Archive for the ‘What Counts’ Category
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
2011: THE YEAR OF CURIOSITY
[Originally posted December 20, 2010 on The Huffington Post]
‘Tis the time of the year to reflect and project. I’m going to take my cue from the most famous management theorist of all time, Peter Drucker, who lived to the ripe old age of 95. This leadership guru incorporated two practices into his professional and personal life that I’ve decided to adopt in the new year.
First off, Drucker made it a practice of spending two weeks every year reviewing his work, a habit he picked up from his Editor-in-Chief when he was working for a newspaper in Europe. He would set aside this time to “review my work during the preceding year, beginning with the things I did well but could or should have done better, down to the things I did poorly and the things I should have done but did not do.” Simple idea, yet few of us practice this kind of self-reflection. I’m off to the beach for the next few days and, while I won’t spend two weeks on this, I will spend a few days doing an inventory of what I learned this year and how I can apply it in 2011.
Peter Drucker’s other practice – to adopt a new subject, completely unrelated to his work life, to study and master over the course of three years is an unadulterated form of curiosity. When I spent some time with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the landmark book Flow, this summer, he told me that the most important trait for 21st Century innovation isn’t creativity, but instead it’s curiosity. Curiosity – that blessed alchemy of wonder and awe – is a quality that we all had as a child and yet, with time, most of us found ourselves on a narrower and narrower path.
For more than 60 years, Peter Drucker studied one subject at a time from Japanese art to Civil War history with the intent of mastering the subject. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it helped Mr. Drucker keep a facile mind and a youthful spirit into his mid-90’s. So, starting in 2011, I am going to take one subject per year and devour it – both mentally and experientially. This first year I’m going to tackle the sublime and geological magic of natural hot springs. Why and how were these created? Why do some smell so different than others? What are the health benefits or risks associated with using them? And, what’s the history of public bathing? And, as I will do in the future with subjects like Renaissance art or hang gliding, I plan to explore these subjects by literally diving in. So, in 2011, I will visit a different natural hot spring every month of the year. Iceland and Japan, here I come!!
Some of you may think this is silly. How can this be related to business leadership? One of the most sage pieces of advice I ever heard went something like this: “Great managers have great answers. Great leaders have great questions.” At the heart of great leadership is a curious mind, heart, and spirit. Today, business serendipity and profound innovation will come from seeing the metaphors and natural laws in one part of life and applying them elsewhere with a vision that less curious minds would never have imagined. See you in the springs.
GETTING MORE MOJO FROM MASLOW: In Order to Survive the Struggles of the Economic Recession, We Need to Reframe Difficult Business Experiences as Opportunities to Find Meaning in Our Work
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist who was imprisoned in a Nazi death camp and wrote the influential tome Man’s Search for Meaning once lamented, “People have enough to live by, but nothing to live for; they have the means, but no meaning.” This is a predicament of modern man. Once we’ve addressed our basic needs in life, what do we strive for?
Modern man is a worker bee. To us, business means busy-ness. We work 25 percent more hours per week than we did a generation ago, not counting the time we spend e-mailing colleagues from home or while we’re on vacation. As we toil away to keep up with the cost of living, we often fail to recognize the high spiritual price we pay for being more focused on means than meaning. But why? Research shows that this approach can be counter-productive. Gurnek Bains, lead author of Meaning, Inc: The Blueprint for Business Success in the 21st Century, says that meaning directly drives employee commitment and engagement. Industry-leading companies like Google, Genentech, and Southwest Airlines—which regularly appear on lists of great places to work—have learned that the key to raising performance levels is to create a sense of real meaning for employees. “This has a tangible and demonstrable impact on business results. Now that other forms of competitive advantage have become commodities, creating a sense of meaning for people will be what makes the difference for most companies in the future.” It is critical, then, to transform the economic challenges of the recession into opportunities for us to understand and infuse meaning into our work.
When I started my company, Joie de Vivre Hospitality, nearly a quarter century ago, I decided that the name of the business should also be its mission statement. Joie de Vivre has since grown into America’s second-largest boutique hotelier, based on our commitment to “Creating Opportunities to Celebrate the Joy of Life.” We distilled our credo into a two-word mantra, “Create Joy” which is stamped into the blue rubber bracelets that all new employees receive during orientation and that many veteran staffers routinely wear.
But one learns the difference between a glorified mission statement and a belief system that guides behavior when a company faces a “once-in-a-lifetime” economic downturn— and, really, we’ve faced two of these in the San Francisco Bay Area in the past decade. In late 2001, I was struggling. I had 1,000 employees, and I didn’t know how I was going to make payroll. The combination of the dot-com crash, 9/11, and a worsening economy had put Joie de Vivre at risk. One afternoon, I walked into a local bookstore in search of a business book that would help ease my financial pains—or at least give me a clue about how to survive. I quickly realized that what I really needed was some serious personal guidance. So I moved from the Business section to the Self-Help section of the bookstore (conveniently located next to each other), where I reacquainted myself with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory, one of the most famous psychological concepts to explain human motivation.
I suppose that a guy who names his company “Joie de Vivre” should naturally gravitate toward self-actualization. Maslow is known as an early leader in the human potential movement; he believed that psychology was too obsessed with our worst behaviors when a lot can be learned from our best practices. He first popularized the axiom, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail,” aptly describing his peers’ over-emphasis on neurosis in the mid-20th century. Re-reading Maslow helped me to see one of the most neglected facts in business: the fact that we’re all human. And, no matter what our role—CEO, line-level employee, customer, investor— in a particular business is, we each have a hierarchy of needs that determines what’s important to us. Late in his life, Maslow started applying his hierarchy of needs to organizations and businesses. Unfortunately, he died in 1970 at the age of 62 before he could closely examine how his theory might shift from the individual to the collective.
During that downturn nearly a decade ago, I started “channeling Abe” to see how I could apply his theory to my company. I figured the worst that could happen is we’d go bankrupt, so why not learn something along the way? I distilled the Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid from five to three levels, or key themes, which make up what I call the Transformation Pyramid: survive (safety and physiological); succeed (esteem and love/belonging); and transform (self-actualization). These themes aren’t just relevant in business; they’re fundamental in life. I looked at how to apply them to the three most important stakeholders in Joie de Vivre: employees, customers, and investors. For the purpose of this blog, I’ll focus on employees.
Maslow concluded that individuals’ deepest motivations sit at the top of the pyramid—and take on an inspirational quality. For example, in his research on people’s relationship with their work, he asked dozens of nurses, “Why did you go into nursing?” “What are the greatest moments of reward?” and “Tell me a moment so wonderful it made you weep or gave you cold shivers of ecstasy.” The nurses answered by describing peak experiences that were virtually life-altering. Nurses who were most able to express a peak experience seemed most “called” by their work.
In A Simpler Way, Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers wrote, “People do not respond for long to small and self-centered purposes or to self-aggrandizing work. Too many organizations ask us to engage in hollow work, to be enthusiastic about small-minded visions, to commit ourselves to selfish purposes, to engage our energy in competitive drives. Those who offer us this petty work hope we won’t notice how lifeless it is … when we respond with disgust, when we withdraw our energy from such endeavors, it is a sign of our commitment to life and to each other.” Maslow helped me understand that my Employee Pyramid was defined by money (survive), recognition (succeed), and meaning (transform).
We all have basic needs that need to be met, and our work compensation package is the means to that end. But Gallup has shown in multiple surveys that money is not the primary reason that people leave a company (in fact, it usually comes in fourth place). People join a company, and they leave their boss. Recognition, which addresses people’s success needs and usually taps into one’s sense of social belonging or esteem needs, is what creates loyalty in the workplace. But money and recognition are external motivators for doing any job. Those who are engaged in something they’re passionate about—such as the nurses Maslow interviewed—have transcended the bartering relationship that defines most relationships between employer and employee. They have tapped into an internal motivation that fuels them. They are inspired by what they do. They have moved from just focusing on the tasks they do each day to imagining the impact of their work. As they become more aware of that intangible we call meaning, employees move to the transformational peak of the pyramid.
Most companies get a little lost in the ether at the top of the pyramid, because it’s easier for bosses to “manage what they can measure,” and it’s simpler to do a benchmark compensation survey than to try to gauge meaning. Someday we may have a “Corporate Meaning Index” just like we have a Dow Jones stock index, so that we can quickly scan who is playing at the top of the pyramid and who isn’t. In studying my own company and dozens of other meaning-driven businesses, I’ve come to realize that workplace meaning can be dissected into meaning at work and meaning in work. Meaning at work relates to how an employee feels about the company, their work environment, and the company’s mission. Meaning in work relates to how an employee feels about their specific job.
I believe that meaning at work is far more important than meaning in work. When employees believe in the work of the company, the whole Hierarchy of Needs is satisfied. Those employees clearly have their basic needs met because they have confidence in the financial stability of the company, which means they have job security. Believing in the company’s mission also typically creates deeper alliances among employees because the sense of being part of a connected crew and the pride that comes from group success satisfy our social or esteem needs. Finally, their self-actualization needs can be met by feeling that we are part of an organization making a difference in the world, plus there’s a halo effect that may render the work they do day-to-day even more meaningful.
One of the most profound decisions I made during the depth of that last downturn was to start managing the business based on meaning and to start measuring meaning in various ways, from asking questions on biannual work-climate surveys to querying line workers in monthly staff meetings, “What’s the best experience you’ve had in the past month here at work?” The question I really like to ask our employees goes something like this, “Most of us think of our job in terms of ‘What am I getting?’ What if you asked yourself daily, ‘What am I becoming as a result of this job?’” Helping our employees reframe their work, changing their tasks to make their jobs more meaningful, and creating a democratic culture in which employees help define our business strategy has helped Joie de Vivre’s turnover rate drop to one-third the industry average. We were recently crowned the “second best place to work” in the San Francisco Bay Area, a remarkable feat for a service company that’s full of people cleaning toilets in a region full of high-tech companies famous for plush corporate campuses.
I learned quite a bit about meaning in business during the last downturn, but this downturn has been full of lessons, too. During the dot-com bust, my desire to learn tended to be organizational, but the worldwide Great Recession has led to more personal lessons. I’ve found myself on an emotional roller coaster the past couple of years. I’ve had five friends or colleagues commit suicide, primarily due to stresses at work, and I’ve seen countless companies in the travel and design industries dissolve under the pressure of this relentless economy. My greatest epiphany resulted in a series of what I call “Emotional Equations” (also the title of my next book, due out in 2011) that help remind me how the world works. The most profound equation that I’ve used for myself and for the managers in my company has been despair = suffering–meaning. I learned this from reading Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
As teenagers, we learned algebra and found there were constants and variables in an equation. That’s true in life, too. The constant in a concentration camp, or in a recession, is suffering. There will always be suffering. Yet, the variable in life is meaning: How do we find a sense of meaning, even in the most difficult times? This is a question that I’ve asked my employees and myself, because if you can find meaning in the rubble, you will lessen your despair. That’s how this equation works: more meaning equals less despair. Yet, most of us in a difficult time put our attention on the suffering. Life and business are all about where you place your attention. If Frankl can live through a death camp by rediscovering the importance of meaning in our lives, we can live through a painful recession by reframing difficult economic experiences.
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
APPLE AND THE A’S: THEY’RE BOTH PLAYING MONEYBALL
[Originally posted Sept. 28, 2010 on the Huffington Post]
As we round the bases for the last two weeks of Major League Baseball, it’s worth noting that big league managers may know more about 21st Century leadership than do Fortune 500 CEO’s, with the possible exception of Steve Jobs. Remember Michael Lewis’ bestseller Moneyball about how Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane remade the game of baseball by looking at new metrics as a means of determining which players had the greatest impact on his team’s success?
The A’s, like Steve Jobs’ Apple versus Microsoft, had high odds against them with a team payroll that was just one-third of what a bigger market team like the New York Yankees could pay their players. So, Billy Beane reevaluated the conventional wisdom that stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average were the most important statistics to consider when selecting players for a team. Doing rigorous statistical analysis and a certain amount of gut wisdom, Beane was able to show that little-considered stats like on-base percentage or slugging percentage were bigger indicators of offensive success than some of the historical numbers that most teams used. And, the Oakland A’s leveraged their intellectual competitive advantage to selecting bargain players who helped them in a series of improbable playoff runs. Sadly for the A’s, the rest of the league caught up and teams like the Boston Red Sox parlayed these “Sabermetrics” (what Beane called these unique numbers) into the World Series and the A’s are back where they started, a perennial also-ran.
Most business leaders are using 20th Century metrics to create 21st Century success. We were taught to “manage what we can measure” and, generally, what’s most easily measurable is the tangible in life. In business, this translates to metrics like profitability and cash flow which are clearly important, but actually are outputs, not the inputs that create success in the modern company. Today’s most valuable business assets often don’t appear on a balance sheet, an accounting relic that is 500 years old. In our knowledge economy, it’s not the tangible factories or equipment that creates sustainable success, it’s the intangibles like innovation, employee engagement, brand reputation, and customer evangelism that drive market performance. Stock analysts suggest that 80% of Apple’s value doesn’t appear on its balance sheet. The balance sheet is the output, just like the baseball standings are the results of how you’ve invested in your inputs.
We’re living in a new era and, yet, we’re using the old metrics. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s GDP now comes from the intangible service industry (as opposed to the tangible manufacturing or agriculture industries) where competitive advantage isn’t about who’s the biggest, but it usually goes to who’s the smartest. Savvy business leaders are learning how to measure those intangible assets like loyalty and reputation (there’s even benchmarks now for how your company is showing up on social media websites) so that they can modernize what they’re managing. What are the inputs or “Sabermetrics” in your business that you’ve been ignoring?
Fortunately, Hollywood is a step ahead of most business leaders as they realize that Moneyball defines our 21st Century world of underdogs looking for a leg up. You’ll see Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane next year when Sony Pictures brings this epic story of “what counts” to theaters around the world. Let’s hope a few business execs sneak off on their lunch hour to learn this leadership lesson on the big screen.
When Means Are Met, Meaning Takes Precedence
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, who was imprisoned in a Nazi death camp and wrote one of the ultimate tomes on existence (“Man’s Search for Meaning”) once lamented, “People have enough to live by but nothing to live for: they have the means but no meaning.” This is the predicament of modern man. Once we’ve addressed our basic needs in life, what do we strive for?
And, of course, modern man is a worker bee. Business means busy-ness. We toil away to keep up with the financial cost of living, sometimes not recognizing the spiritual cost of living in a world that often is more focused on our means than our meaning. But, we’ve traded the assembly line for the office cubicle, braun for brain, and an increasing number of us expect that the personal transformation we create outside the office can be possible within the realm of the workplace, too. We work 25% more hours per week than we did a generation ago (and that doesn’t even count the emails at home and BlackBerry messages on vacation). So, if we don’t find meaning at work, it will purely be in the crevices of life where we’ll have to find soulful sustenance.
Gurnek Bains, the lead author of Meaning, Inc: The Blueprint for Business Success in the 21st Century suggests, “The creation of meaning directly drives commitment and engagement and this has a tangible and demonstrable impact on business results. Now that other forms of competitive advantage have become commodities, creating a sense of meaning for people will be what makes the difference for most companies in the future.”
According to the authors who interviewed more than 10,000 executives, such “Meaning Inc. companies” as Google, Virgin, Genentech, Southwest Airlines, and Tata understand that the key to raising levels of performance is “to create a sense of meaning that is real as opposed to going through the motions of creating statements of purpose and values.” Not only do such companies regularly appear on lists of best places to work, but shares in those with a ten-year stock history have gone up 600%, far faster than their competitors.
I started my company nearly a quarter century ago and decided that the name of the company should also be its mission statement. Joie de Vivre Hospitality has grown into America’s second largest boutique hotelier based upon our mission of “creating opportunities to celebrate the joy of life.” This compelling credo has even been distilled down to a two-word mantra (“Create Joy”) that is stamped into blue rubber bracelets that many of our employees wear and all our new employees receive during new hire orientation.
But, one learns the difference between a glorified mission statement and a belief system that guides behavior when a company faces a once-in-a-lifetime economic downturn (and we’ve had two of these in the San Francisco Bay Area in the past decade). In late 2001, I was struggling. I had 1,000 employees at the time and I didn’t know how I was going to make payroll. The combination of the dot-com crash, 9/11, and a worsening economy meant that my hotel company, Joie de Vivre, was at risk. About that time, I walked into the local bookstore in search of a business book that would cure my financial woes or at least give me a clue about how to survive. Within minutes, I realized I needed something more serious. I found myself sauntering from the business section to the self-help section of the bookstore (conveniently located next to each other) and that’s where I reacquainted myself with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, one of the most famous psychological theories of human motivation.
I guess a guy who calls his company Joie de Vivre would naturally gravitate to self-actualization. Maslow was famous for being an early leader in the human potential movement based upon his belief that psychology had been too obsessed with worst practices and there’s a lot to learn from best practices in human behavior. He first popularized the wisdom, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail” as it aptly described the psychology profession’s over-emphasis on neurosis in the mid-20th century. Spending the afternoon reading Maslow helped me to see one of the most neglected facts in business: the fact that we’re all human. And, no matter our role in business – as a line level employee, as a CEO, as a customer, or as an investor – we all have a hierarchy of needs of what’s importance to us. As I read more about Maslow, I came to understand that late in his life (I was able to obtain his private journals for the last ten years of his life), he started applying his hierarchy of needs to organizations, and, specifically to business. But, unfortunately, Abe died young at age 62 in 1970 before he could closely look at how his primary theory could shift from the individual to the collective.
During that downturn nearly ten years ago, I decided to start “channeling Abe” to see how his theory could apply to my company. I figured the worst that could happen is we’d go bankrupt, so why not learn something along the way. I synthesized Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from five levels to three key themes: Survival (addressing physiological and safety), Succeed (social/belonging and esteem), and Transformation (self-actualization) which make up what I call the Transformation Pyramid. These themes aren’t just relevant in business, they’re fundamental in life. And, then I looked at how we could apply these themes to our three most important stakeholders in Joie de Vivre: our employees, our customers, and our investors. For the sake of this article, I will focus purely on the Employee Pyramid.
In his research on people who were being all they can be, Maslow came to realize that the deepest motivations were at the top of the pyramid and took on an inspirational quality. At one point in his research on people’s relationship with their work, he interviewed dozens of nurses and asked the question, “Why did you go into nursing?” Although the initial questions were rather superficial, as he dug deeper asking questions like, “What are the greatest moments of reward, or tell me a moment so wonderful it made you weep or gave you cold shivers of ecstacy,” he found the nurses expressing peak experiences that were virtually life altering. And those nurses who were most able to express a peak experience seemed most “called” by their work.
Maslow wrote, “People do not respond for long to small and self-centered purposes or to self-aggrandizing work. Too many organizations ask us to engage in hollow work, to be enthusiastic about small-minded visions, to commit ourselves to selfish purposes, to engage our energy in competitive drives. Those who offer us this petty work hope we won’t notice how lifeless it is….when we respond with disgust, when we withdraw our energy from such endeavors, it is a sign of our commitment to life and to each other.” Reading Maslow helped me see that the Employee Pyramid was really defined by Money (Survival), Recognition (Success), and Meaning (Transformation).
We all have base needs that need to be met and our work compensation package is the means to that end. But, Gallup has shown in multiple surveys that money isn’t the primary reason people leave a company (in fact, it usually comes in fourth place). People join a company and they leave their boss. Recognition – which addresses people’s Success needs that usually tap into one’s sense of social/belonging or esteem needs – is what creates loyalty in the workplace. But, money and recognition are external motivators for people who have a job or a career. Those who are living a calling – like the nurses Maslow interviewed – have transcended the bartering relationship that defines most employers with employees. They have tapped into an internal motivation that fuels them. They are inspired by what they do. They have moved from just focusing on the tasks they do each day to tapping into the purpose or imagining the impact of their work. That’s when an employee has moved to the transformational peak of the pyramid as they become more focused on that intangible we call Meaning.
Most companies get a little lost in the ether at the top of the pyramid as it’s easier for managers to “manage what they can measure” and it’s simpler to do a benchmark compensation survey than to try to measure meaning. Someday we may have a “Corporate Meaning Index” just like we have a “Dow Jones Stock Index” so that we can quickly scan who is playing at the top of the pyramid and who isn’t. In studying my own company and dozens of other meaning-driven businesses, I’ve come to realize that workplace meaning can be dissected into meaning at work and meaning in work. Meaning at work relates to how an employee feels about the company, their work environment, and the company’s mission. Meaning in work relates to how an employee feels about their specific job task.
I believe that meaning at work is ever more important than meaning in work. When employees believe in the work of the company, the whole Hierarchy of Needs is satisfied. Those employees clearly have their base needs met because they have confidence in the financial viability of the company, which means they have a secure job. Believing in the company’s mission also typically creates deeper alliances among employees because that sense of being part of a connected crew and the pride that comes from that success satisfies our social or esteem needs. Finally, our self-actualization needs can be met by feeling that we are part of an organization making a difference in the world plus there’s a halo effect that may render the work you do day-to-day even more meaningful.
One of the most profound decisions we made during the depth of that last downturn was to start to managing our business based upon meaning and to start measuring meaning in a variety of ways, whether it be questions on our twice-annual work climate surveys or whether it was asking in the monthly staff meetings with our line staff, “What’s the best experience you’ve had in the past month here at work?” The question I like to ask our employees goes something like this, “Most of us think of our job in terms of ‘what am I getting? What if you asked yourself daily ‘what am I becoming as a result of this job?” Helping our employees reframe their work, changing their work tasks to make them more meaningful, and creating a democratic culture in which employees help define our business strategy has helped JdV’s employee turnover drop to one-third the industry average. And we were recently crowned the “second best place to work” in the San Francisco Bay Area, unusual for a service company full of people cleaning toilets in a region full of famous high-tech companies with their plush corporate campuses.
I learned quite a bit about meaning in business during the last downturn, but this downturn has been full of lessons also. During the dot-com bust, my desire to learn tended to be more organizational, but this worldwide Great Recession has led to more personal lessons. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself on an emotional rollercoaster the past couple of years. I’ve had five friends or colleagues commit suicide, primarily due to stresses at work, and, I’ve seen countless companies in the travel and design industries dissolve under the pressure of this relentless economy. My greatest lesson in this downturn has been to create a series of what I call “Emotional Equations” (the title of my next book coming out in 2011) that help remind me how the world works. The most profound equation that I’ve used for myself and for the managers in my company has been DESPAIR = SUFFERING – MEANING and I learned this from reading Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.
As teens, we learned algebra and found there were constants and variables in an equation. That’s true in life, too. The constant in a concentration camp, or in a recession, is suffering. There will always be suffering. Yet, the variable in life is meaning, how do we find a sense of meaning, even in the most difficult times? This is a question that I’ve asked myself and those I work with because if you can find meaning in the rubble, you will naturally lessen the despair that you feel. That’s how this equation works: more meaning, less despair. Yet, most of us in a difficult time put our attention on the suffering. Life and business is all about where you place your attention. If Viktor Frankl can live through a death camp by rediscovering the importance of meaning in our lives, we can live through a painful recession by reframing this difficult economic experience as the ultimate wisdom creator.
Is the U.S. Census “Senseless”? Measuring What Counts
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010[Originally posted March 15, 2010 on the Huffington Post]
One hundred twenty million of us received the same letter last week. It was a simple warning from the U.S. Census that we would be receiving our mandatory Census form in the next week. The U.S. government spent $57 to $85 million (depending upon the statistic you believe) to send us this silly letter! Get this: we are spending $10 billion to conduct the Census this year, but, for what purpose? We’re asking just 10 very simple questions that only relate to demographics, where you live, and who you live with. It seems that the only purpose of the Census today is to figure out how to reapportion congressional districts and rejigger governmental budgets. Did any of our elected representatives ever consider, “If we’re going to spend bucket loads of billions, couldn’t we ask some more meaningful questions that would help us to understand the hopes and dreams of the American people?”
This ritual of counting the population every decade started in 1790 and there was a time we asked more interesting questions. In the early days, we asked questions that related to how many free white males over the age of 16 were in the household, partly due to America’s need to marshal militia quickly as a new nation. The 1850 census started counting slaves, women, and children and asked questions about social statistics like schooling and “pauperism” – clearly, this foreshadowed the emergence of slaves’ and women’s’ rights. The 1930 census was the last one to ask detailed questions of American citizens as learning the zeitgeist of the American people was important during the Great Depression. Since that time, the number of questions asked in the Census has dwindled to 34 in 1940, 20 questions in 1950, and now down to half that many 60 years later. Is it that we’re less interested in what’s going on in the hearts and minds of our citizenry today? Or, are we more reliant on Gallup to ask the interesting questions? We certainly have the technology and understanding of how to make consumer inquiries such that we could make the Census a more revealing endeavor every ten years. Heck, even little Bhutan asks its third world citizenry annual questions like “How happy are you?” and “How satisfied are you with how you spend your time each day?” Isn’t it about time we asked our citizens more thoughtful questions about what truly counts in life?
What if the U.S. government thought of the U.S. Census as being the ultimate customer satisfaction survey? You know, we all get those surveys after we’ve stayed at a hotel or bought something online. This exercise gives us the opportunity to be heard and to help the company understand how they can better serve the needs of their customers. If we’re going to spend $10 billion on a survey, why not ask questions that can allow our government to both better understand what we’re looking for as citizens (and how we’re feeling) as well as give us an opportunity to offer suggestions of how the government could serve us better. Americans want a more responsive government and they’re certainly used to giving feedback as customers. Nearly one-third of us will not send our Census forms back in the mail in time and, thus, we will be visited (after April 1) by a Census worker at home who will ask these same banal ten questions in person. What a lost opportunity! How many companies make the investment to go and visit their customers in person at home to hear live feedback?
We have a decade to prepare for the next Census so let’s start giving feedback to our elected officials that it’s time for a real American revolution. It’s time for our Census to ask us about what truly counts in our lives. There was a time when the Census was more about understanding who we were than just mechanically counting which box we fit in. It seems all too fitting that the official National Census Day (April 1) is on April Fool’s Day. Census or Senseless?