Societal Teamwork

Things change. Commonly held standards of what are acceptable societal and individual behaviors evolve over time. If we go back a few thousand years to Rome, the Coliseum was the scene of brutal events that resulted in the deaths of an estimated half a million people and a million animals. We deem the spectacle that took place in the Coliseum as brutal and viscous when seen through our lens of our acceptable modern behaviors. Today public spectacles like that would not be deemed acceptable. However, turn on the TV and see how popular ultimate fighting shows are and you have to wonder if we have really changed, or perhaps have just put a more civilized or technological veneer on our baser emotions and behaviors. I have to assume that not all Romans found joy or entertainment in watching others be torn apart or slaughtered in the Coliseum, but enough did to justify a fairly substantial building effort over 10 years time to create the Coliseum which could seat 50,000. And certainly today not everyone enjoys watching two people fight inside a cage, but perhaps too many do as the ratings for these shows would imply. The more things change the more they stay the same.  Maybe I am a little foolish to assume that we can rise above aspects of our sordid history as a species, but I would certainly like to try.

I recently heard a speech by Steven Kerr, (his speech alone made the whole conference worth attending) who described an exercise that he took a group of managers through when his was the Chief Learning Officer at GE. He asked them to help come up with the ultimate definition of teamwork. As a group what they came up with was, “Teamwork: Not allowing others to fail.” That definition is simple, straightforward and deeply profound when you think about it for a few minutes. That definition of course contrasts sharply with Jack Welsh’s stated policy of cutting the bottom performing 10% of the workforce each year (sounds a bit like the Roman slaughter, doesn’t it). But here were a group of Welsh’s managers that consciously or not were repudiating that policy simply by defining teamwork. My understanding from the speech is that this definition of teamwork was derived in an effort to answer the question of how teamwork should be deployed within an organization to maximize the performance of that organization.

While I was at the conference where Kerr spoke, a terrible tragedy unfolded in Binghamton, NY, the town where I spent most of my childhood. Thirteen people who were in class learning how to be Americans were killed by a gunman who had grown despondent over losing his job and his inability to master English. At the end of his murderous spree he took his own life. What would have happened there if somehow as a society we said, here is a person who is struggling and it is in our collective best interests as a societal organization that we do not let this person fail? Fourteen lives could have been saved. The police chief in Binghamton was quoted in the New York Times as calling the shooter a “coward”, because he was wearing body armor and did not shoot it out with the police but rather took his own life. I don’t think the chief gets it. I have little sympathy for police chiefs in Binghamton as I had a run-in with a previous chief-of- police there, almost getting myself arrested. I was working my way through college on the local ambulance and we got an early morning call (the kind you always hated to get around 5:30am or 6:00am as they usually meant someone woke up and found a dead body). Well, we went to the scene and there was a young teenager laying face down in a basement. I flipped him over and sure enough he was dead, however he was a young teen and it was unclear how long he had been dead, so I inserted an obterator airway, started an IV, defibrillated, and passed some bicarbonate and other meds in an attempt to get his heart started. We rushed him to the hospital. A few hours later I got a call telling me to come down to the police station where the chief of police started screaming at me about disturbing evidence at the scene of a potential crime. I looked at him and said, “If it was your kid, would you want me to give him the benefit of the doubt and try to save him?” At which point he got really red and threatened to arrest me. There was only one other time in my life where I was as angry as I was at that police chief at that moment when he threatened me for trying to save someone’s life. Anyway, that is a different story.   

I happened to be in Indonesia at the time of the political turmoil following Suharto’s 1998 fall from power. I was riding in a taxi in Jakarta when we came across a very large political demonstration with a few thousand young men in the streets all wearing yellow t-shirts. I believe it was a demonstration of support for the Golkar party. The taxi driver quickly reached into the glove box and pulled out a yellow shirt which he put on the dash. We were allowed to pass through the crowded streets. I asked the driver what would have happened if he had not had the appropriate color shirt available and I only got a vague response. (I have to admit that I was wondering what in the world was I doing there.) The next day I was again driving in a taxi and this time we came across another political demonstration and the color of the day was red as all of the young men in the crowd were wearing red shirts. And predictably the driver reached into the glove box and this time pulled out a red shirt and placed it on the dash. He indicated to me that the different political groups were assigned different days to avoid any confrontations between the groups, but also to allow the demonstrators who showed up to support one political party one day to show support for another the next, wearing the appropriate color of the day. These political supporters were paid to turnout and show their support. Day after day the same people got paid to wear the right color clothing and show up at the appointed intersections. As it turns out they did not care all that much about politics, what they cared about was earning some money so they could get by for another day.  

The size of the Iraqi army at the start of the 2003 war was estimated at 375,000 soldiers. Once they were defeated the army was disbanded and the level of violence in the country greatly escalated. At the time the average monthly salary of an Iraqi was as little as $60 per month and shortly after the war it rose as high as $200 per month. Using an average of $100 per month, to keep the math simple, the army could have stayed in place and all of the soldiers employed for less than $38 million dollars per month or about $450 million dollars a year. Compare that to the average yearly cost of persecuting the Iraqi war at about $130 billion per year. Not even close. I have to wonder how many of the soldiers turned to violence as a way of simply earning a living, similarly to the political supporters in Indonesia. We allowed the Iraqi society to fail by throwing large numbers into the ranks of the unemployed who had no other way to survive. 

What would be the cost and the benefit if we as a society said to the unemployed come down to the employment office and if you want a job, you will be given a job? That job could be working at a nursing home, cleaning up along a roadway, planting trees, or teaching etc. depending on the skill set of the person, but you would be given a job which covered your basic living expenses. Not welfare, not unemployment, but a job. Our goal would be to drive out despair and despondency from our midst. Each person in additional to a job would be assigned some sort of case worker, whose goal would be to find permanent employment for that person and working on a development plan that may include educational goals, or developmental experiences so as to increase that person’s employability. Societal Teamwork: We will not allow others to fail.

I am not advocating socialism or communism here. I am advocating raising our standards regarding acceptable societal norms. One criticism of this plan might be how and who will define “failure”? What if anything do we as a society owe the individual? We certainly as a society do not owe each person a Masarati in their driveway, and “success” rather than failure should be defined as allowing each and every person to achieve their maximum potential. I would ask not what would be the cost, but what would be the benefit to our society if each and every person were enabled allowing them to achieve their maximum potential?

At a Distance

“Get one pound of best galls, half a pound of copperas, a quarter pound of gum arabick, a quarter pound of white sugar-candy; bruise the galls and beat your other ingredients fine, and infuse them all in three quarters of white wine or rain-water, and let them stand hot by the fire three or four days; then put all into a new pipkin set it on a slow fire, so as not to boil; keep it frequently stirring, and let it stand five or six hours, till one quarter consumed. And when cold, strain it through a clean coarse piece of linen, bottle it and keep it for use.” (Forgotten English, 1999, Jeffrey Kacirk)

Any idea what the recipe above is cooking up? Many times as the distance between original sources of information is increased our understanding of that information is diminished. Sometimes as distance increases we look upon that information with incredulity and wonder how anyone could have ever thought that way or held that belief. Distance can make some things, such as information and attitude more obscure but can also give perspective.  For our purposes here, let’s define distance as a separation by time or place between an event or a piece of information and our interpretation of that event or information.  

This past week I attended the graduation of one of my nieces from Barnard, a women’s college that is part of Columbia University (Magna Cum Laude I am proud to say). The awards given out and speakers at the commencement included the CEO of Pepsico, a distinguished Harvard University professor who is working to save historical artifacts in Iraq, and the US Secretary of State. There was one thing all of three of these highly accomplished people had in common, they were women. The ceremony included a speech given by one of the students, who said something interesting. She indicated that her mother stated that when she grew up she wanted to be like her daughter. It was the rephrasing of a common response of how little girls often answer when asked what they want to be when they grow up that caught my attention. The mother of this very articulate student said she was desirous of all of the opportunities that would be open to her daughter as she began her career, opportunities that were not available to women of her age/generation. Do opportunities and attitudes change over time? Do we operate today on some assumptions, attitudes and beliefs that future generations will deem as absurd? You judge.      

Here are three examples of advice separated from us by time given by Transportation Magazine which in 1943 published a “Guide to Hiring Women”. The guide gave eleven helpful tips on how to hire and motivate women who were now needed in the workforce because of the labor shortages associated with World War II. I wonder how many of the eleven tips could be found in the hiring practices of any of today’s corporations.  

“Pick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they are less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or wouldn’t be doing it, and still have the pep and interest to work hard and to deal with the public efficiently.”

“Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick, and wash her hands several times a day.”

“Give the female employee a definite day-long schedule of duties so that they will keep busy without bothering the management for instruction every few minutes. Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack the initiative in finding work themselves.” (Transportation Magazine, Guide to Hiring Women, Western Properties, 1943)

Even the Supreme Court of the United States has handed down judgments that when viewed through a lens of more modern thought seems absurd. An example can be found in Plessy vs. Ferguson. In Louisiana, Homer Plessy boarded a car on a train that was reserved for whites on June 7, 1892. Classified as a black man, Mr. Plessy was arrested when he refused to leave the car, setting the stage for a Supreme Court ruling on racial segregation. In 1896, the US Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that “separate but equal” did not violate the constitution thereby clearing the path for the proliferation of racial segregation. Separate was never equal, but this ruling held until the 1954 case, Brown vs. Board of Education repudiated the notion. We look back on that now and have difficulty understanding how the notion of “separate but equal” as being equal ever arose. That notion unfortunately, would not be foreign in some other parts of the world today.

We can get into the sociological or the psychology of why individuals within certain groups, cliques or other groupings feel compelled to look upon those that are somehow different, whether by choice, by birth or by accident and feel that they must be labeled somehow as “less”, either less able, or less likely or less deserving, but suffice it to say for now that the sociology and psychology is fairly well understood. Look around today at individuals and groups that are discriminated against for no other reason than they are different or a minority (hence non-conforming) within the larger societies in which they exist, and the challenge is not to find examples which can be used to illustrate the point, but rather the overabundance of choices that can be used as illustration.  

The good news is that things change and over time some of our societal and attitudinal absurdities are likely to fade away. The bad news is that it will take time for societies to change. I, for one however, am reluctant to simply be patient. You have to wonder how much human potential is being squandered by not giving equal opportunity to excel at whatever task or opportunity is desired to all.

The obscure recipe above, if you did not recognize it, is for ink.