May 22, 2014--Commencement Season

During dinner, a friend who is a recent college graduate, was interested in talking about the future, her future, not the food.

"I mean, I went to all this effort and my parents spent all this money so I could go to college and now I still don't know what to do. And with the job market the way it is, even if I did, I'm not sure I'd be able to find work." She sighed, picking at her grilled fish.

"Let's begin," I suggested, "with your current goal, what you want to achieve." A typical career-advsiing kind of question.

"Above all I want to be self-supporting. I know that isn't what a liberal arts major should be saying, but since I'm not sure about anything else, this is at the top of my list. I don't want my parents to . . ." She trailed off, but we knew what she meant.

"I need a job so I can make money."

"Nothing wrong with that," Rona said. "In fact, it's impressive. So many young people seem reasonably all right living at home after college and being supported by their parents."

"That's the last thing I want to do. I mean, I love them and everything, but . . ." Again she left her thought uncompleted.

"Let me put this another way," I said, "You say you want to be able to support yourself but about what you'd really want to do you're confused." I glanced over toward her but she didn't look up, instead she continued to stare at her plate and play with her food.

"But I do . . ." She was mumbling and I couldn't make out the rest of what she was saying. Rona, with better hearing, was smiling.

"But you do what?" I asked.

She looked up. "I do know what I want to do."

"That's what I was hoping you said. What is it?"

Almost whispering, she confessed, "I want to be a writer."

I smiled as well. "That changes everything. I mean, what I want to suggest. You're not really looking for a job to launch a career, like, say, in advertising or publishing." She shook her head. "You need a job to make money, which is very different, so you can support yourself while writing. Yes?"

Now all three of us were smiling. "Yes. That's what I want. What I need. A way to make money. I only hope my family will be comfortable with that. You know, they're a little more traditional and therefore think about jobs and careers differently than . . . . They want me to be comfortable, but . . ."

"But?"

"I don't want to be comfortable. In fact I want to be uncomfortable."

"From that," I said, "I now know you in fact benefited from a fine liberal education. That's one of the things that's supposed to happen."

Glancing at me, she turned back to her halibut and began to enjoy dinner.

Since then we were able to help her find work that enabled her to support herself, and I have been thinking about the importance in some circumstances of discomfort. That it is a source of inspiration for many artists and writers, including our friend.

But then, during this college commencement season, it seems there are forces arrayed to assure that  privileged young people be made as comfortable as possible.

Graduation speakers, for example, have been be pressed to drop out if they in any way would cause grads and the faculty to be upset.

International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde was to address Smith graduates but was thought by many there to have instituted regressive IMF polices in developing countries. She stepped aside.

At Brandeis, former Dutch legislator and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali cancelled under pressure because of her criticism of radical Islam.

And at Rutgers (where two years ago Jersey Shore's Snooki was paid $32,000 to speak) Condi Rice was scheduled to deliver the commencement address, but also withdrew because she was, well, George W. Bush's National Security Advisor when he launched his preemptive war against Iraq.

In all cases, rather than challenge students, perhaps causing discomfort by their encountering individuals and ideas that do not fit a comfortable politically-correct ideology, university officials backed off to avoid any appearance of disharmony or discord during pampered graduates' special day.

Further, other efforts to provide comfort rather than challenging discourse among undergraduates are also underway, largely out of public sight.

As reported in the New York Times, until taken down recently from its website, students and faculty at Oberlin College found the following admonitions about "trigger warnings," alerts similar to the movie rating system that warn about violence, "language," nudity, and "strong sexual content."

At Oberlin, these triggers apply mainly to required readings and the content of classroom discussions--

Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma [my italics]. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism [bias against transgender individuals], ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.

This means, as it literally has occurred on a growing number of campuses, that Hamlet might contain a trigger warning about violence and the Merchant of Venice would include an alert to students that by reading it they would find evidence of anti-Semitism.

What to be concerned about in Huckleberry Finn or the Great Gatsby? Or anything from classic Greek literature? I think you know.

This all sounds boring and oppressive. What would our young friend think? I think you know that as well.

February 25, 2014--Two Young Friends

I have two young friends, recent college graduates, who were hired by Google to do significant work.

Both are liberal arts graduates with just BA degrees; and, since I know next to nothing about what kind of work is available for art and communication major types at a place such as Google, I wondered what the H.R. folks there might have had in mind when they made lucrative job offers and what they might have seen in my friends to inspire them to hire them.

This wondering is in the context of knowing many more senior friends--people in the 50s and 60s--who are frustrated that they have not yet achieved the levels of success they feel qualified for, prepared for, perhaps entitled to in their own careers. These older friends, in search of explanations for their own self-defined lack of success tend more to look askance (I'm being nice here) at these newbies than at what they bring, or do not bring to cutting-edge companies and organizations. These older friends often fail to look within themselves to discover their strengths and limitations and, in doing that, figure out what they, even at 55 or older, might do to make themselves more viable, more competitive.

I've been wondering about this for some time and haven't been able to figure it out. I know that's in large part because I too am feeling "aged out."

Then there was help from Tom Friedman's column in Sunday's New York Times in which he extensively quotes Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations (I love his title) at Google.

In case you missed the Friedman piece, here is some of what Bock shared with him--

G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring. We also found that they don't predict anything. Good grades certainly don't hurt. [But] there are five hiring attributes we have across the company. 

If it's a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical. For every job, though, the number one thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not I.Q. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. 

The second is leadership--in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you the president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? 

We don't care. What we care about is when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical is to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power. 

What else? Humility and ownership. It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in to try to solve any problem--and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. 

Without humility you are unable to learn. It's why research shows that many graduates of hotshot business schools plateau. Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from it. 

They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot.What we've seen is that people who are successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'Here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.' You need a big ego and a small ego in the same person at the same time. 

The least important thing we look for is expertise. If you take someone who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn, and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as a H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go, 'I've seen this 100 times before; and here's what you do.' 

Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer because most of the time it's not that hard. Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, but once in a while they'll come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.

Now I am beginning to understand why Google hired my two liberal-artsy friends. What Bock describes is just how I think about them.