Poetry

Back when I was your age and had too much time on my hands, I was ambitious to be a serious writer and even went so far as to write a few short stories and send them away to magazines, double-spaced and with a stamped envelope. The stories were passionate and full of passionate obscurity. When I re-read them recently, they sounded like bad translations of a gloomy freshmen English major with a visa from Greenland who never left his dorm room, yet being confident in my calling, I felt validated by the magazine’s rejection of them. But what really killed my career was encouragement. I wrote a short story called “Under the elevated benches the pigeons sleep” and an English teacher who drove a vintage Porsche and dated most of the young women in my creative writing class, himself a writer, wrote me a letter praising it that only made me see how cheap and fraudulent it was and I didn’t want to be that kind of fake. I made a simple moral decision that it was better to imitate humor than despair. I quit cold turkey. I’ve been clean ever since.

I gave up the idea of writing serious fiction but never gave up reading it. But reading for slow readers like me takes time, and as my life evolved, I found I had less and less time to read the big, bold, thick books of my youth and tended to read shorter and shorter pieces of work, which ultimately led me to poetry and a subscription to a monthly magazine from the American Poetry Foundation and discovery about poetry I never knew.

Poetry is a necessity. It’s as simple as the need to be touched and similarly a need that is hard to enunciate.

The meaning of poetry is to give us courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you are obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right. Poets have many motives for writing – to be published on expensive paper, to flaunt your sensitive nature and thereby impress someone who might go to bed with you, to win a prize or to give some plausible excuse for the mess of your life – but what really matters about poetry and what distinguishes poets from say, innovation managers or ad salesmen is the miracle of incantation in rendering the gravity and grace and beauty of the ordinary world and thereby lending courage to strangers.

This is a necessary thing. America is in hard times. Our beloved country awash in jitters, politics, on both sides, even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning. At times, our American life feels impossible, and you curl up under a blanket in a dim room behind drawn shades and you despise your life, which seems mean and purposeless, a hoax and a cheat, your shinning chances all wasted, pissed away, nobody can change this or make this better, love is lost, hope gone, nothing left but to pour a glass of whiskey and listen to weepy music.

But it can help to say words. Moaning helps too. So does prayer and walking.

Many people have pulled themselves up out of the pit by the simple expedient of rising to their feet, leaning slightly forward, putting one foot in front of the other. But others need more.
Poetry sometimes helps. The intensity of poetry, its imaginative fervor, it cadences is not meant for the triumphant bailed -out executive, but for people in a jam – you and me. Remember the last time you hitchhiked and stood, thumb out, as the cars passed, waiting for the kind stranger, focusing on the oncoming headlights and thinking: I’m not a killer. I won’t weird you out. I’m actually a very nice person. I need you to stop and give me ride. Please. Then your hitchhiking days were over. You graduated. You got a job, a car, a house, a family, you salted some cash away. Then trouble struck. And now, damn it, you’re right back out there on the highway, except it’s raining. Maybe your job went up in smoke. Perhaps your assets have been turned into succotash by long-term investments you never touched and lost or by buying a house you thought was a good idea and it wasn’t and your accountant gives you the bad news and now you must scrabble your way back up the slippery slope again, but your older and less steady and your heart sinks at the prospect of having to grind it out again. Perhaps you got a horrible phone call from your beautiful wife – breast cancer? How can she have breast cancer? She exercises every day, never really drank or smoked and no one else in her family has ever had breast cancer – and now your life is turned upside down and the IRS wants to audit you because it’s easier to go after you for a few thousand dollars than a Wall Street billionaire who stole from widows and orphans and time has stopped and the calendar is cancelled, and you’re off the plane to a hospital drama.
These troubles come to people all the time.
Perhaps if I knew you better and if you were in a hard passage, I might send you a note, the way people used to do, believing in the bracing effect of bold writing. But I don’t know you that well, so what can I offer? Just this: go to a store and buy a book of poetry. I might do you some good.

Poems describe a common life. It’s good to know about this. I hope you can take some courage from it.

Skepticism

To make judgments is to be human. “It’s a beautiful day or it’s a foggy, dreary, most forgettable day.” Both statements are judgments. We make them all the time. This is not to suggest that when people make judgments they don’t say harsh things. They do. But when a hero, a legend, a political icon of earned and endowed wisdom and goodness receives a tough judgment from a media critic we often label the commentary as “harsh” and speculate about the motives, the agenda that lurks behind the person who is making the trouble, and the idea or policy upon which the trouble is directed – whether it deserves it or not – is being bullied.

We’re less worried about motive when a politician receives a tough review by another politician or by the opposing political party, even if we disagree with the point of view and become so outraged that we send off a letter to the editor or post a blog response, or a tweet to the politician’s Blackberry. That’s because there is a role in our democracy for the dissenting opinion and politicians, and people who act like they’re one, aren’t usually labeled “negative” for offering it. Most critical politicians with whom we disagree are simply wrong; most media critics go negative.

Maybe politicians are frail and we worry about their graying temples and kicking them when they are “fighting the good fight” and trying so hard to do the right thing for so many people. Whatever the reason for our collective undifferentiated anxiety, the negative comment, along with the negative critic, is more of an event that it ought to be.

I’m starting to think negativity needs to be the starting point, the critic’s natural posture, the default position assumed before reading or listening to one word from anyone who dares to go public in any way on any subject on any day about anything. Because, let’s face it, approaching every new everything with an open-mind is well-meaning but ultimately exhausting as approaching every stranger on the street with open arms. Of course, you’ll meet some nice people, but dear reader your generosity will not be reciprocated most of the time. In fact, your sharp, well-tuned taste will be dinged by so much sheer dullness that in time, you’ll be blunted and you’ll start thinking in Power Point headlines.

My advice is when you brave other people’s judgments, ideas, agendas and postures – particularly by someone with whom you are not familiar – it’s best to brace yourself and expect the worse. This is not to suggest cynicism. Indeed, you shouldn’t be reading, listening or watching anything anyone says or does if on some deep level you’re not hoping for the best. But hope should remain on the top rung of the ladder, well-protected, out of reach, until the shell that protects it is really jarred loose.

Now if you don’t like the word negative, then try to replace it with something more accurate another like skepticism. “Well, it looks like the Senate Republicans went expectedly skeptical on the President’s rescue plan.” Actually, I think many politicians would like having their minds opened, if that’s what skepticism can do. Openness is what authentic good government, good policy, good ideas do – but really, how often are we open and authentic? - and if embracing this ideal does it for our leaders, I’m happy for them. All I can say is they must be listening and reading better ideas than I am.

We all might hope for the authenticity and goodness metaphors to work in business and politics, but I think it is by definition exceptional and rare.

So, for the hope in us all, be skeptical.

Consultant Fees

Like lawyers and lobbyists, I try to forget consultant jokes as fast as I hear them. But recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about the high salaries and bonuses earned by a bevy of executives, Wall Street investment people, Washington insiders, and the army of public, private and military consultants of every stripe. And since I am a consultant, and this time of economic contraction and retreat is forcing many people into the ranks of consultancy whether they like it or not, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on consultant fees.

People who consult frequently bear scars from their efforts to bring about change. They are often silenced. On occasion they are killed – figuratively in the private and public sectors, actually in the military sector. Consultancy means always failing somebody. With or without authority, a consultant exercising h/her role in an organization will be shouldering the pains and aspiration of a community and frustrating at least some people, some of the time. Because the consultant’s primary task within the organization is to address a problem, the work of the organization often changes. Change often demands loss. Every bright new idea will likely meet resistance from those who are threatened by it. The loss is real and it means that some people will have to accept the loss, emerge from it and make the best of it by finding new, unfamiliar opportunity. When the issue and direction is too provocative, it’s easier to fire the consultant than address the issue.

Because the benefits and constrains differ, those that consult often lead without authority and must adopt strategies and tactics that are at once more bold and subtle than their clients, who might also be leaders with and without authority. As a consultant you have very little control over the internal holding environment and you can’t expect to be held. You can shape the stimulus, but you cannot manage the response. You can spark a debate, but you can’t orchestrate it. You can challenge an organization, but you can’t do the work for them or they will become dependent, or overload them or they will avoid learning. Without authority, a consultant must regulate distress by modulating provocation.

Some consultant fees are outrageous and easy to dismiss, others are small and easy to dismiss. Mostly, stories about fees are cover stories. They cover up the pressures, the disequilibrium, expectations and frustrations of an organization that is trying to introduce itself to its own ideas. In turbulent and abundant times, consultants become the repositories for those whose expectations have failed. Consultants are attacked, dismissed, silenced and sometime discredited because they come to represent loss, real or imagined, to those in authority in organizations that hire them who feel that have gotten, or might get the bad end of the bargain. Even if people hope for a positive outcome, fear provokes defense, particularly if the stakes are high. At these times, and at most other times, being a consultant is risky and that’s why we work for companies that are profitable and charge fees.

Real Value

All the shareholder value in the world means less than nothing when 6.5 million people are unemployed, 4.5 million homes are in foreclosure and consumer confidence is hovering in the mid-to-low 30’s. Happy days are not here and the skies above are not clear.

On Tuesday, the new President Obama will take office and begin, almost immediately, to disappoint his followers and amaze his critics and set this country on a new path.

It’s easy to see, as my mother used to say, you’re only as happy as your saddest child and it seems all the children are sad today. It is uncomfortable to write these words, believing that all the economic indicators will be troublesome and higher in the next six months - 12 percent unemployment, 10 million homes in foreclosure and consumer confidence in the teens, because to do so trivializes what is happening to our lives.

One reason for my discomfort is we don’t know who shareholders are anymore. Are they people just like us or are they large institutions who made enormous profits selling debt and then bundling and selling the risk associated with that debt to institutions who in turn bundled and sold the same risk again and again to other institutions in ever more complicated financial packages that eventually no one understood, much less profited from, until the whole house of cards came tumbling down three months ago.

The only directive that seems to make sense in these uncertain times is to take care of people first and worry about everything else later. Our economy is down in the dumps and it will cost this country dearly for decades to come because too much power, authority and control was put in the hands of too few. I also believe this is a great moment for America.

My assessment will be neither little noted nor long remembered. That hardly matters because my assessment to our economic times is consistent with our country’s culture – its values and the way it views its relationships with its citizens. American doesn’t just deliver economic value to its citizens. It makes its citizens feel valued, too. For too long, Americans have been taxpayers; we need to be citizens again. We need to focus on only of shareholder value and also on sharing.

Most companies knock themselves out trying to make people loyal to their brands. What they usually forget, and perhaps this is why government is important, is that these same people are citizens and government’s first job is to protect its citizens…all of its citizens, all of the time.

There is little chance that political advertising slogans like “Change” and “Country First” will live as long or as robustly as our first, national slogan that has lived for one hundred years: “We the people..” Originally, it simply meant that by working hard similar people can join in similar groups, cohort groups and experience the warm psychological cuddle that unity provide. Now it means we have to try harder to help each other live better lives because some of our groups have morphed into institutions larger and more powerful than the government that regulates them and have disproportionately distributed the risks and benefits of membership in them unequally. As citizens and people, it is our right to seek equality because as Americans we are supposed to go the extra mile, do extra things, and love the union that embodies the ideals of equality more. It is symbolically great but also great from a pragmatic business standpoint.

Our economic meltdown is helping us find a whole new set of ways to be better citizens. In many ways this transition from value by slogan to valuing our citizens is a metaphor for what has happened to American business over the years. Advertising and marketing programs that used to drive message, trial and adoption smell funny. Whether it’s online, on the air, or on the grapevine, advertised messages are irrelevant to most brands most of the time. And citizen customers will want meaningful solutions that simply help them solve problems and lead happier lives will not be so loyal and eager to respond to their advertised messaged ever again.

For a couple of reasons: first, large institutions don’t really care about what we do, they just care about what we think. They no longer know the difference between what is truly different and what actually works. They have cost engineered their products so much that they are filled with product-like substitutes, not real ingredients. They have talked to us about simplicity but live and breathe and finance their institutions with complexity. And their most tragic flaw is they have come to believe that it is more important to touch us on television than in our real lives.

The answer is not more incremental or extraneous innovation. The answer is overturning the precepts that have shaped "best practices" in marketing, business and organizational policy for the last fifty years. The answer is to design meaningful solutions and provide them when and where people, our citizens need them the most. The answer is to care about what our citizens actually do. The answer is to do what works for the most of our citizens; to understand the imperative of sparing no expense when it comes to satisfying the needs of our citizens and to touch people in real life. We are worth every penny you spend on us.
Citizens tend to like those things, more than they live innovation. Build your brand in that brand space and you will have a real, unique and differentiated company that will give you strength.

Christms Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup water
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup brown sugar
4 large eggs
1 cup nuts
2 cups dried fruit
1 (750 ml) bottle tequila

Directions:
1. Sample the tequila to check quality.
2. Take a large bowl; check the tequila again to be sure it is of the highest quality.
3. Pour one level cup tequila and drink.
4. Turn on the electric mixer.
5. Beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl.
6. Add one peastoon of sugar.
7. Beat again.
8. At this point it's best to make sure the tequila is still ok, so
try another cup just in case.
9. Turn off the mixerer thingy.
10. Break 2 leggs and add to the bowl and chuck in the cup of dried
fruit.
11. Pick the frigging fruit off the floor.
12. Mix on the turner
13. If the fried druit gets stuck in the beaters just pry it loose
with a drewscriver.
14. Sample the tequila to check for tonsisticity.
15. Next, sift two cups of salt, or something.
16. Who geeves a sheet.
17. Check the tequila.
18. Add one table.
19. Add a spoon of sugar, or somefink.
20. Whatever you can find.
21. Greash the oven.
22. Turn the cake tin 360 degrees and try not to fall over.
23. Don't forget to beat off the turner.
24. Finally, throw the bowl through the window, finish the quetila and make sure to put the stove in the wishdasher.
25. Cherry Mistmas!