Steph’s

This week, my father sent a letter both to President Obama and the CEO of GM, reminding them of a few leadership principles and suggesting in essence that we look at the current “crisis” more as an opportunity to transform from some bad practices.  If handled well, Obama could seize an opportunity to, in essence, throw down the gauntlet to organizations of all type - including the banking industry and automakers - to stop doing business ‘the usual way,’ since clearly that didn’t work out so well, and transform the way they do business.

In my dad’s letter, he included Henry Kissinger’s definition of a leader: “A leader is someonone who will take you, your country, or your organization someplace you haven’t been before.”  This reminded me of an excellent article by Mario Bernardez, written in 2005, where he wrote about companies that created lasting success (i.e. across multiple decades, not just a several quarters).  Bernardez points out that organizations which begin with a vision for social impact and change are ones that create the ideal conditions for lasting success.  This sort of approach is underscored by many “big names” in organizational planning, to include Drucker and Prahalad.  Roger Kaufman refers to this as “change creation” rather than “change management.”

Ironically, one of the companies typically cited as an example is Ford.  I hope they find their TRUE heritage, which isn’t a particular make or model of a car but a focus on what our vision for society really is and how the cars/products a company delivers fits into that vision.

This is the gauntlet to be thrown down to the companies that have failed us - at the societal level.  “Us” is part of the whole of society being impacted by consequences of poor planning and bad management.  GM or others won’t get their ships turned around until they get their organizations focused on a vision of where we as a society are headed and how their organizations actually fit into that picture.  Without that leadership, I question whether they or any other organization truly deserves to continue to exist.

In addition, though, I’m not sure that we can wait around for Obama or any other politician to “get it.”  America, and its entrepreneurial heritage, aren’t exactly ones to wait for politicians … but rather we are historically a country of people who make things happen.  Unfortunately, we are slipping in some of those ratings as well.  Perhaps we really are too spoiled like the comedian on Conan joked?  But that cynicism aside, I know too many great minds and great ideas are out there.  So I would throw down the gauntlet to you, individual Americans, to not wait around but instead - go create.  We know what we want our lives to be like.  So let’s create it.

When savings bonds were first created and their terms were being established, Thomas Jefferson urged that one generation’s debt should never be passed on to the next generation:

“…the earth belongs in usufruct to the living:  that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it  … no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him.  For if he could, he might during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come; and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living” (1789, online translation source

 (I am snipping from my book - I give myself permission to cite myself.)

This is sage advice that applies not only to bonds but to all manners of financial decisions and policies … advice that perhaps has elluded 20th and 21st century decision making and policy.

This focus on future generations as an actual starting point for planning and design is not dreamy.  It is actually among the most realistic planning strategies any entity - be it government or for-profit or otherwise - can adopt.  The consequences are real whether we choose to envision them or imagine them or not … and thus they will be real whether we plan for them or not.

In the wake of the economic bailout plans of 2008-2009, Patrick Garot writes:

I do not care one whit if I am able to pass on to my children the consumerist, leveraged, falsely prosperous America that we may have had for two decades.

But I will be damned to hell if I do not pass on to my kids what it is to be American. Capitalist. Striving. An America where the best and brightest succeed, a promise has meaning, and there is consequence. (Garot’s article online)

Lost amidst the current debates is STILL the long-term focus - a discussion driven entirely by the question of what we will leave to our children, to future generations.

Truly, we have done a poor job thus far.  We are leaving a financial debt, an environmental debt, and a social debt.  On nearly all counts, the debts are so large as to seem possibly insurmountable.

I tend to be one who doesn’t like ceding the future or assuming defeat before it really has come.  I tend to be one who simply decides it’s time to put the shoulder to the plow and do the hard work of figuring out the answer to some messy challenges.  These do represent messy challenges, but I don’t think we’re as lost as maybe all of us want to believe.  In this respect, postmodernist tendencies have not served us well as a society (no matter how fun they may be to apply to literary interpretations).

Defining an objective - an aim - is not a bad thing.  In fact a re-constructionist (Jan Winterowd, personal conversation), rather than a deconstructionist, approach could serve organizations and society well … a paradigm under which we assume that we define our future.  We create the shape of society, both by action and inaction.  For too long, we have ignored that we do - are - actively shaping society.  Organizations, be they educational or governmental or corporate or military, don’t operate in a vacuum but instead impact the shape of society.  William McDonough, reknowned architect, points out that we have become strategically tragic … that the very debts we are creating are ones that exist because they resulted from de facto planning.  We didn’t plan for things to be otherwise … so here we are.

We can plan for things to be otherwise (that’s what I mean by a reconstructionist approach).  We define the shape of things.  We define the ends.  We select the means for getting to those ends.  Nobody else is doing it for us.  Whether we do it by choice or neglect, we shape the world and pass it along.

This is why I like Roger Kaufman’s model - Mega Planning.  It forces strategic planning to move beyond the organizational measures (e.g. profit or ratings) to start first with societal-level planning then align that down into how an organization does its thing.  Organizations that include this don’t produce peantus with Salmonella.  They don’t put faulty car designs on the road knowing they’ll blow up in rear-end collisions, or faulty plane parts in the sky.  Organizations that start with societal-level planning can focus their policies and decision-making on desirable consequences (like self-sufficiency for the general population) to ensure that the means and processes they implement drive towards those desired ends.

It’s not really clear to me that the current bailout measures ARE headed in those directions.  There’s a difference between intentions and actual strategic planning.  If anything, I would call on this administration and all future ones (I don’t care what party affiliation) to make sure the bus is driving towards positive societal ends - to stop being strategically tragic by way of practicing de facto planning.  THIS is practical dreaming.

It is rather funny that I have only started to blog now.  I am a techie and a writer, and I had an intuitive sense of these new tools when they arose.  I helped so many people start using these, and yet I myself haven’t done so.  It’s like a singer who writes songs for others but never starts to sing on her own.

Tonight, I start my own.  And I want a place where my posts can be as varied as my thoughts, and loose in construction (i.e. rambles a bit) so I don’t always have to be proper.

What prompted this tonight is my reflections on “stuckness.”  For a great exploration, see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  He talks about mental stuckness, or psychological stuckness.  But I wonder about our more general propensity in life to stay stuck, thereby creating our own unhappiness.  We stay in relationships that aren’t working or that are actually hurting us.  We stay in jobs that under-value and de-value us.  We stay in routines out of habit - church, wardrobe, sleeping patterns, stores we shop, even driving patterns.  While there is an understandable dependability to this, we also shut down part of ourselves as we maintain stricter and stricter routines.  Learning slows down - our brain doesn’t build as many new neural pathways.  We literally create ruts in our brains that translate into ruts in our behaviors.

Part of the reason I think we participate in this stuckness is because of a narrative we buy - a great American life.  If I keep going further, I’m going to get obnoxious really quick.  My point isn’t to challenge a good dream but to challenge the notion of narrative as the ruling structures in our lives.  We tell ourselves stories and then become the characters, play out the parts.  There are many different stories - no given story or narrative is truly priveliged over another.  That doesn’t matter … what I am wondering about is how we get beyond narratives that trap us … narratives that create a “stuckness” in our lives.

A person I care about deeply continually ruins major relationships in his life because of a narrative he keeps telling himself - that he “needs” certain things and that he has to act on what he feels.  As soon as he is in a stable relationship, his “needs” and “feelings” lead him a new direction.  He says he wants a loving, stable marriage, and yet he is constantly acting to the contrary.  He is stuck in a cycle of failure in relationships - at least 8 major ones in his adult life by now.  His personal narrative, about life and about his self-perception, continually lead him away from the things he says he wants and into the same predictable rut each time.

Another person I care about deeply says she is content right where she is and doesn’t want anything to change.  She hasn’t changed in at least 35 years.  She has everything (although by no means in grotesque excess).  However, she may be losing it all by holding on too tight.  In her narrative, stability and stasis trump all and is the way to success.  She acts in accordance with that … and is stuck.

Striking out of these ruts doesn’t guarantee success, though.  We are not always rewarded for our courage.  Any person who has had the courage to get out of a bad marriage knows this.  Divorce battles can turn into fights for life, for freedom, for the chance to move on … to get unstuck.  Part of the reason these fights can be so nasty isn’t because of the financial stakes or social stakes … but because they are evidence that a person’s life narrative for operation doesn’t work. We will give up our money and our friends far faster than we will relinquish our worldviews.

The great strifes that have led to significant shifts in human history reflect this same notion.  Martin Luther King Jr. was a threat to one narrative because he proposed an alternate narrative about societal structures.  We are willing to kill people … in large numbers … when they do not act or are not willing to act according to the worldview, or narrative that we hold dear.

Narratives are perhaps the most powerful, influential force in the world.  They drive decisions, they are at the core of social structures, of negotiations, of strife, of bliss.   They are perhaps the most addictive drug or force available to man - they are in our blood streams since birth, and we can go an entire lifetime or generations without an awareness of their presence.  We can get people to quit smoking or quit committing crimes easier than we can get them to change the narratives by which they operate.

So what. Many of us go about our lives and live these narratives without much consequence … “quiet desperation” - perhaps one of the greatest phrases from literature.  Or do we live them without consequence?  Therein perhaps lies a way for us to begin to sift through the healthy narratives and the unhealthy narratives - consequences.  Does the narrative lead to health?  Does it lead to harm to others, to ourselves?  George Sand wrote that we are prisoners of our metaphors - we adopt a metaphor for our lives.  At some point, our personal metaphors break down.  Our narratives reach a point where they are just a story, not a reality.  What is your metaphor?  And at what point is the metaphor too much?

What is MY metaphor, what is MY narrative?  And is it a good one?  Do I limit or exclude (myself or others) by my narrative?  How is that causing me to get stuck?  And what are the consequences of that … to myself, to my son, to those in my life, to the world?

And what is OUR narrative?  My concern is that our national narrative is one of victimhood.  My additional concern is that our national narrative is one of “Americans as bad aggressors.”  Nothing crumbles so fast as a nation turned in on itself, just like nothing crumbles so fast as a person turned in on him or herself.  We are swallowing some pretty toxic narratives - narratives that if we stopped and questioned the consequences of them, I think we would reject them.  While continual improvement is an honorable goal, and we are never perfect, we cannot function as a system by continually taking in and digesting mostly negative self-narratives.  This undermines our individual psyches (e.g. as in the damage of psychological or emotional abuse in a relationship), and this undermines our collective psyches.  Interestingly, this point of “the narrative” and even “the grand narrative” may be among the most important characteristics of 21st century life about which we could be aware.  Even though it has not been on the forefront of our minds, this is definitely (seriously) on the minds of enemies to the US and its national security (see for example the Venona Papers which in-part document the Soviet Union’s attempt to undermine Americans’ perceptions of themselves from within, and consider the current use of media and narrative construction by our most public enemies).

So - are we stuck on a narrative of self-devaluation?  And if so, what are the consequences of that?  And how do we get unstuck - individually and collectively?  Self-awareness isn’t just about questioning ourselves - it includes sound boundaries about what messages go in, and what messages go out … as we attempt to flush out the negative, perhaps that is how we get unstuck.