There has been much ado about the recent Glen Beck Rally in Washington.  This rally was promoted as an ecumenical gathering with diverse religious traditions represented and participating on the platform.  Though it was characterized as a rally advocating the need to restore America’s honor and the organizers and speakers claimed that it was a ”non-political” gathering, you’ll have to forgive me if I smile a bit at that characterization. 

Since when have Americans been able to successfully separate religion and politics?  Regardless of all our firm and strident language about the so called “separation of church and state” (which by the way is not language found in the Constitution), name me a political campaign in the last fifty years that did not raise religious issues and or invoke God’s providential concern for this nation as a statement of fact?  I am not sure that one could be a serious presidential candidate and fail to address the religious zeitgeist so embedded in our national consciousness

The point is, we have been intentionally mixing together religion and politics from this nation’s earliest years and I can find nothing in our recent history suggesting that we are prepared to stop now.  If anything, the uncritical blending of religious sentiments and symbols with political rhetoric has increased over the past forty years. 

Events like the Glen Beck Rally are causing some commentators to ask this question, is Christianity the religion of the nation or is America’s religion some monotheistic generic blend that when taken with enough cream and sugar can satisfy the vast majority of the population?

Starting next week I will be podcasting my course on The History of Christianity in America.  This course will seek to address the following questions:  What does American religion tell us about American culture? and What does American culture tell us about American religion? 

I would encourage you to visit the website (maxieburch.net), join the class via podcasts, and take part in the discussion via the website’s FAQ section.

My last post was about Texas.  This week I felt the call to write a bit about my adopted state of South Carolina.  I adopted it because both of  my parents were South Carolinians but they decided to bring me into this world while on an education safari in Texas.   I am a Texan by birth, a South Carolinian by lineage.

Historians call Roanoke the Lost Colony.  I think it is South Carolina.  We’ve been around for a long time but no one really knows we are there.  I tell people I am from South Carolina and  they say, “oh, I love the Carolina Panthers!”  No, that’s North Carolina. Or, “I had a good friend who went to Duke”; or, “I flew into Charlotte once”; or ” wow, Billy Graham lives there”.  No, that’s North Carolina.  They all give me this half smile, half frown, puzzled expression and make a mental note to look up South Carolina on Wikipedia. 

Case in point, I am from Beaufort, South Carolina.  Beaufort is a collection of islands off the South Carolina coast.  Beaufort is quite simply a beautiful location on the way to nowhere.  Either you  planned to visit Beaufort or you are lost, you took a wrong turn, you are directionally challenged.  You meant to go to Savannah, Charleston, or Hilton Head but you ended up in Beaufort asking for directions with a half smile, half frown and a puzzled expression on your face.  Beaufortonians are very adept at handling cases of  wrongturnitis, in fact, most of Beaufort’s population is composed of lost tourist who arrived by mistake, discovered how beautiful it was and decided to stay.

I fear that South Carolina only gets attention when we do something news worthy.  In other words we do something dumb or out of step with the current century.  Examples of this news worthy attention would be:  

Starting the Civil War which led to Congressman James L. Petigru’s famous remark that “South Carolina was too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

Miss South Carolina in the  Miss Teen USA Contest Beauty Contest, no further commentary necessary.

A governor who mistakenly believed that the Appalachian Trail was the fastest route to Argentina.

The  Citadel (my alma mater) admitting women into the Corp of Cadets and or conducting one of our infamous mess hall food fights.

We boast the largest Peach Water Tower in the nation, but it could be mistaken for other things.

These are just a few famous highlights for a state that is largely forgotten.  So what is the good news?  South Carolina is a beautiful state populated by gracious and caring people who encourage you to visit places like  Myrtle Beach, Charleston and Hilton Head, eat pork barbacue sandwiches with the locals at Piggy Park or fresh shrimp from the boats on Shem Creek.  You can also read Pat Conroy’s book about growing up in the South.  Of course we are more than happy to pour you a glass of iced tea as we help you figure out where you took a wrong turn and ended up in that “other Carolina”.

I just got back from Texas where my wife and I spent some time in the hill country outside San Antonio.  One of our favorite places was Gruene, Texas (pronounced Green).  Unless you stop to read the Historical Markers in the town (something we actually do), the average visitor would be clueless about the town’s history because there is nothing about the town that gives you a hint about its past. 

Folks who visit Gruene walk around wearing an assortment of shorts, sandals, tank tops, wranglers or wet bathing suits from tubing down the Guadalupe River.  They eat Blue Bell ice cream and Armadillos droppings (caramel candy) from the Country Store after enjoying lunch or dinner at either the Gristmill Restaurant or Gruene River Grill.  They shop at places like Cotton Eyed Joes, Gruene With Envy, Tipsey Gipsey or my favorite, Pookie Janes.  Pookie Janes was my favorite because of The Man Cave.  At the back of the store there is a secret door to a back porch clearly marked “The Man Cave”.  Upon entering The Man Cave you will find two lawn chairs, a t.v. with remote control and a small refrigerator stocked with beer and a sign that reads “One per customer”.  Shopping just got easier.

All of this makes for a great visit, but were it not for Gruene Hall you would miss the town’s history.  Gruene was originally the town of Goodwin until Henry Gruene arrived in the early 1870s, built a cotton gin, dance hall and school.  Cotton farming put the town of Gruene( name changed in 1903) on the map.  Gruene was a thriving  farming community until the arrival of the Boll Weevil in 1925.  The destruction of the cotton industry meant the decline of the town. 

Gruene was resurrected in the early 1970s as a part of the tourism industry associated with the nearby city of New Braunfels.  The cotton gins are now restaurants and most of the original buildings either sell antiques or are trendy boutiques, but if you want to hear, smell and taste a genuine part of Gruene’s history you have to visit the dance hall.  The social life of Gruene has been connected to this dance hall for over 130 years.  Gruene Hall is wood tables, wood floors, wood bar, long-necks, live country music with audience participation and Texas two-step.

When you step into Gruene Hall you  are entering a social world that has not changed all that much since it was built in 1878.  It’s just fun.  Most of the musicians who perform are local talent who play there because they love music and get paid from tips dropped in large plastic buckets, though Gruene Hall has seen the likes of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson too.  Everyone smiles, laughs, nods their heads to the music and a few dance.

Whatever you might think about dance halls, places like Gruene Hall continue to carry part of a town’s living history long after events like the Boll Weevil manifestation devastated its original farming community and destroyed its cotton economy.

So if you are ever in the Texas hill country north of San Antonio be sure to visit Gruene and make sure you sample the town’s history at Gruene Hall.

I am in Texas right now for our youngest daughter’s college graduation.   She is graduating with a degree in Social Work and soon after her graduation she will journey to the Pacific Northwest to help plant an inner city church.  For a while we thought that she would end up somewhere in Africa working with children and that may still be in her future, but, for now, she has decided to make Starbuckland her home.  Her experience as a barista will serve her well in the the land that coffee built.  At some point she will have to buy some model of the national car of the Northwest, a Subaru equipped with a Thule cargo rack.  But for now I think she is planning to use public transportation.

As your children grow up you play that mind game of ”what they are going to do one day”, but I have decided that the more important question is “who are they going to be one day”?  They will change their minds a lot and do all kinds of different things with their lives, at least 40 of those changes will occur in the first two years of college or in the first five years out of college.  But it is who they are that matters, that they become people of character who decide that life is about investing yourself in others and not just making sure that the golden parachute is waiting at the end of your career.

Or to put it in the words of Nelson Mandela, “There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people’s needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others’ needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity.”

So to my daughter graduating  from college and to all of our children, we are so very proud of you.  We are proud of what you will do with your life yes, but, more importantly, we are  proud of who you are, people of character.  In Mandela’s words, you are men and women who will create a deeper self and a more  just world out of your response to other’s needs.

So if you can’t analyze and think your way into change, what’s the alternative?  What if the change you need to create is not one of understanding, it is one of feeling?  People have to see the need as well as feel the need for change.  Folks can listen to your explanation of a problem, listen to the empirical data that supports your arguments and agree with you about the need for changes, and then not change the very behaviors that are reinforcing the problems.  Why?  

Analyzing and thinking is not enough.  People need to see the need and feel the need in order to make the changes that will make a significant difference.  Data and arguments do not overcome the inertia created by the uncertainty, fear, worry and doubt created in an organization that lacks clarity, direction, or purpose.  In those environments people will nod their heads at the appeals for change and then find creative ways to work themselves back into the status quo.

So why is SEE-FEEL-CHANGE a more effective approach?  You still have to provide compeling evidence for change but you want the kind of evidence you offer to  hit people at an emotional level: disturbing, hopeful, sobering, galvanizing, etc.

I was reminded of my first job out of college.  I was high school history teacher and varsity soccer coach.  The team I inherited had suffered several losing seasons in a row but they had a prior history of  winning.  The team’s talent was okay and the boys seemed  eager to learn and turn things around.  I spent time analyzing the team’s problems and I identified several areas that needed major improvement.  The main problem was that they needed to raise their level of play significantly if they were going to be competitive again.  Each player needed to improve their individual skill level and the team had to start playing together.  We had countless chalk talks, individual training sessions and team building events.   The team did improve going to the playoffs two years in a row, but the level of play was still not where it needed to be and we plateaued.  The biggest problem was that the team thought that they had improved enough and that their level play was now adequate  

I did not know what else to tell them or show them at this point.  They were frustrated with me and I was frustrated with them.  This was not an understanding problem.  It was as if we needed to experience something together that would communicate the change that was needed. 

The summer following our second season I took the team to Mexico City for two weeks to be trained by Mexican coaches and to play in a Mexican league.  For twenty-one South Carolina boys this was culture shock on a major scale.  The language, food, and customs forced them to lean on each other to get through those two weeks.  They became better friends on this trip, but more importantly they became a team.  We lost every game we played and we lost badly.  The teams we played embarrassed us with their skill and provided us with clear evidence regarding the level of play that we had to achieve in order to become competitive. 

They returned from that trip a different team on a mission.  Together they had each SEEN and FELT the change that had to happen.  They were now emotionally motivated to make the individual and team changes that would take them to the next level. The following season they went undefeated and won the state championship.  Over the next thirty years the school would win over twenty state championships.   The changes that team made created a winning tradition and expectation.

If you are a leader and you have not read Switch, I encourage you to get a copy and take your time reading it.  The first changes may be the ones you have to make in the way you lead.

Most of the stuff I write about is either something I am thinking about, obviously, or stuff I am struggling to figure out.  More of the latter than the former, I think?  Anyway, I have spent a lot of hours reading books, and having conversations about leadership and its relationship to effecting real cultural change.  By culture I mean the culture of the organization where you are, and by real change I mean the kind of change that results in people acting differently, not just being told to think differently.

I am reading a book entitled, Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip  and Dan Heath.  Let me just say that this book is worth your time to read and process.  Let me just say that Chip and Dan nailed me early in the book which kept me reading, not happy, but still reading.  In their terms, I am the kind of leader who likes to think, but thinks too much and therefore comes to the false conclusion that if I can get everyone else thinking what I am thinking that not only will their thinking change but, more importantly, their behavior will change as well.  Wrong! 

I am also the kind of leader who looks at a problem that is 24 feet in diameter and is convinced that the only viable solution is one that is 24 feet in diameter.  This approach to problem solving is great if you can find a perfect solution that fits every problem, but if you can’t then your stuck, or worse yet, paralyze by your continual analysis of a problem you can’t fix.

So what have I learned so far?

1) Approach a problem by asking if there is anything being done right now that actually works and start there even if what works is small compared to the size of the problem.  I may not be able to think my way into a solution.  I may have to start somewhere and figure it out as I go.  I know this sounds elementary but it is my Achilles heal when facing major issues related to cultural change.  I focus on problems not the possible bright spots.   I may have to create some momentum before I can find a solution.

2) My approach to almost all problems has been in this order, Think-Analyze-Change.  And in some cases this works well.  You think through an issue, analyze it, arrive at a workable solution, clearly communicate the needed change and change happens.  This is an effective approach if “the parameters are known, assumptions are minimal and the future is not fuzzy.”  Otherwise, the better approach is See-Feel-Change.

I will write about this alternative approach next week.  In the meantime, have I pushed any of your buttons where you are?

Most of us have heard the following definiton of stupidity, “stupidity is essentially doing the same thing over and over  expecting different results”. 

I was recently introduced to a short video that undermined the tried and true notion that says, regardless of the task or the desired outcome, the best way to motivate people or incentivize them is with more money or a bigger contract.  If you are a leader and you want your people to be more productive, creative and energetic, then you need to offer them more money.  More money makes people work harder, work more efficiently, think more creatively and bring  more energy to the team.

What if that is not true?  What if there are certain high level tasks for which money is not an incentive, in fact it becomes a disincentive?  Are  we willing to consider another course of action even if it runs counter to previously thought “best practices”?  What if the goal of making more money is taken off the table as the incentive? 

What if the incentive is not money?  What if the incentive is offering people autonomy, mastery and a deep sense of purpose?   What if the money people make is no longer the issue, what if what they really want is the freedom to think, create and contribute to something that gives them a deep sense of satisfaction and meaning?  What if the things that people really care about they would do for free?  Sound crazy?

Would you be willing to change the incentive or keep being stupid?  Check out this video.

The Truth About What Motivates Us

One of my favorite quotes about the nature of life as we all have to live it and the challenging task of trying to accurately represent the causes/effects of past events comes from William Manchester’s The Last Lion, volume two of his two volume work on Winston Churchill.  It was the late spring of 1939 and Adolf Hitler was making threats about invading Poland.  Manchester trys to explain why Churchill’s continual, dire warnings about Hitler’s actions and intentions were consistently ignored by Neville Chamberlain’s government regardless of the amount of documentation and corroboration from other sources in support of Churchill’s conclusions.

Was it because Chamberlain had better or more reliable sources than Churchill?  Was it because Churchill was too rabid and subjective in his views about Hitler?  Was it because Chamberlain disliked Churchill? In other words, why was Chamberlain so adamant in his rejection of everything Churchill offered him?  This is Manchester’s conclusion.

“The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try and make it so, once it has become the past, succeed only in making it seem implausible.  Among the perceptive observations and shrewed conclusions of the Churchills and Sargents were the clutters  of other reports and forecasts, completely at odds with them.

All of it, the prescient and the cockeyed, always arrives in a promiscuous rush, and most men in power, sorting through it, believe what they want to believe, accepting whatever justifies their policies and convictions while taking out insurance, whenever possible, against the possiblity that the truth may lie in their wastebaskets (that would be a trash can for us). 

Neville Chamberlain required a very large wastebasket, for he was stubborn and strong willed, and long after his subordinates had abandoned their faith in appeasement he clung to the conviction that if he could just put the proper deal together, Hitler would buy it.”

That is more often the way life and history happen.  It is less planned than lived by people who make decisions for reasons more often connected to their own instincts and need to believe that they are right than for reasons based on established policies or reliable information.  That’s one of the reasons history can be both interesting and scary.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a basic rule of thumb for studying and utilizing history for research purposes.  For those of you who don’t care, wait for next week’s blog.

Always try to move beyond description to analysis.  In other words, try to get beyond the who, what, when and where to the why.  Retelling the past is how we share the story, understanding the past is how we apply the story.  So in order to move beyond the retelling to the understanding let me suggest that you apply the following process in this order.

Observations…Questions…Research…Analysis.

As you study history what are your observations, what stands out to you, what is of interest, what is peculiar, what is not self-explanatory, what seems strange, what demands your attention?

Turn your observations into questions.  Good questions guide good research.  What needs answering?  What seems assumed?  What appears ironic,  paradoxical or counter-intuitive?  What answers have already been offered but they don’t seem to fit the historical record or they seem to be the obvious and are therefore  perhaps off the mark?

Example:J G. A. Pocock’s realized that many historians approached the causes of the Revolutionary War by interpreting the colonists’ responses to England based on the understanding that the colonists were no longer Englishmen, that they hated England and had become so different from their countrymen that they wanted freedom from England.  Pocock reversed that trend by arguing the exact opposite.  In fact, he argued that the colonists became even more English over time and treasured their rights as Englishmen even more as a result of being away from England so that when England acted in ways that violated their rights as Englishmen the colonists reacted more strongly because they valued those rights.  I guess it was a version of absence makes the heart grow stronger, not weaker.  

Research is the third part of the process.  Allow your research to be guided by your questions and if the research forces you to change your questions or revise your questions, good.  If you don’t get the answers you wanted or expected, be true to what you discover and let your research take you where it will.

Finally, provide your analysis.  Offer the so what, your qualified and educated opinion.  This is what is sorely missing from so much public debate in our time.  No one wants to do the hard work that good analysis requires.  Good analysis is clear, concise and compelling, but it is never a sound bite.  This is one of the reasons few people actually do the work.  People like to pontificate and posture and restate the facts with gusto, but few want to really do the difficult and time consuming work that good analysis requires.

I was listening to a story on the radio the other day and was reminded how history can get lost, rewritten or repackaged in way that creates a memory, picture or image that bears no resemblance to the original event or story. I am not saying that these alterations are intentionally malicious, bad, or demand that we rectify the situation immediately. I’m just saying that it happens regularly and we are usually unaware.

There is a song that as long as I can remember I have always associated with the Christmas holidays. I am not sure why I did that except for the fact that I never heard it except at Christmas. Walking through a department store shopping for gifts, at a party, listening to Dolly Parton’s Christmas Album or watching the Andy Williams Christmas Special (which dates me as prehistoric) etc. etc. So, in my mind, the history of this song was always associated with Christmas time, with cold weather, with snow, and people in love at Christmas time. That is what the song’s writer intended, right? That was the right historical framework for this song, right? It was written for the holidays, right?

June 29, 2010 was Frank Loesser’s centennial birthday. Frank was a popular song writer and composer who is best known for writing Broadway musicals like Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. In the late 1940s he wrote a duet for he and his wife to sing at cocktail parties all over Hollywood and New York. His wife often commented that it kept them in caviar and truffles for years and she considered it “her song”. So, the song was written to sing at parties any time of year. It had nothing to do with Christmas or the holiday season or snow or cold weather, but it was about two people in love. Frank later sold that song and somehow over time it morphed into a song sung on Christmas albums and in holiday specials and associated with snow etc.

Which song history do you prefer, the real one or the one that marketing created? Have you guessed the song yet? Based on the actual history you can listen to it in June as well as in December. Click and listen below, enjoy!

Baby, It’s Cold Outside!