The Long and the Short of It

The Long and the Short of It

          We have all heard about the UN report that gives us a dozen years to take corrective action before the climate change battle is irretrievable lost.  That report, while falling on seemingly deaf Trumpster ears, has made the EU sit up and get even more serious than they have been about addressing the root causes of things like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  Running a business called Low Emissions Resources Corporation and having our scientific and testing laboratories in Scotland (which is and was presumed incorrectly to be in the future, a part of the EU) and having decided to place our first pilot plant in northern Italy (squarely in the EU both politically and geographically), this is of interest to me.

          On this particular day I am sitting in my office at the tip of Lower Manhattan, looking out at a steamy hot harbor and knowing that when I set foot outside the front door of the building soon to go for lunch, I will be putting myself in a heat wave convection oven.  I have seen the maps of the Eastern United States and seen the widespread impact of this mid-summer heat wave and it is startling.  I do not want to be Chicken Little and declare the sky to be falling, but I also do not want to be the unnamed frog that is enjoying his warm bath while he is being boiled from the inside out.

          I have received two specific notifications this morning, forwarded to me by my Head of HR, who is probably sweltering up at her un-air-conditioned summer house in Columbia County, where generations of West-Siders (she is technically now a straddling West-Sider and Harlemite thanks to the soft Manhattan real estate market) have gone to escape the City heat.  Those notices are from the building and from the City of New York (specifically from Mayor Bill DeBlasio, activist-extraordinaire and wannabe Presidential candidate).  The building has stated that they are powering down the building in all sorts of ways after 11am (I am now in the bewitching hour) to conserve energy per the requests of Con Ed and the City.  DeBlasio is being more pointed and specific in his notification, saying that while we are under heat wave advisory conditions we are all commanded to turn our air conditioning up to 78 degrees or higher.  For the record, that is 10 degrees warmer than I like it.

          The other night at dinner we had a Flash Flood Advisory due to heavy rains.  My and every other iPhone in the restaurant went off with that loud claxon alarm that we have come to expect from Amber Alerts, but are also now being used for national weather service and other public safety alerts of significance.  I never downloaded anything to make that alert system active, so I imagine someone in power somewhere decided that I should have no choice in the matter and that public safety announcements were not optional beyond whether I choose to own an iPhone or not.  That alone is a fairly scary change in human liberty.  What used to be a notice being hammered on a post in the town square or yelled out by a town crier is now reaching us wherever we are and no matter what we are doing.  We must be so advised and that is that.  I am expecting a heat wave advisory any moment.

          So I am breaking new ground today here in the office.  Casual Fridays are a phenomenon that has pervaded the New York City workplace for probably twenty years or more.  I know that managerially there were all sorts of rules governing what people could wear on Fridays (it was actually at first summer Fridays, but has morphed to any Friday).  We were concerned about inappropriate casualwear (too revealing, too raggedy, too casual) and we were concerned about a 20% reduction in business productivity if it impaired our client contact time, so the rule was no dress-down if there were clients to be seen.  Over that twenty years, Wall Street has clearly gone the more casual route with ties being the exception and extreme specialists (anything from traders to programmers to marketing and design types) being allowed even further leeway than dress slacks and open collar dress shirts.  Now when you see someone in jeans and a v-neck tee shirt and sneakers, it can be the CEO of the company (my youngest son so described his CEO of the publicly-traded company he started at this week).  My office is pretty casual to begin with (ties rarely worn and same for suits), and Fridays (especially in the summer) can easily trend very casual with no socks and polo shirts.  But today I am wearing cargo shorts and Crocs to the office for the first time in my life.  This is my attire in Southern California, not for a workday in Manhattan.

          Why do I feel it is OK to wear shorts and Crocs?  My children would clearly tell me that there is never a justification for wearing Crocs, but that is more a fashion than a workplace statement. Is this about the heat wave or a statement about global warming and my corporate need to signal the importance of our work?  Not really. Fridays in the summer, things are very quiet at the office anyway (only 3 or 4 of us chickens here right now and fewer by the minute I presume).  People can do what they need to do remotely these days and physical contiguity is really only needed a few times each week.  That is just the modern work environment.  I am a believer that commutation time actually decreases productivity so long as your staff is responsible and their tasks are managerially defined crisply enough.  Even the most buttoned-up companies have come to similar conclusions for many different rationales.  But does that still justify 360-pound 6’5” (and shrinking) Rich Marin wearing shorts to work and baring his knees for the office to see? Tough call.

          I was on a video conference call with London this morning.  After the business was conducted (our seven participants were spread out between New Jersey, Massachusetts, Upper Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, London, Spain and Colorado, and we are all trying to save the world).  This is the new virtual company reality.  If I could sublet our space to save money, I would.  But in the meantime, being the contrarian that I am, I chose to stand up and declare my wantonness by showing everyone on the video my shorts.  It felt like an important climate change statement to make to a group of people collectively working to salvage a small piece of the atmosphere from the ravages of hydrocarbon emissions.  I suspect that it was simply my need to fly my freak flag a bit for this otherwise buttoned-up multi-continental group.  My kids will be relieved to hear that they could only see my shorts and legs, but not my Crocs.  That would be, I agree, going too far.