I’ve just finished reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work an enjoyable and uniquely insightful book by Alain de Botton.

In de Botton’s own words, he wrote the book to “shine a spotlight on the working world,” exploring both its beauty and its beastliness. By turning a philosopher’s eye on the intricacies of labor and trade, de Botton has produced a compelling series of essays that focus on life’s hidden minutiae, offering insights into working people as well as the taken-for-granted structure of the world around us.

The Poetry of Work

The essays are compelling reading – and not only because the approach is novel and the writing superb. De Botton takes us to places most of us have never been, showing us the vast global framework of cargo ships and warehouses, delving deep into their particular logic and strange beauty. He takes us to anonymous structures on the outskirts of the urban core, where:

“…vessels slip in continuously, during humid summers and fog-bound winters, night and day, to deliver the bulk of London’s gravel and its reinforced steel, its soya beans and coal, its milk and its paper pulp, the sugar cane for its biscuits and the hydrocarbons for its generators – an area as noteworthy as any of the museums of the city, but about which the guidebooks are silent.”

De Botton sees poetry in areas others overlook, such as the food distribution facility in the British midlands, where, in early December:

“…twelve thousand strawberries wait in the semi-darkness. They flew in from California yesterday, crossing over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, writing a trail of nitrogen across a black and gold sky.”

It’s a Small World, After All

In his chapters on the global supply chain, de Botton bridges the divide between the First and Third Worlds, detailing how cold-eyed, lifeless fish are transported around the globe by an assortment of humanity. His single-minded pursuit of the journey of a slab of frozen tuna – from the ocean off the Maldives to an eight-year-old’s supper plate in a Bristol kitchen – takes the form of a stark photo-essay.

Eccentricity Generation

The book skirts the edge of pathos when it teases the poetic from a Monty-Pythonesque cast of eccentric characters:

• The man who painted multiple pictures of a lone oak tree for two years, come rain or shine;
• A three-day journey by the founding member of the Pylon Appreciation Society from the Kent Coast to East London, cataloging the 542 pylons that provide illumination for Oxford Street shops;
• An independent career counselor whose conducts business with clients in a house that smells of cabbage; and
• The inventor of a pair of shoes that walk on water.

And if you want to know what Japanese day-time television, French Guiana, the freezing point of hydrogen and the fragile ego of a Hong Kong journalist have in common, read the chapter on Rocket Science to find out.

Lese Majeste

All of de Botton’s characters are treated with gentleness and respect. The one time de Botton seems to be peeved by a subject of his inquiries is, unfortunately, the one place in the book where the cloak of anonymity fails him. His long chapter on ‘Accountancy’ profiles the European headquarters of “one of the world’s largest accountancy firms,” and his interview with the chairman of the operation is singularly bad-tempered. De Botton notes that the senior executive has forsworn the trappings of authority – sitting in an open cubicle, asking people to call him by his first name – yet, as the author scathingly notes:

“…power has not disappeared entirely; it has merely been reconfigured. It is by posing as a regular employee that the chairman stands his best chance of preserving his seniority. His subordinates admire the sincerity with which he pretends to share their fate, while he privately recognises that only a convincing show of normalcy will prevent him from ever having to be normal again.”

Say what?

More convincing are the comments on the frequent internal presentations the top guy delivers “against a backdrop of PowerPoint slogans”:

“It is evident that success in his job will ultimately depend less on anything he might do than on his relative luck in aligning his reign with auspicious currents in economic history. He is like a general on a battlefield vainly striving to maintain an appearance of control amidst the chaos of sporadically exploding munitions.”

‘Nuff said.

The one problem with the supposed ‘anonymous’ critique is that the company chairman is photographed in front of a PowerPoint slide where the logo of the major accounting firm is clearly visible. Curious which firm it is? Turn to page 253 to find out.

John Berger

de Botton’s book reminded me of another of my favorite authors. John Berger is a Marxist art historian best known for Ways of Seeingand the wonderful coming-of-age novel G.

His examination of the life of a country doctor A Fortunate Man is a great companion to The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

Berger examines the daily life of the country doctor with an art historian’s and sociologist’s perspective. The working life of one man is situated in the broader framework of the social relationships.

The book is full of insights like this on the structures of social intercourse:

The easiest – and sometimes the only possible – form of conversation is that which concerns or describes action: that is to say action considered as technique or procedure. It is then not the experience of the speakers which is discussed but the nature of an entirely exterior mechanism ot event – a motor-car engine, a football match, a draining system or the workings of some committee. Such subjects, which preclude anything indirectly personal, supply the content of most of the conversations being carried on by men over twenty-five at any given moment in England today. (in the case of the young, the force of their own appetites saves them from such depersonalization.)

Both authors show depth of meaning and discover truth when they focus on the everyday. As writers, we should always look deeply into the world around us.

Ellen Taliaferro, MD (aka Dr T) is a recovering emergency physician now serving as the Medical Director of the San Mateo Medical Center Keller Center for Family Violence Intervention in San Mateo, CA.

Using her background in emergency medicine, stress management, and writing, she has created a program called Healing the Wound Within with a personal Writing Practice Prescription.

In addition, she continues to speak on Domestic Violence As A Health Issue and The Medical Aspects Of Manual Strangulation As A Form Domestic Violence Assault.

Dr T grew up in Will Rogers country and loves country humor. She sees herself as a true Okie: “Sooner born, Sooner bred, and when I die I’m California dead.” Of note, she finished her clinical career at UTSW medical school and Parkland Hospital. While there, the Dallas Morning News named her as one of the 100 most influential Texas women — an amazing feat for an Okie.

Pro-Track Profile

Dr. T. is a professional member of the National Speakers Association. She’s also a Board Member of the Northern California Chapter. Ellen is one of a growing number of established members who have enrolled in the 2009 Pro-Track class in order to take their career to the next level.

To hear what Dr. T has to say about professional speaking, well writing and Pro-Track, click on the podcast icon below.

Interview: Dr. Ellen Taliaferro [ 8:09 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Appearance is everything at this weekend’s Group of Eight food crisis meeting. Delegates from the eight leading northern hemisphere economies met in Italy to discuss world hunger.

Adverse publicity in advance of an “aperitif and gala dinner” caused the lavish dining arrangements to be replaced with a working dinner and no wine tasting.

The Financial Times report concludes with a reminder that a 2002 UN Food and Agriculture Organization meeting was embarrassed when a lobster and foie gras menu was offered at a forum on global hunger.

Executives and politicians (and their PR handlers) need to maintain constant vigilance as contradictions in lifestyles between the have’s and have not’s threaten the legitimacy of their words if undermined by their actions. The 21st Century is as rich as breeding ground for this hypocrisy as ever was the France of the Sun King or Victorian England.

The Detroit auto executives maladroit arrival in DC in “the jet” (as corporations refer to their private aircraft fleets) is but one example of the speed with which the current crisis is undermining previously non-problematic behavior in the C-Suite.

Executive communicators should be aware of the overall context of a spokesperson’s actions, not just the content of their speech or PowerPoint slides taken in isolation.

Authenticity is a valuable commodity.

Gourmand tastes should be indulged in private. You are what you eat.

Word is that American’s are not feeling quite so brave these days. At least not down in Texas. Many of them are buying guns and lobbying to be allowed to carry firearms on their morning commute. They fear an increase in crime sparked by the economic downturn. This according to the Financial Times:

In November last year there were a record 1,529,635 background checks for gun licences in the US, up 42 per cent from the same period a year earlier, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In January 2009 the number of background checks re­quested was 1.21m, up from 942,556 in the same month last year, and rose in February to 1.3m, up from 1m in February 2008.

In 2004 over a third of American households reported owning a gun. In 2005, 10,100 homicides involved firearms in the US of A.

In this economic downturn, firearms are a growth industry.

A week into the Financial Times’ “major new series” on the future of capitalism and my head is about to explode.

What is it called – cognitive dissonance – when two contradictory ideas live side-by-side?

That’s what reading the FT feels like these days. They still print on pink paper. There’s still the stock, commodity and currency quotes on the inside pages. The weekend edition still has the ‘How to Spend It’ color magazine with full-page adverts for Swiss timepieces and exclusive real estate.

But in light of this series I’m expecting to soon see survival gear and guides to communes in the Oregon woods.

The paper reads like the Marxist sociology texts I inhaled at Leicester University in the 1970′s. Consider:

• “Another ideological god has failed.” (Seeds of its own destruction, Martin Wolf, 8 March)
• “The idea that unfettered, unregulated capitalism would invariably produce the good outcomes was a wrong economic theory regarding how capitalist societies behave and what causes their crises.” (A failure to control the animal spirits, Robert Shiller, 8 March)
• “Our world is broken – and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it. The compass by which we steered as Americans has gone.” (Bernie Sucher, head of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow operations, quoted in Lost through destructive creation, Gillian Tett, 9 March)
• “No one can read the chronicles of those earlier crashes without sensing – with a chill – that history is repeating itself. The story of the modern capitalist economy is a rhythmic repetition of cycles, syncopated by eerily similar crises …This is not the bankruptcy of a social system, but the intellectual and moral failure of those who were in charge of it: a failure for which there is no excuse.” (Editorial, 9 March)
• “Ideologically, the manifest failure of market fundamentalism is the starting point … The financial crisis has turned (the) old political logic upside down. As the recession deepens, cultural issues pale in significance next to economic ones. Public anger towards Wall Street … has transformed the Masters of the Universe from heroes to villains.” (The audacity of help, Chrystia Freeland, March 11)
• “…executives and their companies have been caught in the grip of a storm that will revolutionize business. The deep freeze of capital markets, the implosion of financial groups and the resulting rise in governments’ sway over the private sector have called into question some of the foundations of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” (A need to reconnect, Francesco Guerrera, 12 March)

So, if the FT is right, the ideology has failed; the economic theory is wrong; the compass we steer by has gone; history is repeating itself; financiers are moral and intellectual failures, villains even; the storm of revolution is upon us (emphasis added).

Which means?

Well, (dusting off the texts from Leicester) an alternative was once proposed:

“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32, Karl Marx, 1867)

“In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10, Karl Marx, 1867)

However, that alternative came up short in a few places over the last 150 years.

One thing to consider is the transcendence of the whole panic and crisis mentality; the dialetical thesis and antithesis; winner and loser; boom and bust. Rather than looking for a solution in political economy or the labor theory of value, perhaps a more radical (or root-source) alternative is needed in this time of crisis:

“The root-source of disturbance in the human realm is not a financial crisis, or the crisis of global warming and extreme weather, or the problems that arise with the migration of people to everywhere, or the breakdown of the international system in the United Nations, or the epidemic nature of disease and poverty.

The root-source of disturbance in the human realm is the (by-now-paradigmatic) presumption that human beings exist in the world merely in order to consume, to acquire, to luxuriate in conditional experience of all kinds, to exploit the possibilities of enhancing their own “self”-interests — with no other principle or countering force to which they must be accountable.
.
.
The present world-chaos must be clearly and thoroughly understood – not only as the total and final collapse of all past civilizations (or of ego-culture and the “tribalization” of separate and opposing human socities), but as the consummate critical moment of opportunity for humankind as a whole and single order of mutual responsibility on Earth.
.
.
The old moral, social, and political “order” of humankind is now dead. A new and true and right order of humankind is, now, and forever hereafter, necessary.
.
.
Only everybody-all-at-once can change the current chaos.”

Not-Two Is Peace, Adi Da Samraj.

…would you read an interview conducted over lunch in Ljubljana with a provocative Slovenian Marxist philosopher called Slavoj Zizek. After munching on medallions of veal and lamb with thyme the “perpetual thought machine in manic motion” offers his interpretation of the current financial crisis:

The ruling ideology is trying to shift the blame from the global capitalist system as such on to its accidental deviations – such as overly lax regulation or the corruption of big financial institutions. In some respects this has allowed capitalists to assert their values even more aggressively: while bailing out Wall Street they are shredding collective bargaining agreements at General Motors and relegating the problems of global warming, Aids and hunger.

“The problem is today that when you have chaos and disorder people lose their cognitive mapping. So it is an open struggle as to whose interpretation will win,” he says. “Never forget that this is how Hitler won.”

According to Zizek, the reason Hitler came to power in the 1930s was because he offered the most attractive interpretation of disastrous events. He simply flattered the Germans by claiming that their army had been betrayed in the first world war and by laying all the blame at the feet of the Jews.

We order fruit salad.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

- Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Answer: They are, according to the International Labour Organization, the only four nations on the planet with no paid maternity leave.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports, countries not run on twisted draconian principles of 19th Century capitalism, are debating whether to increase government mandated paid maternity leave. Imagine. The UK is considering an increase from nine to twelve months. Sweden offers 480 days of paid parental leave.

The FT considers the ‘cost to employers’ argument that some 3rd World countries (and these United States) claim is too burdensome, but concludes:

Maternity leave provides clear benefits to society. Apart from the advantages of babies spending their early months with their mothers, breast-fed children have lower rates of infections, childhood diabetes, eczema, obesity and asthma.

Companies benefit from maternity leave by allowing women to return to work when their children are a little older, rather than forcing them to resign if they want to be with their babies. Employers hold on to people and escape the additional costs of having to replace those who leave.

Little wonder President Obama saluted “the hardest-working people on Earth” in his recent address to Congress. With family values like these, Mom has no choice.

I noticed in my blog stats page that the search terms ‘financial crisis explained’ and ‘current financial crisis explained’ were showing up in the top 10 search key phrases for my blog. When I entered them in Google I couldn’t believe my eyes:

I mean, if this is the #1 search result on Google for something of this magnitude?

Not that the article I posted is really what I think, it’s just a recommendation to two articles in the Sunday New York Times which struck me as appropriate to the subject of my blog (executive communications) since, I noted:

Both articles shed light on the dynamics of executive communications when group-think rules. Thinking outside the box before the box imploded was not encouraged or rewarded. Pity.

But c’mon people, this can’t be the #1 explanation of the current financial crisis, can it? Say it ain’t so.

Continuing the tradition began three years ago and the year after, I can reveal that in the past 365 days I have, surprise, become another year older.

I fully embrace the transparency senior executives and politicians tolerate in regard to their age and biographical details. These days it’s only the plebs who have no online identity where anyone who is interested can find out your age, marital status and similar ‘private’ data points. As Sun Chairman Scott McNealy once remarked “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

I’ve now reached the age where 57 years of variety is the spice of life. It’s not only policemen who look younger, suddenly President’s do. As my Irish father-in-law once remarked, you’re not really old until the Pope is younger than you are.

A new venture by NSA Northern California past-president Scott Q. Marcus looks interesting. Scott lives up in the redwoods in Eureka and is turning his geographical isolation to an advantage with a blog on Long Distance Marketing.

Scott writes of the challenge of finding and developing a customer base that is not located near your base of operations:

The question is “How?” That is one foundation on which this site is built. How do you reach potential clients and customers who live far away from you? What works? What doesn’t? In this “new” age of marketing, what are the most effective tools to find your clients? Of even more import is how do they find you?

His blog will document creative approaches to that challenge. One approach is to publish a quarterly magazine called ‘Two Words’.

For a ringside seat at the birth of a new business venture, bookmark Scott’s blog and join in the conversation as he launches himself into cyberspace – WOOOOSH!