RWL #227
Politics should be boring, leadership questions, and career codes
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! We are into finals! The last push of the semester!
If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you know I have a tradition of taking a picture of the empty classroom after all the students leave for the last time. I always take a minute to stand there in the quiet. A class occupies so much space in my head, from the weeks leading up to the semester through to the final grades. And then suddenly there isn’t anything more to say. Well, that’s not quite right - I always have more to say. I never get to all of it, but the time has run out, and the audience is gone. And that is what conjures up Jackson Browne’s The Load Out.
“But when that last guitar's been packed away
You know that I still wanna play
So just make sure you got it all set to go
Before you come for my piano”
I tap my fingers on the lectern, and look out across the empty seats, and I think of the last scene of Cheers, too, with Sam realizing just how much he loves his bar. “I’m the luckiest son of a bitch on Earth” he says, just before walking off stage.
It’s been a really hard semester - for me, and I think for the students. Teaching a class is about creating an experience, not just delivering information. All of the parts - the textbook, the classroom time, the homework - all of it has to interact in a way that enhances the learning experience to make a good class. I’m hoping with COVID resolving that I’ll be able to get back to creating a better comprehensive experience. For now, I know I did the best I could. It wasn’t my best, and I feel that I wasn’t able to serve the students as well as I might have, but that was the nature of the semester, and year.
I think we’ve all been out here doing our best. Our best under the circumstances might not look the way we would have hoped. One of the great lines of literature is from the Lord of the Rings, with Frodo wishing the world were other than it was:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
But the world is changing for the better. Stay well and stay safe! We’re almost through this. (the semester, and the pandemic!)
(picture is of the 200-person lecture hall I was assigned for my 40-person class to allow for social distancing. I can’t wait to see those stupid tape strips gone.)
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Read
What: Reason, When Politics Makes It Impossible To Plan
https://reason.com/2021/05/03/when-politics-makes-it-impossible-to-plan/
Why: Politics should be boring. In this essay from Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor of Reason Magazine, argues that “For more than a decade, politicians have moved toward seizing short-term wins through any mechanism available to them.” This is perhaps best captured by the shift at the Federal level of governing by executive order - as Obama said, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”. As it turns out, so did Trump. And then “President Joe Biden spent his first hours as president undoing many of the hallmarks of former President Donald Trump's tenure”. This whip-saw approach to governing is bad. Good governance is boring. Government actors should be more like referees - the rules should be clear, they should be evenly enforced, and the referees should not grab the ball from the actual players. Economic actors - from individual citizens to international corporations - need the government to provide consistency and predictability. That’s why the exciting and stimulating political fights we’ve had over the last decade are bad. When politics is boring, everyone can get on about their business and not worry that the latest change in regime is going to result in a new set of rules that ruins the investments in time and effort that we have put into place during the previous regime. The literature on economic growth makes it clear that rule of law is fundamental to long-run economic growth, and economic growth is the best insurance of broad-based well-being. It’s a short but effective piece - check it out.
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Watch
What: Robert Steven Kaplan, Mentorship as Dialogue (17 min)
Why: This lecture is less about mentorship and more about Kaplan’s overall understanding of leadership, with mentorship as a part. His leadership construct does have a lot about asking questions. What stood out to me is his question - “How do we (the organization) add value?” That question has to be asked over and over because the world constantly changes and what added value yesterday is not going to add value today. The actions of a leader include mentoring and coaching - which are hard to do. Having a hard conversation with someone - even giving negative feedback to an otherwise great performer - is hard.
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Listen
What: HBR IdeaCast, The Career Rules You Didn’t Learn at School (28 min)
https://hbr.org/podcast/2021/04/the-career-rules-you-didnt-learn-at-school
Why: Gorick Ng has written a book about not only navigating the process of finding a job but being successful. He was a first generation college student (who happened to get into Harvard) who then struggled to make it in the white collar world of work. The basic argument is that there are inheritances of knowledge that come down through generations about how to be successful in the workplace. If you are coming from a blue collar (or immigrant) background, you will have to learn these like an anthropologist. It isn’t enough to be competent and work hard. Part of being competent is knowing the rules of how to behave in an office environment, and to find sponsors and allies. I ordered the book and have just started reading it - it looks promising. I am thinking I will assign it for my post-practicum course next year.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)