A problem-solving leader’s entire orientation is toward creating an environment in which everyone can be solving problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions, rather than personally solving problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions.
From Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler:
My wife brings home a Da Vinci Code DVD from Blockbuster . . .
“You want to see Da Vinci Code?” I ask.
She says, “That’s what you asked me to get, right?”
“Mmmmm, no. Why would I do that?”
“Dad hates The Da Vinci Code,” the boy chimes in. “He hates everything about it. He hates the book, he hates the movie, he hates Da Vinci . . .”
“No, Da Vinci is the one bright spot in the whole sorry situation. Da Vinci himself was a great man. Everyone else involved in these projects is a shameless hack.”
[From Conversations with Frank Gehry by Barbara Isenberg. Gehry (Class of '54) is a USC grad -- like me!]
On the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright:
I studied every section drawing, model and building of Frank Lloyd Wright. Everything.
I went to see what he did in Oak Park. I went to see Robie House. I went to see Unity Temple. I studied Taliesin East and Taliesin West. I studied his planning ideas at Broadacre City and his ideas about the high-rise and his Mile High Building. I read everything I could about Wright’s life, and I visited the buildings in Marin County that were built after his death. I knew Frank Lloyd Wright.
On the competition to design Walt Disney Concert Hall, eventually won by Gehry:
My European colleagues thought I had the inside track, but it was quite the opposite. I was the long shot. In fact, in the beginning, I was invited by Ron Gother, the Disney family lawyer, to come to his office and meet with him. He told me that I should get out of the competition because it was a waste of time. They knew my work, and there was no way the family would have Walt Disney’s name on a building I designed. He actually said that.
On the possibility of perfection:
At the University of Southern California, they had cut in stone above the door a quote from Michelangelo which said, “A work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” I like that because it got me off the hook.
On architects not being recognized until late in life:
It takes a long time for people to trust you and for you to develop a unique language. You also have to develop a way of building that unique language so it doesn’t leak, so it can be done on budget and all of that. It takes a while. So by the time you get there, you’re in your late fifties or sixties. And that’s the tradition. Louis Kahn didn’t get anything until he was in his late fifties. Frank Lloyd Wright was the same. Corbusier. Mies van der Rohe. It’s just a profession that peaks later. And then it’s all over so fast.
London’s Evening Standard from 1966: “Three girls, one of them named Twyla Tharp, appeared at the Albert Hall last evening and threatened to do the same tonight.” So what? Thirty-seven years later I’m still here.
I was at Borders over the weekend and found the Twyla Tharp book. I wasn’t looking for it. It was on the Software Development shelf. It shouldn’t have been there but it was, so I felt that it was my destiny to buy it and read it.
It was meant to be . . .
Several ordinary life stories, if told in rapid succession, tend to make life look far more pointless than it really is, probably.
To update that quote for modern times, replace “ordinary life stories, if told” with “Facebook status updates, if read.”
Oh the vapidity . . .
I posted something on Twitter about helping my son with The Great Gatsby and got what you might call a spam reply from this girl, who said “have u tried http://shmoop.com for The Great Gatsby?”
Evidently Shmoop, which I’d never heard of, has people hanging out on Twitter waiting for someone to mention a book, at which point they send back a “have u tried …” reply.
Lest you think that’s a totally ineffective thing to do, I actually did click over to the Shmoop entry on The Great Gatsby, which starts off like this:
The Great Gatsby is a delightful concoction of MTV Cribs, VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of…, and HBO’s Sopranos. Shake over ice, add a twist of jazz, a spritz of adultery, and the little pink umbrella that completes this long island iced tea and you’ve got yourself a 5 o’clock beverage that, given the 1920’s setting, you wouldn’t be allowed to drink.
So it’s a little bit more hip than Cliffs Notes. I haven’t seen enough of it yet to know if I really like it, but I like it . . .
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
This book would be a great gift from a parent to a child who is interested in becoming a writer. When Junior discovers that winning the Nobel Prize in Literature at age 69 entails spending most of one’s decades depressed, impoverished, ignored, and bitter, he will likely knuckle under and agree to pursue radiology.
The school thought Gillian [Lynne] had a learning disorder of some sort and that it might be more appropriate for her to be in a school for children with special needs. All of this took place in the 1930s. I think now they’d say she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they’d put her on Ritalin or something similar. But the ADHD epidemic hadn’t been invented at the time. It wasn’t an available condition. People didn’t know they could have that and had to get by without it.
Full disclosure: I got a free advance copy of this book because I know the author, G.L. Hoffman.
The books I’ve read on business and career advice fall into three main categories:
Dig Your Job is in Category 3, like every other book I can think of to recommend to people.
It’s a high-density book. Hoffman has done startups for 25 years and shares hundreds of ideas and observations about the workplace in blog-sized chunks.
The style is conversational, easy to read — like having a career mentor you can consult whenever you want to.
Hoffman is currently running excerpts from the book on his blog, so you can click over there for a free preview.
Highly recommended!
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”
This is the epigraph to The Great Gatsby, which my son is reading for school. So beautiful, so sad . . .
(Thomas Parke D’Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, used by him here as a nom de plume.)
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for a real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.
My son sees a book I’m reading lying on a table . . .
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” he says. “What kind of a title is that?”
I say, “It’s hard to explain.”
“Life,” he says in a mystical voice, “is like a motorcycle. You must maintain your motorcyle.”
He makes a gong sound . . .
I am in an enormous vault, dead, and they are paying their last respects.
It’s kind of them to come and do this. They didn’t have to do this. I feel grateful.
Now [my son] motions for me to open the glass door of the vault. I see he wants to talk to me. He wants me to tell him, perhaps, what death is like. I feel a desire to do this, to tell him. It was so good of him to come and wave I will tell him it’s not so bad. It’s just lonely.
I reach to push the door open but a dark figure in a shadow beside the door motions for me not to touch it. A single finger is raised to lips I cannot see. The dead aren’t permitted to speak.
But they want me to talk. I’m still needed! Doesn’t he see this? There must be some kind of mistake. Doesn’t he see that they need me? I plead with the figure that I have to speak to them. It’s not finished yet. I have to tell them things. But the figure in the shadows makes no sign that he has even heard.
How many students, for example, were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them? How many acquired special skills be means of automatic drill so that their power of judgment and capacity to act intelligently in new situations was limited? How many came to associate the learning process with ennui and boredom? How many found what they did learn so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no power of control over the latter? How many came to associate books with dull drudgery, so that they were “conditioned” to all but flashy reading matter?
He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be “here.” What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
FATHER: Would you take out the trash please?
SON: Are you KIDDING?! I’m doing homework! I’ll take out the trash if you read To Kill a Mockingbird and tell me what each chapter is about.
FATHER: I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird. You want to know what it’s about? ‘Racism is Bad.’ Now take out the garbage.
SON: Mom said my dinner was going to be ready by now and she hasn’t even started cooking it yet.
FATHER: You’re a big boy. Why don’t you make something yourself?
SON: I’m really not happy with the service I’m receiving here.
SON: So was Mom pretty horny when you first met her?
FATHER: Oh Jesus . . .
I took my son to the bookstore to buy To Kill a Mockingbird for his English class. They had two paperback editions available — one with a fancy binding for $15.95 and another one for three dollars less.
I pulled the cheaper one off the shelf and my son asked, “Why are we getting that one?”
I said, “Because it’s three dollars less for the same book.”
“I like the other cover better,” he said.
“Gimme three dollars.”
My son had an assignment this weekend to write an essay on cultural values vs. personal values in Huckleberry Finn.
The teacher didn’t assign the whole book, just an excerpt in which Huck has to decide whether or not to send Jim, the escaped slave, back to Miss Watson.
So I read through the excerpt and sure enough, it includes multiple uses of what’s now known as “the N-word.”
I asked the boy, “Did Mr. Murano discuss with you guys about Mark Twain’s use of the word ‘nigger’?”
“No,” he said. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, our school is mostly Asian. Now if Mark Twain had overused the word ‘chink,’ then we’d have a problem.”
What I re-learned in Crucial Conversations class is that you can have “better” conversations with people if you’re able to control your initial emotional reactions and apply some learnable communication skills.
I say “re-learned” because I got the same takeaway years ago from reading How to Win Friends and Influence People and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
And while it’s been my experience that these techniques really do work, I haven’t used them as much I could have because they also seem to take a lot of the zest out of being alive.
For example: Several years ago, we had an electrical problem at the house, where we weren’t getting power in any of the front rooms.
My wife was home when the electrician came out — I was at work — and he fixed the problem in five minutes.
When I got home, she was unhappy that he’d charged us 50 dollars for five minutes of work.
My first thought was, “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What should we do? Save 50 bucks and sit in the dark for the rest of our lives? What do you care how long it took him? He fixed the problem.”
As it happens though, I had just finished reading the Mars/Venus book, in which I learned that while men like to solve problems, women prefer a little empathy, so what I actually said was, “Gee honey, that must have been very upsetting.”
Well, that absolutely floored her. And as she stood there gaping at me, I said, “I mean it. That sounds very upsetting.”
So I sidestepped a colossal argument but I also realized that I couldn’t do that on a regular basis because I’d wind up listening to a lot of nonsense, throwing myself on conversational grenades and keeping all of my best lines to myself.
