R for Ready

This past Friday, Charlie and I attended the New York Times Thomas L Friedman The Next New World Asia Forum.  Friedman’s opening comments were titled “What world are you living in?” and, in a humorous, insightful and optimistic manner, he painted a picture of where we came from to get to where we are today and what tomorrow holds – always making it clear that the future is ours to create.  But we must be prepared as things have, and are, changing. Hence this week’s word – R for Ready.  Are you ready?

One of the foundational changes is in authority structures.  We’ve moved from vertical to horizontal.  In the old world of hierarchy, bosses bossed and workers worked and if everyone just followed the plan, all was right with the world.  Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, believed that “one best way” could be found for any job and that workers should have detailed training in their discrete task and then repeat that over and over for mastery. 

But who has discrete tasks in their job?  Every job is a combination of strategy-implementation, customer service, sales, marketing, finance, compliance, corporate security and technology – and the requirements change from customer to customer, day to day.  The world and its workers do not fit into neat little boxes – it’s a big messy complex rapidly changing world in which we live.  To succeed, we must be able to learn and unlearn and relearn – Friedman calls this ability the new literacy.  We can look to the past as prologue, but not as a pattern for the future. 

Another change he pointed out was that we are moving from high wage middle skill jobs to high wage high skill work – and our greatest shortage is brain power. Thanks to the Internet, knowledge is abundant.  Skill – defined as the practical application of knowledge – is not as plentiful. It’s not what we know, it’s what we can do with what we know.   

A third change in the new world is that companies only hire if they have to do so.  Although GDP and job growth used to move together, this is no longer the case. Rather than find a job, we may have to invent a job – and, if we have a job already, it’s important to think about how we add value to the organization.  Our contributions should not be based on a static job description, but by a desire to be relentlessly entrepreneurial in how we identify opportunity and help to drive corporate objectives.

So how do we prepare for what’s next?  A healthy dose of persistence, curiosity and imagination will be helpful.  Add to this a desire to take risks, to experiment, to fail and try again. Get comfortable with ambiguity – in case we had forgotten, the first decade of the 21^st century has made us painfully aware of the uncertainty and unpredictability of life. Keep learning and unlearning and relearning. Always be in beta. 

That may sound like a lot.  So be sure to take regularly scheduled R&R.  Once restored, you’ll be ready to rule your realm.

Q for Quotidian

Today we arrive at the 17^th letter of the alphabet, a relational fellow as he’s rarely seen without his best friend, u, beside him. Queued like that, they make quite a quaint couple, no question about it.

Without further quibbling, let us quickly turn to our Q word.  Quotidian.  Say it out loud.  It’s a lot of fun.

Webster’s defines it as an adjective meaning daily, usual or customary, ordinary, common place.  And as a noun meaning something recurring daily, a quotidian fever or ague.  The root of the word is the Latin for occurring daily. 

In Europe, it’s likely to be seen as an adjective in a bakery’s name – such as Le Pain Quotidien (spelled with an “e” not “a”).  Listen here.

http://www.lepainquotidien.us/#/en_US/about_us/our_name

Fun, hey?  But for some reason, in the American English dictionaries, a common definition of quotidian is tied to malaria – e.g., a quotidian fever. Which is sad because I think the word has much more to offer. 

These are some of the quotidian events of my life that, although customary and usual for me, are not to be taken for granted. 

Waking up with my husband beside me

Waking up in a climate-controlled bedroom

Electricity – lights at a flip of a switch

Running water and all that entails – an indoor flush toilet, a hot shower

The first whiff of the coffee brewing

The first sip of coffee in the morning

The second cup of coffee in the morning

Skype calls to loved ones

Checking email and Facebook to catch up with loved ones

Clean clothes – a whole closetful with lots of shoes, too

Cupboard and fridge full of food

Ease of doing laundry

Good tennis shoes and a good walk

My Bible

My iPod and all the music on it

Reading

Quotidian events are the substance of life.  Today, I’m giving thanks for “le pain quotidien” that nourishes me, body mind and soul.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the ordinary. - Ralph Waldo Emerson 

P for Peace

P words have been flipping and flopping around in my head like fish out of water, struggling to find their natural element, to slip smoothly through my fingers and onto this paper.  But I’ve been holding them tightly…until this moment when peace has won the page.

I started out with “peace” awhile back, but kept wandering down other paths – pizza, play, poo-poo, and puzzles being a few “Ps” that made me smile. I kept planning to put pen to paper, promising to prioritize this particular project, but the purpose for the prose remained perplexing and it was possible to procrastinate day after day. 

Then I hit the fork in the road that brought my P into perspective. In the midst of all the unrest in the US, I had been self-righteously observing the goings-on at a safe distance, making it easy for me to judge all of those in power and shake my head.  Why can’t they just get along?  Why can’t they focus on the work and quit playing politics?

The details of my fork are not relevant.  Suffice it to say that it was my own political battle and I was in the right.  I knew I was right.  I had the facts and data.  I felt the pull of power, to put my persecutors in their proper place, to pull out all the stops and pound them over the head with the obvious.  My attack was prepared, my speech played over and over in my head. 

Come on, you’ve been at that fork, haven’t you?  One way led to victory for me and my ego.  In the opposite direction was letting go of all that and pursuing peace.  But, let me say it again, I WAS RIGHT.  The decision was obvious.

I couldn’t sleep that night.  I tossed and turned, I rationalized and justified, I argued my case in a manner worthy of Perry Mason.  Not so obvious after all.

At the end of the day, I knew I had to choose peace over being right.  It was not an easy thing to do.  It required self-denial and discipline and letting go of being right, the latter being an especially difficult thing for me to do.  The moment I made that decision, the hard work began.  But the peace was worth the price. 

Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies. Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. Psalm 34:12-14

My pursuit continues.

O for Obligation

Obligation has been on my mind recently.  The word is defined as: “binding promise, contract, sense of duty.”  Okay, the binding promise I get – as in a marriage vow, or agreeing to care for a friend’s house plant while she’s away.  And contract – rental contract, employment contract, pretty straight forward.  The one that trips me up is “sense of duty.”  Who or what defines what is my duty?  And how do I sense it?  

A friend and I had similar experiences a couple of weeks ago.  In a group, no one was quick to volunteer, eyes turned toward us and before we knew it – wham bang add another obligation to our to-do list.

You see, I was raised in the Midwest in a family where “not possible” was blasphemy.  My mother knew every word of Edgar Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done” and we grew up believing that if “we started to sing as we tackled the thing that couldn’t be done, we would do it.”  So you could say it’s in my DNA to take up what others deem undoable.  And, often it works, and the thing is done and it feels good.  But at what cost?  Was it necessary?  Was it worth my time and effort?  If no one else valued it enough to make it a priority, why did I?   

Obligation stems from the Latin obligatio – that ligatio part is also the root word of ligature – tying or binding up.  So when we take on an obligation, we are binding ourselves to some purpose or outcome. Think of a small backpack that you carry daily – each obligation is a stone that you add to that backpack.  We all need our backpacks – but we also need to pack carefully.  Life without obligations, without any bonding to others and with no shared outcomes, would be just as oppressive to our humanity.  But an overloaded pack can be downright onerous.

Once I coached a senior leader who was overwhelmed with his obligations.  So we made a list and looked at all the commitments he had, many of which no longer added any value to his life and were no longer connected to his goals or priorities.  While it might be a real ego booster to be asked to sit on committees and boards or head special projects, these can become heavy stones in our packs.  Over time, we become so used to the backbreaking weight that we forget it’s our pack and so we trudge on, often feeling powerless, resentful or constantly overwhelmed.  The good news is that we have the power to stop, take a look at the load we are carrying, and do some unbinding where necessary. 

We walk on feeling lighter.  And who knows?  The next traveler along the road might be looking for just that stone we’ve left behind.