser. A failure to compromise can also beget future unhappiness. Some of your sacrifices might come back to haunt you.

If you've ever wrestled with any aspect of this dilemma,  I recommend the full article here on Aeon.

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Last summer I attended an Op-Ed workshop with author Michael Fedo who was in Duluth for a book signing, a book that also addresses this very same topic: Don't Quite Your Day Job. A review of Fedo's book is at the end of my blog post Notes from an Op-Ed Writing Workshop.

Whatever you choose, choose to make a difference.

Adversarial or Empathetic: Our Presuppositions Impact Our Dialogue Outcomes

An excellent article from Aeon was forwarded to my inbox this morning about the roots of our toxic public dialogue. The article by Alexander Bevilacqua, edited by Sally Davies, is titled The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture.

The article begins with these sentences (highlights in blue.)

1. As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. 
Too true. Witness the flare-up in response to the recent #Gillette commercial.

2. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. 
Unfortunately, too often this is also true.

In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to judgment. In the face of what she called ‘a culture of “calling out”, a culture of outrage’, she asked students to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’.

The article is an essential read for our time, for it identifies the root ideas that created our culture of distrust.

One mode of reading, first described in 1965 by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur and known as ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’, aims to uncover the hidden meaning or agenda of a text. Whether inspired by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud, the reader interprets what happens on the surface as a symptom of something deeper and more dubious, from economic inequality to sexual anxiety. The reader’s task is to reject the face value of a work, and to plumb for a submerged truth.

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This approach to history results in the erosion of all foundations for determining anything. It's the seed from which ideas like Pizzagate sprang.

A second form of interpretation, known as ‘deconstruction’, was developed in 1967 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It aims to identify and reveal a text’s hidden contradictions – ambiguities and even aporias (unthinkable contradictions) that eluded the author.

The problem we have is one of approach with regard to what we read. The speed with which we judge or condemn others in public discourse springs from our lack of charity. The root of this comes from what Bevilacqua calls the ‘adversarial’ humanities?

Our approach, he suggests, should be more like historians. The task of historians is understanding, not judging.

I am reminded here of Dr. Edward de Bono's P.I.N. method of listening to one another in dialogue. Everything has a Positive, Interesting and Negative aspect or features. Instead immediately jumping on the negatives, we detach ourselves emotionally and address ideas rationally.

This AEON article is a MUST READ for anyone desirous to understand the current heated state of Twitter/Reddit social debate and contemporary dialogue.

Near the end he writes, Reading like a historian, then, involves not just a theory of interpretation, but also a moral stance. It is an attempt to treat others generously, and to extend that generosity even to those who can’t be hic et nunc – here and now.

As I see it, the ideas in this piece, if taken to heart could help reduce the tensions of our current polarized culture. At least it's a basis for hope.