Generations@Work

Lost in the Forest

Lost

Standstill, the trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

A powerful poem by David Whyte. It bespeaks the wisdom of the native peoples of the northwestern United States. The Poem is David’s homage to the stories told by the elders of the northwest tribes to tribal youth eager and impatient to experience and test themselves in the world. The narrative traditions of most ancient cultures centered around the task of bringing to adolescents and young adults an awareness of the wild and unpredictable world around them. These stories were a major part of the social survival strategy of cultures much stronger than ours.

Elders today do not tell stories. The elders in our society seem now to be either lost themselves, preoccupied, or just disinterested. We were not born with cultural sextants. Thus when the elders abrogate their traditional role, its left to a younger group of pathfinders too help the young find their way in the forest. Penelope Trunk is one of those younger pathfinders and she seems to relish the role.

Her book, Brazen Careerist, published earlier this summer, is written primarily for her peers and her younger Gen Y cousins. A primer, not a pocket guide, this book could have been titled Zen and the Art of Career Maintenance. Trunk adopts a voice somewhere between that of an older sister and a Buddhist teacher, dropping kernels in advance of the thirty-five million or so twenty-somethings in the U.S., many of whom, she believes, need a trail map, especially in the workplace.

Her style, honed from writing her blog, also entitled Brazen Careerist, is startlingly direct. From page one of the Introduction, Trunk makes bold claims, declaring that young workers are “revolutionizing” corporate life with a work style and world view that sets them apart from any other generation. From the outset she establishes a dynamic tension between the prevailing, but weakening, mores and norms of corporate life, and the needs and wants of younger people on a quest.

It is this quest that interests her, and she leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind where her sympathies lie. She describes the seemingly erratic and unpredictable behavior of her younger generational cousins, the Millennials, as “Flailing”. Many in business might call it immaturity and irresponsibility. Not so says Trunk. Flailing is but the necessary and rational response of a generation sensing the eroding boundaries, if not the crumbling pillars, of old social models. Predictability in corporate life, if not in life generally, is a thing of the past. The key to success now? Embrace the world of e-lancers, freelancers, free agents and contingent agents of all types, in a festival of permanent indeterminacy that offers a kind of radical freedom unprecedented in history.

In the era of the Great Transformation Trunk sees:

• The end of gender based pay disparity
• The end of the glass ceiling
• The end of the grind
• The end of consulting
• The end of the stay-at-home parents
• The end of hierarchy

And we’re still in the introduction.

Brazen Careerist is a semi-autobiographical book. For those who follow her blog, it is clear that Trunk is no stranger to good solid social science research. The sciences, though, are not her book’s primary anchor. As a pathfinder, Trunk gives us her story of getting lost in the forest, along with the life stories of friends and family. While I admire her nakedly revelatory voice, at times the sweep of her assertions seems out of balance with the evidence she presents. The evidence is out there, starting with one of my favorite books, The Future of Work, and I know that Trunk knows the literature. When it comes to the Great Transformation, Trunk is a disciple with the zeal of a convert. I don’t have any real quarrel with the broad argument in this book, I just think it’s going to take a while before chaos theory rules the Board Room. Twenty-five years of organizational consulting, much of it in the U.S. auto industry, leaves me with a very healthy respect for the resiliency of “old” structures, systems, and practices that characterize a firm or an industry.

The strength of this book lies in its grounded and pragmatic approach to what I call the Millennial Paradox. This generation, the Millennials, demands and relishes choice (freedom). But as philosophers have been telling us for centuries, freedom, the awakening of the self to its own consciousness and the self’s awareness of its capacity for independent action in the world, can sometimes be hard to handle. For most of human history this wasn’t such a big deal. The urge to survive was enough to keep our minds occupied and out of troubled psychic waters. And if we did start to feel a bit full of ourselves, well, there was the culture ready to step in and pretty much tell us how to live our lives. The existentialist Albert Camus took a stab at this question a while back and more or less came to the Jack Nicholson point of view that most of us cannot handle the truth, the truth of our own freedom that is.

But, here come the Millennials, with more choices than any other generation in history, and Trunk tells them, hey, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, embrace the chaos and celebrate by trying on identities like Imelda Marcos used to try on shoes. And here’s the Buddhist part, Trunk also tells them to breathe. Relax. You see that giant buffet out there called the economy? Try as much of it as you can before you order off the menu. The path Trunk cautions against is the path of settling for a bad job, a bad boss, or bad co-workers.

Trunk is a consummate list maker. Here are some Trunkisms:

• Be a Sponge
• Uncertainty is a Good Gift with Bad Wrapping Paper
• Grad School will not Save You
• You’re Stuck, Take and Adventure

And there are a lot more like this.
Who should read this book? Most Gen Y’ers and more than a few Gen X’ers will find something helpful. Their parents too. Maybe every parent for that matter. Whether your Millennial son or daughter is off doing research in Africa, taking those summer courses that will “get them over the hump”, still sitting on your sofa watching South Park, or off to Washington or Wall Street set on a promising career; you can learn something about your offspring and have a laugh or two in the process. You might even be a friendly resource helping the apple of your eye off the couch and into the work force.

Who will cringe at this book? Recruiters and HR managers looking at the retention numbers. For you, these Trunkisms are like arrows aimed at your career planning tools. Or maybe not. Perhaps by taking the few hours that it might take to move through the fast-paced text, you can garner some additional insights into the mind and mood of the Millennials. And while you’re reading take some of Penelope’s advice … breathe.
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A few other thoughts and questions.
First, the majority of self-help books of this type, and Brazen Careerist is one of the better ones out there, are primarily directed at younger college grads, or soon to be college grads. But there are millions, perhaps as many as thirty-five million, young people today in our work force, or soon to enter our work force, or unlikely to ever enter our work force in any meaningful way, who would find most of the advice in this book irrelevant. This is not a criticism of the book; rather it is a statement of concern, a concern I know is shared by many, about the long term employment and economic prospects for the under-educated or poorly educated young people in our society.

Educators and politicians can and will debate the efficacy of policies such as “No Child Left Behind,” But the truth is that millions of young people are being left behind and their great adventure will be to stay out of prison, the poor house, or both.

This is unacceptable. On both moral and practical grounds our society cannot endure indefinitely as the opportunity gap and the income gap widens.

Second, and this may be related to my first comment, this book and books like it are expressive of the hyper-individualism that marks our age. Again, this is not a criticism of this book per se - we all need our own road maps and personal survival guides - but I suspect that a book or books about our collective or common purpose, buttressed with lists of what we can do in our communities, would not get nearly as much attention. One of the ways we can avoid getting lost is by sometimes venturing into the forest together and sharing the compass.

Our interdependence has been well established both in science and in everyday life. But to speak of this interdependence is still seen as either a quaint and nostalgic reference to the past, or a naively idealistic wish for the future. Many Millennials have already begun to adjust their personal definitions of “success” to account for the increasingly apparent fact that a definition of success must extend beyond purely private solutions. A growing number of Millennials, and others, are taking their “great adventures” working for the environment, with the elderly or with the poor, in short trying to make a difference in their own lives by making a difference is someone else’s. Call me old fashioned, but I’d like to add this to our definition of success.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Generational Savvy, Future of Work, Millennial Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.