I have a big advantage over most of you. I mean, in addition to the writing and thinking stuff.I am “flexible.” That’s the coin of the realm. Flexibility.
In the course of your business careers, you’re going to be laid off, transferred, bought out, outsourced and reengineered so often that you won’t even recognize yourselves. In order to survive, you must be flexible.
It comes naturally to me. I watch a news feature on television about nudist colonies and I immediately sit down and write my next column naked. When the editor of the Hartford Business Journal orders me to reduce my column from 3,000 words to 700, do I stomp my feet and hold my breath ’til I turn blue? No, I put the column through the anti-hyperbole machine and it comes out exactly 700 words long. I’m flexible.
When I have an itch to go to Hartford’s new science museum, only to find out that it’s still evolving (sort of like a prehistoric snail or something), do I stand around moping, staring at the empty Front Street redevelopment project? No, I’m flexible. I drive to West Hartford, go to that other science museum — and then have lunch in West Hartford Center. They call me Mr. Flexibility.
Getting Jiggy With It
There’s no better time to be flexible than now. Even outside the workplace, powerful people are poised to prod you to perform in ways that please them.School systems across the country are beginning to pay high school students to pass Advanced Placement exams, which does a lot more for the reputation of the school systems than paying the kids to staff a car wash in the school parking lot.
But don’t the kids want to take the Advanced Placement tests anyway, so they can go to a fancy school and opt out of introductory trigonometry? Well, why should they? If they stay flexible, threatening to go to community college, become an electrician, and become rich without having to wear a suit and tie, their frightened suburban parents and school officials will up the ante to $200 and a new car.
As recently as 1940, only about 5 percent of Americans ages 25 and older had a college degree. But once we all discovered that you probably couldn’t get a comfortable job on the staff of Connecticut’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women without a college degree, the collective “we” became much more flexible. Today, almost 25 percent of the population has at least a bachelor’s degree.
But “flexibility” works in strange and miraculous ways. Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota has snared a $100,000 state grant to “strengthen” its program to teach construction skills. See the flexibility trap? If the school had gotten too good, too quickly, it wouldn’t have gotten the extra money. Stay flexible.
If you’re a young political activist, you would have been wise to remain flexible, as the presidential election fever heats up. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is offering college kids a 10 percent commission on money raised for the war chest. For those of you who opted early for someone else, you’ve lost a chance to get a piece of the action. Stay flexible.
The latest and most impressive flexibility experiment is in New York City, where poor folks will be offered cash incentives as high as $5,000 to do the right stuff, such as attending parent-teacher conferences and taking kids for medical checkups and encouraging the little imps to actually show up at school.
The flexibility Gods are smiling at this one. The trick is, first of all, to remain poor enough to qualify for the insulting paternalism. Next, you must behave badly enough to encourage the financial incentive, but not so badly as to discourage the folks with the money.
The most stressful environment for flexibility in Connecticut will be at the State Capitol, where Speaker of the House Jim Amann is being pressured to stop hitting up lobbyists for donations to a charity where he is the paid fundraiser. So now the lobbyists are going to have to learn how to donate to that particular charity, “voluntarily,” without being asked. Sort of. That, to be sure, is flexibility.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.