Living in More Than One World

When I heard last week about the death of 93 year old Alfred Kahn, widely known as the “father of airline deregulation,” I immediately thought of two things. The first was Dan Reed’s wonderful 2007 profile/interview of Kahn in USA TODAY. The other was the enjoyment I got in the 1980s when I regularly watched Kahn’s commentaries on the Nightly Business Report, on PBS. (Another regular commentator on the show in those days was a pre-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.) Kahn’s TV essays were models of good communication: brief, clearly written and crisply delivered. What I didn’t know until reading Dan Reed’s story when it was originally published was how full and varied a life Kahn lived. It contained prodigious amounts of work, but also considerable time spent with family. There was also a detail that I found telling and touching. He had been singing and performing on the musical stage since high school, and deep into advanced age performed the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan with the Cornell Savoyards. (Kahn was an emeritus economics professor at Cornell, and had a longtime association with the school.) Kahn’s amateur acting career has been noted often since his death. Especially interesting is the post from Lisa Gold, “Remember, darling?”: Alfred Kahn was my Fredrik in “A Little Night Music,” in which she reminisces about casting him as the male lead in Stephen Sondheim’s musical in 1985 at Cornell. “Fred was wonderful in the role,” Lisa writes, “and a delight to work with and talk to.” In a sidebar to the 2007 USA TODAY interview, Kahn provided this quote about his future: “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t continue working. I’ll never retire. I plan to keep living until I die.” He did keep working, but he also had a wider perspective that made for a life exceptionally well lived.

To further your introspection about careers and the workplace, read the thought-provoking Huffington Post entry by the business psychologist and psychotherapist Douglas LaBier, The 4.0 Career Is Coming…Are You Ready? I took an engaging continuing education class taught by LaBier in 1999 for the Smithsonian Associates, in Washington. He also blogs for Psychology Today. His 4.0 post outlines the different stages of careers. In some ways, the ladders from 1.0 to 4.00 are reminiscent of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. LaBier starts with the most basic to the most evolved (and for many, elusive) 4.0, which reaches beyond the 3.0 search for meaning, purpose and balance in one’s work to assuring that it has a positive impact on others. “In essence,” LaBier writes, “the 4.0 careerist is motivated by a sense of service to and connection with the larger human community through the product or service he or she contributes to.” With high unemployment, work in the 3.0 and 4.0 spheres may seem like an unattainable luxury for many. Yet considering work in LaBier’s framework is a useful exercise to help us think about and determine what we really want from how we spend so much of our time and effort. And even if a career of this type may not be possible now, it doesn’t mean that always will be the case.  LaBier also provides a list of 10 points “to assess yourself and your work environment in relation to the 4.0 careerist.” Some of these can be thought of as best-case scenarios; the type of work environment you’d like to aim for, but that probably does not exist in many places. Then again, if you are in the right position, you can work towards creating these ideal environments, for you and others. One final thought: 4.0, as evolved as it is, probably isn’t the ultimate. What will constitute the 5.0 Career, and beyond?

Managementtoday.com’s  If I had to start again… feature on September 1 spotlights Sir Alan Jones, Chairman Emeritus of Toyota UK. He says if he were starting out in business today, he would “still choose the science and engineering route,” and he believes that more young people in the UK need to consider a similar career path, if the country is to remain competitive globally. A big reason is that so many people who work in these fields are over the age of 45, and there may not be enough high quality people to replace them in the future. I can’t get enough of these brief, first-person, what-I’ve-learned features written by people who have been successful and want to share their knowledge and experience. A similar, bite-sized Q&A ran almost exactly two years ago on independent.co.uk, My way: Sir Alan Jones, Toyota UK’s Chairman Emeritus, on opportunity. In the Management Today essay, Sir Alan says that it’s important to look for opportunities, make your own decisions, and if there are problems, learn from them and try not to worry about what’s happened in the past. “When I joined Toyota,” Sir Alan writes, “there was almost a farming culture there and a real belief in continuous improvement (kaizen).” He believes that people need to be inspired to believe they can change the world; others have done it and there is no reason that each of us as individuals can’t do the same, in our own way. Beyond the executive lessons represented by these essays, If I had to start again… should give food for thought to everyone. Suppose Managementtoday.com asked you to write your thoughts. What would you say? And if it looks like a good idea, what is stopping you from starting again?

Rich Karlgaard, Forbes publisher and columnist, points out in his August 17 commentary Drucker’s Final Words On Leadership: Manage yourself before you take on responsibility for others, that people who aspire to become leaders must get their own life in order. It’s a brief and to-the-point column; mostly drawing attention to and setting the context for a link to the full text of Peter Drucker’s 1999 Harvard Business Review article Managing Oneself. The latter is an excerpt from Drucker’s important book from the same year, Management Challenges for the 21st Century. I was pleased to see Karlgaard’s column, since the subject matter dovetails perfectly with the self-development theme of my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Also read the insightful interview Peter Drucker On Leadership, conducted by Karlgaard for Forbes.com and published on Nov. 19, 2004, Drucker’s 95th birthday and almost exactly a year before he died. Excerpts from that interview are included in a book I reviewed in 2006 for USA TODAY, The Effective Executive in Action: A Journal for Getting the Right Things Done, a workbook by Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, based on Drucker’s classic 1967 book The Effective Executive. (Excerpts from the HBR article are also included.) Reading both the Drucker article/chapter and the Forbes.com interview shows how timeless Drucker’s ideas on self-management are, and why we need to learn about and apply them in today’s world of uncertainty. “Successful careers are not planned,” he writes in the HBR piece. “They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.” In the interview, he said: “I’ve seen a great many people who are exceedingly good at execution, but exceedingly poor at picking the important things. They are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done.”

Gordon Pitts of The Globe and Mail in Toronto has a fascinating Q&A today, Why Joseph Rotman hates the ‘do-gooder’ label,  with businessman/philanthropist/volunteer/educator Joseph Rotman, who seems to embody the idea of living in more than one world. The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is named after him. He is highly educated himself and recognizes the value of education not just to individuals, but to all of society. One theme I took away from the interview was that working with and strengthening nonprofit organizations and the arts was in everyone’s interest. They are part of the pillars of making a better life for everyone in a community, or an entire country. Rather than focus so much on shareholder value in business education and running corporations, he says we should use a broader view that takes into account a wider set of stakeholders. “You are part of a total system,” Rotman says, “and, as a corporation and business leader, you have a responsibility to participate in all aspects, which is why I do my community work, why I do my public policy work. I am lucky enough to afford to do it and love doing it.” He sees the arts and the creativity that underpins it as a crucial part of life that should be appreciated on the same level as business, science and technology and other endeavors. The interview is relatively brief, but gives a nice overview of his life, the decisions he’s made about his career and education and how he’s gotten to where he is at age 74. Although he’s well past traditional retirement age, he is doing work and putting his personal fortune to use to benefit as many people as possible. I think it’s significant that the tagline for the Rotman School is “a new way to think.”

I’ve been a big sports fan since childhood, and I watched many times on TV during high school and college as John Wooden coached UCLA to college basketball glory. He is one of the most successful coaches in any sport, of all time. And at age 98, he has done quite well writing books, and in public speaking. Michel Hiltzik’s column, John Wooden’s still Coach, even in the investment game, in the Los Angeles Times is a highly interesting interview with Wooden about his investing principles. Hiltzik points out that Wooden coached in an era (the 1940s through the mid-1970s) when coaches weren’t paid particularly well. A big takeaway from this column, besides Wooden’s thoughts on investing, is how he dealt with uncertainty in life after retiring from UCLA at 65. Besides seeking prudent professional advice for getting his finances and estate in order, he transitioned into what became a lucrative career writing and speaking about not only his coaching principles, but more importantly, his principles for leadership and living a successful, meaningful life. In 1975, it was much less prevalent for people to reinvent themselves after retirement. Wooden is still going strong, 34 years later. And he didn’t dwell on how he possibly could have had more money when he retired from coaching (partly because of a decision revealed in the lead of the column). “But if you always think things will be better with more money,” he tells Hiltzik, “your life’s not going to be that good.” Regarding the concept of initiative, one of the 15 building blocks of his “Pyramid of Success,” Wooden gives a great quote that can be applied well beyond the world of investing: “Don’t be afraid to fail. We’re all imperfect. We’re going to fail at times. If you’re worried about temporary reversals, you’ll be afraid to make a decision.”

What first drew me to Sam Allis’ major Boston Globe profile of architect William Rawn, Starting slow, finishing fast, was the emphasis on Rawn’s  listening skills. Rawn says architects aren’t trained in this skill, yet he spends considerable time at it, especially at the beginning of a project. William Rawn Associates was named the top architectural firm in the country by Architect magazine in its May 2009 edition. Beyond the idea of success-through-listening, the profile is a fascinating portrait of a professional at the top of his game. He is 66 and took a non-traditional path into the profession. Rawn says that architects reach their peak in their 50s, 60s, or even older.  He graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School, and then practiced law in Washington for a couple of years. He spent four years he spent as assistant to the president and then assistant chancellor for physical planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The UMass experiences honed his listening skills and convinced him to become an architect, enrolling at the MIT School of Architecture + Planning. He started as a solo, growing to a 32 person firm that does high profile work for universities, arts centers, libraries and religious institutions. The photo portfolios on the company’s site and the photo gallery that accompanies the article are stunning. Although I didn’t know at the time that he was the architect, I was highly impressed by a visit last year to one of Rawn’s buildings, the Glavin Family Chapel at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., before I gave a presentation elsewhere on campus. It’s a nondenominational space that I wandered into and had to myself for half an hour. The combination of wood and 30 foot high floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto the adjacent wooded area makes for a powerful spiritual experience. I made a mental note at the time that I’d like to return to speak there in the future. That’s an affirmation of a building’s power that I think Rawn would like to hear.

Planning for the Rest of Your Life, a concise essay in the Chicago Tribune by Jim Sollisch, an executive with a Cleveland-based advertising and public relations agency, provides food for thought as we enter the holiday weekend. He reflects on the question “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” He finds that it is relevant not only for his 23-year old son with a BA in Political Science who is working odd jobs as he determines a career path; and his daughter who is about to begin college; but for himself, at 51. He points out that despite a presumably high-powered job, he tells new college graduates looking for internships that he still struggles with how to define himself. He explains that he got both a BA and MA in English, followed by teaching and writing two novels. That life was traded for work in advertising, while still writing short essays for various publications. He has an intriguing warning for young people: you can get stuck in life not just by financial and family obligations, but by success. You can get so efficient at what you do that you make fewer false starts, which “are the fuel of art. They lead to dead-ends and to cliffs that force you to jump. Which requires you to imagine how to land.” His personal and professional strategy that brought career success keeps him from getting up early to write another novel, in his estimation. His message to all of us, at almost any age, is that exploration and what you do and learn when you get lost are important in life. And asking yourself what you want to do when you grow up is really a lifelong question.

If personal reinvention is something you’re considering, or would just like to learn more about, take a few moments to read a brief, interesting first-person account, Reinventing Myself: My Journey Back to Music, by Steven Tjernagel, on the extensive jazz site allaboutjazz.com. In eight short sections with subheads such as “A Reevaluation Of Priorities” and “The Crisis,” through “A Good Plan Never Dies” and finally “The Light at the End of the Tunnel,” Tjernagel details how and why he began his reinvention as a jazz guitarist after years of a well-paid job that he did not find satisfying. He reignited his longtime love of playing music and determined that he wanted to enter a one year jazz studies masters program, finally settling on The University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia.  It cost a lot of money, and involved a difficult audition, but he finally made it on the second try. (He was accepted the first time, but his financing fell through and he had to wait two more years until everything fell into place.) This piece shows that simply having an idea for personal reinvention is only the first step. Many difficulties and roadblocks will probably lie ahead, and it’s all too easy to give up. Yet reading about how he made his decision and overcame some of those roadblocks is inspirational. Becoming successful in music is tough. Tjernagel is to be commended for getting this far, as he notes that he did well in his first semester and is starting his second. “I’m extremely optimistic for the future as I continue to reinvent myself once again,” he writes. His words and experience should resonate for all of us traveling on the road to reinvention.

Although it was written for a journalism-related readership, I think any knowledge worker can gain valuable insights from a guest column I wrote this week for the website 21st News, Lessons Learned from Peter Drucker: A Guide For the Future. It’s partly a personal look at how I have been living and applying some of the principles in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, before and after my layoff last December from USA TODAY. But it is mainly a short guide to how people can apply some of the principles in their own lives, based around five areas: teaching, continuous learning, mentoring, volunteering and reflecting. I pointed out Drucker’s stellar journalism credentials: besides his many books, he contributed for many years to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and many others. He embodied high-minded achievement, delivered with integrity. He was the kind of role model that knowledge workers can emulate if they are working or not working, looking for a new job or thinking of changing professions. 21st News describes itself as  “a comprehensive Web site about the future of journalism and the news business.” The guest column was for Grant’s Angle, the blog by the site’s founder and editor, Grant Perry. Judging from his bio, he is a great example of being multidimensional and living in more than one world. I’m grateful for the opportunity he provided me to contribute to his site.