"Help me get my feet back on the ground"

Note: Thanks to The Beatles for the post title and to Baba for the idea.

As yesterday's post so clearly indicates, I have some compelling personal reasons for looking at the HAVE TOs to which I am subjecting myself. The next 6 weeks will be fairly full of business based demands - including 3 consecutive weeks away from home. For many people, the life I will be leading is so normal that it doesn't even bear questioning. It is pretty obvious by now that I am questioning it.

I should point out that my journey down this path has actually been funded the very same corporate entities that I am now questioning. It has always been my job to make things work better. For the last 12 years, one company or another has been paying me to question the reasoning and validity of everything that they put in front of me. I get paid to question what is and dream about what could be. I've done that with machines and manufacturing processes for semiconductors, with satellite phone call center operations and financial statement reporting. I've always set out with the premise that optimizing the silly bits frees everyone up to do the real work that the organization needs done. And I've usually done it by teaching people tricks and tools to make their own work lives better.

But it turns out that I've learned at least as much as I've taught. I know more about business processes, time management techniques, cross cultural and cross generational communication than is probably healthy. I've researched management theory, effective meeting tools and methods for identifying and engaging the disengaged. I know how to read corporate culture and body language. I can greet colleagues in Hindi, recognize exclamations of surprise in Malay and know what words don't mean what I think they should when talking to team members in the UK. Along with a host of problem solving tools, analytical methods and a genetic predisposition to see things differently, these things have brought me to my current position.

To clarify, my current position is the pinnacle of my corporate career. It is not the pinnacle of my possible corporate career. It is probably not even the pinnacle of the career that my current boss has planned for me. It is just as far as I plan to go. The problems that I am interested in solving these days are quickly running cross current to the jobs that have been funding my life for years.

I am much more interested in the problems of creating a user-friendly life style. For me, that obviously includes being an independent small business owner. But it also touches on certain aspects of the green movement - particularly where energy consumption is involved. It is related to sustainable living - especially in the "think global, buy local" aspect. It includes understanding the social factors involved in our cultural choices. And, if I can just figure out how to do it properly, it makes more time for my family, my friends, and the band.

The trick, of course, is doing it properly. To accomplish this task, I will have to question a number of assumptions that are part and parcel of the pie-in-the-sky, gizmo driven, 2Fast2Furious, HAVE TO inducing marketing job that is being sold as "The American Dream". It is going to take some thought, as much time as I can find in the next several months, and a whole lot of remembering my roots. But it feels like it is just about time to get my feet back on the ground.