Do we really need another Trump rant?

Railing against Trump, his team (enablers?), his narcissism, his ineptitude (not to mention, how little he cares about such claims), and indeed, his megalomania, is rather easy to do.  The talking heads on CNN do it for several hours a day, always breathlessly presented as “Breaking News” even when they had just reported the exact same thing two hours ago. And one hour ago. And 30 minutes ago.  Well, you get the picture.  I rarely learn anything of value from the “experts” who somewhat comically jostle for space behind a ridiculously small table (it’s not clear why the CNN bosses won’t spring for a slightly bigger table).  I still watch periodically though, because the other choices are Fox News – which I can stand for about 30 seconds without risking a dangerous spike in my blood pressure – and MSNBC, which is just an echo chamber for the far left.  A vicarious rant is also a lot easier on my psyche – I can simply turn off the TV or switch to ESPN when it gets a bit much.  Intellectual depth is not exactly the forte of these pundits and most of what passes for “analysis” are like empty sugar calories – it feels good for just a bit, but the feeling wears off quickly and you are left with a low.  Of course, superficial sound-bite expertise is not the cachet of CNN alone – it is pretty much the staple of all these “news” channels.

Back to our illustrious President, as he embarks upon the second (& one hopes, final) two years of his presidency.  Most of his detractors get almost apoplectic when they encounter yet another stupendously idiotic or inhumane tweet or are presented with another fact-free claim in service of his current agenda.  I, for one, believe that such reactions are just a waste of energy.  Every thoughtful American (& indeed any citizen of the free world) should be rightfully troubled by the schism in our society that Donald Trump seems determined to widen.  Too often has American moral authority played second fiddle to realpolitik, but never in greater measure than under Trump.  Whether it is the Saudis, or the Russians, whether it is the coal and oil lobby, or whether it is the immigrant-baiting policies promoted by White Supremacists, the reflexive approach seems to be to label their “political correctness” as simply too dangerous for the nation.  But still, I don’t think there is much value in living with the fear that the sky is about to fall down.

First, some historic perspective is useful.  Reagan is a hero to traditional Republicans, but he did not exactly have the surest grasp of policy or indeed, could be trusted not to make a mess when speaking off the cuff, in public.  As Seymour Hersh outlines in a recent essay in the London Review of Books, his advisors lived in terror that Reagan would make major foreign policy flubs if he was not forced to just read off of a script.  There is also plenty of precedence of the US coddling up to terrible dictators and regimes simply because it suited their purpose – democracy, human rights, and the rule of law be dammed.  In other words, Trump’s presidential incompetence is not unique and neither are some of the morally suspect policies that his administration promotes.

This is going to be heresy to the vast majority of you that have read this far, but some good may even come from the Trump presidency. It is undeniable that the number of women (& many of them first-timers) who ran for and won elected office is a direct reaction to Trump.  I dare say that the Me Too movement almost seems inevitable in the Trump era.  The trade war with China seems a bit juvenile (& pandering to his base), but China is making concessions and maybe it takes one bully to make another bully pay attention, or at least pretend to.  China is of course adept at playing the long game and may be content to make a few conciliatory noises while waiting for Trump to leave office.

There are many who would dearly like to see Trump impeached out of office.  I was one of them.  But now, I believe that that would only make him a martyr to the cause – he and his supporters will always be able to claim the mantle of somebody who was done in by the “deep state.”  This is a legitimacy that I would rather that he not have. 

The best way to exorcise ourselves of the Trump demons is to deliver a resounding defeat at the ballot box.  He must lose the 2020 elections and badly at that.  He needs to be consigned to the bins of history as an ineffective one-term President who didn’t deserve even that.  Trump fears irrelevancy more than anything else – and there is no more fitting way to exact some measure of consolation for having endured four years under Trump than for the voters to turf him out of office and render his entire term inconsequential.

What happened to work?

Nobody wants to go to work anymore.  Ok, maybe not nobody, but it sure feels that way.  It's one of the great ironies of our technology-fueled modern life that, while what we do for our livelihood ("work") has come to occupy more and more of our time and attention, it has simultaneously become less and less attractive and meaningful to many of us.  This is largely anecdotal, but it recently occurred to me that nobody I knew spoke positively about their work. It was always about insensitive bosses, incompetent co-workers, impossible schedules, politics, and on and on.  Perhaps cynicism is in fashion and at least some people may just be taking this stance because are afraid of seeming naive by expressing satisfaction in their jobs. I certainly allow for that and my trained coach's ear does register this undercurrent in a few people but, in my experience, they are in the minority.  The vast majority seems to go to work each day with a sense of futility - with no expectation of being fulfilled or enjoying what they are about to do.

A clarification is in order before I continue on - while I talk in general terms about work, I am really thinking of the modern day technology and service sectors. It stands to reason that almost every industry is feeling the impact of high tech (& in particular the efficiencies wrought by the internet), but I have limited exposure to many of those fields. 

OK, back to my main thesis.  Of course, there are numerous reasons for this state of affairs.  One prominent one is that many people are engaged in jobs that they themselves feel are useless - i.e, not really contributing to the company or indeed, society at large.  People engaged in such jobs are convinced that nobody would be able to tell the difference if they or the job disappeared overnight. David Graeber, a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, went so far as to formally define such jobs and propose a theory around it. Eschewing normal academic restraint, he somewhat provocatively terms them "Bullshit Jobs." He originally proposed this theory in a 2013 article for the online magazine Strike! and then developed it into a book length treatise in 2018.  The motivation for the book was additional "research" that the author did since the original essay (which caused a minor international stir when it came out).  I haven't made it through the entire book yet, but I can safely say that you will get the essence of the argument from the essay. Graeber presents some startling survey numbers. Somewhere between 37-50% of respondents in various western nations felt that their jobs did not make any meaningful contribution to the world! The bare number is eye-popping enough, but then consider that the vast majority of doctors, nurses, policemen, teachers, fire fighters, sanitation workers, etc are unlikely to think of their jobs as "pointless." This then suggests that the percentage of people engaged in other jobs who don't believe their work has any value is much higher than the overall average.  Declaring your job to be a "Bullshit" one is rather definitive, but even without that, workers report that an increasing part of their jobs are not related to their primary responsibility (& hence, lacking purpose).  The author quotes from the US edition of the 2016-2017 State of Enterprise Work Report:  American workers reported that from 2015 to 2016, the amount of time that they spent on their primary work responsibility fell from 46% to 39%. Admittedly, some of this is probably just bellyaching about some process that the employees do not want to follow and indeed, it is impossible to be a 100% efficient in the allocation of time when the team is large enough.  However, a number like 39% ought to cause everybody to take notice.

Prof Graeber clearly has labor-friendly views, but even dedicated capitalists shouldn't really be surprised by his thesis.  Human beings are intrinsically driven to create value, to have an impact. The march of science and technology have ensured that mere survival is not the driving force for humankind at large.  It's not enough for us to just get through each day - we all want to know that we are making a difference.  Daniel Pink summarized this very ably in his 2010 book - Drive - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. There he coins the acronym, "MAP" - "Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose" for what motivates workers.  In our context here, the key is the last one - "Purpose." Pink's claim (bolstered with various studies) is that we are not going to be motivated if there isn't a strong sense of purpose behind our job.  It only gets worse if we harbor the conviction that our job is essentially pointless, let alone merely lacking a strong purpose.

Another contributing factor to the sense of malaise that many people feel about work is the impact of, for want of a better phrase, Silicon Valley.  While the actual geographical location and its most recognizable denizens are very much a part of what this phrase captures - it is quite a bit more than that. It's the internet, it's ubiquitous wireless connectivity, it's the hyper pace of technology startups that have done away with the traditional sense of what means to build up a successful business.  What this has done is to strip away the sense of family and community that companies had tried to foster.  We were all in it together - if one family member was in trouble, we would take care of them.  Now, it is almost entirely about yourself and doing whatever it takes to advance, or failing that, protect what you already have.  Because, that's what everybody else is doing, isn't it?

 

Lab Rats is an entertaining and irreverent take on the management culture promoted by various Silicon Valley oligarchs.  This is a follow-up to the author, Dan Lyons’, previous book about working in a internet-era start-up: Disrupted. Dan admittedly goes on a bit of rant and he pulls no punches in describing the “profits-first” and “people-last” philosophy of the Silicon Valley types.  He draws a sharp contrast between the approach taken by the entrepreneurs of the past – the likes that ran HP, IBM, Ford, and indeed, my erstwhile employer, Qualcomm, and those of the darlings of today – Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc.  Being familiar with this sector, his stories were not a total surprise, but the audacity and sheer hubris displayed by these new age business experts is still breathtaking in scope.  Lyons reserves particular ire for certain management techniques such as "Agile" and "Lean Startup" and gives multiple examples of how these (and other such) techniques have come to literally destroy the lives of many employees.  Agile, for instance, was developed as way to get better predictability for software projects, but instead has evolved into one of the hottest management fads (particularly in Silicon Valley), applied to every aspect of a business. My own experience with Agile, is that, for software projects, it is indeed a better approach than the traditional ones.  However, even within that, blind adherence to "rules" and "process" is counter-productive and as with everything else in engineering, the tool has to be adjusted to the needs of the team and project (& not the other way around). For anybody who still thinks the Silicon Valley approach is the way to go, this book is mandatory reading. There is a chapter on the "Holocracy" methodology that is over-the-top funny.  As part of his reporting, Dan attended an Holocracy workshop run by its founder, Brian Robertson. He calls it the "closest thing to pure madness that I have experienced."  I literally burst out laughing many times and this chapter alone is worth the price of admission. 

Entertaining though the book is, it is hard not to feel depressed about the situation that Lyons describes.  He may be cherry-picking, but these are real people with real lives to lead and real families to support. 

What is one to do?  Some will simply quit the rat race.  Some may take the second option that Hamlet so famously grappled with and take up “arms against a sea of troubles”.  Occupy Wall Street and its sister protest movements come to mind.  The grand gesture though, is not for everyone.  Most of will just soldier on and hope for the best.  

I don't purport to have the answers, but I do believe there is a way to deal with this. Many of our identities are tied up in our work and therein lies the cause of most of this angst. This may sound counter-intuitive, but putting some distance between ourselves and our jobs is the first step to recognizing what it is about the job that is still meaningful to us. Even if we question the value of the job itself, the satisfaction of a job well done is hard to deny.  Taking the time to clearly understand what our personal values are and making sure that we stay true to those (as much as we can) is a fundamental step.  While it may sound grandiose, each of us has a purpose in life - it could be something monumental like "cure cancer" or it could something like "take care of my kids."  For some, it could be something as simple as brightening up the days of the people around them by simply smiling at them and having a positive attitude.  You would be surprised how much of an impact such a person can have. Whatever be it for you, the key is that it is your life purpose, and it will be your North Star to a more fulfilled life.

What I describe above is not easy - we have to be willing to break out of the same stories we have told ourselves time and again. The hard truth is that the answers we seek lie within and not in the world around us or the circumstances we happen to find ourselves in. It may feel self-indulgent, but it is OK to ask for help.  Many people seek out a coach to help them through this, but you may be somebody who can do it on your own.

It has been ingrained in all of us (Ayn Rand followers excepted, of course) that being selfless is the highest moral code. But in fact, when we are not in right state – physically or mentally – we are not of much use to anybody else.  You have heard this in the safety advisory of every flight you have taken: “First put on your mask before helping those around you.”  There is much wisdom in that.  

Total Effort

By the end, tears were rolling down my face.  As I finished the last chapter of Shoe Dog, an autobiographical account of the creation of Nike by one of its co-founders, Phil Knight, I felt that I had re-lived the entire journey with him.  Everybody has heard of Nike, of course, but Phil Knight is almost a mystery man when measured against how much we know about the legendary founders of other famous companies. The same could probably be said of the story of Nike itself.  Why did I find the story so compelling? Perhaps the fact that Phil Knight was an avid runner created a connection right away.  Or perhaps it was that the story is set in the world of sports and the luminous talents that Nike is associated with.  Ultimately, a passage in the book itself suggested the answer, but more on that later.

For most of us, Nike is about its athletes.  Everything about the brand seems to be inextricably linked with the stable of transcendent sporting talents that they have sponsored over the years. So, it came as a surprise to read in Shoe Dog that Phil Knight didn't really care to pay athletes to endorse Nike products and had to be practically forced to do so.  I normally steer clear of  "celebrity" autobiographies.  For one, I am suspicious of their motives (mostly feels like a vanity project), but more pertinently, I wonder what I would gain from them.  But, I got Shoe Dog as a birthday gift and one day, for some reason, I picked it up and started reading it.  And, I couldn't put it down.

The history of Nike, as reported by its founder, reads like an exciting thriller - all manner of twists and turns, near-death experiences, high adrenaline risk, tragedy, and triumph.  Phil Knight did have a ghost writer, but I felt that it his voice coming through loud and clear in the book.  His words and actions (as outlined in the book) seem completely consistent with the personality that emerges from the book - one does not get the sense that he is sugar coating or air brushing anything.  He is (famously) guarded about this personal life (although the important stuff is there), but he doesn't hold back on any aspect that is related to Nike. 

What comes through shining brightly is the focus and strength of belief one has to have to create something like Nike.  Today, their success seems inevitable, but that was hardly the case for the vast majority of their existence.  Over and over again, Phil Knight (& early members of his team) had to fight the odds just to stay afloat.  When we look at a big success (or failure) from the remove of time or space, we tend to see only the large contours.  But, to truly appreciate what it took - one has to see all the little wrinkles and the accretion of small layers that led to the edifice.  Only by noticing the details can we appreciate the all-consuming passion and effort that it takes to create a Nike.

I had carried around this vague notion that it was the "Be Like Mike" campaign with Michael Jordan that really launched Nike as a world wide brand and I was waiting eagerly for the chapter where Phil Knight would surely talk about partnering with some of the greatest athletes of our time - Jordan, Tiger, Kobe, Federer, LeBron.  But instead, the athlete that he talks about most was Steve Prefontaine (or "Pre" as he was more commonly known) - the middle distance track athlete from Oregon. Nike couldn't officially sponsor Pre since he would have lost his amateur status, so they "hired" him as an employee.  Pre was a household name in Oregon right around the time that Nike was trying to break into the big time and Knight dwells in some detail about their relationship and how Pre inspired him (& Nike).  The story ends in tragedy, though - Pre died in a car accident at the age of 24.  He was driving the MG convertible that he had bought with his first Nike "salary."

Knight closes the book talking about another personal tragedy and it is here that he finally mentions how much some of those famous athletes mentioned above mean to him.  Once again, I was struck by how unexpected the relationships were - they were less about the endorsement deals and more about the personal connection he had with each of these athletes.  This chapter really resonated with me - perhaps because many of these athletes have loomed large in my own sports fandom.  His loyalty to "his" athletes is unswerving and it doesn't seem to have a lot to do with their on-field success. He describes how Tiger Woods was the first one to call him during his (Phil's) personal tragedy and goes on to add, "And I will never stand for a bad word spoken about Tiger in my presence." My eyes welled up re-reading that now, as they did several months ago when I read them for the first time.

I rarely mark passages in books because, for me, writing anything in a book is tantamount to defacing it, but I had to make an exception with this one.  Phil Knight has a way of distilling his thoughts into really powerful passages that immediately resonated with me.  As a life long sports fan, I have spent many, many, hours watching, reading, and generally obsessing about sports.  Rarely did I feel this time was wasted and, in fact, feel sympathy for people who do not (or cannot) appreciate sports.  However, I have never been able to satisfactorily capture why this is so. This passage from Shoe Dog does it for me:

"This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do.  Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people's victories.  And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about."

Watching Pre run a race in his trademark all-out style, Phil Knight muses about what made Pre such a compelling athlete to watch.  He suggests that, "No matter the sport - no matter the human endeavor, really - total effort will win people's heart."  That actually does a pretty nice job of capturing why Phil Knight's story had such an impact on me.