Posts Tagged ‘community’

This is part two of A Series of Short Takes, on salient issues of the day.  Like most of these, this one is political and religious, though not partisan or specifically denominational, in case that difference means anything to you.  You’ve been warned, either way.

Had a lengthy debate the other day with two fine ladies of my acquaintance about the Common Good.  I’m going to capitalize that term, because that’s how most people sound when they cite it.

As might be obvious by now, I tend to be quite libertarian in my thinking.  I really do believe that most people would be far better off if they were left the bleep alone by governments.  Because “libertarian” and “conservative” get lumped together a lot, and because I engage in debate a lot, I get accused almost weekly of being heartless because I don’t think it’s a good idea for Uncle Sam to do most of the things he does.  Until recently I couldn’t think of a decent rejoinder (“same to you, buddy” just wasn’t getting it done).  But then we had this debate, and I understood something.

Most of the people that want government to do things – this is ESPECIALLY true of celebrities – love all mankind in the abstract but would never volunteer at a soup kitchen unless the cameras were rolling.  Whereas I don’t think much of mankind in the abstract at all, but I routinely take food from my own pantry and leave it on specific doorsteps because the people inside need it more than I do.

This is not universal.  There are heartless cretins on both sides of the political divide.  I’m not talking, here, about abstracts at all.  I’m talking about specifics.  So here is my admonition: if you want to BE compassionate, to actually love all mankind (instead of being seen to do so, or pretending to), screw the Common Good.  Do something for that guy right there.  Anyone that talks about sacrificing for the Common Good, but has never raked his neighbor’s leaves, you can safely ignore as a hypocrite and a fraud.

Would a society populated by people that really served one another produce common good?  Sure.  Of course it would.  But just like you can’t bake a cake just by saying “there should be a cake here,” you can’t have a good society by talking about general sacrifice.  A good society is made of good people.  It can’t be made of anything else.  You have to have flour and sugar and eggs, and if you focus on the cake, and not on leavening your little corner, you’ll have a very sloppy cake, to extend the analogy a bit farther than it really serves.

I heard a speech recently that reminded me powerfully of this.  The speaker pointed out that all the laws in the world weren’t ever going to be sufficient to stop people from being nasty to one another.  There isn’t time or money to do that much policing.  The only thing that will stop people from being nasty is to get rid of nasty people.  And the only way to do that is to teach them to be decent.  In my teaching experience – and I’ve had some – the best way to do that is to be decent your own self.

So the next time someone makes a grand pronouncement, or asks if we can’t all just get along, ask him this: who is the person you most recently served, yourself, personally?  And if he can’t tell you, you’re safe to ignore him [note: this applies to the Leaders of Nations and Movements as well as to any one of us.  EVERYONE you know needs help at some point, and most of them will need it right in front of you twelve times a day.  There are ALWAYS opportunities to help people, EVERY DAY, no matter how grand the Work you're engaged in].  If YOU can’t answer this question, the world awaits.  And boy, does it need you.

I got this from my most faithful reader.  She blames it on my last post.  I blame her mother.  Nevertheless, I’m so proud of her I could bust.

I just sent this email to my manager

MaryAnne-

I have an idea that I need your help with.� I want to work for free.� Not all the time,
but a shift here or there, maybe once a year, maybe more.� When I go to the grocery store
and they’re asking for donations for Primary Children’s� my response is always,” I
work there, I think I donate enough” but the fact of the matter is that I don’t feel
like I donate enough.� The economy is bad (this isn’t news to anyone) healthcare is
prohibitively expensive (again, not news) but here I am with a good job that (I hope) I’m
not in danger of losing, and I have insurance and .. well, I’m really blessed.� So I want
to give back.

I certainly could donate a few bucks at the grocery store, but the fact of the matter is
that I have more time than I do money, and even if I didn’t I want to do more.� I’m a
good reader, I could volunteer to read to kids, or hold hands, or wipe snotty noses but
the fact is that I have a skill (how skilled I actually am is a matter for a later
debate) both my time and my skills are valuable so why not donate them?

What’s more, I don’t think I’m the only one who does, or would feel this way.� I’d like
to try to put some sort of mechanism in place for myself and for others who would be
willing to donate their time and their skills.

I know that there are certain logistical and legal implications involved in working for
free so I’m asking for your help to get the ball rolling.� I understand that as a manager
you probably can’t publicize or encourage this kind of thing (you certainly can’t ask
your employees to work for free) but I’m not in charge of anyone, I can.� I don’t need
your encouragement but I’d like your help, if only just to point me in the right
direction and tell me who I need to talk to.

Thanks- Al

I’m holding you personally responsible.�

And when I need the encouragement that I disdained from my manager (and I’m pretty sure
that I will because even though letting me do this is pretty much a no brainer for
humans, the blood sucking fiends who run IHC are not human, and I anticipate
difficulties), and when I need help with the PR, you know who I’m coming to.� Because
let’s face it, that’s really what you do best.

Love from the workshop-Al

http://alisonwonderland.wordpress.com/

Please go to her blog and tell her she’s amazing.  She deserves it.

So real unemployment is probably at 20%.  You want a fast check on this?  Think of 10 people you know well.  Are two of them either not working or working at a part-time job (or not working very much as a self-employed person)?  See?  Yes, I do know that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.  I also know that I know a lot more than 10 people, and that at least one of every 5 of them is out of work at this moment.  I would bet that is true for you as well.

What’s to be done?  Look, your resume is really not all that important in this kind of economy.  What has happened, effectively, is that we’ve been playing musical chairs, and the music has stopped.  Instead of there being 10 people and 9 chairs, there are 10 people and 8 chairs, or 7, or even 5 in some industries.  So people sit.  Now the music starts again, but the people in those chairs are not getting up.  No way.  Then the music stops again, and a fellow comes in and takes away another chair, even though someone is still sitting in it.

Arranged around these chairs are all the people that didn’t have a place to sit before, and still don’t have a place to sit.  True, once in a while, one of the chairs empties, because people do die or have to move to St. Louis to tend their ailing mother.  When that happens, a thousand people try to sit in the chair at once.  The problem then is not that your skills aren’t up to the task, it is that there simply aren’t enough chairs for people to sit in.  It’s not your fault you’re standing.  It’s not your fault there aren’t any chairs.  It is your fault if you don’t realize this, and start to think differently about what to do about it.

Mr. Cocky, you’re saying, it’s easy for you to say, being self-employed.  Nobody fired you.  Right, well, let’s talk about that.  First, I’m in the mortgage business. Raise your hand if you think that’s a boom industry.  Second, although it’s true that I still have work, it’s also true that most of what I do every day ANYONE can do without a lot of special training or finding someone to hire them to do it.  It can pay well or crappy, depending on how good you are at it, but no matter how good you are, nobody gives you a paycheck for showing up.  If I don’t produce funded and recorded loans, I make nothing, no matter how hard I work.

This is a good thing, at least for me.  I have never been confused about the source of my check.  In boom times, when everyone has a job, it’s easy to feel like the checks are just out there for you to pick up, and it’s simply a matter of figuring out what company name you want to be on the top of it.  In a recession, you realize that this isn’t so, that somewhere someone has to sell something or nobody gets paid, even the middle managers.  When that doesn’t happen, there are a whole lot of people that lose their jobs, most of whom didn’t really process their connection to the production-and-results people that brought the money in.

So yes, I’m fortunate.  I’ve been in a position where my health insurance lapses because I can’t pay it this month, and my office rent comes out of the same check my groceries do.  I’m well positioned to understand how to fight a recession because my job treats all economic conditions the same.  I’m always looking for work.  Always.  I don’t get laid off because I never get laid ON.  I’m especially well-positioned because the close relationship between business and personal income is obvious, and the tradeoff between doing the right thing and doing what looks like the profitable thing (often, not the same thing at all) stares me in the face every single day.

And now it’s there in front of you, too.  Even if you have a job, unless you’re one of a vanishing few, you know the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you wonder what’s going to happen next, and how you’ll feed your family if the next step takes you off a cliff.  And if you’re out of work, you’re falling already.  So now what?

I have a couple suggestions.  First, separate who you are from what you do for money.  The former is important and durable, the latter is not important and subject to change without notice.  This is especially hard to believe if you’ve been doing the same work for 20+ years, but it remains true.  You are not a computer guy, or a farmer, or the President of Spain.  You are much more than that.  That needs to be remembered.  You’re a son, a daughter, a brother, a mother, a father, a wife, a Cubs fan, a fisherman, a gardener, what have you.  What you do for a living is only one of the things you are, and not even the most important one.  When you lose your job, you’ve lost nothing – your job is what you do, not who you are.

Second, once you have #1 down, you’ll realize that you don’t have to go looking for a new job doing the same thing you were doing before.  In fact, the odds are overwhelming that you won’t be able to find a job doing that same thing.  You can put your resume out there in the usual places, and you should, but you ought to put it in other places, too.  Use who you are, not what you do (or did) to find work. This requires a bit of explanation, and a rejiggering of our usual thinking on the subject of employment.

We have to stop thinking about ourselves as consumers, with employers as producers of jobs that we will consume.  This sound silly?  It’s exactly how most people think about the job market (even I do it – the “job market”, like the supermarket).  Employers put jobs out there, and we select them like cold cuts.  When there are no jobs out in the display case, we get really annoyed.  But should we?  Whose jobs are they?  Do we have some natural right to have someone employ us?

I don’t think we do.

Macroeconomic Tangent: It is precisely this kind of thinking that leads to very silly “American jobs” rhetoric, as if the job belongs to America, and not to Intel.  Intel’s purpose as a company is to create the maximum value it can for the smallest possible cost.  That’s what businesses do.  There’s no good cursing them for finding that they can get good enough work somewhere else, where it costs a lot less.  Either we need to do better work, or we need to do it cheaper (or US tax policy needs fixing, so that US workers are not priced out of the market by Washington’s incomprehensible greed, but that’s another post).  END Macroeconomic Tangent.

You, yourself, are a producer.  You produce work.  You have wares to sell.  It is YOU that are the supermarket – or are you?  Perhaps you’re just a corner store.  Whatever.  Doesn’t matter.   Flip the concept on its head, and start thinking about what you can provide in terms of value. What work can you do that needs doing?

If you want, perhaps not the shortest, but the most satisfying, and ultimately the best course to employment, make yourself indispensable to someone. Go find a place to do some work.  Despite the downsizing going on, there’s a greater need for work to be done now than ever before.  Everywhere there are businesses struggling to stay afloat.  Why?  What do they need done?  Why couldn’t you do some of that?

I do very definitely realize that this is a different way to look at things.  I realize that I’m advocating doing work for people that have not agreed to pay you and perhaps cannot do so.  Yep.  You should.  I do it all the time, people.  When you come to me and we start working on a mortgage, you haven’t agreed to pay me, and you only will do so if the loan closes and funds.  I CONSTANTLY do work for people that haven’t agreed to pay me, just because the work needs to be done.  You can do this, too, without a mortgage license.  Offer something else besides mortgages.  Do you have management or accounting experience? Marketing skills?  A broom? EVERY business you can find needs your help, especially smaller businesses.

If you are successful, that business will likely survive, and that will reduce the competition out there for the jobs that are available, because those people will still have work.  If you are very successful, the business will grow, and will need more employees.  Who do you suppose they’ll be most likely to hire when that happens?

I currently employ an accountant.  She is my accountant because she followed this very course.  I was bellyaching about not having filed my taxes this year, and she said “Fine.  Give them to me.”  She worked on them a couple weeks, filed them, and now she comes to me and says “could I ask you to start paying me something?” and what can I say?  “Yeah, I guess I could, since you saved me $10k on my taxes without charging me a dime.”  And that is why Iron Pen Bookkeeping does my accounting.

I strongly believe that if you get a small group of people together that have time and skills and initiative, you will fairly shortly have viable business ideas, and more than you can possibly tackle.  I believe this because my office is a place where those people come, and shoot the bull, and businesses rise from the ashes of the discussion and take wing.

To return to the original analogy, what you’re going to have to do to find gainful employment in this economy is not hone your resume or find the right online job listings.  What you’re going to have to do is make chairs.  If you want to be sitting in a chair, you’re going to have to make one.  The era of free-range chairs is over.

In short, if you want to fight recession, start where you are.  You don’t need the GNP to rise.  You need the GLP (Gross Local Product) to rise.  More to the point, you need your GPP to rise.  Start improving your Gross Personal Product.  Make a chair.  Repeat as often as necessary.

If you want help, come see me.  I’ll make time.

I’ve been harping in this space about how to change our economic thinking, how to do more with less, how to keep working even if the jobs are gone, that sort of thing.  I have a REALLY long post on this subject that’s still in draft mode, but maybe this week will see the light.

In case you missed it, I contend that the broad economy is totally irrelevant to you personally, and that making things better, creating jobs and increasing activity are things you can do – no, that you must do – every day in the place that you are.  Then along comes the incredible Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) and here’s a snippet of his post from late last week:

What economy? What is that? Some magical entity that decides when businesses are able to make money? Seriously?  Is that the answer? Is that what they teach in business schools these days? Is that what 25 years on various boards and whatnot have taught you? The economy is responsible for my business still looking at a lousy H2 in 2009?

Here’s something to chew on: The economy won’t start getting better until businesses start doing better, and that my friends is not something that will be decided in Washington D.C., Wall Street or even CNN. It isn’t a chicken or egg question. Businesses ARE the economy. No one is going to magically make the economy fix itself. Not Jesus, not President Obama, not the Fed, not even Kanye West. It starts here. Right now. With you. Not with some vague distant fairy godmother of business called “the economy” but with you: The business leaders. The CEOs. The CMOs. The creative directors. The agency principals.  The Social Media directors. The community managers. The customer engagement managers. THAT’s where it starts.

If I call a guy a genius who is saying the same things I am, is that self-congratulatory?  There’s a lot of big-business-speak in Olivier’s post, because he does big-boy things at his company, but I still recommend you read the whole thing.

Do something today to make someone else’s business work better.  I’m begging you.

Markets: Doing well again today.  Yesterday broke the string of 5 straight days of rising bonds and falling rates (we have never had, in the years I have been following this, 6 green days in a row, so it was expected), and today we’ve continued the trend of the past week.  Rates continue to improve.  We’re very close to some exciting things in mortgage rates.  Stay tuned.

Analysis: Folks, the economy is in the soup.  The things that got us here didn’t happen in four months, and they’re not going away in four months, either. This morning @agentopolis (I love Twitter) put me on to this article about unemployment, predicting that we’ll see it hit roughly 14% in the coming months.  I heard a very convincing analysis last night that put the CURRENT unemployment rate at 20% right now, if you count everyone, which the government numbers do not.

Do not worry about this.  You cannot stop any of it.  Work hard.  Do your job.  If you lose your job, it happens.  Call me and tell me.  I know people.  We’re doing things.  We’ll help you if we can.

Find someone worse off than yourself – this will not be hard – and help them.  There’s no better cure for recession than a lot of people working hard to help each other.  No, let me amend that.  There is no OTHER cure for recession than a lot of people working hard to help each other.  Be part of the solution where you are, and let the markets do what they will.

Have a good weekend.

Cj