Composing a Life

incapable of being good deans or presidents because their entire training has been as Johnny one-note. For many, this extends to an inability to teach—if teaching means being attentive to the needs and interests of others. The narrow focus of the industrial organization that gives each assembly-line worker a single bolt to tighten is mirrored in the pressure on executives to attend only to short-term profitability or on researchers to publish in isolated driblets to lengthen their resumes.
    But a household requires sustained attention to many different needs, a very different kind of attention. Time, space, and tools need to be used for multiple purposes, leftovers must be varied and combined. Integration becomes more important than specialization. Leftover fabric from a dress will reappear in patchwork five years later; one task may be put aside when the baby wakes up for a different task that allows interaction. Some tasks are undone within minutes, like a cup of tea that is drunk as soon as it is made. Others endure for decades. Getting along with the neighbors and keeping in touch with relatives are part of keeping the house. Why is it that our civilization is so attentive to the economies of scale and blind to the economies of combination?
    When Alice talked about the challenges of managing the work of creative people in research and development, it was clear that what she was doing was rescuing them from an excess of multiplicity so that they could concentrate. She carried the integration in her own head. This meant setting aside the technical work she had done with pleasure for years and learning a different kind of creativity that is nearly invisible. “If a project is very complex, someone has to know how to break it down. You have to know how to parcel a problem out in sections in order to have little achievement pieces to give the impetus to go on to the next.
    “There are two things about dealing with creative people. One is acknowledging their creativity, exploring it with them, getting them to commit to doing something other than just talking about it, and the other is helping them, because it’s a hard process and they can get discouraged, and then you want to be there to talk with them about the latest problem and make them able to go back to it. But the advantage of dealing with creative people is that they really want to finish their creations. They need those little helps when they’ve lost confidence in what they’re doing, and they need to hear from somebody else that they are on track. The thing that keeps them going isn’t just charisma—that’s what hooks them in—it’s achieving. The more one does it, the more one interacts, the quicker one can set up the situation in which they can achieve and recognize that. You can’t just walk in when everything is yucked up and say, there there, this is really wonderful. Frequently, when you’re exploring some blockage, just doing it is like holding up a mirror, so they can see what they have achieved, and that’s more important than the actual advice you give.
    “Jack and I were a good team because he always wanted impossible things done, which I always loved. I could see in watching others at what point they got unsure of themselves, so I’d go and talk calmly with them. He would make the impossible demands and then I would break them down in pieces so people wouldn’t fall totally apart, and just keep plugging and doing little things to ensure that one would have results. That was very satisfying. In a hi-tech company, new things have to come on-line all the time, a continuous evolution with one product stable while another is changing. I could lose some of my smartest people if they got bored.
    “Jack had gotten used to getting quick results, so while I was debugging the initial system, he was driving me crazy because there wasn’t anything he could really do except breathe very heavily on the back of my neck. I’d say, here he comes, he’s going to breathe again. He was wonderful when there were lots of ideas starting, going around and making sure every pot came to a serious boil. There were lots of things he didn’t know anything about, so he had to ask questions, and you couldn’t just answer with bullshit. It forced people to think. There was this wonderful period where some of us would be working together and doing experiments, and in the process of explaining to Jack it would become clear where the weaknesses were. That