COLUMN: Learning from the Trenches

From Max Page's, "Office Hours," Fall '95 From Max Page's, "Office Hours," Fall '95I admit it: I gloated. The sight of 20-something investment analysts at Drexel Burnham Lambert scuttling out of the bankrupt firm's corporate headquarters a few years ago, with personal computers under their arms and ravaged looks on their faces, moved me and many other Americans to spiteful laughter that only comes with the sweet taste of revenge. In recent weeks, this editorial page has been surrounded on all sides by genteel summons from investment banks and management consulting firms like the Blackstone Group and McKinsey, Goldman, Sachs and Legg Mason. And those seniors who manage to avoid the siren's call of Wall Street, will in all likelihood be drawn into the whirlpool of corporate law. Even as the great greedy ship of the '80s finally sinks, the mentality that Penn graduates should leap from elite educations to top positions in business and government persists. It is worth asking, however, what it means for our country that our leaders know only corporate board rooms and nothing of the factory floor or the welfare office. I wonder if in our quest for salaries or influence greater than our parents ever had, our generation has failed to learn the lessons of leadership. My vindictive pleasure at Drexel's downfall came in part from indignation at the excessive '80s but also from envy. During my senior year of college, I made a pledge to myself that I would resist those boardrooms, the lure of fast money and instant power. For an impressionable 21year old, at a college where nearly half of the graduating class submitted their resumes to Prudential Bache, it seemed an act of great courage to resist the easy call of Wall Street. Instead I thought I would put my talents and energies to use in helping to run the homeless shelters of New York City. I realize now that while I stayed away from the fountain of Wall Street I still drank heavily of its inspirational waters. If my friends were going to be youthful finance wizards, I was going to be the whiz kid of the public sector, at 22 gallantly riding into New York to solve the seemingly insurmountable problem of homelessness. I worked in a low-paying, public sector job I believed in, but I made sure to work high up in the administration, "close to heaven" as we in the central office called it. Unconsciously hoping that I could mimic the power of my Wall Street friends in an ethically responsible manner, I sought a path that would take me to the top, fast. My job up in the clouds required that I spend my days reading and writing memos about drug and alcohol problems whose effects I had never witnessed, horrendous shelter conditions which I had rarely seen, and physical and sexual abuse of our female residents with whom I had never spoken. Despite reading every article and report on homelessness, I realized that I knew little about the realities of being homeless or what our shelters did or didn't do to help those we were hired to serve. Just as my friends a few blocks south sifted millions from computer account to computer account, like sand in their not-so-distant sand boxes, I too "crunched" numbers: Numbers about the "client census count," "Code 3 violations," and MICA (mentally ill, chemical abuser) clients. I was only a little more connected to the people behind these numbers than my friends were to the workers and communities affected by their investment decisions. It was then that I jumped off the fast track and headed to work in a shelter for single homeless women, where I encountered the living, breathing human beings behind policy papers and bureaucratic procedures. There was Tracy, who, like an obscenely large number of our women that no statistic had revealed, had "graduated" from foster care at age 21 and had come directly to the shelter system. I tried -- only partially successfully -- to break the cycle in which she stole from the staff, disappeared for two week crack binges, and returned hostile to all help. I worked with 24-year-old Doreen who had escaped the beatings of her husband. For her, living in the shelter was a boon: For the first time in her life she was on her own. Each woman brought a unique story of victimization, societal neglect, individual resilience and persistent obstacles. The futility of New York's homeless shelter system, its inevitable failure as public policy, only became clear to me from this, the worm's eye view, as it never had from the bird's eye view downtown. At 60 Hudson and 250 Church Streets, there were plans, and the plans seemed to make sense. But at the shelter level, the contradictions became tragically clear. The system was built on incentives and punishments to force people to obtain jobs which did not exist or were too low-paying to allow them to leave the shelter in the required 90 days. Following the perverse logic of this universe, the lucky ones found jobs as security guards at other shelters. While a homeless shelter is a unique -- and bizarre -- environment, many of the issues I had to wrestle with are similar to those I would encounter in any workplace: What customers (in this case shelter "clients") want and need and what they respond to, what makes workers more satisfied and produce better work, what systematic glitches can stop the whole machine. I learned things I never would have learned had I stayed in the central offices. For "close to heaven" also means far from earthy reality. These experiences are the kind that every person who hopes to call themselves a leader should have, whether in government, the non-profit sector, or even on Wall Street. In our society, which is increasingly based on detached interaction offered by faxes and e-mail, homeshopping and computer investing, working at the places where school boards meet, shoes are sold, computers are assembled, or soup is served, can be the start of the reaction that changes a young, eager employee into a leader. I'm not just advocating that young people wait their turn -- "do their time" -- like our parents allegedly did. I simply believe, and know from experience, that you can't be effective in the high command until you've learned from working in the trenches.