Cool Down (25 page)

“No” is a bad word. We were taught its negative connotations way back when we were infants. But those who take the time to investigate the value of a
cool
approach will recognize that “no” comes in shades, not just black and white. There is room for negotiation under the canopy that stretches between yes and no; there is a mutually acceptable mid-ground. But finding it is a practiced art. If using no in your answer, you must factor in the necessary footholds that allow a requestor to accept your response.

When confronted with a request, what are the alternatives to yes? Could you:

Could you negotiate for any of these alternatives, or do they seem too confrontational, too uncomfortable? This is the type of skilled human interaction that the age of email has eroded. How many of us, after all, are comfortable with haggling task for task, face to face? Very few.

The objective of this section is to state firmly that a yes without reservation does nothing but condition the requestor to expect the same deal every time. It sets the stage for a moral debt of servitude that compounds an already crowded day. And that's not healthy.

Alan comes by your desk and drops a folder in front of you. He puts on a pained and helpless expression. “This is a copy of my report to the Development Committee,” he says, “I just need you to proofread it, maybe add a little bit to the recommendations, you know—your usual magic. But I do need it back by 11:00. That's when the committee is meeting.” It's currently 9:15 a.m. What do you do?

 

If I were the person approached by Alan, here's what I would
not
do. I would not say “no” to him outright. After all, he is a co-worker. Even though he's in the wrong in expecting me to drop everything at such short notice, I will still have to work with him on a daily basis.

But assuming none of the footholds for negotiation outlined in the list above is possible, what then? If I were to say yes, without reservation, I would be conditioning Alan to know that he could make the same request again, at any time. That wouldn't be good.

So what I
would
do is this: I would use the power of
slow
to think through a better solution. “I will do this proofreading for you, Alan,” I would say, “but my price is 15 minutes of your time, for a follow-up meeting, this afternoon.”

The objective of this 15-minute meeting would be to discuss a more appropriate approach to the planning and proofing of his documents. Perhaps, if Alan needs me to play a part in his future projects, I can get him to agree to give me a minimum 24-hours' notice. I do not intend to scold or belittle Alan by doing this, but I do need to demonstrate to him that time is money, and my time, just like my money, is not something I give away freely. I intend to remove any preconception of my unlimited ability and replace it with an understanding, a business relationship.

Such is the strategic value of
slow
. The meeting will require 15 minutes from my afternoon. But that
slow
interlude will allow for a better use of my time whenever Alan and I need to work together again, and will likely reduce the number of times he asks for favors. If I had been too preoccupied with my wireless PDA at the time of his initial request, I would have set myself up for years of similar last-minute requests, with no-one to blame but myself.

I have met many people who have sought different ways to handle the guilt or frustration they feel for either saying no—or for
not
saying no. Some will try to dilute the sensation of guilt by taking home a loaded briefcase full of work that either didn't get done during the day because they took on additional requests, or full of new work that they took on out of an inability to say no. This briefcase travels home with them, full, but it does not get opened. It sits overnight full of work and returns next day to the office, still full of work. Somewhere in the act of carrying this extra burden, the briefcase owner derives a certain liberation, as if by carrying the work to and from his home he alleviates the guilt he would feel if he left the work behind at the office.

I applaud these people for not allowing work to chronically take over their home lives. I applaud the fact that once both the briefcase and its owner arrive home, the pleasure of home takes over and the briefcase stays in the hall—full, fat, and no longer important. The fact that it comes back the next day in the same condition, while its owner continues to hold her job, to do well on the annual review, to get bonuses, and to be seen as a team player is testament to the fact that much of what we do at work can wait.

In my previous book,
Cool Time
, I mentioned how I believed the success of the various “Survivor” shows on television was due in large part to the cultural era of
schadenfreude
in which we now live.
Schadenfreude
is a German word meaning “taking pleasure in the misfortune of others,” as happens each time a tribe member is booted off the island or an apprentice is fired. Our collective sense of powerlessness that comes from being so time-stressed requires an outlet, and reality TV provides the perfect venue. Why else is so much camera time given to the reactions of the losers at the moment of their ultimate humiliation? If the shows were just about adventure, the losers would not be shown to such a degree. But that's not the case. We need to see them suffer in order to feel better about ourselves.

It seems now that these
schadenfreude
shows are evolving, continually keeping pace with the frustrations felt in real life by their viewers. A cooking show, for example, features a superstar chef who explodes with rage and actually assaults his hapless interns with the very food they're trying to prepare. Through this exercise, we viewers can experience vicariously the type of “no” we would really like to say, or perhaps the reactions that we fear might come our way if we ourselves were to use that word.

People have been throwing Christians to the lions in one form or another for thousands of years. It would be incorrect to attribute the success of these
schadenfreude
shows exclusively to the fears and frustrations of high-speed life, but I think their huge popularity can be attributed in part to the motivations and tensions that we all experience.

The final fear to consider here is that of emptiness, the idea that space or time with nothing in it is somehow wasted, that continuous stimulation is the pulse of society. Fear of emptiness is natural. It stems from the fear of the unknown, one of the most primal of all fears. Fear of emptiness fuels our desire for constant stimulation, and the electronic world obliges.

But emptiness is not to be feared. Natural apprehension can be consciously overruled without the need to become a monk or a hermit.

These are all examples in which emptiness yields greater power. People fear emptiness in action. Busy-ness, it seems, satisfies the desire to feel busy. But what if you were allowed, as part of your job, to not be busy, at least for a while? What if you were allowed to tune out, to doodle, to think with no outside distraction? What might come of it?

The Ben Franklin Forum on Innovation, presented by Knowledge@ Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the well-documented retreats that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is famous for taking every year at his cottage in Washington State. His strategy has allowed Microsoft to stay “a giant with a market capitalization of nearly $300 billion… [yet]…it retains the agility of a startup when it comes to introducing new products and improving old ones.”
³
Imagine. The world's richest businessman, with so much pressure and so many things to occupy his time allowing himself to disappear and think like that.

The Wharton School forum also cites this example. “After becoming boss of Xerox in 2001, Anne Mulcahy wanted to pump up that company's innovative abilities even as she pared away costs. She sought out the advice of one Xerox researcher responsible for a large number of patents. ‘He said that most innovation happens by accident and experiment, not design,' she recalled in a recent speech at Wharton. ‘It's allowing people to push barriers.'”
⁴

The thinkers at Wharton don't advocate that people wander around aimlessly, of course, but they do suggest strongly that a structure be put in place that encourages creativity. And this is another place where the benefits of
cooling down
become tangible. To me, the poster child for this type of approach still remains 3M, with its policy of encouraging their staff to spend 10 percent of their time tinkering, experimenting, and generally blue-skying. Just such an approach was eventually responsible for the invention of the Post-It note.

Fear of any sort is not to be feared. It is a reaction, and as such can be anticipated and refined. Fear is a living thing. It feeds on speed, and it is contagious. But the good news is it can be starved if people take the time to cut off its supply. And the best news of all is the opposite state of fear, that of being calm and cool, is also contagious, and equally abundant—yours for the taking.