Month: September 2017

You made a comment to a colleague the other day that one could hear more sighs than breaths in the pantry, where people escape from their desks to load up on caffeine beverages, or simply to walk it off for a moment. Yes, business is good, one supposes, if everyone’s so busy all of the time, but there’s an extra sense of exasperation in the air. No one thinks they have the necessary resources to do their work properly, or sales has contributed to the fiasco by overselling and promising the world. Expectations are high, something more appropriate perhaps in a Harry Potter world, impossible to meet, or even to provide moderate disappointment. Yet, the board of directors has offered C-level management huge incentives to cut costs further.

It all begins to form an agonizing and gyrating spectacle of increasing hysteria, of sinking deeper into impossibility. One wonders what can be done, where to go, whether there’s another job out there…

But alas, it’s happening everywhere. Every bank and software company, every startup and green grocer. Everyone is panting for breath, out of breath, or passed out from holding their breath too long.

Meanwhile Nazis are marching in the streets, we have a president who should be on anti-psychotic drugs and who is playing chicken with our lives, and the weather is flashing us signs that things are in fact the way many scientists have stated, though a large number of our leaders are too stubborn, blind or greedy to admit it.

What makes it worse is all of those positive messages out there, people selling paths to a miraculous recovery, bliss, and a wholly fulfilled life if you download their $95 special mp3’s that will teach you gratitude and mindfulness. But pooh-pooh all that. You already have everything you need. It’s your very experience that you are trying to escape that will give you back your salvation.

After experiencing, some in the trenches, others via the fallout, the utter absurdity of the first world war, a number of artists started what eventually became the loosely knit Dada moment, and subsequently Surrealism, all of which were an out and out rejection of the civilizaiton that brought about the absurdity in the first place.

One such Surrealist, a man named Antonin Artaud, went further, left the group, and decided to create what he called the Theater of Cruelty. Artaud felt that art wasn’t accomplishing its main task, which was to wake people up, that it was actually helping to create a deeper distancing and snoozing effect that kept people from a fully realized experience of reality. His theater was meant to be both jarring and disturbing to his audiences (just as aspects of our lives are to us), and to be a form of social and invidual therapy, to provide the cold-water splash to the face to help people achieve a “woke” state.

This life you have, this seeming impossibility, is your teacher. Listen to it and develop a fabulous sense of humor. It will help you survive and flourish. Walk into that pantry and see the other human beings in the room. Imagine what they are feeling. Drop the resentment you have toward your boss, the person who got the promotion you wanted, the guy in the corner office with the attitude, and most of all the story you’ve been telling yourself. Ask: what’s really happening here?

 

The social theorists Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari had one core complaint about Freud, saying that he saw Oedipus in everything, which interfered with his ability to truly understand the rich complexities of human beings and their systems and interactions; and that Marx was similar, in a way, because everything human had become part of a drama around a dialectic of economies.

Though Deleuze and Guattari were both influenced and inspired by the French student and worker uprisings of 1968, and were motivated along social justice and had socialist themes, they did however acknowledge that capitalism had a special talent for decoding the flows of desire and and in doing so actually engage with particular complexities that Freudian and Marxist thought would overlook. To Deleuze and Guattari, Freudian and Marxist thinking was arborescent, or tree-like, because everything group from the central trunk and roots.

On the other hand, capitalism was developing qualities that made it more rhizomatic, or grass-like, since it sprung up everywhere, had no center, and was therefore, at least in its most simple, ideal form, more democratic and anarchic, and in some ways resembles early anthropologic economic forms, such as barter.

This problem, as we know, is that captialism doesn’t end there. As it grows it begins to congeal. The spread of wealth begins to collect in specific pockets of leverage and power. It loses its rhizomatic qualities and becomes its opposite. It also begins to lose its ability to engage with complexity through its chief weakness – a tendency to simplify everything, all human value, to a single variable: capital.

And its arguable that this simplication has engendered something like a univeral language and system of evaluation, which has allowed for the profluence of great expanses of wealth. The problem is that we begin to measure things along that single variable, and compare things that have different qualities, as if they were the same, but of different relative values. When discussing Bergson in a previous post, I pointed out that we do not want to judge apples for being poorer oranges, and vice versa, but Capitalism, as it has manifested in our lives, has us doing just that.

One of the problems with the whole trend toward certification is that the entire business world has begun to convince itself that there are core skill-sets that can be taught to anyone so that human beings can be used as replaceable parts, or be replaced by a fairly simple set of computer code, without taking the whole of people’s education and experience into account. We talk of “throwing another body” on a problem, if someone with a certain level of expertise is no longer available.

And although this kind of thinking makes management seem a simpler and more fluid process, like the directing of liquids or grains of sand toward one goal or another, it’s up to us, on a perhaps different levels of our organizations, to keep an eye on and appreciate those differences, think against the trend of uniformity, not only because it’s smarter and more humane, but because it’s in our own interest, both on a large scale in regard to the economy as a whole, but also because we, as individuals, are best to maintain the resouces we have that cannot be replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.

It’s been a long time since my last blogpost, about a year, and I think I’m back because of a great deal of thinking I’ve done about the demands of my dayjob, my life in general, and how contradictory it is with so many things I’ve read that offer up a list of 10 things one needs to succeed at such and such.

And I admit that I am a sucker for those articles too. I want to find out the 10 things that are going to help me do my job, be richer, manage my stress, etc.. If only…

The problem is that I generally end up forgetting all of the points very quickly after reading the article, or even when I do remember, they seem either irrelevant to my current situation, or I don’t know how to apply their small trinkets of wisdom.

The real trick to the whole thing is that these suggestions are most often things I already know, or think I know. I could have written the article myself perhaps, which makes me suspicious. I ask myself, do these people really know what they’re talking about, or are they just repeating something they’ve heard in a bar, or read somewhere, and have repeated to themselves so often they believe that it’s originated with themselves?

But the problem, what I’m trying to get to, is that life is a lot more complex than we like to make it out to be. Our lazy left brains like easy formulas, but even some of the most successful people writing these articles don’t really know how they produce their success. Very often it’s a number of things they’ve learned long ago working in concert, things they have so fully integrated into who they are that they’re no more aware of them than they are of the air they are breathing, or the fact that their hearts are beating.

Some of you who have read my posts in the past may remember that I tend to rail against the trend toward certifications for this and that: certifications for project management, for business analysis, etc., etc.. Okay, it’s not that I think that they are a complete waste of time – after all many organizations now require them, so it’s useful to have the cert on your resume, I suppose. I just think there is a better way to learn how to think and get things done.

A project plan is really only a compositional model. It tells a story about how things are supposed to get done. It’s generally a composite of events, risks, costs and time relations. If you’ve read enough really good novels, biographies, histories, you’ll have this sort of thing tattooed into your backbrain, and in many ways a richer model, with more variation, and more pathways to solutions, than anything you’ll learn in a cert training. All you need to do is think.

Ever notice how your project is sometimes, with its false starts, miscommunications and drama, more like a 19th century novel than your project plan? That’s because – if you’re doing the project work you’re worthy of, not some simple cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, do-it-in-your-sleep, type of thing, that a machine will be doing, instead of you, in a few years – it is.

Most of what comprises a business education is borrowed from other areas: the humanities, sciences and mathematics. It’s not really its own thing. You’re really better off going back to the source material, rather than the leftover bones remaining after someone whittles it down to its remaining skeleton. Not only does a real skeleton not have any meaning outside the whole system of nerves and musculature, but someone’s simplification of someone else’s great ideas generally miss the point, leave things out, or are confused with other oversimplified models.

My alternative? Beyond reading my blog, it’s follow your curiosity and desire, and do some real heavy lifting in those areas that drive you from the inside. While I’m not one of those who believe that following your bliss insures marvelous results, I do believe the work you do that broadens your mental and psychological agility in any subject increases the scope of what you can and will accomplish.

It’s also merely a better way of living.

Don’t fear poetry.