Dan Erwin

A Gorgeous Black Voice

Some experiences have to be shared. And my best, most intimate friend is always ready to respond. After sixty years of friendship, the affection, emotions and intimacy were inevitable for John and me. He's always been a close friend. Here's how it surfaced. 

I was on my phone, holding for a technician to help me resolve a computer problem. Expecting silence, I got the glories of Saint-Saens from Samson and Delilah.The song went on with the rich, emotionally dark sounds of “my heart at the sound of your voice,” with even the harp and a wailing clarinet or oboe in the distance. And then the half-falsetto of the tenor’s response.  Entranced I hoped the technician wouldn’t come on too soon. I wanted to hear the end of the aria.

So, it finished. Then the technician came on, “how may I help you sir?” I was stopped in my tracks by her voice.

We interacted for probably thirty seconds, then I interrupted. “You have an absolutely gorgeous Black voice,” I said. I could hear her smiling over the phone as she said, “Why, thank you sir.” Without waiting, I asked that she send kudos to the choice of music. “I’d never heard Saint-Saens while waiting for a technician.”

Then she went on with her questions and directions. In the middle of it, she stopped and without any context, she asked, “how did you know?” “I used to be a singer,” I said. “And I first heard Leontyne Price in the early 1960’s. I’d never heard such gorgeous sounds. I learned that only Blacks can make that sound. And that it is present in their linguistic placement of sound.” To my surprise and delight, she confessed, “I wanted to do opera, but I wasn’t good enough.” She was oozing with warmth and intelligence. You could recognize it in the vocabulary she chose, the arrangement of her words, the way she framed her questions and answered with unusual clarity, quite capably moving the conversation along to achieve both our objectives. And so, she fixed my computer problems, then taught me how to do it for myself—and wished me the very best.

I leaned back—to a flood of emotions. I remembered sitting with my beloved wife in concert—now gone more than a dozen years. She squeezed my wrist, turned briefly to me with a slight smile and glistening tears, for the first time hearing the inescapability of desire from Delilah.

As is often the case, I needed to share my experiences. So, I called my old friend and classmate, a psychologist, in the early stages of dementia. Well aware that we could talk freely and that just our conversation—any conversation about most anything--would make his day—and mine.

“How did you know?” he asked. “I would never recognize a speaking sound that clearly.” “There was,” I responded, “a rounded, warm, empathic sound, built into her voice--not sharp or edgy. It’s a very distinguishing placement of sound. You can never hear it in another race. And of course, it’s not true of all Black females, but there it was in her voice. Many tenors,” I continued, “often come from Spanish, Italian or Latin background. It’s their bright and shining sound, the linguistics demanded by the original language resulting in a unique timbre. Say, Pavarotti, Domingo or Carreras. If you listen closely to Frank Sinatra, you can also hear it in his records. It really shows up in his falsetto.” So, my dear friend added, “You gave her a gift she will never forget. Perhaps the best gift.”

[For fun, track down “Nessun Dorma” on Youtube, with Jose Carreras (Spaniard) and Jonas Hoffman (German) and the different linguistic placements become clear—even to the untrained ear. Both create gorgeous sound. The Spaniard bright and shining. The German rich and full. [Take your pick.]

And then my friend was off, reminding me of an experience we had had a few days before our seminary graduation in 1962. We had gone out for lunch. A very attractive waitress had taken our order and was walking back to another client with glasses of wine on her tray. He was eyeing her. “You can’t have that,” I said. He broke up in laughter, but I reminded him he was going to be teaching in a church school. A couple more sentences, and he thought that I was referring to the woman, but I was referring to drinking wine in his new church college position. It still brings a laugh to both of us. Today, we both enjoy a good glass of wine or a taste of bourbon together on a rare occasion. And today, I reminded him that we were listening to the Adagietto of the Mahler Fifth on the way to that restaurant. “I would never have remembered that,” he responded. “God, those were wonderful memories.”

Immune to Fraud?

With my extensive educational background in communication, up to and beyond a PhD, a breadth of work experiences in the church and the seminary, a college class for prisoners in a maximum security prison, and years in an international consulting business with leaders from some of the finest companies in the world, I thought I was smart enough to evade the fraudulent tricksters of the internet world. Especially since I’m a specialist in the arts of persuasion and influence.

I was wrong. 

As a supportive Dad, I decided to buy a fine Bose headphone for one of my daughters. So, I went online and found what I thought was the Bose site, noticing that their $350 headphone was on a special, week-end sale for just $200. Now, I’m also no computer or internet innocent. I’ve been computer literate since 1983, the first year of the desktop. And I was educated to the intranet by some 3M clients before the internet and the world wide web came into existence. In 1992, some Pillsbury techies educated me to the web just a few months after it was opened to public use.

But this smart, well-educated guy really got suckered by some Chinese fraudsters who had created a Bose look-a-like website and was making a great offer. I bought! The “Bose” never came. How did that happen? Simple. My emotions got in the way of my well-educated brain. And the “opportunity” was just a spur-of-the moment gift for one of my daughters. Something dads like to do.

Don’t get emotional.

Anger Intelligence Is the Most important Competency. . . Not Anger Management

There’s a genuine distinction between anger intelligence and anger management. Some have a few, healthy anger management skills, but it seems to me that very few people have anger intelligence competencies. Indeed, I suspect most have never thought about anger intelligence. It is however, a historical study.

Anger is usually viewed as a disrupting, destructive emotion, especially in business — unless, of course, you’re a well-placed executive without those limitations. The religious typically view anger as bad stuff, something we should set aside and, to quote St. Paul, never go to sleep with. Paul, however, never kept his own rule. So like most generalities, there are exceptions. Indeed, there are times when anger is strategic, and also times when it’s simply not useful to set anger aside, much less forgive the target of your anger.

To be clear, studies have shown that anger evolved as a means to help us express feelings of being undervalued. Showing anger signals that if we aren’t treated fairly or if we don’t get treated fairly, it’s going to cost the other person(s) either harm or benefits. It’s that emphasis I want you to consider.

“NAPOLEON:” More Ridley Scott

Over the holiday I saw Scott’s Napoleon. When I walked out of the movie, my daughter asked what I thought of the movie. I paused, and then said, “I don’t know.”

“That’s an unusual comment, “she responded, remembering that I have a PhD in critical tools.

I usually like Scott’s stuff, but when I thought about this movie, I finally decided that he missed his opportunity. The movie just didn’t make much sense to me. It had scenes of big wars and bonking attractive females. But there was actually no

How to Live to Become a Healthy Ninety-Year Old

I just turned a very healthy 89 years old. What’s intriguing about it are all the questions I get. At least eight or ten times over the past four months, people have asked about my  age. After being asked that often, I’m a bit “ho hum” about it. What’s the big deal? Another day. Another year.

On a couple of  occasions, I set up my audience to ask my age in order to make a point. But the rest of the questions were out of the blue. On my trip to Italy early this year, observing my active stance, a number of young people asked my age. One tourist, an athletic trainer from Ireland, had my picture taken with him standing beside me to show to his father, a seventy-year-old who’s “not taking care of himself."

But surprisingly, as soon as I respond to the request about my age, no matter the conversation, it turns immediately to one question: “How did you do that?”

How to Keep Your Enemies Closer Than Your Friends

In April 2015, I wrote a blog questioning, “Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer?” With an excess of 30,000 reads of that post, it obviously identified a real need of a great many people.  The post provided a rationale for the issue, not least that you can learn a lot from people you dislike, gain a different perspective and make it easier for your allies to work with you. But it only addressed strategies for working with enemies and difficult people in a cursory fashion.

Near as I can tell, there are two vocations that absolutely require a person to keep their enemies closer just to keep their job: elected politicos and Protestant church ministers. However, most business people recognize early on that they’re going to have to work with “enemies,” people they don’t especially like or trust--or pay the price in performance and sometime job loss.

So how can you keep your enemies closer?

Why Do Business Chameleons Get Ahead?

That's not a trick question. Chameleons have developed a number of important qualities and competencies. The chameleon's success is built on their ability to self-monitor for the sake of impression management. It’s not that they’re manipulative, but that they’re superb at assessing situations and exceptionally astute in adapting to organizational needs.

Most employees make getting ahead a very high objective. Promotions can drastically change the lives of both those who stay in a company and those who move to another company. Promotions do more than provide different job duties and better rewards. They can also change where you live and who you get to interact with. In today’s high-pressured workplace, gaining new skills and working with different and more capable people can help keep you on the learning curve—and provide for job security.

Recently, studies have assessed the power of personality traits to impact promotion and rewards. The studies have ignored the actual performance of individuals and focused, for example, on the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism. Systematic studies have found that personality can predict job performance fairly well—but only under certain conditions. In fact, you may have lots of job relevant talent and personality traits, like conscientiousness and extraversion, but nevertheless fail to gain power or get promoted. . .

Rumors of Conspiracy Are a Normal Part of History

Not just national or international history. Even my own history. As a twenty-year old rumors of conspiracy terrified me. No longer. History provides me with a healthy antidote: Richard Hofstadter.

I graduated from college in 1959, a few years before Richard Hofstadter's essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics came out in Harper's. As an associate in a Pasadena (California) church, the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society were driving me nuts. One of the promulgators of conspiracy, a retired naval officer and member of the "society" was teaching in adult classes. The senior minister, a swell guy, but utterly gutless, let it go on and on. I was a history major, so I was familiar with American conspiracy theories. I was amazed how many in that well-educated, upper-middle-class church were believers in the process. . .

How We Unknowingly Sabotage Our Own Conversation

    Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. From “The Princess Bride” by William Goldman.

More and more the role of conversation in business is beginning to get attention among businesspeople and the professions. There are a number of reasons for that. But the most important reason is that without effective, enlightening and articulate conversation skills, professionals get ignored. Including professionals with top competencies in their field.

Just a short time ago, I was in a group of professionals discussing the role of artificial intelligence. I noticed, much to my chagrin, one of the brightest guys was often ignored. So I turned on my rhetorical talk-ware to understand why.

In just a few minutes I figured out why: he was sabotaging his ideas with “hedging.” Amazing that hedging can result in power loss, but there it was, right in front of us. And I’m certain he was totally unaware of what his hedging was doing to him and his ideas.

Sometimes hedging is just a verbal tic. But a significant group of generally smart professionals periodically shoot themselves in the foot with its use. They can resolve a problem, break it down into bits and pieces for a solid resolution--and even explain their rationale. But along the way their input loses its credibility for a simple reason: hedging. They don’t understand that hedges limit their credibility.

It’s not just the overly-polite Upper Midwesterners who hedge, but New Yorkers, Virginians and even Californians. Furthermore, it’s not just women who do it: a surprising share of men do the same thing. This small behavior happens too frequently—and inevitably means...we miss out on great ideas and highly creative solutions. And the guy who hedges, gets ignored.

What’s hedging?
A hedge can take different forms. It can be in the shape of a clause, word, hesitation or tone--used to soften the impact of what’s being said. It may be an attempt to defer to the other person, to be polite or avoid bragging. The original motivation for hedging stems from caring about how one is perceived. Over the long term the hedge becomes habituated—and unconscious. And the hedge is habituated into the person’s speech and sound even when there is no concern about another’s perceptions. The response? A tune-out.

“This is kind of the way I think it is.”  The tone in the hedge is usually soft with a sense of questioning built into the sound. The hedge? “Kind of.”

“This is right?” The intonation on the last word is a question with built-in pleading for agreement and acceptance. It’s an unnecessary and destructive caveat.

"It's Just African. . .

It’s a stereotype, a racial stereotype. But is it negative, positive or neutral? One thing is certain: identifying African behavior as stereotypical is dangerous stuff.

I've learned from experience to issue caveats about most any racial or ethnic stereotype, admit to stereotyping and beg forgiveness--especially before using an ethnic or racial stereotype. Even then, you're liable to have to push through assumptions, in spite of the fact that the use of stereotype can be highly valuable for explaining behavior.

However, one of my young friends recently expressed his frustration at Nigerian and Somali friends who call to say they're in town and want to go out for a drink the same night. After experiencing this behavior on numerous occasions, he asked why they don't ever give him advance notice so that he won't have to reschedule his time to meet with them. They both responded, "It’s just African." In our diverse culture that kind of information can be highly useful.

7 Reasons Why I will Never Retire

This is not for fifty-year-olds, but for thirty-year-olds—who, thankfully,  are also the greatest number of my readership. Besides, a lot of people in their forties and fifties have already made their decisions for good or ill. I’m writing this because the earlier you make the decision, the better prepared you’ll be for never retiring.

I decided shortly after I reached 50 years that I’d never retire. Now, at 88 years, it’s one of the four or five best decisions I’ve ever made. Initially my decision was about the fact that I love my business and my profession. Not least because it’s been exceptionally lucrative, making possible a lot of things that I’d only dreamed about.  But as time has gone on, I’ve realized that there are many more reasons than just loving my lucrative business. My decision has surfaced many reasons for never retiring, reasons that were not obvious to a 50-year-old, even within my wide knowledge base.

First, people who continue working have the best health future. I have a high school classmate who was university faculty until his retirement at 70. I chatted with him a short while ago, just checking in on him and how he felt. His response to my question was that he was “bored.” His health shows it. He’s diabetic with a neuropathy, overweight, limited in his ability to get around, and living with his wife in a way-too-small retirement apartment. No question but what you can have plenty of diseases while working, but work often focuses your brain on health. Jobs usually require basic health and so taking care ourselves simply because we’re still working is inevitable for many of us.