Sources: Creating a World Without Poverty by Muhammad Yunus, Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and Democracy Matters by Cornel West
Since I started being a grownup, a staple of my daily media consumption has been NPR's Marketplace broadcast. I listen to it while I drive home from work or to the podcast when I work a little late (or leave a little early). I use the time as part of a crash course in the real world, a subject I attempted to ignore for 4+ years.
As a graduate student, I went forward every day in my arcane studies with the sincere belief that my understanding of 1970s Black Arts essay or diaspora studies theory would benefit the world in some way. It was a naive but not altogether ignoble belief. However, it left me completely unprepared for a world where hunger motivates much more than idealism, and where getting things done takes much more effort than I ever thought. At first glance, it would seem my education has been an exercise in random knowledge acquisition.
But here's the central question of the real world that I've encountered as a project manager, a question my education has helped me to tackle: Why can't people just work, get things done, and take care of business?
The truth is, in a big project where the sum is too complex for any one brain, every team member is lazy, or scared, or uninformed, or confused, or misdirected, or bored at some point in the day. Add personality to the mix. In every team, you have lemmings, John Waynes, and a whole host of individuals who make decisions (or choose indecision) throughout the day, and every individual requires a different management style, tack, or technique. The prospect of dealing with this on a daily basis can be staggering, but this is where my lit degree kicks in.
When I get discouraged or overwhelmed, I begin to think of my team as a host of characters straight out of Dickens, Faulkner, or (on bad days) The Walking Dead. My lit training has honed my memory, increased my ability to extrapolate personality and motivation from small details, and allowed me to visualize the tableau of human resources as a real life Yoknapatawpha County. The only difference, of course, is that my characters talk back and often fail to cooperate, but the application of lessons learned from my study of the Snopes makes my job doable.
The size of my projects, though, pales in comparison to the astounding problems that currently beset the country and the world. With more experience, I hope to contribute to the solution for some of these problems, but only a few months of management experience has highlighted the fallibility of so many of the movements happening around me.
Take Occupy Wall Street, for example. A movement of thousands that has managed to get a few things done, namely create a human megaphone and...well, that's about it, isn't it? A churning mass of humanity is not a spearhead for change. The presence of grievance does not translate into solutions because 5,000 people stomp their feet in the same place. Beautiful rhetoric won't bring the change we need. We forget that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not successful because of his speeches, but because of his organizational ability. The same goes for every other successful movement. We need fair, hard-nosed, and efficient leaders who can mobilize resources and inspire diverse groups of individuals to coalesce into a team. Then, and only then, will the world move forward.
Knowledge for knowledge's sake is a false idol perpetuated by an academic establishment either too incurious or too lazy to face up to the world outside its ivy-clad walls. Having an intimate knowledge of Black Arts essay is valuable, but only if it is used to make the world a better place. The same goes for economics, mathematics, political science, or biology. Without application, knowledge creates only entitlement. The proof is in the unemployed youths who mill around Zuccotti park chanting slogans instead of getting to work to fix the system, positive that their college degrees contain, in and of themselves, an entitlement to society's recognition and financial endorsement.
Application isn't pretty. You have to deal with lazy lemmings and wild card John Waynes. But until people stop waiting for others to serve up opportunities like breakfast in bed, the very real problems that inspired the outrage of Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the world's other grievances will never go away.
Since I started being a grownup, a staple of my daily media consumption has been NPR's Marketplace broadcast. I listen to it while I drive home from work or to the podcast when I work a little late (or leave a little early). I use the time as part of a crash course in the real world, a subject I attempted to ignore for 4+ years.
As a graduate student, I went forward every day in my arcane studies with the sincere belief that my understanding of 1970s Black Arts essay or diaspora studies theory would benefit the world in some way. It was a naive but not altogether ignoble belief. However, it left me completely unprepared for a world where hunger motivates much more than idealism, and where getting things done takes much more effort than I ever thought. At first glance, it would seem my education has been an exercise in random knowledge acquisition.
But here's the central question of the real world that I've encountered as a project manager, a question my education has helped me to tackle: Why can't people just work, get things done, and take care of business?
The truth is, in a big project where the sum is too complex for any one brain, every team member is lazy, or scared, or uninformed, or confused, or misdirected, or bored at some point in the day. Add personality to the mix. In every team, you have lemmings, John Waynes, and a whole host of individuals who make decisions (or choose indecision) throughout the day, and every individual requires a different management style, tack, or technique. The prospect of dealing with this on a daily basis can be staggering, but this is where my lit degree kicks in.
When I get discouraged or overwhelmed, I begin to think of my team as a host of characters straight out of Dickens, Faulkner, or (on bad days) The Walking Dead. My lit training has honed my memory, increased my ability to extrapolate personality and motivation from small details, and allowed me to visualize the tableau of human resources as a real life Yoknapatawpha County. The only difference, of course, is that my characters talk back and often fail to cooperate, but the application of lessons learned from my study of the Snopes makes my job doable.
The size of my projects, though, pales in comparison to the astounding problems that currently beset the country and the world. With more experience, I hope to contribute to the solution for some of these problems, but only a few months of management experience has highlighted the fallibility of so many of the movements happening around me.
Take Occupy Wall Street, for example. A movement of thousands that has managed to get a few things done, namely create a human megaphone and...well, that's about it, isn't it? A churning mass of humanity is not a spearhead for change. The presence of grievance does not translate into solutions because 5,000 people stomp their feet in the same place. Beautiful rhetoric won't bring the change we need. We forget that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not successful because of his speeches, but because of his organizational ability. The same goes for every other successful movement. We need fair, hard-nosed, and efficient leaders who can mobilize resources and inspire diverse groups of individuals to coalesce into a team. Then, and only then, will the world move forward.
Knowledge for knowledge's sake is a false idol perpetuated by an academic establishment either too incurious or too lazy to face up to the world outside its ivy-clad walls. Having an intimate knowledge of Black Arts essay is valuable, but only if it is used to make the world a better place. The same goes for economics, mathematics, political science, or biology. Without application, knowledge creates only entitlement. The proof is in the unemployed youths who mill around Zuccotti park chanting slogans instead of getting to work to fix the system, positive that their college degrees contain, in and of themselves, an entitlement to society's recognition and financial endorsement.
Application isn't pretty. You have to deal with lazy lemmings and wild card John Waynes. But until people stop waiting for others to serve up opportunities like breakfast in bed, the very real problems that inspired the outrage of Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the world's other grievances will never go away.
