“I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused.” — William Ellery Channing
Here are two vignettes from the financial crisis:
**An applicant to Darden cornered me at a reception to tell me about his miserable job and the likelihood of a coming layoff. He is looking for a safe harbor for the next couple of years and thinks B-school will suffice. I told him to think some more. I said that we aim to admit not “safe harbor people,” but people who can be leaders, want to have a positive impact on the world and achieve great personal success—this means writing admission essays that tell us about one’s character, potential, and intentions, not just one’s history. This may not have been the reply he was looking for. Framing the future is hard; talking about the past is easy.
**Old acquaintances from the financial services industry tell me their anxieties about layoffs and disbelief of financial losses. They had so much more and now have so much less. They merit help. I have directed alums to Darden’s Alumni Career Services office, a best-in-class career counseling shop. Yet the before-and-after comparison for these friends is a showstopper. Like the applicant to Darden, these victims of the Panic of 2008 face a challenge about framing the future. Going from plenty to scarcity is a big leap. But to frame the future compared to the past overlooks the relevant choice, between various paths into the future. How you frame choices today is the big issue.
The wave of deleveraging sweeping the world will impose a dramatic reframing of expectations and choices about the future. People ask for my advice about such choices. Four ideas seem relevant:
- Saying “enough”: setting reasonable limits on expectations. In his brand-new book, Enough, John Bogle, the iconic investment manager, rails against the excesses of the recent boom: too much leverage, exorbitant executive pay, managerial self-dealing, and outlandishly risky business behavior. The book is part of a recent stream of jeremiads. ((The jeremiad is an art form. For another example, see Lee Iacocca’s Where Have all the Leaders Gone? The jeremiad has morphed into blogs and media sound-bites. We were recently treated to Jack Welch’s outburst about GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt. And the venerable Jimmy Carter has had plenty to say about his successors in the White House. )) But now is the right time to take such medicine. Bogle tells the story of two great writers of the 20th Century, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, who were at a lavish cocktail party at the house of a hedge fund manager on Long Island. Heller was the author of Catch-22, one of the best-selling novels of the century. Vonnegut was equally successful. Vonnegut turned to Heller and said, “This hedge fund manager makes more in one day than you made with all the royalties from Catch-22.” Heller replied, “Yes, but I have something he doesn’t…enough.” Saying “enough” is probably the first necessary step in a world of deleveraging. This isn’t the year to trade up to a bigger house, buy the flat-screen TV, pester the boss for a big raise promotion, or easily get a job at an investment bank. Be pragmatic. Deal with the limitations you face.
- Benchmark the future against a variety of possible forward paths, not against the past. Last summer, I read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert—it was commended to me by my colleague, Alec Horniman. Gilbert is a psychologist and cites a lot of research suggesting that happiness is significantly a matter of framing the future. He notes that “the human being is the only animal that thinks about the future…Our brains were made for ‘nexting’.” The problem is that the brain plays tricks on us: mis-imagining the future is related to human functions of misremembering the past and misperceiving the present. Unhappy people fail to imagine effectively how things might turn out; they tend to project the present onto the future; and they fail to recognize that things will look different once they happen. His big idea is that “our inattention to these lapses influences the way we think about the future.” With all of this capacity to imagine, we make decisions as much by “pre-feeling” rather than by logic.
- Recalibrate what “success” means to you. So much of the documentable excesses of the recent boom seem linked to definitions of professional success defined by money. This was a big mistake. Success as a manager can also be defined in terms of building a sustainable enterprise, serving others, inventing products and services that lift human welfare, and having a positive impact on the problems facing society. In Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life Laura Nash and Batten Fellow Howard Stevenson present the conclusions of in-depth interviews from numerous successful executives. They find that truly successful people frame career success much more broadly than stereotypes suggest. Real “success” consists of four elements: happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. Success is more than winning; it is multidimensional; it is a moving target; it is sufficiency (just enough), not maximization; it is a lifetime process.
- Find your “calling.” A couple of months ago, I wrote about the need to listen for a calling in order to make important career decisions. In Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life, Michael Novak advances the radical idea that business can be a “calling,” something more than just a job—this is a big idea, since it frames one’s work in terms of being in service to some ideal. Such framing is useful in times like these. Novak’s introductory chapter is entitled, “Plenty isn’t enough.” He writes, “Business is a demanding vocation, and one is not good at it just by being in it, or even by making piles of money. The bottom line of a calling is measured by pain, learning, and grace. Having a good year in financial terms is hard enough; having a good year in fulfilling one’s calling means passing tests that are a lot more rewarding…Doing anything as a calling—especially doing something quite difficult—is a lot more fulfilling than merely drifting.” ((Novak, Business as a Calling, pages 14-15.))
As I connect the dots among my many conversations in the past couple of months, I conclude that (re)framing the future is the big task facing the average man or woman. The cycle of deleveraging imposed by this crisis will take years; the shape and extent of the adjustment this will require is impossible to predict. But as William Ellery Channing might have said, the challenge is not to let yourself be “passively framed” by the financial crisis, but rather to act from an “inward spring” in your engagement with these new circumstances.
Posted by Robert Bruner at 10/29/2008 03:04:05 PM