A reflection on “work” by Devo founder, Gerald V. Casale 

Work. Workin’ it. Workin’ for the weekend. Workin’ for the man!

James Brown was “the hardest workin’ man in show business.” But was he workin’? If it’s fun, it’s not work. You “work” to make money so that hopefully some day you won’t have to work. Work implies a certain amount of drudgery. You work to survive. You tolerate your boss. You clock in and clock out. You feel compromised, unfulfilled, and would rather be somewhere else. You move down the line in quiet resignation. That’s usually what is defined as work (i.e. a job). But what if you like your job? Is it work?

Richard Branson, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Anderson Cooper, Lady Gaga—they “work” hard to be the best and stay on top. The money they make is a by-product of excellence in their chosen paths. Dr. Gupta and Anderson Cooper reached the top by fulfilling roles that are already valued by our society. Richard Branson is slightly different. Part businessman, part slight-of-hand visionary, he created more value than most would have imagined possible by  re-inventing products and services as tried and true as soft drinks, music stores, and airlines. Despite these above-mentioned persons’ power and money, you can bet their lives are filled with some serious compromise that ensures their survival and continued voice in the marketplace.

Then there is Lady Gaga. After a life in Devo, I can relate to her type of success most easily. On the surface it seems free of any conflict. She started by doing exactly what she envisioned, damn the torpedoes. After the required years of hard “work,” rejection and struggle performing content with absolutely no perceived value, there came the big bang moment where the world turned upside down in her favor. Suddenly she could do no wrong and she got paid for being her. She made the masses want something they didn’t even know they needed up to that magic moment.

Devo managed to do the Lady Gaga trick on a lesser scale 30 years ago. For a triumphant moment we tasted what it’s like to have a powerful voice in the marketplace. To me it felt like the scene in “The Right Stuff” where Sam Shepard, portraying real life test pilot Chuck Yeager, wrestles his X-15 spacecraft to the edge of the upper atmosphere and glimpses the infinite heavens before crashing unceremoniously back to earth. We came with a fresh message and a shocking body of songs. People took notice and took it seriously. Then reality set in.

Reality is what always lurks beneath the media myth and hype. Reality says we all work for the man in corporate culture. As the Chinese proverb goes, the nail that sticks out gets pounded. You are especially scrutinized and judged if your success carries any whiff of change or controversy. If you challenge authority in any real manner, your voice in the marketplace is quickly revoked. Pink Floyd’s codpiece was duly snipped when they challenged the necessity of paying large sums of independent radio promo money to launch “The Wall” LP. Sinead O’Connor disappeared after attacking the Pope as a figurehead of illegitimate authority on Saturday Night Live. Pearl Jam was taken to the wood shed for challenging the ethics of TicketMaster. The message: keep grinnin’ and pickin’.

As the cliché goes, you’re only as good as your last hit. Sometimes even that’s not enough. If the outside forces of public opinion, corporate control, and maximum chaos aren’t enough to wear down a public figure, the usual go-to reason for failure is implosion from within. When it comes to a music “brand” that is in fact a group brand, the Spinal Tap-type stories of crashing and burning are the tawdry stuff of VH1 and YouTube jokes. For every Rolling Stones exception there are hundreds and hundreds of Sex Pistols templates.

In the case of Devo, the story is more sad than funny. Because we were actually about something, not just style (as in guys with skinny ties and white shirts), the descent to entropy from a true, vital creative collaboration was more disappointing and depressing. With our para-military type unity, our music machine precision and our ironic, humorous jabs at the more idiotic tendencies of contemporary culture, we had the talent and the will to continue to be relevant and deliver on the public’s expectations for us that we in fact created. All we had to do is remain focused and united in our vision. As long as we did that and “worked” on it, the fact that there were scores of groups who could play more notes than us, sing more notes than us, and look way more glamorous than our spud genetics afforded us didn’t matter. There was no one else sounding like us, looking like us, and saying what we were saying.

So, in the end our battles with the record label over our image, message, and the way business should be conducted, or our pronouncements in the press criticizing religious belief systems and duplicitous political policies were not the conflicts of our undoing. It was rather a slow unraveling, as the shared vision and sincere attempts for artistic innovation gave way to the cult of personality and the comfort some members felt making money doing something far easier than hoisting our creative flag, guns blazing, full speed ahead. We were unfortunately part of what we commented on. We were Devo.

I have directed more than 100 music videos and at least as many TV commercials during the years Devo’s voice was put on ice. I have made significant money doing those things. While one or another project occasionally provided a taste of the pure creative satisfaction that I derived from Devo, it was mostly apples compared to oranges. I was solving someone else’s problems and reacting to someone else’s primary creative output. I learned to roll with the twists, turns, and flip-flopping positions of clients, agency creatives, managers, record label executives, lead singers, etc. I learned to expect that the final fruits of my efforts would bear little resemblance to the original ideas I had signed on for. So often cool ideas that could have been fun turned to anxiety-filled rides down the rabbit hole. They made sure I was “workin’.”

Photo provided by Gerald Casale.

By Erica Photiades

Last summer, I picked up my entire life and moved 1,400 miles to teach orchestra in Texas. I’m from Michigan, The Motor City, baby. I’d never been to Texas, and I’d never thought about living there. It’s not very Midwestern to leave home. It’s the Promised Land, where your immigrant ancestors settled, where all their children and grandchildren stayed to build their lives. If you do leave, it’s to follow a dream, preferably one where you end up somewhere glamorous, like New York City or LA. But, you always come home in the end. Besides, there are tons of clichés about Texas, and hatred of Yankees is pretty high on the list.

The job found me through Facebook. One day I logged on and there was a message in my inbox from a stranger asking if I would be interested in moving to Texas to teach orchestra. That one message changed my life. In the span of that week, I was phone interviewed, offered the job and accepted. I had two weeks to figure everything out before school started down there. My fiancé and I agreed we would take our life to Texas together. One week later, I packed my Camry with a suitcase, an air mattress and a folding table, and I left in pursuit of my American Dream.

I’ve played the violin since I was five years old. It’s a beautiful instrument, but it’s really hard. When people tell me they could never learn the violin, I believe them. Anything worth accomplishing takes effort, but more than that it takes a belief that it can be done. I knew early on that I wanted to be a teacher, and later, when I was thinking about a major in college, it became clear to me that I wanted to teach music. I graduated a semester early with honors. I felt that I would have no trouble finding a job where I wanted, teaching what I wanted to teach.

Of course it was naïve of me to assume that things would be so easy. But most 23-year-olds don’t think about the economy or the job market. They think about how hard they’ve worked, how much potential they have, and they see the world as ripe with opportunity. I’ve always thought that what separates children from adults is work. If you have a job, and you can support yourself, you’re an adult.

I entered the workforce the year the housing market crashed and Wall Street fell apart. Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae all declared bankruptcy. Thousands of hard-working people lost their pensions. No one knew this was going to happen, so no one could tell us new graduates how to cope with it.

Michigan has fared especially poorly, and Michigan’s schools have suffered. School districts have been scrambling just to cover the basic costs of maintaining buildings and a skeleton crew of staff. In many parts of the state, budget items previously considered important—busing, sports, fine arts, field trips—were cut completely. The “good” districts didn’t want to eliminate their “high-quality” programs, so they instead cut staff, starting with their newest teachers.

At the same time, “teacher accountability” became the silver bullet of education reform. From Michelle Rhee to Bill Gates, suddenly everyone was convinced that bad teachers were the enemy dragging down America’s students. As a result, several state governments, including Michigan’s, moved to base teacher “effectiveness” around standardized test scores, and to dismantle the teacher unions.

Two years out of college, my future as a teacher had seemed to evaporate. I had been on tons of interviews, but I couldn’t find full-time work as an orchestra teacher anywhere in Michigan. The salaries that were available were so low I could have qualified for government assistance.

So, the opportunity for me to move to Texas came and I took it. My home state was dying, and if I wanted the chance to teach, I had to leave.

I don’t romanticize that I arrived here with nothing but the clothes on my back and a hole in my pocket. I have a college education, a couple years of teaching experience, and I live in America, which I still believe is a land of opportunity. Texas is currently one of the best states for pursuing opportunity.

It is hard to accept that I probably won’t be moving home again, but my gamble has so far paid off. I work for a school district that appreciates what I do and sees it as important. I have great students to teach. I bought a house with my fiancé, and I have the means to think about a future that isn’t month to month. Here in the Lone Star State, I can be an adult.

Photo provided by Erica Photiades.

By Tasha Huebner

Damn, I was arrogant.

“Hmph,” I smirked, even with a bit of an eye roll thrown in for good measure. “I’ll never be one of those people trying to sell more cornflakes, or—god forbid—figuring out what color hats the Keebler Elves should wear. I’m going to do something a little more important than that.”

So, with Wharton MBA in hand, I set out to conquer the world, self-styled Master of the Universe that I was. And what kind of important things am I doing now? Let’s see. Today I was out at my garden plot fussing over the tomato plants, because I’m hoping that later in the summer I’ll have enough to sell and make at least a few hundred dollars. Had lunch with my mom, which she paid for. Sent an email to a person I write blog articles for on various topics, for a miserly amount of money, telling her that sure, I’d be happy to write articles for a stripper recruiting blog—why the hell not?

Stripper articles.

When you graduate from business school, you are led to believe that striking out on your own—because you’re so damn brilliant and all—is a great idea, just wonderful. You may not expect to hit it big, as in hawking-schlock-sold-expensively-on-QVC-big, but you do feel confident that you’ll at least get by.

But then something like, say, The Cancer comes knocking at your door. No, forget knocking—the rude bastard comes barreling in guns a’blazing, taking no prisoners, leaving you shell-shocked and stunned, because seriously, WTF is this? You have no family history of cancer, you’ve always been healthy to a fault, you’re training for your second IRONMAN, for chrissake, so really, WTH? Then if you have the really shitty luck, like some of us (ahem), a month later you’ll still be training for said Ironman, and will get into a bad bike crash going downhill at 40 mph that will leave you with a severely broken collarbone, bleeding on the brain, no memory of the crash or the three days in the hospital, and oh yeah, that pesky cancer that still needs to be taken care of.

And meanwhile, back at the ranch, because you’re single and self-employed, you have no income anymore because you’re in a cancer-treatment and brain-injury fog, and while you do have health insurance (whew!), you discover that insurance companies are evil bastards who MSU (=Make Shit Up) in order to get out of paying your bills. So you come home one day, exhausted in your 6^th week of daily radiation treatment, and burst into tears when you get yet another bill from BlueCrossBlueShield saying that they’re not going to pay $5K of your surgery because there was “an extra nurse in the room.”

Even I don’t have the creative cojones to make this stuff up.

And at the same time that your life is being totally derailed by The Cancer, you have people helpfully telling you about all the lessons you should be learning from this “journey.” Life is short! Seize the day! Live every day as if it were your last!

First of all, if I lived every day as if it were my last, well, let’s just say that there’s a level of rapacious bonbon-eating there that even I don’t care to contemplate. Second, and more importantly, I would love to “seize the day” and do all the things I’ve ever dreamed of. Visit Mongolia! White water rafting again in Costa Rica! Visiting my CancerChick friends, the group of women who live across the U.S. that I’ve come to know and love as we together deal with the shitcan that is cancer at a young age!

There’s one problem with this, and forgive me for stating the obvious here, but: this costs money. I know, shocking! But true. And to a person, my CancerChicks and I, we’re po.’ The married ones have a bit more leeway, but if you’re single? Forget it. Single and self-employed? Doubly forget it. Do we want to work? Hell yes. I’d like to be able to pay my bills without contemplating how much I could get if I gave blood on a regular basis. Yet for some reason, in spite of my Wharton MBA, my fan-fucking-tastic resume (everyone tells me this) (though okay, I admit I’ve paraphrased slightly), the fact that I’m really good at what I do (shameless plug: marketing, communications/writing), I have yet to find work, even project work.

So while I’d like to report that as someone with The Cancer who realizes full well the importance of embracing all that life has to offer, that I’m doing so every single day—the truth is that I can’t quite figure out how to spend every day in some whirlwind of fandango fun and excitement, because reality kind of gets in the way. Those pesky bills. The minutiae that make it hard for me to move boldly forward into my post-Cancer life. This is true for everyone I know who has this disease that’s determined to kill us.

The other bit of advice that people like to share with you, whether you have The Cancer or not, is this: do what you love to do—the money will follow.

This, my friends, is a bold bit of complete and utter horseshit.

Me, what I love to do is write. I have a blog that’s sweeping the nation (You’ll laugh! Cry! Rally to laugh again!), that I make absolutely no money from. (Note to IRS: no money whatsoever.) I’ve been working on a book, but in the meantime I need to be able to pay my bills, so the book often has to go by the wayside. Such is life. Working as a strategy consultant post-Wharton, that brought in a decent amount of money. The writing, the acerbic wit, the pandering to the eighteens of blog readers who hang onto my every word? Not so much.

So what are our key takeaways here? I think they’d be along these lines:

1. Don’t get The Cancer. If it offers to latch onto your life, just say hey, no thanks, I’m kinda busy now.
2. But if you do, make sure you’re part of a two-income household, or independently wealthy, because…
3. (to paraphrase George Bailey)…money comes in pretty handy down here, bub.
4. If you’re the quintessential Schleprock like I am, don’t follow your dreams. Stick with the well-paying corporate gig; do what you love to do in your spare time. Trust me on this.
5. Realize that if you have the aforementioned crap luck, it makes for some fantastic writing on the blog. Hey, lemons, lemonade, margaritas, go with it.
6. And if you look at the shell casings surrounding the destruction of your formerly orderly and logical life and are completely baffled as to how you wound up here, it’s important to realize that it’s not all bad, that there are always patches of sunshine hidden among the shadows.

And if I at times sound a bit bitter, well, that’s only partially true. I’m not bitter about The Cancer, because quite frankly, shit happens. Not bitter about the bike crash/brain injury, because that elevated things to an almost sublime level of absurdity that holds up well in the retelling.

What I AM bitter about—or perhaps dumbfounded is a better word—is the fact that I have a Wharton MBA, for god’s sake, yet am willing to write stripper stories for a tiny bit of cash, as I lay awake at night wondering how I’ll pay my bills. Wharton! MBA! Amazing resume and experience! Brilliance all in one neat little package! The mind reels.

I’m bitter that tomorrow when I go for my 6-month checkup with my oncologist, the one whose mantra is “no scans without symptoms,” I’m notgoing to try to convince her that I should be scanned at least once. Because if they do find a recurrence or advancement, I can’t afford to treat it. “Thanks, doc, but I’ll pass on more of The Cancer today—it’s just not in my budget right now.”

I’m bitter about the fact that I’m being audited by the IRS, because the brain trust over there flagged my returns when I had a sudden drop in income and, oh, huge medical bills! Lawsy me, what ever could be the connection?

I’m slightly bitter about the fact that The Cancer will be back at some point, because the stats for young women with stage II breast cancer basically suck. I wish I could be earning money so that I could in fact be doing the carpe diem-ing I’d like to do in whatever time I have left. But I can’t.

I’m very bitter about the fact that my fellow CancerChicks, who I love dearly and would do anything for, are all dealing with this same shit. And the bitterness becomes black indeed when I think about the lie perpetuated on us all: that breast cancer is so curable, which is total hogwash, especially for young women. Hell, it’s barely treatable, based on the fact that seven or eight of my friends in just the last week have either found out that they’re now stage 4, or have taken a turn for the worse because their treatments are no longer working.

Curable, my ass.

And yet, in spite of the fact that my life is a total shambles, I have amazing women in my life because of The Cancer, and I wouldn’t give up those friendships for anything in the world. Not for all the tea in China, not all the pots of gold in existence.

So to sum up: Money = good. Jobs = good. Cancer = bad. If you measure success by the amount of money one has accrued, then clearly I’m the least successful person from my graduating class at Wharton. A wash-up. A failure.

If you measure it in friendship—I’m the richest woman in the world.

Photo provided by Tasha Huebner.

By Paula Kiger

1994 found me at the right place at the right time. An organization that I had followed literally since its birth in 1990 needed an Operations Manager to oversee functions that included customer service and other critical areas. The organization’s focus is the administration of a federally-subsidized health insurance program for children. The program has grown virtually in lockstep with my own daughter, who was born about 18 months after I joined. By 2008, both she and the program—which I also loved unconditionally—had developed from toddler to teenager.

In 2006, as our Third Party Administrator (TPA) contract was ending, we started the procurement process for a rebid. A TPA in our case handles: the computer system for insurance enrollees, along with eligibility, payment processing, correspondence, and customer service, i.e. pretty much everything. The contract went to the lowest bidder, who also had scored the most poorly on the assessment tools. As a staff member, it was not my place to question why it worked out that way, but simply to make it work. As the person overseeing activities related to customer service, I was centered firmly in the eye of the storm as the transition from the old TPA to the new one unfolded, with problems galore. (All transitions have problems, but these were worse than “average” and I was the one getting much of the feedback from unhappy enrollees and legislative offices).

Several months into the transition, a typical day would find me with 20+ emails open, each one interrupted by an even more pressing crisis. My seven staff members were valiantly trying to figure out a convoluted system that had not fully matured, while fending off hostility from our partner agencies, who were also awash in dissatisfied enrollees and important stakeholders complaining that their constituents were complaining.

The day I broke, I had the 20+ emails open; our external consultant (who was there to deal with some of the technical glitches but also to make recommendations related to how our staff should function) was sitting with me discussing a project; my phone was ringing; I am sure I had some child-related (as in my own children) issue on my mind. A staff member came to the door, asked me something about refunds, a situation that the TPA was supposed to have handled but had not, and I don’t recall exactly what I said (I think it may have been something along the lines of “if they would just do their **?! job), but the next thing I knew I was in tears, the consultant was beating a hasty exit back to her office to give me some space, and I had reached this point:

I realized deep inside that it was never going to be enough to be passionate about the cause of the organization I work for. As much as I love management and leadership theory, there was not anything in my arsenal of knowledge and experience that could augment the passion enough to fix this set of issues. 

The tears I cried that day were a mixture of frustration, anger, sadness, grieving, resignation, and probably a few other things. As Seth Godin wrote in his post, “Organizing for Joy,” there are companies out there that “give their people the…expectation…that they will create, connect and surprise.” When an organization lowers its expectations, the “chances of amazing are really quite low.”

The day I broke was the day I knew we had given up on amazing anyone, especially ourselves.

Photo provided by Paula Kiger.