books – Page 2 – Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle

June 18, 2006

More on Loving “Work”

I am reading a book by a Cornell class-mate of mine called Steve Shapiro. The book is called “Goal-Free Living.”

The book is quite good, and he has developed what sounds (up until page 62 at least) to be a distinct way of looking at how to think about planning the things that we want to achieve.

While reading, I came across the following quote from Buckminster Fuller:

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and no one else seems to see the need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

This quote perfectly captures some of the experiences I have had in my own life, when I have felt the pull of a commitment that I could not quite explain, but felt very real nontheless. At those moments, I wondered why no-one else can see or hear the things that I did. I wondered if I were the only one.

Until reading this quote, I did not appreciate that what I see so clearly is only what I see, and only what I am able to see — to the exclusion of every other human being.

I find this to the force behind a great deal of what I do professionaly, and why I love to write, and specifically to blog. When not writing, I find myself mulling over points of view or insights that I badly want to express in the world, and while I am writing them I cannot shake the feeling that this stuff is all very obvious, and that everyone must already know this.

This quote helped me to understand that this is not the case, and my recent return to Jamaica has been a tremendous and powerful opportunity to see my country differently. This has been one of the gifts that I received from living and working for 20+ years abroad.

In this sense, “Work” is not a burden or a drudgery. After all, no-one starts a new job saying that they intend it to be dull and uninspiring.

Instead, when there is a belief that the work we are doing is specifically designed for US, and that we are the only ones who could do it — well, that is different. When we are alive to life, and to what is around us in our work, then we can see what no-one else can, and therefore do what no-one else can.

This makes for a life worth living, right down to the minute by minute experience. It also makes for a life that is full, which has more to do with a life in which every aspect is engaged fully (rather than merely full of too much stuff).

In this way, it is easy to see how my own uniqueness allows for each and every part of my life to be a different one. It makes me want to commit — to not having a single corner of my life be ordinary by my terms. I also see how I can bring something unique to each aspect of my life, if I am only willing to first believe that I can, and then to wait until it reveals itself.

After all, if we all possess a divine origin, how could it be any different?

June 9, 2006

The Thwarting of the Creative Class

In an earlier blog, I wrote about how the Creative Class (the engine of economic growth) searches out and thrives in environments rich on the 3T’s: Talent, Technology and Tolerance. (see several blogs starting with Tolerance and Talent).

Strangely enough, we in the Caribbean do not encourage our ‘creatives’ nearly enough. Instead, perhaps out of a mistaken wish for our children to have an easier life than we had, we want our children to become doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers.

For example, I have the distinct impression that if I worked hard, long hours to create a successful patty or roti business, then I would not want them to grow up to be “only” shop owners. Instead, I want them to do better than I did, and become doctors, lawyers, etc. Furthermore, I would probably want them to live in Toronto, New York or Miami.

This particular priority might come from a good and sincerely loving place. However, it has two severe drawbacks.

One is that it breaks up families, and from a business point of view robs the company of the lifeblood it needs to live past the owner’s death. There are numerous stories of companies in which the founder would only trust his or her family to run and own it, while encouraging the same family members to enter “easier” and “more noteworthy” professions. The result is that businesses close when there is no-one interested in running them — not the outcome that the founders had intended at all.

The second drawback is that our societies encourage their members to pursue the high profile occupations, while at the same time discouraging them from starting and running their own companies. In other words, they discourage them from becoming creatives in the economic sense — entrepreneurs.

The result is that Jamaica and other Caribbean countries are difficult places to thrive as entrepreneurs.

This is not a situation that is unique to Jamaica, however, but it is one that I am about to deal with as I attempt to set up a Jamaican company as a wholly-owned subsidiary of my U.S. company. I can’t wait… I expect to deal with a bureaucracy that is inherently inimical to what I am trying to do.

I have been “officially” informed that setting up a company in Jamaica takes only 2-3 days.

As I read this, it makes me think of that crucial distinction made by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, in a chapter named “The Virgin of Guadalupe.” In this chapter, he talks about how cultural icons in Mexico and Egypt that are big-sellers to locals and tourists are not actually made locally. Instead, they are made in China.

Mexican officials, he explains, are quaking in their boots because it has become cheaper and more efficient to mass-manufacture many products in China, even with the advantages granted by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and obvious geographical advantage of being located next door to the greatest mass-market on earth. This includes the religious and cultural icon that is sold in the thousands to Mexicsn adn foreigners alike: The Virgin of Guadelupe.

What is going on here?

Check out this quote from today’s Jamaica Gleaner:

The conundrum faced by the IDB researchers, and the Finance Minister, Dr Omar Davies, is the country’s continued weak economic growth despite its high levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) and relatively strong capital formation, averaging four per cent and near 30 per cent of GDP in recent years.

In other countries with these levels of investment, annual growth would be expected upwards of six per cent a year. Jamaica has struggled to achieve GDP expansion of two per cent or more.

Ms. Currea and her colleagues at the IDB offer an important and perhaps insightful perspective. Bureaucracy, they suggest, impose high transaction costs on business, leading to informality and anaemic growth in the formal economic sector. Indeed, prior to this recent analysis of the performance of the Jamaican economy, the IDB had estimated that the informal sector accounts for about 40 per cent of the country’s economic activity.

Basically, this is saying that it is so hard to do business in Jamaica on a formal, legal basis that it is better just to keep things small, informal and illegal because the benefits of starting an official business are just too insignificant. It makes sense that if I am interested in manufacturing my own “Virgin” that I would try to do so in a country in which it is easy to do business.

Reading this paragraph made me run for my Friedman book, and to this chapter.

In it, he talks about reform wholesale, which was an era of broad macroeconomic reform. Countries, such as Jamaica, China, Russia et al pushed their countries into more export-oriented, free-market strategies. Some of the changes that were made included “privatization of state companies, deregulation of financial markets, currency adjustments, foreign direct investment, shrinking subsidies, lowering of protectionist tariff barriers and the introduction of more flexible labor laws.”

Companies that refused to make these changes (such as North Korea) actually saw their GDP’s shrink.

However, reform wholesale, according to the strategies outlined above is no longer enough, because aggressive countries like India and China have gone well beyond the basics, to offer what he calls “reform retail”.

Reform retail involves looking at a country’s infrastructure, regulatory environment, education and culture and upgrading each one to “remove as many friction points as possible.”

Friction points.

This describes the general difference, for me, of doing business in Jamaica and the region, versus doing business in North America. In the US, as a business owner, I experienced very few friction points, relative to my experience of doing business here in Jamaica.

In a recent blog I mentioned that it took me three days to get someone to answer the phone at the Ministry of Justice. Luckily, the matter was not an urgent one or else I would have had to visit in person, and burn several hours in line waiting only to hear that my papers were still not ready, and that I should have to wait longer.

In the news recently, a judge entered a judgement against a local Jamaican government agency — the National Environmental Planning Agency — when he discovered that they had not followed their own process in granting a permit to build a 2000 room hotel in an ecologically sensitive area. (Full disclosure: my father, Dr. Barry Wade, is the chairman of the company that performed the Environmental Impact Assessment.) The judgement may have the effect of halting construction, which would not only be costly to the builders, but put two thousand workers out of a job.

This must give the investors, a Spanish company, a severe case of “bureaucracy burn” as they felt the friction of doing business in Jamaica. If you cannot trust a governmental agency to give the right permits, then who can you trust, and who can you believe? I am sure that when they are assessing where to put their next hotel, this catastrophe would rank high on their list of concerns.

Taking away friction points like these is not just a matter of throwing cash at problems, either. In fact, that might make things worse.

For example, Trinidad is currently undergoing a rapid increase in wages, due to how it is spending the high tax revenues that are accruing from US$70+ barrel oil. The government launched a series of program for the poor under the name of CEPEP — Community-based Environmental and Enhancement Programme. Unskilled workers were paid a “decent” wage to clear debris, cut bush and do other manual tasks that included plenty time to take lengthy naps (this I know from personal observation).

The result? A labour shortage in Trinidad, especially at the lowest levels. A friend of mine who recently returned to Trinidad to run a business told me that he cannot find people to hire at the wage he needs to pay, because anyone who wants to work knows that they can do so with CEPEP, with more of an emphasis on getting paid, and less on actually doing any useful work. Here in Jamaica, we have had similar programs over the years, usually occurring around the end of the year… hence the name, “Christmas Work.”

So, spending money can actually help to create new “friction points.”

A study undertaken by the IFC in 2004 called Doing Business in 2004 has actually documented the differences. They have also updated their information on their website to 2006.

They measured how difficult it is to do the following basics, all of which I have had to do as a company owner:

start a business in terms of local rules, regulations and license fees
hire and fire workers
enforce a contract
get credit
close a failing business

In Jakarta, Indonesia an entrepreneur must deposit minimum capital of three times the per capita income, and then wait a total of 186 days before he can start business officially.

In Panama City, a company owner finds it easier to keep underperformers on staff than it is to hire a high performer, due to union pressures and local laws.

A trader in the UAE must undertake 27 procedures and endure 550 days to resolve a payment dispute in court.

An entrepreneur in Ethiopia cannot access credit to expand her company because there are no credit information registries. She cannot use accounts receivable as collateral, due to local laws.

A businessman in India cannot make a profit and goes out of business. Due to the 10 year-long process of going through bankruptcy, he absconds leaving his workers, bank and tax agency with nothing.

It takes 2 days to start a business in Australia, 203 days in Haiti and 215 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The IFC report notes that excessive regulation tends to hurt most the very people it is meant to protect. The rich and well-connected just buy or hustle their way around onerous regulations.

It is no mistake, and quite sad, that the poorest countries have the most friction points. Perhaps they were even created by well-meaning government bureaucrats, but the result is the same — a weak economy that discourages the entrepreneur.

When Michael Manley gave his famous “five flights a day” speech that lead in part to the massive migration of Jamaica’s creative class, he had no idea what he was really doing — laying the seeds of poverty for years to come.

We Jamaicans (and I would say that this extends to the CSME countries) must start to critically examine our own thinking, and what we tell ourselves, and what we tell our children. I cannot believe that we consciously conspired to chase off our creative class, and encouraged our children to migrate and enter “high-profile” professions. We also did not consciously intend to teach them them to avoid nitty-gritty entrepreneurship.

I remember a few years a remark that was shared with me about a T-shirt company I had started: “look at how him get big Ivy-League degree and all him can do now is sell T-shirt!”

In spite of our unconscious actions, and their consequences, today we can consciously decide to teach our children the virtues of starting companies, staying to fight for our country’s welfare, returning to make a contribution, taking down barriers to business that make no sense, and see that these actions are critical to nation-building.

And this is not nation-building for the “big man”. Instead, this is mostly about that little old lady who sells sweeties at the corner from a box on top of a stone, who at some point dreamed of owning a store, but when confronted with the friction points that she would have to overcome, simply gave up. As a result, she remained poor.

In the US, it is the little old ladies who start small businesses that are the engine of their growth, according to this news report:

U.S. entrepreneurs are often described as one of the primary drivers of the nation’s economy. For starters, small outfits create some 75% of all new jobs, represent 99.7% of all employers, and employ 50% of the private workforce, according to the Small Business Administration.

That little old lady is one of the many creatives that we as a people need to stop thwarting.

P.S.

Here is Jamaica’s ranking in terms of its relative Ease of Doing Business (out of 155 countries.)

Overall Ranking: — 43

start a business in terms of local rules, regulations and license fees — 10
hire and fire workers — 82
enforce a contract — 39
get credit — 95
close a failing business — 92

May 30, 2006

Worker Attitudes in Jamaica

Carl Stone was a giant of a man, but his work has largely disappeared from view.

He was a UWI academic who was most famous for his innovative polling techniques which seemed able to predict each General Election outcome, much to the chagrin of whichever party he predicted would lose. He was roundly condemned, pilloried and accused of being biased, but his polls were much, much more accurate than those conducted in any First World democracy.

Recently, I needed to get a copy of his book: Worker Attitude Survey. I had seen reference to it in the Jamaica Gleaner, and wanted to get a copy. First, I visited the plaza bookstores. No-one there had heard of Carl Stone, much less his books.

Then I tried The University of the West Indies (UWI) bookstore, where his name was emblazoned on the wall. They had heard of him, and the book, but did not have a copy. They advised me to visit the library.

With my wife in tow, we stopped by the reference desk and got a copy of what was really more of a pamphlet than anything else. It was a dog-eared copy that had been donated, after the owner had made notes in the margins and done some heavy underlining.

We read it in about 20-30 minutes.

The 1982 survey found that on the average, Jamaican workers put out only 67% effort on the job
Today it takes 1.5 workers to produce the same as 1.0 worker 25 years ago
Job satisfaction is correlated with productivity
There is deep distrust about management’s motives and concern for worker’s interests
Work effort was not correlated with job satisfaction or income level
Work effort was correlated with the quality of management, leadership example and having a positive attitude
Only 34% of workers felt that management recognized and rewarded workers who worked hardest
Productivity increases when managers display better skills, and present more upward opportunities to workers (especially in the form of educational opportunities)

These findings correlate well with the results described in the book: Why Workers Won’t Work by Kenneth Carter. This Jamaican case study reports that only 24% of workers are motivated, and ascribes the general cause as “management’s attitude towards workers.”

In the summary of the article available at the Framework website (in the list of white papers under Ideas), the author, Erica Samuels-Wade, states that “Workers cite the lack of respect and recognition, poor communication, lack of involvement in decision-making and general disregard for workers as human beings as key factors in their general contempt for and lack of confidence in management.”

This is the background upon which managers try to get work done. It starts out poorly, and there is not a blank canvas upon which to start to build a relationship. Instead, workers fully expect the relationship to be a poor one from day one.

May 15, 2006

The Dual Income Profession

In 1991 I was exposed to a fact that I have never forgotten.

In a training course that I have long forgotten, I learned that the profession I was about to enter full-time (I was an AT&T employee back then) had a bi-modal distribution of incomes.

What it simply meant was that consultants fell into two distinct groups — one group that earned a lot (median US$75k at the time) and another that earned much less (median $US45k.) The study went on to describe the difference in marketing techniques between the two groups.

Given that this was a time before the internet truly existed as we know it, the marketing techniques did not include an on-line component. However, the difference basically came down to consultants that used content-based approaches that reached a mass audience, and those that did not.

“Content-based approaches?”

Basically, it was saying that the more successful group relied on speeches, public seminars and other relatively high-risk, high-reward approaches to get the messages in which they believed, into the listening ears of large groups. They also wrote books, articles and other pieces for publication, once again for mass consumption.

The less successful group, from the research, relied on cold calls, free workshops, letters and paid advertisement to try to reach a relatively small number of prospects with little more than a shout of “here I am!” These were all very low risk techniques.

It is not too hard to extrapolate these findings to the world we live in 15 years later. Now, there are just more tools to use, most of them involving new technology.

However, the basics are the same — the market rewards those in the profession who develop a unique point of view, and then are willing to develop the speaking and writing skills to get their point of view in front of audiences in high-risk, high reward ways.

Nowadays, we have more avenues available to us through internet technology.

A book can be self-published for US$2000.
A website can be launched for free.
A blog can be created and updated for free.
Digital videography and pictures can be created for US$200 or less.
Newsgroups can be created to address any subject matter of interest.
Voice recordings can be made available to the world at the flick of a few buttons.

A consultant said to me a few weeks ago that he basically “did not believe in the internet” and thought that clients had no interest in viewing web pages. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I have not had a paper brochure for more than eight years or so, and do not plan to ever have one again, and that no-one had ever had a problem visiting my site to download over 30 articles or 40 blogs with content that spoke to them in ways that a brochure could not.

The truth is, it is not the website that makes the difference, but just as it was in 1991 — what separates the higher earners from the others is courage. In 1991 and also in 2006 it is the high-risk, long-term payoff activities that have the best return. Some examples include:

Speaking in front of large groups and risking rejection.
Writing and risking never seeing it published.
Putting ideas out in public, risking that others will take them and make better use of them.
Investing in a website and risking it being ignored.

I have taken the cowardly route in all of these at different times, and have to work hard to keep on taking risks. And then I come back to that old article, and looking at that bimodal distribution gives me faith that it all might work out one day if I continually give up any fear of looking foolish!

P.S. I recommend the book “Creating a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession” by Allan Weiss as the best and only book of its kind that I have ever read, and even though it was written a mere five years ago, it is already stale (no mention of blogging, which was in its infancy).

April 25, 2006

CSME — Is It for Real?

I think most Jamaicans view the advent of CSME with some interest, but no real passion. After all, this is not Miami we are talking about… and truth is that we know more about Broward Mall, Pembroke Pines and Miami Lakes than we do about Long Circular, the Savannah, St. Lawrence Gap or Broad Street.

Our minds are firmly planted in Greater Miami.

This is a pity, because while the hoopla around CSME may not “grab us,” it is a timely reminder that the whole “10-1 leaves 0” business actually has left us poorer than our smaller counterparts in the Federation of old, and unlikely to catch up in the near future. We need to be careful not the make the same mistake twice.

While the changes initially planned by CSME are modest, they are a concerted move on the part of the region’s governments to bring us into alignment with much larger forces in the world.
These forces are stunningly described in the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, in which he talks about what he calls the 10 Flatteners, and how they are enabling China, India and other countries to experience massive growth in their economies.

His book serves partly as a warning to the United States, which is echoed by Richard Florida in his book “The Flight of the Creative Class.”

9/11 laws that make residency and citizenship in the United States more difficult are only hurting that country’s ability to compete at the heart of its strength — technological innovation. Scientist and engineers who are unable (for example upon completion of their PhD’s) to stay in the US and work are taking their skills and returning to China and India. This is leaving the US bereft of much needed talent in colleges, research laboratories and industries.

Furthermore, the US is seriously considering erecting its own Berlin Wall along its border with Mexico. Instead of flattening barriers, new ones are being created to keep America “safe.” It is no wonder that some are wondering if this is what Bin Laden was hoping for all along — the US drowning its own strength in its own fears.

It certainly runs counter to the direction that most countries want to move in, and the direction in which Caribbean countries must go. In particular, the poorest countries in the region (Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti) have experienced an exodus of their Creative Classes in recent years. In most cases, the emigre left their country of origin unwillingly, with its warm climate, familiar feel and spicy cuisine. It makes visitors to the region wonder why anyone would ever leave.

CSME is probably too late for those who left to live in the US and Canada for economic opportunities, but it is not too late for those of us who remain. Perhaps we might be able to leverage the 6 million people in our region, and the combination of skills and natural resources
to create opportunities that might attract back those who have left, and persuade those who stay that their best bet is not to join a long line to get a US visa, but instead to browse a website or jump on a plane, and learn what is happening across the region.

Perhaps we can join together in igniting some measure of economic success that we could not achieve apart. If so, then the CSME is an excellent start.

P.S. If you are visiting this blog after the IMCJ conference: Welcome! The presentation is available by visiting www.fwconsulting.com and clicking on Ideas and then Download(s).

April 11, 2006

Doing The Work

This past weekend I attended a personal development seminar based on The Work of Byron Katie.

Byron Katie is actually a woman who, at the depths of a suicidal depression, developed a body of thinking that fits nicely into 4 questions and a turnaround statement, that is basically the opposite of the original stressful thought.

There is a great deal of information on her website: www.thework.org and I have been using these questions and the line of thinking she has invented for about two years now, with great effect in my personal life, and also in my business. I guess you might say that I used as much of it as I could on my own, before actually investing in a two day trip to DC to do it in person.

Through doing the work, I have been able to develop a stronger capacity to question the thoughts that come into my head. While I conceptually knew that “I am not my thoughts, but instead I am the thinker,” which is a fairly common statement in most personal development courses and books, her steps give ana easy way of quickly dealing with stressful thoughts at the moment they arise.

While we all know at some level that stress is not caused by life itself, but instead by our thoughts about life, this is a difficult idea to put into practice.

In short, her four questions are a way to meet the stressful thought with four quick questions, and over time I have noticed that the lag time between the stressful thought and the questions has only gotten shorter — which has lead to a more peaceful inner life.

Given that I know it works from experience, I believe that I’ll be developing some offerings for my clients based on The Work. I would say that it passes the first test for new ideas that I have, which is “Do they work for me?”

April 7, 2006

Books I’m Reading Now – -April

Just a quick update on the books that have recently attracted my attention:

Reading List (paper books)

The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block
Home with God by Walsch
The Flight of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
What God Wants by Walsch
A Course in Miracles (text)
The Sins of Scripture by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Listening List (audible.com mp3’s on Creative MuVo Slim)

2 further talks / sermons by Marianne Williamson
Freakonomics — Jared Diamond
I Need Your Love, Is That True? — Byron Katie
Fast Company Magazine Monthly Summary
The Right Use of Power — Peter Block
The Funny Thing Is — Ellen Degeneris
The Energy of Money — Maria Nemeth

eBook list (Palm Tungsten eReader)

She Comes First — Ian Kerner
Tomorrow’s God — Walsch

I got a new Creative Zen that has 30Gb of space, but I haven’t yet moved over my audible.com account to that device.

I am going through my usual list of magazines: Time, Runners, Bicycling, Tritahlete, plus the occasional others. And of course, there is my daily reading list of : Jamaica Observer, Jamaica Gleaner, Trinidad Guardian, Trinidad Express, New York Times, Sun-Sentinel — and now and then I read the Barbados Advocate.

April 3, 2006

Doing What is Loved

A friend of mine from overseas was working in a client bank in Jamaica as a consultant on a major project. He needed to open a local account to do some transactions, and decided to open an account at the local branch of the bank.

He found a branch and tried to open the account, but ran into such poor service that he had to return several times, after which he just gave up in frustration.

He mentioned his experience as a matter of urgency to one of his colleagues in the bank, a vice president.

Her response was: “You mad or what? Why you never come to me first? I would never go into one of our branches to do any of my banking! And deal wid dem people deh? No sah, I only go to the branch manager. Here, next time come to me and I will take care of it for you.”

On a quite different occasion, I was eating my lunch while reading the Jamaica Overseas Gleaner, while living in New Jersey. As I turned the pages, I came upon a picture of a mad-man with his head full of live maggots eating his scalp alive.

That was the end of lunch.

I was so disgusted that I felt compelled to call the editor, who I happened to know because I had placed several business ads in the past. The editor was not in, but I did reach the Advertising Manager, who I also knew. Let’s say her name was Mary. She was second in command.

I made my complaint, including the part about the effect the picture had on my lunch. Mary said “Let me tell you something – when I went to pick up this week’s edition from the printer, one of the guys drew me aside and asked me how we could print this. I looked at it for the first time, and that was when I knew that this week’s Gleaner was not going to reach me!!” (In other words, she would not be reading it).

I was flabbergasted… and momentarily speechless and could only recover to ask her, quite weakly, to pass the message on to the editor.

The stories might be different, but the underlying theme is one that I find in too many companies in the Caribbean — too many people doing work they either do not believe in, or do not even like. At times, it seems to me as if all the people who love to serve customers were somehow secretly switched with workers in factories, and on farms, far away from people — while the ones who hate people are stuck in front-line service jobs.

Many Caribbean workers seem to be in jobs they either vehemently or passively dislike. Converely, very few seem to be enjoying what they are doing for a living.

And, we are not very skillful at hiding this fact from each other.

I don’t know yet what the cause of it is yet, but there is at least some lack of care that takes place when people are hired — managers and executives do not seem to be smart about hiring people who even care to use the products and services that the company offers.

In a sports store the workers don’t play the sports. In a shoe store, they don’t wear the shoes. In a health-food store, no-one knows the products because they don’t consume them. In a bank, no-one actually uses the branches if they can help it.

This is just bad for business, and worse for both the employee and the customer, who must now suffer in each other’s presence, while trying to get work done.

I do know that in a tight economy people are just plain afraid to pursue what their heart tells them to pursue. Some use the opportunity to migrate to finally free themselves of these mental chains, but sadly, many are not able to undergo the transformation required. It takes courage to believe in one’s ability, in the face of the culture that is screaming out the stupidity of doing so.

Yet, those who do are the ones who can make up the new Creative Class across our region.

If there is any fault, it lies in our education system, which asks a 16 year old to restrict his or her education to at most 4 subjects for A-levels/CAPE. I will never forget my own junior semester at Cornell in which I did Photography, the History of Art, Government and Philosophy — for full credit — even as I majored in Engineering. Doing these courses (which stand out in my mind as critical to my personal development) sounds bizarre to the Caribbean-trained professional, for whom education has been reduced to a mere instrument — starting at age 16.

This instrumentalism is a travesty, and as I type this I think that there is a certain sadness to see that a decision to pursue training in a career, will end up keeping someone locked in a job for which they have no passion.

One of my favourite authors, Kahlil Gibran says it quite well:

Work:

And what is it to work with love?

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.

It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.

It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,

And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.

Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, “he who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is a nobler than he who ploughs the soil.

And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.”

But I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;

And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

—————————————————————————
Brilliant.

Maybe the new freedom for our people, hopefully including our Creative Class, will be about a personal courage that transcends the culture’s rules.

February 17, 2006

Critical Thinking vs. Faithful Following

One of the grim reminders of plantation slavery in the Caribbean is how well we were trained not to think.

To say it differently, it has to do with how well we were trained to follow without questioning. This tendency that I see widespread in our people across the region does not augur well for business, as critical thinking is a key competitive advantage in a world that is coming to rely more and more on knowledge workers, and less and less on manual labour. Recent studies, most notably in the work of Rich Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class” demonstrate that cities marked by lower wages and fewer knowledge workers are less successful by almost every key measure: prosperity, crime, unemployment, etc.

The truth is, the colonial powers in the Caribbean did a good job in subjugating large numbers of slaves with a combination of physical force and religious fear. In Jamaica, for example, news of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 in which former slaves set themselves free, while killing thousands of their former owners and master, caused a stir in Jamaica’s white planters class. They too were vastly outnumbered (by more than 10:1, I believe). They too were using brutal, physical methods to subjugate their slaves.

Upon emancipation, it was feared that when the Negroes took their revenge there would not be a single white person left standing. However, that did not happen, and it was not only because of the possibility of brutal repression.

Instead, the fear of God had been driven into the hearts of their former employees. Christianity was unknown to the Africans that were enslaved. Today, there is only the slimmest of evidence remaining in a handful of religions (obeah, vodun, etc.) that the slaves brought to the Caribbean had had any exposure to any other religion than mainstream Christianity.

The religious transformation was virtually complete. Millions of slave and their ancestors were transformed from being Muslims, Animists, Ancestor-worshipers and other religions into Christians.

In the mind of a brutal slave owner, I can only imagine that when a missionary asked a plantation owner for permission to “minister” to the slaves, the owner had no interest in teaching them the liberating power of the gospel and the equality of all people before God! Instead, I imagine that he was only interested in how deeply he could entrench his slaves in a thought-system based on fear that would further subjugate them.

This was not the religion of the ruling class in either Europe or the Caribbean. Nor was it the religion of the ordinary white people in either region.

Instead, it was a customized, weakened and twisted Christian philosophy that was more or less invented by whites were, above else, wanted to maintain control. This control was important in just staying alive, thereby avoiding the brutal fate of the slave-owners in Haiti, but it was also critical in making a good profit.

This determination to make a good profit was of course, paramount, and was the entire reason to have slaves to being with. The minds of the Africans being used to make that profit was seen as a potentially useful cog in the wheel.

But it was just not enough to get the slaves to believe a set of lies and half-truths backed up by scripture. After all, obvious lies can be mis-proven through direct experience by a thoughtful few. This fact is puzzling, as the religious fabric put together by the missionaries and plantation owners now seems so transparent and ridiculous in retrospect, and their motives so patently obvious. Couldn’t a slave have figured out what they were up to, and tell the others?

The final piece of the puzzle resonates even in today’s workplace.

Slaves were taught to follow faithfully. Serious questions, doubts and critical thinking were made evil. The reward for blindly believing was God’s blessing in the afterlife, while the punishment for the sin of doubting “God’s message” was hellfire and damnation.

As a slave-owner, getting this way of thinking into the minds of your slaves signified success of the higher order. It made the job of keeping control that much easier, and reduced the slaves to unthinking, but God-fearing brutes.

Which is what we have in today’s Caribbean workplace, in varying degrees. Not brutes, but workers. Not unthinking, but demotivated and disempowered.

From the book “Why Workers Won’t Work” by M.L. Carter” (a summary of which is available on the Framework Consulting website under Ideas) are the following findings:

76% of workers in surveys have described themselves as “demotivated”
Over 51% of supervisors and 83% of rank-and-file workers considered their skills and education to be under-utilized.
Some 65% of the rank-and-file workers considered their jobs to be unimportant in relation to the objectives of their organization.
Some 66% of supervisors and 80% of rank-and-file workers reported that they are rarely, if ever, consulted about changes that affect their jobs.
Some 84% of workers disagreed with the following statement, “In general, the more workers produce, the more management earns, and the more workers will benefit in terms of higher wages and better fringe benefits”.

These are the results of a manager-worker relationship that was born in the slave-master relationship that formally ended in 1838, but has never been discontinued.

Today’s workforce has less and less of a need for manual labourers, and more and more of a need for knowledge workers, yet there is no evidence of a systematic approach to unravelling this historical evil. The results in the Caribbean are clear — the Blacker the country, the poorer it tends to be. In other words, the result of the slave-owners peculiar theology and means of control is poverty, unemployment and crime, and the countries that had more slaves with which to inflict this ideology are suffering the most.

It remains a dicey subject to this today, and it is difficult to see encouraging signs — although I am committed to finding them and writing about them. If the problem were seen plainly, I believe that the mental slavery that Bob Marley sings about could be reversed within a single generation.

Our schools would be focused on teaching our students that their own critical thinking is paramount, rather than the ability the repeat the thinking of others.

Our parents would encourage our children to think for themselves, rather than to just be obedient or else face physical punishment.

Our Christian churches (and mosques and temples) would teach the faithful to skillfully renew their own minds, rather than to merely believe what they are told, and that to do so represents the best path towards the liberation of future generations.

Teachers, parents and pastors have every reason to be frightened by all this, as it contradicts their experience and what they have been taught over the years: ” Don’t do it, or else you will lose control.”

Except that, that’s the voice of the plantation-owners, whispering to us from years past, and it is our duty to steadfastly ignore them.

P.S. The summary of Why Workers Won’t Work can also be downloaded by sending email to fwc-whyworkers@aweber.com