Living in More Than One World

Every year I look forward to the announcement of The MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows Program awards, the so-called “genius grants” that have been given to creative, make-a-difference individuals since 1981. The winners receive $500,000 over five years, with no strings attached on how the money is spent. Reading their profiles, and the media stories about them after they’ve won, is always enlightening. The 2008 fellows include a critical care physician, urban farmer, structural engineer, novelist, anthropologist, stage lighting designer and other professions. The entire list of winners, from 1981-2008, makes fascinating reading.  But the foundation also makes awards to organizations, and on April 27 it announced the worldwide, nonprofit recipients of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. This is the fourth year of the awards. According to the press release, “All are highly creative and effective organizations that have made a remarkable impact in their fields, driving significant change on a modest budget.” Related to the latter point, the release states, “Each organization will receive up to $650,000, a significant sum considering their annual budgets range from $200,000 to $4.5 million.” There are eight winners; three based in the United States, two in Russia, and one each in Nigeria, India and Trinidad. Each is described in separate pages on the MacArthur site. You can also read the Associated Press article on the awards.

There is a variety of interesting material online about Alan Webber and his new book Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self. Among other things in a varied career, he was the co-founding editor of Fast Company.  He has also written insightful columns for USA TODAY. Linda Tischler’s post on a Fast Company blog reports on his recent talk at the Japan Society in New York. He also did a guest post on Gloria McDonough-Taub’s CNBC blog Bullish on Books. The book grew out of years of collecting and distilling wisdom on 3 x 5 cards, a habit he encourages for his readers. That made me think about how I often gather information on folded, full-size paper in my shirt pocket and later (though only sometimes) transfer the most crucial material to notebooks.  What system, if any, works best for you?

To those of us in the challenging position of being laid off (and for others who might have a similar fate in the near future), the ongoing Wall Street Journal blog Laid Off And Looking makes for interesting reading. It contains valuable insight into the personal aspects of the job search and interview processes. Even though it follows a group of M.B.A.s who have been laid off recently, you don’t have to be an M.B.A. (employed or otherwise) to benefit from this blog. Today’s post, Coping with Isolation While at Home, is about the contrast between being alone at home during a layoff, versus the social interaction you previously experienced in the workplace. The first person accounts have some success stories too, of people who have found jobs.

Curt Rosengren’s April 23rd guest post on usnews.com, Take the Slow Road to Success, is a brief reminder that speed and frantic activity aren’t always the best ways to advance your goals or further your career. He suggests finding something that works for you –  such as meditation, gardening, journaling or other centering activities – that by doing on a regular basis can help you slow down, focus and think more clearly. An important point to remember is that these tools are short breaks, not obligations that consume your life. Also worth reading is a post on the same day from his own blog, The M.A.P. Maker, How to use questions to create a positive perspective.
The self-questioning technique is similar to the organizational concept of Appreciative Inquiry. For more on AI’s application in the workplace, see the April 6th “Viewpoint” piece in BusinessWeek, The Problem With Problems, by Fred Collopy, a Professor of Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.

For an easy-to-follow roundup of eight new self-help books, see Megan K. Scott’s AP story, New Self-Help Books Inspire in Our Troubled Times. It includes capsule descriptions and sample advice from such authors as Judith Orloff, M. J. Ryan, Alan Lurie and the financial journalist Jean Chatzky. Lurie seems to be an embodiment of living in more than one world: he is an executive at Grubb & Ellis, an ordained rabbi and a former architect. Learn more about him and his book Five Minutes on Mondays: Finding Unexpected Purpose, Peace and Fulfillment at Work, in the recent New York Post feature, Divine and Conquer: Rabbi Exec Preaches Higher Path to Profit. For more on the new crop of self-help books, see Gwenda Bond’s April 6th article in Publishers Weekly.

What drew me to the brief profile in the Des Moines Register about Michelle Hankins Cook, a manager for Norandex Building Materials Distribution, was her response to Words to Live By: the Peter Drucker quote “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” But what I found even more interesting was how this and other themes of the bio represented areas of living in more than one world covered in my book, including varied and fulfilling outside interests, family, volunteerism, mentorship, leadership, meaningful achievements and challenging work. Her background includes  being both an airplane pilot and lead singer in a rock band.

For an insightful British take on education in New York City and elsewhere, see Off to School, on Economist.com. The Economist’s education correspondent uses the occasion of chairing an education conference in New York City to also visit various schools there and in nearby Newark, NJ. There are some quotes from an interview with Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, and a visit with a TFA alum to speak to current TFA teachers at a Bronx middle school. In Jim Collins’ recent Inc. magazine interview, he called Kopp “my entrepreneur for this decade.” He continued, “Her organization is truly an entrepreneurial creation that is out to utterly transform education. It’s taking an entrepreneurial, let’s-do-something approach to tackling a massive social problem.” Last year, I saw a dynamic presentation by Elissa Clapp, Teach for America’s Senior Vice President of Recruitment, at the Drucker Global Symposium, in Claremont, California.
The piece in Economist.com is divided into four days (so far, anyway); three for school visits and one for the conference itself. Besides the visit to the TFA teachers in the Bronx, there are also reports on the Bronx Lab, a transformed public school that is mainly run by TFA alums, and two private schools; one relatively new (Claremont Prep) and one 130 years old (Fieldston). The next day moves on to Newark, and schools operated by KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), a charter school organization started by two TFA alums. The reports from Newark and New York City paint a hopeful yet challenging picture for the future of education in the United States.

How can you resist a column called This Column Will Change Your Life? The latest from Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian (where he is also a reporter), deals with positives and negatives regarding habits and routines. Sometimes the regularity of the routines causes the benefits derived to be diminished. “But there is one way,” Burkeman writes, “to get the best of both worlds: develop habits and routines that are designed to disrupt your habits and routines, and keep things fresh.” This could entail weekly self-reviews of your work, which even though being another form of routine, still gets you out of your daily routine for awhile.

He also writes about “burst working, involving tiny, timed sprints of five to 10 minutes, with gaps in between,” as an antidote to procrastination.
Also check out “The Bedsit Epiphany, ” his recent in-depth interview with Eckhart Tolle, the mega-selling self-help author of The Power of Now and A New Earth.

Can we really predict the things that will make us happy? How does that relate to how much time and effort we allocate to various activities in life? Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, addresses this in “Delusions of grandeur II: Overexcited, overanxious, and ready for action,” for his Psychology Today blog. Markman’s post references two other psychology professors: Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness and Tobias Greitemeyer of the University of Sussex.

Also worth reading is a short piece in the May-June 2009 Foreign Policy, The Next Big Thing: Happiness, by Swarthmore College psychology professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. He reminds us that a lot more goes into the measure of a country’s well-being than purely economic factors. Many of us, he says, knew about the factors (such as community, family and friends) that contribute to our happiness, but downplayed them in the pursuit of wealth and risk until reality hit.

Po Bronson, author of the best-seller What Should I Do With My Life?, has a thought-provoking piece in the April issue of Fast Company, What Should I Do With My Life Now? His book presented a number of case studies of people who made significant changes in their life. The new article provides a realist view for people contemplating such changes in the current troubled economy. It’s based on six myths of personal transformation, underpinned by the fact that dream jobs, fulfillment and responsibility are all attainable, but they will not come easily. Passion and desire are not necessarily sufficient.