The COMRADITY Journal

Working from the heart.

The mission of The COMRADITY Journal has to been to inspire. I spent several years writing posts at home, in isolation. A year ago, we opened the COMRADITY Strategy and Creative Resource Center, hoping to attract other "birds of a feather." No longer isolated, now I can write about the folks who inspire me. Inspire me to think differently.

Anthony Buzzeo thinks, as many of us do, that working means more than a paycheck. Most of us started out in the corporate world and then ventured into the more risky "gig" economy to find more meaningful rewards - or at least the freedom to choose what to work on. But Tony sort of did it reverse. A graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston (where they told him upon graduating that less than 5% would be earn a living in the music profession) he started out in the "gig" economy then went back to get his MBA to win a ticket to enter the corporate world.

But now he is "rethinking work."

"Rethinking Work" is the title of an opinion piece by Barry Schwartz in the New York Times. He reprises the often reported Gallup study that: "almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be."

He goes on to share other research findings. For example:

About 15 years ago, the Yale organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied custodians in a major academic hospital. Though the custodians’ official job duties never even mentioned other human beings, many of them viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would joke with patients, calm them down so that nurses could insert IVs, even dance for them. They would help family members of patients find their way around the hospital. The custodians received no financial compensation for this “extra” work. But this aspect of the job, they said, was what got them out of bed every morning. “I enjoy entertaining the patients,” said one. “That’s what I enjoy the most.”

Recently, Anthony shared that when he takes a "gig" he doesn't just think about it 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. He dreams about it. He calls it "working from the heart."  

But, he explained, that his biggest challenge in the "gig" economy is throttling his effort back. Why?

Because the corporate world has applied scientific management movement's systems for manufacture to the professions which once capitalized on freedom to think, create, and express ideas. Today, educated, experienced professional are asked to perform to quantifiable standards, as if they are just another cog in the production line.

Importantly, most of the folks I know in the "gig" economy, will tell you that those standards are below what they could deliver. In fact, less than 20% of the projects they work on take full advantage of them as a resource.

When they offer to exceed expectations - they get the "dog look." Because most of the decision makers have only been in the business for a few years and only know the standards they are told to deliver. They aren't motivated by their bosses to learn, discover, and bring new ideas that don't fit the "standards."

Their roles are limited to meeting the "standards" for predictability. In a global operation, predictability is more efficient than exceeding expectations. Seriously, we worked on a project once where conversion rates at retail were 50%. But since the brand manager had only budgeted a 10% conversion rate they went with a less effective alternative.

What is the solution? A new way to go to work so these massive corporations have the flexibility - the agility to capitalize on the experience, and knowledge to exceed expectations and raise the standards by co-creating projects with professionals who will work on a "gig" basis. And a new way for those professionals to co-create with others to overcome hurdles to achieving those higher standards. A variable support system that takes the risk out of large corporate management teams "working from the heart."

Fresh Perspective

A fresh perspective changes how we look at a situation.

Problems become opportunities.

New York Times article "How Walking in Nature Changes the Brain" by Gretchen Reynolds, offers one way to get a fresh perspective, with proof that it works.

The Creativity Crisis. Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility by Roberta Ness demonstrates why we need a fresh perspective. The conflict between creativity and caution has tipped so far towards caution that what we think is innovation is merely tinkering. 

In the New York Times Sunday Review section, Albert Brooks writes: "We Need Optimists" in the context of presidential politics. The New York Times published our comment, which we reprint here:

Professional athletes strive to visualize winning shots instead of the losers for a reason: It works.
When we are focused on the problems, we are at best cautious and at worst, complicating an already complex system.
We should be discovering common interests instead of more reasons to argue and hate.
The artist who faces a blank canvas or piece of paper and sees nothing but problems is an artist with a creative block.
That's where we are.
In this context, leaders with the hope and competence of an artist (the trained and/or practiced artisan who knows how to realize their vision) would be a welcome relief.

A fresh perspective is a place where teams and their leaders will see opportunities they didn't see before.

 

Fresh Perspective: Fixing Opportunities

For years we've heard: to get ahead in business be a problem solver. The assumption is that when we solve problems, they go away.

Maybe that was true at some point.  But what if we have evolved to a point in time when fixing problems is having the opposite effect. They aren't going away. In fact they are compounding.

They are indeed fixed - as in cemented in place. They become dependent upon hiring lots of problem solvers to tend to them. And then there's this pernicious co-dependency of a revenue stream only existing as long as the problem is sustained.

For example, recently I read a New York Times opinion piece which shocked me by the author's complete obliviousness to how entangled the problem of end-of-life wishes paperwork has become. The author is an emergency room doctor who was arguing that a living will and a DNR is not enough. If an ambulance team brings you to the emergency room, they have to continue life-saving protocols. She was advising us to get yet another form that must be signed by a Doctor in addition to ourselves.

The unspoken message was that our wishes weren't enough to protect her from potential litigation. This is an example, in my opinion, of making an already naturally complex situation, more unnecessarily complicated - adding more paper work to fill a loophole left by another document. The problem - a conflicted family who doesn't know what to do, leaving a Doctor with no clear directive and fearful of a lawsuit - doesn't go away.

To improve this situation as well as the many complex scenarios in life and business, we need to stop this obsession with fixing problems. We need to start digging for opportunities.

In a world of unnecessary complications, opportunities are hard to find, develop, and sustain. It takes enormous effort to go against the momentum of this problem obsession culture for opportunities to persevere.

Opportunities are ideas, vulnerable from the start, that need a team with the chemistry to hold together against enormous odds to develop them, defend them, and bring them to life. We need to fix opportunity with a better process.

An opportunity needs "parents" - a team with the chemistry to overcome all the challenges, before even hatching ideas. That team needs the time to dig deeper, below all the superficial problems to find the opportunities that are being missed. And that team needs professional help to capitalize on all the communication tools we have to open the eyes of others who have been trained to see nothing but problems.

The team must include all of the stakeholders in the ecosystem so the outcome doesn't add unnecessary complications. Instead they should strive for ideas with mutual benefit. Inherently, this will simplify the inherent complexities of today's systems.

Before you say that is way to ambitious - I say aim for an opportunity that can be explored as a project - one that will prove this team can work together to make a real difference. Ultimately it is the team's chemistry that makes it able to find, develop, defend, and bring to life an opportunity in this entangled world of problems.