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Who Made Business So Boring?

This article is more than 8 years old.

I worked at retail jobs in high school and graduated to waiting tables when I went to college. I took a part-time office job when I couldn't manage my restaurant jobs around my school schedule anymore, halfway through my sophomore year. I was sorry to give up the tips. I got a job temping at Smith Barney on 50th and 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

As the lowliest person in the department, I was assigned to sit in an empty conference room and address inter-office envelopes, the big yellow ones that closed with a string you'd wind around a little paper knob to keep the envelope closed.

My temp assignment was to slip hundreds of memos into inter-office envelopes and then to write each recipient's name on the first empty line on the back of the over-sized yellow inter-office envelope. It was incredibly boring work, but I was allowed to play my little transistor radio  in the conference room because no one could hear it. The big songs on the radio that year were "Reunited" by Peaches and Herb, "To Be Real" by Cheryl Lynn and every song from the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack.

After a couple days of writing names on inter-office envelopes, I started to go crazy from boredom. It hit me that writing names on envelopes for hours on end might be more interesting if I had a better pen to write with. After work that night, I spent a buck of my own money on a new black Flair pen to replace the cheap ballpoint pen I had been using. Eureka! The Flair pen let me write nice black lines that looked great against the yellow envelope background. I branched out.

I started to thicken the lines in the memo-recipients' names so that the lettering stood out. That gave me courage. I started experimenting with typefaces. I started to write my memo-recipients' names in the New York Times typeface and an Art Deco typeface called Broadway. I paid attention to lettering on the ads in the subway and my textbooks at school.

Now my job was a lot more fun. I got really into lettering. Pretty soon the inter-office envelopes that started to come back to me in the conference room for another trip around the building had neat rectangular holes cut out of them.

My memo recipients were using Exacto knives to cut their hand-lettered names out of the envelopes before recycling them. From my empty conference room I was making people happy. They started to send me notes, addressed to Envelope Girl because no one knew my name. I guess the word got out that I was female.

"This is the nicest inter-office envelope I've ever received," the notes would say. "It made my day to see my name so nicely written in fancy script."

Now my job was connected to the other people in the building, even though they didn't know my name and I would probably never meet them. Once in a while someone poked their head into my conference room.

"Are you Envelope Girl?" they asked. "That's me!" I said.

"Can you write my name that fancy way on this piece of paper so I can make a sign for my cubicle?" they would ask. I would take a break from inter-office-envelope addressing and make a personalized, decorative placard for their cubicle or their desk. "Cool!" they would say. "This looks awesome!" One day my manager Dolores, whom we called Dee, stopped in the conference room to talk to me.

"I have bad news," she said. "No more calligraphy. The higher-ups don't like it. They say that if you have enough time to do fancy lettering on inter-office envelopes, you have too much time."

"I can understand that," I said, "but I've done so many of these envelopes now that I am wicked fast at lettering. Watch how fast I can address an envelope. Whoever would be doing this lettering if it weren't me would not be able to address envelopes this fast, even if he or she were scribbling unreadable names on the envelopes the way most of the folks do."

"That may be true but it doesn't  help," said Dee. "The higher-ups don't care about your speed. They told me it doesn't  look good for you to make the inter-office envelopes fancy. It's not businesslike. Business envelopes aren't supposed to be decorated. They are plain. These envelopes are too fancy. It doesn't  look right."

My manager Dee was a peach and a great mentor. Her observation hit me like a thunderbolt: business isn't decorated! It's plain. Business is gray and blue. That's the way we higher-ups like it. Pretty, colorful things are suspect. They are unprofessional just  because they aren't boring.

I thought about the dozens of office workers I'd never meet who had little rectangular pieces of stiff yellow paper in their wallets or in their pencil drawers -- little rectangles that elevated their names to the stature of illuminated manuscripts just by virtue of an eighteen-year-old temp buying a Flair pen and taking a moment to turn their names into artwork. How could that be wrong?

My middle son is a musician. He will graduate from high school this spring. Each kid gets to choose a quote to appear below his or her senior photo in the yearbook. I asked my son "What quote did you choose for your yearbook photo?" He said "I chose the quote 'Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time.'"

What is the point of decoration, or the point of art or music? They lift us up. That's a human need, as surely as food and shelter are. We are not machines. We need to be lifted up and work is the perfect place to feel that energy surge. Who would be so foolish as to turn off the spigot and say "No lifting up for you! Work will not be fun and colorful. It will be boring and formal and gray. Just get your work done and stop worrying about connecting to your power source!"

That mindset is beyond stupid, but it is prevalent in the business world. We delude ourselves that a paycheck is enough to get people to really care and to be personally invested in their work. I couldn't keep my temp job once my conference-room calligraphy operation was shut down. I became paranoid that simply thickening the lines in the names I was writing on the yellow inter-office envelopes (for readability!) would get me into trouble, and indeed it did.

People started attaching notes to the inter-office envelopes that came back to me. The notes said "What happened to Envelope Girl?" I quit my temp job at Smith Barney. My supervisor helped me get a new job downtown on Wall Street. I didn't last long at that job, either. I took off for Chicago where I started waiting tables again and singing punk rock and opera.

Who made business so dull and flat? There is no good reason for business to be that way. Business should be fun and fizzy and uplifting. It can be all those things. When I got back into the business world I brought life and color to every job I had, from answering the phones in customer service to running the HR department for a fast-growing manufacturing company.

I made my companies fun and human to work for because I am wired that way and because the need for fun and team energy at work are so painfully obvious. Who would run an HR department any other way? Lots of people do, because they are told that business is formal and dull  by definition - but that's a lie! We are served up toxic lemonade that tells  us that work isn't supposed to be fun. That's false. If our work isn't fun, our customers and shareholders are getting ripped off.

Would any CEO or Chairman of the Board get up in front of shareholders and say "Here in our company, the work isn't fun, but that's okay because it's work -- it's not supposed to be fun."?

Would any leader say "In our company, the employees come to work because they can't find anything better."? No one would be satisfied with that level of leadership, but in reality that level of leadership is found everywhere. We don't think we need to make work fun and fizzy and creative, because our employees are getting paid, and that should be enough. Gray walls and gray ideas and boring, stolid, uncreative thinking rule the day in most business organizations, and that's a pity and an insult to everybody who has ever felt a flight of fancy or the intoxicating feeling of inspiration.

How can we expect inspiration in a dusty, gray environment? We are fooling ourselves. Unless people can connect to their own power source at work, grudging compliance is the best we can expect from them. Peaches and Herb and the new music appearing on the scene in 1978 -- Blondie and Ian Dury and Elvis Costello -- couldn't  keep me in that conference room once my calligraphy days were over. I had to find a way to bring  joy and color back into my work, and all of us must do the same thing if we want to feed our souls.

A paycheck is not enough to inspire anyone to great heights. It is easy and free to create a workplace where people can connect to their personal power source and feel the same fizz and electrical charge I felt writing fancy lettering on inter-office envelopes during the disco era.

When we lose the made-up worldview that business has to be boring or that business activities must be performed without any trace of human spark or individuality, we remove a huge obstacle to our teams' successes. We make it easier for people to care. We celebrate the fact that we employ humans and not robots. These things are simple to do. Why not inject some of your own fizz and color into your job today? Maybe you'll inspire someone else!

 

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