Author: Kelley

Other worlds

We’ve believed for years that there are planets outside our own solar system (science fiction writers have known it a lot longer than anyone else, wink.) Recently, scientists have been able to see Doppler and infrared images of some of those extra-solar planets, which was very exciting and made all the SF writers sit up a little straighter.

But we’ve never had an actual picture before.

Check it out — the first “show me” evidence of other worlds. Maybe I just haven’t had enough caffeine, but seeing these little planets busily spinning around their star makes me need to go off and wipe my eyes. I’ll never see those places for myself: but someday, someone will. And right this second, I feel amazingly connected to her, whoever she may be.

Friday pint

Every week I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.

You’re getting Friday pints on a Saturday because yesterday I announced the launch of Humans At Work. And you’re only getting two pints because they are long. Ah, we live in a world where constant flexibility is required.

  • That individual thing (December 2003) — Genre, the marketing of books, and (I now see) the first explorations of writing and relationship that found their way into the 2005 essay As We Mean To Go On.

  • Seeing differently (December 2003) — How the survival strategies of the Other affect writing, and a link to one of my favorite essays about writing (and a Big Clue about where the title of A Leader’s Manifesto comes from).

It’s sunny (yay!) in Seattle, and I hope it’s nice where you are too. Enjoy your weekend.

Humans At Work is open for business

Work is a human thing. Let’s treat each other that way.

I am excited, a little scared, and also feeling very satisfied on a deep level — because after many, many years of thought and more than two years of development, Humans At Work, LLC launches today.

I’ve talked about this before, but here’s a recap:

In my corporate life, I built and led teams, developed and managed process, facilitated meetings of 2 to 250 people, taught effective communication and effective meetings classes, served as a company ombudsperson, and learned everything I could about organizational development and dynamics.

And what I learned boils down to this: managing people is the most important job in business. And it’s the job that no one ever really teaches us to do.

Management is behavior. It’s my experience that bad managers are not evil or insane; mostly, they just have no idea how to be good managers. When we get our first management job, no one sits us down and tells us that the most important thing we can do to be successful is to deal well with the other humans in the building — to communicate clearly, build relationships that help everyone be more effective, share information, collaborate on decisions with the people whose work will be affected, and give people control of how they do their jobs. No one teaches us how to do these things. If we’re lucky as managers, we eventually figure out how to be better… generally at the expense of the people who work for us.

And so we’ve all got a Boss From Hell story (some of us have several). We all know the damage that bad managers do to the people they work with. And it’s not just people — business suffers too, because people who are badly managed become angry and disengaged and unproductive. That’s not good for anyone.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. So I’m going to change it.

I’ve developed an intensive training program called Humans At WorkSM. It teaches basic human management skills to new managers. I have never seen anything quite like it, and I think it’s solid and… well, it’s good. Not just that it’s put together well, but that it feels like I’m doing some good in the world by putting it out there.

Because here’s what I’m doing — think of it as the 21st century approach. First, I’ve written A Leader’s Manifesto, which describes the core skills of good managers, and gives me the chance to testify about why it matters to people and to business that every manager leads from those skills. The manifesto includes unabashed table-thumping and talk of revolution, very fun to write (and, I hope, to read). I hope the manifesto will spread far and wide around the internet, and that people will feel as passionate about its ideas as I do.

Second, I am making the entire Humans At WorkSM program content available free under a Creative Commons License — because I believe so strongly in these ideas that I want everyone to have access to them, whether they can afford to pay for the program or not. There are nearly 400 pages of lesson plans, teaching notes, tools, materials lists and tips for people to set up the program in their own companies. It costs a lot to have me teach the program — my time and my brain are not cheap to hire — but anyone who is willing to do the work themselves will be able to create their own version of the program (for non-commercial use). And I’m available as a consultant to help people do that at a lesser cost than a turnkey program.

I believe that enough people will respond to the ideas of Humans At WorkSM that there will be more than enough work for me. And if I’m wrong, then the ideas that I care about will still be out in the world helping people. No matter what happens with the business, it’s hard to think of that as failure.

My ambitious goal is that every working person on the planet reads the manifesto, becomes aware of the program, and finds at least one idea that helps them make their own work experience better. If you’d like to help with that, I’d be very grateful indeed — because the only way it happens is if people spread the word. So check out Humans At Work, and if you like what you see, please tell everyone — because everyone can benefit from what’s there.

In the room

I love the stories of the journeys people take to make things happen. I’m fascinated when artists talk about how they wrestle with their work, when business executives describe the aha! moments that lead to the big turnaround. I would love to be in the room with U2 as they work out a new album, on a stool in the corner when April Gornik paints, at the table while the jury selection consultant advises the lawyers. I’m into process porn… and so I am enjoying immensely this series of Newsweek articles on the presidential campaign.

A team of Newsweek reporters were given special access to the various campaigns for a year, on the condition that they reported none of their findings until after the election. The result is seven in-depth articles that show the individual campaigns at work, as well as tracing the overall arc that brought Barack Obama to the Democratic nomination and then to the presidency.

It’s fascinating stuff — the campaign seen through the lens of human choices, relationships, how the candidates and their staffs responded to the pressures of the moment. It’s given me the best sense of context I’ve had for the campaign as a whole, and it’s full of observations of the candidates in both personal and political moments.

It’s easy for me to disengage from politics, to feel overwhelmed by the anger and the hyperbole and the sheer competitive win win gotta WIN! frenzy, the self-righteousness and other-hatred that sweeps people up and away. The process feels so dehumanizing to me. But the last weeks of Obama’s campaign made me begin to see him as a real person (as well as a politician)… and now the Newsweek writers have given me a doorway through which I may step back in and remember that everyone in the campaign was human. That it was after all a human process. I’m grateful for that.

Girls and boys and everything between

My 2007 interview with the WPR program To The Best of Our Knowledge will air again this coming week (starting on Sunday). I talk with host Jim Fleming about Dangerous Space, the character of Mars, and gender in fiction and life, and do a brief reading. I very much enjoyed the conversation with Jim — he’s a great host, asked thoughtful questions, and gave me lots of room to wave my arms around (in the way one does on the radio, grin).

If you’d like to hear it, you can find your local station here, or use this direct link to the mp3 of the show. My segment starts at about 38:30.

And in the spirit of it all, here’s a little something I’ve always loved. You don’t have to go far to find the wild side — it’s right there between your ears. Have fun with yours today.


(Click here if you can’t see the audio player.)

Thank you, veterans

Today, war is not the point. The point is that every country needs people who are willing to serve in military forces. We need people who put their minds and bodies between their country and any possible or actual threats to it. These folks train, work, sometimes fight, sometimes are damaged, sometimes recover, sometimes don’t, sometimes die hard in hard places of the world, sometimes die a little bit at a time back home, sometimes go on to live well in the country they have served. Their lives are changed in real and persistent ways by their time in service.

I’m very grateful to everyone I know who has been a member of the armed forces anywhere, including my dad, my stepfather Arthur, my stepbrother Neil, my father-in-law Eric, Ann Holmes, and my dear friend Liz.

Thank you to all veterans, everywhere.

Prop 8

Someone asked me today to comment on the passing of Proposition 8 in California.

When we deny the rights we treasure to others, we only diminish ourselves.
 
— Jack Drescher, in a letter to the New York Times. (thanks, Karina).

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts from the Virtual Pint archives.

Light posting for the next few days while my dad’s in town. Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

  • What’s literature? (November 2003) — Truth, heart, story…the usual.

  • Tribal (November 2003) — Urban tribes and the webs of Solitaire. I still love the idea of tribes, and am interested in Seth Godin’s new book as a way of expanding my own notions about tribes, and connecting them to my ideas about managing.

  • No sequel (November 2003) — I think this might have been the first time anyone asked me this question. I still don’t plan to do one, but I’ve played around with ways to do stories that are related, if not directly. More about that in upcoming Friday pints and who knows, maybe in real time too.

Getting shrunk at school

This is another one of those posts where I have to excuse myself and take my parents off into the corner of the internet for a moment to break some news. Hi Dad, hi Mom. Remember the drugs in high school post? This is the sex in high school post. I just thought you should hear from me first before I told the whole goshdarned internet that yes, I’ve had sex.

And you know, I would rather have swallowed my own tongue than talk about it when I was 16.

Ah, well. The universe sometimes likes to have fun with us around this kind of thing, doesn’t it? So when I was 16, in the winter of my junior year, I was completely hot for a senior boy named John. He was very cute. Was he a nice person? You know, I honestly have no idea. I didn’t know him well at all. I don’t know why he started talking to me in the dining room common room one night after dinner. I don’t know what he found attractive in me, apart from my fairly obvious attraction to him. I don’t know if he liked me or was just being opportunistic. And it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t blame him, and wish him nothing but well.

Because hell, I didn’t know much about myself either. I do know that I was very curious about sex, very personally reserved, and conscious/self-aware in ways that fooled people into thinking I must be very mature about everything. Hah. I wasn’t mature. But I was responsible, in spades. I got a double dose of the responsibility gene from somewhere in the ancestral chain (raises eyebrow at father through the internet), and so when it became clear to me that sex was a possibility, I took myself off to the school infirmary, and tried not to throw up from anxiety while I asked the doctor for a prescription for birth control.

This was 1977. I was at boarding school, and the school was expected to act in loco parentis for me. Giving me an Rx for the pill without parental knowledge was one of those huge gray areas — I was of legal age, I wasn’t breaking any laws, but I’m sure they imagined the lawsuits and the bad publicity of being accused of condoning or promoting sexual activity among students.

The thing was, they were doing their best. Social realities were so much less well-articulated in the 70’s: we did not have general cultural conversations about teenage sex or domestic violence or drug addiction, etc., to the same degree that we do now. We certainly didn’t involve the young people in those conversations. So I was very much putting them on the spot by openly acknowledging that I was intending to have sex, and by asking them to help me protect myself from pregnancy.

But it turns out the school had a process for this (I’m guessing it wasn’t the first time it had come up, grin). The doctor would write the prescription if I would agree to participate in a research project on teenage sexual activity by talking to the school psychiatrist. I don’t know if there really was a project, or if this was just a creative way of dodging liability issues. I said okay because it was the only way I knew to get what I needed, and the next afternoon found myself in the shrink’s office.

Nothing bad happened. He didn’t get prurient about my sex life or ask for Too Much Information. He was more interested in figuring out why I wanted to have sex. No, really. Apparently being 16 wasn’t enough of a reason. It was a pretty surreal conversation, because there was no way I was going to sit in a strange middle-aged man’s office and say anything like well, I want to have sex with this guy because every time he touches me I feel like my brain is turning inside out and my body is trying to achieve orbit…. I wouldn’t have even talked to my best friend about that, never mind the shrink. But, you know, we had a deal. So I just talked about being curious and I think he ended up assuming that it was some kind of intellectual exercise for me, which maybe didn’t sound so weird in a school like St. Paul’s. I don’t know. We talked for an hour and then I got to go to the infirmary and get my little piece of paper.

And then I had to take a taxi to downtown Concord, NH (not the most progressive community on the planet back in the day) and endure the utter disapproval of the pharmacist. He couldn’t deny me the pill, but he could and did explain how to use it at the top of his conversational voice so that everyone else in line got a real earful.

Ah, the 70’s. Good times.

I’m partly moved to tell this story today because yesterday Nicola gave an interview to a young woman — probably about 16 or 17 — to help with a school project. They had a 20 minute conversation about writing, and how to prepare for a career in writing. It was the first such interview this young woman had ever done in her entire life, if I understood Nicola’s report correctly — so Nicola was also modeling behavior about how to conduct an interview, how to open and close a professional conversation, what kinds of questions might be good. Not “teaching” this woman, just showing her through example and suggestion, and leaving it to her to absorb whatever of those techniques was best for her right now.

It matters how adults interact with people generationally younger. Things rub off. When we’re young, we take behavioral lessons and values lessons from even the most casual encounters — and it matters when the other people involved have more power and authority than we do (which when you’re 16 is pretty much everyone…). The lessons, even the bad ones, stick.

The lesson I took from the shrinking experience was that sometimes being responsible means jumping through hoops that make no sense. That was very instructive, really, because it turns out a lot of life is like that (another grin). And now, looking back, I’m glad I didn’t learn that it was okay to publicly humiliate people less experienced and more vulnerable than me. I hope I never do.