Be a Dot

November 17, 2020 by Bill Berry in Leadership, Management, Stories

A few years ago, I was having lunch with a colleague. She was talking about trying to find her calling. At one point, I asked her what she thought my calling was. “I don’t know” came first, followed by, “Help people. I think your calling is to help people.”

I hadn’t thought about that kind of question in quite a while, but her answer seemed right. I’ve learned sometimes we need help figuring things out, including what we think about things.

During a different lunch conversation (I really miss having lunch with people!!), my companion asked a powerful question I hadn’t contemplated before: “How did you get to be you?”

How I Became a Bread Freak

April 25, 2020 by Bill Berry in Stories

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when I was about five years old, I was visiting my great-grandmother in Savannah, GA. One day she asked me what I'd like to have for dinner that evening and I answered the way I'd answer, even today. "Fried chicken," I exclaimed.

That afternoon, she went into the back yard, into the chicken coop, and executed a chicken. I wasn't there to watch that, or the plucking and cleaning.

What I do remember was learning of the event and not eating a single bite of chicken. I don't know if great-grandma was mad or anything; I was only five and, growing up in the city, I thought chicken came from the store.

I also remember eating her big fluffy biscuits. They were available, freshly baked, for every single meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I already loved them. But I think that night, eating biscuits and avoiding the meal I ask for every time, I became a bread freak.

Recipe for Bill E. Bob's Yeast Rolls

April 25, 2020 by Bill Berry in Stories

This recipe has evolved over the last 35 years. My wife Bari substituted vegetable oil for the lard in Paul Prudhomme's original recipe and adapted it for the food processor. I decided to use honey rather than sugar and started weighing things out, so it kind of became mine.

Enjoy!

P.S. Preparing this recipe inspired me to write, "How I Became a Bread Freak." Enjoy that too!

Makes 2 dozen rolls

HOW Does Music Make Us Feel?

April 18, 2020 by Bill Berry in Music, Stories

I'm reminded of a question I used to ask, "How does music make you feel?" Not how do you feel listening to this music, but exactly HOW does it do that? How does it make us feel the way we do when we hear it? I now know that's a trick question. The music doesn't make us feel … anything. It's our brain's interpretation of what we're hearing, our brain connecting what we hear to our history, our emotions, our past, our culture. That's how music makes us feel.

I now know that's a trick question. The music doesn't make us feel … anything. It's our brain's interpretation of what we're hearing, our brain connecting what we hear to our history, our emotions, our past, our culture. That's how music makes us feel.

That Time I Decided to Just Listen…

February 02, 2020 by Bill Berry in Stories, Leadership, Mindset

Once upon a time, I was fixing to get ready to walk into a leadership team-building workshop. While improving the team had sorta been my idea, past retreats hadn’t gone too well. They all seemed to focus on why I wasn’t like everybody else and I decided I wasn’t doing that again.

Before leaving home that morning, I wrote in my journal. The basic idea is to clear my head, empty my thoughts onto paper, and contemplate what I want to do that day. I always start with the date, followed by the name of a song that’s reverberating in my head. This day I chose a Eddie Harris song called “Listen Here!”

In keeping with the theme, I wrote myself the following instructions…

When Are You Going to Fix This?

January 06, 2020 by Bill Berry in Leadership, Stories

Whenever we'd cross paths in San Francisco, Jim Jefferson would always ask me the same question: "When are you going to fix this?" By "this" he was referring to everything in a pretty dysfunctional organization, so I always laughed. I thought of it as just a joke. A rhetorical question shared between two people who knew how hard fixing all this would be. Hard as in, "impossible!"

While Jim is no longer with us, his question now haunts me. Suppose he wasn't being rhetorical? Suppose Jim saw me as someone who really could fix it? At least put a big dent in it? Could that be true? Have I been underperforming all these years? Not trying enough (or hard enough)? Biting off less than I can chew? And, if so, why exactly?

Toni Morrison: “We do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

May 07, 2019 by Bill Berry in Writing, Stories

I just reread Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993. It is so elegantly stated, deeply meaningful, and prophetic. Read the passages I quote below and think about the path we’ve taken to our current time.

"She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

"The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas."

Better yet, read the entire lecture, perhaps right along with YouTube audio of Morrison’s actual lecture.

Arrival

May 27, 2018 by Bill Berry in Stories

I recently came across this great quote from Martha Graham:

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it.

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

“No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Well, that certainly got me thinking.

I am usually happy. I don’t know that I’ve always been. At the same time, I’m almost always focused on making something different happen. Something new.

I’m habitually and unconsciously dissatisfied with what is and want to make it new, different, better.

Maybe I like jazz because it's like that too. Nothing is ever the same as it was. Every performance is unique. Searching. That’s kind of the whole point!

It’s not my business to determine whether my contribution is good or bad, ugly or beautiful. I just have to get my ideas out there.

And do that again. And again. And again…

Being unsettled is a semi-permanent condition. But not apprehensive. I’m not anxious, fearful or dreadful. Certainly not at this moment.

In the moment. That’s another thing about jazz. Being right … there.

I always say that playing music, playing my bass, is like a mini-vacation. When I’m playing, I’m in that moment. Because I’m not good enough to play and think about anything else.

I have to listen. Keep time. Stop rushing — always!! Listen. Contribute. Listen.

Just listen.

It’s a beautiful thing.

OTOH, I hate listening to recordings of myself playing. I only hear the wrong notes. When I listen to a presentation I’ve done, all I hear is “… um.” Still, it’s not my business to determine how good it is…

I’m creative. My canvas is ideas. Or maybe ideas are my paint, my notes? Problems? Perhaps that’s the canvas…

I don’t own the ideas. I give them away (for pay) at work. Or for free. Doesn’t matter. I’ve got more.

I’ll produce more. Upon demand. I have to do it. I’m a world-class idea improvising machine. An idea artist.

Years ago I took the Strengthfinders test and learned “Ideation” was one of my top five. Ideation!

I finally get it! Thanks, Martha!

“And,” mutters to himself, “the ideas ramble on.”

Amen.

Exactly 500 words on blah blah blah…

February 21, 2018 by Bill Berry in Stories, Writing

They say the first draft is shit, so just put a whole lot of whatevers out there, because you're going to rewrite it anyway.

Not that I believe what "they" say, right?

I make mistakes. Sometimes they're doozies! Which contradicts the idea there are no mistakes. I mean, if you learn something, was it a mistake?

Blah. Blah. Blah.

So here's the deal…

Send Me Away

January 07, 2018 by Bill Berry in Stories, Management, Leadership

Once upon a time, things weren’t going so well at work. I can’t remember what we were arguing about, but I left my boss’s office, walked back to mine, and kind of sort of slammed the door. I sat behind my desk – in the dark – pissed!

After a while, one of my colleagues came in and said, “Bill you’re obviously having a bad day. Why don’t you just go home?”

I thought, “you mean I could do that?” While it hadn’t occurred to me, it was great advice!

I grabbed my coat and briefcase, told my assistant I was leaving for the day and started for home.

I walked across Central Park South. When I got to Lexington Avenue, the proverbial lightbulb went on.

I ambled into Bloomingdales and took the escalator up to the seventh floor. I went to the American Express Travel counter where a young woman asked how she could help me.

“Send me away,” I said.

“Where would you like to go?”

“I have no idea, but I obviously need a vacation.”

I walked out having booked a trip to Barbados. I think the hotel we selected was undergoing renovations, so my wife and I ended up going to Jamaica.

Sometimes we need a little advice. It helps to be open to it when it comes. Maybe it’ll get you out of yourself, out of a jam, and relaxing for five days on a beach in Montego Bay.

And make it easier for others to deal with you when you return.

It certainly worked for me!