Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle
New Thinking from Framework Consulting
This is a great article by Jean Lowrie-Chin in today’s Jamaica Observer.
Click here to go to to the article.
It talks about a speech given by Richard Hamming, who has analyzed the approach taken by Nobel Laureates over the years, and echoes much of the discussion that we have been having on this blog on the topic of pursuing what we love in life. It turns out that this is what has driven the Laureates over the years.
This is all quite encouraging!
He had his light and phone cut off. He lived out of his car for a while. He was ashamed to tell others how little money he had. He told his clients to find someone else, and they refused. Everyone who knew him told him was crazy, and that he should cash in on his MBA.
Today he is the coach of the fastest man in the world — the holder of the record for the 100m dash, Asafa Powell.
The man behind it all its Stephen Francis, known to Wolmerians who went to school with him as “Clagga” (or was that “Clappa”?)
His personal story of sacrifice and achievement is a dramatic one, as the events I mentioned above all happened in the space of 4 short years, according to the story told in the Gleaner entitled: Creating World Champions.
I remember him well as a rather disheveled, bright guy who was a member of the Schools Challenge Quiz Team from the year he was in fourth form, and I was in first form. He was not athletic, and did not take part in sports, but like anyone who was on the Schools Challenge team he was able to study, and retain a tremendous amount of information.
He eventually got a degree in Accounting, and then an MBA, and somewhere along the line he decided that he was interested in something new: Track and Field. I remember hearing the news that he was coaching Wolmers Track Team — it seemed like madness to me, as Francis was a brains, not an athlete!
After his MBA, he got the kind of job you could easily retire from — a consulting position at Peat Marwick. I am sure his parents were proud. I imagined that they relaxed, knowing that he had “set himself up.”
I can only imagine what they thought and said when he quit that job to follow his dream of training athletes…
The article is fascinating. In a way I should not be surprised as he has a combined background that can only be a powerful asset to his athletes — after all, not many track coaches have MBA’ s from top schools like the University of Michigan.
And there are not too many that have coached the fastest human being on the planet. In fact, there is only one.
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:
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.
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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.
In a couple of speeches given recently, it has struck me that I appear to be learning less and less. I long for the days when I thought I could offer some powerful answers to the questions of the day, and apply some well-thought out conclusions to my audiences.
However, I find myself only being able to come up with questions.
More questions than the average person asks, to be sure, but still more questions than answers. At the start of each of these speeches I told people that I could not promise them solutions. Instead, I promised to share with them some of the questions that my colleagues and I were asking, and some of the answers that were coming up with. Our answers were admittedly partial.
Fortunately, the experiences were interesting and stimulating. It was exciting to share “partial answers” with a large group, and to let them in on the knowledge we are developing as a part of our own discovery process.
To be honest, I did have a concern that I might appear to them to not know what the heck I was talking about, given that I was coming to them with more questions than answers. Supposedly, they wanted me to speak because I know something about the topic, not because I know a bunch of questions.
But, in each case, my fears were unfounded. I found the following.
Intimacy
Sharing the problem and our thinking about the issues allowed people to better understand the issues themselves, as they could relate to the problem. In most cases, they already had done some thinking about the issues. No-one might have gone as far as we did in our thinking. No-one might have asked as many questions as we have. No-one may have been willing to share the partial answers derived.
But I did sense that people wanted to do their own thinking, even if they did it as part of an audience in a group setting.
Partnership
By opening up the issue with our questions, I sensed that they felt included as our partners in coming up with answers. This partnership could be used to get at better answers, if we both engaged in the questions for long enough.
Credibility
Any concern that I had about my own credibility disappeared when I found out that by virtue of the thinking we have done, we were asking better questions than others. I used to think that an expert was someone who had all the answers, but I’m not convinced that a Master is someone who has better questions, taking me back to my days of reading Tony Robbins personal development books.
Expertise can be demonstrated by the kinds of questions that are asked, as they show that the expert has moved from the easy answers to the more difficult ones, and the audience in each case enjoyed the process of learning by asking, versus learning by being told.
I think the days of being respected by having “all the answers” are essentially over – there is too much knowledge available to the average professional through the internet to allow it to continue. Instead, there is a new kind of respect coming from “having all the questions” especially when the mere fact of asking the questions demonstrates courage, conviction and intelligence.
Mastery, and My Plumber
It’s strange what having a blog does to the mind.
It’s now 3:21 am and I’m wide awake with a blog on the mind. In case you’re new to blogging, no, it doesn’t mean anything illegal, immoral or fattening. This has more to do with having a need to write, and for me, blogging fills the space between having a swirl of thoughts buzzing around in my head, and some end-product like a white paper or published article.
The thoughts I had in mind came from 2 meetings I had on consecutive days this week, both of which went better than I thought they would.
One was a workshop with some managers, and the other was a speech. In both cases, I was the one in the front of the room with the PowerPoint presentation. One audience had about 20 people, while the other had about 200.
In both cases I entered that elusive “zone” in which I found myself completely enjoying what I was doing. Time seemed to fly. My shoulder, which includes a recently dislocated collar bone, stopped hurting. I was accompanied by 2 of my best friends in life, a consultant and my wife. One event was in Barbados and the other was in Jamaica (I did a lot of flying to attend the two.) They were very different in design also, with one designed as a facilitated workshop lasting over 5 hours with a client, and the other being a pure speech given in about 35 minutes to the Jamaica Customer Service Association’s (JCSA’s ) annual conference.
In both cases I used ideas that are presented in my blog. They were thrown out into the world in this space as infant thoughts, and then grew into adolescence in subsequent entries before being tried on live human beings.
I felt a feeling of what I can only call mastery.
Which brings me to my plumber….
My plumber is someone that I knew as a teenager, from my days attending Mona Baptist Church. He was called in by my mother (who happens to be my landlady) to fix a bath-tub leak and a toilet that would not stop running.
After he had done the repairs, we asked whether or not he had a replacement tip for the faucet in the kitchen. It seems that the prior tenants, in their desire to leave with as little as possible while taking as much as possible, seemed to have made off with the tip of the faucet that regulates the water flow. The result is a constant and too-strong flow of water that wets the unsuspecting user, frequently with water that is uncomfortably hot.
Well, as we’d say in Jamaica, “who ask me fi ask him about dat?”
He responded with a lengthy lecture on the need to replace the spout also, because they do not sell the tip separately. Furthermore, he informed us that we had what I’ll call “the Briggston Company A Type” (the true name was lost as soon as it was said.) that was brought to Jamaica in the 1960’s and he used to get it then from Mr. Bowen on King Street, and he in turn brought it to Jamaica at my plumber’s request, which he used to do from time to time based on unusual needs. Furthermore, this maker had a particular seal at the bottom of the spout that was superior, so over time this became the most popular faucet in Jamaica.
(I am clearly not doing justice to the complexity of the subject, and this I say without irony.)
He clearly knew his stuff.
And he truly wanted me to see the world that he sees: I see tip-less faucet, and he sees a world behind that faucet that comes from being someone who loves what he does.
Yesterday while I was preparing to give my JCSA speech my wife realized that she knew the woman sitting next to her.
Actually, it was the woman who recognized us, when we didn’t. She asked us if we came into the HiLo supermarket at Manor Park and we said yes, we did. Then it clicked. She remembered us from a 3 minute interaction in which my wife asked her what the appropriate tip would be for the fellows who take the groceries to the car (just as they do in some places in Florida, but not in the N.E. USA.) She remembered us from then, and while we were laughing at the coincidence I told her that her particular HiLo was the cleanest supermarket and best laid out I’d been in since I’ve returned to Jamaica.
She took the compliment in stride, and without batting an eyelid she asked: “Is there anything you’d like to see us improve?”
I was taken aback. She repeated the question a few times to make sure that I was not just stupid, but the truth was that I could not think of a single thing.
My barber is another one… he loves what he does enough to have left a secure job at the top-rated barber in Kingston (Upper Cuts) to open his own shop just across the street from me. His place is impeccable, incidentally. He, of course, always looks sharp.
And he put me on to a lady who sells replacement parts for my own clipper, which I sorely needed at the time.
My plumber. The HiLo lady. The barber across the street.
They are all people who love what they are doing, and relish the challenge of it, and seeking to master their own corner of the universe.
None of them is rich from what I could tell (my plumber must take a bus to get around town.)
Yet, I’ve worked in corporations with people who earn hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) who hate what they do, and have convinced themselves that they cannot stop doing it. And there are a LOT more people like that than there are masters.
A recent survey in the U.S. showed that some 40%+ of employees are “doing just enough work to keep their jobs.”
But this blog isn’t about them, it’s about the few who dare to fall in love with what they do for a living. They do so in spite of what the cynics around them have to say. They seek out ways and means to fall in love over and over again with their work, by continually expanding their knowledge, broadening their experience and trying out new ideas.
I’m aspiring to have more and more of these masters in my life. They are not only more skilled than their counterparts, but they are likely to open up a sizeable gap over others who are not so in love with what they do.
In reflecting on the last few days, I realized that I could only deliver the workshop I gave to my client and the speech I gave yesterday because of the following truths: the material for the workshop was developed and created by me over 7 years ago, and I’ve been practicing it diligently since then by delivering it repeatedly.
Also, yesterday’s talk wove together threads that I’ve been building up in this blog since I first started blogging early this year. I didn’t realize this at the time, but blogging is addictive – the more I write, the more I want to write. The more ideas I share with you, The Reader, the more ideas come.
And, it took hours of blogging to develop the ideas into a decent speech in which I would have something different to say.
So here is what I’ve learned – the joy of mastery is available now, and at any moment, by developing a love relationship with our chosen work. The tangible and visible fruits, however, take time to come.
So here’s the deal: do what you love, because it beats the alternatives.
Do it better each day, because it makes things more interesting than just keeping them all the same. The hard part is keeping one’s eyes open long enough to see the longer term rewards, especially when they actually may not come. After all, there are absolutely no guarantees in life, and tomorrow October 8th, 2005 may be a reality for you, but not for me.
But being in love with one’s work, and life, may not be a bad way to spend a penultimate day.