[Opinion] You Can Bet Your Bottom Dollar

If you’ve got all your money in front of you, and you put it all on black (or red) you might just be betting your last dollar. Your bottom dollar, if you will.

Employers and employees in the last century used to believe that motivation and morale were traits that could be squeezed out through the regulation of labor, one 22-pound shovel at a time.

But in this new century, as the wheels have come off of the Industrial Revolution, it’s hard to take the measure of modern motivation and morale. Motivation, and even morale, have become individualistic and based, not in professional loyalty, but instead in social public display. Many people—employers and employees alike—have come to understand, without saying out loud, that they have to be willing to abandon old notions of employee loyalty, and even work ethic in order to advance in the workplace.

But many people don’t want to push their chips forward. Many people—employees and especially employers—don’t understand what they’re meeting in a future where motivation is exemplified through doing things that don’t show up on a resume and that don’t scale immediately. Many employees, and employers, feel as though they are putting their souls at hazard.

And as more technology replaces human motivation (which is a trait, not a state) and human morale (which is about the soft skills of team development, rather than the hard skills of work ethic and loyalty and—increasingly—intelligence) becomes less interesting to employers as a trait to develop, many more people are going to choose to not be a part of this world.

Which will inevitably lead to conflict, which may come burnished with the patina of the 20^th century language of social justice, equality, and overall restlessness, but underneath will be about motivation, intelligence, access, talent, and even the ability to engage in emotional labor.

Rather than continuing to seek in vain the next 22-pound shovel.

[Strategy] How to Put In the Work

Putting in the work has to happen even as the work changes.

Work is no longer just about physical labor.
Work is no longer just about mental labor.
Work is now about spiritual and emotional labor.

Putting in the work changes when the labor changes.

Labor is no longer about getting paid for just showing up.
Labor is no longer about waiting your turn, raising your hand, and asking if ‘Will this be on the test?’.
Labor is now about caring, engaging with other people, and doing it with courage.

Putting in the work is not about the tools.

Unfortunately, too many people are still confusing the tools with the work, and thus are missing out on chances to shape how the future of labor and work looks.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] How to Pay Your Dues in a Digital World

The nostalgia for the perceived security and safety of the Industrial-TV complex dominated world of work and human interaction, is almost deafening.

The nostalgia mostly comes in the form of complaints about the work ethic of the current generation by a generation feeling left behind, and discounted.

When work ethic (or nostalgia for an imagined time in the past when people worked “harder” than they do now) is discussed, it’s often framed in the context of “paying your dues.” That mythical state of working hard, being unnoticeable (except for the work that you do), making no demands upon the work structure, and showing appropriate deference to the life experience of people older than you.

In a communication world with digital tools that are reshaping everything from shopping to working globally, “paying your dues” can begin at the age of 15 doing things that

Don’t scale…
…will not appear on a resume…
…that an employer will never know about…
…and will bring the person passive income that can be leveraged after ten years…at the age of 25.

You know, at the moment when the “you should be ‘paying your dues’” conversation begins to happen, directed by superiors, co-workers, and others who didn’t have the digital tools that the 15 to 34 year olds have at their disposal right now.

Work ethic still exists. We just haven’t figured out a new way to calculate its value.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Curing a Spiritual Disease

Giving every working age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives, will do little to relieve the two states it’s designed to relieve: jealously and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities.

Jealousy and envy are human emotions that often aren’t addressed as motivators for people to work. Envy, vanity, jealousy, and pride (yes, all emotions grounded in negative storytelling) are typically at the root of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect.

Lack of meaningful employment opportunities is also rarely discussed. The era of “make-work” is over; but the things is, we are at the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we make stuff just a little bit better” is also over. Meaningful employment is typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions by many people.

Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the universal basic income in the world is only going to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse.

Work provides spiritual, financial, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those outcomes don’t appear on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless, or not considered in the first place. Universal basic income does nothing to address any of these disparities, emotions, or drivers in people.

It really comes down to giving people money, hoping to cure a disease of the heart and the spirit without the uncomfortable surgery of examining deeper motivations, and instead opting for a placebo.

A sure recipe for increased conflict.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Doing More Work with Fewer People

There are now computer programs and algorithms that can render daily, rote, assembly line decisions faster at scale than human beings can.

There are experiments beginning with artificial intelligence programming, that promises to make decisions faster, cheaper, and more rationally and accurately than human beings, without getting clogged up with all that mushy “emotional” content humans bring to such decisions.

There are discussions about the disintermediation of low wage, low motivated, human workers with automation and robotics in places where such technology has never been seen.

There are even more discussions about paying people a pittance for a lifetime to do less of rote work, so that they can do the creative work resulting in outcomes and products that currently many of those same people want for free—or low cost—via a connection to the Internet.

Talk of all of these advances—algorithms, A.I., automation, robotics, basic income—are often made in certain media outlets, with breathless enthusiasm; while quietly, where many people live, we still go to restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and other establishments where human beings are laboring for a wage that is minimum, trying genuinely hard to do meaningless work that is truly the last vestiges of a system showing signs of collapsing all around us.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, in certain media outlets the much talked about “winners” in society are still lauded via social media, television, and viral videos. Much of the news cycle focuses on the comings and goings of the mythical “1%”, while many of the people that act as a buffer between those “1%” and “the 99%” (you know…the middle class…) are working in jobs which appear to offer less and less financial reward, for doing more and more unrewarded work. Places where the corporate mandate to “do more with less” is not really about doing more work to produce outcomes that matter with fewer people; it’s really about doing more busywork that doesn’t matter, with fewer engaged people, while watching salaries remain stagnant.

The technological advances that are gradually seeping into our society are going to reshape the work landscape. The distortions of reward versus effort will be rebalanced in favor of effort. But neither of these events are going to happen in the way that they did in the past: There are no more third party advocates for workers (unions) at scale; and there is little empathy for those organizations and individuals expending effort to actually do work that means something (emotional labor) for little pay.

This is a conflict, no matter how many ways you slice it.

Policies and regulatory changes by governments would help to ameliorate much of this tension. Heart changes in the “1%” and “the 99%” would do a lot to reduce the social friction such changes are creating.

It appears that neither of those changes are on the horizon.

But there is a way out: It requires individual efforts, and individual leadership, in order to work though. And there’s no immediate, tangible, reward or recognition for being successful at it, which is why many individuals refuse to take it on.

Do more work that matters with fewer people.

The myth of scale that we were all sold in the Industrial Revolution was clear that, in order to “get rich” an organization (or individual) had to grow past just doing work by themselves. The myth of scale also reinforced the ego-driven, industrialist idea that, if a small group of dedicated people are doing hard, emotional labor and leading a small tribe of equally dedicated people, with no immediate, tangible benefits, then that work can’t possibly make a dent in the universe.

Well, like most myths, that one is no longer true. And while navigating the communications revolution of the Internet seems daunting to many people, and organizations, there are other revolutions coming, in the Internet-of-Things, and in the development of block chain programming.

The greatest revolution however, has yet to happen. And that is the one in the human mind, and the human heart, that unites with other humans to lead them into doing the only work that can’t be done by a robot, an algorithm, a computer program, or even intelligence—no matter how artificial.

And that’s the work of connecting, collaborating, and relieving the hearts of human beings embroiled in loneliness, disconnection, and conflict. And in doing that work, human beings will come to realize that the tools aren’t what makes the profit; it’s the people connecting with other people in a meaningful way, that makes the stock price tick up a tenth of a point every quarter.

Imagine if the global financial, spiritual, and emotional economy was based on fulfilling those principles…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Infrastructure of Our Assumptions

The infrastructure underlying our assumptions about work, the material world, and the digital world, and even how people get paid for work, have to change.

One assumption people still struggle with accepting is: If it’s not physical, then it’s not worth paying for.

Another assumption people struggle to change is: If I can’t see you physically doing the work, you must not be actually creating anything of value.

And yet another assumption people struggle to change in the face of shifting technology is: If it’s in the digital world (work, products, infrastructure, etc.) then there must be a physical corollary or else it’s not “real.”

All of these assumptions are being upended, moment-by-moment, bit-by-bit, by software companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) product companies (Tesla Motors), and digital goods companies (Amazon, Zappos, Netflix, etc.) and there are no signs of slowing down. Meanwhile, in the “real” world, the debates that rage in our public discourse are over basic income, wealth distribution, race and gender, and the nature of public policy, regulation, and laws in the face of rapid change.

We insist on using 20^th century language and 20^th century approaches to resolve 21^st century problems. The solution to this is not to slow down, change, or push back machine learning, software development, or even physical and digital integration. Instead, the solution to this comes right out of the world of conflict resolution: Developing and sustaining the environments that will allow people to be creative, be generous, be courageous, and be truthful in a world that will increasingly reward by revenues of connection, referral, and relationship, those people who can successfully relationally connect with other people.

Rebuilding and reimagining the educational, social, and community infrastructures that will empower people to be their best, most ethical selves over the long stretch of their lives and creating and sustaining the systems to reward that growth—that’s the hard work.

Assumptions undergird work and the value of human labor. Assumptions undergird emotional labor and the value of that labor. Assumptions undergird adoption of technology, systems, and even the design of physical infrastructures.

But, the thing about assumptions is that human being make them.

Which means, with courage, and without apathy or defeatism, they can be unmade.

Even in the face of conflicts over change.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Future of the MBA

Most MBA program curriculums educate students in the parts of managing, analyzing, and operating an organization that organizations have deemed important: accounting, finance, managerial economics, operations, strategy, and information technology.

All of these are great areas of focus, as well as areas of specialization, but with 4,000 programs at 454 institutions, graduating 157,000 students per year, you would think that all of the MBA programs (or at least a majority) would feature some sort of conflict resolution/conflict management concentration as part of their curriculums.

You’d be wrong.

The average cost of and MBA program is $7,400 per year. The job titles many MBA graduates end up with, vary from Senior Financial Analyst to Vice President of Operations to Marketing Director. But no matter if the average salary upon graduation is $89,000 per year or $150,000 per year, each job title is really focused on dealing with people, to get job tasks accomplished, and move organizational goals forward.

But the vast majority of MBA programs don’t feature negotiation, conflict management, conflict resolution, dispute resolution, peace studies, or any other type of alternative dispute resolution training for dealing with people in organizations. Even more striking, of the top 50 business schools in the United States, only around 5 to 10 of those institutions feature MS or MA programs in negotiation, conflict management, conflict resolution, dispute resolution, or peace studies in other areas, such as the social sciences or the law.

Which means that if you are an enterprising and energetic MBA student, and you are counseled appropriately that emotional labor and “soft” skills will matter more in that senior VP position you are seeking after graduation, than the spreadsheets you will be tasked with developing, you might head over to the social sciences department of your institution and sign on to another master’s program.

But, that’s doubtful.

The future MBA in America should begin featuring courses, specializations, and concentrations, for students in the areas of negotiation, conflict management, conflict resolution, dispute resolution, or peace studies.

The reasons for this assertion are endless, but the top three are:

The prestige of the MBA degree (in spite of its growing ubiquity among business students) has held up, unlike a law degree. Over time that prestige may fade (and that may already be starting), and the way to ensure that it doesn’t is to get the graduates of those programs focused on doing the only work that matters for the long-term sustainability of organizations of all sizes—emotional labor.

The Fortune 1,000 companies (from Google to Ingram Micro) that are fiefdoms and kingdoms the size of small countries, will need more competent and skilled negotiators, conflict professionals, and more alternatives to litigation if they are to survive, grow, and thrive for the remainder of this century. I know that the shareholders, VP’s, Presidents, CEOs, and CFOs, of those organizations don’t believe it now (or quarterly), but the coterie of lawyers they regularly employ to lobby governments and to write regulations, will fade in importance over the next 100 years. MBA graduates in high positions who understand and value a future of business, profit, and peace will guide them to success more often than the 40 to 100 corporate lawyers on retainer.

The MBA graduates are the ones who can save the business world. Arguments for engaging with conflict in healthy ways can be made from outside the walls of institutions (I make them all the time on this blog), influencers can go to fancy conferences and do TED talks that “go viral,” about the power of treating employees like adults rather than children, and books and articles can be penned about how to negotiate and communicate better (or about how to manipulate employees in savvier ways). But at the end of the day, the MBA graduate with a focus in engaging with conflict effectively, hired into a Senior VP position, will do more to advance the cause of peace and prosperity than all of those resources combined. And that leader will do it ethically, on a daily basis, while moving the organization forward and saving the world at the same time.

The unenviable task of academic peacebuilders in the 8,400 professional programs in this country that focus on negotiation, conflict management, conflict resolution, dispute resolution, or peace studies, is to do the hard work of convincing their academic colleagues in the business schools to unite with them to create sustainable, economic futures for their graduates.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 1.19.2015

When I’m blogging, I’m working.

When I’m recording a podcast interview, I’m working.

When I’m in a pitch meeting with a potential client, I’m working.

When I’m facilitating a training, I’m working.

When I’m designing a training for a client until 1am in the morning, I’m working.

When I’m surfing the Internet researching a business idea, I’m working.

When I’m on Skype talking with a potential client in another space, I’m working.

When I’m answering your email, I’m working.

When I’m making a follow-up phone call, I’m working.

When I’m at a networking event talking to you, I’m working.

When I’m reading a blog post, news article, or insight on my phone and it looks like I’m ignoring you, I’m working.

When I’m Tweeting, Facebook-ing, or otherwise engaging on social media, I’m working.

I’m not working when I’m at the movie theatre with my kids. Or, sitting on the couch with my wife. Or, when I’m cooking dinner and listening to jazz music. Or, when I’m reading a book.

I only actually get paid for one of those things on that list above. But without all the other things on the list, I can’t do the one thing well enough to add value to your organization so that you pay me.

Trust me…I’m working…

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT:jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 12.22.2015

My wife will tell you that I never take “time off.”

She’ll say there’s no “break from this project” and she’ll tell you that many of my interactions with other people only demarcate interruptions between email, social platform updates, blog posts, product development ideas, and new business operations ideas. Some that might pan out—many that might not.

My in-laws will tell you I’m obsessive about work. And so will my children. That I never “unplug” or I am “always on the computer.” My immediate family will say that I seem distracted and antsy when I’m not working on cracking some project.

They’re not wrong.

It’s hard to be in this project alone, because, even though many people think that it looks romantic from the outside, to truly become even a moderately large sized force in the arena of conflict engagement and corporate training, the person in the arena has to be dedicated 24/7.

Now, to answer the objections, yes, I understand that material success is nothing without relationships that matter to share it with. And I am doing a better job than I was last year at actually trying to “dial in” to family moments, breaks and respites.

But I’m doing what I love, and I don’t know any other way to get to those outsized rewards in the minimal time that I have left on this planet, than to pursue the results of that love really, really hard for just a little while.

And I do take “time off.” Today is my annual retreat day, where I go to the mattresses (as Clemenza pointed out to Michael in The Godfather) and take some time away from the grind of the day-to-day and reflect on what I’ve done well, what I’ve done mediocrely, and what I haven’t done at all…

Now, I’m headed to Barnes and Noble. It’s the place to unwind, at least while they’re still around.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Our Children

What we don’t teach our children in school for eight hours a day would be classified as child abuse, if we actually believed that the nature of the world of work has changed for adults.

But, we don’t.

The world of work is a place where adults are thrown together with other adults we didn’t choose to be with, with whom we have little in common, and must be “nice” to (meaning non-confrontational, but not too nice) in order to “get tasks done.”

School prepares our children for this, disappearing work world. The world of the white-collar office or even the disappearing, blue-collar factory. School tells our children to sit in desks for 8 hours a day, while an adult stands in front of them, lecturing every hour, on the hour.

No naps. No crackers. No grape juice. Not even in kindergarten anymore.

Governments get involved in schooling because people in power (politicians, political consultants, et.al) want nice compliant voters, workers and adults.

Parents send their children to school because that’s the only way to “get opportunities” out of an adult life that seems more and more volatile, or because of the threat of jailing.

Society overall demands schooling (and the ways we currently school children are a product of the Industrial Revolution, John Dewey, Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor—among many others) if no other reason than some adults would rather not see children “running around town” questioning the carefully constructed adult worlds.

Seems like an environment ripe for bullying, stress, mismanagement, organizational conflict, and avoidance of outcomes.

There are some ways out of this:

Teach to individuals, not groups.

The group lecture doesn’t work without individual engagement, even for well-trained adults. There’s a reason Greek philosophers taught outside by asking and answering questions, taught walking around, and were constantly considered to be “corrupting the morals of the youth” of Ancient Greece. If Socrates could do it with 15 kids under an olive tree (or walking through a marketplace), so can the post-modern, 21^st century educator with all the technology that we have.

Teach principles, not values.

Here’s a principle: “Choose to be good to one another and learn how to get along with people you don’t like, and who don’t like you.” Here’s a value: “Let’s not bully each other because it hurts the other person’s feelings and it’s wrong.” Children are incredibly gifted at sensing the adult hypocrisy that lies dormant behind adults employing the language of principles to hide other motives that are sometimes value driven, and sometimes not.

Teach emotional intelligence, principles and individuals from ages 5 through 12, teach skills, abilities and life options from ages 12 through 17, then let children decide to go to college, or not with their families.

At a practical level, the current formation of primary schooling in this country is broken, no matter whether the governing policy is Common Core, No Child Left Behind or even Midnight Basketball (remember that from the 90’s). This is because the next world that our children face is post-industrial, requiring the ability to dance with fear, fail with grace and be courageous without shame (which children need reinforced between 5 and 12) and requiring people to be really skilled immediately, regardless of credentialing (what children need reinforced between 12 and 17).

Adults (who have children and vote and who don’t have children and don’t vote) need to change our story of why we send our kids to school, and change the assumptions and expectations that we have around learning and the world of work, before anything will change in the school system itself.

Until that happens, we will raise, and nominally educate, generations of people, who will be released into adulthood, with little understanding of what is happening to them in their working lives, why it is happening, and how to overcome it.

Which is a recipe for increasing societal conflict, not decreasing.