Can Camels Shrink? Or Only Grow?

Jim Wood, long known as @shrinkingcamel on Twitter before he threw off the cloak of anonymity and embraced his public persona, is “retiring” as the Work Editor at The High Calling this week.  

I met Jim online before I met him in person. It was via a web site devoted to faith and work, and this guy known only as Bradley Moore (a pseudonym) was commenting and posting. The site was retired a couple of years ago, but I had followed the camel over to his blog, and then we followed each other on Twitter.

One summer Saturday afternoon in 2009, the camel, Laura Barkat and I were tweeting on Twitter, the subject of the movie Bottle Crazy came up, and we exchanged a few lines of poetry. It was a fun thing to do, but that exchange led to poetry jams on Twitter and ultimately to the creation of Tweetspeak Poetry.

At the time, Laura was managing editor of The High Calling, and it wasn’t long before she enticed Jim to become the Work Editor and me a contributing editor.  Most of the articles I’ve written for The High Calling have been on work, and Jim has been my editor. He’s one of those editors who make it easy for a writer to write. We eventually got to meet face-to-face at an editorial retreat at Laity Lodge.

Jim’s the author of At Work As It Is in Heaven (I reviewed it here). I interviewed him at The High Calling about the book.

Now he’s headed back to college (with college-age daughters himself) to finish his MBA. And stay employed at his executive job (responsible for lots of stuff and people). And so he told us a few weeks back that he would be retiring from The High Calling.

It’s one of those decisions friends make that give you both joy and sadness at the same time.

And so, for Jim Wood:

Can Camels Shrink? Or Only Grow?

I saw a camel spit before

but never saw a camel shrink,

never saw a camel sink

at the oasis. One hump

or two, camels find it difficult

to slip through the eye of a needle,

even when lathered with olive oil.

I watch a camel slip away,

I watch a camel embrace his MBA.

I wish the camel well

at the oasis.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

What I’m Up to At The High Calling Blogs

For several months, I’ve been posting occasional articles at The High Calling Blogs (HCB). The site is owned and operated by Foundations for Laity Renewal, whose mission is to renew society by renewing the church; renew the church by renewing the family; and renewing the family by renewing individuals. In addition to HCB, Laity Renewal also operates The High Calling web site (and I’ve written an article or two for that site as well).

How I got there is one of those “internet stories.”

Long before I was on Twitter or Facebook, I had been following a blog called Inside Work, which focuses on the integration of faith and business. I would occasionally comment on a post, especially those written either by editor Jim Hancock or a business executive named Bradley Moore. One day, I followed Bradley’s link to his blog site, Shrinking the Camel. And enjoyed it so much I started following that blog as well. A regular commenter on Bradley’s book was a guy named Marcus Goodyear, and one day I followed the link to his blog, Good Word Editing. That’s where I discovered The High Calling and HCB, because Marcus is senior editor for these sites. About the same time, I found another blog I liked – New Breed of Advertisers – by a guy named Sam Van Eman whom I didn’t immediately connect to HCB – but he’s one of the editors there, too.

Looking at my RSS reader, I can see that Inside Work, Shrinking the Camel, Good Word Editing and New Breed of Advertisers are among the very earliest blogs I followed. (One day, in a post or a comment at HCB, Sam – and I remember distinctly it was Sam – mentioned a book he really liked called Stone Crossings by L.L. Barkat. His comment led me to her book, which led me to her three blogs, which eventually led to me becoming a co-editor with L.L. and Eric Swalberg for TweetSpeak Poetry.)

So what was it that attracted me to these bloggers and sites like The High Calling Blogs?

Obviously, we shared a common faith – different backgrounds and affiliations but a common faith nonetheless.

We shared an intense interest in how faith does – and doesn’t – function in the workplace.

Even more significant (for me, at least) was the sense of community. People from all over the country and even outside the United States come together in the spaces called The High Calling and HCB. And they share their community by writing about life and work and culture and family and art and a lot of other things.

Earlier this year, I received a direct message on Twitter from HCB, saying they had a proposal for me. I didn’t hear anything else for a few days, but soon enough L.L. (the HCB managing editor) asked if I would be interested in being a contributing editor. I didn’t have to think about it. I said yes – a big fat enthusiastic yes.

What a contributing editor does is write posts or articles on a regular basis (mine generally fall into the category of “work”), participate in commenting and discussions about posts, and help build the community. On my posts, I work directly with Brad Moore, who’s an HCB content editor in addition to his day job as a senior business executive and (most recently) a poet, with his own poetry blog. Brad is one of the best editors I’ve ever had. This is a heretical confession for any writer to make – but I don’t mind being edited by Brad because he helps me be a better writer. (And my next post is scheduled for Tuesday.)

That’s what this community is about as well – encouragement.

If you haven’t been to HCB, you should visit. If you’re looking for community, you’ll find it. If you’re looking for good writing, it’s right there. If you’re looking to stretch and challenge your faith, you’ll find it there as well.

It’s a cool place to be a part of.

The Eleventh Day of Christmas: A Shrunken Camel

He’s a business executive, a senior business executive with a VP title. He works for a diversified company in the Northeast; I’m not sure which one exactly but he knows a lot about my company which tells me that some of that diversification relates to agriculture. He’s written for the Conference Board Magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, Sales Gravy and a lot of other publications. He’s been a management consultant. He likes being in the executive suite, and, as he’s written in a formative essay, he likes making money.

He also wrestles with issues of faith in the workplace, and he’s one of the most thoughtful and articulate writers on the subject out there.

His name is Bradley Moore. His blog is Shrinking the Camel. He’s also an editor at the High Calling Blogs, and he’s one of the key organizers for conference held at Princeton University on transforming the workplace. His writings are also regularly featured at InsideWork. An example is his essay on leadership and power. And he makes no apology for business and work – there’s no inherent contradiction between business and faith. Read the linked essay at the end of the “What is Shrinking the Camel all about?” on his blog.

His writing is brash, enthusiastic and irreverent, and he doesn’t hesitate to take on sacred cows. He’s also unfailingly positive (it’s a good antidote for me who leans to a slightly – not much but slightly – more negative view of organizations and management).

Read Bradley’s blog. Follow him on Twitter. Check out his links (he reads more journals and publications than just about anyone I’ve run across). You’ll learn a lot about faith, the workplace, business and organizational life.

And you’ll get to meet a pretty cool guy – who’s proving that a camel can shrink enough to fit through the eye of the needle.


(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

Post on Performance Reviews at High Calling Blogs

My post here on "Performance Reviews: The Good" has been published at the High Calling Blogs today. This is the followup article to my post on "The Bad." (The Bad are always more interesting to talk about, and the Good more difficult to pull off.)

And the post is illustrated with a photo from nAncY at Just Say the Word.

Thanks to HCB and my friend/editor Bradley Moore for the posts.

Performance Reviews: The Bad

At the High Calling Blogs Tuesday, my friend Bradley Moore (Shrinking the Camel) posted “How Important is Your Image?” The article is about the peer review process as part of an individual’s overall performance appraisal, and then goes deeper into a discussion about image and performance. Over the years, performance appraisal processes have become something of a major industry. And there are all kinds of facets to them – peer reviews, performance reviews, results reviews, L-180s (where team leaders are appraised anonymously by their team members), and L-360s (where an individual is appraised anonymously by supervisor, subordinate, peers, colleagues on other teams), among a lot of others.

While the article was mostly about whether or not image was more important than performance, and what kind of image that was, I keyed in on the performance review part. I hate performance reviews, and not because they aren’t (theoretically) valuable. The comment I posted on Bradley’s article went something like this:

I’ve had performance reviews for almost my entire career, except for the four years I was an independent consultant. I can recall a few that were okay in terms of how they were conducted, many that were totally inept, but very few that were good. When I started doing them myself for people on my team, I generally had no role models to emulate, and basic HR guidelines that rarely applied, except for what to avoid doing. So I looked to biblical principles — be fair, be honest, talk about the hard stuff, give credit where it was due, and always affirm the worth of the person.

I should have added that performance reviews should go on all the time and not just once or twice a year. The mantra I chant until I drive people crazy is “No surprises at mid-year and annual reviews. No surprises. Not one surprise, good or bad.” My theory here is, if a problem comes up, you deal with when it happens, not months later. If someone is a consistently poor performer, you’re doing no one any good by saying nothing or trying to transfer them elsewhere. Or if someone deserves recognition or celebration, you do it right then, when everyone understands and sees the connection. So, no surprises at review time.

If you think I speak from experience, you are entirely correct. Too much experience. Since college, I’ve had six employers, seven if I include myself. Before I graduated from college, I had three, so formally and informally, that makes a total of 10. And from those 10, I’ve collectively learned there are at least four kinds of bad performance reviews.

The Zinger. You’ve had a bang-up performance year, you’re firing on all eight cylinders, and choirs of managers have been singing your praises. Your boss knows it and appreciates it. But he can’t give you a 100 percent positive review, because he never had one like that, he doesn’t want to give you the big head, and he believes that no one does all good. So he comes up with – the zinger. This is a simple comment designed to throw the individual totally off balance, something that has never been spoken about, something so totally out of left field that you can’t respond as your boss smilingly adds it to “development needs.”

I had one boss who turned the zinger into an art form. All of us who reported to him experienced it, and we occasionally took bets on what he’d come up with for the current year. For me, it usually some variation of “You’re not aggressive enough.” The first time he hit me with it, I didn’t know what to say. It worked so well that first time that he tried it again the next year, but I was ready and asked, “And how did that affect my performance?” That flustered him. The third time he pitched it at me again, but he had an answer to my question: “It didn’t affect your performance, but it affects management’s perceptions of you.” So I started getting more aggressive – with him. When I said that’s what he had told me to do, he said, “I didn’t mean with me!” Third time was the charm. He went on to something else.

The Non-Performance Review. The non-performance review happens when your boss doesn’t like doing reviews, and will talk about absolutely anything other than your performance: sports, the weather, his kids, your kids, his car, the carpeting on the floor, the light fixtures, you-name-it. It’s not that there are problems he wants to avoid talking about, it’s just he hates – hates! – getting so personal and has learned that a performance review, done properly, makes him as vulnerable as it does you.

Over the years, I’ve had performance reviews that offered opportunities to discuss movies and Broadway plays, the latest non-fiction bestseller, problems with other people on the team (like peers), favorite cocktails, restaurants and pets, among other things. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get back to the subject at hand. And then the time would elapse, and the boss would breathe a huge sigh of relief.

For these, you have to pay close attention to what gets written down, because you won’t know what your appraisal is until you see it. (I refused to sign one of these once – an act deemed equivalent to starting the French Revolution.)

The Image Review. This type of performance review has less to do with your performance than it does with your boss’s perceptions of the perceptions of “management,” which he’s often responsible for. So the image review becomes a kind of tea-leaf-reading exercise, in which you try to discern which “perceptions of management” are actually your boss’s own personal perceptions and which belong to someone else. And who "management" actually is.

This one is tough on the person being reviewed. It helps to have some years of experience here, because you have to know how things work and you have to be fast on your feet in responding. I was once told, for example, that “management” had a problem with my team leadership capabilities because my people liked working for me, the expectations being, apparently, that you were a better team leader if they didn’t like you, so treat them badly. So I said, “Look at their performance and tell me how it could have been improved by browbeating them.” The response was a sullen look. I wish I was making this up.

The Hybrid Performance Review. This one usually combines the Image Review and the Zinger. Performance is barely mentioned; instead, you get a combination of “management’s perceptions” and a series of zingers. I may hold the record for this, in fact. In one one-hour review, performance was discussed in less than 15 seconds – a kind of grunt – and then it was a series of perception zingers, all of which were totally baseless and some of which were actually the perceptions about my boss, and we both knew it.

I would like to say I did the kind, understanding, Christian thing. I didn’t. I was so outraged that I fought back, and hard. I refuted everything. Met with a “but this is management’s perception” response, I hit back with “and you were responsible for almost all of that,” and then explained that in detail.

This wasn’t a performance review; it was a boxing match. No, that’s too nice. It was an ugly street brawl. Bridges got burned. It was just plain bad. Whenever you have one of these with your boss, you lose. By definition.

As I said in my comment to Bradley’s post, it all should down to this: Be fair. Be honest. Talk about the hard stuff when it happens, not during the review. Give credit where it’s due. Always affirm the worth of the person.

And no surprises.

Tomorrow: the good review performance reviews.

Editing a Twoem

It started as something of a lark. L.L. Barkat, Eric Swalberg and I, with a little commentary from Bradley Moore, decided to do a poetry jam on Twitter. Only L.L., Eric and I actually participated in the first session; Bradley had to take a shower after cleaning out horse stables all day for a project at work (I am not making this up).

We had a great time, talked it up a bit, and then started making plans for the second. At some point between the first and second sessions, L.L. suggested creating a site to house the Twitter poems and do other “poetically related” things like recommend books; Eric said he would be up for setting the site up; and I volunteered to edit and manage content. And just that fast, TweetSpeakPoetry.com was born.

Pulling all of the tweeted contributions together into some kind of coherent whole was relatively easy for the first two jams. The number of participants was three or four; we had gotten to know each other and each other’s writing through Twitter, Facebook, our blogs and email.

With the third session, things had begun to change a bit. From a contributor’s perspective, the “Twoems” (Twitter poems) are becoming wonderfully more varied and creative. And they’re also becoming more complex. More poet/tweeters are involved (a good thing), all write extremely and creatively well (another good thing), and all get involved in the jams in very individual ways (a third good thing and what makes the twoems so creative). But it makes for some challenging editing.

What helps is how certain themes will repeat themselves. In the third poetry jam, held Sept. 30, various kinds of fruit trees kept popping up, and I was able to use the idea of orchards to frame the twoem, entitled it “The Orchards of Desire.” For the last one, held Oct. 6, the phrases “ruby moon” or “ruby-red moon” kept recurring, and provided considerable help in editing the eight pages of printed tweets that became "The Poems of the Ruby Moon."

The editing process has its own mystique. I’ve edited a lot of documents during my professional career – speeches, news releases, articles and stories, even book manuscripts. But I haven’t edited poetry contributions tweeted on Twitter in a poetry jam. And it’s a collection of contributions that are made at different levels and different entry points, and with different perspectives on where things should go. And then you add our tendencies (including mine) to interject comments and asides, and it gets quite complicated.

What helps is to love the language. To see what comes from our poetry contributors, writing in short bursts of 140 characters, is absolutely amazing. Many of these contributions are startling, almost shockingly beautiful, and you just think “Wow!” when you see them appear on the screen.

I resist the urge to edit the words. That’s an urge common to all humanity, and especially lawyers. But I resist it. I may add a comma or semi-colon; I may move an entire line or two to another place because the fit is better. But I leave the words alone. I even leave the words of my own contributions alone, even if I see where I can improve them after the jam is over. That kind of editing goes against the spirit of a Twitter poem in the first place – writing tightly and quickly within that 140-character limit. So in spite of all my editing and structuring, there is still a sense of spontaneity – joyful spontaneity – about the finished whole and its component parts.

It’s tremendous fun. And more than that, it’s humbling and instructive to work with such talented writers.

(This article is also posted today at TweetSpeakPoetry.com. If you haven’t visited our poetry journal before, please do so. I hope you enjoy reading it even half as much as we do creating it.)

A Book Review on Work, and TweetSpeak Poetry

A few weeks back, my friend Bradley Moore asked if I would be interested in writing a book review for his blog. Bradley is a business executive in the Northeast, who writes about business and spirituality at Shrinking the Camel. He writes cool stuff, raising questions that stimulate, provoke and make you think. This morning, he posted the book review I wrote for his blog, on Alain de Botton's The Joys and Pleasures of Work.

Last night, just my wife and I were getting ready to go to a concert (Dee Dee Bridgewater, if you're interested), an email arrived from one of my online poetry co-conspirators, Eric Swalberg. He was letting me and Laura Barkat, the other main co-conspirator, know that TweetSpeak Poetry was live and ready to rock. This is the place where we'll be placing all of the "twoems" from our twitter poetry jams. (Laura invented the name "twoem," for Twitter poem. I invented the name "twepic," for twitter epic, which is what one of the twoems turned into.)

Our first jam was Sept. 9; our second on Sept. 22; and our third and most recent on Sept. 30. Other online poets have joined us from time to time, and we've collected all of the tweets at @tspoetry (when we remember to use the hashtag) and on this blog, where I've taken all three and edited them.

We had a technical glitch last night (that means we've really, really arrived) but the site is back up; I posted the first "twoem" this morning. It's entitled "At the Oasis, The Camel on Caravan," in honor of Bradley Moore, who wasn't able to participate.

A poetry journal launched, a book review published -- I thought Sundays were supposed to be quiet.

Shrinking the Camel and Inside Work

I’ve written before about a blog called Shrinking the Camel that I follow closely. It’s done by a business executive named Bradley Moore, who lives and works “somewhere in the northeast U.S.” In addition to his own blog, he also posts on a site called Inside Work, which is all about the practice of faith in the workplace. And yes, I follow that site closely as well, and not only for Bradley’s posts. There is a whole group of terrific writers and thinkers – and they write about faith and business. They don't write about the application of business practices to the church -- an affliction in the church in America for more than two decades. Instead, the writers at Inside Work look at the practice of faith in the workplace.

Yesterday on Inside Work, Bradley posted an article called “How God Saved My Life through Writing.” And he talks about how he came to start writing the Shrinking the Camel blog in 2008. It’s honest writing, writing from the heart.

How I happened across Bradley’s blog, as well as the Inside Work site, is one of those stories about how the web works. I was reading a blog post on a writing web site, and saw an interesting comment by a guy named Marcus Goodyear, an editor and poet who's actually written a poem for his wife about the Large Hadron Collider -- and had it published. I clicked on his name, and landed at his web site, Goodwordediting.com. One of the things he does is serve as an editor at a site called HighCallingBlogs.com, a collection of blogs that look at the entire world as a place to practice faith, including the culture (a shocking notion, I know). One of those links took me to Inside Work, where I found an article written by Bradley – and I clicked through to Shrinking the Camel (cool name for a blog, by the way).

And this process continues. At the High Calling site, I read a post about poetry by a writer named L.L. Barkat -- clicked through to her blogs (there are three, including Seedlings in Stone), and am now getting ready to start her book Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places.

In his latest article at Inside Work, Bradley writes about how he began writing – disillusionment with evangelical Christianity, a sudden skepticism about the Bible, angst and burnout with his career – and he discovered that God was creating a new work in him through the whole process (my words, not Bradley’s). Reading those words evoked a powerful sense of identification. I’ve gone through a long period of skepticism, not about the Bible, but about the contemporary American church. Having gone through a disastrous experience with a church that embraced every business fad found on the bestseller list, and wrecked anything in its path that might stop its quest for cultural relevance, I pulled back, and pulled back hard. And angst and burnout with my career? Yes, I've known that, too, a couple of times at least.

About three years ago, I started writing a novel, and actually finished it, along with a sequel and a plan for a series. Some of the partially completed “volumes” in the series have as many as 40,000 words or more. And I learned something, the same thing that Bradley has. Writing has been a means for me to begin coming to grips with what happened to my church, and what happened to my faith. In an odd way, writing is like having a conversation with God.

I’m still on that road. Finding the Bradley Moores of this world is like having a fellow pilgrim come alongside.

Inside Work

The Sabbath was originally a day of rest from one's labors, so I suppose some thinking on Sunday about work may be a kind of contradiction in terms. But it's been on my mind a lot lately, for a lot of varied reasons.

I've been spending some time exploring a web site called Inside Work. Here's what it says in the site's "About Us" section: "InsideWork® infuses business innovation with biblical insight to stimulate change in our work, organizations and marketplace." The articles are thoughtful and thought-provoking, challenging and sometimes provocative -- and never dull. I'm so used to experiencing business beliefs flooding the church that it's actually refreshing to read about biblical beliefs addressing the workplace.

Right now the current articles featured on the site are about corporate strategic vision (it's not about technology or change; it's about character); defending one's self in the workplace (David and Psalm 69); what it means to really love the customer (a short treatise about Starbuck's); why God love commerce; and the idea of a mission statement.

One regular contributor is a business executive named Bradley Moore, who works in the northeast U.S. and has a blog always worth reading called "Shrinking the Camel." (The name of the blog alone speaks volumes about its content.) (If you're not biblically inclined, it has to do with the statement in the New Testament that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.) Brad writes about the practice of faith in the workplace -- not so much talking about it as doing it. He's written the current article on Inside Work on loving the customer at Starbuck's.

Inside Work has become one of my favorite web sites about work. Take a look.