Business of Changing the World

Posted on January 10, 2016 by admin

Last night I watched the CNN documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. It told me much that I already knew, namely, that Jobs was a problematic figure with both a dark side and a light side, a man of genius with deep human flaws, but someone who clearly changed the world, at least on a technological level. We relate to computers and telephones today in ways that were almost unimaginable 30 or 40 years ago. At the same time, the movie filled in some gaps in my knowledge and made me aware of some aspects of his tragically shortened career that were less clear to me before.

But that is not the most important part of my reaction to the story. In fact, I had this blog post in mind well before seeing the movie in part because it simply reinforced a thought that has been with me for some time: that the shape of our choices is dictated to some extent by the timing of our lives and the circumstances in which we grow into adulthood. Many of us can still change a great deal as our life moves on, but those initial choices in high school and college, in our teens and early twenties, predetermine a great deal of what follows.

I have not yet read the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs, though it sits on my shelf waiting for me, so I was intrigued to learn that Jobs graduated from high school in 1972, just four years behind me. But he died in 2011, and I am still here, his life ending early at 56 years of age as a result of complications from pancreatic cancer. Four years does not seem like a long time in a full life, but at that formative age, for baby boomers following the Sixties, it made all the difference in the world. It may have been one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history.

I entered college in the fall of 1968. In April of that year, as I was completing my senior year of high school, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. We barely recovered from that shock when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, was also assassinated in a hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. Before the summer was over, the Democratic convention in Chicago was disrupted by major protests that were suppressed with major police violence. It was a rather traumatic introduction to four years of higher education and was followed by numerous protests. I attended college in downtown Cleveland, and watched or participated in civil rights, antiwar, and environmental demonstrations.

I mention this because, in the many years since then, especially more recently, I have wondered if I might have benefited from taking some business courses in order better to understand some of the more progressive business phenomena that have evolved on the American landscape. There are now green businesses focused on renewable energy, food businesses catering to new tastes for healthier foods, and environmental businesses focused on cleaning up rather than despoiling the environment. When I was a student in Cleveland, however, the businesses I knew best seemed like an extensive monolith of status quo enterprises, defending the despoliation of the environment, resistant to equal opportunity, with the corner offices almost an unrelenting parade of conservative, aging white men. I may have been a young white man myself, but I most definitely wanted to live a more interesting, purposeful life than those white men.

And so I studied literature at first, then switched to political science, in a quest to change the world, and eventually, by the early 1980s, returned to school to obtain graduate degrees in journalism and urban and regional planning. I did survive three undergraduate electives in economics, which were reinforced by planning-related economics classes at the master’s level, but that is not the same as classes in marketing and accounting and business management. As I said, as I have watched a new generation of business enterprises take new approaches to engaging with the world, I have wondered whether I might have benefited from learning more about entrepreneurship and business principles. But it was not to be because the influences that bore down on me made that less appealing when it might have been more feasible. I wanted to change the world in what I deemed a positive way, and the businesses that might have employed me in Cleveland at the time did not seem like the way to achieve that. Nonetheless, I did work in the business world for several years before moving to Iowa to take the helm of a small public interest nonprofit organization, only after which I pursued graduate school.

It was only as I was completing that graduate education that many of these new enterprises—and Apple Computer, which was a provocative and sometimes perplexing blend of both old and new ideas about how to run a business—burst onto the scene. Meanwhile, I was acquiring a whole new set of skills that implanted me firmly in the public sector, although I have spent most of my subsequent career in a nonprofit professional association. Along the way, I learned that a strong entrepreneurial spirit is a powerful ally even in the nonprofit world. They too must find ways to attract money. In my case, we most often do that in a highly competitive environment, developing proposals for grants and contracts that require significant innovative thinking—the very sort of thing that would probably serve me equally well as a consultant because, in effect, that is to some extent what I have become. I am in a service business, but I have had and enjoyed opportunities to change the world in ways that matter. Small ways, perhaps, compared to the impact of someone like Jobs, but appreciable. I have helped alter the prevailing thinking about the ways in which planners can contribute to the reduction of losses of lives and property from natural disasters. That does not seem like a small thing when I think about it very hard.

My sense of entrepreneurship was enhanced by the fact that I also was writing for a living, sometimes enhancing my income from working as a planner with book royalties and article fees and honoraria for speaking. I learned some marketing because I had to learn how to hone my message and sell books. It’s not nearly as easy as it may seem. In fact, the publishing business can be downright brutal, but I learned to survive.

In the end, my takeaway is that it matters less whether one ends up working in the private sector, nonprofit sector, or public sector, or anywhere else, for that matter, and much more what we ultimately do with the skills we acquire. Entrepreneurship is as much an attitude as a skill, and what we sell matters as much as how well we sell it, but what matters more is why we want to do what we do and the satisfaction we derive from doing it well. Looking back, I have no regrets about the skills and knowledge I developed or about my accomplishments in life. They have not made me a billionaire like Jobs, but the psychic rewards have been high. I took the hand that life dealt me during a volatile stretch of history and used it to make a difference. I will not ask for more.

Jim Schwab

Resolve to Get Your Hands Dirty

Posted on January 3, 2016 by admin

More often than not, New Year’s resolutions involve aspirations for some type of self-improvement: eating a better diet; exercising more; getting better grades in school; or achieving something in one’s profession. I am no stranger to such resolutions. I am still living with the decision two years ago to start working with a personal trainer. Having slogged through a year following Hurricane Sandy with 23 business trips, three others to Iowa in connection with my adjunct professorship at the University of Iowa, and some personal trips, I finally decided that, if I were to sustain the stamina to continue at such a pace, something needed to change. I signed up at X Sports Fitness, but then was delayed in implementing my plan when I injured myself with a pinched nerve on New Year’s Eve by carelessly tossing a heavy laptop on my shoulder at Barnes & Noble. I started 2014 with a few weeks of therapy to ease the pinched nerve before finally launching my plan. But I have never looked back and recently became my trainer’s first client to do a two-minute plank, just before my 66^th birthday.

So I understand and applaud the best intentions if they become real. But I am going to suggest something much riskier and more profound if you are ready to follow me into the deep water. Oh, yes, learning to swim is also a legitimate resolution.

I suggest that you at least consider resolving to get your hands dirty this year. Metaphorically, that is. On behalf of creating a better society, if not changing the world in some small way.

By getting your hands dirty, I do not necessarily mean protesting in the streets, but what I mean may include some vocal advocacy. It does not mean simply charitable work, such as Toys for Tots, as helpful as that may be. What I mean is getting involved in some way that entails some risk of learning to see the world in a new way because you must be open to new perspectives in order to be effective at what you choose to do. It may involve some reputational risk if others do not immediately see the benefit of what you are trying to accomplish. Some of the greatest leaders in the world had to endure significant opprobrium in order to produce fundamental changes in society that have benefited us all. But the change you initiate most likely will not be so grand and may even be invisible to most people. Let me share our own example.

A quarter-century ago, my wife and I began to explore options for adoption through foster care. One can talk all day long about what may need to change in improving the lives of our most vulnerable children, but until you actually get down in the trenches, accepting one or much children into your home, learning of the life circumstances that brought them there, and really committing to better outcomes, you can never learn what obstacles exist to producing real change. It is deep one-on-one commitment, a leap of faith into generally unknown and sometimes unknowable backgrounds that power deeply engrained reactions by children to the world around them. This blog does not begin to offer sufficient space to explore this topic—I actually started a memoir about 12 years ago that I have never finished—but it does allow me to use this as an object lesson in, first, making some kind of a difference, and second, in how easily you can underestimate how difficult that is.

Children who have suffered some type of abuse or neglect at the hands of natural parents are among the most prolonged sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome precisely because they have usually suffered at a time when they were too young to make sense of their surroundings or to understand that what was happening to them was not normal or acceptable. Their supple young minds are simply programmed to react to stimuli that, when they cease to exist in real life, still haunt them in ways they cannot articulate and can only begin to understand with the help of sustained therapy. Sometimes, an overloaded child welfare system compounds the problem by placing them in new abusive circumstances that only add to a child’s confusion, depression, and withdrawal.

Jean with two of our grandchildren, Angel and EJ.

And then, as a foster parent with intent to adopt, you step in with the objective of trying to help fix all that. If you are like us, you step in with a modest amount of training before certification, but you quickly learn that what you know is a tiny fragment of what you will come to know. Our two daughters are now grown and have their own children, and we and they are all still learning. Yet many people see the system as one in which children are emancipated at age 18, and these new adults who never had a proper childhood are now expected to act and proceed as if they have all the tools to succeed in life, and some foster parents operate on the same assumptions. Our society can be incredibly naïve at times.

Or incredibly judgmental. Unfortunately, one daughter’s penchant for running away, both literally and figuratively, from her problems led to a few encounters with police. It is seldom possible for police to understand even a small portion of the background that leads to such encounters, and most understand that, but that does not prevent some from harshly assuming that the problems were created by your bad parenting, especially when they do not know they are dealing with adoptive parents. There may even be some truth to their judgment at some times, but it is also true, and I know this as deeply as I know anything, that you can make errors of parental judgment simply because you do not know what emotional triggers lie deep within someone’s early childhood experience. It may take years, which is why we try to remain close and supportive but also instructive. Making a positive difference can take a long, long time.

Granddaughter Lashauna engages at the Chicago Public Library.

I will not elaborate further because it is not my intent to highlight foster care and adoption as the only ways to get your hands dirty. You can undertake many other initiatives, and many of them may involve direct attempts to influence public policy. What I am suggesting is that, if you want truly to make a lasting difference, choose something that challenges your preconceptions, that liberates you from simplistic assumptions, and makes you rethink, over and over again, exactly what difference you are making, why you want to make it, and the best way to achieve it. The most important risk you can take is to be open to challenging your own assumptions about how that change is going to occur and what it may ultimately mean. It means getting close enough to people to get hurt once in a while.

The world is not a simple place, and there is, as some have said, a world of hurt out there. Resolve to change some of that, and in the process, to put as much of your ego aside as possible. Resolve to get your hands dirty. God will appreciate what you do even if no one else does.

Jim Schwab