Until a few days ago, I thought that we had reached the absolute nadir of customer service in our culture.  But I was wrong.  There were two encounters that changed my mind – both occurred at the Minneapolis airport.

The first took place at one of the Delta Crown Rooms.  I walked up to the reception desk to present my credentials and encountered a staff member who was sullen-faced and on the phone.  Notice that I didn’t say “I was greeted by a staff member.”  She said absolutely nothing; looked at me with total disdain; and kept talking on the phone.  There was no “hello,” no “I’ll be with you in a minute,” nor “can my associate help you.”  Nothing.

I waited a few moments, while we stared at each other, and then asked her if she was going to say anything.  She snapped at me- “I thought I said hello;” to which I replied- “I don’t think so.”  (If she did, she must have said it in a frequency that only dogs could hear.)  All this time she remained on the phone.  It goes without saying that things went downhill from there.  I should point out that this person was not a post-pubescent twenty-something that I regularly deal with in the “hospitality” industry.  I’m not great at ages, but she was definitely pushing fifty.

After this encounter, we went over to a line of about five people, at the service desk.  There was one person behind the counter actually helping a customer, and two other staff members doing whatever they could, not to help anyone.  For a minute there, I had a flashback to my days in Chicago, watching fourteen guys on a fifteen man road construction crew, watching the one guy who was working.

What I was struck by, in this experience, was the powerful and unequivocal non-verbal communication of the personnel in the club.  The message was intense and unmistakable- “I’m very unhappy working here; I don’t like my employer; you’re interrupting my sulking; and you ought to be paying attention to my feelings, not vice versa.”  I got the message.

The second instance occurred when we boarded our flight.  As we got on the plane, our heads were snapped back by the stench in the air.  It smelled like a barnyard.  Much worse than typical airplane B.O.  People were getting on the plane with handkerchiefs plastered to their noses.  I talked to a flight attendant, who agreed that the smell was awful, but said that there was nothing she could do about it.  She suggested that I go on the internet and send an email to customer relations.  I told her that I’ve been there, done that, and that I always get the same response.  “Thank you for your concern; you’re a very valued customer; we have no intention of doing anything about your complaint; and please don’t bother us in the future.”   (The latter two sentiments expressed in the most saccharin and convoluted spin, worthy of a politician caught groping one of his staff members.)  The response of the flight attendant was illuminating- “You’re lucky, we don’t get that much.”

I’m very much aware that the lives of airline personnel (as well as millions of other workers) have been turned upside down, as a result of the economic meltdown.  Work ain’t what it used to be, and it’s never going back to what it was.  But given the sullen, passive-aggressive behavior of many employees, it’s obvious that company leadership has done little or nothing to deal with the feelings generated by the losses created by mergers, right-sizing, and the meltdown, in general.  These people are in deep grief, and they are stuck.  And the customers (and the companies) are paying the price.

Good customer service has very little to do with smile training, script memorization, or “mirroring” customers’ communication styles.  Personally, I find those things insulting and patronizing.  Anyone with a room temperature I.Q. knows that a smile is better than a frown; that spontaneity beats a stilted “shtick;” and that people don’t like being manipulated.

Good customer service presupposes the ability to have the full range of your feelings, in an appropriate context and venue, which prevents you from dumping them on people who have nothing to do with their genesis.  This is not the same as telling employees to “suck it up” and leave their baggage at home.  All that does is create more hostility that leaks indirectly into every customer interaction and provokes people even more.

If you want employees to deal well with the public, then provide a vehicle, at work, for the full expression of their feelings – especially the ugly unpleasant ones.  The research is clear.  If you deal with employee unhappiness by really listening to how they feel, and by not trying to shut them down, nor defend your decisions, you’ll get a workforce that will deal with each other and the public, more effectively and more positively.  If, on the other hand, you ignore their feelings and give them no venue for expressing them, and instead, just work on fixing their practical complaints, you’ll facilitate a workforce that is just as nasty as before, and becomes better at finding new things to complain about.  (BP and the Obama administration may want to think about getting Gulf Coast residents together, in their communities, and actually listen to their feelings, instead of trying to avoid them, or give them one lame promise after another, that they’ll fix the leak.)

Arleah has a saying in her work – “You don’t always get your way; but you always get your say.”  If business leaders followed this more often, we might see a dramatic improvement in customer service.

The Obama administration’s pandering to unions represents much more than the payback of a political debt.  It has an insidious and subterranean intent that goes way beyond the elections of this year and 2012.  Its ultimate purpose is to further infantilize the workforce; create a broader and deeper dependency on government intervention in personal and private interactions; and guarantee the continued growth of the Federal bureaucracy.

Unions undoubtedly served a purpose in my grandmother’s generation; and possibly in my parents’ time.  My grandmother came to this country as a frightened teenager; severely traumatized by the terror and persecution she was fleeing.  She had no marketable skills, extremely limited information and expectations, and no ability to leverage her labor with an employer.  She worked long hours in a sweatshop – six, sometimes seven days a week – and she clearly needed an advocate.

The position of the contemporary worker is hardly comparable.  He is armed with much information and high expectations; he has marketable skills; and he has no trouble advocating for what he feels he deserves.  The only similarity between the early union movement and the present one is the latter’s commitment to promulgating the mythology of the abused and helpless worker.

In many ways, the contemporary union movement has taken on the characteristics of a governmental body – in particular, those of the Federal government.  Its overriding goal is to stay in power, increase its reach, and convince as many people as possible that they are incapable of taking care of themselves.  At its heart of hearts, the union movement caters to a mindset of victimization, low self-esteem, and an unbridled envy of individual and corporate success.  In our time, it has become the primary cultivator and insurer of mediocrity throughout the culture; it fiercely resists competition amongst workers; and it is clearly committed to a battle to the death over performance-based promotion and compensation for professionals, paraprofessionals, and skilled workers.  The unions have taken the lead in battling school choice and voucher programs in innumerable states, and their entrenched commitment to intimidation, coercion, and outright thuggery is unabated.  (Talk to anyone who markets their goods or services at trade shows about setting up their booths.  They are charged obscene fees to have union members do what they are perfectly capable of doing themselves.  If you as much as try to screw in a light bulb, you expose yourself to physical intimidation.)

In an irony of ironies, the union movement has become as exploitive, insensitive, and vicious as the industrial giants it took on, at its inception.  But worst of all, it has become the prime mover in undercutting and sabotaging the principle and core value of individual responsibility in our society.

The licensing of professionals and skilled workers is nothing more than unionization in better clothes.  If the public has ever been sold a bill of goods, this is it.  There is not one shred of evidence that licensing protects consumers from incompetence, fraud, manipulation, or outright evil.  Does anyone seriously believe that licensing has kept drug addicted surgeons from leaving instruments in patients’ bodies?  Or psychotherapists from sleeping with their clients and calling it “treatment”?  Or credentialed financial advisors from swindling every last penny from the rich and poor alike?  (Does the name Bernie Madoff ring a bell?)

All licensing does is protect mediocre practitioners from competition, and produce and reward lazy consumers, who are under the delusion that their best interests are protected by a test and a certificate.  I have never seen a licensing exam, in any field, that can tell me if a practitioner is a decent human being; cares about people; is not arrogant and condescending; and empowers clients to take charge of their own lives.

Early in my psychotherapy career, I was on the staff of a private psychiatric hospital.  My mentor there was a psychiatrist who had studied under Dr. Thomas Szasz, the founder of “radical psychiatry”.  When a patient we were working with wanted to be treated with medication, my mentor would hand them the PDR (the “Physicians Desk Reference” that describes almost all drugs, their action, and their side effects); recommend the class of drugs that might be of help; and tell them to pick the one that they thought would work for them, and had the least onerous side effects.  If they questioned this advice, he would say to them – “You may have some psychological problems, but you aren’t stupid.”  He was not a popular member of the medical staff.

Both unionization and licensing are undermining of the basic tenets that created and sustained our society, often through excruciatingly difficult times.  They have given, and continue to give, people permission to abdicate responsibility for their lives.  The most amazing thing to me, about the economic debacles involving the Enrons and the Bernie Madoffs of the world, was that no one asked any questions or challenged anyone in charge.  No one demanded to know what was going on, and why it was happening that way.  No one, in essence, took care of themselves, because they believed that someone else would take care of them.

If you have wondered about what phenomena like the Tea Party movement are about, this is it.  It is an often poorly articulated protest against, and revulsion with, the political and ideological assault against personal responsibility and individual accountability.  I am convinced that the battle has not been lost.  In fact, I think it’s just begun.

I have fairly closely followed the immigration debate, including the uproar about the legislation passed by the State of Arizona.  But I was certainly not anticipating an involvement in it, or the necessity of having to take a practical position on one of its ramifications.

About three or four months ago, I accepted an invitation to do a keynote presentation at the annual meeting of the directors and CEO’s of the country’s YWCA’s (in October of this year).  The conference was to be held in Scottsdale, Arizona.  A few weeks ago, I received an email informing me that the conference site had been moved to Washington, D.C.  At first, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the information; and then it struck me.  They’re boycotting Arizona because of the new law.  I was furious.  And I have rescinded my acceptance to speak at the conference.  It is not because I have some principled objection to boycotts.  What I do have is a revulsion against hypocrites and ignoramuses.

Whenever I ask opponents of the Arizona law what they object to (if they’ve read it, which most have not), they pinpoint their objection to racial profiling and their adamant belief that the law was passed, primarily, to single out and hassle Hispanics.  When I point out that the statute expressly prohibits profiling and mandates that no one can capriciously be stopped, harassed, or compelled to produce the appropriate papers, simply because they may look Hispanic, they almost always respond that that may, in fact, be the case, but that you cannot trust law enforcement personnel to obey the law and not single out Hispanics.  (I also point out that if you put the Federal statute side by side with the Arizona law, you might be surprised to find that the Federal law is wide open to abuse, and allows for little or no cause for stopping people and demanding they validate their presence in the country.)  What I find truly unbelievable is the rank hypocrisy involved in profiling cops.  It is, in the eyes of opponents to the Arizona law, completely reprehensible to assume that anyone looking Hispanic is probably here illegally, and warrants detention and interrogation.  But it is fully permissible to assume that law enforcement officers will abuse and break the law, simply because of who they are and what they do.  How racist and bigoted can you get?

Closely connected to this gross hypocrisy is the uninformed and criminally stupid condemnation of the United States immigration laws and policies; amongst the mildest and most lax of any on earth.  This is most outrageous when compared with the Mexican government’s immigration laws.  (It takes enormous chutzpah for the Mexican president to come to the U.S. and lecture us on immigration, when his policies are amongst the most brutal and repressive.)  Take a look at these:

1.       There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools.

2.      All ballots will be in this nation’s language

3.      All government business will be conducted in our language.

4.      Non-residents will not have the right to vote no matter how long they are here.

5.      Foreigners will not be a burden to the taxpayers.  No welfare, no food stamps, no health care, or government assistance programs.  Any burden will be deported.

6.       Foreigners can invest in this country, but it must be an amount at least equal to 40,000 times the minimal wage.

7.      If foreigners come here and buy land, their options will be restricted.  Certain parcels including waterfront property are reserved for citizens naturally born into this country.

8.      Foreigners may have no protests; no demonstrations; no waving of a foreign flag; no political organizing; no bad-mouthing of our president or his policies.  These will lead to deportation.

9.      If you do come to this country illegally, you will be actively hunted and when caught, sent to jail until your deportation can be arranged.  All assets will be taken from you.

If we applied Mexican immigration policies to our own country, we’d totally clean out Hollywood, most of southern California, and a significant portion of the American southwest.

I am not opposed to immigration at all.  Exactly a hundred years ago my grandparents immigrated to the United States.  Without that courageous decision, I would not have had the extraordinary opportunities and blessings I have experienced as an American.  People are surprised when I tell them that a day doesn’t go by without my feeling grateful to this country and to the people who made it possible for me to have been born here.  I often think of what life would have been like to have been born a Russian, Jewish peasant, unable to find work; uneducated; and scorned by the society I was born into.

I am very ambivalent about what to do about the millions of illegal immigrants living here now.  I was raised by immigrants, and I know deeply what that drive is like to have a better life, especially for your children.  I don’t think it’s possible or morally defensible to deport eleven or twelve million people, the majority of which have no ill will toward this country.  But neither do I believe in open borders and the chaos and danger tyrannizing our southern border.  I think the only viable solution to our immigration problem is a dichotomous mix of extreme toughness vis–à-vis closing our borders, a sane and logical guest worker program, and an acceptance of those already here who contribute to the society with their productive labor.

The key for me, in terms of a sane immigration policy, is assimilation.  An unassimilated population is doomed to economic and cultural marginality.  And the absolute prerequisite for this assimilation is the learning of English.  The language of a culture carries its core values, and we are no different.  If we want to survive and flourish in the future, and do right by our newer immigrants, we will insist that they speak our language and make it a requirement for becoming an American.  To do any less is a disservice to this country and a cruelty to our immigrants.

Morrie

The economic meltdown and global orgy of debt, has had a number of unforeseen ramifications and consequences. It certainly has brought about a massive re-ordering of priorities for millions and millions of people in both their personal and work lives, and a similar re-prioritization in hundreds of thousands of businesses.
One of the most striking realities it has brought to the forefront of innumerable companies and industries, is the shocking lack of key skills on the part of veteran salespeople. To put it in a nutshell, what we are seeing, in industry after industry, is that experienced and long-tenured salespeople don’t know how to close a sale or get referrals from former or current customers. And what further complicates this, is that their level of embarrassment over these deficiencies, keeps them from seeking help and counsel, to remedy the problem.

The behavioral explanation for this malaise is not that complicated. For many years now, salespeople have been functioning as order-takers for willing and able consumers, flush with discretionary income and an almost insatiable appetite for acquisitiveness. This was true for product sellers and service providers alike. When the economic collapse began, in 2007, there was an almost palpable panic in every type of salesforce imaginable. I saw a lot of blaming, accusing, and rationalizing; followed by withdrawal, hiding out, and almost paralysis; ultimately resulting in much denial and depression. People simply didn’t know what was wrong, nor what they could do. They couldn’t figure out how to change things, primarily because the problem was not one of technique or strategy. What was lacking was an interpersonal skill.

At the heart of closing a sale, as well as obtaining referrals, is the ability and, more importantly, the willingness, to generate, engage in, and manage conflict. Without a commitment to participate in conflict, the salesperson simply becomes a “friendly visitor;” often very good at generating interest and conversation, but very poor at getting customers to part with their money. They may occasionally make a sale, often because the customer wants to alleviate their own pain at seeing the salesperson struggle so much to ask for the business. Or the sale may take place because the customer is willing to do almost anything to get the salesperson to stop talking at them, and just get rid of them. Unfortunately, many of these sales produce a high maintenance, high aggravation client, or one who cancels the purchase within a short period of time.

To fully understand the role played by conflict, in inhibiting veteran salespeople, we need to define some terms. Conflict is the behavior we see when people are expressing the emotion of Anger (an equally misunderstood term). And Anger is simply the expression of disappointment in a person or situation. The disappointment comes from an unhappiness with the gap between what we have and what we would like to have. Any time this gap exists, between what is, and what could be, there will be Anger. Where there is disappointment; there will be Anger; where there is Anger, there will be Conflict. This is extremely important to understand! Highlight it; write it down; put it on your refrigerator or your desk or your computer. Disappointment is good. Anger is good. Conflict is good. All three are necessary for growth. They are a vote of confidence in a person’s capacity to be better and do better. Without them, we know that expectations are low, caring is gone, and abandonment has occurred.
So, an Angry/Conflict statement would be – “This is the third meeting that we’ve had over this contract. I’m really disappointed that you still haven’t signed it.”

Conflict is often confused with Hostility, one of the two most frequently utilized behaviors to avoid Conflict. Both Hostility and Passivity are deflections and distractions from directly expressing disappointment. Hostility is a universal accusation, from which there is no redemption. So, a Hostile statement would be – “Every time I put you in front of a customer, you blow it.” There’s not much the person can do to change things, if everything they do is wrong.

Passivity is a blanket denial of one’s needs and a dishonest approval of the status quo. So, a Passive statement would be – “It’s fine with me if we keep meeting about this; I’m in no hurry to get this done.” And we can be assured that nothing will ever get done, and nothing will ever change for either party.

Very few of us grew up with healthy models of Conflict. Almost everyone alive today grew up witnessing Hostility and/or Passivity. This isn’t because we grew up with bad or inept people. On the contrary, we grew up with people who were trying to do their best by us, and were busting their butts making sure their families thrived and survived. There was no time, and little opportunity (or tolerance) for dealing with disappointments and unhappy feelings. The latter are luxuries of affluence. So, expressing disappointment is pretty scary stuff; and very uncomfortable to do. It’s a lot easier for us to get Hostile, or to withdraw into Passivity.

This, then, is what veteran salespeople are up against. Add to this cultural and psychological history, an information-loaded and very challenging consumer, and you have a prescription for stagnation. All the technique in the world isn’t going to budge this one iota. As soon as the possibility of Conflict rears its head, the salesperson is immediately shot back to the very earliest times in their life, when disappointment was unacceptable and impermissible. Another key point: All Conflict-Avoidance is about the past. It is about danger and survivability, from the perspective of a child, not that of an adult. The worst thing that can happen to an adult salesperson, if they choose to engage in Conflict, is that the customer dislikes them, and they lose the sale (which they don’t have to begin with).

So, how do we help these salespeople get through this challenge? We need to give the adult salesperson the courage to take on the freaked-out five year old running their business life. We do this by making it more uncomfortable and painful to avoid Conflict, than to take the risk of engaging in it. For example, we have the salesperson identify the customer relationship that has gone on the longest without a closing of the sale. And then we give them the following assignment: In the next thirty days (or other reasonable time frame), you will close the sale or unequivocally end your relationship with that customer. If you fail to do either one, there will be a significant negative consequence (monetary, write-up, access to support, or dismissal). We are not doing this because we think there’s going to be some magical transformation and an immediate sale. We are doing this for one simple, but powerful reason: To show the salesperson that they can engage in Conflict, and live to tell the tale. In other words, to reassure the five year old, that life, in fact, will go on.

One last point. Courage does not come out of thin air, or from some mystical place deep inside of people. It comes from caring relationships. Relationships with people who care enough to challenge people to go one step beyond where they believe they can go. I learned a long time ago, that great leaders are great because they believe more in their people, than their people believe in themselves.

It is becoming increasingly clear that many, if not most, people in our country, don’t get what Islamo-Facist Terrorism is about. From the embarrassing spectacle of our Attorney General’s inability to form the phrase “Muslim Fanatics” to the mass media’s creation of a soap opera around the Times Square would-be bomber, it’s apparent that those in power and those running the media are engaged in either willful ignorance or a frightening cowardice.

The widespread Jihad against Western Culture is financed by, organized by, driven by, and celebrated by, Muslims – in particular, by Orthodox Muslims. None of the obscene, horrific attacks against innocent civilians, to my knowledge, have been carried out by Quakers or Swedes. It is important, no essential, that we acknowledge this, openly talk about it, and cut through the bizarre political correctness that tries to deflect responsibility and ownership. Contemporary Islam is in the death grip of the Orthodox community, and there is little evidence that any forces are mustering, either religious or political, to loosen or overthrow this stranglehold. Even the super-apologetic New York Times, pointed out, a few years ago, that Islam is the only remaining world religion, that has not undergone a major reformation. What other world religion tolerates the targeting of individuals for assassination, for what they’ve written or said? It still amazes me when I see TV interview after interview, with women from Islamic countries, who are under 24/7 protection, after writing and speaking about the treatment of their peers in the countries of their birth.

What exacerbates this situation even more, is the rank hypocrisy of the political establishment and the politically correct mass media. What do you think would happen if a Catholic bishop, a noted Baptist official, and a respected Jewish rabbi, issued a statement proclaiming that non-believers in a Judeo-Christian faith were infidels, and were worthy of being slaughtered, like cattle? Barack Obama would be in front of a teleprompter in under an hour, calling the statement unacceptable and stupid; Attorney General Holder would characterize it as ill-advised and possibly discriminatory; the Huffington Post would go more nuts than usual; and MSNBC would declare a national emergency. The statement would be withdrawn within hours, followed by an orgy of apologies and self-flagellation.

A few years ago, if you remember, Muslim cabdrivers serving the Minneapolis airport, demanded foot-washing facilities, to meet the requirements of their religion. Instead of an outcry against this outrageousness, their request was eventually granted. What I find most telling about this situation, is the temper tantrum and threat of litigation, on the part of civil libertarians, every time they discover a crèche or a tablet inscribed with the ten commandments, on public property. I guess that separation of church and state only goes so far.

The saddest thing about the absurd lengths that this political correctness has gone to, as applied to the Muslim community, is the implicit put-down and depreciation of its members. Every time we accord special treatment to a group, and go out of our way to ignore their destructive behavior, we are making a de facto judgment of their inferiority. If they weren’t inferior, we’d hold them to the same standards and values that the rest of us live by.

So besides being disappointing, infuriating, and deeply troubling, what’s the problem with Islam being in the death grip of its most Orthodox members? The problem lies in the very nature of Othodoxies.

An Orthodoxy is a belief system that cannot be questioned. Its primary and overriding purpose is to control its followers and limit their choices – ideally, to one. At the heart of every Orthodoxy is a fear- of life and death proportions – of choice. And the reason for this fear is simple, but powerful. If you tolerate, let alone encourage choice, one of those choices could be to leave the Orthodoxy. From the perspective of the Orthodoxy, this is a death sentence. This is why the rhetoric of crazy clerics and committed terrorists, is so infused with the language of martyrdom and death.

Orthodoxies evolved for two reasons. The first, was to explain the inexplicable: To give adherents a rationale for the sometimes frightening and occasionally terrifying events that they experienced. In this sense, Orthodoxies were the pre-age of enlightenment’s science.

The second, and more important reason, was to guarantee the integrity of the tribe, clan, or subculture. To make sure, in other words, that the bonds within the group would always be there to insure the survival of each individual. As more and more information infused western cultures, more and more choices were available to people. And as people exercised those choices and often left the groups they grew up with (or became less dependent upon them), the very Orthodoxy that had provided security, safety, and opportunity, was diluted, contaminated, and threatened with destruction.

I was born into a ghetto on Chicago’s west side, peopled with a mix of Orthodox and Conservative Jews. Culturally, it was a closed system. Until I was seven or eight years old, I knew no one very well other than Jews. My grandparents work, support system, and social network were totally linked to other Jews. Without those linkages, we would not have survived. Likewise, my father’s practice would never have seen the light of day, without a connection to the Jewish community. But as the Jewish community migrated to different parts of the city (and eventually to the suburbs), the ghetto became less geographical and more virtual. My father’s practice became more “diverse” and my parents’ support system and social network broadened, if ever so slightly. In my generation, the dilution was profound. Every one of my siblings (including me), married non-Jews, and ceased any affiliation with the formal religion or religious observance and practice. My children’s generation has little or no ties to the culture, let alone to the religion. I still have memories of my grandparents’ customs and rituals. My children have none. The Orthodoxy I grew up with is gone. (The core values are very much intact, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

This is what the Muslim Orthodoxy fears and why the West is so hated. Western cultures work to assimilate diverse populations into a values-homogenous whole, built around individual responsibility and choices. This inherently marginalizes Orthodoxies and undercuts their influence and impact. And nowhere is this done as clearly and thoroughly, as in America. This is why we are so hated and reviled. And this is why Islamo-Fascism is a life or death issue for them and us.
I have lost my patience with philosophical discussions of where to have terrorist trials and whether or not homicidal maniacs merit constitutional protection. We are at war with psychopathic murderers, who are obsessed with spilling our blood. What is it going to take to convince politicians and intellectual apologists that this war has nothing to do with “infidel troops” in Muslim land, or the Palestinian situation, or “capitalist excess?” This is about exterminating the West and its freedom to choose. That’s it. Simple and brutal.

There is nothing new, or even recent about this war. I have written before about my experience in the early 1960’s as a student at a radicalized university in England. Quite by accident, I found myself living in a dorm at Leeds University, with Chinese Communists, South American revolutionaries, and Muslim fundamentalists from a number of Middle Eastern countries. I was clearly in the minority – there were five Americans in my dorm.

Even though every night at dinner quickly evolved into “attack the American,” I became friendly with and close to a number of the Muslim students. We talked endlessly about our backgrounds and our respective cultures; we traveled together on school vacations; and I got to know many of their families who visited them during the year. When it was time for us to leave Leeds, and return to our home countries, we got together to say our goodbyes. I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but something I said angered one fellow, and he looked me right in the eye, and said – “If I was told to, I would slit your throat.” I was stunned, and so shocked and bewildered, that I didn’t know how to react. I asked him if he was kidding, since I couldn’t believe he was serious. He made it clear that this wasn’t a joke. I then regained enough composure to ask him how he could say that to me, given the relationship we had built over the past year. He looked right at me again and said-
“You’re an American, and a Jew; that’s enough for me.” I shall never forget that day.

So, given the ferocity and psychotic-like intensity of this assault, what do we need to do to protect ourselves and significantly diminish this unparalleled threat to the very existence of our culture? Three things must be done:

1. The Obama administration needs to stop talking around reality, declare an all-out war against Jihadists, abroad and especially here; and actually start using the “M” word. Among other things, it is nothing short of obscene that we tolerate Imams in the United States, inciting violence, and permit foreign countries (often our “allies”) to fund so-called “schools” that spew forth hate and teach children to despise our culture and view us as sub-human. If skinheads and American Nazis tried to set up schools that were funded by foreign interests, and taught white Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and called for the extermination of Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, homosexuals and other “undesirables,” they’d be shut down in under a day.

2. The mass media in this country needs to come out of its journalistic closet and start holding American Muslim leadership accountable for renouncing the edicts and fatwahs of crazy clerics calling for a critic’s assassination, or some family’s “honor killing,” or the attempts of Muslim student groups to intimidate speakers who challenge their orthodox views. There’s only one question that needs to be asked of these leaders – “Do you unequivocally renounce your fellow Muslim’s statement or behavior? Yes or no?”

3. The current administration in Washington, needs to get beyond this pointless pretext of closing Gitmo. There needs to be a place to keep irreparable lunatics, and even the people around Obama have figured it out. (I guess at this point, they need to come up with a way to save face, given the fact that no one in our country wants committed killers down the road from them.) It’s still hard to believe that the fabrication about Gitmo creating new terrorists had any credibility for as long as it did. There was no Gitmo in the 1970’s, 80’s, or 90’s, when these madmen were blowing up people all over the world. I learned a long time ago, through a variety of experiences, that there are people so destroyed inside themselves, that they can only see themselves destroying others. These people can never be allowed to see the light of day. I often think of the quote attributed to Howard Bloom –
“Almost all great civilizations have succumbed to barbarians, primarily because of their inability to understand them.”

I am very disappointed in the Muslim community in our country. They have shown a reprehensible cowardice in not rejecting, totally, and not keeping the spotlight of disdain on the worst amongst them. Courage is the commitment and risk embodied in calling out your own. The famous quote from Father Martin Niemoller, in the National Holocaust Museum, says it all:

“First they came for the socialists, and I said nothing because I was not a socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I said nothing because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews, and I said nothing because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak.”

When I first read Sartre, Nietzsche, and their band of merry-makers (as an undergraduate in the Neolithic Period), I had absolutely no clue what they were talking about. I may as well have been reading the phone book. My only “existential dilemma” was trying to stay awake when I went to the main library to study. I have always had trouble sleeping at night, in a regular bed, but I could nod off, like a toddler, and get some powerful REM rest at that library. Now that I’m in my late 60’s, I have a new understanding of existentialism and nihilism. (Why we try to teach these philosophies to 20 year olds, has always puzzled me.)

I did pretty well all through my 50’s. I kept up my breakneck schedule, traveling somewhere in the world almost every week; lecturing, doing workshops, and facilitating some very intense small group meetings. I thrived on the variety of places, clients, and challenges, and the intensity fed something in me that satisfied my need for impact. Looking back on those days, I’m often amazed by how I did it. I’m a one million miler on United, and a three million miler on Delta. (You know when you’ve flown a lot, when the airline sends you a very nice piece of Hartman luggage.)

Somewhere around turning 62, I hit a wall. It’s like I woke up one day, and couldn’t figure out how I got to be in my 60’s. It may sound weird, but what it felt like was – one day I was forty something, and the next day, I was in my sixties. And I seemed to have no clue as to how I got there. I’m quite aware that this makes no sense, whatsoever, but that’s how I felt.

I also, at this point, realized that I had made no plans for getting old. (I also got real tired of people telling me that 60 wasn’t old at all, and that I was still a “young man.” Forty may be young – sixty is not.) As smart as I am, I was completely dumbfounded by what I was experiencing. I had never thought about slowing down; about wanting things to be more convenient; about making less money; and most of all, about not living in our house, in the future. The latter was crushing. As I’ve written before, our home (and property) in Montana, is not simply our “dream” house. It is the fulfillment of our vision for our life, and the instrument for achieving our personal and professional mission – to change the world, one person at a time.

As a result of hitting this wall, and facing these realizations, I went into an unannounced retirement for over a period of two years. I did some work, but didn’t seek out much new business. I was in deep grief over the decision to put the house up for sale. It made perfect sense to downsize, relieve ourselves of the rather staggering financial burden, and rid ourselves of the responsibility of managing a large piece of property. Unfortunately, that didn’t make it feel any better.

For a period of time, I got stuck in depression. To say that it felt awful, would be the understatement of my life. For the first time in my life, I asked myself some very disturbing questions. Like – “Why am I doing all this?” and “What do all these achievements mean?” I also questioned the value that I brought to the relationships I was in, both personal and professional. At one point in this self-dialogue, I heard myself saying – “None of this really matters, because I’m going to end up dead anyway.” That certainly got my attention. It was a new, shocking, and sobering thought. That lead to the realization and the articulation of something that I knew was there, but had not wanted to face: I was in the last part of my life, and the delusion that I would go on forever was coming to a crashing end.

I’m still not at the point where that realization doesn’t pull me up short, and tend to bring me down; albeit for shorter and shorter periods of time. My friends who have a religious connection and belief system have talked to me about the solace that it brings them, and I appreciate their concern and their words. I’ve tried, at various times in my life, to embrace the tradition I was brought up with, as well as some others. But it just doesn’t work for me. There’s something in my background or my DNA that makes it impossible for me to grasp the idea of prayer or the concept of a personal God. I’d have to meet the man, to move in that direction.

Two things have helped me move through my existential crisis. The first, not surprisingly, has been Arleah’s insight that, as she so eloquently puts it – “You can’t live in a dream forever.” She realized, long before me, that it was time for us to move on; practically, philosophically, and emotionally. We need a new dream. Its time (probably overdue) to say goodbye to the old dream. Our vision and mission remains the same – we are still committed to changing the world, one person at a time. What we need now, and what we’re working away at, is some new ways of doing it.

The other thing that has been very helpful, particularly this past year or so, has been the unbelievable amount of communications from people I’ve worked with over the past years, as to the impact of our work together. I don’t think a week goes by, these days, when I don’t get an email or a phone call thanking for me what I’ve done to change someone’s life for the better. Some of this feedback comes from people I worked with twenty or twenty-five years ago. I’m always deeply touched.

I was talking recently with a former client and then colleague, who off-handedly referred to me as his mentor. When I got off the call, I was aware that the term somewhat surprised me. I have not, in my work or other relationships, thought of myself in those terms. I’ve always known that I make an impact on people, but I never would have phrase it that way.

All this great feedback has made me aware that I have created, unbeknownst to me, a legacy. I have heard other people talk about their legacy, but have never before applied it to me, or my work. It feels good, and I think it will help get me through my Nietzschian moments.

Morrie

One thing this recession has unequivocally driven home for businesspeople is the penultimate importance of relationships in building and maintaining viable businesses. Unfortunately, though, not many people have offered very specific definitions of what constitutes a good, profitable and growing relationship. For me, that relationship has five characteristics. It is, or it has the following:

Judgments give people the information they need in order to grow. They allow people to put their values and beliefs up against a measuring standard and make conscious, informed choices; perhaps for the first time in their lives. We owe others our convictions of what we believe is right and wrong, good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable. We not only have the right to be judgmental, we have the obligation. Not doing so is a form of moral, ethical, and interpersonal abandonment. Others can accept our judgments, reject them wholly, or incorporate aspects that feel right. In any case, they must ask themselves what they believe, and why they believe it.

All good relationships are conditional. Conditions set the limits, boundaries, and values that create respect, integrity, and self-esteem for all parties to a relationship. Unconditional acceptance creates the platform for abuse, neglect, and manipulation. If anything and everything you do is acceptable, then both you and I have little value. Business relationships (and personal relationships) often fail because of the lack of clearly articulated conditions, which inevitably lead to the tolerance of corrosive and destructive behaviors.

High expectations are a vote of confidence in people’s ability to continually get better and be better people. We only have high expectations for those who we believe have the capacity to not only achieve more, but to feel better about themselves. High expectations create high performance and high self-esteem. You get what you expect. For years, people have asked me what the difference is between great companies and average companies. Great companies expect more – and they get it.

All good relationships meet the needs of both parties. This is the perfect confluence of individual selfishness meeting individual selfishness. Though politically incorrect and somewhat counterintuitive, reciprocity is the highest distillation of self-interest. In fact, reciprocity is impossible without self-interest. I cannot get my needs met if I refuse to meet yours. That’s why infants are so draining and adult narcissists are so repulsive.

A great relationship ought to be energizing. It should be magnetic, attractive, and re-charging. Its purpose and intent must be clear and direct and there should be no doubt or ambiguity about the agendas of the parties involved. Indirectness, hinting, and circuitousness are draining. The worst thing businesspeople do is to put up with and even indulge draining relationships. It rewards mediocrity, wastes inordinate amounts of time, and erodes profitability. Practice putting up your hand and asking, “What is this conversation about and what do you need?”

In last month’s newsletter, I discussed the growing disenchantment with both the Left and the Right in the American political scene. I also discussed the sense I had that we may be ready for a new political constituency based on a true understanding of core values, as opposed to the clichéd, hobby horse issues that dominate our current political blathering.

In the first place, no one on the current political spectrum would recognize a value if it fell on them. A value is a belief system about how the world ought to be and ought to operate. It lays out the kind of world one wants to live in and work toward creating. And it has the following five characteristics:

Values are very different from goals. Goals are where you’re going. Values are how you’re going to get there. And values always trump goals. I’m interested in where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. But I’m much more interested in how you’re going to get there. How we’re going to get somewhere determines our quality of life much more than where we’re going. All brutal, inhuman, tyrannical regimes in the history of the human race have been crystal clear in their goals (often beneficent, charitable, and generous in tone); and all have been scurrilous and ruthless in the articulation of their values.

A brief example of the critical difference between goals and values. World peace is an admirable goal. We could achieve it in a fairly short period of time by militarily subjugating all the most lunatic regimes and factions in the world, including, probably, the use of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, we could achieve it by having all first world countries abdicate democracy and voluntarily submit to the rule of autocratic orthodoxy. In either case, we could have world peace, but at what price? (What really irritates me about causeniks is their self-righteous snobbery. They act like there are millions and millions of people who are opposed to world peace, feeding the poor, or other noble ventures; and that they are the caring few. What chutzpa!) You can readily extrapolate from the world peace example to other lofty issues – global warming, abortion, gay rights, poverty, etc. The question is always the same; and it’s not – “Can we solve this problem?” It is – “At what price to our values?”

I believe we can build a strong and vital political force around four fundamental values:

I’m convinced that these four values can mediate us through all the troubling and difficult questions and dilemmas of our time. These values are tough to live by, but they offer us the opportunity to participate in a dialogue that can bring us together, as opposed to dividing us further. For example, look at the burning question of our time – “Who caused the recession and what’s the way out?” Answer – “We all did; by violating the core value of individual responsibility.” With very few exceptions, across the socio-economic board, we bought, spent, and indulged ourselves like drunken conventioneers. What’s the way out? To not be rescued from the pain of our individual irresponsibility and to learn something from it. All the rescuing will do, is simply reward us for violating a set of values that can sustain us through any changes and dislocations coming our way. I see signs throughout the culture that we’re ready and up to the task of living by a coherent and sustainable set of values.

Two months ago we moved my mother from an assisted living facility in Florida to a skilled nursing facility in Montana, twenty minutes from our home. Her physical and mental condition were deteriorating and it was getting increasingly difficult to manage her care at a 2500 mile distance.

When people ask me how she’s doing (she’s almost 90), I never quite know how to answer. Her physical care is much better; some of her medical issues have stabilized, and her memory loss, at times, seems less severe. On that level, she is clearly doing better.

On another, quite different level, things are in turmoil and in a painful transition. I have not lived this close to my mother, nor seen her this often, in close to fifty years. The contrasts (and the similarities, in certain things) are stark and sad. At various times, earlier in her life, she has been a classically trained ballerina, a teacher, a chorus line dancer in three Hollywood World War II era movies (starring Donald O’Connor, who hit on her regularly), a manager at Saks Fifth Avenue, and a homemaker.

She was a kick-ass lady in everything she did. She ran our household like Mayor Daley (without the patronage) and she always knew where we were. If we weren’t home on time, she tracked us down and came to get us. She admitted few mistakes – she was in her early 80’s when she shared with me and Arleah that it was a mistake to have let her mother live with us, after she had been widowed early in life.

She spends her days now in a wheelchair or occasionally a walker, in a hospital-like room. She has five pictures on her walls – three of myself, my brother, and my sister as young children; a painting (by her cousin) of a medieval rabbi; and a collage of photographs of our family celebrating our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. She reads quite a bit and the TV is almost always on.

Arleah sees her almost daily (she has been unbelievably giving to her) and usually brings my mother’s dog with. I see her two to three times a week. The visits are painful and draining. Twenty minutes seems like an eternity. She will often, in the middle of a visit, pick up a magazine and start reading it. She is always ready for us to leave.

Like many women of her generation, she felt she had no right to talk about her (or anyone else’s) feelings. So she lived a life of constant activity – we called her the “white tornado.” When we ask her now how she’s feeling about the facility, the move, or her life, she looks either puzzled or irritated. The most she says is that, “I never thought I’d end up this way.”

As Arleah says, “Your mother is gone.” I have many memories, and hopefully, she does too.

Morrie

In some recent work with a corporate client, I had one of those painfully obvious “duh” moments. It had become clear, through working with the senior management team, as well as a key group of middle managers, that the COO was a very difficult person to work with, and that most of his colleagues and subordinates chose to minimize their interactions with him, or to avoid dealing with him, if at all possible. There were a slew of complaints about him, but they essentially revolved around two major issues: Whenever an idea, project, or report was presented to him, it was met with a surgical, unemotional, and completely impersonal rebuttal and dismissal. It was given no credence, whatsoever, and instead of being critiqued, it was eviscerated, in the manner of a verbal autopsy. In addition, everyone who interacted with him, left feeling like they had just been in combat and had lost the battle. Many also felt personally discounted, diminished, and depreciated.

In attempting to deal with this situation, we pulled together a meeting involving the COO and a number of his direct reports. All of the direct reports had had a history of difficult, unpleasant, and unproductive interactions with the COO, over periods of time ranging from a few years to over ten years. All of them, at different times, had given him feedback about how difficult he could be to deal with, and a couple had engaged in quite spirited conflict with him, on a few occasions. But until this meeting, no one had shared with him directly, how personally impacted, in a negative way, they were, and how much they felt assaulted and attacked.

To everyone’s surprise, including the COO, he was shocked and profoundly shaken by the feedback. He was certainly aware that he could be “argumentative,” and that he was not the easiest person in the world to work with; but he was really taken aback by how hurtful his behavior was, and, at the same time, how unintentional it was. By the end of the meeting he was clearly sobered by the feedback, but completely clueless about where his behavior was coming from.

Things became a lot clearer in our one-on-one meeting, following the group session. After some discussion about the feedback from his colleagues and his reaction to it, he told me that this had been a particularly stressful year for him. When I asked him why, he said that his father had died earlier in the year, and that he was really impacted by his father’s passing; and that this surprised him. I asked him why he was surprised, and he told me that he had never had a good relationship with his father, and that he had been a very unhappy person, impossible to please, and emotionally distant. He added that he had grown up feeling like he never wanted to be like his father, nor did he want to treat people like he had been treated. I then asked him if he was aware that he was acting exactly like his father. He looked puzzled, then turned beet red, and said that he had never thought about that. He had a lot of feelings in his eyes, and it was clear that he had made a significant connection. We spent the rest of our time together talking about the life his father had lived, and how sad many of his choices had been.

So what can we learn from this?
Every single leader I have worked with – man or woman – had either an emotionally unavailable father; a father who was deeply unhappy and unfulfilled in his own life; or a father who was never satisfied with the achievements of his children. Many leaders had all three.

The death of our fathers, is the death of what could have been. It solidifies a process of hoping that somewhere, with somebody, our needs for closeness, validation, and an emotional connection, will come true.

We cannot “break the chain” and change, in ourselves, the destructive behavior we grew up with (including what we missed), by doing the opposite. Trying to do the opposite, in fact, guarantees a replication of the past. It’s like trying to be there for everything your kids do, because no one was there for what you did. Your kids know it isn’t for them, and you never get the appreciation you’re looking for, because it isn’t about the present. Grieving what we lost is the only way to leave sad feelings and experiences behind, and to truly begin anew.

My time with the COO was the beginning of a grieving process. It is a reiterative process; a review and articulation of feelings long buried, but profoundly impactful. He will now be able to do this again (and again), and with each reiteration, he will dilute the power of his past and live more in his present.

As an interesting update; within a week after our encounter, a number of his colleagues reported that they had interactions with him that were not only pleasant, but also productive. He actually listened, gave them helpful feedback, and everyone learned something. Miracles may not happen, but change does occur.

As I indicated in my introduction to this newsletter, I think the underlying issue that the passage of the HealthCare bill has brought to the forefront is the question of what kind of culture do we want to live in. Specifically around the issues of risk, innovation and growth.

An important point here: All cultures are trade-offs. When societies declare (consciously or unconsciously) what’s most important to them, they also, implicitly accept both the good and the bad that comes with those choices. There is no free lunch, nor is there a utopian society.

Example: If we say that we value individual choice and responsibility (politically translated into personal freedom), then we have to live with bad choices, as well as good ones. In other words, there can be no preemptive intervention with people because we think they may behave badly. That means that one of the prices of freedom is regular instances of people doing awful things to each other, or to themselves. A lot of people don’t understand this (along with most of the mass media), and go through the same ritual of angst and blaming every time some disturbed soul commits a heinous act. They rail about our inability to predict aberrant behavior and to protect the rest of us from dangerous lunatics. We could stop 99% of this behavior if we were willing to give up our personal freedom, and turn our country into a fascist police state. The old East Germany and the old Soviet Union were some of the safest places on earth. People lived in constant fear of being accused of harboring thoughts and intentions that the State thought subversive.

This country was built by risktakers. They ventured everything, including at times, their very lives, to carve out a culture that has met the needs of the vast majority of its citizens, at a level unparalleled in the history of the species. And this achievement came at a price. Some people who took risks failed. Some people who took no risks lost everything. Until fairly recently, we have implicitly accepted this trade-off. Whether or not we talk about it much, it is clearly understood, for example, that jobs are created by people who take the risk of starting a business and making sure that it stays viable. There would not be one job in America were it not for the men and women who put everything on the line to create enterprises that produced goods or provided services. (Or generated tax revenues that supported the public sector.) And these risktakers are at the heart of our nation’s creativity and innovation, as well as its primary driver of individual and societal growth.

There is no doubt in my mind, that Obama and the people around him, at best, want to minimize the role played by risktakers and maximize the guarantees provided by government. At worst, they seem, at times, to be launching a full scale assault on the very people (entrepreneurs, small business owners, mid-size business leaders) that feed the pipeline of job creation. The philosophical bent of those surrounding Obama is unmistakable – 93% of his advisors have only public sector experience. The next closest administrations were those of Kennedy and Johnson, at between 50 and 60%.
So, what evidence do we have of this negative predilection toward risktakers? Three specifics have always struck me:

1. The very first act of the Obama administration was to kill the voucher program for poor families who had chosen to send their children to non-traditional, non-public schools in the District of Columbia, which has, arguably, the worst public schools in the country. This was done, clearly, to assuage the teachers union, which sees these schools (and the school choice movement) as a threat to their guaranteed jobs and their low-risk view of life. The irony of this cut was that its impact was felt entirely by minority (almost exclusively Black) families.

2. The staggering burden of new taxes instituted by this administration will fall predominantly on the shoulders of small, independent business people (sole proprietors, partnerships, LLC’s, etc.) who run “pass thru” operations. These men and women create 85% of the jobs in America, and have razor thin margins in their businesses. Additional dollars of taxation put them in the position of keeping a tight lid on their overhead, which translates into no new hiring, or even worse, laying people off. These folks are the real risktakers in our society; not the “barons of industry” that the media is always carping about.

3. Obama’s sticky alliance with the union movement is not accidental. The mission of the unions is to maximize guarantees and minimize risk, which is the antithesis of what built this country. The pioneers of every epoch were not looking for guarantees; they were seeking opportunities. America’s creativity and ingenuity are driven by risktakers, not bureaucrats. I learned an indelible lesson living in western Europe and spending much time in Scandinavia. The higher you raise the floor, the lower you bring down the ceiling. And the ultimate physics of this dynamic is inescapable and fatal. The culture dies of suffocation.

I am not opposed to reforming the healthcare/health insurance system in our country (and I know no one who is). What bothers me is the sledge hammer approach and the unstated agenda of further removing risk from the culture and substituting guarantees. We need to remember that there was not one peep from unions, government regulators, the media, nor the public at large, when Wall Street “wheeler-dealers” were raking in the profits and filling the coffers of union pension funds; when Fannie and Freddie were underwriting loans that could never be serviced; and when financial advisors were helping private citizens stuff their pockets with cash. I have never had much respect for selective outrage, particularly when it comes from politicians.

I have heard much these days about how we are to judge what a “good society” is. Most of it says something to the effect that the good and noble society is defined by how it takes care of its “less fortunate” citizens. I couldn’t disagree more. From my perspective, the good and noble society is distinguished by how it supports, incentivizes, and rewards its most successful citizens. Without these risktaking and courageous people there would be no resources whatsoever, to help anyone with anything. The greatest threat to our culture, at this point, is not external. It is the continual discouragement and demonization of those amongst us who have done the best. Class warfare and hostility, generated by envy, has destroyed many societies. I fervently hope we can move beyond it.

A few weeks ago, Arleah and I were in L.A. spending some time with our son, our daughter-in-law, and our granddaughter. They had discovered a unique place to have breakfast – Santa Anita racetrack – and we all decided to go there one morning. Santa Anita is one of those classical places, rich in history, and replete with memories for those who have even a sparse connection with thoroughbred racing. The breakfast is held in the pavilion-like area right up against the railing of the track, and the timing of it coincides with the working out of the horses. You’re literally thirty to forty feet away from some of the most beautiful animals in the world. They are truly magnificent creatures. And nothing on earth moves with their grace, elegance, and raw power.

As we entered the area where we were to have our breakfast, I stopped for a moment to take in the full panorama of the track, the infield area, and the horses in various stages of being worked. It was a beautiful spectacle. I was really enjoying it, when all of a sudden, I was hit with a wave of grief. My eyes teared up and a deep sense of sadness swept thru me, replacing the joy of the previous moment. It really took me by surprise, and for a few moments I had no idea what was going on. Then a picture of my father flashed into my head, and things became clearer.

When I was growing up, there were two things that my father and I did together. We went to Chicago Bear’s football games and we went to the racetrack, in suburban Chicago. These were the only places where I saw my father feel anything.
At the Bear’s games we would sit quietly, most of the time, freezing our asses off, until an exciting play occurred and/or the Bears scored. When this happened, my father would shoot out of his seat, screaming at the top of his lungs, and pounding anyone around him on the back (as I got older, it was often me). As soon as the play was over, he was back in his seat, looking intently at the field. When I was real young, these outbursts were a little scary. As I got older, I anticipated them, and saw them as part of the game experience.

At the racetrack, the experience was somewhat similar. As the horses rounded the final turn and headed down the stretch, toward the finish line, he was up on his feet, screaming his lungs out. It was like he was instantaneously transported to another world. And, again, as soon as the race was over, he was back in his seat, studying the racing form, preparing for the next race.
The racetrack culture was one of the most unique societies I had ever been exposed to (or have since experienced). It was a weird amalgam of upper middle class professionals (it was said that if you needed a doctor or a dentist, in Chicago, on a Wednesday or a Saturday, you’d best be prepared to go out to the racetrack); and gambling addicts and racetrack touts. The touts were men who spent their whole lives at tracks throughout the country, hanging around the stables, talking with trainers, handlers, and jockeys, and making their living giving tips to well-heeled bettors. If the tips paid off, they got “tipped” with a portion of the winnings; sometimes quite handsomely. My father knew the most well-known tout, a Persian immigrant named “Charlie Potatoes” (no one knew his real name). He took great pride in the fact that he never owned an overcoat, nor ever worked a day in his life at a regular job. One day, toward the end of the season in Chicago, he had a spectacularly successful day, and since he was headed south anyway, he took a cab from Chicago to Miami (I believe he said that it cost $10,000). I have very fond memories of those times. They may have been the beginnings of my lifelong interest in interesting people and unique subcultures.

My father was a kind and gentle man. Everyone said, about him, that he was the easiest going person they knew. His patients worshipped the ground he walked on, and I don’t believe that there was a person on this planet that disliked him. He never got angry at anyone or anything. He put up with my grandmother (my mother’s mother) living with them, from the day they were married, till the day she died. I think my mother secretly wished that he would have given her an ultimatum that it was either him or my grandmother.

My father gave me a hug and kissed me at my Bar Mitzvah. It was the only time in my life. On his deathbed, when I told him I loved him, he couldn’t reciprocate. After I left the room, he told Arleah that he loved me.

Years ago, I stopped feeling angry at him. I’m just sad. My father was embarrassed by feelings, especially with men. I have struggled with that my whole life, and I imagine that I always will. I grieve this regularly, and it frees me up, to do so.

Morrie

N.B. This newsletter is labeled “April” because I got behind, again, and considered the last newsletter to be “February/March.” I will try to get on schedule again, but there are no guarantees. As you may have deduced by now, I struggle with getting these out. I very much like the end product, but I hate the process, and still can’t figure out why.

Morrie

“Family Secrets” is a concept that comes out of the research and practice of family therapy. It refers to the unspoken and often unconscious collusion of the members of a family, to never talk about, or confront, obvious and unavoidable bizarre, dysfunctional, or destructive behaviors, on the part of one or more family members. In some recent work with a corporate client, an analogous behavior popped up, that had enormous implications for the company’s bottom line.

In working with this client, I facilitate, along with the CEO, three accountability groups, made up of mid-level managers who represent all of the departments and functions of the company. In the middle of a discussion with one of these managers, about his particular challenges, he revealed that he had felt for some time, that the company had made a clear mistake in hiring a fellow manager in another area. A discussion ensued about the specific behaviors and capabilities (or lack of such) of the manager in question. And it was clear, after a short while, that the performance problems of the manager in question, were directly attributable to the characteristics pointed out by the accountability group participant.

At the conclusion of this discussion, the CEO asked the group to estimate a dollar amount of lost revenue attributable to missed opportunity, poor communication, unaccountable management of staff, and a myriad of dysfunctional behaviors. The CEO emphasized that he wanted them to be specific and very conservative, and to be able to justify the dollar amount with examples. The amount they came up with was sobering – in the low six figures, projected over the course of a year. To say the least, the rest of the group meeting was even more sobering and informative. Well over half the group had similar observations about colleagues, subordinates, and superordinates (including the CEO). This theme was mirrored in the two remaining groups, and at the end of two days of meetings, we had arrived at a total, conservatively estimated amount of two and a half million dollars of lost revenue.

When we asked people why they had not spoken up earlier, and made the company’s leaders aware of their perceptions and feelings, they identified attitudes and assumptions about sharing their feelings about other people, that had little or nothing to do with their history with the company, and everything to do with their personal background and history. They initially talked about not wanting to “get people into trouble,” but as we explored this, it became clear that the company had no history of summarily firing people who had performance problems, and, quite to the contrary, had an established track record of working with people (and providing resources) to help employees remediate their problems. What became evident, after much discussion, was that people weren’t afraid of getting other people into trouble – they were afraid of getting themselves into trouble. And the fear was not of getting fired, but of being disliked and ostracized.

Our work paradigm comes from our personal paradigm; not the other way around. You can talk all you want about being open to people telling you what they actually see and how they feel about it – i.e. telling you the truth. But this isn’t going to happen if they’re clueless about their underlying belief system about the penalties of speaking the truth.

So what’s the lesson here? Don’t spend much of your time talking to people about how open you are to their feedback and how much you value honesty and directness. Its like beating your head against a linguistic wall. Instead, do spend your time talking to people about their past experiences in being open and direct; how that went (usually badly); and that you fully understand how risky it feels to level with people. Simply getting this on the table dramatically decreases the anxiety connected with telling the truth. Not only can the truth set you free, it can also drop to the bottom line.

Here are some of the “big picture” issues facing us, as we move into the future. These come from my own kind of “research.” I talk to and work with lots of people who actually run businesses; I consume large amounts of information; and I have good intuition.

1. We are not experiencing a classical recession. We are in the midst of a global sea-change in our economic and cultural life due to the explosion of information and its impact on consumer and personal behavior. Consumers will be increasingly unimpressed with brand name products, and in transactional interactions, will be brutally price driven and have the information to back up their position. In relationship-driven purchases they will be unforgiving of poor or marginal people skills, and totally unaccepting of neutral or lousy attitudes. Personal relationships will have higher and higher expectations, and the demands for vulnerability and real intimacy will challenge people at levels they have never imagined.

2. We are never going back to “how things used to be.” Everything is undergoing profound changes that will prove to be permanent changes in employment, lifestyle, and sociopolitical attitudes and behavior. More and more people will work virtually or as “free agents;” international mobility will fundamentally redefine the idea of “where do you live?”; and non-aligned voters will supplant party loyalists. As the Great Depression and post WW II affluence reshaped generations, our global crisis and contraction, will reshape us.

3. There will be no significant drop in the unemployment rate in the foreseeable future. An unemployment rate of 5% will be seen as the anomalous period. (The vast majority of economists have always considered 5% unemployment, full employment.) We have overdone so many things, for so long now, that we have almost entirely lost perspective. The creeping sense of entitlement, coupled with the deteriorating attention to accountability, has created millions of “make work” jobs. (On a recent trip through the Pittsburgh airport, I counted 19 TSA workers standing around, chatting and joking with each other. When I asked what they were doing, I was told that they were on a “break.”)

4. No matter how much the economy “recovers,” businesses will continue to let people go. They have discovered that they can do as much, or more, with less people. This has profound implications for how we help people become marketable. With profits flowing in, unabated, for years, many employers unintentionally became de facto employment agencies, instead of productive businesses.

5. We need to stop directing our efforts toward finding jobs for the unemployed or underemployed, and focus our efforts on giving people the requisite skills to market their ideas and talents to entrepreneurial ventures and to seeing themselves as “free agents.”

The notion of finding jobs for people continues to frame them as passive and helpless victims, instead of people in control of their lives. We need to remember that information-intensive cultures push more and more responsibility onto individuals, not less (in spite of what’s coming out of Washington).

6. The movement of existing companies will be toward a size model of middle market and small market companies. Those that remain big will become more and more virtual, with people working at home, or in small geographically dispersed pods. Huge, centralized businesses have become lower trust and higher control organizations, and have crippled decision-making, at all levels. This realization has begun a re-ordering of their fundamental structures.

7. The consumption of goods and services having retrenched to 50 – 70% of “pre-recession” levels, will stay there permanently. We will continue to be a consumer driven economy, but we will be putting our purchasing decisions through a significantly modified filter. The blending together of “necessities” and “luxuries” has been shaken at its core, and massive re-prioritization is taking place. Everyone we work with, and everyone I talk with, is seeing a return of the consumer, but at a clearly downgraded level. The challenge to business will be to figure out how to sell less to more people. (Look at Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail.”)

8. The training of the worker of the present and the future will be heavily weighted toward “soft skills,” with an emphasis on people skills and the ability to develop others. Task masters will be more and more expendable. Our technology has reached the point where we can monitor performance and collect data to make decisions, with minimal involvement from people. We don’t need managers to watch people work and give them painfully obvious feedback. We need leaders, at all levels, who can help workers figure out how they get in their own way, and what they need to do to change it.

9. The capacity to take risks – financial and interpersonal – will separate the “haves” from the “have-nots,” more than any other single factor. Information drives people to higher and higher levels of risk, and challenges them, at a values level, to decide which is more important to them – growth or comfort. What we have learned, in our work, is that sustainable change only occurs when you put important relationships constantly at risk. (Risk, in this context, means continual challenge and higher and higher expectations.)

10. Educational institutions have the opportunity to lead the way in this transition, if they begin to teach students the core skills of relationship-building, decision-making, conflict creation (and management), and the building of intimacy through challenge and constructive confrontation. In order to do this, the educational establishment will have to engage in a massive paradigm shift, from security to excellence. This will be a tall order.

11. We need to prepare our society for radical changes in socio-economic behavior. For example, the coming disaffection with home ownership, and the realization that a fixed asset of that magnitude is increasingly incompatible with a mobile, free-agent culture. In a nutshell, the ability to tolerate and absorb fundamentally different lifestyle and work-related choices, will be pushed to the limit.

Someone asked me the other day, how I have arrived at my political and philosophical points of view. I could easily identify broadly impactful life experiences like growing up in a neurotic, constantly argumentative sub-culture where dinner resembled “Meet the Press;” going to university in Europe and living with political radicals and revolutionaries; working with politicians; and traveling through much of the world, lecturing and consulting. But as I gave the question more thought, individual encounters came to mind. One that indelibly changed me involved an encounter with a person we’ll call Ronnie.

Years ago I worked with Mel Pope, a financial services client in Tallahassee, Florida. Mel was (and I believe, still is) one of the kindest, most gracious, and most generous people I have ever known. If you look up the word “gentleman” in the dictionary, you’ll see Mel’s picture.

When I came to Tallahassee to work with Mel and his organization, I stayed at Mel’s house. His house was situated on a beautiful piece of property, at the end of a very, very long and perfectly straight driveway. One day, when we were leaving Mel’s house, to go to his office, I noticed, at a distance, a car turning into his driveway and chugging its way toward us. As it got closer, I saw that it was a wreck of a car; old, huge and dilapidated. In addition, it had all kinds of antenna-like projections sticking out from every possible location. I asked Mel who that was coming toward us, and he told me, “that’s Ronnie; I want you to meet him.”

The car finally arrived at where we were standing, and out of it popped a disheveled, frenetic, and quite agitated man, talking at us, oblivious to any niceties of conversational interactions. As I remember it, he was telling Mel something about a conversation with the Governor and the state police, and that there was an imminent threat to the planet from God knows where. I didn’t need my psychotherapy training to know that Ronnie was nuts. He was what we call an “ambulatory schizophrenic.” In Star Trek terms, he operated in a parallel universe. Mel told me, subsequently, that Ronnie lived in his car, monitoring police calls (and anything else he could pick up), and periodically made the rounds of Mel’s neighborhood, warning people of impending doom, and, incidentally collecting food and cash. This had been going on for years, and Mel couldn’t remember a time when Ronnie wasn’t crazy.

At one point, when Ronnie paused to take a breath, Mel told him that he’d like to introduce him to his friend – me. “Ronnie, this is my friend, Morrie. He’s a psychologist who comes down here to work with me and the agency.” I have never, in my life, seen someone lose all the color in their face as rapidly as Ronnie did, the moment he heard the word “psychologist.” He turned white as a sheet, and headed for his car. Mel stopped him and said words that I will never forget – “Ronnie, he won’t put you away. He’s okay.” Ronnie relaxed, though visibly shaken; and after a short while, went into Mel’s house to talk with his wife, and get some food or money.

As Mel and I drove away, all my years of crystallizing my thinking about institutionalizing people came together. Right after my psychotherapy training ended, I spent about a year and a half working at a private psychiatric hospital. For a small number of patients it was a good place. It gave them some necessary boundaries that they couldn’t find elsewhere, and it helped them organize and manage many free-floating and disparate feelings and thoughts. For most patients, it was a nightmare. They didn’t know why they were there; they didn’t know why they were being medicated; and they had harmed no one. From their perspective, they were in prison. It became clear to me that they were in this hospital because they were disturbing; not because they were disturbed. (If this distinction piques your curiosity, you may want to look at the writings of Thomas Szasz, M.D., the founder of “radical psychiatry.” Szasz was the mentor of one of my early mentors in my clinical career.)

Ronnie did not bother or disturb me. He had created a life that clearly worked for him, and had found a community, of sorts, that helped sustain him. Why would anyone want to put him in an institution? Would it be about Ronnie, or would it be about their own unresolved pain?

We need to think long and hard, in our society, about why we “help” people, and what its really about. How much of our help is for the benefit of the recipient, and how much of it has to do with our unresolved stuff. A crooked motivation always ends up with disabling help. It has been (and remains) one of my missions in life, to hold our culture accountable for why it does what it does, and to continually ask the question: “Who are we really doing this for?”

Morrie

Given what I’ve written above, I don’t feel compelled to write a lengthy section on business.

I do want to comment however, on the value and importance of curiosity. I have noticed over the years, a connection between curiosity-about people and things in general-and success in business and personal life. I’m not claiming a scientific correlation here; only a consistent observation. It certainly has been true of my clients and my friends. (I discovered, to my amazement a few weeks ago, that I have worked with almost a thousand organizations and individuals over the past thirty years. I was asked to join the adjunct faculty of an MBA program and I had to put together a resume – a weird experience at this point in my life – and a client list.)

I first discovered this connection, between curiosity and success (and I might add, liking one’s work and one’s life), through my years and miles of flying. Almost without exception, if the person sitting next to me was curious about who I was, what I did, where I lived, or some other aspect of my being, they were inevitably, successful at what they did and enthused about their life. Sometimes they initiated the conversation; sometimes I did. It really didn’t seem to matter.

My most recent experience with this connection occurred on a flight where I met Gene Robbins. Gene is a fascinating fellow who owns a construction company that, among other projects, secures military bases. Gene started out his life in law enforcement, transitioned into traditional construction work, and then created a specialized niche expertise in security construction. He is extraordinarily creative in his work and comes up with solutions to security challenges that none of his competitors have ever thought of. But what I found particularly intriguing was Gene’s interest in his people-what makes them tick, what makes them successful, what they struggled with, and how to help them grow. To say the least, we had a compelling and engaging conversation and decided to do some work together.

Curiosity is also a foundation element in building relationships-both work and personal. It is very difficult to connect with someone who has little or no interest in anything outside themselves. The successful salespeople I’ve worked with have all been information hounds – they have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about people, relationships and the culture they live in. Similarly, the successful leaders I’ve worked with have a genuine, abiding interest in who their people are, not simply what they do for them.

In personal life, curiosity is inextricably linked to intimacy. Until I had met Arleah, I had never known anyone who was simultaneously intrigued by Ayn Rand, quantum physics, and the internal workings of machines. Her interests and curiosity were compelling and irresistibly attractive; and is still so to this day. Now that she has a Kindle, her access to new knowledge is almost infinite.

As we wrote in “Love in the Present Tense”, couples don’t fall out of love, they fall out of respect – respect for their partner’s lack of interest and curiosity about the world they live in.

So what’s my conclusion? In the workplace, look for people who are curious when you’re recruiting folks. How many questions do they ask you and how interested are they in you and your business? In terms of your colleagues, how often do they take the risk of going outside the nine dots and pursuing a new and different idea or behavior?

In your personal life, how curious are you? And how curious and interested are the significant people in your life? We talk a lot about our responsibilities in life? Perhaps one of the top ones is to cultivate our curiosity and that of those we care about. (I realize, as I look back on this section, that it isn’t very brief. Somehow brevity and this newsletter don’t seem to go together. I need to look at that).

I am repeatedly struck by how seemingly pedestrian interactions can catalyze thinking about profound political and cultural phenomena. About a month ago, Arleah and I had done some work with a client in southern California, and were being driven to the airport by one of our client’s employees. The person driving us was a young, Hispanic fellow who did entry level work for our client. After a bit of chit-chat, I asked our driver how long he had worked for our client. He said that he had worked for the client for five years and added that he liked working for the company, a lot. (The driver had no idea of who I was or what work I did with the company). I asked him why he liked working there and his first response was that he worked with people from all over the world (the company is a veritable United Nations) and that they were very nice to him. The next thing he said blew me away – “I also like working here because they made me learn English”. I was stunned. I gathered my wits about me and asked why he though that having to learn English was a good thing. This led to a conversation about his goal to become a sales person, his wife learning English, and the opportunities he felt it created for his young children. He also talked about the sadness and puzzlement he felt because his parents decided that it would be easier for them if they returned to Mexico. This young man’s politically incorrect point of view got me thinking about what ultimately is at the core of my discomfort, concern and increasing distaste for the Obama administration.

I don’t know if Obama is a socialist at heart. The crazy-quilt of his economic policies is only rivaled by the wildly contradictory nature of his foreign policy. While he travels around the world apologizing, at every opportunity, for the seemingly endless misdeeds of our country, we are bombing villages senseless, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. At one moment we are at war with Al Qaeda, but it is impermissible to call anyone terrorists or Islamo Fascists. (He has no problem, however, reciting the sins of Israelis).

One thing though is consistent and perfectly clear in the policies of his administration. They are fiercely intent and stubbornly insistent upon instituting caretaking as the sociopolitical underpinning of our culture. Every legislative initiative, executive order, and judicial determination has, at its core, the undermining of individual responsibility, the blocking of the natural consequences of poor decision-making (institutional and individual) and the protection of people from themselves. The focus of program after program is to do things for people that they are perfectly capable of doing for themselves, and to convince large segments of the population that they are helpless and incompetent, and cannot take care of themselves and succeed without help from the government. The latest absurdity put forth by the administration is a proposal to certify/license storefront tax form preparers so that “the public” is assured that these folks fully understand the tax code. This is to be administered by the IRS, which by its own admission (verified by many internal audits), can’t rely on its own personnel for consistent answers to tax questions. If you’re too gullible or too stupid to not question your tax advisor (whether they’re a CPA or an H&R Block franchisee) you deserve the results.

The worst thing about caretaking is not its wastefulness and squandering of resources that could be used productively; it is its demeaning of the recipients and the methodical undermining of their self-esteem and belief in their own capabilities. As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in the heyday of the Democratic machine in Chicago (and much of Cook County). If you wanted a job in the public sector (and often in many areas of the private sector), wanted your garbage picked up regularly, or wanted to make sure that your kids had summer jobs, you better have had a good relationship with your precinct captain, city councilman, or someone connected to one of them. (Your other option was to know someone in the Mafia). What was even more insidious and destructive was the Machine’s commitment to create make-work jobs for those people who had developed no discernable skills in their life and had been so infantilized by government caretaking that they were convinced that they had no value to bring to an employer.

Growing up, I knew about the Machine, but had had no direct contact with it until I was a young teenager. For some reason that escapes me now, I had to go down to the county building in the heart of the city. It was an impressive, ornate structure that had been refurbished in a number of ways. One of they changes involved the installation of automatic elevators. I remember walking into an elevator along with four or five other people and noticing a fellow in a very official uniform, standing in the corner, next to the panel of buttons that ran the elevator. I began to reach over toward the panel, to push the button for my floor, when the fellow in the uniform gave me one of those looks that said, unequivocally, I was about to commit a serious faux pas. What became instantaneously clear was that it was his job to push the buttons. He stood in that elevator all day, asking people what floor they wanted and pushed the requisite buttons. How demeaning, depreciating and dismissive can you get! At the time, I just thought it was weird. I did feel a certain sense of sadness, but I didn’t have the life experience or wherewithal to understand the truly tragic implications for that poor soul.

If the Obama administration continues to have its way, we will eventually have a government program for every person in the country who has made poor decisions in their life; who has not planned well for their future; or who grew up with people who couldn’t see beyond their own narcissism.

It seems to me that the fundamental challenge of our time is to see beyond the increasingly shrill argument over the CBO’s pricing strategies, the falling value of the dollar, or which political party is least irresponsible and petty. I think the real question we need to be asking and answering is – “What price are we willing to pay to live in a society that holds people accountable for their choices?”

Whether I end up rich or poor, struggling or comfortable, it means little to me, if I find myself living in a culture peopled with self-made victims and self-righteous parasites.

I was in an airport the other day and had one of those emotional wake-up calls. I was standing in the gate area waiting to board my flight, when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a woman going by me, pushing an unusual looking little wheelchair. Sitting in the wheelchair was a young girl, perhaps seven or eight years old. As they stopped at the check-in counter, I had the chance to focus on the little girl. If there are angels somewhere, they have the face of this little girl. She was the most beautiful child I have ever seen. But as my eyes traveled away from her face, I started to grasp why she was in the wheelchair. Her hands were bent awkwardly at the wrist, and her fingers were misshapen and out of her control. Her legs were pointed in an unnatural direction and they were clearly of no use to her.

As I continued to look at her, I felt my eyes beginning to well up with tears. It soon became difficult to maintain my composure, and I had to walk away to another part of the gate area. There was a part of me that wanted to go over to her mother and ask her if there was anything I could do to help her. There was a bigger part of me that wanted to gather that child up in my arms and make her whole. At that moment, I would have given anything to see her run around that gate area, laughing and giggling.

When we boarded the plane, her mother picked her up out of the wheelchair, and carried her on, placing her in the seat next to her. They sat right across the aisle from me and I regularly glanced over at her. I never saw her say anything – she looked blankly into space-and she eventually fell asleep against the window of the plane. When we landed at our destination, I left the plane, regretting that I couldn’t say anything to the little girl’s mother that would have made any sense, or would not have left me sobbing. I undoubtedly will never see that child again, but she irretrievably touched me. I have been remarkably calm since I encountered that little child and her mother. I still have my typically strong reactions to the challenges of this time in my life, but they subside very quickly and don’t feel like that big a deal.

These last few years have been brutal. Our financial situation has sucked, our boys have had their challenges, my mother’s physical and mental deterioration has been gut-wrenching and draining, and my own aging process has been sobering. The challenges, at times, have felt overwhelming, and I’ve had to battle to regain some perspective. That little child has given me a bunch of perspective.

Morrie

There seems to be a heightened emphasis these days on the selection aspect of the recruiting process. A part of this emphasis comes from dissatisfaction with the results versus the time, energy and resources dedicated to the process. Too many new hires are delivering mediocre performance, melting down at the first encounter with critical feedback or leaving their jobs shortly after beginning them, with no explanation or communication.

From our experience, the reason for this is simple, but not necessarily obvious – We are still hiring people for what they know; not for who they are. The proliferation of information has made technical skills, lots of knowledge, and even brilliance, simply commodities. It has also slowed down and delayed maturation and left people with huge deficits of common sense, people skills and problem solving abilities. Consequently, the selection process needs to focus and zero in on the candidate’s life experience more than any other single factor. We need to find out, in particular, the quantative and qualitative nature of the candidate’s experiences in two key areas: decision-making and relationship-building. If they are good at those two things, they can usually learn a lot of job content very quickly. If they’re not, everything else is usually an agonizing struggle. Towards the end of this section, I’ll discuss the key questions that focus in on these characteristics.

What about some of the traditional assessment factors that have been a part of recruiting and selection forever: the resume, formal education, and recommendations?

We have found that resume content is fairly useless. A slew of studies of resumes show that upwards of 70% of them contain wild exaggerations and embellishments as well as outright fabrications. They are good though for two reasons. First, are they neat and clean and don’t look like a pet walked on them. Second, does the writing resemble English syntax and grammar? If you want something practical to assess, have the candidate give you a writing sample (the content is irrelevant). The organization and flow of writing is highly connected to logical thinking and what we call “common sense”.

The key variable in assessing formal education is when it occurred. An uninterrupted history of schooling – high school, college, grad school – with no interludes of life experiences, do not usually bode well. This more than likely produces someone who is armed, dangerous, and has no aim.

The area of schooling inevitably raises the issue of reputation, an issue I frequently see my clients struggle with. What’s a good school? My experience, as student, professor and business advisor, is as follows: the best teaching in America goes on at community colleges; the next best are urban branches of state universities; the next at traditional small liberal arts colleges; and lastly, at the main campuses of state institutions. A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that the reputation of universities is based, almost exclusively, on non-teaching criteria – publications, research, grants generated; and that students rarely, if ever, see the faculty in a classroom, that created the reputation. Most often, students at high profile schools spend a lot of their time with teaching assistants who frequently struggle with their English.

Given our litigious society, recommendations have ceased to have a great deal of value. People are hesitant to put negative comments (or even mildly critical feedback) in writing, for fear of a lawsuit or other legal harassment. You may have a shot at a sound balanced recommendation, if the recommender is known to you personally and is willing to speak “off the record”.

What this leaves us with, then, is a tremendous weight put on the interview; a tool which has not changed much over decades and decades.

The biggest mistake made in interviewing candidates, is to “sell” the candidate on the position and to make the interview as comfortable and enjoyable as possible. The logical absurdity of this doesn’t seem to dawn on us. None of my clients have ever hired people to do easy, comfortable, and low stress work. So what do you think we’re going to find out about someone’s suitability by conducting a comfortable interview? If, then, the interview is going to be a genuinely useful tool, it must mirror the most significant challenges inherent in the job. It must contain feedback to the candidate about how you’re experiencing him, and how you feel about his responses to your questions. And it must involve going deep with a few questions, not staying shallow with many questions. For example, don’t ever let a “throwaway” response slide. A comment like “You know what that business is like”, should invite further scrutiny and drilling down. An in-depth interview is essential, then, if you’re going to find out if the candidate’s life experience is sufficient to work with (once she’s on board) and if there is a significant and meaningful values match.

In terms of interview questions, there are three key areas that will be of immeasurable help in assessing the candidate’s life experience and capabilities in the critical areas of decision-making and relationship-building. These areas are: conflict, stress and loss. The specific questions are:

The key to an effective selection process is to treat candidates as highly resilient people who cannot only deal with a highly challenging interaction, but who will also respect and be attracted to the organization behind it.

I’ve been involved for some time now, in a running debate with a close friend over health care reform specifically and the political direction of the country in general. We are pretty much diametrically opposed in our points of view. I believe that the current legislation under consideration is a disaster and will create many more problems and burdens than it will solve; and he believes that it will remedy a social ill, long neglected in our country. Likewise, I see the direction the Obama administration is trying to take us in, as moving our society away from the core values and principles that have made us a great nation and he sees that same direction as moving us toward an even further realization of our greatness.

What I have been struck by is that in spite of the fact that we are both strong-willed, opinionated, and deeply convinced of the rightness of our respective positions, our disagreement has not damaged our relationship. And this fact got me thinking about how we deal with our opposing points of view and our disagreeableness in our country and how it is quite different from most other societies in the world.

It is almost impossible nowadays to get away from the heated, acrimonious, and often hostile debate over health care reform and a slew of the other initiatives proposed by the current administration. The divisiveness is at a level I’ve not seen since the height of protests over the Vietnam War and I can’t remember a time when the President was called a liar by a member of the Congress in a public, nationally televised address (I thought it was interesting, telling and wryly humorous that in a BBC interview with a long-standing member of the British Parliament, shortly after Joe Wilson’s outburst, the MP said, “We would never call our Prime Minister a liar; an idiot or a moron perhaps, but never a liar”).

In most other countries, severe political disagreements precipitate crippling strikes and demonstrations, fisticuffs on the floor of legislatures, brutal assaults on protestors, and military revolts and coups. When I lived in Europe, it seemed like every month or so, daily life and commerce were disrupted or completely shut down by a new labor action, student protest, or the latest anarchist movement calling for the destruction of society as we know it. There would be lots of grumbling and grousing about it, but most people seemed to accept it as part and parcel of what went along with political disagreements.

I have a wondered lately why we handle things differently here; and one of the things that has struck me is that we are the quintessential pragmatists. We certainly like ideas and we’re not adverse to a good debate. But when push comes to shove, we get something done and we do what works. Our labor strikes are rarely extended, nor overtly self-destructive, and our political divisions are usually resolved with a clear winner and a clear loser; not a dysfunctional coalition that is incapable of taking decisive action. We compromise on policy and tactics, not on whose values will prevail. We are highly competitive and we love to win. And even though we hate to lose, we accept it; we lick our wounds and we being the process of strategizing for the next battle, committed to being winners again.

Almost without exception, we accept results we don’t like and we follow the new rules, knowing that whatever the new game is, we can somehow make it work for us. Part of the reason for this is that our opportunities are so much greater than any other place on earth.

However, our greatest strength is that we continue to reject orthodoxies and unquestioned traditions and readily entertain new ideas, new processes, and new structures. In addition, we have rejected tribalism and rigid social stratification, in spite of numerous attempts to inject them into our cultural fabric. Sometimes these practices and attitudes have worked well for us and sometimes they have caused us much distress. They have certainly made us a target for parts of the world.

All in all, I continue to be impressed by how we deal with disagreements, even with disagreeableness. I know that no one’s going to be completely happy with whatever comes out of Washington in the next few months (and even in the next few years), however, I’m equally certain that we will deal with it and adapt to it, and sustain our relationships with each other. I certainly plan to do so.

I have just finished looking at my favorite website – “Old Jews Telling Jokes.com” and was aware, after some hysterical laughter, of some sadness about the loss of some rich part of my past. By the way, if you like Jewish humor, this site will not only keep you in stitches, it’ll be guaranteed to pick you up on one of those blah days. An example:

Rabbi Goldstein, attending a conference, has just checked into his hotel room, when there’s a knock at his door. He opens the door to find a gorgeous, statuesque blond, in a full length mink coat, standing in front of him. She enters the room and before he can utter a word, she drops her coat around her, and is standing in front of the rabbi, completely naked. He mumbles something about why she’s in his room, and she tells him that she’s a gift from Rabbi Schwartz. He recovers his composure and launches into a rant about being a man of God, pure in his life, and beyond the temptations of the flesh; and how outrageous it is for Rabbi Schwartz to do this, particularly at a religious conference. He picks up the phone and asks to be connected to Rabbi Schwartz’s room. When the latter answers, he launches into a tirade about how offended he was and how this was insulting to him. While he’s castigating his colleague, the young woman starts walking toward the door. Rabbi Goldstein stops his invective and asks the young woman – “Where are you going?” She responds that she’s leaving, and he says –”Don’t go; I’m mad at him, not you.”

I miss that part of my heritage. I grew up with that humor; almost on a daily basis. It was simply part of our life. Not just professional comedians, but all my relatives were joke tellers. It was the way they coped with the regular and irregular challenges of life; of being immigrants, of being Jews, of running businesses, and of dealing with the characters and kooks in our huge extended family. It’s hard to imagine now, but I grew up in a neighborhood with 40 to 50 relatives within a four block radius. As a kid, I never needed money to go to the store and get candy. They knew who I was and who I belonged to, and they kept a running account of what we spent, and settled up at the end of the month. One Sunday night, each month, we all got together at someone’s apartment, for an orgy of eating and arguing. We called it “The Cousin’s Club.” If you didn’t want to argue directly, you could play cards and get into an argument that way. One of my relatives, a quiet, good-natured, and very rotund lady, came to the get-together with a huge shopping bag, and went from table to table filling up her bag. All of us kids thought she was nuts, but no one said a word. It was clear, though unspoken, that she was certainly weird, but that there was, and would always be a place for her. Sort of an urban version of the village idiot.

The Cousin’s Club lasted almost three generations and then slowly but surely disappeared. Everyone’s scattered now-literally all over the globe. There are some small pockets of a few family members living around each other, but they’re the exception to the rule. The old culture is dead and diluted; by mobility, by “mixed marriages,’ and by success and affluence.

What killed the culture were the aspirations it taught its children. The bantering, the debating, the arguing, were all in the service of raising our expectations. We were taught never to accept the obvious; to ask more questions; to challenge the prevailing wisdom. Sometimes tactfully, more often not. I remember the stir I caused, in my adolescence, by challenging our rabbi on a number of theological and intellectual fronts. It was my first realization of the contradictions inherent in my upbringing and the angst I was heading toward. It was good to challenge, I was told. But not with the Rabbi. The situation was resolved, soap opera style, when the rabbi ran off with his secretary, much to the chagrin of his supporters, but no surprise to his detractors.

The contradictions I first encountered in my teens, grew and deepened as I pursued my aspirations. I went off to college, became exposed to different people than I had grown up with, and different ideas, went on to graduate school, professional school, living in a foreign country, marrying a gentile, and on and on. All of this driven by my early training; to keep learning, to keep exploring and to keep growing. And all of this undermined the glue that bound the old culture together.

All these necessary losses are an integral part of who I am now. I am saddened, at times, by them, and occasionally wish I had some of that old culture back. At the same time, I wouldn’t change any of the choices I’ve made. That old culture, in a very meaningful way, is still a part of me, and I cherish it.

Morrie

A short while ago I heard an interesting program on the BBC, which focused on a curious thesis: Namely, that there must be something amiss at the Harvard Business School, since a preponderance of C-Suite people from companies that took “excessive risks” and melted down in the recession, had received their MBA’s from that esteemed institution. The program interviewed a number of business gurus, including the Dean of HBS, and everyone concluded that the School had missed the boat in not emphasizing “business ethics” to a greater degree, in its curriculum.

Now, the BBC usually does good solid reportage, and tries its hardest to bring in all significant points of view (other than in its editorials, which make Lenin look centrist). But this was, undoubtedly, one of its silliest programs. They insisted on treating ethics as a purely intellectual concept; as a legitimate academic discipline. Their premise was that people do unethical, immoral, even criminal acts because they are thinking poorly. And if they just had more and better information, they would then do the right thing. If this were true, we should have rid our culture of smoking at least forty years ago, and the rate at which convicts return to federal prisons (which have had educationally-based rehab programs forever), should be pretty close to zero.

Business ethics, along with other pseudo-disciplines, is a fantasy. Even as a wet-behind-the-ears undergraduate, “ethics” made no sense to me. From my experience, even then, people didn’t do either the right things or the wrong things because they didn’t think enough about it. They did what they did because that’s the way they felt. Their gut feelings drove their behavior. And now, after thirty years of working with people, as educator, therapist, and consultant, it is crystal clear to me, what exactly it is that corrupts people. Put simply, it is a gut-wrenching fear (for many a sheer terror) of conflict. And most often, a potential conflict created by disappointing others. So, instead of engaging in a painful conflict, people withhold information, cut corners in doing business, hide their troubling behaviors, and ultimately, engage in criminality.

I grew up in Chicago, when two cultural phenomena, which dominated the political, economic, and sociological life of the city, were at their zenith – the Democratic Machine and the Mafia. My extended family knew many people in both organizations. None of those people were stupid; and all of them knew that what they were doing was wrong. What they all shared in common was a deep-seated belief that trying to get what they needed in life, by going through established “straight” channels, would be futile and unsuccessful. What this covered, for each and every one of them, was a paralyzing fear of rejection, disappointment, and conflict.

Later in life, I did one of my psychotherapy internships in the prison system, and a few years later than that, I did law enforcement consulting for about five years. What I learned from those two experiences was that our prisons and jails are not full of evil people. They are jam-packed with conflict avoiders. I can’t tell you the number of convicts that told me essentially the same story – “I wouldn’t do what you squares do (to get a job, buy a house, etc.), if you had a gun at my head. It’s way too hard, and it’s only for fools.”

Conflict avoidance is fundamentally a dishonest behavior. Not telling people what you really think, feel, or observe, is a form of lying. We learn it very early in life; that’s why it’s so hard to change it. (When our kids were growing up, they would regularly complain that their grandparents were boring. It took us some time to get up the courage to agree with them. It made those visits a lot less tense when the truth was out.)

Employees who are conflict avoiders are now the greatest risk factor for companies. This gives a whole new meaning to “risk management.” I am never surprised when I learn of corruption in a company. I am surprised that there isn’t a lot more. A little bit of dishonesty goes a long way.

One more point. As there are “gateway drugs,” there are “gateway emotions.” I learned recently that when people start talking about feeling “overwhelmed,” there is a conflict being avoided. The energy being utilized to not deal with something, builds up such momentum, as to create the feeling we call “overwhelmed.” The lesson here is simple, but not necessarily easy. Watch out for your own, and others, conflict avoidance. Nothing can get you into as much trouble. Muster up the courage; bite the bullet, and get it out on the table. You’ll not only feel better, you’ll avoid a lot of grief.

I heard a phrase the other day that caught my attention, because it seemed to capture where we are in the current political landscape – “On the cutting edge of ignorance.” There is no dearth of intellectual or academic brilliance in the current administration. They are not stupid. They simply ignore facts and don’t let knowledge and experience get in the way of ideology. There are three things that stand out in our current dilemma:

First, the unimportance of simple facts, and the lack of attention to unintended consequences, is nothing short of startling. The discussion of health care/insurance reform is the most cogent example of this.

Second, the ironic nature of the Obama administration’s focus on “transformative” change has all but escaped scrutiny. I am less troubled by the attempts to move us toward a European-type nanny state, than I am by the more insidious and regressive attempt to undo the cultural impact of information on all aspects of our lives. What a crowning irony, for the internet President to be the instrument of trying to return us to the pre-information age.

Third, the core similarities between the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration are stunning. Ideology reigns supreme, and ignorance of how our culture works, is identical. (I know it’s hard for those afflicted with Bush derangement syndrome to view him as an ideologue; perhaps because they saw themselves in his rigidity.) There is no fundamental difference between Bush’s moralizing and self-righteous religiosity, and Obama’s country-deprecating monologues and anti-capitalist victim mongering. Both are patronizing and demeaning, and ultimately depreciate people’s ability to assess their environment and make choices for themselves.

Let’s look at health care/insurance reform. I think that preventive care is a good and noble idea, and it would be wonderful if every citizen could utilize it. Unfortunately, the facts are that the last thing it does is save money. There is not one reputable study that indicates that. In fact, in the case of diabetes “adding in the cost of the preventive services raises the overall cost of care” (Health Affairs journal). And according to the New England Journal of Medicine, “. . . preventive services add to health care costs, not reduce them.”

Likewise, why do you think insurance companies exclude pre-existing conditions? Because no other single factor escalates the cost of care for everyone else. Particularly, when these conditions are chronic, debilitating, and require extensive, and expensive care. This is, then, not about punishing patients, nor demonizing insurance companies. It is about reality.

To my knowledge, there has been no public debate over these facts. There would be a way, however, to accommodate both of these issues. Put a cap on malpractice awards and move to a “loser pays” system. And allow insurance companies to cross state lines, and thereby dramatically increase the size of insurance pools. None of this, however, is currently on the table.

As I wrote in my first book – “Working Without A Net” – information impacts a culture, most dramatically, in two ways. First, it significantly increases the nature and frequency of conflict in all relationships. When people have more information, their expectations rise, they challenge more, and this generates more conflict. This may be good or bad, depending upon your point of view (cf. my comments in the “Business” section of this newsletter). The other thing that information does to a society is to methodically erode traditional notions of security, based upon a reliance and dependence upon institutions and organizations outside of the individual (i.e. businesses, government, social safety nets, etc.). It then replaces them with a new form of security, based upon an internal sense of self-reliance and individual marketability. This process has been occurring since the 1980’s and has manifested itself in phenomena like free-agent workers, the virtual workplace, the steady erosion of corporate benefits, the redefinition of “community” ala the internet, etc. This has been a scary and disorienting transition, from security being something external, to security being something internal. And for most people this change has come about in bits and pieces, with little realization of the big picture. By and large, most politicians are clueless vis-à-vis this shift, and have done little to help people adapt to this new reality. Obama is not only continuing this tradition, he is trying his best to reverse reality. No one has the power to stop this cultural evolution, unless they can completely shut down the manufacture and distribution of information. It has to be a cruel irony that the maven of information is going all out to combat and reverse its effects.

Ideologues are ultimately elitists and non-risk takers. They hate being wrong, they dread failure, and they want to avoid pain (especially their own) at any cost. They see no point in experiencing the discomfort that comes with growth and learning, and want to construct a social apparatus that is as comfortable as possible, regardless of the price. So the idea that people make choices not to take risks, and that these choices then limit their lives (unless they change them) is abhorrent and repugnant. These people, then, must be protected from themselves and taken care of by others who know better then them, what is good for them.

What we are dealing with now, in the political landscape, is worse, even, than the attempt to generate class warfare. It is much more damaging. It is the introduction of a new domestic colonialism, with its own noblesse oblige. Those without formal education, the requisite job skills, and a lack of relationship-building and decision-making skills, are the new “primitives.” The new idiot class that has to be care taken and provided for because of its innate incompetence. With all the resources available to people in this culture, it is not only preposterous to engage in this orgy of victim-mongering, it is shameful and racist. And add to this, the coordinated effort to demonize successful people and organizations (and guilt them into supporting a massive expansion of entitlements) and you have a perfect prescription for dulling this society into mediocrity.

What we are dealing with now is tricky. In my clinical practice it was very hard to help people see how those who had been so “nice” to them could have done them so much harm. It’s like being molested by the clergy. Remember that those who are doing things for you and to you, which are “for your own good,” usually have the evilest intent.

In the midst of our economic meltdown and our political “transformation,” I’ve had an epiphany: I am, without a doubt, one of the luckiest, most privileged people in the world. This realization came about, a few weeks ago, during a fairly pedestrian task that I have probably done, a few thousand times.

On a beautiful sunny Sunday, Arleah and I decided to take the mule (Kawasaki, not animal) and ride down to the mailbox and get the paper. About half-way down, I was struck by how green and spectacular everything was looking that day. The trees were brighter than ever and the mountains seemed taller than I had ever seen them before. All of a sudden, I found myself tearing up and appreciating all the important things in my life. The dogs were running around freely, clearly enjoying themselves. I’ve always been touched by their freedom (they’ve never been on leashes); don’t quite know why it moves me the way it does. We get to live in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and the community has welcomed us back, with open arms, since we decided to spend more and more of our time here.

I was then struck by the fact that I have always loved my work. I’ve done five or six different professions by now, and they’ve all been about teaching people new things and changing their lives. And none of them have ever felt like “work.”

I then looked over at Arleah and was flooded with feelings. We’ve been together now for almost 32 years. I can’t remember a time before her and I can’t envision a life without her. Her smile and her laugh have always made me feel good with myself and with the world. I have not only always loved her; I have always admired her – her insights, her commitment to her clients, and most of all, her commitment to her own growth. That we found each other has always seemed miraculous to me. Things are good!

I have always, and probably always will, think deeply and constantly about where our world is going, and how it can be better. But I also realize that there has to be some tempering of that. I know now where that comes from.

Morrie