Protective, rehabilitating love

When I have waves of anxiety - usually about debt, my job, death, or other responsibilities I have - it is arresting. Most often, it creeps up when I awake from a dream in the middle of the night or when I first rise in the morning. Sometimes, it's hard to bring my heart rate down even after a few minutes of deliberate meditation.

But lately, I've started to close my eyes and think about a small group - my wife, my dog, my parents (biological and by marriage), my brothers and sisters (biological, by marriage, and from passed time), and the rest of our family...the people who love me and let me love them.

I don't know how to explain what think really, really hard and honestly about them feels like. It's like gentle sunshine permeating through all my limbs and chest, purifying of everything non-biological I am. It is my realest blessing.

I don't know what kind of ideology / opinion / worldview this is, but I want to have that protective, rehabilitating love for my whole life. And I hope we can live in a world where anyone who wants that is able to close their eyes, at the times they are scared and frustrated and defeated, and be able to think of at least one someone that brings them back from dark places.

I hope that I'm able to give that kind of love to at least a few other people, too.

A letter of thanks for all of y'all's wedding invitations

Friends and family who have invited us to celebrate their marriages,

I've been reflecting on the marriages Robyn and I have attended (especially the ones since last year) and before I go any further let me say this - thank you. It has been wonderful to celebrate with you on one of the biggest days of y'all's lives. We are attending one next weekend (yay Liz and Tyler!), which is our last for the foreseeable future. We've only missed a few, mostly because we had family conflicts or other weddings. Thank you all for inviting us, and letting us celebrate with you both in person and in spirit.

Of course, I'm thankful to you all because of all the fun we had. You've hosted us - as guests, travelers, friends, & family and showed us tremendous love and kindness. The food and drink, the music, the dancing, the company, the beautiful places - it has all been a blast.

But I say thank you for a deeper reflection as well, one I've had about weddings we've attended since Robyn and I began planning our own.

On our wedding day, there's a feeling I first felt when I saw the church doors open to Robyn walking down the aisle with her father, that lasted until we walked out of the church sanctuary together, hand in hand. It's not a happiness or a joy, but something just as special. I can think of no other way to describe it, other than calling it a lightness. I felt as if my soul itself was slowly rising, as if it was being lifted upward, levitating from the soles of my shoes to the top of my head.

It wasn't an explosion of emotion (those feelings of happiness and joy came at plenty of other times on our wedding day) but it was just a lightness. I have only felt that lightness one other time since - when we found out the sex of our first child.

It was a feeling I didn't know existed until about a year ago. But ever since our wedding day, I've felt a little bit of that lightness every time we've been to y'all's weddings. I've felt it when we walk into the ceremony venue. I've felt it when I see the groom's face as his bride starts coming down the aisle to marry him. I've felt it at the cocktail hours when old, true, friends embrace after too much time apart. I've felt it during the reciting of vows and during the toasts. I've felt it on the dance floors, regardless of how good or bad the DJs have been. I've felt that lightness in so many different ways at each wedding we've attended.

Feeling just a little bit of that lightness at so many moments - both big and little - helps me to relive the best day of my life and be grateful for all the days since. The privilege of feeling that lightness is a gracious gift you've all given me, and I appreciate it deeply.

So friends and family, thank you for letting me be around on one of the most intimate, special, profound days of your life. Thank you for the fun memories, of course, but thank you even more for sharing a little of your lightness with me. It has been such a blessing to see and feel it at each of your celebrations of marriage.

Love,
Neil

On Signaling Love To Our Children

DENVER, CO - I met a young father (he has two kids under 5) yesterday who is a political science professor at Colorado State University. We were swapping stories and ideas about fatherhood and generally having a good chat over a beer. As one might expect, he was fairly familiar with social science research about parenting. I was surprised to find out that nobody really knows anything, empirically speaking, on what parenting strategies actually work.

The only clear finding, he said, was that being loving and kind to your children matters a lot. Moreover, he said, having loving parents even has observable effects as children age into the 70's and 80's.

As a soon to be father, this was reassuring. One because that's the only real concrete objective I have as a father right now (that I will love our children unconditionally), and two, because it helps me feel less pressured about being a perfect dad / mentor / friend / provider / disciplinarian / chef etc. It's a lot easier to focus on one thing that really matters (being loving and kind) rather than stressing about every single decision I ever make as a father about everything from schools to organic greek yogurt.

But that raises an important, tactical question - how do you show your kids that you love them unconditionally? Because it would seem to me that loving them only matters if they feel loved. If I loved our children fiercely, but they never felt and understood that love, does it really matter?

So, to me, love is an act of signaling, in a way. I as a father, say or do something, and that action (ideally) signals to my children that I love them unconditionally. The signal has two components - the message (I love you unconditionally) and the intended recipient (my children). So there's two challenges here - you have to send a clear, understandable message, and, you have to send that message to the right person.

I suppose I have a few ideas on how to signal to my children that I love them unconditionally, but I won't go into that. Every person, not just every kid, understands love differently. The way you show love is highly dependent on who you are trying to show that love to. I highly recommend the Five Love Languages as a mental model for thinking about how to signal love effectively. So anything I can say probably won't be broadly relevant.

The flash of insight I had is that it's easy to signal to the wrong person, unintentionally.Let's take a child's birthday party as an example (I missed my cousin's / nephew's 1st birthday party this weekend because I was in Denver for a bachelor party, so birthday parties have been on my mind lately).

In theory, as parents Robyn and I would throw a birthday party to celebrate our child's life and make them feel special (i.e., signaling that we love them and that we value their life). This is why we'd invite lots of friends and family, put in effort to have nice food and ambience, eat cake, etc. The effort we put in signals to our kids that we love him or her and that celebrating birthdays is a way to show love to others. Throwing a party is great fun for the child (and everyone else), but the fun matters less (I think) than the signal of love that it sends.

But let's say we went a little crazy on the birthday party. Say we went over the top with lavishness. Maybe we invited some parents out of obligation and to make people think we are generous, instead of their connection to our family. Maybe leading up to the event we were obsessed with throwing an awesome party, rather than paying attention to our child and getting him or her excited for the day.

In a hypothetical situation like this, who would we really be signaling to? Our child, or to the party guests?

I don't think we'd be signaling love to our child. Rather, I think we'd be feigning the appearance that we love our child to others, without our child actually feeling that love. Worst, the party might not be about love at all, it might be a signal of our social status to those we invite (or who follow us on Instagram). 

The point of this thought, though, is not to razz on parents that get wrapped up in their community standing to the detriment of their children. The point is that signaling matters. That signaling has two components, the message and who it's supposed to be going to.

Especially when it comes to showing our kids that I love them, I want to be intentional about both. Really, signaling love is the most important thing they need me to get right.

Making an "Enough List"

This weekend, I wrote the first version what I'm calling my "Enough List."

The exercise is simple. I started with a list of things that I believe I need to have a well-rounded life. Then, I asked myself a simple question, "how much is enough?", and wrote down what I thought.

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The "Enough List" from my notebook.

Two surprising things happened. First, it was surprisingly easy to jot some guidelines for how much "enough" really is. Second, I was shocked at how close to "enough" we are already. Granted, we've had a blessed life and that's not a luxury everyone has, but still. I immediately felt a sense of relief because I realized that much of my anxiety about career, money, meaning, etc. is unfounded, because we have enough. I realized that I've been sweating over the cherry on top of a sundae, even though I've got more than enough ice cream in my bowl.

I've been gnawing on the notion of enough for months - when my friend Jeff shared about some reading he had done about personal finance (he enjoys personal finance blogs, and lucky shares the interesting ideas with me). What he suggested was figuring out the number (literally, a dollar amount that could be written on a note card) which accounted for enough money. Most people, he said, don't benchmark how much money they really need. As a result, they're constantly just chasing the next raise, promotion, or job and trying to make more. For most people, he added, research is starting to suggest that number is somewhere around $75,000 / year.

The problem is, when you don't set a benchmark up front, it's likely that the next milestone - whether it be about money, love, respect, food, or whatever - will never feel like enough. Without a benchmark, my default mindset was to maximize how much money I made. In a maximization mindset, I was always falling short because what I had never was what I could theoretically have, and certainly not as much as someone else I knew had.

Once I made this list and realized that I was really lucky to have darn near enough at age 29, I started to wonder - why do I feel so much anxiety about the items on my Enough List? So I made another list of things that make me believe I don't have enough:

• Advertising
• Greedy, exploitative organizations (that are better off when their workers feel compelled to work more)
• People I associate with who are motivated by power, social status, or grandstanding
• The fear of big, cataclysmic events (e.g., Black Swans)
• Economists and MBA types, who are wired to maximize things, who propagate narratives about maximization in other domains
• Being exposed to all of the above on social media exacerbates their effects

I hope that by being more conscious of these polluting influences prevents them from being so destructive.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

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How To Torpedo a Team, Company, or Organization of Any Size

The surest way I know to destroy a team is to obfuscate priorities. Try this exercise:

Take a blank piece of paper and create three columns. Label the columns with these three headers:

• What matters most
• What doesn't matter (at least for right now)
• What some people may think really matters but actually doesn't

If you (or your colleagues) can't complete this exercise in 10 minutes or less, you might have a problem.

If you can't clearly articulate both what matters and what doesn't, your team, company, or organization will have one of three mindsets:

1. Everything matters
2. Nothing matters
3. I know what matters to me, so that's what matters

None of these three mindsets leads to a team that achieves predictable, measurable results, let alone good ones.

If you don't know your priorities, start figuring it out today. And believe me, if you're in this boat I'm in it with you. Setting priorities takes a long time to get easy.

My struggle with protests and other adversarial tactics

When I think about the injuries I could face because of my racial identity, they only falls into two categories: injuries I could receive from injuries and injuries I could receive from other people.

I could be treated poorly, disrespectfully, or unjustly, for example, by institutions like the government, the cable company, a bank, or a large property management company that rents me an apartment. These are parties that conduct business based on policies and standardized procedures. When I am injured by these parties I have a slew of options for recourse available to me like raising a complaint, tweeting about poor service, protesting, "talking to a manager", taking my business elsewhere, and voting, among others.

I could also be treated poorly, disrespectfully, or unjustly by an individual person. These individuals could be the person sitting at a nearby table at a restaurant, another driver on the road, a neighbor, a sales clerk at a small business, a parent at my child's school, or a co-worker. These are parties that conduct themselves in public based on beliefs they have about themselves, the world, other people (i.e., not policies and procedures). When I am injured by these parties my options for recourse are more limited - I mostly can just talk to them, call the cops, file a lawsuit if their behavior happens to be illegal, or retaliate.

I fear individuals (strangers, really) much more than I fear institutions. Institutions don't flip their lid as often, their are fewer of them, and there are more options for recourse. On the other hand, all it takes is one loose-screwed individual to see you at a bar, harass you because of your national or ethnic identity, be physically removed from said bar, return with a gun, and shoot you. This sort of thing is something I for real have to think about because I happen to be a man of Indian descent in America (and I have before, it's my "nightmare scenario").

All of that is backdrop. Here's what I've been struggling with.

I think about that guy who shot those Indian immigrants in Kansas. What could have possibly stopped his behavior? A protest against hate? Probably not. Tighter restrictions on guns? Maybe. A non-discrimination law passed in Kansas? Perhaps. A tweet or facebook meme? Doubtful.

All i can think of to change the mind and behavior of someone like this guy is for him to have had more positive interactions with Indian immigrants throughout his life. Enough of those interactions to outweigh the preconceived notions he had from whatever stories he had heard. If anything, I would guess that seeing protests and the like hardened his beliefs about immigrants rather than softened them.

I feel so conflicted when I see so many dissident tactics being used by people whose political views are probably somewhat congruent with my own. On the one hand, if the government or another institution is acting unjustly one surely must protest, vote, write letters, march, organize, etc. On the other hand, are those tactics making individual people who are iffy about me in the first place more likely to hate me or do me harm?

Because at the end of the day, I want to change people's behavior and beliefs in such a way that it makes them less likely to injure me. And it when it comes to changing the behavior and beliefs of free-willed individuals (as opposed to institutions) I don't see adversarial tactics working in the long run. But that's the playbook I see most often on the news these days.

So what would I rather see?

I'd rather see intentional attempts to get people who don't interact much to do so more.

Maybe that's more free street festivals, more programming at parks, or more opportunities for high-schoolers to study abroad. Maybe that's increased investment in public spaces and the creation of equitable residential density so that people of different races rub elbows more. Maybe that's subsidized plane tickets from large metropolises to rural towns and vice versa. Maybe that's money for people to throw backyard barbecues with their neighbors or to take a senior citizen out to lunch. Maybe it's money for bus fares so that urban and suburban churches can attend services in each others' houses of worship. There are truly a lot of possibilities.

I'm not talking about revolutionary ideas (or maybe I am), I'm talking about nudges which make us more likely to interact with someone different than us in some way.

I don't only think we can do more than use adversarial tactics to change others' beliefs and behaviors, I think we have to.

I swear I write this all earnestly. I am really struggling with it.

How to Make Outstanding Pancakes (And Companies)

I love making pancakes, and I'm very serious about it. I've probably made close to 5000 pancakes in my lifetime - crafting my skills over nearly two decades. I can (and often do) literally smell my way through mixing pancake batter from scratch. For years I've maintained (only half jokingly) that making pancakes is the only thing I'm truly exceptional at.

The secret to an outstanding pancake is not in the recipe, it's in the making.

• Always start with the flour. Spend at least 90 seconds stirring it, and it alone, with a whisk. This mixes air into the batter from jump, leaving you with a fluffy texture. A fork or a spoon is insufficient, use only a whisk. Stir slowly. The flour is your base and you have to caress it.
• Next, you must mix in the butter. Melt the butter so it's hot. The liquid you mix in will likely be cold, so if you mix in the liquid prior to the butter, the fats will clump before they spread evenly. You must add the butter before the liquid to ensure the fats are spread evenly throughout the batter. Don't be stingy with your fats either, err on the side of more. It's better to have a little extra than not enough. The fats are what give your pancake softness, so you want to get this right.
• Next, mix in the liquid. Use whole milk as it has a nice balance of fat and viscosity. Buttermilk is okay, but it leaves you with a chewy pancake with a overly rich taste if it's mixed in at the wrong temperature, so I avoid it. It also usually is always has a strange odor when it's not fresh.
• I like to add the sugar and then baking powder next. Adding sugar to the batter once it's liquid helps you smell the sweetness and calibrate the quantity needed.
• Finish with eggs and salt. These are the ingredients that bring the batter back together. If you don't do these last, you'll have to beat the batter harder and it affects mixing of and absorption of the liquid. You must do these last.
• When you cook the batter, don't blindly follow the heating instructions in the recipe. You have to know the intricacies of your cooking surface. I use an electric griddle at home and I keep it at just below 375 degrees for the first 2 batches, until the surface's heat is holding steady. I adjust down from there. My mother's electric griddle runs hotter and heats up faster. There's no way around knowing your own pan.
• Flip once the pancakes start to bubble and they've risen slightly. They'll be golden brown.

Don't get me wrong, recipes do matter (and to be sure, I've tinkered for years to develop a fantastic one). But an outstanding recipe alone won't get you an outstanding pancake. The real amazing stuff happens when you take a great recipe and make the hell out of it.

I've learned the same lesson in management - a great strategy doesn't assure great results. A great strategy (even an okay one) executed well often does lead to great results.

I used to glorify strategy development, strategic planning, strategy consulting, and the like. I no longer do, because the majority of companies I've been exposed to, don't need a monumentally better strategy. They just need to execute the hell out of the strategy they've got. 

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

A Justification For Goodness

I don't think being a good person ought to require justification. It's almost part of the definition of something being good to not need justification.

But that's not particularly persuasive. So something I've been thinking about is why being a good person matters. In particular, I'm trying to think of an argument persuasive enough to affect the opinion of someone who doesn't already believe that being a good person matters.

Here's what I don't think is persuasive:

• "Because, God" - Theological guidance for moral behavior is a fine reason for being good, and I happen to be influenced by it. That said, there are a lot of people who range from ambivalent toward religious perspectives or downright resistant to them. Consequently, religious and theological arguments aren't sufficiently persuasive.
• "Because, it feels good" - To me, acting with goodness feels light, natural. It feels right. I feel good after doing the right thing, especially after a particularly difficult dilemma. But this isn't persuasive, because the spoils that can come from not doing good - and the power that comes with it - can also feel good.
• "Because, other people will respect me" - Sure, people whose respect is worth earning (in my humble opinion) will respect you for being a good person. But, if you switch your peer group you can get respect (cheaply) just as easily, so again - not persuasive.

Here's what I think is persuasive:

Let's consider a world where people generally act with goodness versus a world where people generally don't.

In both worlds, there is conflict. In both worlds, there is suffering (because even good people make mistakes). In both worlds, there is law and order (because we are sufficiently different from each other for misunderstandings to occur).

What I suspect would be different is the design of the governing institutions in the world where people generally don't act with goodness. There would have to be more laws, with steeper punishments, precisely because it can be expected that there are bad people. In that world, non-good people are not the exception, they are the norm.

As a result, there would have to be stronger components of law enforcement. There would have to be larger armies. The state would have to be strong, to prevent people from causing harm toward each other, more so than the world where goodness was the norm.

This is all to say that the state (or some other regulating entity) would amass power. Which is to say that those in cohoots with the state would also amass power. And as human history suggests when power is amassed by a select few, freedom becomes precarious.

So here's the most persuasive argument I can think of for being a good person. A society in which people act with goodness creates less of a need for strong, forceful institutions. Fewer strong, forceful institutions make it less likely that freedom will deteriorate. Because nearly everyone I can think of values a free society, we should be good and expect others to be good.

Goodness creates the space for free societies to exist.

The world keeps turning

This year started at 12:00:01 on January 1st and the world was turning. Two weeks later my father died.

And though I was devastated, in a way that felt violent and deliberate, it kept turning.

Then, we went skiing and the world kept turning. One of my close colleagues died. The world kept turning. We were married, I tried to elongate every moment and drop of joy in every last one of my nerve endings, because the world kept turning.

We celebrated weddings, births, and birthdays - near and far - and the world kept turning.

Some nights, when I was lucky, I talked to Pops in my dreams. And the world kept turning. When we visited my family in India, the world kept turning. The world was turning before, during, and after, I ran a half marathon.

When I made mistakes managing projects at work the world kept turning, too. Riley became part of our family and the world continued to turn just the same as when another colleague from work was murdered unexpectedly one night.

At Thanksgiving, Christmas, and every day between, before, and after- when we laughed, cried, stubbed toes, kissed, raised glasses, napped, walked along the river, hugged, voted, cooked, and read books. Even when we sat still and quietly the world turned.

In our new home, the world will turn.

I feel a strange mix of guilt and relief saying this, but when Papa died I felt for the first time it was really, honestly, possible that the world would stop spinning. But thanks to God, it didn't. As much as the only constant in life is change, I find it comforting that the world still turns - with or without us, and every living thing we've ever known - no matter what happens.

We don't have to concern ourselves with the Atlassian task of keeping the world turning, thank God. All we have to do is keep this world of ours a nice place for our children and grandchildren, and teach them to take care of it when we're gone.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

Iterating a life

This evening I came across a blog post about stoicism. The blog post boiled stoicism down to one sentence that a 5 year old child could understand. It came down to this - you cannot control what happens to you, you can only control how you respond.

Over the past few months, I've been starting a larger writing project and one of the two core questions I'm exploring is how to be a good man. As a result, I've necessarily been thinking about my own philosophy. Here's where I'm at:

Discovering how to be a good person (i.e., having good intentions and acting upon them) happens over time. The keys to getting 1% better every day are reflection and discipline, so focus on those two things instead of trying to be perfect.

I obviously have a lot of intellectual lifting to do here, but this is what my philosophy comes down to.

My Beliefs Haven't Changed

Before the 2016 Presidential election I'd like to think I acted with a specific set of values related to citizenship. Here's a summary of what I believed then.

I believed that community problems are best solved when all the impacted parties have a voice at the table. I believed that everyone was worthy of being listened to. I believed that issues should be debated vigorously with facts. I believed that I had a sacred duty to tell the truth. I believed that I had a responsibility to act on convictions, and protest the government when necessary. I believed that all political parties are on the same team, at the end of the day. I believed in treating others with respect, even if I didn't like them much.

I believed that violence is never acceptable. I believed that I should surround myself with a diversity of perspectives, including ones that don't conform to my worldview. I believed that I should argue (with civility) with people I disagree with. I believed in voting. I believed that complaining was not much more than cheap talk. I believed in thinking through the complexity and nuance of issues. I believed in changing my mind when the facts changed. And many more.

These are ideas I still believe in. It's going to take a lot more than one election to change my mind about the things I believed on Monday, November 7, 2016. 

I've seen a lot of talk amongst the people I surround myself with (who tend to be progressives) and I suppose this is what I'm trying to say: I don't care who you are or who you voted for. As long as you're willing to exchange in a civil dialogue about issues, beliefs, and ideas, I'm willing to be part of it.

I have so many other ideas and frustrations about American politics at this moment, (about conservatives and progressives), but I think I'll leave it at that for now.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

Boiling my MBA down to four points

The overarching point of an MBA is to try to figure out the answer to one question: How do you make a company more profitable? Being a fan of making complex things simple, here's my answer to that very simple question.

Basically, to make a company profitable you have to get better at one (or more) of these four things:

1. Management
2. Innovation
3. Money
4. External Environment

It's that simple.

All the strategies you can use to become more profitable - and by extension, everything you learn in business school - falls into one of those four categories. If you're running a company, and you want to become more profitable, all you have to do is brainstorm how you will tweak the four levers, prioritize your ideas, and start executing.

Apparently, management theories are more legitimate when you make them sound mystical, so I'll call this idea "Tambe's MIME Model." Before continuing, let me suggest that this model can apply to the public and social sectors as well, if you broaden the question from profitability to impact.

TAMBE'S MIME MODEL

Management is first lever you can tweak. This includes the management of people and other assets, like equipment, that people use to do their jobs. If you were to tweak this lever you'd figure out why your people weren't effective and then do something better. That might include improving the quality of managers and supervisors in the company, improving a process to increase output, or upgrading technology and equipment to something better.

Innovation is the second lever you can tweak. This includes introducing new products and services or improving existing offerings. If you were to tweak this lever, you'd put in the hard work of understanding customers' needs and pour resources into R&D to figure out a solution for those needs. Innovation need not be big - it could be as simple as improving one feature (e.g., remember when Apple added volume controls and a mic to its earbuds). Or, it could be as big as doing something the world has never seen before (e.g., creating the microchip).

Money is the third lever you can tweak. This includes cutting costs or improving the terms of financing. If you want to tweak this lever, you'd improve financial controls or find better ways of getting capital into the company. This is the sort of stuff people talk about when it comes to accounting, corporate finance, and improving the "bottom line."

External Environment is the fourth lever you can tweak. This includes increasing trust and awareness with customers or working to change the company's competitive landscape. If you want to tweak this lever you might do a marketing campaign, lobby for a more benevolent regulatory framework, or buy your competitors to reduce competition. Everything from lobbyists, to marketers, to M&A fall into this category.

I'd add that there's a dark side to using the MIME Model, because you can try to tweak these levers in an honest way or in a dishonest way. For example, when it comes to external environment, you could run a marketing campaign that truly informs consumers about the value of your products in a compelling way (think the Pure Michigan campaign). Or you could run a disinformation campaign that misleads the public (think the tobacco companies downplaying or outright lying about cigarettes causing cancer).

You could also try to lobby the heck out of an issue to prevent new, innovative entrants from entering your industry instead of upping your own company's game. You could threaten to fire people in order to increase productivity, or you could do the hard work of building a management culture that improves performance without fear tactics. If you ask me, appealing to the dark side of the MBA toolkit is cheating and not sustainable anyway.

Again, to summarize, there are four general ways to making a company more profitable: improving management, innovation, money, or the external environment.

In any case, I fully welcome your critiques on how to make this model more useful, especially from my fellow MBAs. After all, what's the point of spending a stupid amount of money on tuition if we can't distill what we've learned into something simple enough to be useful by us or by others?

For a great read that congealed my thoughts for this post, check out The Economist's special report on Superstar Companies.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

The freedom from meaningful work

I no longer expect work to be meaningful and I don't think you should either. Which you should be skeptical about, given that how I make a living could be considered "meaningful." Nonetheless, let me try to convince you.

I think of my mental health using a simple model, as a function of meaning and trauma. Basically, I try to do more things that fill up my heart (meaning) and do fewer things that are toxic (trauma). Perhaps that's a simplification, but it's honestly a good enough mental model. 

Naturally, I then think about what's meaningful and what's traumatic. Here are some of those things. I don't claim to be a proxy for all humans, but I've found these to be consistent across people:

Things that are meaningful (aka things that fill up my heart)

• Serving others (or at least making their day)
• Accomplishing something challenging
• Learning something new
• Doing the right thing
• Expressing love and emotion
• Trying something that's never been done before
• Faith and spiritual exploration

Things that are traumatic (aka things that are toxic to mental and emotional health)

• Losing friends or loved ones
• Being yelled at
• Being shamed
• Being ostracized
• Being coerced
• Cutthroat competition
• Letting someone down
• Thinking you aren't good enough

Here's the point - the deeds that generate meaning or generate trauma can happen anywhere. Not just at work. Which is to say, meaning and trauma can be generated in any domain of life, whether it's at work, with family, when participating in public life, when with friends, anywhere. There's absolutely no reason we have to couple work and meaning. 

Which is to say, to be a sane and happy person you don't have to generate meaning at work, because it can come from many other sources. In actuality, meaning and trauma need not have anything to do with work. They have everything to do with deeds, wherever they occur.

From there, I've thought about what I can control to keep the overall balance of meaning and trauma in my life at a healthy place. I've come to three truths:

1. I have a lot of control of how meaningful and traumatic my life is outside of work
2. I don't have much control of how meaningful my work is, but I do have some control over how traumatic it is
3. If I put boundaries on my work, I can do things to recuperate from the trauma in life that is inevitable

So why not acknowledge work for what it is - important and useful drudgery - and generate meaning in our lives from the deeds that we have more control over?

If you're still not convinced, I can vibe with that. But I'd offer this advice from what I've learned. To borrow from David Foster Wallace - we're swimming through water (the culture of how organizations work) we don't even realize is there. To find more meaning at work most of the advice I see is tantamount to guiding people on how to be better swimmers (i.e., do these 10 things to find more meaning at work). That's crap.

What I think is better advice is acknowledging the water we're in and cleaning it up - changing the culture of how organizations work.

To be honest, I think we can generate a ton of meaning at work (even though I've argued against that strategy in this post) and that we should  - especially given how much time we spend there. But I don't think that will ever happen without reimagining how organizations work.

The dominant "operating system" for how organizations function is hierarchal bureaucracy and cutthroat competition (think org charts, moving up the ladder, status meetings, and the like). The way that operation system is built structurally squashes meaning and propagates trauma. In other words, employees should expect that hierarchical bureaucracies, by design, will be traumatic and not-so-meaningful places to work. To add insult to injury, almost nobody likes hierarchal bureaucracy - customers, employees, or innovation-minded executives - and we still use it profusely.

The problem is, nobody has yet figured out an alternative to hierarchical bureaucracy. It's like the whole world is using Windows and nobody has invented Linux, MacOS, iOS, or Android yet. Maybe someone has, but the word hasn't yet gotten out to the masses.

And that, my friends, is why I'm on a mission to imagine alternatives to hierarchical bureaucracy and experiment with new ideas at work at every opportunity I can.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

Management is simple

Don't let pundits, the mess-load of half-rate leadership books, overpriced management consultants, or blogging MBA graduates fool you - management is simple. It's not easy, but it is simple. It's taken me twenty years to reach this insight but here it is. Management comes down to this:

Management is a craft of shared sacrifice. If you can convince others to advance a common interest more often than they advance their own interests, you've succeeded as a manager. If you haven't done that, you've failed. It's just that simple.

If you had to buy-off, intimidate, or otherwise coerce someone to advance a common interest, you're a manager - but a pretty bad one. If you've done it without coercion, you're a pretty good manager. If you've convinced others to advance a common interest, but that common interest is harmful to society in some way, you're not only not a manager, you're also a scoundrel.

All those other things that you can learn about management, leadership, organizational strategy, and such from books and leadership coursework still apply. Yes, you have to be vulnerable. Yes, you have to clearly define roles and responsibilities. Yes, you have to have integrity. Yes, you have to inspire. Yes, you have to have accountability and control systems. Yes, aligning incentives matters. But following those rules is not a formula for being an effective manager.

At the end of the day, the result that matters is if a group reaches a place of shared sacrifice. If you can do that, everything else falls into place relatively easily. Getting others to advance a common interest more often than they advance their own interest is the only rule you really need to know.

If anyone else has a better sentence describing the essence of management, I'm all ears and eager to learn from you.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

Putting Family First

For a long time, even though I said "family comes first" and I tried to live by that principle, in my heart of hearts I thought it was wussing out. You know, something that people who fell short on their careers and ambition said. I thought making family the center of one's life, though virtuous, was in a way, the easy way out.

As it turns out, I was epically wrong about that. Putting  family first is the hardest possible path. Luckily, it's also the most rewarding.

Putting family first - which right now for me means investing in my marriage - takes everything I've got, every day. First, it takes an enormous amount of time. And by time, I mean time with intense focus, energy, and undivided attention. From what I've heard, this gets even harder when kids enter the picture.

Second, it takes an incredible amount of sacrifice. Sure, some days you lean on your partner and family more than they lean on you. But for it to work in the long run, everyone has to give more than they get - and find pleasure in it. Put simply, "the team, the team, the team."

Finally, it takes an incredible amount of trust, faith, and vulnerability. Even on the easy days you have to dig deep and keep your mind and soul open to love - and that's taxing, scary work.  More than that, you have to trust that your partner is going to do the same.

Putting family first is so hard, in fact, it's essential that we all help each other build our marriages, families, and by extension our collective community. Luckily, all this is so fulfilling it makes the hard, hard work feel easy in retrospect.

Don't get me wrong, my most difficult days at work are really challenging, and require a considerable amount of cleverness, plus a lot of hard work. But nothing I do for my job is as audacious as building a marriage and family. A career is a series of goals that you must chase with dogged persistence. A family is a series of shared dreams you bring to life with devotion and unconditional love. That puts family in an entirely different league.

When I was a younger man, I don't know why a focus on family made me feel inferior, soft, or professionally inadequate. I don't think any of us should feel that way, because building a marriage and family is not an easy path. Putting family first is not settling. It's actually quite the opposite.

I need your help to tell my story

I need your help. I need you to tell my story to people who will never hear it otherwise.

I need you to tell them that brown people are peaceful, just like non-brown people. I need you to tell them that people who are good at math can be good at things other than engineering and IT. I need you to tell them that people who choose to be goofy aren't pushovers. I need you to tell them men who bake bread on the weekends, learned ballet, or watch an inordinate amount of Star Trek are just as capable of being men than those who constantly talk about sports. I need you to tell them that those who don't humblebrag about their credentials are as talented as those who do (maybe more).

More than anything, I need you to tell them this: don't believe TV or the Internet is a representative sample of reality. Regardless of the identify of mine you consider: race, religion, size and shape, attitude, political beliefs, or level & disciplines of education, what you see on TV or the internet is only a caricature of that identity.

I didn't even know it until yesterday, but the Brexit and rise of Trump Republicanism have made me fearful. Not only because of how much of a train wreck a Trump presidency would be, but because of what his rise indicates. When I see Trump winning primary after primary, it signals to me that people believe those caricatures they see on TV about categories of people they've never met. I fear that belief in those falsehoods will affect how people treat me and eventually turn to violence, because that's what's happened throughout history.

The best way to combat those beliefs are to expose folks to categories of people they've never met. But no matter how many dinner parties we all throw, that's not enough because there are probably lots of people who will never willingly expose themselves to new things.

Which is why I need your help. I need your help to set the record straight about me and others who have identities that are made into caricatures on TV and the internet. I need you to tell my story to those who will never hear it otherwise. I am probably already doing the same for you.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

A Celebration of Being Outside

For the majority of my childhood, I lived inside. I was a bookish kid who went to dance classes, swim team practices, school, and not much else. Later, I started to participate in sports like football, tennis, and track, but that's not exactly being outside, either. Nothing about those sports requires you to be outdoors.

I never appreciated really "being outside" until I was twenty-two years old. Two of my close friends - Aaron and Jeff - took me on an overnight camping and hiking trip to Giant Mountain in the Adirondacks, near Lake Placid, New York. They were both seasoned outdoorsmen and they showed me the ropes. It was the first time I was truly "outside."

They helped me buy equipment and shared some of their equipment with me. We applied insect repellent and ate foods that were closer to rations than a meal. I had boots that over the course of two days, actually got dirty. We boiled water to make lunch on a windy mountaintop. We were caught in the rain. We ventured far enough away from automobiles, that we couldn't hear road noise. We traded stories about the trail and about our lives. By the end, I was anointed a trail name - "Bucket List."

Experiencing nature is now one of the things in this world that brings me the most joy. Since my first trip with Aaron and Jeff, I've now been to almost a dozen state or national parks across the world. My wife and I even spent part of our honeymoon at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. I'm now experienced enough to help others experience the outdoors. It is a great honor and duty, I think, to be a person that introduces someone else to the glorious natural treasures we have in America.

Our country and world are so blessed to have tremendous majesty and natural beauty. And experiences in nature leave you feeling so connected not just to the earth, but to all those have traveled trails before you - it's a damn near religious experience. Once you experience the outdoors in such a meaningful way, it's hard not to take that appreciation to other parts of life - whether it's in your own neighborhood (Detroiters - Belle Isle!) or to the ballot box.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service - it's a celebration of being outside. Whether it's a park, nature reserve, or historic landmark you'll be glad you visited - take a trip! Not only is it wonderful, it can be a very cheap vacation. The Park Service has actually really upped its game and it's never been easier to plan a trip, just head to findyourpark.com or recreation.gov.

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If you're an audio person, you can also catch these posts (with a little extra discussion) by subscribing to my podcast via the iTunes store. Happy listening!

My $3 Trillion Mission

I don't like bureaucracy. As an employee it's oppressive and as a manager it's stifling and frustrating. Perhaps there's a time and place for bureaucracy - when control needs to be the top priority of an organization - but in the vast majority of situations, bureaucracy doesn't make sense.

What Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini figured out is that bureaucracy is also expensive. In a paper they published, they estimated that bureaucracy costs the US economy $3 Trillion dollars a year. For businesses, getting rid of bureaucratic management means more profits. For cities and governments, getting rid of bureaucratic management means more jobs - assuming that gains are reinvested in job creation. For people, getting rid of bureaucratic management means better and cheaper products and services.

The potential gains from choosing an alternative management style to bureaucracy are enormous. It's my mission to imagine those alternatives and bring them to life.

For me, the stakes are higher than just financial gains. I think about how so much of the reason people hate their jobs is because of how their companies are managed. People take that stress home to their families and it has real effects on their well-being. I think about how bureaucracy wastes so much of our country's talent. We could have so many more life-changing inventions and innovations if organizations used management styles that unleashed people's talent instead of letting bureaucratic management degrade their talent.

We can choose alternatives to bureaucracy, and our world would be better off if we did. I mentioned before that it's my mission to imagine alternatives to bureaucracy and bring them to life. I'm not the only one, there are management thinkers, company executives, and other influential people who are going to the mat for this fight. 

But it's not just powerful people who can make a difference in this. Imagine if each one of us did something different on our own teams to make them less bureaucratic. Each one of us can challenge the status quo in our own organizations, whether it's by doing something to communicate across silos, or by giving our front-line colleagues the authority to make just one decision currently made by a manager.

We can all be a part of bringing alternatives to bureaucracy to life. And we should.

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Exciting news, I'm starting to podcast my blog posts! You can listen to episodes here (below) or subscribe to the podcast in the iTunes store.

Life Is Built In The Off-season

The past few months have been the hardest "season" of life that I've ever had. I lost my father, I've had very rewarding but very high-pressure projects at work, I've had to help plan a wedding, and I've had to learn to live with the steam-rolling weight of student loan debt.

Because today was a particularly difficult day, I started to reflect on the most important lessons I've learned this year. After all, what good is a hard season in life if you can't learn from it? So I thought, "How'd I get through this?"

It didn't take me long to realize that the only reason I got through this season was because of the outpouring of support from loved ones that I've built relationships with over years and decades. Even people I barely know sent me nuggets of wisdom and comfort after my father died.

Moreover, I've been able to lean on regular rituals like morning gratitudes, alternating grocery shopping weeks with Robyn, or attending an at-home brunch hosted by two dear friends every second Saturday of the month. Hell, even the consistency of eating exactly 5 spoonfuls of yogurt with granola cereal every morning helps keep me sane.

I could go on. But here's the point.

Life is built in the off-season, when things are going smoothly and there's not a crisis afoot. Building up relationships and disciplined routines are the guardrails that keep you afloat during difficult times. Habits and relationships are an inoculation against adversity, and they are most easily built during the calm times between storms.

So, if you asked me, "how did you deal with the past few, very hard, months?" I'd tell you that you were asking the wrong question. The better question would be to ask what I did in the off-season to prepare.

How To Actually Build A Culture - What I've Learned

Most companies I’ve come across are copycats. Their founders and executives look at how other companies do business and mimic the work environments (a composition of a company's habits, rituals, and practices) they like. In effect, they try to copy the culture of organizations they’ve seen before. On it's face, this is a fool's errand because most people haven't been in a high-functioning organization or team to begin with.

Even worse, it's reckless to mimic a different company's work environment, even if it is high-functioning. Why? Because those practices might not work well in a different business environment. Instead, the curators of a company’s culture – which are most often its founders and executives – should evolve their company’s work environment to fit the context in which they operate.

Animals and plants have been doing this for centuries. Camels and cacti, for example, have evolved to deal with water scarcity because they live in the desert. Bears have lots of fur and hibernate in the winter because that's what they need to survive in a colder climate. Animals and plants evolve to their habitat.

Companies, or even individual teams, should do what animals do – evolve their work environments to fit their habitat. Just like it doesn’t make sense for a camel to try to mimic a bear, it doesn’t make sense for a company in one “habitat” to mimic the culture of a company with a different business environment.

What's My Company or Team's Habitat?

I’ve found that the answers to two questions give reasonable insight to what a company’s “habitat” is and what that habitat requires of its work environment. After all, if you’re in a position to shape the culture of a company or team, it’s hard to do that without what your business environment requires. Here are the two questions:

1. What do your customers reward – execution or innovation?

2. What is the operating context in your market niche – simple & stable or complex & dynamic?

These two questions yield 4 basic “habitats” that each require a company or team’s work environment to emphasize different attributes - Coordination, Discipline, Motivation, or Learning:

(For help on how to determine your company or team’s habitat, click to this supplementary post).

How to Evolve A Culture

Correctly identifying your company or team’s habitat is one challenge, and evolving its culture to fit that habitat is quite another. I think the way to do this is choosing something – a moment in the day, an interaction, an artifact – and experimenting with it. Some colleagues and I put pen to paper on this concept in Work Environment Redesign.

I’d recommend experimenting with something small and mundane that’s done a certain way because “it’s the way we’ve always done it.” My favorite example is reimagining standing meetings. Here’s how the agenda of a standing team meeting could look for companies and teams in different habitats.

Lot's of little things can be evolved to fit a company's habitat - annual reports, branding, how customers are greeted, physical space, how recruits are interviewed, etc. Even if you only experiment with only one or two aspects of your work environment at a time, you’d be surprised how much your company or team’s culture can evolve even in a few months.

One more nuance I'd like to point out is that this model implies that a company's culture shouldn't be permanent. If a company's business environment changes, so should its work environment.

If you have stories or experiences to share with others about evolving your company or team’s work environment and culture – I’d love to hear about them in the comments (or a guest post)!