Mr. Considerate

Today I came across a scene that stopped me in my tracks.

A motorcycle was parked on the sidewalk outside Whole Foods in Redwood City. It was unusual that it was on the sidewalk, but that was not the most unusual part.

Beside the motorcycle, partly under the engine, lay a small blue towel, folded neatly. On the towel was a small plastic bowl. In the bowl was a quantity of motor oil, which I assume had leaked out of the motorcycle engine.

This was amazing! The owner of this motorcycle was so considerate of his fellow citizens that he had placed a little container under his engine to catch the dripping oil and keep it off the sidewalk. And he had it on a towel as further insurance!

Think about that. Can you imagine a more civic-minded, caring act? Seriously!

You know this guy has to be the most polite, courteous and thoughtful person in town – maybe on the whole planet.

Upon reflection, I figured the motorcycle was probably owned by one of the employees in the store. There was quite a bit of oil in the container, and if the bike belonged to a shopper, it couldn’t have leaked that much oil in a short time.

But this possibility did not take away from the charity and thoughtfulness of the owner. Just completely cool.

It reminded me of what my wife and I saw on a visit to Japan. In Tokyo, a businessman walking down the street – suit, tie and briefcase – stopped to pick up a stray piece of paper on the sidewalk and deposit it in a nearby trash can.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a few more people like this in the world? OK, I know we’ll never convert everybody, maybe not even a lot of people. But how about just a few more thoughtful and considerate people to take the edge off the brutish rudeness that is so pervasive today?

Mr. Motorcycle Driver, I salute you. The world could sure use more people like you.

On being an optimist

I was asked the other day what it takes to be a rebooter. I think the single most important requirement is optimism.

An optimist has a strong sense that whatever path he or she takes, it’s going to work out fine. Part of the reason, I believe, is that an optimistic person works harder at making things turn out right than a pessimist. When you are sure things are going to hell, they usually do. I don’t know what the actual correlation is, but my instinct tells me it’s a strong one.

It takes more courage to be an optimist when the going is tough. I was moved to look up some quotes on optimism. Here are the best ones I’ve found so far:

For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else. – Winston Churchill.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. –Helen Keller.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Winston Churchill.

I’m not suggesting that being an optimist will land you a job. But I would suggest that pessimism is a less effective option!

Reinvention of self -- again

Three years ago I did a collateral reinvention when I started teaching an online course in Crisis Communications at the University of Maryland University College.

This has turned out to be a very satisfying reboot. I’d always harbored a desire to teach, and UMUC is a great place to realize this goal. While I would still like to try the classroom in-person mode, teaching online has quite a few advantages that in-person classes do not have. Asynchronous teaching and learning can be very convenient for both the teacher and the student.

This fall I’m branching out yet again, adding a new subject to teach in addition to Crisis Communications. The new subject is Intercultural Communications and Leadership. The material looks very interesting and challenging, and I’m looking forward to engaging with a new set of students in a different academic discipline.

Nancy J. Adler, author of International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, one of the textbooks we’ll be using, frames the teaching task this way in her first chapter:

“Focusing on global strategies and management approaches from the perspective of people and culture allows us to understand the influence of national and ethnic cultures on organizational functioning. Rather than becoming trapped within the commonly asked (and unfortunately misleading) question of whether organizational dynamics are universal or culturally specific, this book focuses on the crucially important questions of when and how to be sensitive to culture.”

The company I spent most of my corporate career working for – Pacific Gas & Electric – had only minimal international operations, but my consulting career has carried me into several large organizations that operate around the world. I get a firsthand look at the interplay of communications and culture almost every day. The world is now the business arena. As Adler puts it:

Managing the global enterprise and modern business management have become come synonymous. The terms international, multinational, transnational, and global can no longer be relegated to a subset of organizations or to a division within the organization. Definitions of success now transcend national boundaries. In fact, the very concept of domestic business may have become anachronistic. Today “the modern business enterprise has no place to hide. It has no place to go but everywhere.”

I feel certain that the teacher in this course is going to learn as much as the students. Considering who the teacher is, probably a lot more.

Tag, you're out!

A while back, I wrote somewhere (I thought it was in this blog, but I can’t find it) that the creation of RebootYou.com was a rebooting for me, and I needed to learn how to manage a website.

Well, this summer I decided that the time had come to quit procrastinating and learn HTML and XHTML so I could do my own tinkering with http://www.rebootyou.com/. People told me, “Sure, you can learn it. I learned it, so surely you can.”

So I enrolled in “Publish on Web Using HTML/XHTML” at Foothill College. It was an online course, a delivery method with which I’m familiar because I teach an online course at the University of Maryland University College. I was excited about learning something new, and about being on the student end of an online course.

I got into it, and early on I discovered that the people who invented the web were smarter than I thought. Way smarter. These languages are not simple. And they are mercilessly unforgiving. Make one mistake in an opening or closing tag (don’t ask) and HTML simply refuses to perform. It just sits there, lines and lines of code on your computer, and because you left out one punctuation mark or got some tiny part of the syntax wrong, it does nothing.

Talk about user unfriendly. I felt it was user hostile!

To make a long story short, when I bombed the mid-term I realized that I had bitten off more than I had time to chew at this particular moment, so I withdrew from the course. Licking my wounds, I left the field of combat and said, “OK, I’ll come back another day.”

A month or so later, in a completely unrelated development, I was participating in a virtual meeting with a person who is an expert in HTML and XHTML, and we were discussing modifications to a work-related website. I could see his computer screen on my laptop. At a certain point he began writing new code to change the look of the page.

There, before my very eyes, I saw a person writing HTML as fluently and easily as I am writing English in this post. More than that, he was thinking in HTML, the way fluent translators can think in second and third languages. It rolled across the screen, all the tags and colons and semicolons and quotation marks and styles, marching across the virtual page in perfect order and form. He clicked “publish” and voila! There was the web page, looking exactly how he had told it to look.

It was a beautiful thing to see (OK, beautiful to me). To watch someone do so easily and so effortlessly what I had struggled with so mightily was both amazing and humbling.

Bottom line: I have a whole new appreciation for the people who do web design and creation. A huge appreciation. I learned my limitations. I learned that not every rebooting enterprise is a good idea. In truth, I can’t do everything.

Some things are better left to the experts. And HTML and XHTML are two of them!

He became his better self

Last Saturday Ted Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Reflecting on his life and the triumph and tragedy of the Kennedy family, Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times, “The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.”

It occurs to me that Ted Kennedy was a rebooter of heroic proportions. From that tragic accident at Chappaquiddick, to that day when he stumbled over the question, “Why do you want to be president?” to the final years of his life, when he was revered as a consummate lawmaker who authored or co-authored many landmark pieces of legislation – he remade himself.

He picked himself up by his bootstraps and became “his better self.”

So many of us these days are at a point in our lives where a rebooting is necessary. It may be that we need to reinvent ourselves for economic reasons, for retirement-building reasons, or for personal reasons that go deep into our spirit. There is a time and a season for everything. This is a time and season for rebooting.

Funemployment is here

There’s a new term to add to the lexicon of the current recession: funemployment.

An article in the Los Angeles Times describes the new state:

“While millions of Americans struggle to find work as they face foreclosures and bankruptcy, others have found a silver lining in the economic meltdown,” says the article by Kimi Yoshino. “These happily jobless tend to be single and in their 20s and 30s. Some were laid off. Some quit voluntarily, lured by generous bailouts.”

The “funemployed” do not spend their time studying job listings. Instead, “they travel on the cheap for weeks. They head back to school or volunteer at the neighborhood soup kitchen. And at least until the bank account dries up, they’re content living for today.”

The Urban Dictionary’s definition of funemployment: “The condition of a person who takes advantage of being out of a job to have the time of their life.”

“‘Recession gives people permission to be unemployed,’ said David Logan, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. ‘Why not make use of the time and go do something fun?’”

If you’re in your 50s, losing your job may not exactly be funemployment.

But there’s no rule that says you can’t take time off to recharge your batteries and have some fun before rebooting yourself. When I “retired,” I took a year off before starting back to work and had a fabulous time. It was the sabbatical I never took earlier in my career, and it thoroughly refreshed me. It gave me time to think long and hard about rebooting, and when I did decide to go back to work, I did so with confidence and enthusiasm.

I’ve often heard it said of work, “If it ain’t fun, you ain’t doing it right.” Some people are proving the same can be said of non-work.

Everywhere you look -- reinvention

Here’s a reinvention story inside another reinvention story.

My Google alert for “reinvention” served up this headline from the Boston Business Journal:

“Job crunch: With unemployment rising, reinvention is a necessity in today’s economy.”

Sounded like just the kind of story I like to comment on. I read on. Here are the first four paragraphs:

Some 50 unemployed professionals gathered in a conference room at the ValleyWorks Career Center in Lawrence on a recent Monday afternoon. On tap was a presentation by two licensed social workers who started the session by asking those in the room to shout out their past job titles.

There was a banker, a grant manager, a computer programmer, a human resources specialist. “Now go back a few years and think about what you wanted to be as a child,” the social worker, Liz Maniscalco, said. The replies were far more adventurous, yet generic: artist, veterinarian, architect, nurse.

“Your attachment to your job attaches a lot to your personal worth,” Maniscalco said.

Most of the people in the room had recently been detached from their jobs — few, if any, by choice. The message from both the staff and jobless clients at ValleyWorks is that the thousands of workers laid-off due to the deeply troubled economy have a chance to craft new identities, to start over — whether they wanted to or not.

I thought, wow, this is a great technique for rebooting possibilities: comparing your last actual job to what you wanted to be when you were a child. If you’re thinking about rebooting and are unsure of a new direction, revisit your earlier passion.

I was warming to the story, when I came to these lines:

This article is for Paid Subscribers ONLY. If you are already a Boston Business Journal subscriber please create or sign into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid print subscription and have access to the complete article. Become a Subscriber to receive immediate access to this article and access to additional exclusive content every week.

There’s the other reinvention story – newspapers charging for online access. It’s one way the experts say that newspapers may be able to save themselves in a rapidly deteriorating industry.

As a serial rebooter, I’m hoping many of these folks – and millions of others who are in the same boat – can successfully reinvent themselves. And as an ex-newspaperman, I’m hoping that the daily print medium survives. That printer’s ink is still inside.