Cleaning Up

Today is one of the toughest days of every year. After the presents, after the food, after the pictures, the inevitable silence. Did you stay up too late?  Drink a little too much?  Say something you maybe ought not to have said? 

I got this text this morning:  "Cleaning up is a bummer." Most would agree.  But what if cleaning up is a sign of new things to come? I wondered what it would feel like if we all shifted our thinking, today, the Day After. What if we cleaned up not only our kitchens and homes, but our thoughts and ideas.

We could start with feeling happy and grateful that we ate so well, rather than scowling at the scale. As we started throwing out all that garbage, we could think about what we keep, always close to our hearts. Maybe it's that memory of an old family tradition; you know, the one you grew out of, but it never fails to put a smile on your face when you remember it. Then as we turned our attention to the mounds of dishes and maybe a broken glass or plate, we could marvel at how resilient we are, how much we can bend and change, rather than being sad or mad at what was lost. See what I mean?

Cleaning up is serious business.  All those thoughts and ideas just waiting to be swept out and a new clean cubbyhole ready for a fresh approach, a wild curiosity, and a childlike silliness. Lots to explore today, tallyho!

How to Practice Sacred Commerce

First answer - don't practice, do it. Just start! Sacred means respect and reverence. It also means deserving of veneration. So the question really becomes how do we show respect, give it and receive it, in our workplaces.

Here are a few pointers that came out of our discussion at the Sacred Commerce dinner in October, hosted by Columbia Business School Alumni Association. There are many but I will merely start a conversation here with the first three that come to mind. Feel free to add to it in the comments.

Ask for respect.  If you truly want to have a workplace that supports your growth and helps you feel supported, ask for it. I can't tell you the number of times I've facilitated a discussion where the participants make vague general statements. I'd hear things like, "They don't respect us." "They don't value us." That's when it's time to stop the discussion and get real. Get specific. "Can we stop here for a minute and can you tell me what you mean?" Don't assume you know what the person is asking for.  As colleagues, friends, and leaders, let them tell you how they can best be respected.

Some wisdom from my Grandmother here - begin as you intend to proceed. Ask for respect, and at least you will have been clear about what you need.

There is no THEY.  Let's move on to the "They" in the comments preceding this paragraph.  I remember working with the CEO of Lucent Technologies. He commented to his team frequently, "there is no THEY." He actually had a sign printed up with a red circle and a slash through the center where the word THEY was printed. Sacred commerce means we, not they. Remember the quote from Lincoln, "A house divided against itself can not stand." The more you split off from the 'other' group, whether that's the leaders, managers, the 'in' group, whoever, the less chance you have to being able to understand their thoughts and ideas, and the less chance there is for respect.

Look again. I've been asked a lot, 'what does respect look like?' People take me aside and they say in a hushed tone, "I know what it means to respect my elders, I hold doors, give up my chair, I even hold my tongue on those occasions when I think I need to learn from someone older and wiser than me, but what does respect look like in the office?" I nod gravely, look at their face and into their eyes, and, smiling, I say, "Exactly!" Respect comes from the Latin word, respere, meaning to look again. The description of holding doors, giving up a seat, listening patiently, all these are done because we look again at the person in front of us and we really see them. And we choose to show them 'respect.' Now do it all the time, no matter what.

Sacred commerce is very much like that marathon run, that moment of sheer delight on a long mountain hike, that peaceful restful place after a good meditation. Whatever you respect, think about it, and use it as a guiding star when you are at your work. 

Sacred Commerce

Every morning I walk down to the coffee shop and order my cuppa joe.  It's a ritual. I love this ritual. I say hello to the folks there, it feels like my day is off to a great start. The people at the bakery, it's actually a bakery that serves coffee, are doing their job, with a smile, and all feels right in my world. Last week, I said to the guy I always see, whose name I now know to be Tony, "how come you guys are always so nice here? It's a pleasure just to come in." 

Tony said, "we have no reason to be mean." He started telling me about how much he liked working there, that he has a great job, and he's basically lovin' life right now.

"We have no reason to be mean." My jaw dropped.

Here's a guy who's in his 20s, and he's happy. Doesn't he read the papers? My world came screeching to a halt. I study work places, for a living. That's what I do.  I'm always looking for great workplaces, the ones that get it, and as a result, get a lot in return. 

I walked back home and checked the company out.  Sure enough, the website looks exactly like the characters I see everyday over my steaming coffee cup. Happy faces, a YouTube that rocks, slightly irreverent, mostly proud. You can feel how alive this company is.

That's when I knew I had to meet the owners. I pulled out the stops.  When I really want to know someone, I figure out a way.  I sent an email, then a follow up long letter in a big sized envelope, then...low and behold, I didn't even have to go to step three. Tom Frainier, one of the owners of Semifreddis Bakery, calls me.  Okay, that's already unusual.  More typically, I have to badger at least twice on the phone to get a call back. Nope, and it turns out that's one of their signature ways of doing business. "If we're open, we answer the phone." 

Tom invited me to come in for a chat and I met him this morning.  He gave me an hour of his time.  I walked out with a huge story, about big-hearted people, doing things they love in a tough business, hitting the results out of the park, and, I had two loaves of their artisanal bread in hand and a big smile on my face.

Work that works, wow! I had just found another example of 'sacred commerce'.

Tom and his co-owners have cracked the code on how to create work that works. The work in this case is artisanal bread, and my local bakery is one of only two retail stores which bring in a small percent of their revenues. The bulk of revenue comes from their wholesale side.  They keep it local, they keep it fresh. And this bakery that I toured this morning is 19,000 square feet, impressive since at their founding they were baking bread in a 450 square foot closet! One bread machine (I saw it.)

Today, they have the company they envisioned.  What was that vision? It hasn't changed: To make the best bread in the universe. Yes, you read that right, the universe! Gotta love that kind of aspiration. By telling their employees what they were aiming for and by helping them understand what was expected of them, they started to grow the right culture and to build trust. They said, show up on time, work hard, work together, and we all get paid. 

And they do get paid.  According to Tom, they get the highest wages in the bread making business. Almost no turnover.  Of course, why would there be? With full healthcare plans, 401k plans, profit sharing, and not too shabby bonuses every year, people are happy. They start out in junior positions, and they make their way up. Head of bakery, been there 20 years.  Head of distribution, been there 17 years. 

I could go on and on. The company is greener than Ireland and a heartfelt community member. They respond to charities and other non-profit requests on a daily basis by donating fresh bread.  Fresh bread, not day old bread, the fresh stuff. Tom said, "most people don't do that, because they're afraid it will be sold.  You gotta trust people, and when the charities ask, we're there."

Why am I writing a blog post about this company?  My work is to help people transition from jobs that no longer inspire them to jobs that feed their soul.  I'm not a career counselor.  I help people face their frustration, find out what sets them on fire, what inspires them, and then together we feed that flame until they create that work.  I help companies do the same thing.  Or, I should say, I help groups of people who work on a common goal to create a place that helps them grow as people. That's  how I define 'sacred commerce', a place that helps people grow, not just profits.

I asked Tom about it and he said, "My philosophy is capitalism with a heart. I got my MBA from Berkeley, graduated in 1981 and went to work for Clorox.  Good company Clorox, I worked there 7 years, but I had a little too much personality.  By the time I was 30, I quit. I could quit, I wasn't married, I didn't have a mortgage.  I just knew I wanted to do something, make something. After about six months, my sister suggested I come work at her small bakery, and I thought why not. I went from making $70,000 a year in financial planning at Clorox to making $7.00 an hour. And I loved it! I've never looked back. "  

He summed it up with "That's my philosophy, capitalism with a heart. Treat people well. There you go, that's it."

'Treating people well, and being treated well' is simply said. It is the first pillar of sacred commerce and something many of us are seeking: how to live our lives in wholeness, do something we're proud of, and make money.  That's it, simple.  And the good news is, more and more people are stepping out of their corporate systems, and making it a reality. 

Ever since I met Tony at my local bakery, I smile every morning thinking to myself, what would it be like if other businesses had employees like him and they felt the same way he does: "we have no reason to be mean."

Outstanding! 

Materialism & Spirituality

If you have a family like mine, you probably receive emails from parents evangelizing one political/ideological position or another about once or twice a week.  I love hearing from my family, what I love less is the tone and tenure of these emails.  So polarizing, mired in positionality.  Recently though, I behaved less than I would have liked by responding quite sarcastically to one of them. In that email, it was implied that we are moving toward a socialist society given our current President's track record.  In an amusing retort, my Uncle called the email 'bunkum, crap, bullshit' and the like.  My response, which I thought was funny at the time, did not sit right with me. I applaud my family for continuing to model our freedom in the US to argue our views without fear.

To honor them, I offer my own viewpoint.  Read all the way through.  If you are not religious, do not stop at the sentence that notices how irreligious we are.  There is room in this discussion for all beliefs.  If you are religious, do not smugly read on until you get to the part about materialism being the source of our current evil. Read it to the end, reflect on our current level of materialism and our impoverished spiritual state. Until our polarizing discussions come to an end and we look inside ourselves and then “upward” who wins our election is akin to a band-aid on a gunshot wound.

If I offend anyone, I sincerely apologize upfront and immediately. I simply express that this is a viewpoint I embrace.  You may find this surprising, it was expressed by someone else in a speech in 1978!  

“As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world (East vs. West) is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward.

Harvard commencement speech, Alexander Sozhenitsyn, 1978.

Skeptics and Skepticism

Sometimes I don't write for a while because something is brewing inside of me and looking for a way to grab my attention.  That's the case this month.

I've grappled with the subject of skeptics my whole life and it suddenly dawned on me, I'm not the only one.

If you've read my blogs, you know there was one where I told you the story of doing a cartwheel. I desparately wanted to be a cheerleader, I was still in grade school and it was a big deal. To be on the squad, though, you had to do a cartwheel, minimum requirement.

The gist of that story was the remembered taunting of the other kids, the shouts of 'kelly belly' on the schoolyard, as I tried and fell, tried and fell. And the ultimate victory that persistence brings, doing a cartwheel and making it on the team.

I had alot of skeptics back then, even my parents tried to dissuade me, perhaps thinking an overweight kid is just going to embarass herself.

Here's the thing:  the skepticism never eased up. In fact, it got more intense as I grew up.  The numbers are in the hundreds and now thousands of people I would encounter who would ask me something about myself and I would answer and receive a barrage of naysaying, doubting, challenging, sometimes angry, skeptical retorts. Even close friends, family.

We've heard about this before, right?  Michael Jordan not making it on his high school's basketball team, most famous example.  Somehow those stories seem far removed from my little coffee shop, and my morning cuppa joe and that one person who seems interested and curious, and then wham, before your caffeine has kicked in, your told five ways your story/dream/idea/purpose doesn't work.

Does dreaming a really big dream scare that many people?

I'm dreaming a really big dream right now.  I'm in California, and I'm going back to school for a Ph.D. Here's the big hairy audacious goal: how can we shift our corporate/business models so their focus is on human growth and development and secondarily on commerce?

I have an idea how to do that. (And a ton of people who are skeptical!)

Even so, I have an idea.....and I'm going for it.

I wrote this for my current and future clients.  Here's the takeaway: Skeptics are there to hone our choices, to make us better, to shape and mold our ideas. Thank them, honor them, stay the course, tweak it, and carry on!