I’m joining a cool project, helping a photo-essayist to produce a treatment for HBO. No pay, but I could use the new experience. Who knows where such a thing could lead?

Note to self: even before achieving the 4-hour work week, the 40-hour-work week needs to include at least 4 or 5 hours, if not more, to embrace the random.

I blog from the air. It’s a slow journey to the location-free, time-free lifestyle I imagined when I was a kid. The technology that enables it is falling into place, though. In the late 1970s, submitting work from an airplane to clients in two states was not possible.

I stumbled across a blogger who commented (with seeming surprise) that the founder of Google “seemed like a regular guy.” In my experience, many highly successful people come across this way if you meet them in private. People with confidence in themselves seem to leap over the vast middle in most arenas – bad haircuts, awkward table manners, and all. They get to the top (whether that’s CEO of Google or just president of the local parks commission) by ignoring most of the rules people “in the middle” use to make sure their neighbors don’t advance before they do.

A friend of mine, an accomplished playwright with a graduate degree, shared (with concern) that her boss demanded she “take a grammar class.” Why? She wrote successful grant proposals; he wrote proposals that were not funded. So, he focused on a couple of typos he was able to find in her work.

As the late Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, noted – you can hire a proofreader to clean up the style for a good writer who can’t spell. What you cannot do is fix boring ideas or the inability to recognize an interesting story or relevant topic.

Maybe people are just wary to admit to themselves that their efforts to become something other than “regular guys” have been a waste of their time.

This suggests an entirely different role for all people in the “socializing” professions – teachers, therapists, managers – that they will be stripped of their charge to enforce rules and extract specific behaviors from people. Instead they will be equal co-creators building environments that others can build in.

If you’ve been a professional writer long enough, you have undoubtedly gotten this request: “I have a great … story … memoir … screenplay, I just need someone to flesh it out.” In the same category are copywriting requests from prospective clients that actually entail devising the entire marketing or communications plan.

It’s baffling. But what’s behind it?

I think this writing crisis is the result of cultural changes:

• The teaching of formal language arts skills have fallen out of favor. Thirty years ago, correct spelling was required in middle-school term papers, and learning grammar included structured exercises such as diagramming sentences. I wonder, were those approaches a necessary element in the teaching of advanced rhetorical and critical thinking skills?
• At the same time, professionals and small business owners must write for themselves; “secretaries” aren’t around anymore to perform discreet, unacknowledged editing for style and polish.
• Finally, the “publish or perish” imperative has moved beyond academe: business leaders and self-employed people publish books, and even moderately ambitious job seekers need Web sites.

This certainly creates business for professional copywriters. It also suggests that there are competitive advantages for people in any field who choose to achieve mastery at expressing themselves via the written word.

People are talking about the Equity Project’s high teacher compensation. By paying $125K salaries plus bonuses, the Project aims to bring “talent” to schools where underprivileged children learn.

The most popular arguments for and against this tactic cover some well-tread territory:

From: “If we value our kids, teachers should get paid well for the important work they do” to “Teachers shouldn’t be into it for the money” to “Let the market set salaries.”

These positions miss something – a fundamental shift in the way people work today: the boundaries between kinds of work are breaking down. Thanks to the internet, the social entrepreneurship movement, increased pressure for “corporate social responsibility”, and bigger student loan burdens – to name just a few factors – more and more “talented” people are rejecting the silos of the past. Innovators can work in nonprofits. Do-gooders can work in corporations. Artists can be businesspeople. Ordinary professionals can be entrepreneurs. Self-employed people in home offices can work with large companies around the globe.

Increasingly, at least some of the kinds of the people who make great teachers – smart, resourceful, good communicators, and so on – will realize that making a contribution as an educator does not require being the employee of a school at all. As more and more of them do, schools will have to compete as workplaces against every other work option that offers the same intrinsic rewards.

“Is college necessary?”

It’s a question that touches a nerve – especially with parents of young adults, people who take great pride in their academic accomplishments, and disgruntled souls paying off hefty student loans with what could have been a house payment while working jobs they don’t like.

A recent post at the blog College Startup profiles 15 high-profile entrepreneurs who are not college graduates. Like most riffs on the “is college necessary” theme, the article misses the point. What people want to know is, “Will college help me get the life I want?”

College offers students: credentials, education, experience, and connections. To determine the value of college, it makes sense to take each of these assets separately.

Credentials: If an individual’s calling is to be a brain surgeon, then there’s no room for discussion. No academic degrees, no brain surgery career. For many people, the value of a degree as a credential is over-rated. Specifically, a credential is no more than a marketing tool in in many occupations: a bachelor’s degree may impress a prospective client or employer, but it won’t make the sale. People without degrees often seem to overestimate their need to get one later in life. Life coaching clients may regard a degree as proof of credibility, but there are ways to build credibility that don’t take years or cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Take away: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. By all means put that PhD on your business cards. But weigh the usefulness of the credential critically.

Education: Does knowledge live within the bounds of campus libraries and the heads of people with particular letters after their names? Universities can grant a person easily navigable access to great teachers and programming, intelligent peers, and facilities such as laboratories and libraries; however, self-directed learners can find most of what college offers – and more – in the wide world. Some of the world’s great minds are more available for direct correspondence on the internet than they may be with their students.

Take away: Knowledge wants to be free, so it is!

Connections: Cynical thinkers suggest that the opportunity to make connections is the primary offering available at many schools. Visits from professors’ business contacts, late-night bull sessions with people who may someday be CEO, and membership in alumni networks can all be valuable as a graduate moves through life.

Take away: Getting connections in this way is probably most important to those who don’t already have them. Of the student who grows up in the projects and the one whose dad is a well-placed business executive, the former has a lot more to gain from expanding that circle of contacts via attending college. (See Malcolm Gladwell’s “Getting In” for more on this.)

Experience is … the wild card.
Ultimately choosing to go to college, whether at 18 or at 80 means foregoing other experiences to do so. So, perhaps the most important question to ask is whether or not attending will provide experiences the student can use. Possibly the worst reason to go to school: to extend a comfort zone and avoid new experiences in the world. This applies equally to the high-school partier looking for an environment where alcohol flows freely and the laid-off office worker who figures that law school “can’t hurt.”

Take away: You only live once. What’s on your “bucket list”?

Author Howard Rheingold shared an intriguing definition of “social capital” in a video he posted recently. (I don’t know if it’s new or original, but I had not heard it previously.)

the ease with which people can get things done without going through institutions

Among the things that increasingly fall into that category – substantial chunks of our jobs. In some bureaucratic organizations, workers find themselves subverting management simply to do what they’re being paid to do as effectively as they can.

Have you:

• searched the Internet instead of the stagnant corporate library,
• Tweeted a colleague you trust for coaching on a task rather than asking for direction from a manager you don’t trust,
• used a software tool installed on your phone because the one on your desktop computer was less effective,
• Googled your company and found customer feedback that dispelled the assumptions held by your leaders – and suggested that your organization consider a new tactic or ditch an old one?

An observation: None of these uses of social media tools constitutes goofing off. So, why are they treated as such?

For nearly ten years, my life revolved around my two cats, Marmalade and Luna. Then they were both gone. I decided to make animals my job. Like a good, little academic achiever, I considered a graduate program, pursuing the Animals and Public Policy master’s degree at Tufts. When I perused the list of graduates’ achievements, I saw the kinds of jobs that I knew would never pay enough to allow me to cover the student loans I’d have to take out (on top of the ones I was already paying.)

It is only in hindsight that I realized my good fortune in stumbling onto a path of “Profitable Adventures,” an education in Animals in Society beyond what I could have planned and richer, I believe, than a year of classroom learning could have supplied. My accidental curriculum:

• working on technology, PR, and communications for a big-city SPCA
• developing business for a pet acupuncture clinic
• editing for one national leader in the humane movement and interviewing another
• writing original articles and blog posts
• caring for dozens of dogs as cats as a shelter volunteer
• making friends and allies promoting the No Kill, rescue, pet hospice, pet loss awareness
• having my journey profiled in a national magazine
• having my dog featured on the Website of a major newspaper

Where I would have been after a one-year master’s program: $50K in additional debt. Gross revenues from this alternative course of learning: over $120,000.

My goal for the next phase – figuring out how to create profitable adventures that become passive income sources as well, gifts that keep on giving.

I am a member of a lively mailing list populated by people who work in the nonprofit sector in the San Francisco Bay Area. The online community is a project of the regional chapter of the national Young Non Profit Professionals association. The organization aims to improve the sector inside and out, to help it be more effective in our communities and societies and a better place to work. Among list participants, two complaints come up often: limited advancement opportunities and low pay. Both issues are affected negatively by a cultural matter, a conflict between the usual role of “professionals” in society and the nonprofit world’s conception of the relationship between cause, organization, and employee.

In for-profit companies and independent business, a professional may be defined as such:

“An autonomous member of a self-regulating occupation comprising a theoretical body of knowledge and standard tools and techniques, and bound by a code of ethics.”

The gold standard examples are doctors and lawyers. To practice at all, people in these professions must be recognized by a board composed of members of the profession. Although a “public relations professional” doesn’t need a license, people in the field advance certain standards, often through certification programs, and encourage employers to evaluate workers by those standards. As experts in a domain, professional workers commit to “using its powers for good.” Within institutions, professionals protect broad societal interests from being trampled by organizational interests. Unfortunately mission-driven entities sometimes immunize themselves against challenges by professionals by simply “de-professionalizing” the jobs.

An example from my own experience: A volunteer coordinator with whom I worked asked for my help in producing an online volunteer survey. In the past, surveys had been administered via paper, which made delivery, collection, and data analysis cumbersome. Having worked in several tech companies, I was eager to use some skills that were underutilized in my day-to-day job with the nonprofit. The software tool provided a number of option for ensuring the validity of the data, including things like giving out a link that could be activated only once and only from within the email address of the invitee. There was also a choice either to retain the data matching an email address to each individual’s survey (and its responses to each item) or to “lose” that data, enabling people to answer anonymously.

The volunteer coordinator’s plan: Imply to people that we were collecting information anonymously while keeping their data on the back end. From the position of “helper” rather than a professional technology advisor, I could only suggest how this should be handled. I could not determine policies or procedures. Neither could the IT Manager. The volunteer coordinator had the discretion to make the call.

As you read this, you may or may not agree with the morality of her approach. I would argue that this question should not be left to morality of each organization or worker. What does this have to do with professionalism? The shift from mores to professional discipline is central to the question.

“Is it the usual or standard technique to reveal that a survey is not anonymous? Is it typical to use non-anonymous surveys in this context?” Junior-level professionals can answer these questions, even if they don’t know why the standard practices exist.

“What kind of privacy expectations do people have when they fill out such surveys? How do people currently perceive the trust relationship in this organization? How would they feel if they knew the organization was doing this?” Degree programs, professional associations, and mentors engage practitioners in inquiry and learning around these concerns.

“If information technology is used to deceive people (even for ‘a good cause’), how will this affect society? What is the spirit of our organizational policy on communication, and what course of action fits the culture we are trying to create?” A senior professional technologist should be cognizant of the first question; a senior HR professional should be focused on the second.

All-too-often, nonprofit organizations embrace a world view in which the Good of the Cause automatically makes the organization and its bureaucratic leaders Good. Dissenters to organizational policy or procedures and those who would impose limiting conditions on policy-making are seen as traitors. Moving up, in many nonprofits means taking on a management position – accepting more responsibility for representing the agency as an entity. Professionalism is viewed as being in opposition to unity around the cause.

Managerial authority unyoked from expert authority can hurt clients, workers, and society as a whole. It hurts workers via the problems named at the beginning of this email. As compared to other white-collar workers, professionals learn more, earn more, experience more challenge in their daily jobs, and earn an increasing amount of discretion and freedom. Because professional occupations are defined by hard skills, the path up is typically somewhat more objective; there are clear steps in the ladder, and there are distinct ladders even within a single broad area like “marketing” or “training”. Even the profession of management calls its members to measure a particular employer’s behaviors against an outside standard.

When I made the transition from for-profit employment to non-profit employment, I was prepared for a reduced earning potential. I considered that a reasonable price to pay for what I might have described as “meaning”, the chance to make a difference. I was not prepared for the frequent crises of integrity that came from being stripped of the ability to “question authority”, an entitlement which the disciplinary parameters of the professions help to provide.