I recently invented a little self-help exercise for myself that I call “Ten Minutes of Sincerity.”
It’s designed to force me into a state of non-flippancy for at least ten minutes per day. It’s to sort of keep me in touch with reality and stuff.
During the ten minutes, I have to reveal to someone what I’m actually thinking. Most of the time, I make stuff up to make people laugh. It makes them feel good. It makes me feel good. We all get something. The world spins on. Etcetera. That’s not allowed during “Ten Minutes of Sincerity.”
This is my third day of “Ten Minutes of Sincerity.” I didn’t do too well during the first two. At dinner last night, a friend of mine told me that she thought I wasn’t quite ready for sincerity, but that honesty would be a big first step for me. I think she’s right, so I sometimes might simply be being honest when I intend to be sincere, but whatever the case, it’s better than nothing. I’m not very good at this yet, but I’m trying.
I’ve decided that today’s “Ten Minutes of Sincerity” will be performed before a live studio audience.
And the subject is…
A Corporate Problem
I love my job 80% of the time. The other 20%, I want to walk off into the woods, coat myself in honey, and then feed myself to ants (note that this is actually the most positive I’ve ever felt about a job, so I consider choosing death over work only 20% of the time to be a very good thing).
The 80% of positivity ought to be pretty easy to understand. It’s a good job, I work for a company I believe in (if not one with which I always agree), and I’m getting paid to do things I truly enjoy. That’s all good.
It’s the 20% here that might not be so easy to understand, and the reason I’m about to go deeper into that 20% is that I know for a bloody fact that many of you, if not most of you, probably feel similarly, but don’t express it for whatever reason. Fortunately, during “Ten Minutes of Sincerity,” self-censorship is a big no-no. So let’s look at that 20%.
It’s a huge component of the corporate mindset to behave in accordance with methods laid down in books with titles like “Positive Your Way To Success!” and “Passionify Your Workplace!”
The ideas are nice and all. It’s sort of like this institutionalized business hippidom that prescribes peace, love, and defeat of one’s enemies. It’s about feeling good. I like that. It’s a good goal.
The problem is the implementation.
A few years ago, Communication became the big corporate posterchild of success. Teams were failing because they weren’t communicating. Companies died from lack of communication. It was communication this and communication that.
Then people started having meetings just to communicate. I’ve been to a lot of these. They weren’t about anything. They were just meetings for the sake of communication. Minutes would pass by without anything important being said, but because people were communicating, it was considered a good way to pass the time. Hell. The books said so.
Good idea. Bad implementation. It’s like the mechanics were understood, but the concept and purpose were MIA. Such meetings feel grossly uncomfortable for me. The bad acting around the table rivals a love scene from one of the new Star Wars movies, as though everybody has suddenly channeled the unconscious, uninspired muse that drove George Lucas to inflict his mediocrity on us.
It was going through the motions. And it was wasteful. And it still is, actually, since communication for communication’s sake is something that’s still worming its slimy little tentacles into every aspect of business.
It reminds me of a twelve year old smoking. If you’ve never watched an extremely young person smoking, then you should try it. They clearly don’t understand that smoking is about being addicted to something that smells awful and makes your breath smell like a rotting pig intestine. They very stiffly raise the cigarette, and then, with no soul or style, drag off of it, pretend to savor the flavor (since that’s what the cig ads tell us to do (which is like savoring having someone shit in your mouth)), and then exhale in the traditional fashion.
There’s no style. No comprehension of the purpose of the act, but simply an understanding of the mechanics involved. It’s a waste of time. If you’re going to smoke and put up with all the crap that goes along with it, you might as well get good at it and do it for the right reasons (addiction, cancer, irritating people in restaurants, etc.).
Understanding the process doesn’t count for anything if that’s the only reason you’re doing something.
Enthusiasthma
The contemporary blight of communication, at least at Microsoft, is passion. You can’t walk three feet on the Redmond campus without hearing someone talk about passion.
If you interview for a job at Microsoft, you will get drilled about your passion. During the course of your job, you will attend meetings in which people constantly refer to passion. You will receive emails about passion.
Again, like communication, passion is a good thing. It’s good to talk. It’s good to be excited.
But, it’s gotten to the point that the passion has become a sort of disease. I call it “Enthusiasthma” (if you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s a combination of the words “enthusiasm” and “asthma”). People act so excited about things that they can hardly breathe. And they live their lives this way. They show up for meetings out of breath, and present on topics with their voices notched up a whole octave. You can really hear the passion.
Except that you can’t, really.
This notion of constantly being excited is exhausting. It’s not healthy. It isn’t normal. It’s downright stupid and counter-productive.
People at the company are so terrified now of not appearing to show passion that they’ll give you Oscar-winning speeches about what they had for lunch and why it was so great for customers. If you end a sentence with fewer than three exclamation points, offset by several spaces to isolate the excitement and drive it home, then you clearly aren’t really behind whatever it is that you’re talking about.
This is bad.
Like, so bad.
As long as employees feel pressured to constantly overflow with passion, they’re going to be terrified to speak when it’s time to address what isn’t going so well. I’ve watched projects continue, and not with any great success, fueled mainly by passion. In those cases, yeah, people are being passionate, but they’re putting all this passion into things that aren’t really helping. They’ve been fooled by their own passion.
And this is happening company-wide. It’s like open honesty and skepticism are getting brushed aside for passion. It’s spreading thanks to that other often celebrated social disease, the meme. It’s everywhere. And the word is used so often that it’s losing its meaning.
At Microsoft, one of the other words you’ll hear left and right is “innovation.” I’ve already said what I want to say about this awful word, but regardless of how overused I think the word “innovation” is, I still understand its importance.
So here’s something to think about: As long as people are running around with all this passion, having left their critical thinking and skepticism in the late 90’s, and while they’re driving these sometimes winning/sometimes losing projects with all this passion, they’re handicapping their ability to innovate. Innovation is only good as long as what’s being created is actually useful.
We have this situation, then, where one company ideal, innovation, is getting squashed by another company ideal, which is passion.
The problem is that all of this reeks of extremism and zealotry, which never lead to real success. The way you win with extremism is by fooling yourself into believing that everything you think is right, and then bludgeoning your enemies with your abundant resources until they give. That’s not really winning.
Enthusiasthma.
How To Fix It
It’s never cool to just rant on without having a solution, and, fortunately, the solution here is simple.
Don’t buy into to the crap in these self-help business books. There will never be any single idea that will make you succeed. The best you can do is approach everything you do with a dose of skepticism, and by questioning everything at least a little bit. When one of your coworkers comes to you with this “FANTASTIC REALLY COOL !!!!!!!!!!!!!” idea, feel free to ask that person why it’s so great, and don’t settle for passion.
When your coworkers put effort into things that you know, deep down, aren’t good for the team, then they’re dragging you down with them, and it’s your right to speak up. Don’t be intimidated by someone’s out of control (and probably inappropriate) confidence.
It’s probably enthusiasthma.
This concludes today’s “Ten Minutes of Sincerity.” I can get back to being an asshole now.