My apologies for the long time between posts. It’s not for lack of writing; in fact, it seems as if I’ve been doing nothing but. Position papers, emails, investment memos, thank you’s, meeting reports… Raising money for a company is not as easy as it’s made out to be. “The Valley,” as Silicon Valley supplicants like to refer to it, has its own unwritten rules about what or who is “in” or “out.” On both counts, my company and I are firmly on the out, which makes for lots and lots of explaining; all of it written in slightly pitchy (but never too effusive) language. All our graphs are up and to the right, as they say.
The joke I tell my co-workers is that pitching a hardware company to venture capitalists is like having Ebola and asking someone for a hug. In general, I’ve been okay with our contrarian little startup. What we’ve been trying to do: introduce something completely novel into a product area that has not changed in 50 years. This is a Sisyphean task far more significant than we could have imagined when we started. We didn’t choose our environment when we began—we just knew we had a cool idea and stuck with it. And stuck with it. We only learned how crazy we were to keep going after we had been at it far after most others would have given up. Ironically, in the hyper-growth mantra of modern business, the very fact that we’ve been around so long makes some investors think something must be wrong with us. Staying alive while being left for dead is its own way of life.
Down from my house, there’s a well-beaten path that runs parallel to an untroubled little creek. The trail is well maintained with steps on the slopes and even small ladders that help hikers surmount toppled redwoods. There’s one smallish redwood that fell in a storm years ago. Judging by its circumference, this sapling is about 30 years old; it spans the creek bed perfectly with enough room for any tall person to comfortably walk underneath. On my hikes on that trail, I reach up and touch the trunk as I pass beneath out of a little respect. This tree, despite its horizontal orientation, keeps growing.
The fallen tree is a study in impossibility. The tree was not engineered to bear its own weight this way—the branches in the middle will eventually grow big enough to snap the center bore. Not to mention the spanned bank eroding away and the whole woody thing crashing into some new dysfunctional shape. More than any tree around it, the simple function of it’s continued existence says infinity and finiteness simultaneously. Nothing about this tree says “living,” but there it is anyway defying its own viewpoint.
I get it. The tree doesn’t know any better. Give it a chance, and it’ll grow and do as well as it can; however it is planted. The tree does not care for inspiration, metaphors, symbolic hope, or the quick slap of my hand on its mossy bark as I path underneath. The tree wills its own thing no matter what orientation it finds itself in.
Circumstance, it seems, is not a reason for surrendering.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
-Aristotle
Somedays I am haunted by ghosts who find a way to get their tribute if I ignore them for too long. My ghost this week was Robert Schumann. Schumann’s spirit led me to think about a man named John Daverio and a rapturously crazy man I watched when I was in Laguna Beach.
I wonder on the gap between supposedly rational thought and giving one’s self over to ghostly music. Is there a boundary between what I hear and you don’t? Perhaps we fool ourselves into thinking of free will as a wall against madness, when it is just a porous membrane letting the ethereal leak in and lead us in a dance if we let it. Robert Schumann, composer, a friend of Brahms, husband of Clara had his rationality flow away like the frozen Rhine he jumped into to try and end his life. After his failed suicide attempt, Schumann begged his wife to have him committed to a hospital where he died two years later. Before he died in 1846 at the age of 46, Schumann’s “angels” played music for him which he dutifully transcribed. The scores are somewhat obscure but are known as the “Ghost Variations.” I imagine Schumann at a German asylum, kissing Clara goodbye and then, silence? What did he bring with him? What notes were ringing in his ears as he stepped away? Did he escape the dance there?
One night I walked back to my hotel in Laguna Beach in near silence except for the thrum and hiss of waves breaking nearby. It was beach town, mid-week quiet, and as I strolled along, I could see a person up ahead, dancing near a bus stop. From a distance, I assumed he was listening to music on headphones, but as I moved closer, I noticed no earbuds, just him dancing to sounds only he could hear. He was mad with whatever he was hearing. The man was jumping and swaying; his arms were swinging great circles. I watched him leap onto a bench and hold his arms high, palms out, facing the water as if he was accepting the enthusiastic cheers of an audience. I made a plan to cross over to the other side of the street out of a bit of fear, but then seeing the look on his face, I stopped and started to think I heard the music too. I don’t think I have ever seen someone that unguardedly happy. When I last saw him, he was shining in a pool of light outside a store, dancing with his reflection in the shopfront glass. I wonder on the joy of giving over reality to a song no one else can hear. For all the apparent craziness, his dancing was a profoundly conscious, intimately brave act.
You can read some about Schumann’s “Ghost Variations” in John Daverio’s “Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age.” John was a distinguished Professor at Boston University and one of the world’s foremost Schumann scholars. Security cameras show him leaving his office on a cold March night in 2003 carrying a white bag containing what Police think was a book. Did he hear music as he walked? They never found the bag or the book he might have been carrying, but they did find his body a month later floating in the Charles River near the DeWolfe Boathouse. Maybe it was just an accident, a misstep on an icy bridge.
Falling is an elemental form of a dance, really; falling in love, from grace, falling into madness or just slipping in the snow. All falls share loose joints, twists, a twirl or two, and loss of control. The control was probably an illusion anyway. Make an unplanned step and gravity, music and ghosts take over. Maybe creativity is just going along for someones else’s ride. Clara, protective of Schumann’s legacy, did not want the “Ghost Variations” published. She was kept away from the hospital until just before he died. John Daviero left his wallet and his briefcase behind in his office. My dancing friend in Laguna beach seemed to have given up his place in society. All of them seemed to have moved “outside the pool of common meaning” as a dear friend has told me on more than one occasion. The stories sound morose, but the surrenders, the giving into the music, there is some wonder in that.
Schumann was later heard to say that the angels he heard were demons, but to me, he was complaining about the physics of a fall after he was already in the air. The key is perhaps to give the ghost the tribute, to be led to the abyss but not over; to keep company with singing angels, and dance, dance, dance near the water’s edge.
Do you see white dots? Can you train yourself to see the spaces in-between first?
I cannot remember when I first heard the story about armoring WWII bombers against enemy fire, but it was so counterintuitive that it captured my imagination. I think about Abraham Wald and his analysis of those aircraft whenever I have to consider lots of data and what seems like apparent answers. The story of how bombers were eventually armored has led to counterintuitive conclusions in my own life.
The airplane story took place during World War II when a young mathematician named Abraham Wald was working for the war department’s Statistical Research Group. The problem he was working on was a statistical analysis of the distribution of damage to bombers coming back from their missions. The broken planes would land, and someone would map out the various holes left from enemy fire scattered over the aircraft. Eventually, a master map was created for each type of airplane, showing the concentration of damage laid out on a diagram of the plane. The Statistical Research Group’s task was to decide where were the best spots to add reinforcing armor to the airplanes. The obvious answer was to look at the diagram, find the places that had the most holes and then apply more shielding to those areas. Abraham Wald had other ideas.
Abraham’s genius was to recognize that all the collected data only came from aircraft that had successfully returned. He assumed the damage across all airplanes (those that landed and those that crashed) was uniformly distributed. He then went on to think about where the holes might be on the aircraft that went down. Logically, he concluded, the missing aircraft’s damage was in spots other than the ones the team could examine. The damage maps they had collected were, in fact, diagrams showing where aircraft could take a hit and still make it back. Instead of having a chart of where to add extra armor, they had a picture showing them where they did not need it. The “blank spaces” in the diagrams were the airplane’s most vulnerable areas.
Perhaps humans are not naturally built for statistics. We can see the damage, count up holes, create pretty diagrams, but our intuition to tell a story about the data in front of us inevitably leads us astray. We forget about the airplanes that did not come back because they are not present, even though they still have data necessary to complete the analysis. Those holes, the ones we cannot see, fill a gap in our knowledge. The empty spaces complete the picture.
Looking for the empty spaces to complete the picture turns out to be a very useful life skill. My favorite trick, when confronted with a problem is to look at the blank spaces and see if they tell a different story. The technique starts with a willingness to suspend judgment, and then ask for information that may have been overlooked. Sometimes the right answer is not obvious at all, no matter how many smart people have achieved consensus.
There was this one time that I left our office out the back door, only to find a homeless couple living in a car parked back there. Their car had broken down and was pulled haphazardly into a spot that hidden from street view. I talked to them; their situation was unfortunately typical—a medical emergency had drained their savings. The solid job the husband had wouldn’t wait for him to get better. They’d run out of options.
I went back inside and got them some drinks and some snacks and made a crazy decision. I would let them stay in our office overnight and would sort out their situation in the morning. I dropped off the snacks and then went back inside, locking up all the offices and lab. I found some boxes of instant ramen and some fruit in the refrigerator and set them out in our break room, invited the car-couple in and prayed I hadn’t done something idiotic as I went home. I didn’t sleep well that night either. What would they steal? Would they damage something? What parts of our insurance or lease had I just violated? My worry about protecting the office made me pretty miserable.
The next morning I woke up early, stopped by Safeway to pick up some breakfast for the couple and headed back to the office. They were fine. Everything was fine. They’d called a relative during the evening who was coming back over to help with the car that day. There’s more to their story, but let’s leave it that we managed to get them sorted out with a minimum of drama.
Not so much for me, though. In my fit of paranoia, I had locked all the offices and the lab. I didn’t have the keys to open them. No one had ever locked their doors before, so while we may have had keys at one point, they were long gone. By some strange coincidence, I did have a ladder handy. I set about climbing up and through the drop ceiling outside each space. I jumped down into each office and, unlocked each from the inside. By the time everyone else arrived that morning, the doors were open, the homeless couple was fed and waiting on a tow truck out back, and I was a mess. The entire time I was climbing and crawling and jumping, I was thinking about what a stupid invention an office is. The function of an office is to keep people out; it is a shut off space, protecting an outside view. Offices make you want to lock doors. An office is a statement about position and location; it keeps the world outside in a beat-up Honda.
I haven’t been able to have a proper office since then, and it has worked out just fine. When I was made interim CEO of a different company sometime later, I moved into a cube near the ex-CEOs colossal fish tank of an office; this caused some concern. The executive team wondered if I was going to make them give up their walls and doors. The new CEO moving into a cube is the kind of symbolic act that is fear-inducing (in an ironic way). In another company, they tried to give me the only office, and I said no. In yet another company they set aside an office for me, and I made them turn it into a conference room for us all to use. Each time I do this some executive worries I am trying to take some space away from them—such is the power of a door and a window. I am, however, always content to let them have their enclosed spaces, as long as they will let me have the freedom not to shut things out, or pen myself up. Work is better this way.
There was a psychologist once names Erik Erikson who was among other things famous for his ability to hypnotize people. He was so prominent in fact that at one point, people were suspicious of even shaking his hand for fear that he would put them into a trance—that’s how good he was. Dr. Erickson, who had a lot of experience with the way people’s minds work and how easily they could be hypnotized, made an unscientific observation about people in general. He opined that the average person is actually only “awake” for about 40% of their day. The rest of the time we’re in some kind of self-induced trance.
At first, this observation shocked me; I felt it had to be wrong until I observed my own day. I remembered getting in my car, making a phone call… but how exactly did I get to work? Or in thinking about a problem at my desk, where did the time get to? Reading twitter online, scrolling… wait, where was I? It seemed I did have frequent, sustained lapses in “consciousness” during my days. I had never really thought about them as trances before, but perhaps Erickson’s observation wasn’t that far off.
But then I had a different thought: what if certain interactions between people depend on this trance state. Isn’t this what advertising is about? Mindless (as in “trance-like”) click through’s on a website? Politician’s spreading mind-numbing fear to encourage a vote? Aren’t some sales pitches designed to turn off critical thinking? Maybe in fact (and this is not a new thought at all really), our culture actually wants you “asleep.” Perhaps we’ve designed a system that is very good at inducing trance-like states. Again, this is not a new thought. One only has to go back and read the dire warnings on too much TV watching (complete with pictures of zoned-out families in front of a TV set) to see that we’ve been warning ourselves for decades about our propensity for falling into trances.
But here is a potentially new thought: what if we incentivized the opposite? What if we tried building systems, or talking and acting in ways that encouraged awareness? What would that system look like? Only the most cynical would argue that an aware society is a corrupt society. If awareness, or “being woke” is a rare and laudatory thing, then what are we doing to make it happen? And for those who approach us and are aware and awake, are we treating that moment as the precious sacred thing it is, or are we working for something that wants to turn that part of them off? Think about it (and I mean that!). If you’re in business, are you trying to convince someone of something, or trying to lull them to sleep and get a fogged out “yes”? Is your presence encouraging others to zone out, or stay awake?
There was the time I was supposed to book my first order. I was 23 years old and working for Motorola at the time. It was supposed to be a simple thing, just needing me to drive to an account, hand over a quote and get a purchase order for some MOSFETs. This was the perfect way to get a sales engineer, fresh out of training, an easy win.
This is how it went. I drove my company car over to a small power supply company in Branford, Connecticut. It was the first time I had ever been on a sales call alone, and I wore a suit and tie. I think I carried a Samsonite briefcase with me. Inside that briefcase was a folder with one piece of paper in it which was the quote necessary to book the order for the semiconductors we were selling. All I had to do was hand the buyer the paper, and then he would give me an order for the parts in question. Easy.
The buyer’s name was John, he was a big burly guy in his late 40’s. He’d worked there most of his career, and he stalked around the building like he owned the place. John met me in the lobby, shook my hand, and then escorted me through a maze of cubes to his office near the factory floor. This was one of those places that had caution signs posted in hallways and mirrors high up on the walls so you could see if a cart was barreling toward you. OSHA would have been proud.
John sat me down in a chair across from his desk and eyed me carefully.
“Where’s the quote?”
I pulled the paper from my briefcase and handed it to him. He looked at it for a moment, grunted, and then reached around his desk to some shelves where he pulled out a thick, bound computer printout. As a quick aside, I should point out that this was 1986, so there was very little (if any) “looking things up” on a computer screen. In fact, I do not think there was even a keyboard in his office. John opened the printout and began thumbing through it, running his finger down a column until he came to a part number. He took out a red pen and drew a line under the device name and extended the line across the page. He grunted again.
“You’re too high. I need you to do better.” He said, leaning across the marked up list.
This was not going according to plan. John was supposed to thank me and give me a P.O. I had no idea how to lower a price, or even if I could. So I sat there just looking at him. Some sales guy I was.
John said, “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. I just looked it up. Your competitor is cheaper. You think about a better price. If you give me that price, you get the order. Tell me when I get back.”
And he left, leaving the printout with its big red line and, what I now knew was my competitor’s price, open on his desk. All I had to do was get up and take a look. He was practically telling me to do so.
But I’m stubborn. I sat there, not moving, wondering how it could fall to me to screw up something so easy. John came back.
“Well?”
“Well…” I said. “That’s my best price. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lower it.”
John closed the printout and folded his hands on top of it, and looked at me the way a parent looks at a recalcitrant child. He was, in fact, old enough to be my Dad.
“Carl, look up above my head at the pillar in the corner. What do you see?”
I looked up. Attached to the pillar was one of those curved mirrors giving a wide-angle view of the hallway and, of John and I seated in his office.
“I see a mirror.”
“Yes sir, you do,” he said. “If you go down that hall a little bit and stand near the coffee pot, you can see right in here. I watched you. I do this a lot. You never looked at the printout I left open. Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I think I was sulking a bit. It would have been easy to have read the book. “I guess I felt like that would have been cheating.”
John went on to tell me, to my surprise, that I was the first person he had done this with who had not looked at the book.
Now, you may be thinking that this is where the story has a happy ending. The gruff purchasing manager, seeing the integrity of the young, inexperienced salesperson, gives him the order anyway. The lesson being that honesty gets rewarded. That is not what happened, and that is not the lesson. Texas Instruments booked my first order that day because they had a better price. Why? Because John was true to himself too; over time, I came to know that about him. John was a wonderful guy and a great teacher.
This was the start of a successful long-term relationship between John and I. Relationship leads to trust leads to business. That cycle takes patience, but when given the time to develop, it is the bedrock of real, sustained growth. John and I respected each other. That was worth far more over time than the momentary purchase order I had just lost. I had gone in thinking that the order was all that mattered and left empty-handed but full of thoughts.
No looking for “sales” became my secret to successful sales. If revenues are the thing that one measures success by, then, there is this: before my 38th birthday, I turned that understanding into over $1B in orders. Revenue, purchase orders, money, etc. are distractions that hide a simple underlying truth: the first order of business is always people, and the first order of people is a relationship.
Even little problems taken to an end can expand into the realm of the overwhelming. Let me give a brief example: recycling. Out here in Santa Cruz County, it is taken pretty seriously. Paper in one bin, soiled paper in another, organic matter to a compost bin, numbered plastics in another, batteries, electronics… Most households have gotten used to the sorting and the stacking and the extra effort it all takes. All for a good cause, right?
But, what happens when the system breaks down?
Just a short year ago, we could take our trash to the dump and spend a good thirty minutes transferring our sorted waste into the bigger containers at the dump. Now? They will not and cannot take any of it. This means that almost everything we throw out is going into the landfill. We’re not alone in this. Plastics recycling has primarily ceased in the U.S. China stopped taking our plastics because the sorted types were not of absolute consistency. The same is happening for paper. Recycling glass is becoming very difficult too.
While active recycling wasn’t easy, it had a process, and if you set your mind to it, you could get it done. But what happens when you find out your yogurt cup, beer bottle, or old newspaper are part of more significant problems? A tiny yogurt cup goes from being a piece of trash all the way to a decision made by the Chinese government. You peel back the tin foil, stir your fruit up from the bottom and perhaps think, “I just want to eat yogurt, but now I’m thinking about geopolitical environmentalism.” A little part of your breakfast becomes a symbol of an overwhelming issue.
As a general rule, when people are confronted with an overwhelming problem, they shut down and ignore the whole thing. We often revert to, “Well, I tried. There’s nothing I can do about it.” This is natural, but only in the sense that we self-negate our agency because we cannot solve the whole problem. We go from being a point of difference to a victim; it becomes easy to give up.
The real issue here is that it is easy to blame something big enough that we don’t have to think about a fix. Realizing that every yogurt cup or wine bottle in California is a problem, makes it easy to stop being an answer. All because we don’t have THE answer.
The trick is to blame something smaller. In my house this week we’re blaming paper towels. We bought several rolls of bamboo cloth towels that can be reused multiple times before being thrown away. Next week maybe we will start blaming plastic wrap. We can do something about the smaller thing, and so we do. Isn’t it ironic that it is easier to blame something out of our control than do one little thing every moment that is?
Maybe we can convince a friend or two along the way and then they can do so with their friends and so on. However, how my friends react to my small acts of resistance does not matter one bit. The thing is just to do the one action that matters NOW. That is literally all any of us can do.
Since I’ve gone to Carolina in my mind these past few weeks, here is a lesson I learned at a fruit stand about the countless satisfactions that come from engaging in the process of buying and selling something from another person. Oh, and, this story also has great peaches in it.
South Carolina Grows the Best Peaches
There is a small town named Moncks Corner (the “Moncks” is pronounced just like the robe dwelling brothers you might find in a monastery) snugged up between Lake Moultrie and the Francis Marion Forest in South Carolina. Even though it is a tiny place, it merits its own exit off of I-95, and it was that exit my wife and I took on our way back from Charleston one humid August afternoon. We made a small circle in a parking lot to a pop-up stand selling peaches.
Now, I’m here to officially announce that South Carolina grows the world’s best peaches. Everyone knows it, even those usurpers to the south who go so far as to put a peach on their license plates. The watery, string-fleshed stone fruit from the other guys cannot begin to compare to the subtle, sweet-juiced terroir of the one-true-peach from South Carolina. These peaches are meant to be eaten from the brown paper bag you bought them in, held gently between index finger and thumb, a napkin wrapping the back half as you bite into them; or without the paper holder, stooped, so the juice doesn’t stain your front. South Carolina peaches are multi-sensory things: eating one requires looking and leaning and slurping, and maybe humming a joyous little tune at the same time. A Georgia peach demands no such honor, its only ceremony coming from the sound of a can opener and the ooze of corn syrup as its flesh is poured into a jello mold.
The Proper Way to Buy a Peach
Peach season is so hallowed in South Carolina that the buying and gifting of the fruit during harvest is as necessary as a plate of cookies are at Christmastime. So there my wife and I were, eyeing the beautifully boxed rows of Carolina sunrises, lightly touching, smelling and picking up peaches as carefully as a sommelier would choose a wine, when up pulled a car. It was a Cadillac with tinted windows, and New Jersey plates. Out stepped a woman leaving the car running, and driver’s door open. She grabbed a paper bag and began cramming peaches into it. The way we were all watching her, you might have thought she was throwing live puppies into the sack. Having amassed a bag full of bruised fruit, she handed them to the man standing by a cash box and said, “These are Georgia peaches, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
A minute later, the change handed over, she was back in her car and off north on 95. Yankees… they miss out on so much by being in such a hurry.
My wife, a South Carolina native, handed over our bags. Her accent always becomes just a little thicker, either when she’s on the phone with her Mama or, as was now the case when talking with one of her countrymen.
“These aren’t Georgia peaches, are they,” she said. It was not a question, but instead, a drawled out observation.
“No, ma’am. Picked ‘em this morning about two miles up the road.” He was smiling.
“Thank goodness,” she said. “If they weren’t from South Carolina we wouldn’t buy them.” And then they were both smiling. He could tell from her accent that she was a local. The way she inspected the produce and handled it showed respect. In the style of these things, they had formed a relationship. They knew each other. I suspect that a merchant selling spices in a stall in Morocco a thousand years ago would not have seen anything new in that umbrella-covered stand that day.
The money changed hands, and I noticed the peaches cost less for my wife than the woman in the Cadillac. Then we were off too, carrying our precious cargo back to friends and relatives.
Transactions vs. Sales
This whole process from peach to purchase was an essential counterpoint to in-vogue postmodern business wisdom. First, the farmer intuitively knew the difference between a transaction and a sale. The interaction with the woman from New Jersey? All transaction. Everything about her, from the idling car with an open door, to the haphazard bagging of the peaches, said she cared only about speed. She didn’t care about the product or the price. It wasn’t even clear she knew how far away she was from the Georgia border. As far as any of us could tell, she wanted Georgia peaches NOW, and that is what she bought. She was a McKinsey consultant’s dream client. The transaction was swift and efficient; highly quantifiable. It was a profitable sale. Could it be even better? Seeing the transaction and not the people makes it disturbingly easy.
A consultant from Bain might look around and offer a helpful Pareto chart of how the fruit stand could be faster, and handle even more volume. There would inevitably be a suggestion to move the fruit closer to the highway. Perhaps have hanging bags of peaches and a drive-through lane so patrons could just roll down a window, get their fruit without stopping, and pay electronically. With a transaction mindset, growth is always the goal. Hyper-growth with speed is better. According to everything preached in “best business practices” now, this would all be considered “good.” Notice though, the thing slowing everything down, messing up all that efficiency? People.
Contrast transactional business with the sale of peaches to my wife. The farmer knew his customer. She knew the farmer. They shared a state of mind; a sensibility. Heck, it was South Carolina, they were probably even distant cousins. The entire conversation between them was a relationship that had a thread of trust running through it. Counter-intuitively, that trust came with a discount. The process was slow. The bills were crumpled, and we were fishing for pennies in a change purse. Pennies! The very inefficiency of those little slugs of copper was a testament to the farmer’s lack of “business agility.” In the end, the farmer even received less revenue by his own choice! By everything that we read in the Harvard Business Review, this process would be considered “bad.” Damningly, the entire sale might be labeled “inefficient.” And yet, there was a deep, immeasurable satisfaction to the whole experience; it was unquestionably, “right.”
Where Did All the People Go?
Sales is always a subject. A transaction is an object. Transactions are things counted; they are atomized, devoid of the essence of human interaction. Frustratingly, “transactions” are all anyone in business wants to talk about anymore. Transactions are significant little numbers in spreadsheet cells, walled off from the ephemera of needs and pennies and fruit flies. Transactions are things to accelerate, to synchronize to arbitrary dates, to graph. The human piece, the heartbeat that quickens the entire enterprise? It seems these days to be too messy to measure. How does a farmer accelerate the ripening of a peach? Fruit cannot be harvested on arbitrary dates. People are unkempt, and out of control, so it is perhaps not surprising someone would try to get them out of the system. Yet everything a business does relies on one person buying and one person selling. No matter how hard we try to get rid of that inconvenient fact, it will always be true.
I sit in board meetings these days and listen to all the talk of scale, users, clicks, shareholder value and speed, speed, speed. I wonder: what happened to the people? In business’ zeal to find units of measure and then show them as beautiful asymptotes of growth, did we lose the soul of what is and always will be, a human enterprise? Trust cannot be measured, so we do not seek its pulse. “Relationship” does not graph nicely on PowerPoint, so we stop trying to foster it. Businesses now prefer words like transformation, disruption, and disintermediation and work very, very hard to take humans out of buying and selling. The self-referential business is “in,” and the human-facing company is tres passé. Just because it cannot (or should not) be measured does not mean it is not essential. We mistake the absence of a measure as if the thing has no meaning, and in so doing, attempt to build businesses without actual people in them. Only much later do we run a survey on our company and wonder why our employees feel disenfranchised, cynical, and powerless. Of course, the forgotten feel that way.
Here’s the thing, and it is so pervasively embedded in being a human it is overlooked. Buying, selling–the interpersonal exchange of goods, services, and ideas is one of the condicio sine qua non human experiences; it is an indispensable and essential activity that helps define personhood. If you think this may be a bridge too far, try to go a day without engaging in either buying or selling. Try to go even an hour without. If you’ve gotten this far in the essay, you’ve just spent (spent!) 15 minutes being sold on an idea. This is why the entire concept of a transaction based business should be anathema to us; it says our personhood has no value. Business needs to get back to the essential truth: it is there for people, not the other way around.
Because the people are there waiting, just hidden in plain sight, doing their lovely, crazy human thing. We know them by the way they’re cradling a bag of peaches all the way to the kitchen counter. People are the ones slicing just-picked fruit over ice cream on a hot August night, while fireflies dance above the front lawn. Humans are the ones that marvel at the taste of something that defies all measurement.
There was this one time I was staying at a lovely little boutique hotel. The hotel was in a converted mansion full of polished blonde oak and wide staircases. The check-in desk was a real desk positioned in the front hallway between the large beveled glass entrance and rear doors. There was always a person at that desk who remembered your name as you came down the stairs or helped you get dinner reservations at a coveted restaurant.
As I came down the stairs one morning, I could hear a woman’s raised voice mixed with the placating tones of a man’s. I surmised that a guest was complaining to the desk manager and was surprised to find as I rounded the corner that it was one of the hotel housekeepers. She was angry about something, that much seemed clear, and she was venting to the young man at the desk. As soon as they saw me, she toned it down while I crossed the small lobby out to my car. I was back only a few minutes later, a bit surprised that the housekeeper was still there and still upset. Again, the conversation stopped, to be replaced by a sheepish “welcome back!” as I passed.
I began to worry about the front desk person. He was a young fellow in his late twenties. Something about the snippets of interaction I saw as I had passed told me he was “that guy.” You might know the type: open, good listener, friendly, compassionate in word, and posture. These all sound like wonderful high “emotional-quotient” behaviors unless you realize they often come with baggage. I’d seen enough of these interactions elsewhere to guess that because the housekeeper thought it was acceptable to have a gripe session in the lobby, the front desk manager might be serving the role of the staff’s go-to confessor, which implied he was everyone else’s pain-repository as well. It’s far too easy to go from being a “good listener” to becoming a victim in one’s own right. You can lose yourself in the process. That’s a difficult way to make a living.
Later on, as I was checking out, I offered him a bit of advice. First, I told him what I had seen when I was walking through. He became upset and told me he was sorry I had seen the “incident.” I told him it didn’t bother me at all. I also told him that I believed it was a normal thing for him.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re the one everyone comes to complain to, even if it has nothing to do with you. Some days you wonder how you became a psychotherapist. It even happens with your friends when you’re not at work. You don’t know why they tell you all this stuff, and it’s hard to see how to make it all right for everyone all the time.”
He looked surprised and agreed.
I said: “You did really well with her. Where’d you learn how to do it?”
I’m never shocked when they tell me it’s their role in their family. He was a middle child of four: the one who just-does-it. I then guessed his parents lived close by and he was the one, almost by default, whom the siblings had left to check up on them. I was right on this guess too. Sure enough, he was a “fixer.”
“You sound like you know me really well,” he said.
I’m not nearly as clairvoyant as it might seem: it takes one to know one. Total strangers wanting to share their pain with me can happen anywhere; in a grocery store line, in a taxi, filling the car with gas, at the farmer’s market. The things people will divulge to try and get rid of the hurt seems never-ending. To try and hold all of it, for everyone, is crazy-making. Just to cope with all of it, I have had to learn some strategies over time.
“Can I give you some advice?” I offered. “I want you to remember that in all of these conversations, all of the stuff people want to give to you… I want you to remember that your ocean is bigger than their firehose.”
It was the best I could offer in a minute or two standing at a desk in a public place.
Here’s the dynamic: someone gripes for the relief of the act and someone lends a sympathetic ear. There is a spectrum of engagement in these types of conversations, and we often forget what role we are playing when someone is expressing their pain. There is a tangible difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion. My experience is that the vast majority of conversations that involve pain transmission (griping or complaining) are only looking for the sympathetic (“I care about your suffering”) ear. The transmitter just wants to know that the receiver heard them. The act, the conversation, is the relief.
The problem for the young desk clerk was (and this was a guess on my part) listening with a compassionate framework in mind; he’s a fixer (“I want to relieve your suffering”). The desk manager didn’t appreciate that he could listen and feel without carrying the pain himself. I tried to give him an image to hold onto that contextualized his agency in the conversation. The housekeeper’s firehose of hurt can be pointed at a big ocean of shared suffering — genuine empathy — and at the same time, stop short of being personalized in real acts of compassion. Put another way, he had a choice in how he dealt with the way people wanted to share suffering.
I hope he took away a little more space from the conversation. I have a feeling that in this age, knowing the difference between pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion is going to be a critical survival skill.
And man? Free of one kind of fetter, He runs to gaudier shackles and brands; Deserving, for all his groans, no better Than he demands. —Louis Untermeyer “He Goads Himself”
Every time I’m back in my adopted home of South Carolina, visiting relatives, I run the same route in the mornings before the day gets too hot and humid. I run up Santee Road, and then down the gently winding Camelia Circle. I jog past the stately magnolias and the moss-draped pine trees. The well-cared for lawns are mostly free of weeds, sprinklers are misting and hissing here and there, and the passing cars all offer me a friendly wave. By the time I reach the end of Santee Road, I must look quite the sight, not to mention how loudly I must be breathing or what I must smell like to the dogs in the yards of the houses nearby.
There’s a pair of dogs of indeterminate breed, small spotted squirrel chasers who seem to always pick me up on the canine radar as I round a curve on Camelia. I hear their insistent yapping begin to peak as I come near their domain, and as I reach the corner of their yard, they are shooting straight at me, as if fired from a cannon. My cadence and my steps are unaltered by the impending attack though, I have done this run many times. These mixed terriers and I understand the fixed distance between us will not be crossed even though nothing visibly keeps us apart.
There is an invisible fence, a wire, buried along the perimeter of this yard. The dogs each wear a collar that, should they encroach or cross the hidden wiring, will cause the collar to administer an unpleasant electric shock to their necks. My run takes me on the road past their lawn, and they follow me every frenzied inch of the way—never for a moment crossing the spot where the wire waits to administer its stealthy charge. We both trust the power of that divide as if it were concrete reinforced chain link.
This method of training has been understood from the time Pavlov had his own canines drooling at the sound of a bell. I’m confident we could disable the collars and remove the wire in the yard, and my Camelia Circle dogs would still pull up short at the edge of their lawn—such is the power of conditioning. Even empty space can have the capability of a science fiction force field with the right kinds of punishments and rewards.
I am perhaps over-mindful of invisible fences after several weeks of graduation ceremonies and hours upon hours of family gatherings. I look at my sons and my wife and most of all myself and see the shock collars and the self-imposed boundaries. I feel a tingling as we all get near long-buried wires and then vector away, laughing, poking fun; teasing the way families do at reunions. Higher education frees the mind and at the same time, adds other engaging barriers. We have a Lawyer now, and a College Professor matched up with a Special Education Teacher, newly minted Anthropologist, and a Peace Corps volunteer. The little administered shocks at the dinner table when a debate gets going amongst these capable young men causes me to nurse my glass of wine and smile.
They have years yet. Years before they learn that the collars they put on in their youth (ones I most certainly helped them buckle firmly into place) aren’t connected to anything real. At some point, they will realize the wires their professors, partners, administrators, bosses, and brothers buried can be turned off, and they have the switch. They’ll learn soon enough that if they keep running, past and over the invisible walls, all yards are theirs.
