I [heart] business,I [heart] Inc.

After clearing out all of the coupons and ads from my Inbox this and every morning, these two are what I'm left with most days: the Harvard Business Review and The Happiness Project.  Sometimes there's a personal message or something delightful from Martha Beck or another blogger whose email list I've joined, but most days this is it.

I love it.

On the one hand, I have the opportunity to consider some great business thinking, some of it relevant to the work I do in the worlds of non-profit finance and small mom&pop business, some of it written in language I don't currently, and may never, speak.  Today, for example, it's all How Not to Dismiss Your Gen-X Talent (relevant) and The Market That Needs a Market Maker (what?), with a little When To Tell Your Boss You're Pregnant (not) and Why We Use Social Media in our Personal Lives But Not Our Businesses (super interesting).  I can geek out on the content 7 days a week, for reals, even as I'm simultaneously trying to build a life of art.  And a life of happiness in which the daily quotes from The Happiness Project serve as a constant reminder to stay true and focused.  Today: ""Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit" (Marguerite Yourcenar).  A very nice counterpoint, indeed, to the business news.

In a way it's like throwing two very different decks of tarot cards first thing in the morning, or reading the horoscope.  Between these two posts, I tend to find a balanced approach to the day or to whatever's happening inside my head.

I sometimes forget that I have an MBA, but I never forget how much I really and truly love business.  I loved the entire gruelling process of earning that MBA in two years while I simultaneously flew all over the world for work and dealt with a herniated disc at least for part of it.  I deeply loved the camaraderie with my classmates, forged of meeting intense school and work deadlines simultaneously, walking a tightrope that sometimes, looking back, I can't believe I survived.  And all in the interest of having more tools with which to approach my paid-work and more ideas to launch my husband's (our) small business, which has been successfully operating, even through some hard years, since 2001.  I am an unabashed business nerd who loves nothing more than when a friend has a great idea and goes balls-out to create a livelihood out of thin air, like our friend Alan right now who's creating Pelo Fitness in San Rafael.  Super exciting!

One of the weird things for me in the whole Anusara melt-down of the past two weeks is how much I've seen written about the fact that Anusara is an Inc. and not a non-profit, as if these two were mutually exclusive and the non-profit a superior structure.  Some of the logic I've read goes like this: the problem with Anusara, the reason it blew up, is because it was an Inc that concentrated too much power in the hands of one person.  In my opinion, that's just silly.  As another person put it, a person whose name I shall leave out since I haven't met him (based on his comments, though, I think we'd be fast friends), "Perhaps JF's problem is that he can't keep his dick in his pants."

And that's nothing to do with Inc.

As a person who's worked in incorporated non-profits (that's right: you can be BOTH) and as a person who runs an Inc with her husband, I know from personal experience that there's nothing inherently evil about being incorporated, no demon instantly appears demanding payment in the form of your soul, integrity and common human decency.  And that things can be super-fucked up in a non-profit, that leadership can be just as narcissistic and messianic and destructive as in a for-profit, albeit with fewer opportunities to line their pockets with gold.

But I know in saying this, in saying, Hey, Business isn't the problem, people are the problem, I run afoul of the tenor of our time, afoul of the Occupy language that's been hard for me to swallow from the beginning.  I'm not saying there haven't been grotesque abuses of public trust, heinous collusion, etc., etc.  It's just that I don't agree that corporations are the cause.

The cause is people.  People who can't keep their dicks in their pants or their hands out of the cookie jar.  Sure, structures that have built-in safeguards to keep people's parts where they belong are great, but people are people and do get up to mischief, no matter whether you're for- or non-profit, a sole proprietorship or a corporation.

And our job, as people, is to keep each other accountable, no matter how we're organized, whether in a non-profit organization or a bank or a community of yogis drawn together around a certain teaching methodology.  It's always US.

Which is why I love business and happiness at the same time.  Business offers a profound route to personal realization, to the fulfillment of dreams and creation of new ideas and avenues for others to fulfill their own dreams and they tell two friends and so on.  It's a path to happiness for many, an essential human drive, in my way of thinking, and certainly not something to be derided.  Sure, like all things we do, it needs boundaries, it needs accountability.  But it itself?  It ain't bad.

Nope, business makes me happy on a daily basis.  Thank you, Harvard Business Review!  Thank you, Happiness Project!  You're awesome individually, but even better taken together. 

Michael's Sourdough Challenge: Week 1

I love a good project and/or game, and will make a project or game out of just about any activity.  This leads to hours of amusement and entertainment -- sometimes I am the only one entertained or amused, but that's fine by me.  I am a total nerd this way, but don't forget that I am the very same person who worked on a report about cats with Medora Payne when we were under-10 kids on Liberty Street, neither one of us able to have cats as pets (family allergies), out of total love for subject spending hours at the library, reading books about cats, collecting images of cats, writing page after page after page...  Yes, I have a long history of this.

For example, coming home from Tahoe a few weeks ago, I decided that I would make a little project of counting how many medical marijuana dispensaries there are along the freeway corridor.  Lately, I've been noticing these everywhere. So I kept a running tally in my notebook.  Unfortunately, it appears that really, the bulk of the dispensaries I remember are on a different stretch of road, so it wasn't that fruitful.  But then, since it was getting to be twilight, optimum raptor hunting time across the flatlands of Highway 37, I turned it into a game of Pot vs. Hawk.  Hawks won it, hands down.  Awesome!  There are many, many more examples of my project-mania, but you get the idea.

Over lunch at the delicious Michael's Sourdough a few weeks ago with some friends, we were discussing our unfortunate tendency to always order the same delicious thing.  I always get the #23 with Dijon, no onions, half-wrapped.  Always.  Because it's delicious.  Half-wrapped because the sandwiches are enormous and certain to induce food-coma if eaten in their entirety.  How sad, we said, that there are broad swaths of menu we are not accessing because of our favoritism.

And so a new project was born.

The Michael's Sourdough sandwich menu has 26 items on it.  Twenty-six -- how tidy, I thought.  If we eat here every other week for one year, I proposed aloud, we could work our way through the entire menu.  Thank goodness my friends are generally willing to humor me and my silly ideas.

We start today with Sandwich #1: Idaho Ham.  The rules are that everyone orders the same sandwich; we eat and discuss.  If nothing else, it's an opportunity to see some people I love on a regular basis in the middle of a work-day.

The Michael's Sourdough Challenge will not be easy.  The menu (sorry, vegans and vegetarians, and me with my sometimes-narrow tastes) is quite meat-y, and does include liverwurst (week #12) and salami (week #8, oh the breath!).  Schedules are another challenge, since it's absurd how hard it is to coordinate the schedules of just 4 people.  Keeping a commitment with each other for a year is another aspect of the challenge.

So we'll see how it goes.  I'll be there today, tasting the #1 sandwich on the menu and in our game, enjoying the company of friends and a little mid-day break.  And naturally, taking notes.

Valentine's is for chicks...

With Valentine's Day 2011 behind us, I wanted to get down my Valentine's Manifesto as a way of already getting ready for next year.

I love Valentine's Day so much I should marry it.  At minimum, I should make it its very own Valentine, covered in stickers and glitter.  I love Valentine's like I love Santa and Christmas and New Year's Resolutions and a host of other holiday traditions that make so many people grumble.

And there are really so many haters out there!  I get it.  For some people, these externally-imposed obligations are such a drag, create so much pressure and anxiety.  The cynicism and negativity abound.

That's just wrong.

It's such a missed opportunity to use it for your own ends, to make something beautiful out of what might otherwise be a chore.  Somewhere recently (maybe in Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project) I read, "if you can't get out of it, get into it."  Such great advice!

The essence of my Valentine's Manifesto is getting into it, getting deep into it, up to your elbows in glitter glue and construction paper.  

I have been doing it this way for years, so long that part of the fun of the activity is thinking back on the old days.  It's bittersweet for me, too, because my strongest memories, the sweetest, are of hours spent over teacups and music, making delicate, beautiful Valentine's with a friend who's entirely lost to me now, eaten by substance abuse, vanished from the texture of my life.  I think of her so much as I cut out hearts, remember being in her house surrounded by her mewling cats.  For some years, we'd make a tea party out of it, but she was always at the center of the making, its creative hub.

Even then, like now, for me Valentine's Day is not a romantic thing.  It's a celebration of love between girlfriends, between friends, a day for me to express love to all those people -- besides my husband -- who fill my little world with love all year long.  For some, those for whom I have addresses, this means a Valentine in the mail.  And that's the super-fun part.  

I devoted an afternoon to Valentines this year, a whole leisurely slow happy Saturday afternoon while Joe was off racing, to cutting shapes from construction papers and doilies, applying the glitter glue, then the stickers.  It was a three-step process, since they had to dry in between.  It was sweet, listening to music, thinking of my friends the whole way through.  They had to sit for a week to be good and dry before going into envelopes, then I had a little schedule for mailing, to  ensure that the East Coast people got theirs in good time, the West Coast people not too early.

This is, no doubt, another manifestation of my Inner Dork, but like I said, Get Into It.

And, to be clear, I do not refuse the box of See's dark chocolate Nuts and Chews which Joe always brings me.  

So here's my Manifesto for next year.  

- Make an Open House out of it
- Lay in a supply of paper, pens, glitter, glue, stickers, what have you
- Bake a batch of cookies, make a big pot of coffee
- Put on music and 
- Go

I can only fit a certain number of people around my table, so I'm inviting others to have their own Valentine's parties.  Really, it's so fun.

Because Valentine's Day really is and should be a way to love up your friends, to let them know in a small but powerful way that you're thinking of them, holding them in your little paper heart.

And how nice would it be for me to receive some Valentines by mail next year!  Get Into It!