From Here to Autonomy (Part III): Work is cheap, thinking is priceless

I read an interesting blog entry on Worthwhile today that chips away at a dynamic I’m only just beginning to make out. They pulled a quote from -- Michael Ray’s and Rochelle Myers’s book, Creativity in Business:

After finding that about one child in 30 is brilliant and happy, (Harvard psychologist Burton) White did a great deal of research to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. … he determined that the bright and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space.

See, all that time my mother let me vedge out and watch episodes of Gumby was not a waste; something was happening there. I used to daydream a lot in class about sports, boys (those pre-sexual bubble-bath fantasies), and being the youngest actress to ever win an Oscar for Best Actress (screw you, Tatum, you only got best supporting actress). None of these habits have been cited as contributing to success later in life, but perhaps this now makes the case for adults who give Palm Pilots to their kids so they can manage their busy extracurricular schedules. Thanks Mom and Dad, you have taught your kid to be a no-questions-asked suck-up. You have taught your kid to be a Do-er.

The Burton study provides a beautiful argument for letting adults free their minds and see what answers come to them....at work. Certainly, making required contemplation a company policy might be interpreted as early Happy Hour for some, but for others who are craving the time to simply sit and think it could make all the difference.

As I explained earlier in this series, employees below a certain level of the corporate strata get paid to DO, not to think. Somebody else gets paid to think and he tells those below him what to do. Sometimes he offers some leeway in how to do it—and that, today, is considered good management.

But this model is not very useful: In fact, the people who are paid to think rarely know how to do that. They have been hard-wired to DO, and thus, when they approach a problem they crunch the numbers, collect the data, and prepare presentations describing how they plan to approach the problem. They go to their default. They DO. And then they ask the people paid to Do to act on their half-baked ideas.

We've assumed they've thought through their plans, but that would take a heroic effort on their part to sit down and listen to their guts, the world, the market. To simply participate in the world.

One of the best jobs I ever had was not a full-time gig. It was a series of projects I did for a major magazine publisher that was working on several magazine prototypes—a couple for women and one for teens. While I was no Anna Wintour, I had proofedited a few hundred thousand miles of text before I was 25 and sweated the less creative details behind a number of custom magazines. When the publisher of the group hired me to “Create Concepts” I immediately went into project management mode.

I told him how long I anticipated it would take to hire the freelance designers, develop and approve the artwork, and finish the prototype, but he wasn’t interested in the logistics. He had called me in, he said, to help him develop the ideas behind these titles. If we wanted to attract teenagers to the magazine, how would it look? What would be the title? And, most important, what would our magazine say?

I started to sweat as he described the parameters of this project, from excitement, yes, but also from fear of the unknown. How would I take on a project that required me to gather ideas? To put myself in the shoes of a teenager? To pretend? To think, or, more accurately, to simply let ideas come to my head?

He finished describing the project and waited for my response.

“Umm,” I said. “Does this pay by the hour?”

“Let me give you a word of advice,” the publisher said. “Consider that this isn’t the kind of work that pays by the hour. It pays by the value of your ideas.”

I went home and started writing up lists of possible titles and articles for the magazine—none of them applied. I understood what the publisher meant now: some projects can’t be quantified. The “solutions” spring from a mind that has taken everything in—former magazine jobs, the teens smoking in their school uniforms on the subway, even Gumby, dammit. These influences combine and churn out a message to be interpreted by you and you alone, in five minutes, or five hours. To turn on the meter the moment you start this process is bastardizing the outcome.

So what does this concept mean for business? That companies should go back to the Esalen-inspired  rituals that got them mentioned in Fast Company in 1999? That they now have to invest in crayons and finger paints? Hardly. But those who claim to be in creative professions (by creative I mean any profession in which you are commonly asked to provide solutions—proposals, programs, patches, whatever!) must understand that, to their employees thinking/zoning/contemplating/becoming one with their inner voice/intuiting is living. By doing all of the thinking yourself, and then having your staff do all the stuffing and stamping is a waste of brain power (and saliva).

Don’t get me wrong, there are some brilliant Do-ers out there—they make doing an art. But even they have brought their creativity to the doing, be it in the beauty of their systems on in how they inspire others to Do.

I work with a woman who is a brilliant logistics planner. Before she was hired I was often asked to do things such as reconcile accounts, negotiate hotel rates for our staff, and order crudités for our events (and I’m the head of business development); I winced at every request. I see how she is passionate about logistics and has raised herself to an irreplaceable stature in the company.

She strategizes how she’ll collect competitive bids with hotels. Planning menus for the event is to her tantamount to picking stocks—each choice has an implication to the overall tone and outcome of the portfolio. She relishes her “collection calls,” when she chats up clients who are delinquent with paying invoices and offers them ways they can split up payments. The clients actually enjoy her calls, laughing when she plays up her European accent to the hilt and like a strict German nanny says, “Thanks Gott I don’t charge you double for making me vait!”

Please understand that I do not attempt to define the word DO; it is merely a placeholder for mindless work that you perceive as sucking the life force out of you. If you suspect that your job—or even your career—has been a cesspool of DO, please note the following:

• Paying people to DO is a short-term strategy. Note the people you pull in with a DO job: folks who are in transition, or who have been unemployed and just need a job to pay the bills, or who need a temporary weigh station to fill up on some job requirement.
• Good money is a temporary distraction if you are in a DO job. Money can often provide the illusion of meaning. I’m the last person to turn down a nice paycheck, but staying at a job just to get paid well is like seeing Battlefield Earth and Grease II because they are offered as a double feature. Are you really willing to trade in your time for a few bucks? You may be getting paid, but in fact you are paying.
• In the end your gut will tell you in insidious ways—your tendency to always forget to bring the right documents to a meeting, those lingering doctor appointments, that recurring sore throat. Your mind doesn’t default to your work anymore. You feel pangs of jealousy toward the people in the yoga class down the street. You may have plenty to do, but still you are bored.

Those are not signs of weakness or impatience. Those are pushing hands.

I should mention: that job I had of creating magazine concepts--best-paying one I ever had.

Comments

[Joy DJ]

WONDERFUL! This was a great series.....I totally related to what you had to say. Something I've told you for a very long time....you really are a fabulous communicator. M.

[Robert]

Poor Pokey, never gets referenced alongside Gumby. Perhaps as Pokey was the Do-er, and Gumby the Visionary. :-)

[genevieve]

Jory, my children had a headmistress who insisted on the importance of "downtime" for kids so they learned to organise themselves to get something done independently - if that was what they wanted - or simply to learn how to wind themselves down without intervention!! or even to play (what an oldfashioned word). One of my sisters wants to teach kids relaxation - I think it's something kids should be able to teach us.