Pay Attention or Die

The aggregated crisis—COVID-19 and the underlying social, economic, and political problems that it has exposed—has forced us to reflect on endings. As I have written before, the pandemic has abruptly put death at the center of our societies, and despite the desire to rush back to “normalcy,” we know we are experiencing the agony of aging paradigms, systems, and stories. Some of them have aged well, others not so much.

Kill management

Management belongs to the latter, Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behavior at business school INSEAD, would argue. “We need to kill management,” he insists in his new, much-discussed Harvard Business Review article. Gianpiero argues management is going through a mid-life crisis, and in fact, has been for a while: “A mid-life crisis is a euphemism for the realization that the instrumental answers that theories generate from data do not fit existential questions.” “The question we need to answer is no longer, ‘what works best?’; rather it is ‘what is worth living for?’,” he writes. It’s an exhilarating read, grim and ultimately liberating.

The future belongs to losers

I would like to posit another ending, arguably more radical, but perhaps even more liberating: the end of winning. If we want a true reset after this crisis, and not go back to “normal,” we need to do much more than reexamine shareholder value, profit maximization, and other business fundamentals. We need to loosen our attachments to money and power. Deeper still, we need to rethink winning—and turn the very concept on its head.

In this essay, I argue that the future belongs to losers. For decades, we’ve been narrowing the space in which people can lose without social stigma. The result is a society that views the “art of the deal” as the highest art of all, where the winners are the best dealmakers, and where everybody gets only what they pay for. We have normalized a transactional, zero-sum view of the world. There is a straight line from this world view to Donald Trump: “We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning,” he promised. And the worst of Trump’s insults is simply: “Loser.”

This is why a positive narrative for losing is a subversive plot. In the essay, I present Strategies for Losers on the societal, organizational, and personal levels, including Universal Basic Income, Melancholy, and Ritual, derived from my new book on this very topic (so far only available in German; the English version is coming next year if all goes well).

The sorry state of America

Speaking of Trump and agony, this year’s 4th of July holiday is surely one of the saddest in the history of this once proud nation. In The New Yorker, Robin Wright bemoans that “To the world, we are now America, the racist and pitiful,” and Roger Cohen states in The New York Times that “The virus has feasted on a compromised body.” Most poignantly, the descendants of Frederick Douglass recite his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” which asks all Americans to consider the country’s long history of denying equal rights to Black people.

Arnold Schwarzenegger tries to lift the nation’s spirit by reminding it of its generosity. The American Dream, he demands, must be “as true for a Black child born in Minneapolis as it was for a white bodybuilder born in Austria.” I experienced America’s generosity myself when I came to the US as a German graduate student in 2003 and in 2006 when I became an American citizen. I fondly remember taking the oath in San Francisco, along with people from more than 100(!) countries.

“I stand on Main Street, U.S.A. It’s not beautiful, but it contains beauty through its embodiment of the fact that America is a nation of plain-spoken strivers drawn from every corner of the earth. They will not desist until America’s promise is reclaimed,” Roger Cohen writes.

Meanwhile, videos of partying no-distance idiots in Florida and other states make the rounds on social media. I’m afraid a people that views wearing masks as a sign of weakness, as an attack on their masculinity and “freedom,” does not have a bright future in this day and age. America has one last chance, and it’s on November 3 this year.

Generosity is a matter of attention

Last week I had a new experience which was a deja vu. I visited the same art exhibit twice in the same week: Lee Mingwei’s “禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals” in Berlin. Since it involves letter writing, rice raking dances, and opera singers performing Schubert songs for select visitors (if they consent), the exhibition is constantly changing anyway, but regardless, I found it fascinating how much I had missed the first time. In fact, not only had I missed references and context, I had missed seeing entire rooms! It reminded me of my daily walk during the height of the corona lockdown when I noticed different things every time I went on the same route.

The act of noticing holds tremendous power, and it is true that, as L.M. Sacasas writes, citing Simone Weil, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” He continues:

“What is jeopardized when our capacity for attention is compromised and hijacked is not our ability to read through 'War and Peace' but rather our ability to care for ourselves, our neighbors, and our world as we should.”

In his 4th of July essay “Attention, Austerity, Freedom,” Sacasas draws parallels between our individual responsibility regarding the spread of COVID-19 and our individual responsibility as users of digital technology.

It’s interesting by the way that in English we say “pay attention,” whereas in German you “gift” or “devote” attention.

The language of pleasure

Attention as a form of care is also a subject Mariana Lin, poet and former principal writer of Apple’s Siri, discussed in last week’s Living Room Session, “The Language of Pleasure.” She mused:

“What would happen in society if we each took better care of ourselves, before we even stepped out the door, before we spoke to another person? What would happen if we radically prioritized our own wellbeing and fed this vessel of senses that we are? What would happen even to our minds if our bodies were fed more fundamentally and given its deepest pleasures. We underestimate humans when we assume they respond to punishment over desire. I think punishment can bring temporary behavior change. But punishment ultimately shrinks us, whereas desire, especially desire for those things that feed us, expands us, and we continue to grow in it.”

Poetry, she suggested, is one such way of caring, about ourselves and others. It forces us to pay attention, to care, because “if you rush through it, you miss almost everything.” Poetry allows us to zoom in and zoom out at once. It is the rawest and yet most refined form of imagination.

Collective imagination and personal action

The issue of collective imagination and whether it can enable belonging and a more inclusive future is a question Vanessa Mason of the Institute for the Future examines in her excellent overview of various recent contributions to this important conversation. At the House of Beautiful Business, we will explore moral imagination, social fictions, and new myths in more detail in the new few months as well.

In this line of inquiry, I came across the work of social theorist Karen O’Brien and the quantum perspective on social change (and in particular climate change) she presents in her new book, You Matter More Than You Think. She pinpoints the frustration I have felt with the mechanistic worldview shaped by the scientific rationality of the enlightenment (the “age of reason”) for a long time:

“A focus on the purely functional connections between the different parts of the ‘machinery’ that drive our systems ignores deeper questions of meaning, purpose, and what really 'matters.’”

She opens up a whole new realm of possibility by considering the entanglement of humans and (natural) systems and viewing “matter” not just as a physics concept: “Matter has agency.” This article provides a good entry point into her thinking.

The Great Wave

Is it possible to take action and dream at the same time? What are the new storytelling tools and techniques that allow us to search for meaning? How can we surf the new quantum age where everything is connected with everything and means at least two things at the same time? How can we go with the flow and yet stand for something? And all of that in and through business?

These are exactly the questions we will explore with The Great Wave, Friday through Monday, October 16–19, 2020, the first-of-its-kind practical-fantastical global festival to reinvent business and yourself, taking place across Zoom, WhatsApp, and Soundcloud, but also at 25 local hubs and via meet-ups, field trips, and micro-actions and ripples around the world.

Become a part of it!

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What else is happening this week

I’m excited about this week’s Living Room Sessions (as always, registration is free) I’m co-hosting along with my colleagues at the House of Beautiful Business. Meet a new line of circular, socially responsible businesses; travel to the underbelly of the internet and the dark side of our souls; and learn from world-class ballet choreographers and dancers how the COVID-19 crisis is changing the relationship to our bodies.

Cortney Gusick, the founder of Hawaiian startup Pāhiki, brings us full circle, back to death. After attending to her late father before his passing, she decided to devote her work to deathcare, but with a sustainable twist: Pāhiki produces eco-caskets. Hear more of her moving story today at 7 pm CET in “Circle of Business.”

I will read two pages from my first book, The Business Romantic: Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and Create Something Greater Than Yourself, at Michael Bungay Stanier’s (“The Coaching Habit”) Two Pages Festival this Thursday, July 9, 11 am EST, in the great company of Jenny Blake, Erica Dhawan, Nir Eyal, Seth Godin, and others. The festival will stream via LinkedIn Live—simply follow Michael’s LinkedIn feed to tune in.

Final note

Finally, a reminder of the perils of new work in the pandemic age: “Man offers resignation after showering during live-streamed video meeting” (via The Guardian).

The bottom line: Pay attention! ??

Take care,

Tim

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