The unedited transcript of Phalana Tiller's interviews with Geoffrey Brewer and Richard Ford for the June 2011 episode of Drucker on the Dial entitled "The Importance of Work." First, Geoffrey Brewer, of the Gallup Press, discusses his book on the events that have occurred since 2001, entitled Decade of Change: Managing in Times of Uncertainty, co-edited with Barb Sanford. He says that because the existence and publication of the Gallup Management Journal, ran parallel with some of the most remarkable events in recent history, he and Sanford wanted to create a retrospective that could not only look back, but could be applied looking forward. One of the discoveries that emerged, was the importance of building an economy around a generation of good jobs. He explains that Gallup has a twelve item survey which measures employee engagement, and that none of the 12 items even mentions the words money or compensation. Brewer talks about receptive managers, and an employee's self-responsibility to get to know something about the person he or she will be working for. He goes on to say that anyone who is an employee of an organization will learn from his book. Next, Pulitzer prize-winning author Richard Ford, talks about the anthology he edited, entitled Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work. He says that he wanted to portray work as broadly as he could, and in ways that could be surprising to the reader. Ford believes that fiction has to do something with life, that life itself doesn't do. He says that the business of business is life, and that when you hire, you hire the whole man, which includes his fears, his kids, his past, his aspirations for the future, and that all of those things figure into the execution of his duties. He explains why he feels that earning a living is kind of on the low end of the moral totem pole for him. Ford believes that when you lose your job, you lose your community and you become existentially isolated. Ford goes on to talk about his previous work experiences, and says that he has had a lot of false starts.
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