Hire Human Beings. Be A Human Being

Reading in Theodore Rockwell's "The Rickover Effect," a biography of Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was a driving force in developing the Nuclear Navy. It's a pretty fascinating look at the man and his role in developing the nascent military-industrial complex, but with the aim of increased efficiency and lower costs. (The bad of the complex came in afterward, I'm convinced.) Anyway, I thought this bit was an interesting look at how Rickover picked people to work with his program:

"Admiral [a subordinate said], I can't figure you out. You just washed eight guys down the drain with the back of your hand, and now you're going to spend hours on the plane tonight to make a possible small difference in somebody else's career. How come?"

"These are my people, [Rickover said]. That's the difference. Dunford, did you ever really look at the kind of people I've brought in here?"

"Yes, sir, of course. And I've heard people from industry and from research laboratories say that this organization has the highest concentration of bright young engineering talent in the country."

"You still don't get it. Our senior scientist has a master's degree in electrical engineering ahd an Ph.D in physics. But he is also an ordained Orthodox rabbi, and highly devout. He has spent many a twenty-four hour day in an airport because the sun had started to set on a Friday and his religion forbade his traveling. Our senior metallurgist is so highly regarded by the Mormon church that I'm afraid they're going to pull him out of here for a top position in Salt Lake City someday. One of our chemical engineers ia a leader in the Church of the savior, a particularly respected evangelical church here in town. And now I've had a request from one of our people for six weeks off so that he may make the pilgrimage to Mecca required by his faith. These are very spiritual people. They are not just technicians, they are highly developed human beings."

Rickover clearly wanted human beings working for him. He wanted people who showed dedication in every aspect of their lives, not merely exerting dedication in certain areas, like work. He wanted people who were well-rounded, who stood up for what they believed in, even if it didn't apply to the technical work they did for him.

The book mentions earlier that the metallurgist in question is Richard G. Scott, who did indeed answer several calls to serve in Salt Lake City, as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy from 1977 to 1983, when he was called to serve as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles until his death in 2015.

Rickover knew his people well, and wanted to treat them well because they were willing to giver their all. A good example for me to follow.

Self-Worth at Work

It’s important to note the only reason Cinderella had a dress worthy of going to the ball in (as far as Walt Disney is concerned) is that Cinderella’s birds and mice fixed it up for her while she was off working.

As part of the rallying cry to get the job done, Jaq laments: “Cinderelly not go to the ball. You’ll see. They fix her. Work, work, work. She’ll never get her dress done.”

Does Cinderella have a “pleaser” personality? Or is she letting her work define her? Maybe that’s what the allegorical nonsense is all about.

What’s not nonsense is what Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic about the religion of work.

As I read Thompson’s essay, parts of it rang true as I consider my own attitudes toward the Work=Fulfilment Complex. This is almost me, for example:

Some workists, moreover, seem deeply fulfilled. These happy few tend to be intrinsically motivated; they don’t need to share daily evidence of their accomplishments. But maintaining the purity of internal motivations is harder in a world where social media and mass media are so adamant about externalizing all markers of success. There’s Forbes’ list of this, and Fortune’s list of that; and every Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn profile is conspicuously marked with the metrics of accomplishment—followers, friends, viewers, retweets—that inject all communication with the features of competition. It may be getting harder each year for purely motivated and sincerely happy workers to opt out of the tournament of labor swirling around them.

I’m not sure I worship my work. I mean, I’m happy where I am. Much happier than when I was a journalist and was proved incompetent. I do what I do and I enjoy it and I’m good at it. And because we need the extra money, when I’m done with the full-time job I go home to the part-time job, and am just about as happy doing that as I am doing the full-time job.

I have hobbies. I don’t think much about the full-time job when I’m home. And I look at my interactions on social media and while I may occasionally feel a twinge of professional jealousy when I see friends who have turned a hobby (creative writing) into a published endeavor, for the most part I enjoy the time I spend on social media.

I suppose I’m lucky in my contentedness. I could be of the Millennial generation, of which Thompson says:

There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. Indeed, if you were designing a Black Mirror* labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.

I’ll admit on the surface I appear to be beholden to sloth and laziness. That’s only partially true. I’m a great believer in the Peter Principle, which says workers tend to rise to their level of incompetency, then rise no more.

I did that as a journalist. Have not yet done that as a technical writer nor as an online English instructor. So I have little incentive to want to progress up those ladders, particularly as their combined length seems to be getting me where I’d like to be.

I’d like to reach my level of incompetence as a fiction writer. Need to get back to Doleful Creatures. Or is this a sign I’m already at my level of incompetence in this arena?

Still, it’s good to have these little reality checks. And even better to know that my identity and worth are not tied exclusively to what I produce. Because most of what I produce literally goes down the toilet.

*Never seen the show. Have not even heard of it before this.

Workshop is Done. And Will Be Better Next Time

If the Uncharted retreat held this past weekend taught me anything, it’s that perhaps, maybe, I do know a few things about writing.

But you certainly can’t tell that from the workshop I put together for the weekend, in which I babbled on a lot about stuff that wasn’t, for the most part, practical in helping beginning to intermediate writers with the craft. So it’s a good thing I didn’t deliver that workshop.

Oh, I delivered about 40 to 50 percent of it, but it was funny. As I launched into it, I realized – quickly – what my audience needed was not what I had prepared. So I launched through the exercises and improvised their utility on the spot – hardly the best thing to do, but it seemed to work all right given the circumstances. I hope I gave them some good advice. We’ll see what happens in the follow-through, once their stories start coming in.

See below the notes I took on my presentation after the fact. I think I can make the next one a hundred percent better. And feel better about charging for it in the future, with the hope our Explorers will want to come and listen and learn and maybe leave with a few ideas on how to "write real good."

Workshop Rework

Social Media and Work

Beth just isn’t having a good day.

I understand, however, where the pointy-haired boss is coming from. Though social media has the magic juju of helping business people connect with their customers, not everyone at work really needs that kind of interactivity, no matter how much we might say to the contrary.

Take me, for example. I don’t necessarily need to “network with my peers” when it comes to writing documentation on how to handle nuclear waste. What we do is fairly unique to our own installations, so there’s no real need to appeal to outside help. We get a lot of help internally, but we can do that by phone, e-mail or in person – we don’t need the social networks.

That doesn’t mean I don’t try to keep up with what’s going on in technical communication – or in the subsidiary worlds of journalism, social networking and other areas. I read a lot of research, just not on company time.

Still, the ability to use some “social” aspects of the Internet at work would be helpful. I do know the reasons why we don’t have access to the following, but I still believe that with a bit of responsibility on my side, I could use them without trouble:

Box.net. I’m an online instructor (on paper right now, that is) at a local university. We use box.net to help set up our courses. I can’t access it at work, and any e-mails sent from box.net to my work address are blocked. Trouble is, I’ve forgotten my box.net password, and since it’s tied in with my work account (a mistake on my part, I admit) I can’t get back in, since the e-mails to reset my password get lost in the system. I may have to re-establish a box.net connection through my university address, rather than fight the system any longer. How I’ll be able to do that without accessing box.net, however, I don’t know.

Non-company e-mail. Here I’m talking Gmail and Yahoo! mail, both of which I use for personal and business reasons. I don’t use them for company reasons – which should take the curse off the at-work block, since I use company e-mail for company work.

That’s it. I don’t need Twitter or Facebook, or even this blog at work. Other things, however, would be pretty handy.