Dan Erwin

“Once a thief, always a thief.”

I keep a record of interesting statements I’ve heard people make or picked up from a book, movie or the web. This blog title surfaced in a very unusual situation and remains unforgettable even though from nearly forty years ago. It also reminds me that I function best in opposition.

Here’s the context. Shortly after I finished my PhD thesis in the summer of 1984, I got a phone call from my University of Minnesota advisor, Bob Scott. Scott knew that I’d started a business and wondered if I might still have three hours a week to teach a semester course on basic communication at the maximum-security prison in Oak Park Heights.

He’d had difficulty getting any of his recent grads to take on the responsibility. That made sense. The prison was brand new, just three years old, but also housed the most dangerous criminals not only from Minnesota but also from other states as well. It was a level 5 maximum security prison where some high-profile inmates had also been housed. I had no concerns, so I said yes immediately. He gave me the contact at the prison and told me the time to get there to start the classes, indicating that the warden would offer a few rules for my activity and security. The warden was gracious, indicating that there were two tv cameras in the room and that most of the group hoped to eventually get out of prison. And that there need be no concerns about safety since all the group was working on a college degree. They had been told that if they earned a college degree, it would be helpful for the parole board and for a job if they ever got out of prison. The only rules he offered were to never give out my phone number or home address. Anything else I wanted to tell them was strictly up to me.

I’d had a diverse set of experiences before I got there: raised in an upper middle class family and church in post war Detroit area, worked in a Detroit factory for a year, associate minister at a well-educated, upper-middle class church in Pasadena, developed a thriving community of worshippers and a gorgeous architectural building in the university town of Boulder, Colorado, pastored a major church in Flagstaff, Arizona, that included hundreds of students, more than 50 faculty families from NAU as well as a broad section of townspeople, developed a new program of communication and preaching at a Minnesota theological seminary, and then taught a semester of preaching for priests-to-be at St John’s Seminary in Collegeville.

When my advisor called, I was in the process of developing a free-lance business consultancy. But I thought the experience of teaching the incarcerated would provide me with a still more diverse set of human insights.  That’s what brought my agreement.  

When I walked into the classroom, I saw there were about a dozen students in short rows like a typical small classroom. There was, however, one guy sitting on the right side of the classroom with his back against the wall. I briefly introduced myself, commenting that I’d taught speech on numerous occasions. They could call me Dan. And the best place to begin was to hear from each of them.

A Memoir: Unconscious Humanist

For the last fifteen or so years, many of my blog postings have been circling around the issues and tools of personal and career development. So, I’ve written about observable competencies, the specific abilities like managing your boss, dealing with difficult people, building coalitions, and even doing small talk. But in all my blogging I’ve never revealed my proprietary process, the specific actions I take to develop the observable competencies. Initially, because it was a clear competitive advantage distinguishing my service from the hundreds of psychologists digging around in the business sandbox. But secondarily because execs aren’t really interested in understanding the development processes. They were plenty interested in manufacturing processes, but not in the largely interpersonal or cognitive development processes. They just wanted to me bring these tools, the competencies unique to their needs and coach them.

The third reason, candidly, is that I’d been playing with my model for so many years that my process system was largely unconscious. Indeed, there’s a strong sense that I didn’t prepare for business, but my life prepared me for it. So, I didn’t choose my business: it chose me. Furthermore, I didn’t recognize until the summer of 2024 that all the sources for these processes, competencies and even my coaching lie within the humanities--until my close friend, Bill Bellinger, Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at Baylor University, asked me to write a paper on the usefulness of the humanities in life and career.

History
So begin with the fact that the process tools of personal development and ultimate career success are not only built bit-by-bit, but they continually expand through our use and experience with them. Much like learning to play the piano or any other instrument. The more you work with them, the more difficult compositions you can play. 

It’s pretty clear from years of experience and observation that the simple, most foundational process competency is analysis. The first of five: analysis, questioning, reflection, narration and creativity. And the five are clearly interrelated. Notice also, given the context, these process competencies can become observable business competencies. Narrative, for example, is often also used for selling services or products to customers. 

This bit-by-bit orientation to process competency has a personal history that goes back at least to my 4th grade fascination with kid-fiction--specifically detective stories. But about the same time, the orientation quickly lapped over into my piano studies, culminating between 1950 and ‘52, with a superb artist and teacher who completed her studies under the great Beethoven exponent, Artur Schnabel. She would demonstrate how to break out more difficult passages into small bits for analysis, sometimes just the notes of a single bar: one hand, then two hands. All this, making the compositions more obvious and thus, usually more playable. I used that model to explain how to listen to what’s being said while paying attention to the important subtexts that are not being said. An interesting form of simultaneous cognitive multi-tasking.

Years later, the organizational specialist, Karl Weick, while at Cornell, drew the same conclusion in a 1984 study called “Small Wins.”

Is Your Anger Functional or Dysfunctional?

Over the years I’ve met with clients and business people who were resistant to working with a colleague because he or she was an “angry asshole.” But when I analyzed their statement by talking to other colleagues, I found that so-called “angry” people were a very mixed bag. Their anger differed significantly. It took me awhile to figure out that some anger served a useful purpose and some did not. But that the differences are rarely clear to most people. What I learned was that it was often helpful and enlightening to push back on “useful” anger, but that I was liable to get burned by another person’s anger.

Intuitively, I could usually figure out the anger that was being displayed, knowing whether to charge ahead or back off. Furthermore, in my seminary studies (1960) I had stumbled across a very insightful statement by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable and crimes unchecked.” That single statement had caused me to rethink

Over the years I’ve met with clients and business people who were resistant to working with a colleague because he or she was an “angry asshole.” But when I analyzed their statement by talking to other colleagues, I found that so-called “angry” people were a very mixed bag. Their anger differed significantly. It took me awhile to figure out that some anger served a useful purpose and some did not. But that the differences are rarely clear to most people. What I learned was that it was often helpful and enlightening to push back on “useful” anger, but that I was liable to get burned by another person’s anger.

Intuitively, I could usually figure out the anger that was being displayed, knowing whether to charge ahead or back off. Furthermore, in my seminary studies (1960) I had stumbled across a very insightful statement by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable and crimes unchecked.” That single statement had caused me to rethink