Ed Howker and Shiv Malik's Jilted: On The One True Adult Life

Jilted is a book written by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik. Who are talking about the uncertain and opportunity-poor lives of their generation. Well, almost. Messers Howker and Malik are 29 and work for the Sunday Times, Prospect and the Spectator - which pretty much puts them in the cosmopolitan elite of British journalists. Turns out they're married as well, so you know they aren't sofa-surfing. The book is part calling-card - they want political careers - and part self-congratulation - they don't live like that anymore. But I don't want to discuss them. I want to talk about what they don't understand.

Their complaint is that people born after 1979 - the Jilted Generation - are having an unjustly hard time setting up an adult life. They start with significant debts from paying for a university education that actually isn't worth that much, will barely inherit anything from their parents - whose longevity will use up most of the estate - and will never be able to retire as their pensions will be worthless. Actually, that describes much of my life: the only reason I have a house is that I bought a run-down property in a part of Middlesex most famous for its Young Offenders prison. A pleasant property in Richmond or Chelsea always has been utterly beyond my means. Which doesn't mean that the Jilted Generation should suck it up because I did. I can't afford to buy my house now - not on the same earnings multiple I bought it. I have no idea how young people are supposed to make the life my parents made. Maybe the answer is that you're not supposed to make that kind of life: you're supposed to make other kinds.

Howker and Malik have a conception that there is One True Way for an adult life. It means living in a decent house, working for a sustained period of time in an industry or profession in which one can build a reputation and without immanent fear of redundancy, and of course, marriage and children. It means playing a role in a community - based on where they live, or around children's schools, good causes or some professional activity. It means some kind of political engagement, if only at a local level. They get ideas like this from Richard Sennett, who was doubtless a good man, but whose ideas are pure fantasy for all their grave and sober expression. Which is also where they get the idea that there is only One True Adult Life, and anyone who isn't living it is deficient in moral fibre, especially the kind needed to stand long periods of mediocrity and generalised ennui. It's an idea which had its heyday when the largest employer was the State, which owned and operated the railways, the telephones and post office, the electricity, gas and water industries, the coal mines, the roads, some dockyards and steel works, a chunk of the car industry, was one of the largest customers for house building and office construction, as well, of course as running the Police, schools, hospitals, Army, Navy and Air Force and all the other functions of local and national government. You think the public sector is large now - in the 1950's it was gigantic. All over the world it was gigantic. And it could support the kind of life that Howker and Malik and Sennett regard as the One True Life.

Once upon a 1950's their idea of the One True Life was an adult life. That is, parenthood and adulthood went together, partly because the prevailing ideas of child-raising were consistent with both states. When those ideas changed, adulthood and parenthood were free to diverge and did. My generation looked at its parents and asked: "where's the upside in this whole 'being an adult' thing?" Adults didn't seem to be having much fun and they didn't seem to have many privileges that were worth the wait. As an adult with grey-haired gravitas, I have certain advantages over the young people I work alongside, but only because I have spent my life developing and acquiring a culture, knowledge, an understanding of the human condition and workplace politics, and many years ago, a whole new body by weight-training. Parenting seems to me to arrest the parents' development at the age they had their first child and turn many of them into controlling risk-avoiders who crave stability, rather than independent, risk-taking adults who can cope with ambiguity and change. In the 2010's, parents need to live in Disneyland, while adults want to live in Soho. This is because the prevailing ideas of child-raising force parents to behave in a non-adult manner: for many parents, children are valuable possessions rather than apprentice people. As valuable possessions, nothing must be done that threatens their value, or, of course, brings the sniffer dogs of child services into their lives. Hence the helicopter parents, the traffic-jammed suburban streets during school terms, and the overweight computer-gamers of popular mythology. And, of course, as valued possessions, everything must be done to show them off, hence the risible sight of parents jogging with their prams, the yowling babies in cafes and restaurants, crying children dragged round the Saturday shops in prams and yelling toddlers keeping hundreds of people in an airplane cabins awake for an entire long-haul flight.

The sheer monetary cost of the old idea of adulthood, plus the use of effective contraception, the changing role of women in the workforce, and the far greater opportunities for finding interest in work, culture, travel and sports, mean that many people simply don't want, and now don't need, to fake it anymore. The 1950's were a pretty dull time, and pace the Sennetts of this world, there is no virtue in the fact or toleration of dullness. Whatever synonyms they use for it.

In the next part, I'm going to talk about why the One True Adult Life is neither One, nor True, nor Adult and certainly not a Life

The Real P&L Managers Deal With

I woke up the day after I had read Seth Godin's Linchpin and asked "where are the managers?" His book is addressed entirely to employees. All the cute stories are about busboys, stewardesses, PR flacks and other folk generally regarded as "staff". Compare it with Robert Townsend's Up The Organisation and you will see what I mean: Townsend's book is addressed to managers. Why are there no exhortations to managers to stop ruining their staff's talent, provide some lebensraum and generally behave like Good Guys?

I'm guessing that Godin has given up on managers and management as a force for anything positive in a corporation. He's pretty much open about having given up on corporations as a force for anything except low prices, poor quality and mis-using the workers - and I'm not really reading between the lines here. I gave up on management a long time ago. When I started work, I wanted to get into management: it looked like a place that a real man could go. Now it doesn't. Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into management. If they can't make management, they go into central government. If they can't make central government, they go into teaching. If they can't make teaching, they go into local government. And if they can't make local government, they go into charities.

I've given up on "managers" because middle-management always was and still is there first, to provide a channel of communication between the "guys at the top" and the "guys who do the work"; and second, to handle the P&L. Except this P&L isn't "profit and loss", it's Personnel & Logistics - recruitment, training, development, administration, supplies of tools and materials, and sometimes actual transport and distribution - so that the guys like me who do the work can, well, do the work. What confuses the middle-management is that, while their job is to handle personnel and logistics, they only get promoted if they take actual initiatives and make a difference: but they are given no resources to do this and no idea what initiatives will be received with a smile.

"Management" today in a large company is about delivering compliance with internal rules, delivering the messages to the staff from the guys at the top and selling this year's no-pay-rise and lousy bonus - again. The managers aren't there to run the business, they are there because everyone can't report to the Board. They are place-holders in an organisation chart. Except that the ones who do something that makes a difference get promoted to "near-Board" positions and get some actual clout and decision-making. So "management" is full of people wondering how on earth to make an impact and what the hell they're supposed to be doing for a living in the rest of the time. This is why they have all those meetings: to disguise the fact that they don't have any work to do and couldn't do it if they did - because their technical skills are obsolete.

Some of them are Good Guys. Right now, I'm lucky enough to work for one. Most of them can neither be trusted nor distrusted and some are just bullies and jerks. I've worked for plenty of those. None of them run the business. None of them have a clue what to do next. Even the good guys. And they know that if they don't get a clue, they aren't going any further. No wonder Godin reports that one thing managers want is a clue from their staffs.

Which they would get if they deserved it.  But most of them don't deserve it. And why they don't is another subject

September Holiday (Not Much)

I was on holiday last week. I didn't go away, in fact, because the sky was grey, the air full of some fungus that set off histamines in my bloodstream after ten minutes, the temperature neither hot nor cold, the air damp, there was nothing much on at the movies, plus I do not have £1,000 to blow on air fare, hotels and decent meals in, say, Nice or Paris, so in fact, I stayed indoors at home. I listened my way through a fair chunk of the Mariss Jansons' mix of Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies. I read a couple of books, kept trying to get started on Sartre's Being and Nothingness - which is a lot to get started on - and finished watching the first series of The Guardian, which is not a newspaper but a series about a corporate lawyer who has to work as a child advocate or go to jail for doing drugs. It's pretty good. Also I kept waking up at 05:45. I wanted to sleep late - 08:00 would do fine. But no, there I was, bouncing around at 06:00.

And at some point, it dawned on me that it's not me who doesn't get it, it's the management in The Bank. The senior management and the talk they talk? I thought they are smart people being cynically manipulative, but now I know they are ordinary, dull people who actually believe what they say and do. None of them would last a day in a real private sector company, though they might survive in British Telecom or Cable and Wireless. They read pop management books if they read at all. Somewhere inside they know that the whole financial services sector is a badly-run mess, and they think it's cute.

Anyway. On the one day I did go into town, I passed by the Lazarides gallery and had a look at the Botulism exhibition by a Brooklyn artist called Bast. I liked a lot of it. Here's one - Utz - that caught my eye even if it is beyond my wallet. The gallery were kind enough to send me a pdf catalogue.

As ever - if you need me to take this down, I'll be happy to oblige.

Also I downloaded and tried Evernote which is a cloud notebook application. It's way useful - I now draft stuff in Evernote rather than Open Office Word  - and it's on my MacBook Pro and Asus netbook. It's right up there with Dropbox as a must-have.

On Being "Done"

These are due to Bre Pettis.

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

There is no editing stage.

Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

Banish procrastination. If you wait for more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Destruction is a variant of done.

If you have an idea and publish it on the Internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

Done is the engine of more.

The most important one for me is: the point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. This helps me curb my tendency to hold back on delivering because it hasn't got this little tweak or that little feature. Doing so means I can't be getting on with other stuff. Which is the point.

Rescuing The Boss Isn't In The Job Description

At the end of Seth Godin's Linchpin is a plea for we poor bloody infantry to perform above and beyond to rescue (the customers and products of) corporations from the mess they're making of running themselves. Will the workers please rescue the managers (and for that matter, the cheap, chiselling, entitled customers as well)?

The answer to that is, of course, NO. Well-adjusted people don't do rescuing of anybody or anything from their own freely-entered-into dysfunctional behaviour. (Unless we are being paid huge fees specifically to do so - like the rehab clinic gets paid and for the same reason.) We're paid to do our jobs, and management are paid to run the company. That doesn't mean I do as I'm told all (or even any) of the time: I can question their policies and propose stuff, but the decision is theirs.

If management decide to outsource accounts receivable to India and the customers go ape hearing foreign voices demanding payment with all the sensitivity of anyone working a script, guess what? They don't get to shrug and tell us we have to make it work - which is pretty much like a gambler telling his wife to make ends meet now he's blown half the week's money at the track. It's for management to cancel the outsourcing contract and bring the work back home, with a mass apology to the customers along the line. No-one gets to screw it up, pay themselves a bonus, deny there's a problem and leave someone else to clear up the mess.

Well, except managements do that every day. However, not rescuing them from their own dysfunctional, narcissistic egos doesn't mean we do a bad job. Godin tells this little story:

"Working the First-Class cabin at British Airways can be a nightmare... Spoiled, tired executives are waited on by flight attendants for hours on end, rarely earning the service they demand. Sure they've paid for it, but all too often, they're not open or receptive to it. The secret of working this flight, I've been told by the people who do... is to realise that the extraordinary service being delivered is not for the passenger, and it's not for British Airways. It's for the flight attendant."

We do a good job for our own self-respect and because being a sabotaging grump is bad for us in so many ways. However, if we're not careful we give the employer and the customers a free ride on our good nature. Not happening. The trick is not to let the chiselling employer or the entitlement-laden customers benefit too much, if at all. That's a tough one for the cabin crew, but it's a lot easier for head office / back-office people.

Let's get this straight. I'm not saying we don't make suggestions about how to improve products or services for the customer, or how to cut costs and improve response times without cutting quality of service and reliability. Above a certain level, that's part of the job. I am saying that we don't "work round" a bureaucracy the management allow to be obstructive, nor do we try to fix the poor service from the outsourcing company. It's a subtle one. A customer who is polite and friendly gets helpful and friendly back: one who dumps their entitlement on you gets the minimum service with no value-add. (This is what I suspect the cabin crew do: what they're not doing is forgetting the bad passenger's drinks or spilling dinner over her dress. Which they would like to do.)

I am saying the company and the customers don't get a free ride. They don't get any more value-add for their business than they put in to us. I am saying we figure out how to get more value-added to us than they are prepared to offer. I'm saying you don't do anything outwith your core job description for the company that doesn't add value to and for you. And I'm saying that the constant re-organisations, mergers, disposals, outsourcing and use of consultants releases us from any obligation we may feel that we have to leave something lasting behind us.

So over some more posts I'm going to examine this idea a little more.

Parkrun Saturday - Bushy Park

A few times over the summer, first thing Saturday morning I've parked the car in Bushy Park to walk into Kingston, where I do a little market shopping for things like ripe fruit that supermarkets don't carry sell any more. When was the last time you had a ripe anything from Sainsbury's?

I've been greeted by a sight like this..

... of the healthy professional husbands, wives, partners and friends who inhabit the areas surrounding Bushy Park and do things like jogging at 09:00 on a Saturday. I assumed it was some local club. Until a couple of weekends ago when the crowd was this big...

I asked one of the stewards and they told me it was a 5k run organised by an organisation called Parkrun. It's done every Saturday morning all over the country and at all times of the year - they even run on Christmas Day. You just turn up. No qualifications, no entry fee, no minimum fitness requirement. See website for details. I'm going to pass over the bit where they let you run with a pushchair or buggy (which is carrying ostentatious parenting way, way too far) and stick to the bit where it looks like a great idea.

When I got from shopping at 10:30, the place looked like this...

...which gave me that "But they were here! Hundreds of them! You have to believe me!" feeling. The stuff that goes on when we blink eh?

The Covent Garden Early Morning iPhone 4 Queue

The new Apple Store in Covent Garden is a thing of temple-like spareness and beauty...

This was taken from outside because I had a feeling they wouldn't like me snapping it inside. There are three floors of those tables - never in the history of retail has so much floor space been given to such a small product range. Anyway, here's the thing. That snap was taken at 08:15 on Wednesday 1st September. (If I wake up early and can't doze off again, I'm going into London early and having breakfast there before going into the office.)

Round the corner was this...

This is the iPhone 4 queue. You want to buy a MacBook Pro, just walk right in. You want the iPhone, you queue. I'll say again, this is 08:15. These people were up at 06:00 or so to get there. It's been like this since the store opened about three weeks ago, and if you go at lunchtime, the queue is almost as large.