My aim was to learn what kind of strategies these men use to get hired.  After all, what could be a more honest scene than one that has to be productive if a player wants to eat that night?  When lives literally depend on one’s behavior, how does one behave?  This is obviously far from scientific.  I draw no firm conclusions from it, and neither should anyone else.  But everything, even five minutes talking with day laborers outside a Home Depot, is a learning opportunity if you are open to it.

In my brief and chaotic encounter with the day laborers on the sidewalk in front of the Home Depot, here’s what I learned:

The loudest and most aggressive get the attention first, but the best communicators get the attention that lasts.  Communication that day begins with a surge of attention and energy coming my way in a ragged five-foot-six sweatshirted and baseball capped wave.  The wave has no shape, it’s pure cacophony as nearly every one of the 40 guys on the sidewalk clamors for attention.  The wave breaks and dissipates when I begin asking questions most of them don’t understand, and it becomes clear I’m not there to hire.   The multi-lingual players move front and center and focus fiercely on understanding what the tall gringo in the black fedora wants.

“Why do people hire you?  Who is the best at getting hired?  Why?  What do you tell people that gets you the job?  Do you work alone or in teams?”

A few of the men, younger than most of them, comprehend.  At this point, a minute in, the scene centers on three or four people, with the rest of the guys either walking away or lurking nearby to see where this is going.   Skill sets come up.  Yes, the young men in front say, knowing how to do many jobs is a plus.  They begin to recite all the skills they have…painting, dry wall, concrete, plumbing, floors, landscaping…”

One of them, name of Jose, stands out.  He is the most articulate and the one most capable of engaging in a dialogue.  He says that to get work it helps to speak English and Spanish, do many jobs well, and have friends who will bring you along when groups get hired.  And a business card, he says.  Here is my card.  He is the only one with a card.

I slip Jose twenty dollars and tell him to buy breakfast for an old guy standing near us, who looks like he’d be the last one out of this big group to get hired for the day.  Which means he has almost no chance of getting hired.

Getting hired for a day by a contractor to plaster walls in Echo Park has more in common than most of us would like to believe with finding work in the Networked World.   In a swirling, shifting job market, employment opportunities move like empty vans into a Home Depot parking lot.  The vans are not empty long.  We’d better be ready to attract a contractor’s attention, and when we have it, hold it.  A player needs a strategy, and a player must be prepared to improvise.

Here’s what I learned (or was reminded of) that day:

It helps to throw off a lot of energy at first, but that doesn’t last long.  Okay, so you made a big entrance, or delivered a killer initiation for the scene.  Now what?  Once you have an audience’s attention, what are you going to do with it?   What skills do you have that will expand and heighten the scene, and captivate your audience?  In a Home Depot parking lot and in the Networked World, it helps to have many skills.  If you’re in media, can you write, produce, direct, shoot and edit?  If you’re in law, can you arbitrate, negotiate, adjudicate, argue, defend, file…and market yourself?  If you’re in HR, are you versed in psychology, human sexuality, labor law, hiring practices?  If you’re working a staff job you hate can you navigate into doing something you love without missing a beat?

It helps to speak many languages, and I don’t necessarily mean spoken languages, though that certainly helps, especially if it’s Chinese.  (Chinese students are learning English at a way faster rate than American students are learning Chinese.  It cannot help but expand their opportunities for employment in the next 10-12 years.)  Humor is a language.  Programming obviously includes many languages.  Cloud Computing has its own lexicon, as does Sustainability, and almost every industry.  Golf can be a language you and a potential employer speak.  Or gaming.  Or travel.  Food.  Music.  The point is, always be adding to your vocabulary.  It will give you a broader audience.  It will help you engage in more productive dialogues with more potential employers.

In To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway wrote, ‘A man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.’  I think the boys in the Home Depot lot would understand that, and so should you.  When you’re part of a team, a tribe, an emotionally-bonded group (with the Home Depot boys it’s probably their hometowns in Guatemala, Nicaragua or Mexico that bind and define them), your opportunities are increased exponentially.  When your homie makes a connection with a contractor who ‘needs four for drywall,’ homes will bring you along on the job, and vice versa.  Your team gives you an opportunity to be of service to others.  In life, in work, in improvisation, supporting others is the strongest move you can make.

Lifelong employment with one company has pretty much dodo birded, which is to say it’s kaput, gone, extinct.  Work in the Networked World will be more project-based or brand-based than it was in the Industrial Age.  These days, a person can have five or six, or ten or twelve ‘careers’ in their working lives.  Nothing wrong with that.  It can lead to rich and rewarding experiences.  It can also be hugely disruptive, especially when young families are caught up in it.  The people who navigate these swirling waters best, those who are captains of their own destiny,  communicate best.  And they never stop learning.

Here is Jose’s business card.  If you’re in the L.A. area and need someone to do Painting–or Drywall or Taping or Linoleum or Roofing or Gardening or Plaster or Sprinklers or Stucco or Block or Hardwood Flooring or Cement or Ceramic Tile–give him a call.

Improv Everywhere is a worldwide federation of improvisers and pranksters who stage spontaneous street theater scenes. The organization is an evolution of the flash mob phenomenon, wherein a group of people employ internet and mobile technologies to cause some kind of public disruption for a few minutes — spontaneously singing a Beatles song in the handbag department at Macy’s, let’s say — then disperse, leaving onlookers befuddled and bemused. Chances are one of Improv Everywhere’s scenes, or as they call them, ‘missions’ — like Food Court — the Musical, Frozen Trafalgar Square or Slo-Mo Home Depot — has crossed your radar.

Media coverage — and it has been extensive — of the Improv Everywhere missions has been primarily dumped into the ‘oddity’ genre — the same genre as the story about the guy who accidentally let the $12,000 engagement ring sail away in a helium balloon, or the grandmother who clocked a burglar with a canned ham. But Improv Everywhere deserves deeper analysis. The group is participating in a significant shift that’s taking place in the culture. This month the New Museum in New York City hosted a discussion with the group’s founders to talk about and show video of its performances. As a symbol of the times, Improv Everywhere ranks with The Merry Pranksters of the ‘Flower Power’ movement of the 1960s. (It is no coincidence that one of the merriest of the Merry Pranksters was Del Close, a major figure in modern improv theater.)

On the Meta level, what Improv Everywhere is saying to the mainstream culture is this: We do not do things or see things the same way as you.

With their clever disruptions of the status quo, the IE (how’s that for irony?) performances are a form of social protest. The games they play are political statements. This is a group of smart, tech savvy, photogenic, funny, subversive people telling the rest of the world that they perform at their own tempo and pitch, use different tactics, communicate in new ways. They are GameChangers of the first order. They understand instinctively how and why networks form. They know that with improvisation, a group can focus on the objective and be productive with very little planning and zero expectations as to outcomes. All this should hit anyone conducting business in the Networked World like a canned ham to the noggin tossed by a mad grandma.

By taking the familiar and making it strange, by shaking up commonplace scenarios, they are telling the world, in the gentlest possible terms but with a great degree of certitude and not a little desperation, that we all have it in us to rouse ourselves from our workaday lethargy and become more aware in the world. IE’s form of theater calls as much attention to the audience behaviors as to the performers themselves. They crack a mirror in the face of the mundane.

They’re showing us that the wherewithal to get together and do something extraordinary exists right smack in our everyday midst. If we look at things just a little differently, we can see it. And if we can see it, we can be it.