Not quite out-of-the-box
by Jon Worley

The last class I took in college was "The Creative Process". The goal of the class was noble: To help students unlock the creative potential that resides in most people. The main method the teacher employed was throwing all sorts of new age thoughts at us and seeing if we could accept them or not. If you accepted them, you were being creative. If not, then you weren't.

I have a habit of questioning everything I see, hear and think. Each of my opinions and ideas is always open for scrutiny, and this process makes me feel much more secure in my thinking. Unfortunately, I continuously annoyed the creativity instructor by questioning what we were doing. She understood that I wasn't rejecting the stuff out of hand, but that I was simply wondering why the hell she was, for example, passing off liquid mandala healing processes as a cure for AIDS.

She gave me a B, with a note on my journal that said: "I'm sure you'll be very successful in your own mind." Like I said, we didn't exactly see eye to eye. But after further reflection, I think the one problem with the class is that she couldn't accept that some of us have different methods of utilizing our personal creativity than the ones she foisted upon us. I had a few younger friends in that class, and they seemed to get much more out of it. "It convinced me that I could think for myself," my pal Troy said. That makes the whole class worthwhile, at least for Troy.

Now that I am once again attempting to find gainful (read: moneymaking) employment, I am relearning what I discovered after I left college, that most businesses don't want truly creative people. In fact, folks like me are treated as some sort of bogeyman, to be trotted out once a year and shown to the crew-cut, white shirt and blue tie masses as an example of why they don't want to be like us.

The thing is, I really don't care about the dress code itself. It's the fact that a company feels the need to tell its employees what to wear and how to act that bothers me. When I worked for Intertec and designed motorcycle manuals, I showed up for the first day of work in a tie. They could tell that I was somewhat uncomfortable in the thing (I sweat a lot, particularly when the top of my shirt is buttoned), and they told me there wasn't a dress code and I didn't have to wear a tie. Also, when I had suggestions they at least listened before dismissing them out of hand.

As Fortune 500 companies goes (Intertec was a division of KIII Communications back then; I have no idea if it has been sold since then), this was a good place to work. Since then, I haven't found a similar company that is as flexible and responsive. Even some newspapers are silly enough to implicitly require copy editors to wear ties on weekdays (when the publisher might be around, you see). This says something about the state of journalism today, but it also illustrates my point.

My father-in-law bought me a subscription to Businessweek as a Christmas present last year, and so I have been subjected to the horror that is American business every week. This gift has convinced me that I will never again attempt to run my own business, which is about 180 degrees away from its intended effect. But week after week I see stories on businesses that are sending their managers to $1000-a-pop seminars on "Thinking Out-of-the-Box". This is considered a good way to spend money. In other words, these people have been so mangled by capitalism that they cannot even think for themselves any more.

And so when a person like me is presented to the average human resources hack, alarm bells go off. My resume reads like a travel memoir, with lots of short stays in weird places. I sign my letters with the phrase "stay amused". Unless I know a contact name, I address the cover letter "Dear folks:". My friends are convinced that I do these things to sabotage my chances. But the truth is nothing of the sort. I simply want people to accept me for who I am, and honestly, they need stuff like that to prepare themselves for a face-to-face. I give strange interviews, answering questions truthfully and refusing to use power words. One interviewer told me that I was the most real person he had ever met. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

The business community lauds people like Sam Walton and Bill Gates who forged ahead on their own and created massive monoliths with somewhat innovative thinking. When it comes to folks like me who also have a penchant for thinking for ourselves, the answer is most commonly "We'll let you know."

McDonald's has hired a consultant or thousand to analyze the whole Arch Deluxe and Campaign 55 disasters. I can give the solution to this particular problem in three words: hire real people. People who think that the idea of Ronald McDonald dancing in a disco is stupid, and who just might point out that if you price a Big Mac at 55 cents you'll only reinforce the idea that the company's marquee sandwich is really only worth about that much. Thoughts like that expressed at the right time would have kept a significant amount of egg off the corporate face.

My job search will continue. Someday I will find a company that believes a free-thinking, respectful and intelligent employee is an asset to the organization. Until then, there's always beer to brew.

Jon Worley is beginning to discover that there is very little call for computer work in the town where Harleys and Caterpillars are made. The fastest-growing sector in the area seems to be teenage obstetrics. He's not planning to be around in a year, so that rules out med school.

Perhaps the best response to this warped "Family Values" chick would have been saying that all she needed was a good stiff... . Jon's pretty sure that would have gotten him in a lot more trouble.

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