Know Thy Friends - The Experience of a Layoff: QMN060
Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Monday, 16 September
(This week’s report is a 10 minute read)
NOTE: Apologies on the late release - some technical difficulties this morning. (BJM)
BLUF: Sudden unemployment is a major life stressor, ranked among things like divorce, moving, and the death of a spouse. I quickly found that without a job or the safety net afforded by either dynastic or carefully-conserved capital, we are all beggars. You find unexpected friends and allies when you're down and out, who probably didn’t even realize that just by being there; just by checking in, they fortified and strengthened me.
KSA here. The first week or two after a layoff, you've got nothing but friends promising you all kinds of support. By the third week, that number sharply drops. By the one month mark, it's down to a small handful. Past a month and you're basically invisible, though the occasional post on Facebook can cause a spike in LinkedIn skill endorsements or, better, a cup of coffee or a beer.
It's like grief. After a while, your friends can't relate. They have lives that they have to live. Your former colleagues may very well be sympathetic, but they have jobs to do and the fear of being next on the list - a terror engendered by whatever cuts were made - keeps them on their toes.
Despite popular opinion, being unemployed and looking for a job isn't a full-time job. Sudden unemployment is a major life stressor, ranked among things like divorce, moving, and the death of a spouse. It's nothing like a full-time job. A full-time job affords you days off. A full-time job doesn't leave you waking up in the middle of the night and wondering how you're going to pay the rent or feed yourself. A full-time job, no matter how menial, offers you some degree of security, whether it be in the form of a paycheck or health insurance. It offers you collegial relationships: the social support network provided by the workplace. Looking for a job is a 24-hour-a-day exercise in exhaustion, fear, and stress, especially if you're one of the 78 percent of Americans who was already one paycheck away from living on the sidewalk.
Eventually, well-meaning friends or family members will make suggestions like "why don't you move back to_______?" For some people, that can be a great option. That was never an option for me. Even if we put aside the fact that moving is another major life stressor, there's also the fact that despite global connectivity, moving would more than likely take me out of the job market. If you want to be a writer in New York, first you have to be a writer... and secondly, you have to be in New York. Is there anything magical about New York? That's arguable, but what New York does have is a slew of opportunities that, like or not, rural towns like the one I grew up in simply don't have.
There's no shortage of advice - although it usually arrives in the form of condescending platitudes handed down by people who sorely overestimate their own positioning and value in the economy - especially if you're looking for work or trying to dig your way out of debt. At some point around the three or four week mark, someone will make a comment to you about looking for work outside of your profession. There's a strong chance that they will even say something along the lines of "beggars can't be choosers." I generally let comments like that roll off my back, but here's the problem with that particular analogy:
I didn't "lose" my job due to some ineptitude or malfeasance. I was laid off. I wasn't a "beggar:” I was an educated, experienced professional seeking employment in a field that would utilize the skill sets that I spent years of my life nurturing and building. To equate that with being "choosy" is to seriously devalue and invalidate those skills, my education, and more importantly, the time I've spent acquiring, improving, and profiting from them. That final point - that my skill sets have value, as proven by the fact that I was employed to use them to drive profits for someone else - should not be underestimated.
Unfortunately, after a few weeks of trying to find a job and getting low-ball offers from companies who are used to fresh-faced college kids who'll jump at the chance to make $15 an hour just to see their name on a website other than their blog, I quickly found that without a job or the safety net afforded by either dynastic or carefully-conserved capital, we are all beggars. As Lewis Lapham wryly put it in his 2005 film, The American Ruling Class, "As was true in the early years of the Republic, the country is governed by a commercial oligarchy and the citizen who cannot afford the luxury of a contrary opinion learns, of necessity, to dance the beggar's waltz."
That said, I still reserve the right to preserve my dignity when called as much by someone whose livelihood is just as precarious as mine.
You find unexpected friends and allies when you're down and out... and you lose some, too. I had some people go above and beyond for me, emailing people on my behalf. Making sure I ate. Putting me in contact with professionals in my field. Offering me projects. Probably not even realizing that just by being there; just by checking in, they fortified and strengthened me.
I eventually made my way out of the unemployment slump by working for myself as a freelance writer and marketing strategist, eventually finding full-time work with a former client. The memory of that stress and pressure, however, has never left me. (KSA)
*****
BOOK REVIEW: THE EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE by Peter F. Drucker
Brady here. I've met more than a few civilian business leaders who openly refuse to read modern business books. I think I know why in most cases - business books usually apply a new framework, method, point of view or mindset onto business in general. They often subject the reader to a business fad that often has them chasing unimportant and overblown ideas filled with new terms - and leaders who read them often end up subjecting their organizations to mindless exercises in fashionable management. It’s often a good thing to question trends like this - to lead with common sense and a baseline level of judgment and plain speaking. But dismissing all business books out of hand would ignore the most important one of all, Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive - which is the antithesis of the modern business book. It doesn’t impose a new model upon the old platform of business. It makes the reader stop and reconsider the basics of why we’re at work in the first place, and think of how we can fulfill our duties toward others through our work.
Peter Drucker spent a lifetime studying, educating and writing on management. Having written 39 books on management in a 70-year career that spanned nearly the entire 20th century, he’s known by most in the field as the “father of modern management.” This title might make one think his approach was complex, hierarchical, stifled and boring - it was anything but. His approaches he put across - usually gleaned from common-sense observations of organizations of all sizes - emphasized simplicity and decentralization in nearly every instance. His viewpoint and recommendations were profoundly human - he reminded his readers that they were bound by strengths and weaknesses like everyone else and that they should be working every day to serve others and fulfill their duties.
In The Effective Executive, Drucker outlines what executives - defined as anyone in a company charged with getting things done - do that makes them effective. He charges that every leader who’s been effective has had to learn that skill - nobody’s born that way. In order to learn how to be effective, the first step Drucker recommends is managing one’s time, which begins with tracking how it’s spent - and then it takes actual, real, uninterrupted thought. Executives have to determine how they can contribute the most to the organization, which comes from a self examination of one’s own strengths and how they fit with the work at hand. Once that’s determined, the executive has to prioritize time and talents to make the best use of himself and others get things done. This requires decision making, and Drucker devotes the last two chapters to considering what good decisions are made of - and whether you need to even need to make one. His tone is authoritative but not overbearing, and his style is refreshingly plain but not dry - and therefore he’s able to pack a lot into one book. Drucker uses a lot of historical examples from his own reading or relationships, which I happen to appreciate a lot.
This book changed a lot about how I view work. Drucker was the first person I ever read who said that one should play to their strengths and avoid their weaknesses - and that managers should apply their people based on their own individual strengths. This requires a level of self-knowledge that can tell you how you do your best work - and requires a level of commitment to ensure you fit your schedule to your nature. In other ways, Drucker was a half-century ahead of much of the productivity anti-hacks of the last few years - when he first wrote the book in 1967 he urged leaders to only do one thing at a time in order to focus their attention and resolve, an idea that helps drive New York Times bestsellers today. But most of all it’s his foundational concepts of stepping back and really reconsidering the purposes for our actions that have impacted me. Drucker advises leaders to create a “stop doing” list that includes all the things your organization is doing today that given your current knowledge you wouldn’t have started - and to stop doing all of the things on the list. It seems easy and logical, but given momentum, habit, perception and social pressure it’s bound to be tough. Nonetheless, if you’re going to be effective, you have to minimize ineffective actions. And around decision making he advises leaders to focus on making a few very impactful, big decisions as opposed to many with little consequence.
The thing you really come away with from The Effective Executive is a sense that we all have the ability to be impactful leaders in our fields, but that becoming one takes careful consideration and resolve to follow through on big decisions. There’s no shortcut, but we’ve all got the basic tools to get the work done - it’s both staggering and reassuring at the same time. It reminds me of a lot of leadership lessons I got across nearly a decade of military service: You have the ability to be a good leader if you put in the time. (BJM)
Anyone interested to get a taste of The Effective Executive without committing to the whole book today can read Drucker’s 2004 HBR summary of his book here (15 min).
*****
NEEDED: REAL TECH STRATEGY CONSIDERATIONS: In the Deepfake Era, Counterterrorism Is Harder (8 min) “We also know that Russia’s deception efforts in 2016 are already looking primitive in comparison with what’s next. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “deepfake” photographs, videos, and audios are becoming highly realistic, difficult to authenticate, widely available, and easy to use. In May, anonymous users doctored a video to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear drunk. It went viral on Facebook. When the social-media giant refused to take it down after it went viral, two artists and a small technology start-up created a deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg and posted it on Instagram. In it, the phony Zuckerberg brags, on what looks like a CBS News program, about his power to rule the world. “Imagine this for a second: one man with total control of billions of people’s stolen data,” he says. “Whoever controls the data, controls the future.” Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported the first known use of deepfake audio to impersonate a voice in a cyber heist. An executive at a British-based energy firm thought he was talking to his boss when in reality it was an AI-based imitation, right down to the lilt and slight German accent. The fraudulent call resulted in the transfer of $243,000.” (BJM)
NEEDED: ACTUAL CULTURE CHANGE: How to Fix a Broken Special Operations Culture (15 min) “I find this argument unconvincing. It would perhaps provide plausible explanation for a rise, say, in the number of DUIs and other relatively minor infractions but surely not for murder, rape, drug trafficking, and child pornography. And as a former member of the special operations community, I would argue that the term “special” carries with it higher standards of resilience, maturity, and behavior than might be expected from our conventional counterparts. The admittedly significant pressures of sustained exposure to combat shouldn’t be used as an excuse for the type of behavior that has made recent headlines. Perhaps there is a simpler and more credible answer: We have let some of the wrong people into our community.” (BJM)
NEEDED: THOUGHTFUL APPLICATION: Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of war (8 min) “The point of processing information, of course, is to act on it. And the third way AI will change warfare is by seeping into military decision-making from the lowly platoon to national headquarters. Northern Arrow, a tool built by uniqai, an Israeli ai firm, is one of many products on the market that helps commanders plan missions by crunching large volumes of data on variables such as enemy positions, weapon ranges, terrain and weather—a process that would normally take 12 to 24 hours for soldiers the old-fashioned way by poring over maps and charts. It is fed with data from books and manuals—say, on tank speeds at different elevations—and also from interviews with experienced commanders. The algorithm then serves up options to harried decision-makers, along with an explanation of why each was chosen.” (BJM)
Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.
KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)