How do we really support and understand the Differences around us every day? The emphasis on that has sharpened… particularly in the last year, and that sharpness belies an edge that is hard to engage. Gender, race, orientation all imply “obvious” Differences – and yet, are those changes “real” or simply a convenient way of not really understanding others? And how do we handle holidays that are intended to bring us together by celebrating what is unique? Like St. Patricks Day…
Thank goodness Van Morrison is ACTUALLY Irish. I thought he was, but if you know me, you know that there is a lot I know that is not really true, but in this case, his story will fit amazingly into the discussion of Differences. He was born in August of 1945 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the only child of parents descended from working-class Ulster-Scots. His father was a shipyard electrician… and spent time in Detroit, Michigan in the early 1950s. While there, he acquired “… one of the largest record collections in Northern Ireland…”
… see, collecting all my albums may turn out to be important 😉 In Van’s case, he grew up listening to Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, and others. He would reflect years later, “If it weren’t for guys like Ray and Solomon, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Those guys were the inspiration that got me going. If it wasn’t for that kind of music, I couldn’t do what I’m doing now”.
His father gave him a guitar at 11, and at 12 he formed a band called The Sputnik – guess what year that was 😉 Another band had a hit with a Sax solo, and he convinced his dad to get him one of those and started learning to read music. And the rest becomes history, but not as quickly or easily as he had thought…
… which leads to another great Leadership topic – Happiness. What is it, and what role do we have as leaders in helping find it, if that is even what we can or should do? And interestingly, as success comes finally, Van finds like many leaders that is drives away the very thing that started the journey. So a couple of weeks of readings on Differences and Happiness with some amazing music.
Leadership and management are about making a Difference. Ask anyone who attempts it, and the motivation is to make things better, faster, more efficient, easier. Some definition of Different is embedded in both the role and the calling. Those who are not that role will often look up at them and wonder first why would anyone want that job, and then second, exactly what the heck are they talking about? Clearly, it is some other language, as what they are saying makes little or no sense to them…
Turning to engage this week, we lost an hour… but that means we gain more evening on Wednesday … to celebrate the gift that Irish have been to the world, particularly to America. As a mutt myself, I have a special affinity for “… your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. And it gives me the excuse I need to write about one of the true giants of music, and hopefully tell some stories that are Different – which is what the musical soundtrack and this week’s theme start with. Differences – which has received a lot of attention but…
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! An interesting day like most modern holidays that has a Different story behind it than you may know. The day is supposedly the day he died and was buried in his adopted Ireland, and to celebrate that, the Lenten season’s ban on drinking is lifted for this day – and probably why there is so much of it 😉 After 20 days without, and anticipating 20 more days until Easter, it is a day to let it all hang out. And while the Irish were hated by most Americans when they arrived in the 1840s, we were more than happy to embrace any holiday that allowed a party…
Your brain is an amazing invention, observing and integrating literally billions of bits of information every second. They measured the bandwidth of your eyes which is close to 9 GigaBytes a second. For reference, that amazing 4K TV you watch is about 25 MEGA bytes/second… so your eyes can actually send your brain 360 separate programs simultaneously. Use that when you get in trouble as I do for channel surfing. One they cannot do well is see a hot pan or in the dark, and in both cases, without other senses, you would get hurt… which is exactly the same in leadership.
After listening, the hardest thing I work with leaders on is unlearning what they know. That may seem counterintuitive, but honestly, they don’t know it. Their brains have made it up… based on facts that it has chosen to observe, and ignoring those that it really doesn’t want to notice. The fancy name for it is the Ladder of Inference, but Paul Simon says it clearer “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear.. and disregards the rest”. When you really understand the depth and breadth of this deception, it is really any wonder we know anything…
Success had been tasted, but also had left some residue for Van to wonder about and resolve. Now in New York, he was influenced by Bert who helped Here Comes the Night and Gloria become hits to sign a contract that he didn’t read. He had a few songs collected and was persuaded to go into the A&R studio to record “4 singles” – which is typically 4 ‘good’ songs, and 4 that are the B sides. Now admittedly his B sides were great, but these were all recorded in only 2 days in March of 1967, and he really didn’t think much more about it…
… until he was called to let him know his first solo album was being released, including cover art that was highly psychedelic, and titled Blowin’ Your Mind. Van had never been a drug user, and was adamantly opposed to the release of the album, but the contract was clear that all control had been given completely to Bert, and as such the album came out. Even after Bert’s death later that year, the contract was in dispute which included a ban on performing without Bang Records approval… and Van was forced to move to Boston.
He struggled, but eventually was able to work out of the contract and land at Warner Brothers after, I kid you not, a $20,000 drop of cash in a warehouse on Ninth Avenue…and the commitment for 36 more songs. Van recorded them – on an out-of-tune guitar, with lyrics about Ringworms and sandwiches. They are known now as the “revenge recordings” and only saw the light of day in a 2017 release by Bang 😉 And… the wonder is that the time in Boston allowed him to work on one of the greatest albums ever… but I am again ahead of the story…
Like Van and his contract, your brain literally sees what it wants to see… even if that is not real. It constructs facts that match what it has seen before… unless you can slow it down and wonder what you are missing… what is not seen, or heard, or inferred. And it is particularly perilous as you ascend into leadership – where the common idea is you are paid for what you … know. And often that can work… until it doesn’t. And then you need to have either the ability to wonder yourself what you are missing, or have people around you that see it… Differently.
Those people blow your mind, saving you from decisions that the “facts’ in your head may support, but are actually wonders of your imagination. Differences in perspective that you need to either develop in yourself, or in those around you, so that your decisions are based on an integrated view. Differences that will challenge you, will even raise your anger, but can… in fact… slow down that supercomputer on your shoulders … to actually make better decisions. They are around you, and, like the hit that started a career that we still celebrate in spite of the contract, may come from a Brown Eyed Girl.
I have been thinking about Teams a lot lately, particularly those that are formed in a crisis. They typically execute with “show up in a conference room at ….” and from there, take on a life and a feeling that is hard to describe. Leaders of those teams have a unique challenge – how to assemble a group that has all of the various skills that might be needed, and then, how to keep them together when there is not a lot that they share. Differences that bring strength and breadth also challenge you to communicate and lead in a way that says execution is about the work and not about what happens to you or others 😉
Mid-day yesterday, the Earth passed through the mid-point of the trip between Winter and Summer -...
As we round the bend on a year of many things, I was looking at my ring finger. Being old, it takes a LONG time to heal, and about this time last year, I was rebuilding one of my flower beds. We have a large surplus of rocks, otherwise known as living on a mountain, and they make easy garden borders. As I was placing one, the point crushed my finger – right on the nail. About 10 minutes of pain… followed by a year of the nail turning black, and being like that for most of the last year. Now, it is almost back to normal, with only a few changes… an interesting metaphor. What reminds you of what has engaged you for the last 364 days?
Like many things I start, they go well… until some odd unintended consequence pops up, usually...
Who is around you when Happiness shows up? Seems like an easy question - and yet, as we discussed...
In the Will Smith movie 15 years ago, we see a man working to pull himself through a difficult period of his life. Starting as a Stockbroker, he quickly falls into a series of bad outcomes, until he is clearly not “Happy”. As we watch this true story brought to life, there is a particular phase he observes again and again. “Thomas Jefferson… how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what?”
As I crested the hill west of Tyler as a 17-year-old freshman, Happiness was palpable and real. My favorite radio station would only get stronger, a good stereo to set up in my dorm room was in my trunk, and an easy drive ahead to take me into the…. Future. I was as prepared as I could be, and now it was only to wonder how the story would unfold. Looking back 45 years later, wonder is what I can see in each of the various phases and steps that have landed me here… but Happiness… what actually is that?
Being a “human doing” is easy for me, and probably the closest common denominator to what integrates Happiness into my day. If you remember fractions, and frankly who doesn’t, denominator means the quality/number that reduces those crazy-looking numbers into something you can combine together. Without stretching the math metaphor too far, it means that it is present in all of the things you are working with. All my best stories include, “I was … “ followed by something I was doing… A “human being” …and being Happy at that… a complicated conversation to execute…
One of the arguments I enjoyed using in Debate was “Causality”. It is something that is often muddy – did this particular thing CAUSE this other thing. We see it all the time now in our reporting, and often is something that is simply correlated. A famous one is the Number of People who Drown in Swimming Pools and the Number of films Nicholas Cage stars in – have the same shaped graph. You could imply that one caused the other, but I doubt that would stick. But do you believe that Happiness causes renewal, or vice versa, or are they even causal?