While working at the French advertising agency, Baldwin became acquainted with a co-worker named Sébastien who did literally almost no work at the office, constantly missed deadlines, and sometimes wouldn't show up at work for several days in a row. Baldwin couldn't believe he still had a job and asked other workers why this was the case. "You can't fire someone in France, Olivier explained," Baldwin wrote. "It's too difficult, Tomaso said. 'You simply stop giving them things to do,' Françoise said, 'and they sit in a corner for a few years, and you hope they quit. That's how it works.' " Later, having gotten fed up, Baldwin's boss Pierre, a Frenchman who had lived in New York, fired Sébastien. Sébastien and the rest of the office were aghast. "He knew he'd done wrong," Baldwin wrote of Sébastien. "Now he felt he'd been done wrong.... Fired, as in fired-fired? About half the office, who had despised working with Sébastien and had said so out loud while Sébastien listened to electro-clash in his peony headphones, still didn't see why Pierre had needed to purge him... .people made Pierre out to be a villain. He'd broken an unspoken trust. The same people attributed Pierre's firing Sébastien to the influence of Pierre's years working in New York."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
