Archive for June 4th, 2009
The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com
The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com.
Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.
Present at the Creationm
Fathers today are steeped in the fine points of birth coaching and Lamaze, but once upon a time they had, literally, nothing to do with the event other than participating in the kickoff nine months earlier. As late as 1938 half of American women were still giving birth at home and men were, as they had been for thousands of years, unwelcome on the premises. The mother gathered her lady friends around her; the father was sent packing. In one charming bit of correspondence from the period, reproduced by Ms. Leavitt, a letter-writer observes how the womenfolk managed the event: “Mrs. Warren, who was absolute in this season of female despotism, interposed, and the happy father was compelled, with reluctant steps, to quit the spot.”