Corporate Existentialism

In my life thus far, I’ve had the good fortune of attending two of the best universities in the country, each with it’s own unique strengths.  In the preceding months, those two schools, Stanford and Cornell, faced off in New York City’s competition for an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island.  As the competition unfolded, the ethos of each university was underscored.

Stanford has an attitude that levitates between confidence and arrogance that could be summed up simply as “we’re the best.”  It’s starts at freshman orientation when students are told over and over that they are the chosen few, and that drum never stops beating.  This attitude can be a bit much at times, but it is also self-fulfilling and, for the most part, productive.  Students leave with a sense of greatness and many go on to do great things as a result.

Cornell, on the other hand, takes a more humble approach.  There is a sense of excellence and history, but also an understanding that there’s more work to do (to move up in the rankings, attract the best applicants, spin out more technology, etc.). This attitude is healthy, but students (and alumni) must walk a fine line between the humility that leads to personal reflection and growth and the (unwarranted) inferiority complex that nags at some who, perhaps, wanted to go to Stanford. There are times when I wish I could tell Stanford “get over yourself” and times when I wish I could tell Cornell “act like you’re the best and you’ll be better for it.”

Cornell rocked the competition for the NYC campus.  I won’t go into the details here, but to quote the mayor: “Of all the applications we received, Cornell and the Technion [Cornell’s partner] was far and away the boldest and most ambitious.” When the competition concluded, the appropriate response from Stanford’s administration should have been a statement congratulating Cornell and acknowledging that the better proposal won. Instead, Stanford entered the competition with the attitude that it was a foregone conclusion that it would win and then dropped out at the eleventh hour when it realized it had, in fact, lost, with a veiled excuse that it would not meet New York City’s terms.

I find it hard to believe that anyone walked away thinking, “Stanford is number one and the only reason it didn’t win was because it dropped out.”  More importantly, Stanford’s actions and communications sent the wrong message.  Do we really want to cultivate leaders who cannot admit that sometimes others are better, that they deserve to win, and that our collective society is better for it? Launching future leaders without humility is risky business—that’s how we end up with everything from life and career dissatisfaction to a variety of ethical breaches.

It’s also worth mentioning that, in part, Stanford owes its origins to Cornell.  When the Stanfords decided to found a university, they used Cornell as a model and many of the first Stanford professors were from Cornell.  Very few of my Stanford peers even know this fact.

So as a Stanford alumna, I would like to congratulate the competition (and as a Cornell alumna, I relish the victory on behalf of my alma mater).

P.S. Happy New Year to both of my readers! (Note to self: make a resolution to blog more.)

I represented Cornell last night at an event titled, “The Value of an MBA to Women.”  Cornell was among five or so other schools that hosted, so there was quite a crowd (about 300 women all together).  The room was packed.

For me, the most uplifting takeaway was that the conversation (including a panel of alumnae and one on one networking) wasn’t about the value of the MBA to women at all.  Rather, it was a bunch of smart, accomplished women talking to a bunch of smart, younger women about the value of an MBA generally.  A man could have been in the room (there wasn’t a single man there) and gleaned just as much insight from the topics.

The reason that I find this so appealing is because I think it means that the way young women are beginning to think about their careers (and the decision to get an MBA to advance in those careers) doesn’t have much to do with the fact that they are women, and instead has everything to do with their desire to be successful human beings.  The truth is that there isn’t (nor should there be) a special value of an MBA to a woman, and I believe that the type of discourse that would indicate otherwise holds women back.  As an aside, it’s almost hard for me to believe that I’m writing about younger women within the context of graduate education.  I guess that means I’m getting old.

I’m not saying that I don’t think women have unique issues in their career and family choices and I’m certainly not arguing that women shouldn’t support each other at every turn.  Quite the contrary and, in fact, that’s why this event was so great. It was all about women supporting each other. It was not at all about women pouring over issues that perpetuate inequalities by the very nature of discussing those inequalities. And that’s progress.

I’m not a huge proponent of writing on women’s issues in so far as they relate to our success in the corporate world.  Generally speaking, I think women should act, rather than discuss.  However, I recently attended the annual Women in Leadership Luncheon sponsored by WSGR and I think it’s worth a blog.

First, I should say that it was an honor to be in the audience, among so many of the Bay Area’s most successful women (thanks to my colleague Christa for the invitation).   The speaker was Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.  She spoke exclusively about women’s issues, focusing on our absence in boardrooms and corner offices.  She gives the talk on a regular basis and it’s available on TED here.

In some ways Sandberg’s ideas are pretty obvious and most women in the corporate world probably understand and buy into them to some degree.  An MBA and former McKinsey consultant, true to form, her arguments are logical and backed up by statistics.  But they aren’t philosophical or even psychological in nature.   In other words, they take a lot for granted.

Philosophically, we can’t simply take it as a given that women should aspire to achieve positions in the upper echelons of our modern corporate establishment while maintaining the institution itself unchanged.  While many might argue that the modern corporation isn’t likely to change for many, many years, and that for that reason women should focus on trying to achieve within that paradigm, we should at least consider that there are other ways to make money than working for a large company.

While the literature (and the media) focuses on women’s lack of achievement in high-profile corporate jobs, it largely ignores that many have excelled and even out-performed their male counterparts financially in many types of partnerships and small businesses, as micro-entrepreneurs, and as individual contributors (think musicians and writers).  5 of the top 10 richest musicians are women (Beyonce, Britney, Lady Gaga, Madonna, and Fergie).  J.K. Rowling is the first billionaire author.  We could probably add high-growth entrepreneurs to this list as well, if not for some of the limitations of the venture capital industry.

Psychologically, we might consider issues that range from men’s egos, women’s preferences for life partners, and whether it’s even realistically possible for men and women to share responsibilities at home equally.  If that isn’t psychologically possible, then there is no way parity can be achieved in corporate life.  Psychological tendencies do change over time, of course, but the evolution of the male ego into a form that could fully embrace domestic life could take centuries.

Business people, particularly consultants, are often so focused on finding a solution to the apparent problem that they fail to understand the complex underpinnings.  And they aren’t the most equipped to grapple with these issues anyway.  Setting statistics, anecdotal examples and commentary aside, in the end, it all boils down to one simple idea.  Money is power, and the more of it that women make, the more opportunities we’ll have.

March madness is more than just a collegiate basketball tournament.  I think most Americans recognize that.  For one thing, it’s a marketer’s dream—boasting everything from celebrity (Charles Barkley is hilarious), to gaming (guess who took second in her office pool?), to old-fashioned copy writing (sweet sixteen, elite eight, final four…need I say more), to pure sportsmanship and the kind of 110% effort from the athletes that results in so many nail-biting victories (and defeats).

The tournament, marked by upsets where comparatively small-sized underdogs surpassed the “Bigs” of teams like Kansas and Florida, was a spectacle of heroes.  But none was more obvious or more relevant to the corporate-bound spirit than Brad Stevens.

Affable but focused, Stevens seems to have taken to his head coaching position, soul intact.  He started, of course, with the God-given gifts of ability on the court, intelligence (he’s known for using statistics to analyze the game), and a temperament suited to coaching.  But what’s most captivating isn’t his gift, but his leap of faith.

Commentators marvel about how Stevens left a good job at Eli Lilly, where he was flourishing, to take a volunteer position with Butler’s coaching staff.  Entrepreneurs of all kinds know this story all too well—to succeed you must sacrifice salary, lifestyle, peace-of-mind and often pride for some distant goal that may never come to pass.

Surely, not everyone should give up their lucrative day jobs to coach basketball—consider the laws of supply and demand.  But this guy clearly should have, and we only know that much retrospectively, because he did it.

When people talk about Presidents Day, they talk about road trips and weekend getaways, about relaxing on their day off, and sometimes about shopping.  They never talk about George Washington.

I don’t think this is because people are unpatriotic.  More likely, it’s because the three-day weekend is such a precious gift to the corporate-entrenched soul.  In a world where we are told when and where to be for five days out of every seven, that extra day off is a breadth of freedom intended to be used for adventures or squandered on movie marathons.  It doesn’t really matter which.

This idea that Presidents Day, our national day off, is celebrated for the freedom that it provides is philosophically appropriate.  I believe Washington and the rest of our Founding Fathers would celebrate the idea of freeing our weary souls for a day.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are enabled by hard work, but it usually takes a day away from work for us to fully experience those freedoms.

Given the impending holiday, a blog on romance seems fitting.  The definition of romance and the means by which romance presents itself has changed over the years.  I imagine that what romance was to my parents is different than what it is to me.  There’s something about living in a co-ed dorms in college that stripped out the mystery.  To be sure, we’ve lost much of the etiquette and social taboo that romance was once built on.

There are many definitions of romance floating around, but the one that seems most existentially relevant comes from Merriam-Webster: “something that lacks basis in fact.”  I love the simplicity of that definition.

We live in a fact-driven era.  Access to information has made the “facts” inescapable (I put the word in quotes because “facts” implies accuracy, which isn’t necessarily the case).  Where romance once filled in the gaps—where the mind was once afforded the space to wander and create, it now scarcely has time between the constant barrage of information from mobile phones, laptops and TVs.

I’m all for a society that embraces largely commercial romantic gestures like jewelry, flowers, and fancy dinners.  After all, if we ever stopped trying to buy each other’s hearts, the Dow would take a serious hit.  But what we need is the kind of romance that only exists within our minds…that which lacks basis in fact.

The complexity of the mind may well be trumped only by that of the soul.  And yet the world is so full of commonalities and redundancies that patterns emerge.  If there’s anything that the Arkansas bird deaths on New Year’s Eve should have revealed, it is that we are disposed to turn to myth to explain the world around us.

The mass death of birds is so striking a visual that it begs for all the apocalyptic explanations of the weeks following the event.  Scientists will tell us that these types of events are (relatively) commonplace in nature, but that’s not enough.

The mind’s desire to turn to myth to understand the world is as much about departing from the here and now as it is about explaining it.  We need something larger than ourselves, something more imposing than the concrete walls of the corporate high rise, something less fleeting than a paycheck.

Theorists have argued that the economy is the “new religion,” but the economy could never captivate the mind like religion once did for most and still does for some.  Religion has myth.  If something is to take its place it will not be measured in dollars and cents (or yuan).

It’s Sunday night and I’m trying to take it down a notch in preparation for the work week.  I’m searching for some peace—some soulful moments of relaxation, some quiet Zen, some improbable tranquility with the urban chaos knocking on my door.  In other words, I’m watching the Steelers inch ahead to beat the Ravens on Sunday night football, while making a compilation CD for a friend.

As John Cusack so eloquently states in High Fidelity, the making of a great compilation is hard to do.  This is because good mixes have trajectories—like literature, there is an exposition, a climax, and a denouement.  But the real trick is the ability to mix genres and to set aside your own personal biases.  Can Conor Oberst exist on the same disc as Lady GaGa?  The answer is yes, but one probably shouldn’t immediately follow the other and the song choice needs to work.  Arguably, the compilation should include both songs that are familiar and songs that are unknown, so the recipient can feel challenged but not alienated—excited but comfortable.

In a world where tens of millions of people use Pandora, the real value of a handmade compilation is that it is intensely personal.  Pandora’s algorithm may be pretty good at picking songs for users based on historical preference, but Pandora (or any other web service for that matter) couldn’t possibly understand those intangibles that move us to really love certain songs over others.  Those lyrical subtitles that resonate with our own lives and harmonies that speak directly to our souls remain sacred and just accessible enough to be shared among friends.

Vinod Khosla spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier in the week on the subject of why pundits never accurately predict innovation.  He gave a handful of retrospective examples to demonstrate just how bad we are at predicting the future, focusing on the fact that no one would have ever predicted that Twitter’s 140-character model would have proved so successful and influential.

Given that our inability to predict the future is largely a bi-product of our inability to predict the trajectory and rapid pace of technological innovation, the Twitter example is perhaps not the best.  Twitter is not a product of technological innovation, but rather of a limitation placed on technology.  In other words, Twitter’s innovation is related to the human mind, not technological possibility.

Serendipitously, I attended an unrelated presentation this week that was put on by Cornell’s Human Computer Interaction Lab.  One of the panelists, Dr. Lee Humphreys, presented her research on the similarities between 18^th century diaries and Twitter.  Apparently, in the 18^th century, a diary manufacturer introduced a new product that provided only enough room for a few lines of text for each day.  Immediately these diaries started to fly off the shelves.  The insight that this company had apparently identified was that people find an entire blank page daunting and are attracted to the limitation of a small space.

Of course, Dr. Humphrey’s research is retrospective.  Twitter already exists and her research illuminates the comparison. But it’s not a big leap to imagine that a historian or sociologist could have identified this human preference and created an online parallel (ala Twitter) as a result.  The problem is that the “pundits” that Kholsa describes tend not to be historians who specialize in the 18^th century.  And historians of the 18^th century tend not to start technology companies.  Perhaps they should.

The New York Times ran a blog this week about the brain’s inability to distinguish the physical from the metaphorical.  The author’s point was that we might use this blurring of reality to influence matters of social gravitas, such as peace.

From a marketing standpoint, ethicists are always trying to draw a line between influence and manipulation.   But I don’t think that they (or the author of the NYT article) give the nonconscious mind enough credit.   Philosophically, there may not be a meaningful difference between the physical and the metaphorical. Physical pain and emotional pain can be equally debilitating (and defining).  Warmth, whether from a cozy living room or a friendly face is equally safe and comforting.

The question then becomes: is the mind missing the distinction between real and metaphorical, or is the mind drawing upon the confluence of the two to establish a more nuanced way of seeing the world?  Either way, as a marketer (and an employee generally), I would be remiss not to acknowledge the metaphorically real.