Tag: Jobs

WORKING MY UNDERGROUND PATHWAY AFRESH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I’ve reviewed the counterculture history through the lenses of the out-of-the-way places I inhabited, there are those who ask if I was ever really a hippie.

Usually, I finesse an answer – nobody really fit the stereotype, not on all fronts. And I certainly felt more at home in that circle of identity than any other at the time. Yes, I did live pretty much as a monk for a stretch through there, but that was followed by a return to a college campus and all of its action. Maybe I was in that world but not of it. My music, after all, was mostly classical and opera, along with some folk and jazz. Only now am I coming to more fully appreciate the sounds that identify the era. As for sexuality and caring, well, there’s much more to evolve there. Maybe even some radical political and social activism.

My Hippie Trails novels reflect the times, even though I keep wondering how much of the story I could recast as ongoing today – especially when it comes to physical desire and fulfillment or the simple matter of earning a living.

What I am experiencing as I dig through the encounters, though, is a sense of release – these are events that have been entrusted to me, and now that they’re published, I can move on. No matter how mundane and minor they might appear, contrasted to Haight-Asbury, say, or the Black Panther and Weathermen struggles, they were what many of us experienced, pro and con – and much of what we left unfinished. It’s no longer in my hands but rather in the wind.

This release, I’ll admit, is accompanied by an anticipation of a new phase, one adding disciplined faith to the path of renewed personal growth and service. So much of the dream awaits fulfillment.

LISTENING FOR REAL WHEN IT COMES TO IDEOLOGUES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Back in high school, I remember hearing the Young Americans for Freedom and other Goldwater supporters claiming that African-Americans would flock to their side.

Talk about blind faith! Just who were they talking to? Where were they spending their time?

I could see ways that wasn’t grounded in any reality.

No wonder I started backing away.

It was a sensation I also felt as the Vietnam war began building up.

Or as a homemade sign on the Antioch College campus boldly warned: Help Goldwater and LBJ nuke Vietnam.

At the time, all eyes and ears were cast on the conservative’s sword-and-bomb rattling. The president, we were assured, was more reasonable and reasoned. And then, once elected by a landslide, LBJ, to our horror, ramped up the American involvement. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? As we learned later, it wasn’t grounded in any reality.

The promise, of course, was One More Year. Talk about blind faith! Just who were they talking to? Where were they spending their time?

Are we, as a people, ready for some uncomfortable true statements? We need to get grounded in reality rather than unsupported ideology. Just who are we talking to? And where are we spending our time? Let’s run some numbers, for starters.

STILL LOOKING FOR A BETTER PARTY FIT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The possibilities of a viable third party or even a fourth in the American political system have long intrigued me. The two-party model in its either/or delimitation has rarely seemed to offer a good fit for my leanings and convictions, especially when we’re trying to reconcile ourselves with a full slate of conflicting issues, and I’m sure I’m not alone here. (Where, for instance, is the fiscal conservative who’s willing to slash the military budget? Even before we ask about abortion rights or education support or environmental stands?)

Sometimes, the lines have been drawn along religious, economic, racial, or similar lines: Protestant/Catholic, white-collar/working class, WASP/people of color, and so on. Or east versus west of the river, those on the hill versus those in the valley, or even two corners of a state or its big city versus everywhere else. And it’s not always that clear, especially when lines – and identities – muddle.

In practice, many parts of the country find themselves having a single-party system by default. One side or the other dominates the elections, year after year. It has the money, influence, and power to override challenges or to simply bully everyone into line. Or else.

Add to that the ways local offices can go begging for candidates. School board? City counselor? Town selectman? How many people are willing to put in the long hours – often at no pay – and often at the end of much verbal abuse? Not that all in public service are entirely altruistic, mind you, but let’s give many of them their due respect and gratitude.

What it comes down to is the importance of alternatives at the local level. (Yes, we’re back to the dictum, All politics is local.) Does a second party in a community necessarily have to line up with a second one at the state or national level? Or can it instead connect with that third or fourth party and then wield some influence?

Let’s ask, for instance, what working models of Libertarian policy and administration at local levels can we look to? Without such community-level organization and practice, dreams of a viable third or fourth party influencing state and national affairs remain only notions. So it’s back to ground level, for real change.

ROLLING THE POLITICAL DICE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

One of the Quaker objections to gambling or gaming is that it instills an expectation of getting “something for nothing.” We haven’t earned the money.

And it’s not charity.

In addition, the pot might come at the expense of those less fortunate than ourselves. (That, in practice, seems to be the case with the state lotteries now found across the United States, supposedly for the support of education.)

Listen closely to the campaign rhetoric for the “something for nothing” appeals. They come from both sides of the political divide. Then ask who’s really paying – the rich or the poor, especially. Who can most afford it? And who will most benefit? And where does justice fit in the mix?

WHERE ARE THE VOLUNTEERS?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

Some years ago, as I recall, a New York Times op-ed piece mentioned that America’s reliance on volunteer service in public affairs shifted after World War I. We started turning more and more to paid workers – the ones we now call professionals.

Maybe some of it had to do with the shift from a rural and small-town society to big city life. And some of it, no doubt, as a matter of working inflexible hours in factories. Nowadays I’d add the shrinkage of local ownership, with executives who were expected to participate in public service, and the necessity of two-income families to make ends meet in the face of lower pay levels.

It’s a complicated issue, one that can lead to long discussion – maybe even some wailing.

I see it most directly in my Quaker circles, which function on an expectation that everyone in the faith community will offer service to the whole. That is, serve on a committee. I’m among those who are arguing that model needs to change to adapt to current conditions. Of course, it’s a matter many other groups – secular and religious – are facing. But it’s refreshing to read others who are thinking along similar lines. For one presentation, click here.

Maybe you have some helpful suggestions to add.

RUPERT IN THE FRAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

One of the more curious twists in recent American history is the impact of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron who became an American citizen to keep control of his then fledgling television network.

Politically conservative, he’s nevertheless lowered the social standards of mass media. So much for values. He introduced dirty words to television and thus made them more acceptable in otherwise polite public discussion. His tabloid newspaper journalism, meanwhile, focused on celebrities and scandal in ways that have eroded serious political debate and public policy. That’s even without getting into his influence in Hollywood.

Put simply, we’re a less polite society than we were before his appearance. Or should we just say, cruder? That’s even before we get into the Fox News role as the Republican Party mouthpiece. Or all of the Murdoch-related phone-hacking uproar in Britain.

Now we might wonder how he’s reacting in private to the Donald’s emergence as the GOP presidential race leader. Someone from another television network, free from the Fox connection, all the same rising and then riding on the confrontational entertainment celebrity approach to political argument Murdoch’s nurtured.

Still, Murdoch’s far from the faceless corporate existence we see elsewhere. He’s passionate about print journalism, for one thing, and has been willing to take risks. But when people complain about “the media,” he’s still part of the mix, the one that almost always carries negative connotations. And, for the record, let’s point out it’s really corporate media, focused on big profits, rather than liberal.

WHERE SMALL TOUCHES ADD UP TO DELIGHT AND PLEASURE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

My wife is big on “quality of life” touches that affect our sense of living. They don’t have to be big expenses, either, as many of her yard-sale finds demonstrate.

The concept hit me while changing the bed the other day in my gratitude regarding a new set of striped flannel sheets, unlike the old floral patterns.

Just wait till we slip in, I thought. Oh, the sweet anticipation!

START FILLING THE GROCERY CART … WITH BOOKS AND VIDEOS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I blogged during the summer of 2014, the No. 1 topic of discussion across much of New England concerned the dramatic battle for control of the Market Basket supermarket chain. In an unprecedented reaction to moves by one-half of the family owning the company to sell the popular stores to more expensive rivals, its management, devoted workers, trusted suppliers, and loyal shoppers united to bring the enterprise itself to a halt. A grinding halt. And it worked.

After months of earlier rebuffs and daily headlines, the part of the family actually running the stores announced an agreement to buy the entire operation from its hostile relations.

It was a complicated story, with some long-festering feuds in the not-so-recent background. The kind of story that’s bound to show up as movie adaptations. Maybe even as a television mini-series. Maybe not Dallas in Boston, but as rich in its material.

We’ve been waiting for the book-length analyses, and the first one is finally making the rounds: We Are Market Basket (the title comes from a slogan at the time) has been published by an American Management Association affiliate.

Authors are frequently advised to “know their audience,” with the implication of tailoring their work to assumed demands. In this case, the book can be seen aiming at two audiences: New Englanders who remember the revolt and likely participated in some part of it, and then business majors and managers around the world. It’s both a strength and weakness for the volume.

Reading the text, it’s easy to see which part was written by which coauthor: Lowell Sun newspaper reporter Grant Walker drafted the day-by-day narrative, while associate business professor Daniel Korschun provided the chapters on business management. It’s all good stuff, though a bit repetitive, as one might expect from daily news reports that have to recap earlier developments. And I started wishing Walker had more sources to draw on. Still, they underscore the point of their book.

As the subtitle says, The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved a Beloved Business, this was a remarkable event. Korschum uses it as a platform to argue for an awareness of stakeholders in a company – not just stockholders. It’s a theme Bernie Sanders has been pressing in his presidential campaign, and he’s not alone it saluting its importance. Workers, suppliers, and entire communities have investments of one sort or another in the companies that operate in our presence. For Market Basket, with prices typically 16 percent lower than its major competition, customers have a definite reason for supporting the stores, which, as it turns out, are remarkably profitable, despite or (as Korschum argues and others of us believe) because of their culture of contrarian instincts.

You can read the book for the reasons why. The list of down-to-earth practices throughout the operation, where the lowest level workers are encouraged to find ways to improve the business, is worth the read alone. You won’t walk through any store quite the same afterward.

My interest in the topic goes back decades before this, as I saw the operations of a smaller but similar grocery operation run by my then-girlfriend’s father. His own father had started out with a produce cart that went door to door. Besides, my own inclination has been for smaller, typically family, operations rather than monolithic corporations – as I demonstrate in my novel Hometown News and pursued for most of my employment as a journalist.

As I was perusing We Are Market Basket, I kept thinking of business books like Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence series. They’re fun to read and make their point, though there just might be more to the story. In this case, I definitely feel there is.

Yes, when we come to the stakeholders argument, we can look to John Henry Patterson’s benevolent leadership at the National Cash Register Co. in Dayton, Ohio, or the glory years of the cereal makers in Battle Creek, Michigan, or Aaron Feuerstein’s moves in the aftermath of the Polar Fleece fabrics’ devastating factory fire in Malden, Massachusetts. Essentially, these provide similar models of enlightened leadership along the stakeholders’ ideal. But this book also leaves me wondering about the next generation after Arthur T. Demoulas’ leadership – he is, after all, pictured riding a white horse. So there’s a need for a management text on maintaining leadership a generation or two down the pike, which this book glides over as one of simply maintaining the historic company culture. There’s a lot of repetition on Market Basket’s culture in these pages, perhaps to drive the point home or, as I suspect, perhaps because of slack editing. But will that culture be enough?

On another front, there’s a volume yet to appear that puts the Market Basket experience in perspective with other leader-defined companies. Yes, we love our heroes, but they’re hardly the stuff of corporate America these days. More often, they’re anonymous and invisible. What kind of executive would be needed to fill Arther T.’s shoes?

And there’s another round of writings that might relate Market Basket to other family-owned companies and their survival or failure in moving from one generation to another. Family ownership issues have become a distinct subset of a business school curriculum. You don’t get fired from being a brother or a sister or cousin or grandkid — it’s a lifetime position.

We Are Market Basket skims over the earlier family conflicts that erupted into ugly, protracted, and costly court battles only years before the events at the heart of this book. To understand the bitterness of the most recent round, I’d love to see a volume – or at least one more open to both sides – more detailed than what this one presents. Not that the other side made itself in any way sympathetic in the 2014 accounts. Even so, the events were not quite as black-or-white as they seem to appear. An astute reader senses the authors’ desire not to antagonize their sources, meaning the book’s told basically from one side.

Another fascinating dimension also appears in corporate ownership that’s not quite split evenly 50/50. Television viewers may remember an episode of Ed Asner’s Lou Grant series where the newspaper was threatened by such a division – not that much different from the Seattle Times, actually, where one percent held the sway vote.

When it comes to Market Basket, we have one crucial family voter who switched. Why? Everyone wants to know.

So I’m still hoping for a more definitive volume than this entry. Maybe by the crack team from the Boston Globe, which could throw far more reporters at the story than the suburban Lowell Sun could – reporter/author Welker at least had the advantage of having the Demoulas family grocery stores originating in Lowell and putting their headquarters one town over, in Tewksbury, but he was a Lone Ranger in the face of a large reporting and editing staff in Boston.

Another of the case studies waiting to happen would look at Market Basket since the uprising. Can it sustain the large debt load and still maintain its generous employee bonuses and profit-sharing, along with its low prices? A year-after report by the Globe found that the company is indeed prospering in its rebirth. But long-term questions remain.

Will the fuller story ever come out?

For me, more and more, I’m looking for another current example, somewhat the way scientists want an experiment that can be replicated — another stakeholder over stockholder victory.

In the meantime, we’re still shopping – almost religiously – at Market Basket.

WHERE’S THE HONOR OR ADVANTAGE?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Once upon a time, being Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States was an esteemed and quite powerful position.

For one thing, I never previously realized my hometown carried the name of the third speaker. Nor did I realize that Massachusetts had been the source of more of the officeholders, eight, than any other state. (In contrast, Virginia and Ohio provided the most presidents.)

I do remember finding family postcards of the Missouri mansion of Champ Clark, who was Speaker 1911-1919, and being told, in reverential tones, that one of my great-great-grandfathers had somehow been in charge of his affairs in this native state. Not that I’ve ever followed up to confirm the story. Maybe it was a cousin?

Curiously, though, despite all of its prestige, only one president – 0ur 11th – ever served as Speaker. That was James K. Polk, who led the House, 1835-39, before landing in the White House, 1845-49. In that election, he defeated another Speaker, Henry Clay. (For the record, Gerald Ford had been only Minority Leader before becoming president through Richard Nixon’s resignation.)

Looking back, though, the last reference to the position with any general air of full respect from both sides seems to invoke Tip O’Neill, 1977-87.

That’s three-plus decades ago.

For someone with the ambitions of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, these factors have to come into play as he considers Republican Party calls for him to run for the Speaker’s gavel. Even without the current toxic situation, it would add up to a dead end. Or, at best, a final step.

Let’s see how long reason holds out in the end.

ARE THOSE SEAMS TURNING INTO TECTONIC PLATES?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Only weeks ago, I wrote on the longstanding seams in the Republican Party and wondered about their coming apart. (Here’s what I posted.)

Since then, in the dizzying developments in the party’s inability to name a new Speaker of the House of Representatives, along with the mystifying field for the presidency itself, it’s now possible to ask whether those seams have become tectonic plates – the kind that are about to erupt as a very destructive political party earthquake rather than simply ripping apart.

The so-called Freedom Caucus is being called the “kamikaze congress,” one that would rather see the Capitol blown up than do anything for the good of the country. The more moderate or more mainstream Republican congressmen, meanwhile, are awakening to the fact that their party can’t govern in its current state – whether they align themselves as a Reality Caucus with a core of moderate Democrats is making for some fascinating discussion.

As a blogger without insider information, I can only watch all this from a distance. Keeping up with the news, much less digesting it and relaying any conclusions, is exhausting. So here we are, following a big drama. Who knows how many acts there will be or how much figurative blood will be shed. It’s that, or comedy, but I can’t see anyone here laughing anytime soon.