Book signing!

Hello my precious, infrequent readers,

(That is only fair; I'm an infrequent blog poster.)

Just wanted to let you know that if you find yourself in the north end of Seattle on the evening of Saturday, November 7th, please consider stopping by the Kerf International Gallery.

Why?

I will be participating in an opening called Thirty women over Thirty. In this case, the art is my recently self-published book, Fallout from the Workforce: Living in a post-career world and the people who teach us.

I met the gallery owner, Dave Felker, this year.
He has taken this little spot in the Wallingford Center (1815 N. 45th St., to be exact), and turned it into a showcase for artists of all kinds. The fact that he invited me to launch my book during the opening of this exhibit tells you a little something about how welcoming he is to creative folks of all stripes. He has a genuine desire to help people bring their work to a wide audience.

Please consider joining us at 6:00 p.m. Saturday, November 7th. I'll be there signing books, fielding questions, and talking about my work.

Hope to see you there.

Biosphere consciousness, social capital, and taming the market tiger

Why do I get out of bed in the morning?—to avoid becoming someone I don’t want to be, someone conscious, but not awake, someone who moves about, but isn’t strong, someone who grows distant from other people, but who wants more than anything to remain vitally engaged. So to increase my awake, strong, vitally engaged self I’m jumping back into the blog glögg and going for a swim. As I had hoped my summer hiatus, which turned into summer, fall, and most of winter, proved to be fruitful thanks to relentless cross-pollination of excellent, non-fiction reading.  I can hardly be an expert on everything that interests me. So I am encouraged when there are so many authors who dare to describe and prescribe conditions for our society’s improvement and healing. What follows is a compilation of the key points from these writers.

How will humans evolve when our choices within a market economy are driven by the very forces that serve to destroy us? While we ride the tide of ever escalating and sophisticated technology, how can we manage social changes brought in its wake?

The answer is essentially a recognition that we can no longer maintain the growth of capital at the expense of social capital. Any enterprise in the 21^st century that wants to capture the social conscience will have to do so while grounded in “biosphere consciousness.” As described by Jeremy Rifkin this organizing principle follows the natural rhythms of life, and the laws of energy. It powers every living thing in existence; photosynthesis, solar power, geo-thermal power, etc. Equally as important is the goal of social capital—empathic engagement with one’s fellow human beings. It represents accumulated trust between people and helps create the narratives that bind us together. Slowly we are learning how to treat each other and share what we have so that our culture reflects who we want to be.

Much of what has spurred the development of these ideas is the massive dysfunction of the organizations and systems in which we currently live.

Anticipated re-orgs:

·         A long string of stalemates has eroded trust in our government. People will withdraw their support or force a reorganization.

·         Intelligent technology will substitute for various forms of human labor in the commercial arena, while social capital in the collaborative community will increase.

·         Education reform: In many ways we are teaching ourselves how to live in what Rifkin calls a distributed, collaborative, open-source economy.

Our culture and its leadership have no choice but to drive the changes we seek. Transformation initiated by government can happen, but only under pressure from its citizens.

                How can the system self-correct unless we intervene?

                There is an undeniable need to impose limits on human behavior. Capitalism as we know it will re-align favorably with environmental conservation initiatives when it is proven that they deliver measurable financial reward. The market and its regulatory context must reward businesses for their performance. Rather than making business the demon, it must be reformed from within so that values of its well-being are not at odds with maintaining the health of our physical world. From decades of having witnessed the carnage of oil spills, we have learned that pleas for intelligent environmental protection have fallen on disbelieving ears, and it is insulting to imagine that the cost of repair can ever equal the loss of our one and only world. As Paul Gilding puts it, we must cage the market tiger.  

Please stay tuned for next week’s installment where we find how personal economy gets involved.

Occupy: Changing the message, giving hope

In all the disruption created by the recession, I see how a collective sense of purpose has had a timely convergence with popular mythology to create the lightning bolt that is the Occupy Wall Street movement. Like many others, I have so much at stake. The challenge living between jobs is to keep the narrative of my life on a course that makes sense. And just how does one do that? They say you’ve really got to pay attention to the messages you internalize.

The job search industry message flourishes by helping people navigate the preparatory maneuvers for getting hired. It’s a mix of networking, presentation skills, and the summation of all that you have to offer, your personal brand. In fact, professionals need to see themselves as a start-up, a constantly evolving, improving machine of business efficiency and innovation.

Alongside this conventional wisdom runs a cross-current that is trying desperately to envision life and work beyond the demands of commercial markets. For those who feel betrayed by working for the typical corporate structure, the search for alternative messaging finds itself right in the heart of the Occupy movement. It takes no convincing for the truth to resonate among the ninety-nine percent who have already sold their personal brand enough times to know their efforts aren’t making a difference. Mechanisms that once provided a balance to capitalism are now dismantled and the resulting inequities weaken its ability to make people believe that they can profit at all. So while the popular advice for servicing the corporate system still prevails, our collective impulse compels us to create an ethos that promotes fairer participation. Therein lies the beauty of living in a hyper-connected world.

The birth of the Occupy movement coincides magnificently with so many supporting social trends:

*        the work of social psychologists like Dacher Keltner, Brene Brown, and others that cede we are built for cooperation and connection, not just competition

*        the emergence of collaborative consumption, (eloquently explained in What’s Mine is Yours¹) that may shift the predominant ownership paradigm to one of more autonomy and control through shared networks of access to products and services

Indeed, mastering the moment through appropriate messaging has never been more abundant with possibilities. My challenge is in making sure I’m listening to the right ones. The predictable corporate-speak that prefers I see myself not as a person, but a resource of free agency traded on the market, never counted on alternative currencies, alternative trade, alternative networks.

                What gives me hope is that now more people are listening. They are paying attention and sorting things out. They know the process will hit snags, be uncomfortable. And none of that will necessarily be any harder than the lives they are already living. Maybe it will, and that won’t be surprising. But if what evolves is a greater distribution of functional livelihoods for all those who seek them, then perhaps the new message will replace the dysfunctional status quo. It obviously isn’t working. Not everyone sees themselves as an entrepreneur, not everyone sees themselves as a knowledge worker. Resources might fit in boxes, people don’t. Why do we pay so much lip service to notions of innovation and imagination, passion and creativity, and then have no courage to embrace what the results might be? I think we are going to answer that question sooner rather than later. And I can’t wait.  

¹ Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2010).