The American Dream: Hummingbirds or Eagles

I see it all the time now.  The hummingbird effect.  Hummingbirds flap their wings up to 70 times per second to stay in the air.  70 times a second.  Whew!  Eagles on the other hand don’t flap much at all, yet they can fly up to 80 miles in an hour.  Their secret is they surf the wind.  They catch currents and thermals and just zoom.  We’ve become a nation of hummingbirds.  It’s what happens when stress overwhelms us.

We now know a lot about the physical, emotional, mental circus that noisily plays inside us when we are under constant, unrelenting stress.  We either start flapping our wings frantically like a humming bird trapped in a glass room smashing ourselves against windows that look like a way out but aren’t, or hide in our nest.  Unending stress makes us feel powerless.  At first this makes us angry, then sad, and ultimately hopeless.  Desolate.

This is what I see in America’s workplace.  Frantic wing-flapping or hopeless disengagement.  This recession has, to use a phrase of my mother’s, knocked the stuffing out of us.  Let’s face it.  The last ten years have been a whopper.  8 million of us lost our jobs and many of those jobs are permanently gone.  We’ve been rocked by the dot-com bust, Enron, World Com, subprime defaults, foreclosures, Wall Street casino games and oil spills.  The suffering of 9/11 has become a never-ending ache of Iraq and Afghanistan.  And all of this is being narrated by an apocalyptic media who merchandise fear, anger and despair like 31 flavors of imminent personal catastrophe.

All of this might be livable if we simply shut off the noise, but the biggest stress has seeped under our doors like toxic smoke.  It’s the sinking fear of economic starvation that drives our work life.  All of us know people who have lost their jobs and haven’t found a new one.  All of us know people who have been forced to move in with others.  Most of us still juggle debt we thought we could handle.  And many of us work for companies, even good companies, that have laid off too many people and pushed the extra work around the way a farmer spreads manure over a garden patch.

Layoffs and trying to bloom through a new layer of fertilizer has happened many times before.  But not like this.  The economists who track the numbers say the past two year’s rise in worker productivity is the greatest in history.  But worker productivity is basically a measure of revenue divided by worker pay.  Thus if managers can fire workers faster than sales decline, productivity magically goes up.  Profits too, at least temporarily.   But real life is not found in spreadsheets.  And in real life all I see is hummingbirds.  People flapping their wings to the point of exhaustion.  Literally.

Last month, a sweet woman who recently found a new job told me that in her previous job at a large company a close colleague was so stressed out over wave after wave of layoffs that she began to suffer form fainting spells and heart palpitations.  This is what happens when our hormones trigger biological responses that constrict our blood vessels.  She refused to take time off or go to the doctor because she feared she would be singled out as a weakling or worse a health care risk.  Her husband had already been laid off so her fear was not unwarranted.  One morning she started to have a panic attack.  She refused to let her friend call 911, said she would be fine and would go lay down in an empty office.  Her friend called the sick woman’s husband and then went down to the darkened office.  She was dead.  A heart attack had stolen her life.  Sadly, I am not making this up.  Are we really working ourselves to death?

This is more than sad.  It’s tragic.  And it’s driven by, as Einstein said, counting the wrong things and not counting the things that should be counted.  Firing people and forcing the survivors to do more work is not leadership.  It doesn’t create more value.  Value is created when we innovate and invent.  These are creative acts that arise in positive work environments where the rhythm of human life is respected.  The invisible air currents that help us soar at unthinkable heights are not sensed when we are madly flapping.  Those opportunities only come when people have the calm to see what was previously invisible.  Work environments that create conditions for human innovation or extraordinary value are drying up, so we must create them ourselves.

The original American Dream was driven by the ideal of self-sufficiency.  Brave nation builders came to our country willing to clear a field of rocks and stumps so they could plant.  Today our farms are our minds.  It is over-time to take the rocks out of our heads and plant for a more secure, self-determined personal economic life.  We must learn how to become extraordinary at what we are passionate for.  We must learn to be economically literate and create a sustainable lifestyle.  We must find time to rest our wings and find ways to soar.  It’s possible.

Last evening we were walking through our neighborhood and ran into Jake.  He’s a young-in-his-30’s, constantly smiling, life-loving, neighbor who we originally met when he was waiting tables at a local pizza place.  He learned to use a video camera making movies of local skateboarders.  He talked himself into a local skateboard manufacturer as their performance team manager and videographer.  The company has exploded with growth (Who would have thought?) and Jake told us he was on his way to Europe for a month, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, to compete as a member of their high-speed downhill demonstration team.  I know…Jake is an example of a guy who lives near the beach in one of the most ideal communities in the world getting paid to ride and film skateboarding around the world.  It may not be your dream.  But it is his.  Jake will not die in an empty office.  And neither should you.

What’s the best thing you can do?  Don’t leap.  Wisely plan to take control of your economic future.  Choose, adapt, live.  Really live.  This week we celebrate our independence.  Be  sure to celebrate yours!

Business Leaders Committing Suicide

I think we know by now that one of the biggest obstacles to an economic recovery is an off-the-cliff fall in consumer spending.  This is leading to lack of investment in new plants, equipment, research and development, exporting or any other growth producing activity.  Of course as more people lose jobs the more the fear contagion spreads so the more consumption and investment shrinks and the more jobs are lost.

All I hear and see from business leaders is hand-wringing panic.  By now we hear from idiot economists who didn’t foresee the sustainable bubble bursting that the world wide global economy is being “reset” at a lower level.  Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, recently said while he announced the layoffs of 5000 smart productive employees that his economic analysts don’t see a recovery in demand for personal computers for many years, if ever.  Meanwhile Microsoft made $4.17 billion in profits, which is enough to pay the people laid off for a decade even if they did no productive work.  What Ballmer did, of course, is what business leaders are doing all over the world.  He made sure the 5000 people he just fired and the millions that watched him do it would be too scared to buy a new computer or upgrade their software to Windows 7.

Yes, we are seeing the rotten cycle of short-term, me-only leadership.   Most CEOs today earn bonuses based on stock price increase based on maintaining high-as-possible short-term profits.  The easiest way to do that is cut expenses.  And the big expense target is always the same…employees and now product development.  What’s insane is that this kind of myopic leadership accelerates the decline in consumption and insures that few exciting or improved products or services will be developed.

The problem is our business leaders literally don’t know how to think differently.  They behave like sheep in a panic stampede.  Now is the time for leaders to lower the cost and time for consumers to buy their product by removing waste and all non-valued features.  Now is the time to invest in new solutions to the problems we face or the joys we desire.  Now is the time to remove the dysfunctional or obnoxious aspects of our workplaces.  Now is the time to dream of ways of creating sustainable abundance and attack the worldwide market with better ideas.  Most of all, now is the time for business leaders to step up to their social responsibility to creatively employ their workforce in producing value.

The needs of the world have not changed.  In fact they are growing.  The only reason leaders of profitable business are laying off people is that they are scared to think differently.  They are scared to lead.  They need to get out of the way and let someone with courage and imagination lead.  Next time a leader of a profitable enterprise layoffs hard working, value producing employees, he (or she) ought to lay himself off.

Oh yes, I am off to Washington D.C.  I am trying to get a certain Senator to support the 1% Percent Solution.  Let’s create jobs by unleashing our entrepreneurial energy toward socially strategic enterprise.