Rarely have I used a reader’s correspondence as the premise for an entire column, but sometimes the thoughtfulness and clarion good will that come through deserve that it be shared (anonymously, in almost all cases, as here) with the larger Adam Smith, Esq. audience.
So, apropos “Where’s the Happiness (or Work/Life Balance) Dial?”, a reader writes (and I excerpt his message in full and verbatim):
Hopefully you will not be put off by receiving the message – my first – in this manner. I have been reading adamsmithesq for a fair while now, although you primary subject area is very far from my work.
I am surprised and disappointed to see Adam Smith Esq. descend to use of the term “PC” (as in “PC police”). Time to reread “Politics and the English Language”, both with respect to the “worn-out and useless phrase” and the barbarous use of language. In my experience:
· People use “PC” as a ploy to end discussion by resorting to derision;
· “Political Correctness” is some thing done by one’s political/propositional opponents, never by one’s allies, much less oneself.
You wish to support the proposition that the purpose of a corporation, including a legal corporation, is to return maximum profits to the owners (commensurate with boundary conditions of markets and legal standards of performance)? Fine; it’s well trod ground, and one that you can defend. Without insults, actually.
Perhaps the issue with the “PC police” is that they wish us to consider expanding the paradigm, say to something like “optimizing value to the owners (commensurate with legal and ethical standards of performance)”. Now, you may wonder what metrics we would use to reach such judgments, specifically with “optimize”, “value”, and “ethical”.
In my realm (physical science applied to environmental performance) we have found that conversations about metrics can happen, but if and only if people will discuss the conceptual model first, and then worry about how to parameterize the problem for quantitative analysis. If one party simply dismisses the other out-of-ideological-hand, then we devolve immediately to the dialogue of the deaf, in which we feel free to disparage other notions as the first step of “conversation”, and then moan about all our time wasted responding to these fools.
What model would I propose? After 40 years of doing natural science, I am persuaded (and have been since I discovered the work 20 years ago), that the neo-pragmatist approach of Richard Rorty is actually enormously useful, for example as argued in his essay “Pragmatism without method” (easily accessible in pages 63-77 of Volume 1 of Rorty’s s collected Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press; my edition is 1991.)
Respectully submitted,
Mark
Now, let me lay a bit more groundwork and attempt to put this in context. Then I’ll try to address what Mark has to say.
I used the phrase “PC” in my original column twice–in a 2,500+ word piece (he added defensively). The first time appears in this excerpt:
Meanwhile, Vivia Chen [The “Careerist” on law.com] writes that the “business case” for work/life balance hasn’t been made, and that “there’s a subtle pressure not to ask too many thorny questions or challenge the sacred cows that drive the work/life balance discussion.”
This brought down on her head the predictable opprobrium from the PC precincts–but, to be fair, from many other commenters as well–the more productive and thoughtful of which focused on the pressure to avoid criticism of the work/life balance cause for fear of its being seen as “cat-fighting,” which would be a huge distraction to “our common cause.”
Lamely, I was trying to convey a sense of camaraderie with Vivia, who received a high volume of criticism for her short piece. Wry jokes that fall flat often fall really flat, and here we have an example.
The second time appears at the end of my original column:
The entire debate, I submit, about “happiness” and work/life balance, is misplaced. I say this from hard-won personal experience.
Happiness in one’s career has nothing to do with hours, which is a pitiably uni-dimensional way to characterize or think about it.
“Happiness” for a human being, like “profitability” for a firm, is not something you can control directly. (We could repeal Chapter 11 if it were.) Rather, it’s the result of so many other things that the person or the firm does. Happiness (profitability), in my book, are outcomes of what the individual or the firm are doing in all other aspects of their lives and business.
I have found it fairly simple to state, if terribly difficult to achieve for many of us:
If you’re passionate about what you do, happiness will result (at least, that is, vis-a-vis work). If you’re not passionate, not.
If the firm collaborates, has no internecine warfare, and knows what it’s all about, and is dedicated to client service above all, profitability will result. And if not,…
In other words, it’s not that you’re a lawyer that makes you unhappy and it’s not that you’re a law firm that makes you unprofitable. You are in the wrong line of work or the wrong business. That’s what needs to be fixed: Not dialing up the “happiness” or “profitability” volume on the control panel. No such knobs.
So what is all the sturm und drang over lawyers’ happiness about?
I’m sorry to say I think it’s just the PC police indulging the fantasy that wishing for a world would make it so, all the while exercising their inalienable right to be tone-deaf to human nature.
Consider this another lame attempt to refer back by too-casual shorthand, as it were, to those advocating work/life balance without proceeding to the very difficult exercise of contemplating what a life focused on “work” looks like vs. what a life focused on “balance” looks like. The thrust, or certainly a major thrust, of my original column was that each of those represents a choice and they are not the same. Nor, as I imply above, does the mere number of hours one works serve as a proxy for one’s own personal “work misery” index.
But to our correspondent Mark, and very much to me, words matter: And dismissive phrases such as “PC” are a weak and lazy substitute for thought or descriptive specificity.
More importantly, he makes the nice point that folks advocating for the work/life balance side of the equation are speaking in terms we can recognize: Terms of “optimization” and of “value.” To have that conversation seriously, however, people have to start from the vantage point of what the proper conceptual model of a firm (or of a career) is.
It’s perhaps a bit akin, on a parochial scale, to the debate we may be starting to have here in the US about containing the federal deficit. As long as that conversation begins with phrases like “dead on arrival” (in regard to XYZ proposal to ameliorate the situation), “simply unacceptable,” and so forth, we know the debate will not take place.
It’s only when a critical mass of politicians can agree to start with something such as “everything has to be on the table” that there’s hope of any substantive agreement.
And so I conclude:
- Mark (thank you!) was absolutely right to call me on the “PC” phrase;
- But/and I still am longing for a serious, engaged, bilateral dialog about work/life balance in a high-performance organization, and how, and if, those two different views of the world can be reconciled.
Update: 30 November
Mark has kindly replied, as follows:
Dear Bruce:Thank you very much for the seriousness and promptness with which you treated this message. I was quite astonished to see the new posting addressing this matter – I have grown quite accustomed to writing to one or another, typically in public service or journalism, with either no reply at all or the most causal and patronizing brush-off. As one has come to expect from adamsmith esq, your response is neither of those.You are quite right: there is an existing conceptual model (already well parameterized, actually) of a high-performance law firm. Those who find this unsatisfactory must step up to offering a different model around which the conversation could then proceed, and the model must be substantially commensurate with respect to outcomes as viewed by the client. That’s the tricky part, eh?For what it is worth, my organizational field (consulting engineering, as you would have guessed) is quite similar to the law in these matters, with respect to a conceptual model of the nature of the business (what I take to be Vivia’s “business case”) and with the struggles over how to actually manage a disparate (talent, experience, age, gender) group. We like to think we, too, are a ‘high performance” business, although our hourly rates (I know it is not your favorite metric) are small fractions of those for many attorneys working in “business” (including for some of the same clients on the same matters!)Keep up the good analysis and the fine writing. I’ll keep reading.Onward,Mark
This is quite gracious of him, to say the least; I particularly appreciate his introducing the notion of the importance of “outcomes” as viewed by the client. All too often we are prone to view all these “organizational” challenges as our own private firm business, without regard (without consciousness, actually) to what impact our decisions on these matters will have on the work we produce for clients–which is the raison d’etre of our firms.
Worklife Balance has long seemed to
me to be a metaphor that imprisons a good debate. It conjures up a scale
on whose two pans we stack up work stuff and life stuff. But work IS
life. For most, it is a big part of life. And, from the
perspective, say, of a woman working in the home, child-rearing is also work —
it’s not mere life. I just don’t understand the balance thing, the scale
seems a mis-used metaphor and the surrounding rhetoric is a jumble.The real issue, it seems to me, is
not balancing two sides of life but integrating various aspects of life so that
they arrive at harmony, more or less. This requires identification of
barriers to integration and their elimination. Technology helps.
Telecommuting and the rest. But support systems that help on all aspects
of a life worth living are important as well.[…] Part-time can help, but it’s often a concept that just says,
in effect, move a few grains of salt from this side of the scale to the other,
whereas in fact the whole notion of a scale should be thrown out the
window. Many of our [non-equity, alternate-track] partners are our most productive
because they don’t think of themselves as just part-time.
