Lara Lee is a directing associate of Jump Associates and former VP of Enthusiast Services at Harley-Davidson. I first heard her speak at MIT in 2009, and was impressed with her intelligence and clarity. I thought, “This may be what a Chief Culture Officer sounds like. I interviewed her in San Francisco on January 21, 2010. All the quotes below are from this interview. (send this to Patty and to Katherine)
Here I am, this young, Caucasian woman from the East Coast, suddenly in Singapore trying to speak to you in Mandarin and help you fix your business problems. And you are the owner of a fish processing company who buys from Indonesia and sells your finished product to California.
This is Lara Lee. Miles from home. Twenty-three years old. Trying to get the job done.
Lee may be out of her depth but she has an advantage. She can see into the world of her Singapore client.
I seem to be able to relate to all sorts of different people, and I think that stems from a natural curiosity and a lot of natural empathy.
Still, she is up against it. Especially back at the office in Singapore.
People were very friendly on the surface, but I found actually a lot of resistance to my presence just beneath the surface. I was 23 years old and highly educated and flown across the world to come and work in this nascent consulting group. It was like "What is she doing here?" "Why do we need her?"
Lee solved this problem as she did the fish processor’s problem, with curiosity and empathy.
I came to understand how all the social skills you use in the wider world … show up in the business world. And that was sort of a mini epiphany. I became fascinated with finding out how to make those emotional connections in the context of business.
For Lee, empathy makes everyone transparent, colleagues, customers, consumers alike. Empathy, it turns out, is an all-access pass.
Lara Lee makes it looks easy, seamless, obvious, but her career is, I think, a small miracle. In the early 1980s, when fellow students were pursing Japanese language training, Lee wondered whether Chinese might be the better bet. (Now, of course, she looks prescient. At the time, she was the only Chinese student at Brown.)
That Lee is doing business at all is remarkable. A lot of kids coming out of Brown in 1985 regarded business and global culture as the enemy. (This remains an article of faith in many Liberal Arts programs.) Lee demurred. She believed that business was where cultures meet. Lee has what the Victorians used to call an “independent cast of mind.”
[More to come! Came back soon to hear how Lara Lee served as a CCO at Harley Davidson.]
I saw a dandy presentation in Boulder by Steve Clouthier.
It had a strange structure. Steve began with one image and stayed with that image for the entire 40 minutes of his talk.
When he wanted to make specific points, he would drop down on to one of the sections of this image, and an entire world would open up. Finished there, he would climb back up to the entire image.
Steve’s presentation was given as if from Google Maps. He was working from 31,000 feet. When he needed to give us a finer view of his topic, he would drop down into it. And then return.
What I liked about this was that it broke from the seriality of a Powerpoint presentation. You know, the one that forces us to move from slide to slide…and away from the "big picture."
The image shows me giving a talk at MIT. I am projected my talk as a tree diagram using Mind Manager. This approach is a little like Steve’s. It shows the entire argument at any given time. And this allows the viewer to go back through and check all the subarguments, test the argument in it’s entirety. It also has the advantage of tattooing passages from the image on my very bald head. I am happy to serve the argument any way I can.
There are small and large advantages to the simultaneous view. In certain liberal arts circles, the idea is to "release" the argument, using powers of evocation as much as denotation. Arguments that are designed to unfold in this way are not well served by simultaneity. Indeed, simultaneity is a little too effortful and obvious.
But this style really works in business schools and other institutions that prize themselves on clarity. This was one of the things I noticed moving from the Museum world to the Harvard Business School and then back to the Liberal Arts at McGill. In Museum circles, it is perfectly okay to speak discursively. And no one ever asks for clarification, as if this was perhaps a confession of intellectual insufficiency or just a matter of being a little obvious.
But at Harvard there was no shame at all in asking people to restate some part of the argument. The person making the request would almost always then look away and listen to the restatement with the utmost care. No shame at all. I guess you couldn’t ask for this sort of thing indefinitely without throwing your intellectual abilities into question. But once or twice a session was perfectly ok.
And that’s, I think, because every argument is not so much an evocation of theoretical verities, niceties, or, indeed, advances, but a little machine. And the listener was entitled to the specs for this machine. And a demonstration of how it works.
At McGill, once more in the embrace of the liberal arts, I was returned to the world of the argument as flight of the pigeons. One turn over the audience and everyone pretty much knew what you meant.Specific details and propositions were entirely up to the listener. Nothing so obvious as restatement was ever permitted. I mean, really.
But there is another reason, I think, to encourage the use of Steve’s approach. (The software in question, he tells me, is Prezi.) Seriality assumes an attention span, and I haven’t had one of those for some years now. And it’s not just me, I don’t think. How many of you "come to" in an auditorium thinking, "oh damn, what is this talk about again?" The great thing about simultaneity is that you don’t have to ask this question. It’s all up there on the screen.
Simultaneity is good for the big picture and it’s good for scrutinizing the finer points of the argument. And it’s a good way to deal that problem that some of us have with that…er…what was I saying again?
References
See more on the software in question here.
So I am in the United lounge at La Guardia (sp) the other day. And I hope to use the wireless system there. And for a moment it works.
T-mobile at my disposal.
Not really. I can’t make contact.
And then, I can’t get out.
Mr. Impatient business man, I revert to my wireless carrier of choice, AT&T
But T-Mobile won’t let go.
In fact, I can’t "get out" and make contact with AT&T because T-Mobile insists I must be trying to talk to it.
"You talking to me." It is very like a scene out of Taxi Driver. I am now in the hands of a maniac.
Normally, bygones would be bygones. But no. Every time I look at the little line of icons on Google Chrome, the place normally occupied by the Google M (for Gmail) is now occupied by that funny purple icon (as above).
T-Mobile, to make absolutely clear that it is really very badly behaved has commandeered even the icons that once belonged to Google.
Google, bless them, signed on to the digital world by saying "don’t be evil."
Apparently, T-Mobile never got the memo.
For one shining moment here in Boulder while walking down a side walk, I thought one of life’s great secrets was about to be revealed to me.
This reads: "There is no greater beauty than that of." So close to illumination and then..new sidewalk!
Picture yourself in the hinterland of British Columbia.
You are many hundreds of miles from Vancouver.
You are in the middle of nowhere on a stretch of road so desolate it feels like something out of an X-Files episode. (Cue the X-Files orchestra for a few bars of that eerie theme music.)
There’s a mining camp at one end of the road and a mining camp at the other. Most everyone here get an hourly wage. And the wage is generous. These rough necks are paid like princes. They start high. (Who would come to this god forsaken place otherwise?) And because there is nothing much to do here, they work extra hours most days and most weekends. Add "time and a half" and "double time," and it’s not long before these people are worth a bundle.
Periodically, they head for town. For most the destination is Vancouver, many hundreds of miles away. Guys, they are mostly guys, will hitchhike for a while. And they take buses when they must, and eventually they say, "F*ck it, I’m buying a car." And they do. They buy a Buick with all the trimmings. And away they go.
The trouble is, the guys have been drinking since they left camp and by this time they are often blind drunk, so, well, it’s not uncommon to come off the road and wrap the Buick around a tree.
And here’s the weird part. The guys don’t get the Buick fixed. They just keep going. What they have done to the Buick captures what they will do for the remainder of this trip to Vancouver and for the duration of their stay there.
The "skid row" in Vancouver is there to greet them. The card sharks, hookers, and bars are seasoned tourist professionals, skilled at various kinds of value transfer. It will take a couple of weeks. But eventually our guys will wake up in a gutter without a dime.
And here’s the other weird part. They will brush themselves off, and go back to the hinterland. Some will do this many times over several decades. Which is way there are so many cars rusting on the roads of the interior of BC.
From an conventional point of view this is deeply irrational behavior. Why endure the privations of life in the bush, and the exertion and the danger of this kind of labor, unless you are going to keep some part of what you earn? Surely, the point of coming here is to earn your way out. Not to spend your way back in. But the hinterland is a prison to which inmates keep returning by choice. In a sensible world, people would come here just long enough to make enough to buy the motel, dry cleaning store, or bowling alley that will release them from wage labor forever. But no, they take their stake and they squander it. These guys seem bent on destroying wealth.
Which brings us to Pirates. I know you were waiting for the Pirate passage. I’m reading a nice little book called And a Bottle of Rum by Wayne Curtis. Here’s a passage.
After his raids, Captain Morgan and his men would sail to Port Royal to whore and drink and spend their money. The more carelessly they could rid themselves of their gold, the happier they were. "Wine and Women drained their Wealth to such a Degree that in a little time some of them became reduced to Beggary," reported pirate chronicler Charles Leslie. "They have been known to spend 2 or 3000 Pieces of Eight in one Night…" Morgan "found many of his chief officers and soldiers reduced to their former state of indigence through their immoderate vices and debauchery." Then they would pester him to get up a new fleet for further raids, "thereby to get something to expend anew in wine and strumpets." (location circa 664 in the Kindle version of this book)
Which brings us back to British Columbia, and an aboriginal practice called "potlatch" when rival communities would take turns dumping Hudson Bay blankets and other valuables into the Pacific ocean. One of the explanation for this practice is that it is undertaken as a very deliberate act of wealth destruction. ( I don’t know the literature here as well as I should so I am penciling these data in provisionally.)
This destruction of wealth is a wonderful thing. Wealth for miners, pirates, and perhaps aboriginals is charged with potentiality. To keep this wealth is to do its bidding. Once you’ve made a small fortune in a logging camp, some convention says, you must leave the hinterland, pay that motel, and "start a new life." Which these loggers and miners devoutly do not wish to do. Hence those trips to town. These loggers are fighting demon wealth.
Our loggers, miners, pirates (and aboriginals?) are defending their way of life. They are destroying the money that threatens it. They can see the potentiality of all this wealth, they can feel the cultural instructions embedded in it, and they are damned if they will give in it. Better, easier, truer to their life missions, to piss this money away.
Actually, there is nothing irrational about this behavior. It has a job to do and it does well. But there is no economic model that came help us retrieve the rationality of this behavior, I don’t believe. To do this we need to look beyond "rationality" narrowly defined, beyond "interest" and "benefit" as it is usually construed. We need to capture the culture that supplies the meanings that shapes the lives that demands the destruction of wealth the results in all those rusted Buicks. There’s a method to the madness. In fact, it isn’t madness.
Indeed, under carefully scrutiny a lot of economic behavior, even the b to b variation thereof, is not fully rational. But when the economists find things that do not find the paradigm, they insist these are "irrational." Um, but surely there is a grey area in between. That economic actors are not rational doesn’t mean that are irrational. The trouble is that the idea of rationality is so narrowly defined is to leave much of the human experience out of account. It is true that actors are sometimes not rational but they are almost never not interested. They are always driven by an idea, a concept, a preference, an "interest," and almost always this idea, concept, preference or interest comes from culture.
So when Adam Smith excises culture from the proposition in a sense he assumes what he means to prove. And he leaves us with a model that can’t explain new Buicks any more than it can rusted ones. I mean if transportation is the object of the exercise, there’s an awful lot chrome that doesn’t seem germane. And no, we may not put the model on life support by evoking status competition and conspicuous consumption. Nice try, Mr. Veblen but there are so many more cultural meanings besides status at issue in any give Buick that you did not so much rescue the model as cleared the way for a more thorough going assessment of its insufficiency.
I guess this post is my way of saying there is a lot of learn from loggers, miners and pirates. It’s just so very difficult to get them to come in for guest lectures.
