Thank you for this award. Especially to Marilyn Schoeman Dow who I’ve heard put you up to this. I spend my days giving commendations, not getting them. And it’s particularly startling to be commended for something that has annoyed the hell out of the people in my life who had other ideas about what I should be doing.

Creativity—AKA making it up as you go along—you know people who think that’s too odd to be tolerated. It’s got to be stamped out. It’s great to be in an assemblage of people who want more of it.

Making it up for me included making up a job I was willing—even delighted—to do, after years of trying to fit into slots created by others. It was always a lousy fit. Mainly because employee creativity was not exactly high on my employers’ agendas.

I worked for a few small outfits like the US Maritime Administration, the State Department, USIA, AT&T, and IBM. I usually managed to get myself into a little subset Tom Peters would have called a skunkworks, and Gifford Pinchot would describe as “intrapreneurs.” Whatever name you choose, it’s where the oddballs cluster and work, under the radar of anti-creativity forces.

At AT&T, I was on a small team that was making films for the company. Their Basking Ridge studio was state-of-the-art, a technically exciting place. I was in that studio in 1982 when word blasted through to set up a closed-circuit broadcast from Washington DC for an announcement by the CEO, Charlie Brown. His face came on the monitors, describing the deal he had just signed to break up Ma Bell.

It looked to me like he had pulled off the coup of the century, offloading parts of the company that were stagnant and holding those that were the most promising and profitable. This rocking-chair company was suddenly a rocket ship. Or to use Michael Beyerlein’s great image from earlier today, the massive, lumbering tanker was breaking up into a fleet of speedboats.

But looking around me, I saw my exuberant reaction to this prospect was not shared. I saw tears. I saw ashen faces. Creativity, making new things up—manning rockets or piloting speedboats—was not what people there had signed on for. They wanted good old predictable, invariable Ma Bell.

A few decades of such experiences of no creativity @ work, helped convince me that I was going to have to make up my own work world.

Creating the Giraffe Heroes Project gave me the chance at a day job that fully uses my ideas on how people and operations should be managed, my personal skills, and my deep concerns for the health of the body politic.

I seem to have created a game others want to play. The Project has consistently attracted such marvelous people, it’s a pleasure to get up in the morning and head for the office.

Next week a faculty member at Davidson College in NC is flying across country to volunteer in our office for a month. One of her email messages said, “I’ve read your whole web site and your work is absolutely creative and subversive. I can’t wait to get there and help.”

She got that right. And I’m wondering how often creativity is indeed subversive.

The Giraffe Heroes Project works across a broad spectrum of ages, from preschoolers who listen to the adventures of our mascots Stan Tall & Bea Tall, to adults who come to our website and our workshops. To all of them we deliver the subversive message that they can make it up, that their concerns matter, that their actions matter, that they can invent their own responses to life’s challenges.

We offer all of them the stories of Giraffe Heroes, people who are living their lives creatively, bravely, compassionately, changing things that need to be changed, making it up as they go along.

In classrooms, we then say, “Go see who you can find who’s living this way and come back to tell the class those stories.” When the kids are full of these exemplars of meaningful lives, they’re ready and eager to move into concerned action themselves, doing real things in the real world that make a difference, and we show them how do do that successfully.

I believe that the kids who’ve had the experience of making up service projects and seeing them have an impact won’t settle for life as consumers. They’ll be citizens.

That should be a goal of public education in a democracy—to foster caring, involved citizens.

We want people who can bring skills, curiosity, integrity and creativity to the American workplace because our country desperately needs creativity for our economy, and strong citizens for our republic.

Giraffe materials work on that citizenship part and it’s appalling that we’re subversive—for doing what ought to be the work of public education. But citizenship and creativity are not being instilled into kids in the system.

The more I work with our schools, infiltrating the system with Giraffe materials, the more I think we’re lucky if there’s an iota of creativity left in any of us.

I speak from unfortunate experience. I was one of the “good” kids, jumping through all the hoops, but with this underlying mutter of back talk—

“Are you serious?”

“What if we did it this way?”

“There’s a bigger picture here and the tiny peek you’re taking at it is just too small. There’s a link to that material over there, in another class, maybe even to things happening outside the school, in the real world.”

“How come you think it’s great that I get As on tests when I know I don’t remember a word of the material—and it doesn’t seem to matter that I don’t?” “Why do you keep filling up my time with busy work when I’d rather be reading everything I can get my hands on?”

I was still thinking—and muttering—that way when I showed up for work—such an annoying young person.

But I wasn’t wrong. I have as my witness many wise people who have studied our system of compulsory education and reported that it’s an appallingly effective stifler of creativity.                                              top

If you want to understand what our schools are doing, I urge you to read the works of Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto. You won’t be happy with what you learn from them. After 30 years in the classroom Gatto stood up to accept an award as New York’s Teacher of the Year, and his acceptance speech must have taken the paint off the walls.

He told the shocked audience that he teaches kids seven things:

Gatto is saying that we’re schooling kids to be drones, not creators. There will always be kids like Frank Conroy whose imagination, curiosity and fervor for life survive their schooling, but it ain’t easy to do that.

On the plane coming down here, I was reading Conroy’s memoir of growing up in spite of the deadening effects of his schooling—he describes cutting classes and faking his way to barely passing grades because he needed the time to read five books at once, to explore the real world, to teach himself to play jazz piano. You read him, you see a brilliant, curious, talented creator at work, and you thank God he didn’t buy into his schooling.

Life in School, the comic strip, absolutely nailed what’s going on in the mind of a bright kid trapped in the classroom Gatto describes:

Teacher’s voice: Now class, who can tell me the purpose of what we have learned today? Anyone?

The kid, thinking to himself: To be dull little sheep. To knuckle under to petty authority. To avoid all fundamental criticism of the powers that be. To regard those who are different with suspicion and contempt. To always go with the prevailing belief.

I’m waiting.

To fill our brains with facts without stimulating mental activity. To make us get used to meaningless busy work in preparation for our boring adult jobs. To keep us off the streets till we’re eighteen. Well here goes…

Yes. You there in the back.

Teacher, today we learned the importance of good citizenship, civic pride, and keeping our desks tidy.

Thank you. That was very good.

Last frame: And to be devious little weasels.

 Great. Just what we need. Devious little weasels arriving @ work and @ the polls, taking up places in our communities.

If you want creativity to bloom @ work in the future, look to the schools!

We need education that helps kids make up lives that don’t always drop into prefabbed patterns. We need them to know that if you’re out of the box, there’s a whole lot more room to move about—room to create the innovations of the future. We need creators coming out of schools and moving into the world of work.

For some of us, it’s a long time coming. Sometimes I feel like introducing myself by saying, “My name is Ann and I’m recovering from a public education.”

It’s taken a while. There’s a quote over my desk from Miles Davis. It says, “Sometimes you have to play a long time to play like yourself.”

I didn’t start the GHP until I was in my 50s! It wasn’t until then that I was clear enough about myself and the world that I could launch into my own work despite being told it was absurd, that it was impossible.

We need people of all ages—fresh out of school or late in life—who will put Walt Disney’s low-key, wonderful statement on their walls: “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

We even need thinkers and doers who can follow the wild lead of the Dutch artist Escher, who shows us mind-boggling realities where stairways defy gravity, walls are both interior and exterior, and hands draw themselves. Escher said, “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check.”

On a more sober note, I leave you with something we say to everyone who encounters the Giraffe Heroes Project. You might ask it of people you come upon who are hesitating to live and work creatively.

It’s a quote from the wonderful poet Mary Oliver: “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.”

May it be creative.###