The Big Shift

How the 'Pursuit of Happiness' can save our economy

This piece also appears on Nikhil Goyal's blog in Psychology Today 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”

--The Declaration of Independence

A few months ago, I met a high school senior who had recently been accepted to Princeton. “I really wanted to go to a small liberal arts school where I could focus on creative writing in an intimate environment, but my parents said I should go to the best school that I get into,” she related to me. She went on to say that her parents were also pressuring her to consider a more lucrative profession. What ever happened, I wondered, to the right to pursue happiness?

America’s founders believed that God instilled in every individual a sense of purpose, and it was the right of each person to discover and live out that purpose.  For them, happiness was the deep sense of satisfaction growing out of living a life of passion and meaning. So strongly did they believe this that they enshrined the pursuit of happiness into the American creed, deeming it one of three rights worth mentioning in the Declaration of Independence.

The right to pursue happiness has always been an odd bird, but somehow still central to America’s sense of self. The other two rights cited in the Declaration of Independence—Life and Liberty—establish our freedom from those who would harm us. With these two rights there is a corresponding legal obligation not to interfere with an individual’s freedom. But with the right to pursue happiness, there’s no corresponding legal obligation. No one goes to jail for failing to make another happy. The right does, however, imply a duty to create the conditions that best enable the pursuit of happiness. It’s a demand of our culture not of our legal system.

At the time of the nation’s founding, freshly liberated from British rule, Americans fully embraced the right to pursue happiness. They were fiercely independent of established authority, masters of their own destiny. One-hundred years into the American experiment—with the onset of the industrial era—Americans summarily abandoned the right to pursue happiness in exchange for unparalleled affluence. And another one hundred years later, with the industrial era on life support and a less hierarchical and more dynamic socioeconomic order on the ascendency, we have yet to fully reclaim it.  

As the industrial era set in, assured of unprecedented prosperity, the doyens of industry went to great lengths to snuff out the right to pursue happiness. The education system quickly followed suit. America’s emerging economic model required the creation of a massive and docile workforce engaged in monotonous and menial work. Henry Ford’s assembly-line reduced the once independently-minded American worker into a mere component part of a giant machine.  While at first not every worker acceded to these conditions, eventually, as other industries embraced scientific management practices, workers had little choice but to comply. The new culture of compliance not only affected factory workers but, in due course, shaped the self-image of all but the most entrepreneurially-inclined. It was hard to argue with the results: the standard of living of the average American increased by a factor of fifty in the succeeding decades.

Not long after, compulsory education, designed to move the child of the farmer from the fields to the factory, became the mirror image of the factory, complete with ringing bells and shift changes at regular intervals. The American education system did not enable the pursuit of happiness—far from it —nor did it advance critical thinking or independent thought. Kids were provided the skills, with a special emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic, necessary to be compliant workers in the industrial economy. Despite sweeping economic change in the past three decades, the vast majority of schools still adhere to the factory model.

More than a century after Ford introduced the Model T, the majority of industrial jobs are long gone. Those that remain are vulnerable to more advanced machinery and a growing semi-skilled workforce in Asia. Even many of the information-age jobs are at risk to lower paid tech workers in places like India.

Notwithstanding this big shift, America's core institutions—family, school and work—are stuck in the old industrial mindset, unable to see and adjust to the new economic reality. These institutions are predisposed to moving people along, like a factory conveyor belt, into fulfilling the perceived needs of declining industries. Fearful of change, they conspire to set our sights low. Too many workplaces, counter to their own interests, still place a premium on employing the unimaginative but dependable worker; nearly all schools educate students to be that unimaginative but dependable worker; and most parents dutifully oblige, preparing their children to take their place in this decaying social order. Our core institutions continue to insist that young people trade their potential for happiness for the promise of wealth, status and stability, which, tragically, will make them both less happy and less wealthy.

When Americans finally become unstuck, they will find a whole new universe of opportunity waiting. The very forces that are wiping out the old economy and the old work are giving life to a new economy and new work. The technology that destroyed jobs creates the possibility of mass private enterprise. There’s greater opportunity than ever before in human history to innovate and connect with new markets. In the industrial age, the potential for entrepreneurship was scarce, requiring large amounts of capital or super-human initiative; today it's abundant, requiring nothing more than a laptop, a creative eye and an adventurous spirit.

In this new era, raising and educating our kids to obtain basic skills and follow a once defined path to success went from being a good bet to a bad bet. Raising and educating them to bring out their creativity, chase their dreams, and dare to be different is both less risky and potentially more rewarding. Far from being an obstacle to productivity as it was during the industrial era, the pursuit of happiness is key to thriving in the emerging connection economy. Our economic fortunes will likely grow in direct proportion to the number of people who throw off their industrial-era shackles, figure out what they were meant to do, and bring their talents to the marketplace.

We gave up the right to pursue happiness in the 20th century and desperately need to get it back in the 21st.

Four changes we must all make to thrive in the 21st Century

The chart below lays out four big shifts we must make in order to become more innovative and thrive in the future:

 

Old Order	New Order (Shift)	Rationale
Compliance: Exhort our children to learn the material and comply with authority	Creativity: Cultivate in our children risk-taking, critical thinking, and creativity	We need to produce a generation of innovators who can think for themselves
Competence: Train people to be adequate at a defined set of professions, based on stability, local economic conditions, or financial rewards	Passion: Bring out the sense of purpose and passion of every individual, encouraging that person to do what he or she loves and is best at	Purpose-driven people are more innovative, effective and happy
Uniformity: Uphold a single standard of intelligence, learning and professionalism	Diversity: Embrace a diversity of attributes/strengths as indispensable assets in today’s economy	A thriving society and economy requires a wide variety of people, including those with unconventional strengths and weaknesses
Hierarchy: Impose hierarchical management structures and teaching to maximize efficiencies	Self-organization: Create flatter, self-organizing structures in school and the workplace to maximize innovation	Self-organized teams and learning units are more nimble, and better able to learn and innovate

 Book Recommendation: Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner

The Painter and the Sculptor

“Teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge.”

--John Taylor Gatto

When I first came across the quote above, I was struck by the powerful metaphor of the sculptor, and not just in its application to education. For the past 100 years, we were busy painting. Our industrial economy required us to synthetically produce an obedient and docile workforce. Teachers were painters, parents were painters, managers were painters. Leadership involved defining the world for and giving instructions to followers, be they children, students, or employees, with little respect for individual differences, passions and aspirations.

The emerging connection economy no longer requires us to produce a conforming and homogenous population. It thrives on authenticity, creativity and differentiation. Individual differences have become the key rather than the obstacle to success. The new economy requires the sculptor--the parent, the teacher, the manager—who helps reveal the unique image locked into each slab. In today's world, leadership involves empowering each individual to find her purpose and live up to her potential.

Being a sculptor is scarier than being a painter because we don’t know what we'll uncover as we chip away at the stone. We secretly worry that the image won't meet our hopes and dreams for that person or will reflect poorly on us. The sculptor is the parent who helps a child pursue a passion in theater, despite the parent's misgivings; the teacher who sees a flicker of genius in a teenager everyone considers a troublemaker and works to bring it out; the manager who allows a young employee to take on an innovative but risky project rather than direct his every move. Being a sculptor requires putting aside fears and relinquishing a measure of control.

Sculpting is, unfortunately, less common than we might care to admit. Most people and institutions are still telling people what they ought to be rather than helping them become what they were meant to be. Giving people their marching orders used to work for us, and it seems safer to rely on what used to work than to try something new. So we work harder and harder at doing what's not working. At the very moment we need to cultivate individuality, we double-down on uniformity. At the very moment we need to encourage creativity and love of learning, we issue "common core standards," insisting on what  “every” child ought to be able to do and when, as if every child was meant to do the same things and be the same person.

We are a learning society—a slow learning society, but faster than most others—so eventually we will overcome our insecurities and shed our outmoded beliefs. Eventually we will learn a new way of teaching, leading and inspiring. The question is: how much more painting must we do before we realize that the image we are looking for is just beneath the surface?

HBO series Girls on why having your sh*t together is no longer enough

Ok, I'll come clean, I’ve recently started watching the HBO series Girls, the popular comedy/drama about a group of twenty-somethings struggling with life in the Big Apple. Several twenty-somethings in my office have been chatting animatedly about the show at the water cooler, and…Why shouldn’t I watch it?  I mean, it’s important to understand how the millennial generation thinks, right?

The show is, admittedly, highly entertaining, but I digress. The Big Shift is always on the lookout for big shift thinking in pop culture, evidence that the people in Hollywood who wield such staggering influence on our cultural sensibilities recognize how and why the world is changing. If Hollywood gets it, eventually the broader society will too. The writers of Girls get it.

In one of my favorite scenes, Marnie, an art gallery assistant who recently lost her job, finds out that her ex-boyfriend, Charlie, developed and sold an app for lots of money. Marnie is dumb-founded and jealous of Charlie's instantaneous success, and launches into a rant: 

Charlie is living the dream….I thought he was going to be broken for like at least six years…I like mentally budgeted like six years of brokenness…he’s not broken at all…and it just proves to me, like, it doesn’t matter how right you do things…because you know who ends up living their dreams are like sad messes like Charlie, and the people who end up like flailing behind are people like me....who have their shit together.

 

The scene gives voice to a generation’s rude awakening: That you can do everything that your parents told you would get you ahead—study, get good grades, look for a job after you graduate—and end up floundering, while the aimless boob who had heretofore muddled through life makes it big.

The writers of Girls understand that today’s marketplace values less and less people who merely have their shit together, and more and more sad messes who are willing and able to proffer an original thought or do something bold.   

 

Could a student's civil disobedience spark a learning revolution?

UPDATED: One thing's for sure: if more kids engaged in acts of civil disobedience in school (and others filmed it) like the one in the video, it would prompt a serious national conversation on education.

Follow him on twitter @JeffLongHair8

The story here is not, in my view, about the lackluster teacher; it's about the student and the potential of other students to follow suit. It's about the possibility of widespread civil disobedience against the tired methods of factory schools.

Sometimes we like to think of social change as neat and linear when in fact it's often messy and circuitous. As a political moderate (except on education), I certainly fall into this trap. We want change to be  relatively civil when many of the precipitating events tend to be anything but. No one describes the social change process and the instigating tactics better than the great social organizer Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals.It's a great read.

While the student's (Jeff) critique is impassioned but raw, outbursts like this captured and spread virally on Youtube have a much better chance of opening eyes than even the most compelling policy paper or opinion piece.

Is such a mass movement possible? Is it desirable? Where would it likely lead?

 

My piece in Psychology Today...Today

My piece "Some disabilities are actually quite good for society" appeared in Psychology Today as a guest post on my friend Nikhil Goyal's blog.

Nikhil is the author of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School (a very good and important read). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, MSNBC, NPR, FOX and Friends, FOX Business, NBC Nightly News, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, Fast Company, and Education Week.

Oh, did I mention he's 17 years old?

The problem with being a good professional

A few days ago I reviewed a draft employee evaluation form. It asked the supervisor conducting the assessment to rate the employee’s “level of professionalism.” It got me thinking. What do we mean when we say someone is a good professional? We know he presents himself well, but what has he gotten done lately? What new change initiative has he taken on? What has he proudly failed at because he was willing to take a risk?

We often use the term “professional” not to describe a person’s accomplishments but rather a set of supposedly desirable behaviors. At best, it's a commentary on the person’s acumen at certain work-related tasks. The good professional fits in and does things right.

With all the emphasis on this long-revered archetype, you’d think that the companies that best exemplify professional behavior would be the most cutting-edge and innovative. But highly professional cultures tend not to be innovative, and innovative organizations tend not to be highly professional. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Zappos, imperfect though they are, are notorious for allowing employees to be themselves and openly disparage strict codes of conduct.  They know that when people are allowed to be authentic, they are more likely to be happy, tansparent, and productive.  

Why is it that highly professional cultures often lag behind in innovation?

Professional cultures reward those who adhere to cultural norms and punish those who deviate. They lose sight of what it means to be effective.

Professional cultures expect everyone to be and act the same and don’t recognize highly skilled and creative people who don’t fit the mold. They deprive themselves of talent.

Professional cultures are status conscious, and maintain implicit norms on who has standing to speak at a meeting and who doesn't. They stifle discourse. Employees rarely talk openly about what is and isn’t working. The organization stagnates.

Professional cultures are risk averse because no one wants to be seen as failing. Good professionals don’t fail. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a role for the good professional in the workplace. Our institutions need the polished person with good skills. She may be the best salesperson for the product line or the perfect line manager. But she's not the only type of worker our institutions need. It’s time that we stop putting her on a pedestal and erecting an entire organizational culture around her.

Thankfully, millennials seem to be rebelling against the professional norms of yesterday’s workplace. They don’t know why they should have to dress and act like their parents. Their heroes are not well-coiffed corporate executives in custom suits, but charismatic high-tech entrepreneurs in jeans and t-shirts. I used to think we needed to acclimatize the millenials to the professional culture of the workplace—to make Gen Y more like Gen X. Now I think we need to make Gen X more like Gen Y (minus the excessive whining and entitlement mentality…jk… well, sort of).  

One sign that society is successfully making the big shift and becoming more innovative will be when organizations stop evaluating an employee’s “level of professionalism.”

What my Israeli cousin’s business tells us about future marketplace winners and losers

I first met my Israeli cousin Eyal when I was 18 and he was four years old during my year-long study abroad program in Israel. I noticed he was always playing around on the computer. When he turned five, I showed him how to program a computer in BASIC language. He didn’t know any English but, amazingly, picked it up immediately. At 17, Eyal started Israel’s first unlimited internet access company. Fifteen years later, he continues to innovate.

Eyal

Eyal’s business experience gives us a glimpse into the types of people who will likely thrive and those who may languish in the emerging economic order.  Hint: those who fly highest will not necessarily have the highest grades or SAT scores.

In 2007, Eyal founded Media Force, a performance-based marketing company specializing in online media buying and ad distribution. Media Force builds, operates and promotes its own in-house lead generation websites. Although Eyal lives in and runs the company from Israel, employing, among others, two of his siblings, the vast majority of his business is conducted with US clients. In fact, most of Eyal’s clients have never laid eyes on him.

Eyal recently told me about an Indian computer programmer who emailed him out of the blue, offering to write code for Media Force for a fraction of what Eyal would have paid an Israeli or American programmer. Eyal agreed, reluctantly, to try him out. He later hired others. “We found that working with programmers in India can be tricky…once you know and even more importantly trust a few guys, they can provide you with quality work for much less than we would have paid if we had to assign it to a US based company,” he said.

We should be in awe of what the technological changes of the past two decades have wrought: An Israeli businessman runs a company out of Israel with nothing more than a few computers, selling his services almost exclusively to US companies, using Indian programmers, none of whom have ever met each other. The Indian programmer can easily connect with a company in Israel and acquire work that would have otherwise gone to Joe or Yossi (Joe in Hebrew) software technician. In the recent past, the factory worker was vulnerable to being supplanted by a low wage worker in Asia. Now the technician is at risk as well.

I can understand why some are gloomy about the prospects of further dislocation in our new economy. But there is good news here as well. The same forces that allow an Indian to connect with an Israeli to sell his services also allow an Israeli to connect with an American to sell his services. The connection economy takes away something tangible—a job—but creates an opportunity for others to connect to new markets.

The winners in this story are the entrepreneurial young Israeli and moderately educated Indian technician. The loser is Joe or Yossi the technician who offers nothing more than the technician from India.

Moral of the story: (1) We’ve got to retool our education system to emphasize innovation. With the pressing need for innovation, it makes little difference how our kids do on standardized tests. Nor is being skilled good enough anymore. Anything that can be done more cheaply in India or China will be done more cheaply in India or China (or be done by a robot).  (2) There are more opportunities to find new markets, turn a profit, and do something we love than ever before in human history. We’ve just got to create more innovators to take advantage of them.

Google learns that having a strong sense of mission is more important than SAT scores

Awesome news for The Big Shift: The New York Times reports that major companies, such as Google, have determined that the traditional metrics, such as SAT tests, are not reliable indicators of  job performance:

"Google, not surprisingly, is committed to applying data-driven decision-making to human resource management. For years, candidates were screened according to SAT scores and college grade-point averages, metrics favored by its founders. But numbers and grades alone did not prove to spell success at Google and are no longer used as important hiring criteria, says Prasad Setty, vice president for people analytics.

Since 2007, the company has conducted extensive surveys of its work force. Google has found that the most innovative workers — also the “happiest,” by its definition — are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy. “Our people decisions are no less important than our product decisions,” Mr. Setty says. “And we’re trying to apply the same rigor to the people side as to the engineering side.”

Here's to hoping that high schools and colleges will eventually figure out the same!

 

Five Big Shift Thinkers Who Explain How the World is Changing

The Big Shift is a worldview that holds that the economy is changing rapidly, and that society must adjust in order to take full advantage of its potential rewards. It stresses that we must recognize and cultivate the diverse array of human talent, and allow each person to contribute in a way consistent with her passion and purpose.

Here are a five of my favorite Big Shift thinkers:

Seth Godin

A digital-age marketing guru, Godin sheds light on the myriad opportunities of the connection economy. He inspires us to channel our authentic, artistic voice to potential markets. When I grumbled to him in an email about the trials and tribulations of organizational change, he responded “keep raising a ruckus,” believing that putting ourselves and our art on the line will make us better artists and give us the best chance of business success. He sees differences among people as the bedrock of our modern economy and society.

Favorite Quote: “We’ve built a world where it’s possible to fly higher than ever, and the tragedy is that we’ve been seduced into believing that we ought to fly ever lower instead.”

--The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?

Sir Ken Robinson

Robinson did more in 18 minutes in his now famous TED talk to usher in Big Shift thinking than the rest of us can hope to do in a lifetime. Viewing it changed me forever. Robinson believes that people are born creative, but that schools suppress creativity. In his book The Element, Robinson argues that each of us have a sense of purpose. “The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.” It’s society’s job to help people find their element.

Favorite Quote: “I’m convinced that taking the definition of intelligence for granted is one of the main reasons why so many people underestimate their true intellectual abilities and fail to find their Element.”

--The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

 

Dan Pink

Pink describes the critical role that right brain thinkers can play in the emerging economy. Pink also delves into human motivation, arguing that most motivation is intrinsic.

Favorite Quote: “The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind— creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people— artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers— will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

--A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

Walter Russell Mead

Walter Russell Mead is a professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and writes for The American Interest magazine. Mead argues that the institutions, ideas and expectations that defined American life since World War II no longer work. He worries that American intellectuals, themselves  prisoners of the status quo, have failed to grasp the emerging reality and shine a light on the road ahead.

Favorite Quote: “Too many of the very people who should be leading the country into a process of renewal that would allow us to harness the full power of the technological revolution and make the average person incomparably better off and more in control of his or her own destiny than ever before are devoting their considerable talent and energy to fighting the future.”

Yong Zhoa

Zhoa is a professor of education at the University of Oregon. He has written prolifically about transforming the education system to stress innovation, independent thought and entrepreneurship. He asserts that America should stop trying to catch up in standardized test scores with countries such as China, which produce high scores but low innovation, and lead the way with a 21^st education system.

Favorite quote: “Schools in general reduce instead of enhance creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit because they have been designed to prepare good employees.”

--World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students