Moving from Hierarchy to a Circle of Equals
When people ask me, “What do you do?” or “What kind of work do you do?”, they generally are asking me what kind of job I do to make a living. And particularly because I am a white male person of some economic and educational privilege (with a head full of gray hair), they often presume that that job is a fairly high-powered one, and a major part of how I define myself. My job is fairly high-powered, I am a “business process consultant” for Kaiser Permanente, specifically the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, which is a not for profit health insurance company. But nowadays, that is not how I answer the question of what I do or even what my “work” is.
Though I am a great advocate for what Kaiser is doing as a “health maintenance organization”, modeling what I believe to be the best approach to health care in the United States, my work for them is at most my “day job”, and how I pay our family’s bills. Increasingly, I answer the question by talking about my “life’s work” instead,
