More Conscious of Time

At The High Calling, we’re finishing up the last chapter and epilogue of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks. And now I’m considering the story of Harold and Erica at the end of their lives, and what does that mean.

I’ve discovered I’m becoming more conscious of time, and its passing.

It’s not moving any faster than it ever did, of course; I’m simply becoming more aware of it. And it’s in the little things, like it takes five and a half minutes to unload the dishwasher.

I know this has to do with age. Chronologically, time is catching up with me. And I’m trying to stare it down.

I’m doing things at 60 that would seem more natural at 25 or 35.

I published a novel after I turned 60. I’m working on the sequel. Depending upon how the sequel does commercially, a series lies behind it. Another novel, completely different, has almost 70,000 words completed, with another novel idea rolling around in my head. And this novella thing I’ve been working on, all because I heard a piece of music. I’m experiencing a literary flood that’s almost overwhelming, at a time and an age when I thought ideas might be drying up.

My day job involves social media. I was a speechwriter who started with electronic communications in 1993, moved on to the web. And then it was blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the rest. I am not exactly what most people think of as the correct demographic for social media. As the King of Siam told Anna, “Is a puzzlement,” except that I think what’s different – why I ‘get it” when others my age and younger don’t, is that I bring a lived life to the understanding of communications technology.

I’ve become more aware of the impact of my parents on my life. I spent 18 years under their roof in direct, day-to-day contact, and 42 years later, I can see the influences they had far more clearly than I could years ago. Earlier this month, I spent a long weekend with my mother in New Orleans, and we talked in a way we never really had before. I should say I asked questions and she talked. I wish I had had a tape recorder, but I didn’t anticipate the level of conversation we ended up having. But I did take notes.

It’s no coincidence that I can look at my own two children, my two sons I love so much, and I see my influence.

Part of what Brooks says in The Social Animal is that so much of our lives is actually directed, influenced and shaped by the “dominance of unconscious processes.” It’s likely true, but it’s an incomplete statement.

His perspective is largely biological and sociological; mine is increasingly spiritual. I don’t see unconscious processes directing what I do. Instead, I experience how God has wired me, both collectively as a human being and individually as me, and I’m only gradually becoming aware of the totality of it all.

And it is awesome.

“We are not who we think we are,” Brooks writes.

And he’s right. We aren’t.

Until we understand that we are the children of God.

And then everything changes.

To see more posts on the final chapter and epilogue, please visit The High Calling, where our discussion is hosted by Laura Boggess.

This One's Political (Sort Of)

In our discussion of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by David Brooks over at The High Calling, our fictional characters Erica and Harold take a turn for the political – they get involved in a presidential election, working directly for a candidate (party unidentified but I would suspect Democratic). Brooks uses this to talk about our political inclinations and how we get them, and throws a lot of conventional wisdom out of the window.

I wonder what he would make of me.

The first time I was “legal” to vote was 1971. At that time in Louisiana, if you wanted to vote, you had to vote in the Democratic primary. The Republican Party existed in Louisiana and other Deep South states, but it was a non-starter in state politics from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the 1980s – a century of Democratic control.

For the most part, this “southern Democrat” translated as conservative. Then came the McGovern candidacy in 1972, and the changes engineered in the Democratic Party which turned out to be vastly more consequential than McGovern. What the changes had the effect of doing was to drive Southern conservative Democrats into the arms of the Republican Party.

For the next 30 years, and in three states – Louisiana, Texas and Missouri, I considered myself a Republican. I voted for Republicans at the national and state level, and usually if not always at the local level. My attitudes, perceptions and political beliefs were shaped and molded by essentially a Republican sensibility. I did feel an uneasiness with how the Republicans talked a good game on social and moral issues but never really initiated much. They seemed more adept at stopping or slowing, but not really willing to take on the major moral questions.

Two things happened that cut me adrift.

First, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 demonstrated the sheer incompetence of federal disaster authorities. People were dying in the streets of New Orleans, while the administration seemed more interested in making sure the President had just the right backdrop for a photo opp. I think the President truly cared, but his handlers were far more concerned with political appearances than with rescuing people.

This was my hometown, my family and friends, my heritage, and I was stunned by the ineptness of the government’s response. As columnist George Will pointed out at the time, whatever else you wanted to say about them, the Republicans were supposed to be competent. I joined the streams of tens of thousands who took to the internet to find out information, share information, and help people (I will admit to sharing what I learned about how to get in and out of the city with all the major highways blocked by police and troops.)

The second thing that happened involved David Kao, who had served as deputy director of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for the White House. He began to tell all – and the “tell” was about how the key political handlers surrounding the President callously mobilized and used evangelical voters to get elected and then promptly ignored their concerns.

People like me.

I walked away from what had helped shape me for three decades – most of my adult life. I didn’t turn to the Democratic Party or other political groups. I simply walked away from the Republicans.

I began to do some serious soul-searching about what had shaped me. I realized that it had been less about what the Republicans stood for (or what most Republicans stood for) and more about what the Democrats had become.

Politically, I’m still adrift. I still am. And it is a good thing. I broke the lenses I was looking at life through, and I began to see more clearly.

To see more posts on these three chapters in The Social Animal – The Leader, The Soft Side and The Other Education, please visit The High Calling, where Laura Boggess is leading the discussion (and may be avoiding all this political stuff).

A fairy tale

It happens like this only in the movies.

We’ve been reading The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievementl by David Brooks over at The High Calling. Brooks uses the fictional characters of Harold and Erica to illustrate a wide array of sociological, psychological and biological studies all pointing to our “social-ness” as one of the most critical factors, if not the most critical factor, in what makes us human and how we develop and live. Last week, Erica was on the brink of leading an insurrection at her employer Intercom, which bore a resemblance to the now-defunct Enron.

The insurrection happens, but it’s a movie script, not what most of us have ever seen happen in the workplace.

For months, Erica works with a number of her co-workers who all believe the top executives are taking the company down the drain. (And there’s no question about this; that’s exactly what they’re doing.) They look for an opportunity to present their recommendations, and it comes when the company holds a live webcast for investors, analysts and the board of directors. Erica and one of her “co-conspirators,” Raymond, are able to speak for 15 minutes. Heads nod but nothing happens, or at least happens immediately.

Within a few months, however, the company’s downward spiral worsens, the board acts, names Raymond as CEO, and the turnaround begins. Several years later, Raymond retires, and another CEO continues the rebuilding. Eventually, Erica is named CEO, and becomes something of a minor business celebrity.

Where the story went awry for me was the live webcast. There is not a public company anywhere in the world that would allow that kind of webcast, especially one involving investors, analysts and the board. These kinds of events are heavily scripted, with a kind of standard liturgy. The only relatively unscripted part is the questions and answers – you never really know what an analyst might ask but you can usually make a pretty good guess. Employees would not be allowed to speak.

It might be different at an employee event, like an internal town hall. But the board would rarely have an opportunity to attend one.

If such a live meeting as Brooks describes would occur, a more likely outcome would be that Raymond would find himself packaged out via early retirement and Erica would be marginalized (or find herself eventually looking for another job, voluntarily or involuntarily).

When significant change comes for an organization, it usually comes in the form of an external crisis. Think BP’s change of leadership in the aftermath of the Gulf Oil spill, or the near-collapse of General Motors and Chrysler (and I’m not going to argue the merits or demerits of the government bailout). Employees question executive leadership all the time, and often rightfully so, but corporations and other entities (including a lot of charitable and non-governmental organizations) are not democracies. When leadership makes bad decisions, it usually takes time and the revolt of external constituencies to make change happen. Leadership often doesn’t realize that the decisions are bad ones, and there’s a certain defensiveness about having one’s authority questioned.

But it would make a fun movie script.

To read more posts about the three chapters in The Social Animal being discussed this week – The Insurgency, Getting Older, and Morality – please visit The High Calling, where Laura Boggess is leading our discussion.

Erica Meets Enron (Or Something Like It)

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess has been leading us in a discussion of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love Character, and Achievement by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks has done something that makes what otherwise would have been a dull if important discussion of studies about human beings – he explains the studies through the fictional account of Harold and Erica.

Harold has been raised in a very recognizable upper middle class home and family, while Erica, with a Chinese-American mother and a Mexican-American father, has been raised in a very working class family in Brooklyn. Erica hires Harold for her new consulting business, and gets more than she bargained for: they fall in love. For several years, they have both a successful business and a successful relationship.

Then the economy tanks, and the consulting business goes under. Harold finds a job he loves with a historical society, but Erica is more driven, and more performance-oriented, and she eventually lands a job with a cable company that gets about as close to Enron as you can get without calling it by the name. Erica’s company is like the Titanic heading straight for the iceberg, with a leadership oblivious to its own faults and shortcomings as the drive to diversify the business becomes increasingly frantic.

Brooks surrounds this story with a discussion of two streams of political philosophy and economics that developed simultaneously during the Enlightenment – the English stream that led to capitalism and the American Revolution and the French stream that led to the Reign of Terror. What they shared was a faith in reason. Where they differed was that the English stream understood the connection between reason and passion (or emotion) much better than did the French.

From a business perspective, where almost unadulterated reason led was to what happened in late 20^th century America – an almost slavish obeisance to the concept of rational business processes and the redesign of those processes, coupled with a hunger for success and invincibility that Enron served as the stereotype for. And while many industries and companies might have needed restructuring, much of what was sought was a mirage, one that would never be realized.

The fictitious company Brooks describes as Erica’s employer is an extreme example, but it is nonetheless recognizable. A lot of us lived that experience – endless restructurings and downsizings, plant closings, acquisitions and divestitures by the fistful, the workplace overrun by consultants often competing against each other, freshly minted MBAs (often with no business experience) expounding on the proper course for century-old organizations, concepts like turning staff groups into “shared services,” and people becoming known as “resources” and then “talent.” For many people in many organizations, it often felt like a Reign of Terror.

We’re going to live with the consequences of all of this for a long time. I’m deeply interested to see what Erica is going to do, because it sounds like she may aiming for a revolution of her own.

To read more posts on The Social Animal, please visit The High Calling.

Ah, Consultants

In the three chapters of The Social Animal by David Brooks we’re discussing this week at The High Calling, the fictional character Erica we’ve been following graduates from college and decides to join a consulting firm. After a few years, and learning the highs and lows of consulting, she strikes out on her own and becomes an independent consultant.

Ah, consultants.

In the course of my career, I have worked with many “outside consultants.”  I’ve worked with virtually every big-name consulting there is. I have worked with numerous consultants no one has ever heard of. I have been an outside consultant myself.

I’ve worked with good consultants and consultants who had far too many degrees to be of any use to anyone. I have ridden the waves of virtually every business fad known in the past 30 years. I have heard consultants offering expert opinions that were as vacuous as the nodding heads of the clients hearing the opinions. I’ve experienced consultants instructing a roomful of 300 highly paid executives how to build Legos together while sitting on the floor. And I’ve experienced consultants miraculously breaking through a corporate culture that needed to be broken.

As a consultant myself, I once spoke to a group of company executives who were keen to change their corporate web site, and had been arguing for months how to have the best web site in the industry. I wowed them – I am not making this up – by showing them print-outs of what their competitors were doing. No one had thought to look.

In general, outside consultants were viewed by organizational insiders as the enemy, an enemy whose primary purpose was to destroy jobs. Consultants didn’t help their cause when they arrived with attitudes. Senior management rarely saw the attitudes, because few senior managers worked with consultants. Communications people, like myself, worked with them all the time. Consultants knew, often better than executives, that communications was critical to any effort to change an organization.

One of the best experiences I had with an outside consultant was when St. Louis Public Schools hired a management firm to run the district and do what elected Board members were unable to do politically themselves – close schools, eliminate jobs, outsource everything not related to education. It was a district that at its height had more than 100,000 students. But that was four decades earlier; the number of students was below 40,000 and continuing to decline. The problem was a school district that had an administration and infrastructure for 100,000 students, not 40,000.

A political war ensued. The consultant was given a year when it needed at least three, but it still made significant gains. But schools were closed, jobs cuts, benefits policies changed, contracts outsourced. Even more was needed. The communications function was the crossroads, and was often at the epicenter or every major (and daily) trauma. A few years later, the state of Missouri took over the district, and still runs the district today.

As described by Brooks, Erica’s experiences as a consultant and what she learns ring true. She goes out on her own, expecting to bring something of value to clients. But she finds that clients aren’t interested, and that, to survive and be successful, she will have to add some “wow factors” to what she knows and can do. She turns to behavioral economics, and it is there she will meet Harold, the other major fictional character in The Social Animal, whom we left in high school a few chapters back.

To read more posts on these chapters in The Social Animal, please visit The High Calling, where Laura Boggess is leading the discussion.

Norms and Culture are Personal

Donald was a Baby Boomer, born and raised in a suburb of New Orleans. And while no suburb of New Orleans could ever be truly Americanized, this one was as close it got. He grew up with children whose last names reflected the region’s French, Spanish and Italian heritage (and accents), and children whose fathers came from all over the country to work at the huge NASA assembly facility. His friends had names like Hebert (pronounced A-bear), Melancon and Sardelli, and also names like Clark, Pollock, Phelps and Miller.

His own family reflected the same dichotomy. His mother was born and raised in New Orleans, from a large family with French, Cajun-French and German ancestors with both Catholic and Lutheran overtones. His father had been raised in Shreveport, in a family that was hard-shell Southern Baptist and still fighting the Civil War.

Both of Donald’s parents had been married before, his father twice before. He had a half-brother who was part of his family and a half-sister who both was and wasn’t. He was the first child of this new marriage, and he eventually had a younger brother. What both of his parents prized and extolled for all of their children was the virtue of hard work. All four of the children would exhibit and practice the same belief, although each would learn that hard work was no guarantee of personal success, and that other factors could play a large role as well.

His father was something of a family black sheep, and often the despair of his grandmother. His father struggled with authority issues his entire life – the Baptist church, his parents, his employers, the Navy, the government, local New Orleans police officers looking for protection money. That struggle translated into a suspicion of all authority by the children, including Donald.

He spent more time with his mother’s family than his father’s, but his father’s family had the relative Donald loved the most – his grandmother. Every summer, from the time he was 7 to the time he was 13, Donald spent a week with his grandmother in Shreveport. He adored her, and she adored him. He was many things his own father was not – studious, respectful, never getting into trouble, among others. His grandmother often wondered how Donald could have been produced by her son, and decided that while he looked like a carbon copy of his father, he must have been more influenced by his mother. Donald loved Shreveport; it evoked a sense of the almost magical because of his grandmother.

And that was true. Donald’s father worked hard and worked long hours, six days a week, trying to make a go of his small business. When a small child, sometimes weeks would pass before Donald would see his father, getting up after his father had left for work and going to bed before his father got home. And what he learned from his mother included a strong sense of romanticism; he substituted as his mother’s movie partner because his father just didn’t care for them.

When Donald began dating in high school, the girls were varied in background. Some were natives of New Orleans; others had moved with their families to the city and were from all over the United States. Most came from a similar middle class background; a few came from wealthy families who lived on prestigious streets. But there was no longstanding high school sweetheart.

For college, he attended the state university, whose student body drew a majority from Louisiana but had a significant number of foreign and out-of-state students. His dating patterns, however, varied little from high school, and he found himself dating girls mostly from the New Orleans area, until his senior year, when he met and started dating a girl from the magical city of Shreveport. And this would be the girl he married.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading The Social Animal by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Today we’re covering three chapters – on norms, self-control and culture. These three chapters are about Erica, who comes from a lower economic class family in New York that is Chinese-American on one side and Mexican-American on the other,

 The Social Animal is a non-fiction book largely told by telling the stories of fictional characters. My post today is an example of how Brooks has written the book, illustrating his fictional stories with numerous psychological, sociological and other scientific studies. The “Donald” is this post is based on my own experience.

To read more posts on these chapters, please visit The High Calling.

Miss Roark and Louisa May Alcott

My ninth grade English teacher was named Miss Roark (we still said “Miss” in those days). She was from Alabama, and her distinctly Southern accent stood out in a school in suburban New Orleans, where most people sounded like they were from Brooklyn.

The class that year focused mostly on British and American literature. We read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – the curriculum tsars thought it might appeal to a class of all 14-year-old boys. We read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. We read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (boys like war, right?). Our major project was to take one British and one American author, do a deep dive into their worlds and lives, and write two papers (and oral presentations) on how their lives shaped and influenced their writing.

We chose our authors from a list Miss Roark put on the blackboard. We chose in alphabetical order, which meant I would get whatever no one else wanted. The two names left were Shakespeare and Louisa May Alcott, Miss Alcott prompting a great deal of laughter from my classmates because she was the only female author on the list. (Some poor soul thought he was choosing a male when he chose George Eliot, the pen name for Mary Ann Evans.)

Miss Roark bristled at the laughter, and upbraided the class for their ridicule of an author she called, in her delightful Southern accent, “one of America’s most beloved authors.”

We had to read a number of their works. For Shakespeare, I read Julius Caesar (with the rest of the class), Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For Alcott, I read Little Women, Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

Miss Roark said she was available to help anyone on their projects if they needed it. I was the only one who took advantage of her offer. We’d meet at lunch or after school. And she guided me, mentored me, and suggested several themes I could pursue. I loved that project, as much for the interest she took in me as for what I was reading and learning. Perhaps even more.

I thought of Miss Roark as I read the chapters on mapmaking, attachment and learning in The Social Animal by David Brooks. We started the group discussion on this book last week at The High Calling, and Laura Boggess continues to lead us this week. These three chapters start the story of Harold (son of Rob and Julia, whom we met last week) from the time of early childhood to high school. He finds his Miss Roark when he’s a senior – and she’s an English teacher, too.

Reading Harold’s story, and how he struggled, thought, read and wrote, and how he ran into roadblocks and was guided around them, I realized how it was virtually identical to my own project in ninth grade. The high school cliques he navigates are the same, although, unlike Harold, I was never part of the athletes’ clique. He learns a lot about himself, and he learns how to study deeply, do research deeply and think deeply.

Author David Brooks uses Harold’s story to illustrate the science and physiology that studies say go on in the brain with this kind of learning. It’s interesting, but it was less important to me than to recognize the overall process I experienced 45 years ago.

I never saw Miss Roark after that year. I changed schools for tenth grade. She called me at Christmas that year to thank me for the Christmas card I sent her; like Harold with his teacher, I was likely a little in love with Miss Roark. I sent her a card the following year, too, but it was returned; she had moved with no forwarding address.

But she had an enormous impact on my reading, my education, my future career and my life. I hope she knows that.

To read more posts on these three chapters of The Social Animal, please visit The High Calling.

I Love You with All My Physiology

We’re starting a new book discussion at The High Calling today, and the book is The Social Animal: the Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by David Brooks. Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times who writes on politics and public policy, describes himself as a political moderate. It tells you something about my hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that it carries his columns as one of their hat tips to conservative opinion. His own description is closer to the mark.

Yet The Social Animal has nothing to do with politics or the 2012 election cycle or any of the usual things he writes about. It’s more like a college sociology text, except Brooks knows, what most of us knew in college – sociology texts were the perfect cures for insomnia. So what’s he done is to tell the story of Rob and Julia, the parents of Harold, and most of the book will eventually be about Harold and Erica.

He tells the stories of these couples using a wide array of studies, theories and speculation, explaining, for example, what happens on a physiological level when Rob and Julia first meet. It’s interesting, fascinating and thought-provoking.

Brooks is saying that the unconscious mind is vastly more important than the conscious mind in making decision, that we actually process information emotionally rather than rationally (which may explain a lot about the political process). “Over the past century,” he says, “people have tended to conceive decision making as a point in time. You mass the facts and circumstances and evidences and then make a call. In fact, it is more accurate to say that we are pilgrims in a social landscape. We wander across an environment of people and circumstances. As we wander, the mind makes a near-infinite number of value judgments, which accumulate to form goals, ambitions, dreams, desires, and ways of doing things.”

This seems rather intuitive – and it would certainly explain a lot about decisions in politics, business, the workplace, education and every other human endeavor that look like they make no sense. It’s because they indeed make no sense – the decision made in reaching those decisions was emotion-based. (Brooks points out that this might explain why after half a century of trying to improve public education in the United states and the spending of trillions of dollars, nothing much has changed.)

I like how he uses characters to tell his story, but the danger here is that it’s all rather reductionist – everything in a personal relationship can be explained by hormones, culture, upbringing, and evolution. We’re reduced to bundles of physiological, chemical and biological processes and actions. There’s not much talk about heart and no talk at all about soul.

We’ve only covered the introduction and the first three chapters, so we’ll see where Brooks is taking this. In the meantime, if you’d like to see other posts on the book, please visit The High Calling.