For use November 3, 2001

 Future Shoes 
"Twenty Minute Dialogue"

by Michael Finley

When I was a boy I wanted to be either the crusading writer John Steinbeck or the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Either way, through literature or spirituality, I figured to find a trap door out of this world. I never liked this world.

The saint thing didn’t pan out: I was booted out of seminary. When the Reagan recession hit in 1982 (19% inflation, 8% unemployment), I set aside an unsold novel to make some money, mainly as a copywriter and ghostwriter.

I eventually turned my copywriting business into a fair living, but it was a comedown from being John Steinbeck. I was the down-and-dirty hack who wrote about getting the most bang from your Yellow Pages buck. I took on unlikely clients and tried to make them sound inevitable. I wrote several pastoral letters on sexual topics for a Catholic bishop. I wrote a pseudomedical paper on the effects of soda pop on spinal health for a chiropractor. I ghostwrote a Sidney Sheldon-style novel for a disbarred lawyer, in which he refuted his accusers and slept with their wives. 

It was lowly work, but I did it, to feed my family. I was neither Steinbeck nor Merton. I was a trickster, a manipulator of effects. I was to ethics what Goebbels was to culture ("When I hear the word, I reach for my revolver.")

Eventually I began to write bylined articles again, including some for a Minnesota startup magazine called Business Ethics. Their mission in life was to get corporations to ponder more seriously their responsibilities to stakeholders -- employees, consumers, and the community at large. In those days, I thought they were kind of la-di-da. Business was war; didn’t these people understand that? But being what I was, I took their money.

But as time passed and my reputation grew, I found myself taking the high road I never felt permitted to take before. I wrote about how to get along with people (Shut up, I'm an expert on it), how to deal with bullies, and how to persuade people to do difficult things. I think I was unconsciously tilting back to Thomas Merton, morphing into the good monk of business. I got invitations to speak. I wrote high-minded essays. It was a stone groove.

Then the terrorists flew into the buildings. In the blink of an eye, I lost all but one client, and publishers forgot who I was. I felt the chill wind on my back, just like in 1982.

Well, what can you do but go back to what used to work. I phoned everyone I hadn't alienated on the way up, and begged for work. And God bless 'em, they helped me line up enough small gigs to pay my mortgage and buy groceries.

But the story's not over. This week I was invited by Business Ethics, thirteen years after I last did any work for them, to participate in a "dialogue" on what it means to do business these dark days. I went in both offensive and defensive: hoping to network with people who could do me some good, but wary of a roomful of really sensitive business people.

The facilitator for the day was a man named Craig Neal, who runs dialogue sessions for business leaders here and in the Bay Area. The structure was that first, three visiting business people would describe their struggles. One was the CEO of a Yonkers, NY bakery founded by Zen monks that employs down and out people on an "open hiring" basis -- the first person who applies for a job gets it. Next was the man named Myron in charge of integrating all the different computer systems at the University of Minnesota into a single system -- as challenging a task as I can imagine. Finally was a California company that makes cabling products for computer networks, and that is 100% owned by employees.

After these three stories, we would break into small groups for twenty minutes. These are the rules for the twenty-minute dialogue:

O      Listen. Communication involves speaking, but exploration only happens when you listen. Michelangelo painted dozens of major and minor prophets on the Sistine Chapel frescoes. The only way to tell the major ones from the minor ones is that the major ones are always listening.

O      Suspend certainty. Listen as if you are not at war with what is being said. Set aside your prejudices, the things that make you feel comfortable or one up. Shut up inside.

O      Slow down the inquiry. Understanding is not a race. Raw speed is the enemy of thoughtfulness. In the West, we think of silence as a hole crying out to be filled; in the East silence has its own fullness.

O      Hold the space for difference. Dialogue is based not just on tolerance but also on a kind of reverence for what is different.  Different outlooks.  Different knowledges.  Different backgrounds.

O      Speak from awareness. Not because it's your turn. But because you have something to say that's a surprise even to you.

The topic of the group I was in was "Doing business in a down market." I intended to keep quiet and listen. The leader of our group was Myron, the University IT czar. Next to him was a man named Jack, perhaps 65, who did strategic thinking for Honeywell until Honeywell merged with oblivion last year. Jack was in Manhattan when the planes struck.

"The thing about the phrases 'down market' or 'down cycle' or 'hard times,'" Jack said "is you don't know what they mean. Down for whom? Down for funeral parlor owners? We buy into these phrases and they acquire their own reality. Discouragement is as irrational as ebullience. To live honestly you have to find your own truth."

A sad-eyed woman named Ann said she was an "ex-psychologist," having just turned in her license with a large medical group. "They weren't letting me help people the way I know I can," she said. "So I said, the hell with them." Asked what her plan was, she smiled and said, "I'm going to hang out my own shingle. And this time call myself  'coach.'"

I spoke. "When I got here, I was uneasy," I said. "I think I've been feeling ashamed, like I'm not really an ethical person, just a hustler. I always have felt bad doing the crummy jobs I do for people, like I'm taking out their garbage.

"But you've got me thinking that what I do all right. So I made a chiropractor sound like a scientist. So I helped a bishop speak comfortably about rubbers and gay priests. So I helped a lawyer get back at the people who hurt him. There's nothing wrong with any of that, and all those people felt better after I gave them words.

"Just because you’re a trickster doesn’t mean you can't have a work ethic.

"The past month." I said, "I've been scared  to death. But this 'down cycle' has taken me back to the fundamental questions. If you want to keep living, you better help other people live. I've been learning that again from scratch, and it feels -- I don't know -- good?"

Finally, a distraught young man named Abe, who I thought might be of Iranian descent, asked why we couldn't just link arms and march through this thing. "Banks don’t want to own your business. They don't want to foreclose on your assets. They want to help you pay off your loans so they can keep their books clean. If we all agree to hold off on taking action, and not fire people, and not kick people out of their houses," Abe said, "we can get through this. Isn't that the American way, to stick together?"

I locked onto Myron and Myron peered back at me. We older ones knew, along with our enemies, what the younger ones like Abe didn't, that at the far right side of the capitalist food chain, Moloch must be fed.

But was it true? If Jack was right, the situation was what we decided it was. If Ann was right, we can assign new names to things and go on almost as before, only freer. And if I was right, our nation is rapidly metamorphosing, returning to bedrock instincts of survival -- with no appreciable diminution of ethics.

Abe was right on, and everyone who smirked should be ashamed. Forget Steinbeck. Forget Merton. What can you do to help the next person you see succeed?

Pretty good for a twenty-minute conversation.

Future Shoes
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2001
by MICHAEL FINLEY}

Mike is available to write for your publication or organization right now. Call him at 651-644-4540. Or e-mail him.

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