Over the last few years, I’ve been asked a lot about loyalty. Usually, the question is – “Whatever happened to it?” And my answer has been – “If you mean the notion of loyalty that we’ve historically grown up with, it’s gone.” One of the unintended consequences of the accelerated rate of change we live with has been a significant redefinition of the concept of loyalty.

The old notion of loyalty is based on a backward looking sense of obligation. That is, a feeling of indebtedness for deeds done in the past, that were helpful, sometimes invaluable, and most often, brought meaning and great importance to a relationship. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, nor should this notion be summarily discarded. The problem with it is that it is no longer a sufficient reason for maintaining a relationship, personal or professional, moving into the future. And the reason for this is the amazing rate of change, and the qualitative nature of change. Business success, for example, is now predicated on an understanding of some fundamental shifts in customer behavior, employee expectations, and workplace dynamics. Consumers are no longer impressed with brand names or torrents of information. They do their own research, and they’re either ruthlessly price driven, or unforgivingly insistent upon a transparent, honest, and fully engaged relationship. They are certainly not impressed by traditional salesmanship.

Employees now come to work insisting on a recognition of their lifestyle choices and requirements, and a need to have input into decisions that impact their work milieu. Some of this is realistic and quite appropriate, and some of this is right out of la-la land. Either way, it is very different, and demands a different approach to the workforce.

And the workplace itself is undergoing nothing short of a revolutionary shift. Not only are we becoming a nation of service providers and information processors, we are, less and less, working in geographically centralized, behemoth office spaces with hundreds (if not thousands) of colleagues. Working virtually is spreading at an astonishing rate, and there are major corporations that have as much as one-third of their employees working at home or in small pods at a significant distance from the head office. And this does not include the millions of small businesses that integrate work and home, and have fully leveraged telecommuting.

All these changes have had a profound impact on the old notion of loyalty. The saddest, and most troubling, is the fact that those who helped build many businesses are often not those who will create their future. Not because they are untalented or unskilled; but because they choose not to change. The problem arises when they expect to play a continued role in the organization because of what they contributed in the past. Their challenge is to commit to a constant process of re-invention, or to become irrelevant.

This situation creates some very hard conversations. I have participated in hundreds of these interactions, and it never gets easier. And it is not solely the difficulty in telling someone that there is no longer a role for them in the organization, it is more so, the understandable dismay and bitterness over the feeling of having ones past contributions being discounted. There is no way (at least that I’ve discovered) to make this conversation feel good, for anybody. It needs to be lived through, and it is necessary. It may seem harsh, insensitive and even brutally non-caring. It is, quite to the contrary, just the opposite. People need to know and realize that their choice not to change has enormous consequences. And the only thing that I’ve seen that brings about this recognition is an emotional shock. Talking about changing, in the abstract, has absolutely no impact.

A few years ago, I worked with a client that made the decision to eliminate most administrative support people, and replace their function with technology. One of the people eliminated was a crackerjack administrative assistant, who had been with the company since its inception. Out of a feeling of loyalty, the CEO created a position for her. She became the “coffee lady,” and her job was to clean up the break area and keep it supplied.

This was not enough work to keep anyone busy for forty hours a week, nor did it fit her capabilities. Instead of being confronted with the need for her to modify and upgrade her skill base, she was accommodated and kept around. It was humiliating, and everyone, including her, experienced it as such. Tragically, when the company later downsized, she was out on the street, unemployable, and ended up on welfare.

So, what’s the new loyalty about? The new loyalty is based on mutual growth. It requires both parties in a relationship to have a continual commitment to their own growth, if they expect a commitment to each other. If the growth commitment continues, the loyalty is there. If the growth commitment ceases the relationship is at risk. This is true for personal, one-on-one relationships, as well as for relationships between individuals and companies. It has been my experience, that high growth people leave low growth (or no growth) companies and that high growth companies leave low growth people behind.

Underlying the re-invention that I mentioned earlier, growth is fundamentally about continual self-assessment. An assessment of your current skills, knowledge base, attitudes, and risk level. And the question accompanying this assessment is critical – “Is who I am, and what I’m doing, in touch with and in harmony with the world around me?” This involves facing disappointments in yourself and embracing and utilizing these disappointments to go to the next level of growth and development. Acknowledging disappointments is a vote of confidence – in yourself and in others. It is also an act of courage, and a necessity for getting that loyalty that we are all seeking.

Much of the current, often heated debate, over health insurance and health care reform, seems to focus, almost exclusively, on financial issues, service guarantees, care restrictions, and policy control. These are certainly important issues, but from my perspective, they overlook the fundamental question, which has the most profound implications for the future of our culture. And that question is – “Should Health Care and/or Health Insurance, Be A Right Or A Privilege?” Should the provision of health care services be a guarantee – an explicit part of the social contract – or should it be an available service, shaped and defined by market forces, and controlled by the relationship between the provider and the consumer? The answer to this question will determine a lot more than whether or not we get a “public option,” or to what degree there are cuts in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

This critical question spins off two more vital questions:
“If Health Care Is A Right, What Are The Implications Of Further Extending Entitlements In Our Society,” and “If It’s A Privilege, What Are The Implications For Social Cohesion And Cultural Unity?”

As is the fashion these days, let me be real transparent – I do not believe that health care and/or health insurance is a right. I believe that there is no constitutional imperative dictating it, and that, like other social needs – housing, food, jobs – you get what you deserve based on the choices you make and the risks you’re willing to take. I am a minimalist when it comes to government and social guarantees because I believe it gives individuals the greatest opportunities for self-realization and success (as well as self-destruction and failure). And as I’ve written before, both, I believe, are essential for maximizing human potential and freedom.

But, after having taken that position, I have to admit that I have serious concerns about the shredding of our social fabric, if we unequivocally reject a “public option” and all that goes with it. I wonder if we have gone so far down the entitlement path and so raised people’s expectations to be care-taken by entities outside themselves, that we could be on the verge of creating an irreparable schism in our culture.

I cannot remember a time in my adult life, when so many people in public life promulgated so many entitlements, and offered to remove so many risks from people’s lives. And this comes from individuals of a myriad of political persuasions. I think it is fascinating, that as Obama’s poll ratings fall, a lot of folks seem to agree with him that health care is a right, and that we need to do everything possible, to remove risks from our lives. I have never believed, as some on the right do, that Obama is anti-business (just look at how much money and subsidies have gone to Wall Street). I do believe that he and his administration are anti-risk, and are doing everything in their power to punish risk-takers and risk-taking. This culture was built by people who put everything on the line, and created opportunities for the masses that never before existed in the history of the species.

There is a very interesting connection here, between one of the causes of our current economic crisis, and the debate over health care reform. Beginning in the 1970’s a movement began in the Congress to “open up” the single family housing market to a broader spectrum of the population. Basically, to people who heretofore couldn’t afford to buy a house. This movement culminated in enormous legislative pressure on Fannie May and Freddie Mac (and the banking sector in general) to lend money to people, many of whom had no chance in hell of ever paying it back. What do you think drove this movement? The belief that every American deserved to live in a single family home. That they had a right to it. So, de facto, home ownership became a right. And we have now seen what a mess this created.

This extension of “rights” raises a very knotty question, that, I believe we are right up against, as a society. “Where Do Rights End, And Individual Responsibilities Begin?” About a week ago, I was invited to a showing of Michael Moore’s film, “Sicko.” It is an extraordinarily well done piece of propaganda on the ills (no pun intended) of the American health care system (and our culture in general), and a celebration of the systems in England, France, Canada, and Cuba. It was fascinating to see what was highlighted, since I have a fairly extensive knowledge of three out of four of the countries (I lived in England, had a Canadian business partner, and traveled extensively in France and went to school with many French people). I was particularly aware of two things during the movie. First, the unquestioning scorn of American culture on the part of many in the audience. And second, my own reaction, especially during the segment on the French system. As I watched the depiction of house calls by French doctors, free medical care for everyone, in-home parenting assistance for new mothers, almost free childcare, and on and on, I found myself, at first, feeling like – “Damn, this is amazing! Maybe this total nanny state stuff isn’t so bad after all.” It was very seductive. And on the surface, very appealing. Then I remembered what it was like, to spend time in France, and work with French people. The infrastructure there makes New York look like utopia, the government bureaucracy makes you nostalgic for the California DMV, and getting anywhere is a nightmare because almost every day some group is on strike or demonstrating for more time off or more money for doing less. The unemployment rate is sky high, productivity is low, and the slums outside Paris are continually at a flashpoint.

Every form of social organization has its tradeoffs. The question we are facing now is what tradeoffs are we, as Americans, willing to live with? In our system, there are clear winners and losers; mostly determined by choices within their control; sometimes, unfortunately, by forces outside their control. In other societies (third world countries), there are winners and losers, mostly determined by forces outside of most people’s control. And then there are cultures (like the Scandinavian countries) where equalizing outcome has so leveled the society that winning and achieving is a moot issue. I believe, by the way, that losing, in our culture, is a unique opportunity to learn, grow, and develop.

Finally, on a practical level, there is no doubt in my mind that our health care and insurance systems need some changing. There is also no doubt in my mind that the changes can best be made through lessening regulation and controls, not by increasing them. We need, for example, to completely sever the ties between employment and health insurance; we need to remove geographical restraints on writing insurance coverage; we need a loser pay reform of our tort system; and we need to dramatically expand the health care services that can be provided by non-M.D.’s, which would have the most profound impact on primary care of anything that has been done for the last fifty years.

But, before we do anything practical, we need to decide what kind of society we want to live in for the foreseeable future. That’s what the big debate ought to be about.

For almost all of my professional life, I have helped people understand and deal with change. Why they struggled with it; why it was so difficult to deal with; and why it was so scary. I have created a unique body of intellectual property around “familiars” and the relationship between change and loss. And, I believe, I’ve done some pioneering work around the connection between success and loss, and why so many people sabotage their success. All the while, unbeknownst to all but a few people, I didn’t know how to turn on a computer, or send a simple email.

I covered up these deficits with a pretty good story; even taught it as a strategy to make busy professionals more efficient and effective. Why would I waste my time in front of a computer, slaving away at a keyboard, when I had assistants that I paid handsomely to relieve me of the details of life? So, I persisted in writing out my outlines, power points, etc., in longhand, on notepaper, and faxing them to my executive assistant. I even had my assistant read all my emails and fax the legit ones to me, so that I could write out my responses and fax it back to her. At least, I reasoned, I was using some technology. (It just took me five minutes to figure out how to underline “was” and “some.” I wish I could think like the people who design computers.) I have been ashamed to admit the latter to many people, until I had dinner a few weeks ago with a former client and member of my generation, who confessed to the same modus operandi. (The italics only took me a couple of minutes.) We had a good laugh. It was like two adolescent boys mutually discovering that they kept the same magazine under their mattress. This lead to a great discussion of how our grown children have shamed us into “texting.” (My youngest son won’t answer his cell phone and has no landline.)

I grew up in an upper middle class professional home. My father was a dentist and my mother was a college educated manager in an upscale retail chain. They were the first in their generation to leave the ghetto and homestead the suburbs of Chicago. Making it, in their peer group, meant doing nothing around the house. In my household, extreme manual labor was watering the lawn. And a screwdriver was a high tech instrument. There was always great angst about who would drag the garbage can the fifty feet to the alley. We had a lawn service and anything that required maintenance around the house, was fixed by one of my father’s patients. My job, growing up, was to do well in school, and to learn how to argue.

It has been very hard for me to admit that a lot of technology scares the hell out of me. And even harder to admit, that as smart as I am, I have been convinced, until very recently, that I could not figure out how to use a computer (or plumb the depths of my cell phone). When I finally did come to terms with that reality, I started doing what I have taught people to do for years. I faced my fears and took some risks. Two days ago, in preparation for a phone conference, I developed a talking points document, saved it in my computer, emailed the client, and (to my utter amazement) attached the document, hit “send,” and had a great meeting. It worked! I can’t tell you how good it felt, and how proud of myself I was. It was right up there with re-setting the clock in my car, last spring.

In addition to all this being a great personal triumph, I now have a new, profound respect for people who struggle with change. I definitely “feel their pain.” And I can, in good conscience, recommended facing your fears, “fessing up,” and taking those risks.

Morrie

It wasn’t your imagination – there was no June newsletter. Somehow the month got away from me. There was an announcement of the release of a new book by a good friend and colleague, Mark Deo. I appreciate the positive response of many of you to Mark’s book. He has a finely tuned understanding of marketing, shared by very few others. So, here’s the July newsletter. Enjoy!

The prolonged economic crisis that we’re experiencing is putting a spotlight on what works and what doesn’t work in organizational and business life. In particular, it is highlighting the characteristics of people who understand what has shifted in the global economy, and what they need to do in order to assure the survival and growth of their companies. In other words, they “get it.” They have three critical characteristics:

1. They are change adaptive
2. They are willing to put relationships at risk
3. They are comfortable being judgmental

Change adaptive people understand that all change involves loss. Good or bad, change is a process of identifying and coming to terms with the give-ups that accompany the gains implicit in any change (even if the gains involve simply holding on to what you’ve got). The pace of change, in our time, is not only brutally fast (and continuing to accelerate), it is forcing a lowering of expectations, at all levels of the culture, that most people alive today, have never experienced. I cannot remember a time when I have seen so many people, from so many different walks of life and socioeconomic strata, consciously lowering their expectations and re-ordering their priorities.

Change adaptive people also have the ability to manage their emotions. And I want to emphasize manage, not control, their emotions. They let themselves experience painful and uncomfortable feelings, and they understand that these feelings are as necessary and helpful, as pleasant and happy feelings. They assume that all feelings are transitory and survivable. On the contrary, change resistant people believe that “bad” feelings will last forever.

People who are willing to put relationships at risk believe that individual integrity is the foundation of healthy relationships, and strong and vital organizations. They believe that if you fail to respect yourself, you will fail to respect others, and ultimately, fail to respect any group that you’re a part of. In the final analysis, they believe that any relationship worth having is worth leaving.

In this economic climate, it is very tempting to make compromises; particularly if these compromises appear to insure your survival. And certainly some compromises are understandably worth making. One compromise you never want to make is around key relationships that drive your business. That is, relationships with your most significant stakeholders – leaders, employees, customers, lenders, or vendors. Getting into bed with the wrong people can lead very quickly to a fatal disease. And any relationship that violates a core value will sooner or later (usually sooner) corrode and poison an organization from within.

The willingness to be judgmental presupposes clarity of individual core values. This insures complete alignment between an individual and an organization, and eliminates the likelihood of internal sabotage. Given the economic pressures and the fierce, ever increasing competition, the last thing a business needs, these days, is well paid saboteurs, who undermine business momentum by constantly contradicting the values flow of an organization.

One of the least understood prerequisites for a strong, stable, and vital organization is an absolute certainty, amongst its members, of what is right and what is wrong, in all significant individual and organizational behaviors. This certainty provides all stakeholders with the structure and boundaries that are as reassuring and comforting to adults, as discipline is to children. Without this certainty, people flounder, get de-focused, and act out destructively in order to get the limits set. Judgmentalism, in its most helpful manifestation, is the commitment to tell people where you stand and what you believe is acceptable, so that they can decide where they stand and what they find acceptable. This allows people to make choices that are good for them, precisely because they are put up against a clear and measurable standard. No one achieves values clarity in a vacuum. All clarity emerges from the context of a well-articulated and firmly supported system of beliefs.

If this is what people believe who “get it,” how do we know when people are not “getting it?” This is critical information in building a culture that will not only survive this economic crisis, but will thrive in its aftermath. There are a number of criteria which I have come to call “The Big Three.” When the following behaviors are being exhibited, people aren’t getting it:

1. You change the way you are, when you’re around someone
2. You give people feedback and they tell you why you’re wrong
3. You have the same conversation over and over and over again

If you feel like you can’t be yourself around a person you work with, and you need them to make some changes in what they’re doing, there’s a misconnect between how they see themselves and how the prevailing culture sees them. And this usually means that an unacknowledged special deal has been struck, which is destructive for everyone involved, and for the company as a whole.

There’s lots of ways that you can be told that your feedback is wrong. You can be told directly (which is rare); you can be told that you’re the only one that’s ever felt that way; you can be yabutted to death; or, trickiest of all, you can be readily agreed with, but nothing changes. All of these are conveying the same message – “I have no intention of changing who I am, so either take it or leave it.”

When you have the same conversation over and over again, you’re missing the message being sent; which is – “Change is so frightening for me, that you’re going to have to raise the ante, to help me get through my fears.” If the pain of not changing is less than the perceived pain of changing, nothing happens.

If you want to help people “get it” and fit into growing, learning, and constantly evolving business cultures, you need to help them identify and begin to grieve and say good-bye to the necessary losses that come with change. In essence, you need to help them say good-bye to who they used to be and welcome who they can become.

I agree with our Attorney General that we are way overdue for an honest discussion of race. So let’s have one. But before we do, let’s get rid of the dishonest, politically correct rhetoric that has dominated the dialogue so far, and deal with reality:

There are no “minority groups” in America. There are only groups that have succeeded and there are groups that have failed. If we truly had “minority groups,” we’d have affirmative action programs for Orthodox Jews – that’s a true minority.

The model for success in our culture has always been, and continues to be set, by middle and upper middle class white folks. If you want to be successful, you act like them, or you learn how to deal with them.

Maintaining your “cultural integrity” is the road to poverty. As in business, staying the way you’ve always been will guarantee you what you’ve always gotten. Culture is an evolving concept, dominated by change.

If you want to succeed, you better know the difference between values and rituals. Values are time immemorial principles that speak to the kind of world that one wants to live in. They are culturally neutral, people neutral, and situationally neutral. They apply to everyone and everything, and can evolve out of a myriad of backgrounds and cultures. Rituals are habits and learned behaviors that fit a specific time and place, and bring certain predictability to everyday life.

Success is all about assimilation; and assimilation is a prolonged process of loss. It is a loss of the rituals we grew up with; the habits that gave us great comfort because of their familiarity. It is not, and should never be, a loss of core values. It is, in fact, a discovery of those values in a context that, initially, may seem foreign and strange. Any society that has effectively shared its benefits with the majority of its citizens has required assimilation to a clearly understood norm. Whether or not we recognize it, that’s what we mean when we refer to the United States as a “melting pot.” Those societies that have failed to provide for their people (and have, in fact, brutalized and dehumanized them) are uniformly committed to segmentation and tribalism. You don’t need to be a cultural anthropologist to see this.

Successful people understand, mostly on an intuitive level, how to grieve. And they have integrated the grieving process into the repertoire of their skill sets. They long ago realized that to gain the benefits of the society they find themselves in, they would have to pay a price – they would have to sustain some losses. Over the course of three decades, I have worked with many successful African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other “minorities.” To a person, they have all had to identify and decide to leave behind parts of who they were, in order to become who they would like to be.

“Minorities” have struggled and continue to struggle in business, because they choose to hold onto habits, mannerisms, and ritualized behaviors that either puzzle or offend customers and clients. I have worked for many years with managers, executives, and business owners, in a myriad of industries, from Fortune 50 companies to family businesses of twenty people. And during those years, in hundreds of organizations, I have come across a handful of true bigots – individuals who discounted and dismissed people because of their race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. The rest were quite willing to give all comers the opportunity, given their willingness to act in a manner that was compatible with the values, norms, and language of the organization and its clientele. These employers didn’t always like everyone they hired, nor did they want to be their best friends. But they were willing to invest time, money, and other resources in their training and development. And after this investment, the return has been and continues to be, predominantly disappointing and poor. The vast majority of “minority” individuals who go thru this process choose not to use what they were taught, or go right out and use it in a manner that puts off the clientele.

I have met a number of the leaders and spokespersons for “minority” groups (and have seen most of them in the media). And I have always been impressed by the fact that, without exception, they speak the King’s English, they dress like Wall Street bankers, and they work a room of donors like Bill Clinton. And, yet, when the issue of accountability for irresponsible acts and reprehensible behavior arises, they exploit the victimization card in a heartbeat. This reaches its zenith in the intellectual apologies and rationalizations for criminal behavior. I have often wondered why these leaders don’t assume and insist that their followers act like them.

Making the choices I’m talking about and sustaining the concomitant losses is not easy. In fact, it is extraordinarily difficult and courageous. It means facing a slew of obstacles – family, friends, and subculture, and risking one relationship after another. I think of two individuals I worked with over the years, who have achieved much, faced very tough choices, and said goodbye to big chunks of their past.

One is a Black man in a managerial role in a large financial services company. He comes from humble roots, has siblings who have made poor choices in their lives, and has not had great encouragement to succeed, from the subculture he was raised in. He has an amazing commitment to his work (I don’t know anyone who works harder); he is an avid and lifelong learner; and he is a superb teacher.

What I admire and respect about him most, is his willingness to entertain information that is not only new, but even alien to what he has previously thought, and stay open and receptive to it. If it then makes sense to him, he incorporates it and uses it immediately to make changes in his life and the lives of others. This requires the courage to leave parts of him behind, which I’ve seen him do a number of times.

The other is a Hispanic woman who is a vice-president and key leader in a high-end retail business. When I first met her, she was a secretary/assistant, who struck me as having extraordinary insights into the people around her. As she steadily mustered the courage to share her insights with company executives, her talents were progressively rewarded and she rose rapidly through the ranks, to a senior management position. Her greatest struggle, as she gained more and more responsibility and authority, was not with the corporate hierarchy – they were consistently ahead of her in recognizing her readiness to move ahead. The most resistant obstacles were her family of origin, her subcultural ties, and her own internal battle to leave behind the role she had been raised to play. Those closest to her, with few exceptions, were not supportive – at best, they had resentful respect for her advancement. Her courage has always impressed me, and I have nothing but admiration for her commitment to continually take herself on – to steadfastly maintain her core values and let go of rituals that threatened to hold her back.

My grandfather was an Orthodox Jew. He went to temple every morning before he caught the bus to go to his job in the center of the city. His religion infused his life. He and my grandmother respected and observed the Sabbath, kept a kosher home, and lived a very modest life. He never learned how to drive, and never desired to own a car. He spoke English at work and to his grandchildren, but he was most comfortable speaking Yiddish. He saw much horror in his youth and experienced much loss and suffering in his life. And he never remembered a time when there wasn’t a virulent anti-Semitism.

My grandfather modeled, for me, the values that have permeated and directed my life – individual responsibility, accountability, a love of learning, and a drive to continually grow and succeed. But the greatest gift he gave me came during a conversation when I was a young man. I remember it vividly, because he was a man of few words, and rarely talked to us directly. He looked me straight in the eye and said – “If you want to be successful, don’t act like us.” His meaning was clear as a bell. And I have never forgotten his words.

I have tried, in my life, to never compromise my values. Honing to them has not always been easy; nor has it been easy to say goodbye to many of the rituals and customs I grew up with. There is some sadness mixed in with the growth and gratification, but the choices have been well worth it.

I hope, as a society, we can move beyond the clichés of identity politics, condescending caretaking, and “minority” victimization. We need to help people discover their value and their values and be able to move beyond their ritualistic constraints and disabling pasts. It has been my experience, that the ultimate act of courage is the willingness to overcome one’s history.

I have always considered Michael Jackson to be a tragic figure. And I mean “tragic” in the classical sense of the original Greek dramas, where an event, or series of events, once consummated, sets off an inevitable, lifelong pattern of choices and interactions that have a destructive, often fatal outcome. Everyone from media pundits to TV shrinks has noted Michael’s lack of a true childhood, and his rocket-like ascendancy to stardom. He has been labeled lately, a case of stunted or delayed development; a perpetual child in search of a true family. Much of this analysis has some truth. For me, though, the true tragedy lies in the reduction of Michael Jackson, from the earliest of times in his life, to a single characteristic – his uncanny ability to perform and absolutely captivate and galvanize an audience.

Over the years, I have worked with many superstars – fabulously successful business people, professional athletes, well-known entertainers and politicians. What has always struck me, about most of them, was their own definition of themselves. They all had reduced themselves to a single, admittedly extraordinary, characteristic. They were driven and shrewd, strong and fast, blindingly beautiful, or compellingly charismatic. This view of themselves, rarely extended beyond this characteristic. And this was, at one and the same time, their greatest strength and their saddest weakness. It caused them enormous internal torment, because if that characteristic was all they were, they could never have enough of it to reassure themselves that they were ok. I always remember a strikingly beautiful model/actress I worked with, that literally disfigured herself in one vain attempt after another, to “fix” features that she considered imperfect.

When I was in middle school, in the Jurassic period (the 1950’s), I was chosen to be one of forty students to go through a super-accelerated, “gifted” program at what we were told was the best public high school in the nation. The former Soviet Union had launched a satellite (Sputnik) and appeared to be way ahead of the U.S. in space exploration. Our reaction was to launch a national initiative to create a space program and fast track the development of space scientists. Our group of forty was some of the first participants in the program. We had all our core courses together for all four years of high school, with hand-picked faculty. The curriculum was designed at the top universities in the country and flown into our school on a regular basis. And we graduated from high school (after taking the requisite AP tests) as college juniors, with advanced placement in math, chemistry and physics.

We were continually told, when we were chosen, and all through the program, how smart and brilliant we were. We were intellectually and practically segregated from the other students, and our specialness, and that of the program we were in, was constantly reinforced. Our parents were flattered and we were thoroughly seduced by all the attention. The casualties from the program were numerous. In the years after graduation that I kept in touch with a number of people, there were a number of suicides and wasted lives. And I can only speculate at the number of participants who lead meaningless and empty lives. One of my friends in the program, an M.D., Ph.D. in his early twenties, has never had a meaningful relationship, to the best of my knowledge.

For reasons that I had no conscious awareness of at the time, I turned down the advanced placement opportunities and didn’t apply to the selected group of universities that we were targeted toward. I entered the University of Michigan as a regular freshman, and got my degree as an English major. I remember that many people felt sorry for me and my parents, and few understood my choices at the time.

Being smart has served me well, in a number of ways. It has helped me develop a unique career, using my various backgrounds in an atypical and creative manner. It has also been an albatross. It has narrowed my perspective on many aspects of life, and has lead me to be rigid and unbending, when flexibility and openness would have served me better. And it has been a consistent challenge to my ability to fully connect with, and become intimate with those I care most for.

So, what does this have to do with Michael Jackson and lessons about life? What it says to me, is to be careful, in your view of yourself, as well as your views of others, to not pigeon-hole people to their most outstanding characteristic. It is very tempting to do this with our children, with our friends, and with those that we admire and respect. And it may seem normal and positive in the short run. In the long run, it is no gift. We are a lot more than our most outstanding talent.

Morrie

Morrie

I don’t know anyone running or working in a business these days who isn’t somewhere on the frustration scale. What used to work, doesn’t anymore; or at best, it doesn’t get the results it used to. Almost everyone you talk to is interested in what you sell or provide, but now’s not the right time. And nobody has a clue when this horror show of an economy will turn around. So what can you do to turn your frustration into something productive? There are three “understandings” that have helped our clients decrease frustration and increase results:

1. You need to understand the difference between good anger and bad anger.
2. You need to understand the relationship between emotional clarity and intellectual clarity.
3. You need to understand the Trinity of Success – Feelings translated into thoughts, which are translated into action.

Good Anger involves the expression of disappointment and the raising of expectations. Both are votes of confidence. We are only disappointed in people who we believe are capable of doing better. Likewise, we only have higher expectations for those we truly care about, respect, and have confidence in. An important point here about expectations. We need to expect more from people than simply an increase in activity. If you work harder and longer at what you’ve always done, you’ll simply burn out quicker, with no increase in results. What we need to expect is an increase in self-information and conscious decision-making. Why are you doing what you’re doing? What does it have to do with all the changes around you? And how do all the decisions you make, line up with what you’re learning? I’m constantly amazed by how much unconscious decision-making dominates business behavior.

Bad Anger involves self-blaming, caretaking, and hostility. The biggest pitfall for successful people is the belief that they have done well because they have controlled everything in their environment. If they believe this, then struggling or failing means that they are totally at fault, and blaming themselves makes logical sense. There is a fine, but clear line, between self-analysis and self-blaming. It is the line between courage and masochism.

Caretaking occurs when expressing disappointment in others is too painful and uncomfortable for oneself. It is not only a form of self-sacrifice, but is ultimately a sacrifice of both parties. On a practical level, caretaking is the protection of people from their own choices, the demeaning of their capacities, and the destruction of their future.

Hostility involves a universal accusation from which there is no redemption. If all I tell you is that everything you do is wrong, there is nothing you can do to change. There is a big difference between telling someone that what they said to a client was inappropriate, and that every interaction they have with a client is a hopeless disaster. Without specificity, there is no hope. Without hope there is no change.

A very simple, but important point – Emotional clarity always precedes intellectual clarity. You do not think well if you are clueless about how you feel. I have seen more businesses ruined by emotionally confused and befuddled people, than any other single cause.

When you’re clear about how you feel, you get real clear about what you can do and what you can’t do; you make better decisions; you have no doubts about what you need from other people; and you have great credibility with others. These times require tough conversations and even tougher decisions. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to engage in these – with credibility and empathy – without coming from your heart, first, and your head, second.

Even as a non-Catholic, I’ve always been a believer in trinities. The one I’ve seen work best in business is: Feelings – Thoughts – Actions. In my formal education, I was taught to reverse the first two, but I never saw that work, either in academia or the real world.

Feelings come first, because that’s where our values come from. Something either feels right or it doesn’t. When you violate your values, your gut sends you an unmistakable message. But feelings, without the framework provided by our intellectual capacity, leave us no different or better off than before we recognized them. Thinking is the vehicle that organizes feelings and drives them toward action. Without action there is no way of measuring whether or not any change has occurred. The problem with most “help” in our culture is that it is devoid of any demand that people do something with their feelings and thoughts. Any one of these three, in isolation or in combination with only one of the other two, gets you no results, or results you wished you didn’t have.

The more I talk with people, travel the country, and experience the various information media, the more I am convinced that the vast majority of our populous is thoroughly fatigued by political fanaticism and has had it with massive and relentless polarization. People are beginning to sense and feel that both the Left and the Right are equally nuts, and are, in fact, cut from the same cloth.

It has become clear to me that when you cut through all the propaganda and palaver, both the Left and the Right are fundamentally about CONTROL. Very specifically, about controlling other people’s lives. You’ve heard about OPM, other people’s money. This is about OPL, other people’s lives. The Left is about removing all pain, struggles, and failure from our lives and has little or no trust in our ability to learn from our experience. The Right is about dictating personal morality and decision-making, and shares the Left’s low trust in people. High control, low trust. Sounds like somebody thinks we are incapable idiots, needing constant supervision and direction. The Left loves to catastrophize and frighten people into adopting their belief system. The Right relies on shaming people into adopting their doctrine. Neither one trusts people to adapt when they feel the need to change and neither has much use for people’s feelings, instincts, and intuition. It has been my experience that the vast majority of people do not wish to live in a cesspool or trash heap; they respect and value life in all its forms; they know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil; and they most assuredly realize that a lot of life is about making tough, uncomfortable, and often painful decisions.

They don’t need to be intellectually terrorized into caring about the environment, nor do they need religious dogmatists to tell them what their values are. I believe that the great middle ground of America will not destroy itself (or the planet) and is perfectly capable of taking care of itself and getting the information it needs to do so. And I also believe that the great middle wants leaders who have common sense, who talk with them (and not down to them), and who trust them to be individually responsible and accountable for what they do.

Lastly, I believe that the country may be ripe and ready for a political movement that is based on some simple, but powerful set of values that transcends the hysteria of hobby-horse issues that both the Left and the Right are currently exploiting. In my next newsletter, I’ll lay out these values and talk about how we can, hopefully, move beyond the polarizing paralysis of global warming, world peace, abortion, and gay rights.

One of the strange gifts of this economic meltdown is a renewed appreciation for what I have and for the comfort and predictability of the routines in my life. I have always valued the important relationships with family, friends, and clients, but I have been keenly aware of relegating the routine, pedestrian activities surrounding these relationships to a secondary role. For over thirty years, I have chosen to wrap my professional life in travel – to be gone most of the time. I have kept myself extraordinarily busy and have worked at an exhausting and breakneck pace. Sometimes I think I made the right choices; sometimes I have regrets.

I’m not so busy now. I could manufacture more things to do, but I know they would be make-work. I’m busy doing a number of things to try to create opportunities and deal with the changes brought about by the recession. But I have also come to terms, with no little struggle, with the reality that some stuff is simply out of my control. I may be smart, creative, and talented, but I’m not an alchemist. I’m struck, again and again, by the paradox of our current dilemma – we’re all cutting back and we all want everyone else to spend their money on us.

So, I have more time on my hands. And I’m spending it at, or around home. Arleah and I have become real homebodies. It’s a new experience for me. Most of the time I like it. Some of the time it feels weird and strange, like I should be doing something “productive.”

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the lives of my grandparents and parents. My father’s parents had hard lives. They escaped from Russia with little more than the clothes on their backs. They worked long hours in harsh conditions and considered it a privilege to do so. And when they got enough money to buy half of a two-flat, they thought they had died and gone to heaven. Nothing pleased my grandmother more than cooking a gargantuan meal, and nothing pleased my grandfather more than sitting in his modest living room watching his grandchildren play and bicker.

My father worked like a mule to put himself through school. We grew up listening to stories of his pulling a rickshaw at the 1938 World’s Fair. My mother worked outside the home and was also a full-time homemaker and caretaker for her mother. When they got enough money to move out of apartments, we moved into a single family home – modest by today’s standards, but a crowning achievement for the children of immigrants. My mother has always said that she felt like a queen in that house. The whole family watching television together left my parents with an enormous feeling of pride and satisfaction. (Grandma loved wrestling – no one could convince her that it was fake.)

I’ve come a long way and I’m very grateful. Looking back has helped me move forward. I strongly recommend it.

Morrie

There has been much discussion these days about the role and value of coaching for business people. Many questions have been raised. What exactly is coaching? How does it differ from mentoring and training? How “personal” should it be? What can it accomplish?

The best way I’ve been able to answer these questions is to write up case studies that capture my work with some clients, in a modality that I’ve come to call Breakthrough Coaching. The following case study has been particularly helpful to a number of clients:

Breakthrough Coaching is a methodology for achieving sustainable behavior change, by helping people make connections between counter-productive patterns of orchestrating relationships and powerful, but seemingly unrelated feelings. On an emotional-behavioral level, it is analogous to reconnecting neurons whose linkage has been severed, thereby creating an energy and movement that has been frozen and paralyzed.

The power and impact of making the connection can best be illustrated by sharing a case study.

A few years ago I was engaged to coach the founder and CEO of a company that outsourced a number of important functions for service-driven businesses. He was very bright, articulate, hard-driving, and innovative – so much so that he invented a technology that took his industry to an entirely new level of effectiveness and achievement. In addition, he had a kind of boyish charm and appealing klutziness. The widely shared joke about him was that you could always tell what he had had for lunch by simply looking at his tie.

Unfortunately, he also was a bully who regularly abused those who worked most closely with him. He asked for their input and then ignored it; he demeaned them in public forums; and he constantly compared them unfavorably to their respective predecessors. Like most bullies, he would then unexpectedly and spontaneously turn around and very warmly go out of his way to do something very helpful and caring for one of his direct reports.

Before I arrived on the scene, he had had a number of coaching relationships which focused on the negative impact of his abusive behavior on key leaders (and the organization’s culture as a whole), the confusion and chaos that his mixed messages created, and the self-talk and rationalizations he engaged in to justify his behavior (i.e. people he depended upon were constantly letting him down and failing to meet his expectations). He knew his thinking and rationalizing were faulty and he was very much aware of the devastating impact of his outburst, tirades, and “lectures.” When push came to shove, he just couldn’t help himself.

He had worked with prior coaches on changing his self-talk, on keeping silent for prescribed periods of time during senior management meetings (allowing his direct reports to make their contributions without interruption and criticism), and a number of “visioning” exercises geared toward creating a sense of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of his abuse. All of these strategies worked – for a few months. And then, as he put it, an overwhelming rage and venom would just shoot out of him, most often taking him by surprise.

Our first breakthrough occurred when I asked him what the payoff was for his abusive behavior. His first response was that there was none. His key people were angry at him, thoroughly disgusted, and wanted to get as far away from him as possible. They thought about leaving the company, reconsidered, and most stayed for a surprising length of time (an issue for a separate discussion).

I explained that “payoff” had little to do with a positive outcome, but had everything to do with an outcome that had deeply familiar feelings for him. Feelings that he knew well and knew how to deal with. So I asked him how he usually felt after he acted abusively. He first responded that he felt regretful, sorry that he had treated someone else so badly. He then said that after the regret, he would find himself sitting behind his desk feeling alone, isolated, and without a friend in the world. I asked him if he had felt that way at any time earlier in his life. He responded, “a lot.”

As we discussed this pattern on a number of occasions, he made a feeling connection that had been a mystery to him, heretofore. He saw and felt the purpose behind his seemingly inexplicable behavior – he abused and mistreated people so that he could precisely feel alone, isolated, and abandoned. To say the least, it made no logical sense and it certainly felt awful. But it was predictable and he knew how to deal with it. Without anyone having a clue, he suffered in silence. This was his terrible secret.

You don’t have to be a master sleuth to reconstruct my client’s personal history. His father was an unhappy, embittered soul – an immigrant fleeing persecution in his native land. He was unhappy with his work, his marriage, and his life in general. And he took out his misery on his children. He abused them verbally and physically, and finally threw my client out of the house when he was fifteen. My client spent the next eight years roaming the country, living out of a very used car, and surviving by his wits. He learned many skills and got an extraordinary life-education. He learned all of this by himself. And mostly, he learned how to be alone.

Our second breakthrough occurred when I asked my client if he would be willing to share the connection he had made with his leadership team. He agreed to try it. It’s important to point out that this was not to be an apology. He had done that numerous times. This was a gut level disclosure of a feeling connection that had enormous meaning for him. It was risky and courageous. And the impact on his team was profound. Everyone was emotionally touched and moved. But most significantly, the disclosure closed the gap – the gap between my client and other people. Something became possible that was both feared and desired. Other people could actually get close without posing a threat. And he began to learn that he did not have to suffer in silence and be all alone.

Establishing feeling connections allows people to make different choices. In a sense, they take people off automatic pilot and give them conscious control of their decisions and their lives. My client’s abusive behavior significantly decreased. He regressed at times, but what was different was a conscious recognition of what he was doing and why he was doing it. Years later that feeling connection is very much a part of his life and his every decision and behavior.

I am struck, most recently, by the nature of the debate over our economic crisis, and its focus on the amount of money being spent and whether or not it will work. Not that these are inconsequential issues. The amount of money is sobering, if not horrifying. And I join every other soul on the planet in being extremely hopeful that this socioeconomic nightmare ends. But I am equally concerned, if not more so, by a different question – what are the unintended consequences of the underlying values, assumptions, and philosophy driving the totality of all the “rescue” plans?

I have been in the business of helping people and solving problems for almost forty years. In that time, three lessons have stuck with me the most:

I don’t know if the rescue plans proposed by the Obama administration will work. I do know that they are well on their way to creating an even more monstrous sense of entitlement than we currently have. Last week, the administration added three new “rights” to our constitutional tapestry – health care, higher education, and single family housing.

We need to understand that as soon as something becomes a “right,” individual responsibility, initiative, commitment, and investment are degraded and abandoned. The receiver of these “rights” is diminished and the provided is exploited. We learned, during the height of our experiment with welfare, that the system created resentment and bitterness in the recipients – not gratitude – and further solidified the culture of poverty. Is this further erosion of individual responsibility, the problem we want to deal with when we recover from this crisis?

Pain and struggle, whether our own or someone else’s, is difficult to tolerate. At times it is so intolerable and intractable that we just want it to end, no matter what we need to do or what the price may be. I learned early in my career as a psychotherapist, a very counter-intuitive lesson. The more I could distinguish between my pain and the pain of my clients, the more helpful I was, and the more rapidly and effectively they took charge of their lives. The more I identified with my clients’ pain and eradicated the boundaries between them and me, the less they grew and the less they took responsibility for their lives.

It is extraordinarily painful and humiliating to lose a job, go bankrupt, or lose a house. And all calamities leave us with a gut-wrenching question – “What do I do now and what changes do I need to make?” Having to face this question leaves one with the opportunity to develop the skills that underpin adaptability to change or to give up and become marginal to the culture. You have a fifty-fifty shot. If you’re rescued from the situation, you have no shot. You learn nothing and your unraveling is guaranteed.

The same is true for risk. Insulating people from risk and protecting them from failure, guarantees perpetual failure. Even worse, it erodes the soul and flatlines the spirit.
Some years ago, I spent time in two countries that had taken caretaking and social engineering to its zenith – Denmark and Finland. In Denmark, government bureaucrats scoured the streets trying to find people who looked like they had given up and “needed help.” They picked them up and gave them everything they needed. It goes without saying, that this cycle was perpetual. In Finland, life had become so predictable and so free of risk (and possibilities) that bands of children roamed the streets of Helsinki, drunk out of their minds. One evening in Helsinki, Arleah and I had dinner with two bankers, a man and a woman. During dinner the woman confided to us that she very much wanted to buy a new car, could afford to do so, and was choosing not to. The reason – her colleagues, her friends, and her family would deeply resent it and shun her, because they couldn’t afford it and would feel that her getting one was grossly unfair.

I learned from these experiences (and many others) that raising the floor inevitably lowers the ceiling. I also learned that the strength and vitality of the American culture was the opportunity given to our citizens to rise to the heights of success and to utterly screw-up and ruin your life, with little or no interference. Both are critical.

So, when you react to and evaluate the proposed solutions to the mess we’re in now, don’t simply ask yourself whether or not you think that they’ll work. Ask yourself, also, what they might create in its place and if that’s the next problem you want to deal with.

Right after the first of the year I had one of those sobering, life-changing and fairly unexpected experiences. I went in for a routine treadmill stress test and came out with a suspected cardiac problem. Two weeks later I was the proud owner of a chromium stent in my circumflex artery. I can’t say that I was totally surprised, since I suffer from Woody Allen Syndrome – any pain or ache between my diaphragm and neck is a sign of a total heart attack; and all headaches are indicative of brain cancer – but I was shook up and very scared. Being an incorrigible learner, I have kept track of my experience and wanted to share the major impacts it had on me:

The heart catheterization process (which followed two weeks after my stress test) was one of the weirdest, most surrealistic experiences I have ever been through. I was fully awake, felt very little pain or discomfort (except when my artery was expanded to insert the stent), and was engaged in conversation with my cardiologist, who was looking at TV monitors, explaining to me exactly what he was doing. About halfway through the procedure, he told me where the blockage was, how significant it was, and told me that I had a decision to make. “I can put a stent in right now; you can think about it and we can do it later; or we can look at other forms of treatment.” I asked him what he would do if he were on the table, instead of me. He replied that he would put the stent in right now. I told him to go ahead. In retrospect, I reconstructed the process I went through to arrive at my decision. Did I trust him? He seemed to know what he was doing and he had never given me any reason to doubt him. (I knew him personally as well as professionally.) Then it dawned on me. This had only partially to do with him. The real question was – did I trust myself to be able to deal with however this might change my life? The answer was affirmative. Arleah and I have written about this definition of trust in our discussions of adult intimate relationships and it now hit me that it’s true for all of life’s big decisions. Is it really about other people, or is it about you?

Within minutes of being taken to my recovery room, my body felt pretty good and felt progressively better as the time went on. Except for the nasty catheter inside me and a dull ache in my groin (where the sheath had been inserted that allowed access to my heart), I felt surprisingly alert and energized.

My emotions, on the other hand, were a wreck. I felt like I had been irreparably altered and was very frightened about the future. I was receiving tons of information, written and verbal, about blockages, stents, recovery, lifestyle, diet, ad infinitum. I remember distinctly one interaction with my cardiologist, who was telling me how lucky I was that I had only one “distinct blockage,” and that the rest of the artery (as well as the other two), looked great. He also said that I’d be not only as good as new, but better than new and that I’d have a lot more energy (which has certainly proven true). However, that’s not what I was feeling. I had two strong, overpowering feelings – I had never felt so fragile and vulnerable before; and I felt like damaged goods. Like everyone important to me – Arleah, my kids, my friends, and my clients – would all look at me differently and not positively.

I tried sharing some of my feelings with the nurses and the aides. They wanted no part of it. Some actually acted like I wasn’t even talking. I finally blurted out some of what was going on with me to the cardiologist. He actually listened and thought that it would be a great idea to have a kind of “emotional or psychological protocol” for patients recovering from heart procedures. After this interaction and many talks with Arleah, I not only feel better, I feel whole. My new physical energy level is now accompanied by an emotional optimism that I’ve not felt in quite a while. The lesson for me, and I hope, many of you – Don’t let those feelings stay disconnected, no matter what’s happening with the rest of you. Arleah has a great saying – “You don’t always get your way, but you always get your say.”

Welcome! – To what I hope is the first of many issues of my newsletter. Initially, I plan to get it out monthly. If I get really ambitious, it’ll come out twice a month. And if I get wild and crazy, it’ll be weekly – then I can call it Mondays with Morrie.

Each newsletter will have three sections: Business Tips, Political and Cultural Observations (my spin on PC), and Personal Notes. My intention is to provide useful and usable information about the workplace; to put our personal and work lives in a broad societal context (“the big picture”); and finally, to share the emotional, gut-level impact of these times on myself, in hopes that they will resonate for and be of help to others, particularly in understanding and making sense of your own experience. I promise to be direct, honest, open and often provocative, and I very much welcome your feedback.

If you’ve noticed employees behaving oddly these days, it’s probably not your imagination. Two things are happening with the workforce that are undeniable and that demand different strategies and reactions from business leaders at all levels.

Employees are scared. They’re afraid of their companies failing, of losing their jobs, their homes, and everything they’ve worked long and hard for.

In addition to feeling scared, huge numbers are feeling like failures. With few exceptions, nobody’s hitting their targets (even after multiple re-settings in a downward direction) and they’re constantly reminded of it in meeting after meeting where they’re confronted with embarrassing numbers or given patronizing and hollow pep talks.

How do we know they’re scared? One of two types of behaviors is sweeping through the workplace. Workers are quietly withdrawing to wherever they can hide out – their offices, break rooms, behind computers – seeking safety from any kind of interaction or inquiry. They’re placating, obsequious, almost painfully polite.

On the other hand, the amount of childish squabbling and pointless conflict has escalated to baffling proportions. In many companies, the culture has all the feel of a middle-school lunchroom instead of a dynamic place of business. Pettiness predominates, rumor-mongering is epidemic, and triangulation is the rule of the day.

You don’t need to be a psychotherapist to figure out what’s going on. Our earliest responses to fear are two-fold. First, we go quiet and hope no one notices us. Second, we lash out and try to hurt others. Both are in the service of trying to stay safe.

So what can we do to counter this unacknowledged underground movement? The following strategies have worked for us and many of our colleagues:

What he has had to develop is a new skill base involving self-disclosure, transparency, and vulnerability. There’s nothing inherently wrong with his historical skill base – it’s simply not enough anymore.

Having been through a number of recessions, what we’ve learned is that good times and high profits not only hide many sins, but also disguise a profound and damaging lack of personal and professional growth. It sometimes takes a challenging economy to show us that 80-90 percent of what has made us successful is also the cap on our future growth.

When I put on my cultural historian hat (my original training and work), I clearly see Obama’s election as the beginning of a new social contract for America, or at least the latest major revision. Our original social contract – minimizing government and maximizing individual independence – has been altered a number of times. The Federal Income Tax, The New Deal, The Civil Rights Movement, have all moved us away from a frontier ethic and toward greater and greater social engineering. From a politically neutral perspective, all these revisions of the social contract have created both more opportunity and more constriction. The farther away, as a culture, that we get from survival, the more inclusive we become and the more self-destructive we become. We have opened the tent to literally millions of people and have created a standard of living and quality of life, for the masses of people, unmatched in human history. We have also created a gargantuan sense of entitlement and caretaking that could literally bankrupt us and devolve us into a second-rate country and a third-world culture. Obama’s election signals the possibility for the expansion of both options – increased inclusiveness and opportunity, and increased entitlement and self-destruction.

I have two major concerns about Obama and an Obama administration. First and foremost, I believe that he may very well be too bright, smart, and intellectually slick, to be an effective president. As a recovering intellectual (and one-time academic) nothing scares me more than all the adulation and praise for Obama’s intelligence and the intelligence of the people he has thus far picked to surround him. I shudder when I hear how “smart” all these folks are. I learned, long ago, through my years of formal education and college teaching, that there is nothing quite so dangerous and damaging as an intellectual with power. Intellectuals got us the schizophrenic conflict in Vietnam, a hopelessly convoluted tax code, a corporate and public welfare system that disincentivizes initiative and success, and a mass media and educational dinosaur that discourages dissent and creativity. I do not want a brilliant president. I want a president who is the master of the obvious and can get done what anyone with an average IQ knows is necessary to do.

Second, I am afraid that historical significance and practical realities have become so fused together, in the minds of so many, that expectations for Obama have become so exaggerated as to insure massive disappointment, bitterness, and ultimately, heightened cynicism.

A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to lecture in South Africa, a few months after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. The group I was a part of met with Mandela and heard him deliver one of his first public speeches. What he said was not what most people expected. He almost immediately lowered expectations, dismissed the possibilities of dramatic change, and strongly dissuaded his followers from looking for handouts and guarantees from a new government. It was a galvanizing talk and surprised everyone – black and white.

I know that Obama has said that the change he is promising will not come easily. He needs to say a lot more. He needs to say that his mandate is not about evening the score and righting past wrongs. If he fails to make this clear, his administration will simply usher in an orgy of investigations, litigation, and overbearing legislation. If he does, his tenure could begin a process of genuinely moving us toward new and productive solutions to our profound and challenging problems.

I believe that Obama is committed to putting the interests of the middle class at the top of his socio-economic pyramid. Whether this means the significant expansion of the nanny state or a true partnership of government and individual responsibility remains to be seen.

There have been very few times in my life when I’ve been bombarded with such strong and conflicting emotions. I’ve felt a paralyzing anxiety, a gut-wrenching fear, and a deep and profound sense of hopelessness and futility. On the other hand, I feel a confidence and optimism about my (and our) ability to get through this. I also feel gentleness toward almost everyone I meet and interact with these days and in particular, a warmth and sense of gratefulness for the loving and caring relationship with Arleah and our boys.

Three things in particular have been helpful to me. First, I fight like crazy to keep perspective. Our connection to nature, always important, is now paramount. The unswerving affection and unflappability of our dogs is touching and reassuring, and the almost daily encounters with the deer and elk are calming. After all these years, I still find them beautiful and spiritual.

One “ah-ha” moment about perspective. Arleah and I were out shopping the other day and ran into the wife and mother of a family of loggers who’ve done a lot of work for us. They have no work now, and are surviving by doing odd jobs and selling firewood. She was out shopping for food for some of her neighbors who are not doing as well as her family.

Second, I try very, very hard to stay in the present (as unpleasant and scary as it is, at times). I was raised by survivors of brutal persecution and the Great Depression. I was immersed, on a regular basis, in talk and implication of the inevitability of doomsday. It was in the very fiber of our everyday life. No matter how hard you work, how smart you are, and how many credentials you amass, you will eventually lose it all – to capricious, unfeeling forces, completely out of your control. Keeping those messages separate from current realities is a constant challenge.

Lastly, I talk regularly and often incessantly, about how I feel – the good, the bad, and the ugly. I talk about how life feels very surreal now – like living next to a war zone, hearing about and seeing the casualties, but not yet being hit. Our daily lives are fundamentally unchanged, but they could change; quickly and dramatically.

Talking about how I feel keeps me from withdrawing into a dark and isolated place. Isolation is now the enemy; much more than the economy. As long as I know that I’m not alone these days, I know that I’ll make it through these times.

To borrow a topical metaphor, keeping connected to those we care about is job number 1.