The Power of the Both/And

Thanks to K.S. for his comment on my entry on The Tyranny of the Either/Or, noting extremes are important: Black and white are needed to make a beautiful photograph.

It's a wonderful analogy! The beautiful Ansel Adams photographs that so many of us enjoy have an incredibly rich range of grays between the deep black and bright white extremes. (One of my treasured experiences was taking a 1-week photo workshop in Yosemite, offered by the Ansel Adams studio.)

How would his photos look without the grays? Fairly stark. Of course there are questions for which there are properly only yes or no answers. R.S.V.P.: Will you be attending the event? But many other questions involve nuances - shadings of choice. Those who try to polarize the public are very skilled at recasting complex, nuanced questions into stark either/or, black/white forms. It's a lot simpler to pick between 2 choices. Alas, often that's a false simplicity because the answer is "it depends."

An even greater challenge is when we're offered no choice: It's either all black or all white. What dull pictures those make! (Even Ad Reinhart's totally black Abstract Painting at MOMA - one of my favorites - is made of very subtly different shades of black.) If our worlds were all black or all white, we'd be blind and reliant on others to guide us. That's the danger that Adams, Jefferson, and others warned against in founding the U.S.A. We must be educated well enough to make our own judgments or we risk becoming relegated to being subjects of totalitarian government.

So the answer to the Tyranny of the Either/Or must at least be Consider Both/And. That answer doesn't quite do it, though, because we need to be discerning enough to see the multiple shades of gray. We'll need to find a pithy way of saying that, though.

Three Stages of Life

My friend and former boss Tally emailed me a link to Lee Iacocca's "9 C's of Leadership" (widely quoted). I agreed with Iacocca's 9 C's and went out and bought his 2007 book: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

It's a blistering attack on President George W. Bush's Administration, timed, of course, to help influence the 2008 election. Given President Bush's popularity ratings, many would probably agree with Iacocca's criticisms. Alas, given the political nature of the book, some non-political gems of his thinking have gone largely unnoticed.

In thinking about his own life, Iacocca acknowledges that it took years into his retirement before he discovered:

Getting back to the meaning of retirement, I like to look at life as having three stages. The first is learning. The second is earning. And the third is returning. A lot of the baby boomers are still yearning in the third stage, because they’re never satisfied. But if you think of retirement as a time for returning – of giving something back to society – it can transform your life.

Learning. Earning. Returning. It's similar to a maxim I learned years ago: Do well to do good.

While I find I agree with a lot of Iacocca's thinking, I disagree a bit with his his suggestion that retirement is the time for returning. Iacocca came late to the realization that one should give something back to society, recognizing this need to help him find fulfillment his retirement years.

My friends Wayne and Mike made the returning point to me when they asked me to consider leaving my newly-gained partnership in Andersen Consulting - and its income - to join the Cuomo Administration in 1983. Now, 26 years later, I still recall them observing: "This State has been so good to you - look at how successful you've become. Don't you think you should do something to repay that goodness?"

I'm grateful that because of my parents and society, I got to learn and I got to earn. I'm also grateful that because of my upbringing and friends, I've gained great personal satisfaction in having the opportunity to start and keep returning, long before my retirement years.

Ground Hog Day

Six more weeks of winter! But it's not just winter, it's the craziness of the weather that's the problem.

I recall meeting then Vice President Al Gore early in the Clinton Administration and talking to him about global warming. "It's not that you'll notice it getting any warmer," he said, "but you will notice the weather getting crazier!" Well, he was right!