The best side of who we are

Tomorrow on the HR Happy Hour show we will welcome Kaya Oakes, the author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, and a writing instructor at the University of California, Berkley to the big show.

Kaya also writes a cool blog at her site - Oakestown.

The show can be heard live from the HR Happy Hour show page, or via the call in line at 646-378-1086.

I picked up 'Slanted and Enchanted' a few months ago and once I had finished the book, I knew I wanted to try and book Kaya on the show. I wrote a blog post referring

When I told Kaya a little bit about the HR Happy Hour and asked her to appear on the show, she graciously accepted but had to wonder, I think, why a show that (allegedly) focuses on Human Resources and Talent Management would want to talk about indie culture.

A good question, but after thinking about the topic some more, I thought there were some really interesting and relevant parallels from the development and evolution of indie, and what is happening in the workplace and especially in the changes in traditional views of work and employment.

Networking - The pioneering indie artists relied on their strong personal networks of peers, fans, and friends in adjacent fields for support, promotion, and even basic survival at times. Indie and punk bands relied on each other to such an extent, and there was a strong culture of reciprocity that developed. 

What is every recent graduate, job seeker, or for that matter experienced professional told these days? Networking, giving to your community of peers, and promoting the good work done by others are all seen as absolutely essential for long-term career and professional stability and success.

Entrepreneurship - A frequent theme of the book, and perhaps the single most important driver of indie culture is the belief that art that is created independently, for its own sake, and representing the personality of the artist alone while having little to no regard for its commercial viability possesses a purity and value that elevates it from mass produced and mass consumed junk.  Kaya observes that 'art that evolves outside corporate America can and does make a difference in the way people think.'

Who hasn't been touched in a personal way by the deterioration of the American economy in the last two years? The traditional bonds between corporations and employees have probably never been weaker.  In an economic climate that smacks of 'it's every man/woman for themselves', the idea of collecting your ideas, talents, and personal drive and trying to package, promote, and sell them to the marketplace has become so much more resonant and important.  So maybe you are not out there 'selling' two-minute songs and T-shirts, but the mindset and drive needed to make it as a professional entrepreneur are not at all unlike what is needed to pack up the van with instruments and amps and hit the road.

Creativity - The indie artists, mostly by virtue of the lack of restrictions and influence of outside interests like big record companies or major publishing houses, were free to unleash their creativity and passion as they saw fit.  Exploration into new sounds, sources, and inspirations were all common, they did not ever feel compelled to follow the rules and stay within the lines. It values the contribution and creativity of each individual.

This week the results of an IBM study were released that indicated the most important leadership quality for success in business is creativity. More important than integrity or global perspectives, creativity is seen by CEO's themselves as essential for their own, and their organization's success. How does the organization find more creative people, and encourage the development of more creativity from it's existing ranks?  Could it be that a better understanding of indie and the people that are motivated to create would be high on any executive or HR leader's list?

I hope I have made the case for the link of indie to HR and the workplace.  I hope you can join us on the show tomorrow night at 8PM EDT.

Note - The title of this post comes from the below video, where Dale Dougherty of Make Magazine describes the Maker Faire festival, and talks about this culture of creativity as demonstrating 'The best side of who we are'.

The Next Indie Superstar

In the comments on last weeks' 'HR and Indie Culture' post my friend Kris Dunn and I had an exchange about what was ostensibly a simple question: How do you as a open-networking, tweeting, blogging, cutting-edge type of HR pro keep the 'indie' mindset and streak of rebelliousness once (or perhaps more accurately if), you actually bust into the C-suite, get the big time job, or (please don't brutalize me in the comments), get the 'seat at the table'.

Which on the surface is a decent, if not terribly interesting question.  The 'right' answer is pretty obvious, stay true to yourself, keep doing the things you did on the way up, don't sell out, etc.  I think when faced with that as a hypothetical question, it is pretty easy to answer it in that way.  In the real Seger (but you certainly knew that)world it is not always so simple.  How many times have we heard individualists and 'rebels' like Bob Seger and John Mellencamp providing the background music for a series of forgettable, (yet I am sure lucrative for them) truck commercials?

When the suits come in waving around the big money and trips on the private jet it has to be pretty tempting to forget about (or at least alter slightly) ideals that made sense to you when you were 22 or 25.  Let's go back to Bob Seger. You're getting pitched to have 'Like a Rock' used as the soundtrack to 50 million truck commercials. You have to be thinking, what's the harm really? And if I don't do it they'll just grab Tom Petty or Aerosmith while I get to keep it real and work the state fair circuit for another year or three.

Actually the entire conversation is predictable and kind of boring.  Some people will remain true to their Indie roots, some will forget them entirely to get by (and I am NOT judging at all), and most will fall somewhere in-between. Eventually you have to make a living, you make some concessions to fit in, and every once in a while you bust out on the weekend to see the Warped tour in your cargo shorts and golf shirt. 

The better question that KD and I kicked around was not just would he, or anyone else stay 'Indie' after they hit the big time, but would they coach, support, and encourage the next generation of indie, even if it meant that the new blood would take indie in a different direction, perhaps one that is better, more imaginative, and perhaps even more 'indie' than you had ever done yourself?

Would you be comfortable enough to see folks on your team actually surpass what you have accomplished?

In indie music the pioneering bands like the Minutemen and Mission of Burma ultimately were seen as extremely influential to scores of bands that followed, but they did not directly 'train' or necessarily mentor any of the acts that came after them.  Their influence, and I suppose most kinds of influence, is from observation, anecdote, and to some extent legend. Budding musicians went to their shows, traded bootlegged concert tapes, and tried to mine bits of inspiration from all they saw and heard. It was a passing relationship at best.

But the rest of us are not touring the country playing in a band (or in my personal dream competing on the professional barbecue circuit). We are mostly inside our organizations, leading, collaborating, and yes, influencing the people around us. So maybe some of us are doing amazing things, perhaps a few of us are bringing exciting and innovative ideas and strategies to the table, and we have mastered this whole blog, twitter, unconference game to the point where we have the other folks in the organization scratching their heads at just why the heck we suddenly got so popular. That's awesome and an achievement to be proud of.

So I will leave you with this question: What are you doing to find, support, mentor, and cultivate the next indie superstar?

And if you have someone in mind already - let us know in the comments, you can think about it while you listen to Mellencamp singing about a truck.

HR and Indie Culture

One of the mainstays of the 'business' blog world is the occasional book review post.  Bloggers get pitched by PR agencies or writers all the time to see if there is interest in reading and potentially reviewing the latest work on management, marketing, leadership -  you name it.  Other times bloggers provide their take on one of the popular business books of the day that have a subject matter in line with their blog's focus and target audience.

Some recent (and good) examples of this kind of review are Paul Hebert's look at 'Switch', or Kris Dunn's take on 'Linchpin'. Switch is all about influencing people to change, right in Paul's sweet spot, and Linchpin, with its focus on results and getting stuff done aligns well with some of the recurring themes of Kris' blog.

I don't write many book reviews on this site, since in the case of books like Switch or Linchpin I am either a bit late to the party, or don't really have much to add to or improve upon what people like Paul and Kris (and lots of others) have already covered. More so, in the case of the majority of books I read, they are not really in line with the realm of what this blog is (theoretically) about, technology and HR topics.

So when I picked up Kaya Oakes' 'Slanted and Enchanted : The Evolution of Indie Culture' a few weeks ago I did not intend on writing about it on the blog. I am actually not sure why I bought the book, maybe I was a bit tired of reading about how to convince people to do stuff they really do not want to do, or undergoing more admonitions of how to be fantastic and awesome by just being fantastic and awesome.  Possibly it was the cool looking cover.

Either way, after completing the book I felt like posting about it. Not so much a 'review' but just some observations of the similarities between indie culture and what is going on in the HR space lately. The book is essentially about the history and evolution of so-called indie culture, that is creative works done outside the 'mainstream' of corporations and organizations and without much concern about the viability or financial rewards.

In the book's retelling of the origins, early heroes, development, and export of indie music, books, art, and design I saw some parallels in the creation, distribution, and eventual attempted absorption by big corporate interests of indie culture, and some of what is starting to happen in the HR and Talent world where this little blog (and hundreds of others) reside.

When I think about the growing influence of the HR and recruiting blogs, radio shows, and bootstrapped 'unofficial' Unconferences in the Human Resources community it seems to me not unlike some of the stories in Slanted and Enchanted. Death Cab for Cutie gets a major label deal and makes regular appearances on The OC, and HR bloggers now routinely get press credentials to 'mainstream' HR events, get asked to make speeches or sit on panels, and many major and entrenched organizations and associations are trying to figure out how to understand, embrace, and possibly even absorb elements of this growing 'indie' movement in HR.

I think it is fantastic the the 'Indie HR' community is getting more recognition, notice, and is gaining (subtly) in influence with the mainstream HR world.  But here is the thing, as 'Indie HR' gains acceptance and gets more intertwined with 'traditional' HR is it in danger of losing what makes it so vibrant and meaningful?  Will it get toned down, homogenized, or otherwise turned into just another extension of the status-quo?

Last thought, in 'Slanted and Enchanted' Kaya Oakes says this about what being 'indie' really means:

Independence means rebellion, risk, tenacity, innovation, and resistance to convention.

She was referring to art, music, and poetry.  For those of us in 'Indie HR' we could be talking about interviewing, social networking, performance management - you get the picture.

As Indie HR goes more mainstream, can it still remain rebellious?  Or will it resort to making VH1-friendly videos and counting the royalties?