There’s a quiet in my heart.  A stillness.  A complete sense of satisfaction that no howling will properly express.  It’s like watching a pond at night, watching the moon slowly dip into its own reflection and disappear while crickets chirp.

Not knowing when it ends until the sun rises tomorrow.

Until then, it’s a watching the moon and the stars, and smiling like you’re among them.

Good night.

I’ll miss you until tomorrow.

Fin.

I started this on Thanksgiving, but some old friends came into town yesterday and decided I needed a Thanksgiving party, so Mexican food, tequila and mezcal, dancing all night, and the drunkest acapella Elvis cover band in the world substituted for family togetherness and turkey. Kind of. Anyway, here’s what I started yesterday and neglected to finish until this morning:

I’m sitting on the hard tile floor in a mildewed dark room next to the only working outlet in this hostel that is also within range of wifi. My family and friends are several countries away, and on this day of family togetherness and giving thanks, I’m nursing a head cold and surrounded by strangers. Nobody aside from Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, so as you might guess I’m a bit out of my element today.

Making things harder is the fact that I’ve drifted far enough away from everyone I love that they aren’t really able or willing to contact me any longer. The last time someone outside of my family called me or emailed from back home was weeks ago. It’s not them – I don’t usually have a phone, and I’m far from the most communicative person anyway. Still, it hurts a bit when your good friend sends you an email and you realize you can’t remember the last time that happened.

It’s my fault – I’m the one who left, I’m the one who isn’t close, or a part of your day to day life, and I like to think that people do still think about me from time to time. Even if they don’t, I still have things to be thankful for, and this seems like a good day to reflect on them a bit.

First, the stupid material shit – I’m thankful for my little laptop, the eee I’ve had traveling with me all over Central America. Sure, she’s been more weight in the bag, but I couldn’t write or blog at all without her. Plus, it’s always nice to have a lifeline back home. Likewise, I really appreciate every single thing I still own, and that isn’t a lot. I’ve given away everything that doesn’t fit into my backpack or messenger bag, and as I do so every thing I still have becomes all the more precious. My 4 changes of clothes, 5 pairs of underwear, 6 pairs of socks are each valuable to me, each special in a way that I never understood before they were all I had. My mementos of this life, coins, bits of wood, shells, twisted metal parts are all imbued with memories. Really, if you carry everything you own around on your back all day, each thing takes on significance – this is my machete, it keeps me warm in the woods – this is my sleeping bag, it lets me sleep anywhere I choose – this is my headlamp, it lets me see, and so on. I’m thankful for everything I have.

Even more, I’m thankful for what I don’t have – my lack of a career, steady housing, a life plan, a car have all become precious gems, points of pride, and signposts that give evidence that I’m moving toward something better then what I had before. I take ridiculous pride in how much I don’t have, don’t need, don’t want even. I’ve found joy in not having, in giving away, in doing without the unnecessary. The other week I gave away almost 50 pounds of gear – clothing mainly, but also boots, a backpack, gloves, hats, books, everything. I haven’t bought anything I didn’t need for a while now, and I’m thankful that I’ve come to this realization of how little I truly need so early in my life. It would be much more difficult to live my life if I’d gotten deeper into the consumption game before I got out.

That’s what I’m most thankful for today – I’ve gotten out, torn myself free of a life I was terribly miserable in, and found a way of living that makes me truly joyous. I smile all the time, laugh genuinely, give hugs and kisses to people I don’t even know. I make friends every day, some of them for life, and get to experience a world completely alien to most of the people I know. I’m thankful for my Spanish – I can communicate with people I would never have otherwise met, learn about their lives, beliefs, hopes, dreams. I’m so thankful that I was right, that people everywhere are the same, all wanting and needing the same things – it’s one of the bases of my whole world, and sometimes it is quite nice just to be correct for once! I’m so incredibly happy to be living here, in this strange yet welcoming land, in another language, another culture, and still share moments of deep understanding with people of all stripes. From crossing cultural barriers I never knew existed before finding them to meeting, befriending, and sometimes dating people of very different worlds then my own, I’ve done a whole lot of growing lately – a trend I’m happy to be pursuing further.

Lastly, well, no, not lastly but lastly for now, I’m thankful to everyone who has made my adventures possible – from Sjoerd, Dan, Becky, Seth, Veronique, Marc, Matt, Karina, Vish and all of my traveling companions to the countless friends I’ve made, there are so many people who have made my life the better simply by touching it. The people I’ve left at home have been so good as well, especially my mother, who lives the most hectic life yet still manages to send me touching emails, and my father, a man who has fought so long to live life on his terms and is beginning to see the returns he deserves. I owe my existence to them, and am so lucky that they raised me in a way that has allowed me to become the person I am – did an excellent job too, I should add. Then there are my brothers, K2 and 3, who I see growing up and developing into themselves. It was incredible to call my family on Skype and see a DIY halfpipe in the backyard, then to realize that my youngest brother is taller then I am! Without the support of all of them, and my good friends too, I’d be so much lonelier out here. I’m thankful too that I can call home and everyone I know seems to be doing well, or at least, putting on a good show of it. Sure, I come off as crazy to most, but just having you there makes a hell of a difference.

So that’s it I guess – it’s been a tough year, but I’m better for it, and falling into this strange and wonderful life seems to be the reward. I don’t know how long I can keep it up, or how things will go tomorrow even, but in the present moment I’m fulfilled, lacking nothing essential, happy in every way, and in love with the world I inhabit. How can I not be thankful for all of that? Happy Thanksgiving to you all stateside – a day late and probably more then a dollar short, but I wish everyone the best anyway. Ciao! -k

Divorce takes everything away from you and makes you realize what’s important.  Things and stuff don’t really matter in the big picture.  

I am thankful for my relationships, few as they are.  I know that they are true and honest and full of love.  I am happy. 

But, it is still a weird feeling to go up to My old front door and knock.  

It makes me angry to walk in to My kids’ rooms… the ones that I painstakingly decorated and carefully organized… to find them strewn with clothes and garbage and toys.  Beds are covered with laundry that is thankfully clean but it means the girls haven’t slept in their beds in months.  The importance I place on teaching practical life is apparently lost on their father.  The irony is that it’s quite possibly the exact thing that broke our marriage into pieces.  I was busy with our children and our home and our life.  And he was busier lost in his job.  My busyness was lost on him.  He didn’t see me.  He tolerated me.  

He says that it was all for our family.  He had to work hard to provide for our family.  We made this big life together.  And it takes big money to keep a big life.  At times I questioned the values associated with our big life.  This conversation was never a welcome one.  My questions meant I was unhappy and being unhappy meant that he was doing something wrong.  I was a problem to fix.  He never looked at what I was actually saying.  He only saw the problem… me… and tried to fix me with more money and more things.  What an awful vicious cycle when all I really wanted was to be heard and loved by a partner in life.  He wanted someone who would just be happy with the things and his absence, thankful for the good provider that he was.  Unfortunately, for me, I believe that a good provider means so much more than a fancy roof over our heads and Spring breaks in Mexico.  

I am angry that he never listened and never heard.  I am sad that he misunderstood or rather didn’t take the time to understand.  He still doesn’t get it.  Unfortunately, this is the emotional fall out of divorce.  It doesn’t matter who is the leaver or the one left.  The emotional fall out is the same.  One is forced to make judgments on their value system and adjust accordingly. 

I love this definition of love:  When the satisfaction, security, and development of another person is as important to you as your own satisfaction, security, and development, love exists (Harry Stack Sullivan 1968).  I have also heard it explained that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.   I lived with indifference for a long time.  Love is so much sweeter.

There is nothing wrong with having a good image and good behavior but it says nothing of the matters of the heart.  Techniques for “good” living are everywhere but my values are not on the doing… the techniques, the tips but rather on the being.  Honesty and integrity have nothing to do with presenting a good image and everything to do with the state of one’s heart.  

Divorce takes so much away but it also gives you perspective and a second change… an opportunity to redefine your life and make adjustments to your value system.  In my moments of emotion and anger, I have to take a deep breath and find that perspective.  

The next piece in the 25 Weeks to Building a Successful Organization series is “Re-inventing organizational values, beliefs, and goals.” I use the word re-inventing because you may already have some sort of formal vision and/or mission statement. The questions is: Are these current statements or tenants really serving their purpose? If not, then the aim now is for you to hopefully find inventive ways to engage your employees in deep dialogue, connecting individual values, and developing a joint sense of purpose.

Before beginning, I would like to share one of my favorite quotes surrounding purpose.

When the organization has a clear sense of its purpose, direction, and desired future state and when this image is widely shared, individuals are able to find their roles both in the organization and in the larger society of which they are a part. This empowers individuals and confers status upon them because they can see themselves as a part of a worthwhile enterprise. They gain a sense of importance, as they are transformed from robots blindly following instructions to human beings engaged in a creative purposeful venture. (Bennis & Nanus, 2005, pp. 53-84)

How does one truly create a clear sense of purpose and direction in our organization? When Bennis and Nanus stated, “. . . transformed from robots. . . to human beings engaged in a creative purposeful venture,” what thoughts came to mind? I immediately considered creating commitment rather than compliance. With that said, purpose is so much more than just simple statements—e.g., vision and mission. In fact, I believe that the process of bringing everyone together to explore purpose is much more valuable than the actual statements that may appear.

Although much of the past and present literature stress the importance of organizational purpose, few provide specific activities for finding that purpose. In my book, Strong Schools, Strong Leaders, I spend some time talking about the fostering of a combined purpose. The focal point of one particular chapter centers on forming a shared purpose by tapping into the individual values and beliefs of each and every employee. This is followed by another chapter that outlines a practical, hands-on workshop to do just that.

Both chapters refer to my framework titled, Co-Creating Purpose: A Step-by-Step Process. Generally speaking, the model contains three steps that support the emergence of collective purpose. The first step in the model encourages employees to explore their personal purposes. Finding each employee’s individual purpose is a stepping-stone toward a collective organizational purpose. The second recognizes common themes, goals, and values among the employees. Third, the leader has to encapsulate those relationships into a single overarching purpose. All of this rests on the idea: “to co-create means to form together.”

I believe that inspiring others to explore their own purposes and translating them into overarching ideals is one of the most important and daunting tasks as a leader.

Try this.

In the previous post, Rethinking your own leadership, I offered two great books.

• The Change Handbook by Holman by Devane and Cady (2007). Sixty-one different change methods are offered and written by the originators and leading practitioners in the field.
• The Practical Decision Maker by Harvey et. al. (2001). This resource includes fifty-four different structuring devices for problem solving with your people.

I urge you to use both resources (as well as others) to find a way to engage your employees in recognizing their own personal values, beliefs, and goals. Try to understand where they are “coming from,” where they are presently, and where they want to go. By allocating time to listen and to value each employee’s dreams and aspirations, you can tap into some powerful passions in both their personal and professional lives. Remember to not forget about you own personal aspirations and dreams.

A few helpful processes included in the above-mentioned books may include Playback Theater, Appreciative Inquiry, Visual Explorer, SOAR, Study Circles, and so on. I urge you to check them out.

A lack of individual purpose is a call for concern, and timely action can create new opportunities to recover lost meaning. As soon as you begin to express interest in the ways your employees view their own purpose, a perceptible shift emerges. Suddenly, you will see your employees feeling more valued and respected.

Try this.

Now that you and your employees are more familiar with your own personal ideals then it’s time to unite them by finding the organizational core values. As you know, this requires strategic initiatives to take dialogue to a higher plane for the individual and joint goals of stakeholders rather than shelving output in the hope of revisiting it sometime later.

Here is a section of the Co-Creating Purpose: A Step-by-Step Process model that might help you in the above activities.

Each circle represents your employee’s life purposes; however, each individual purpose is separate from the other. On the surface, there may be no common features. Remember, nothing is wrong with diversity. Activities connecting individual vision-oriented purposes should lead to a set of core values, which the organization adopts. Finally, the shared purpose links each individual purpose through those core values of the organization.

Just an idea

Right now I am working with my employees on re-inventing our own organizational purpose. Here is a little background. A couple of years ago I brought together nearly 1,500 stakeholders and employed a version of the Appreciative Inquiry method. In the end we were able to create multiple values statements and each employee committed to a fresh, new vision. Thus far, these “statements” and vision have both served as guideposts in our planning, as well as day-to-day operations. With the passing of time, along with the hiring of new employees, I felt it was necessary to revisit our purpose.

To do this I am adapting the Visual Explorer approach and attempting to use symbolism (e.g., pictures and thoughts) to represent emergent themes between each employee’s individual purpose. Like the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Think about the possibilities: Finding meaning through vivid, emotion-provoking pictures. Not only can these pictures represent the values, beliefs, and goals of the organization; but each employee can also translate their own aspirations and dreams with each picture. If you would like to hear more on the progress of this challenge, please contact me.

Final Thoughts

Even though this post corresponds to “Weeks 5-6″ in the 25 Weeks to Building a Successful Organization series, you and I both know that discovering purpose takes so much more time. Don’t we all wish this feat only took two weeks. Maybe over the next couple of weeks you can begin the planning stages for this feat; and, hopefully, by “Weeks 11-14: Developing clear targets aligned with organizational and individual values, beliefs,” you and your employees will have had an opportunity to begin the dialogue.

Don’t rush it though. As I mentioned earlier (and I cannot stress this enough), the process of bringing employees together to explore purpose is much more valuable than the eloquence of a vision and mission statement on a piece of paper.

Activities in a nutshell

1. Find and facilitate processes that lead to in-depth dialogue so that your employees can begin to recognize their own ideals.
2. Find and facilitate processes that compel your employees to recognize themes that emerge from everyone’s personal ideals—resulting in a shared purpose.

Questions for you.

Please take the time to add any additional thoughts, ideas, or processes in the comment box. How have you created a strong sense of purpose in your organization? Is it rooted in personal experiences, stories, and dreams?

Upcoming

The next stage in the 25 Weeks to Building a Successful Organization will be “Cultivating effective teams.” The ideas outlined in this upcoming post stem from my research, Professional learning communities and the effectiveness of the teams within those communities. Without a thorough understanding of effective team characteristics and development processes, many teams will continue to operate in a less productive, conventional manner. You can become the vehicle in building staff capacity to lead and operate within highly effective teams.

Cheers!

Perry Wiseman, author, Strong Schools, Strong Leaders: What matter most in times of change

I will never forget the two times I was nominated to attend a week-long executive management training session for high potentials as a member of the Executive Management Team of a Fortune 100 Corporation.  I did happen to think that it was strange that we were kicking off such an event on Sunday, a day of rest that many of us observe.  On one of these occasions I “tested the water” with some of my colleagues to see how they felt about meeting on Sunday (or Friday/Saturday as the case may be) for a work event and I was very surprised to learn that each of these talented, well-educated and dedicated employees didn’t reveal one faint connection with Saturday or Sunday being their day of rest even in the most subtle of ways.  I then finally realized that a significant portion of the leadership of this organization was totally devoid of any link to faith related activities or was uncomfortable sharing their real views in this setting.  This was the first time I began to realize how companies can impact personal values and how important it is for companies to promote solid values in the workplace.

A few more interesting observations about this company:

• I became aware of two very high level executives that I personally knew were going through divorces stemming from acts of indiscretion with their associates.
• I became aware that there was serious jockeying going on within the ranks of executive management that became extremely nasty and over time new groups of leaders evolved in coup-like style.
• I witnessed an executive get sloppy drunk and fall over a table amongst the CEO and the company’s team of executives; this person was promoted six months later.
• They preached compliance 100 times over when it came to regulatory issues, but promoted unscrupulous behavior – if not explicitly, by turning their cheek on displays of poor behavior as long as it wasn’t unlawful.

This is not just isolated to one company; I have worked with many large corporations and have personally managed upwards of twenty formal teaming relationships with other major corporations where I observed similar issues.  In fact, I worked with another major corporation where the executive team would conjure up their work plans and openly evaluate the politics of certain individuals.  Bad enough that leaders subscribe to this behavior, but this activity was on the tail-end of rather long social events involving heavy drinking.

I am not being a prude or trying to seem righteous, but we can see how our eroding values are affecting our society.  For example, the perpetrators of 9-11 being tried under the protection provided by the Constitution of the United States as opposed to a war tribunal. Why and what are the American defense lawyers thinking about that they would even participate in this?  How about members of the Clergy that lose tax exemption status because they choose not to officiate same-sex marriages?  And Fort Hood – How can it be that members of our Armed Services cannot police their own ranks properly and protect our soldiers from a terrorist?  It seems we have put political correctness above our values and our commonsense.

We need to start acting with better judgment at all levels in our society.  Individually, families, neighborhoods, local, state and federal governments — our workplaces.

Some questions to consider:

• Are you reinforcing selfish behavior by rewarding individuals instead of rewarding your team?
• Are your creating unbalance in your employee’s family life because you are holding conference calls, work sessions or other work related activities on weekends; I am not referring to the necessary shift work that requires some employees to work on weekends in the manufacturing industries, for example.
• Are you subjecting your employees to situations that might compromise their own values?
• Do your employees have the appropriate tools to get their jobs done?
• Are acts of sharing information and knowledge rewarded or are you promoting silos in your organization?
• Are departments cooperating with each other or do we make it okay for some department managers to do their own thing?

At DiBona & Associates, we believe that prudent management techniques not only improve productivity, quality and service, but also promote values that are fundamental to the long-term success of your people and our communities.  Successful people will be better employees and project a more positive image of your company.  Whatever your faith, or even if you don’t have one, treating people in a positive way that helps them succeed and doing so within the constraints of creating success for your business is the duty and responsibility of every leader.  Promoting the right values in our workplaces starts with each of us.

I am thankful for little people. I don’t know who they are, but they make my shoes and clothing, carry away my garbage, and, I am told, even go down in the sewers to make sure that it all flows smoothly. I really, really appreciate them.

I am a member of the Democratic, or “left” side of the two ruling collectives here in our great Republic. We are the ones who really care about little people. We are better people than the Republicans, who abuse them. We of the Democratic collective know more about little people, which is why they support us when we put our leaders before them for the biennial voting ritual.

We care. For instance, we want to keep them educated in the means of social advancement by giving them the necessary education to survive in today’s world. Where once the tools of the important occupations were the broom and shovel, pipe wrench and dolly, today they are the cash register and scanner. Oh yeah – and that thing that makes my lattes – you know – the steam shooter? (?)

Here’s a humorous story: This happened down in New Mexico recently. There is a chain store known as “The Wal-Mart” (NYSE: WMT) where little people shop for Chinese goods, and where other little people perform various important functions. One of the functions is to gather shopping carts from the parking lot and return them to the entrance. They use a machine that pushes them from behind while a little person walks in front guiding them.

Anyway, I suppose you’d have to see the store video to appreciate the humor, but one of these little people got on the cart-pushing machine and tried to escape. He was a portly McDonalds-fed specimen, and was easily run down by another portly specimen, a “security guard”, as The Wal-Mart labels them. Imagine the scene as one blubberous specimen overtook the other!

When interrogated, the escapee claimed to be disappointed at having aspirations of “a better life” where he would be “rewarded” for his “hard work”. It was a clear case of EV, or expectation virus. He was not a breeder, so there were no offspring. The store management euthanized him.

Sidenote: Remember when Roman slaves were executed, and their heads placed on stakes to line the road into the city? How far we have come since those brutal days!

Anyway, EV does pop up now and then, but is largely under control. When brought home from the war of the 1940’s (the one where everybody had to fight, there being a real enemy and all), returning veterans collectively decided they were entitled to a “better life”, as the traitor Roosevelt put it.

The virus was rampant during the fifties and sixties until antidotes were found, and is pretty much wiped out now. The antiviral drug known as “Proctoutsource” was very effective, as was Neo_Nafta and of course, the aged but effective “Rightowork”, still sold over the counter. Non-infected Mexican species of lp’s are also replacing those strains where the virus occasionally exhibits in a latent strain.

Things have settled down, and the breeding stock is kept functional for the productive years in a corn-fed state with heavy doses of television. Tobacco people do a good job of spreading the smoking habit, so that many of them die shortly after their productive years end. And reading, that awful two-edged sword that both infects and inoculates, has been brought under control.

During the height of the pandemic, little people had infiltrated the information delivery system with images of death in one of the foreign conflicts. It wasn’t well understood then, but apparently these images inflamed passions. The TV has been retaken by the ruling parties, and the threat is eliminated. The indoctrination system is working well.

Life is good. The masses are calm, EV under control. Education throws a wet blanket on the land of the free. You can see it in faces … blank stares, passions let free only at sporting events or during election cycles, when the “voting” ritual allows for a grand staging of their “freedom”. (Best damned control word ever invented, IMHO.) Dangerous energies are well under control.

All is well. Let’s be thankful for the little people, but even more so for those great minds among us who have tamed them, removed the threats to our way of life, and made the holidays a time when we can really toast one another with sincere gratitude.

To the good life!

Is religious education a form of brainwashing? Should children be free to make their own decisions about fundamental matters of faith? These questions are provoked by the new poster sponsored by the British Humanist Association. [See it here.] Two gloriously happy children hold their hands in the air as if they are about to do a cartwheel. The main text reads: “Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.” And floating in the background are the various labels under attack: “Buddhist child. Agnostic child. Protestant child. Humanist child. Catholic child. Atheist child…”

Religious education in Candelaria

First: The exercise of freedom requires some prior foundation. Children have to learn how to make choices: how to weigh things up, how to judge what is best, how to take responsibility. Any child psychologist knows this. Freedom doesn’t just happen. And an essential part of learning to choose is having some sense of the meaning of the world we inhabit, of the value of our actions, and of the significance of their consequences. In other words, freedom can’t be learnt outside a context of meaning and values.

Religious faith can help establish this context; so can a robust humanism. But to think that freedom can be learnt in a vacuum, without the sharing of any moral or philosophical convictions, is simply naïve. Children who are brought up without inherited values of any kind are actually less able to exercise their freedom and choose for themselves. Just as children who are brought up without boundaries will never be able to learn the significance of crossing them.

Second: If you believe something important to be true, then you shouldn’t pretend it is an open question. This goes for secular humanists as much as for religious believers. If, for example, you are a convinced atheist, and you think that belief in God is false at an intellectual level and damaging through its distorting effects on morality, then of course you would want to share this conviction with your children. It would be unjust to keep it from them. Similarly, if you believe in God, and you believe that this faith is not just a lifestyle choice or a cultural imperative but an objective truth with profound implications for human existence, how could you not share this conviction with your children? Yes, you want to nurture their freedom and you hope they will discover things for themselves. But if it is a question of truth – whether scientific or moral or spiritual – then you will inevitably want to guide your children along a certain path, knowing full well that they may one day choose to veer off in another direction.

Third: It’s a fantasy to imagine that children can be raised in a philosophically neutral environment without some dominant world-view. Theism – as much as atheism, materialism, or secular humanism (these terms are not synonymous) – provides a particular understanding of the meaning of the world and of human life, which will help structure a child’s understanding and values. But if you try to bring your children up in an environment which is indifferent to questions of ultimate meaning, then your purported neutrality will already have been lost. If, in effect, you say to your children, “I don’t care enough about these values or convictions to share them with you”, or “they are important to me but not important in themselves”, then you are presenting them with a very particular world-view. In this view, religious questions and all questions of ultimate meaning are relativised, and indifference is taken to be the predominant value.

To say to a child, “I don’t mind – you choose!” is to give the child the strongest possible impression that the available options are all equally significant, which is to say that none is uniquely significant. So this apparently ‘soft’ form of neutrality suggested in the poster is actually a ‘hard’ form of relativism which relegates religious and philosophical questions to the periphery of human interest.

Fourth: A strong notion of autonomy, which is essential to an individual’s freedom, requires an appreciation of one’s human dignity. Children need to know not just that they are loved but that their life has meaning and is valuable in itself. If this is not communicated in some way, then the love of the parents, however profound, will become distorted, because the children will see themselves as valuable to their parents but not valuable as persons in their own right. It doesn’t matter how this innate value is framed (‘human dignity’, ‘the sanctity of life’, etc.) as long as it is articulated somehow.

Human autonomy, rightly cherished by secular humanists, needs some notion of intrinsic human dignity to support it – otherwise it has no foundation and no meaning. So, paradoxically, in order to liberate children from the limited vision of their parents and culture, you have to imbue them with a strong sense of their own worth, of their dignity, of their significance in a framework of meaning. The humanism of the early Enlightenment held on to a strong notion of human dignity and human uniqueness, even as it became more secular. But as secular humanists have become more and more materialist in their outlook, and as materialism has failed to offer any satisfying accounts of human dignity, it has become almost impossible to avoid describing human nature in reductivist terms.

Contemporary secular humanists are largely unable to explain to children why their freedom and autonomy have any significance, why their life has any meaning – and this is why the exaltation of freedom proposed in this poster feels a bit hollow. If you really want your children to be free, you need to tell them why their freedom matters, and help them appreciate some of the values they might pursue. And to do that, you need to use at least a few labels

In a year in which one out of five Americans are either unemployed or underemployed and our economy is beginning to reach levels approaching the ’stagflation’ of the Jimmy Carter years sans the staggering interest rates of that era, as yet anyway, Americans take time to give thanks for that which we have and that we have been blessed with by our creator.

Despite the strident protestations of the secular left this GREATEST country in the world remains just that. A FREE country rooted deeply in JUDEO/ CHRISTIAN values and the principles of liberty, individual responsibility, freedom to make of one’s life what we will, freedom to speak our minds without fear of retribution, the freedom to govern ourselves, and to defend our homes, our families and our country from evil and oppression.

I thank God for my blessings everyday. But on this day especially. I thank my God, as I understand him, for the tens of thousands of American men and women in the Armed Forces of this truly blessed land with whose sacrifices on our behalf on a daily basis  I stand in awe.
As a United States Marine I spent a number of Thanksgivings and holidays away from home and a couple of them overseas in cultures very unlike my own. It’s a very lonely existence far from home, family and friends and in an unforgiving, hostile and sometimes dangerous environment.
We have simply the greatest military in history.

The world has a great deal to be grateful for on this day of Thanksgiving as well. It would be a far different place were it not for the thousands of Americans who have sacrificed their lives on every continent of this globe. Europe, Asia, the Pacific, Africa…all would be far different places without the expenditure of vast amounts of American blood and treasure. We are the most generous, freely-giving society in history. We are also the most open minded and forgiving.
Many of those who have benefited the most from our generosity have appreciated it least. But time after time we have turned the other cheek and continued to befriend our detractors.
This is the measure of the greatness of America.

God bless this great country and God bless you on this day of Thanksgiving.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2009

There is an amount of pride that comes with being an American citizen; the only way that you’ll be able to appreciate, though, is by losing it. Or, like many, begin without it. I’m proud to be an American. I was born here, not brought here. I did not flee here from somewhere else due to an unfair government, persecution, or crime. I didn’t sneak over in search of a better life,  better living conditions, or a better opportunity. I did not arrive as a war criminal a prisoner, or a prisoner of war. I’ve been able to marry since birth, was afforded the right to vote, and had the privilege of serving my country with little more than a background check. I haven’t been aligned with any group of U.S., or non-U.S. persons that have been racially or religiously profiled due to their affiliation, whether innocent or guilty, with radical groups that commit heinous crimes in the United States or against her citizens and properties in foreign countries.

Living under the auspices and freedoms of the United States of America, I was not born in the wrong city, the wrong body, in the wrong era, near the wrong neighborhood, living in the wrong house, to the wrong parents who wrongly treated me. I did not I was not sent to the wrong school, never got shot at by the wrong crowd, and never killed the wrong person while aiming for someone else. No, I went to a school where I was given the choice to get an education, or not. I applied to jobs where I chose to work, or not. I was approached by the wrong people, and I had a chance to take the easier road, or not. When I made the grades to get into a college, I had a choice to attend classes, or not.

I did not attend classes…a choice that led me to fail college within the first four months. Which caused me to get put on academic probation. I lost my housing, my funding, and my shot at college. Thus, the military.

The military doesn’t provide many choices, so my chances for success immediately improved. I received a Security Clearance, a duty station and a job. My duty station was at a Law Enforcement (LE) and Search and Rescue (SAR) Unit These privileges came with responsibility; I learned to fight, became a marksman and a sharpshooter, and had to show up at my post on-time. I also had to pay taxes and vote.

About a year and a half later, I attended “A” School for telecom installation and maintenance in California.

I spent 9 years in the military, and decided to leave when former President Clinton decided to downsize the armed forces because it meant that I would not get promoted. I was third in line to move up, and the powers that be decided that I would not make it that year, and possibly the next.  So I bailed and went back to college, graduated, and here I am today.

I suppose that in a small way, I should be understanding of all of the downtrodden groups of Americans who cry out that their rights have been violated because the American way of life that they’ve been enjoying for most, if not all, of their lives are somehow now not meeting their freedom-based, perceived needs.

Wasting our time, our money, and our attention on various propositions that, if not voted upon in the desired manner, take to the streets and cry “FOUL.” Their attitude, of course, that when Democracy does not go “their way” then it’s not fair; their God-given rights have been violated, although they do not believe for the most part in God. Well, the truth of the matter is that you really don’t have any rights unless they are given to you. Just because you live in America does not mean that America must bend to your needs, and as an American that has actually given his will to his country, maybe it would be better for all involved if you just got out…you’ve got nothing to lose, after all. America isn’t fair? Move. Leave. Go.

We have become a country that puts the needs of your tiny, meddling, superficial groups to the forefront because our leaders are afraid of being called biased. We spend a lot of time on you…and you know exactly who you are…hearing out your court cases and legal summaries as to why things should be this way, or that way, to be truly fair. Instead of seeking a new haven as so many millions have sought America, you instead use fear and hate to spread your doctrine.

It’s a doctrine that is destroying our country and our way of life. Congratulations. While you wage another protest, or sit-in, or attack, the real danger awaits outside our borders. While watching you, we’re forced to take our eye off the true danger. Move to Mexico, Canada, or the Middle East and establish your lives there…I don’t care where you go just as long as it is not here. Goodbye. Good Luck. Get Out. You say that you want freedom and equality, yet you hold the country hostage. I’ve but one more thing left to say: The World Does Not Revolve Around You.

“If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you, then how can you contend with horses?” -Jeremiah 12:5

photo courtesy of  flickr.com

In the Olympic games, the greatest runners of the world compete for gold medals and laurel wreaths. Long before the final race, competitions are held in countries throughout the world  to weed out those who are not fast enough to compete. At the Games, the fastest of the fast qualify for the final competition. They trained to be fast, if not the fastest. Their goal is not just to finish the race but literally  to outrun the others.

In some remote areas in Africa, their runners train with unfamiliar method,  they run against horses. Of course, they will not win against those beasts, but it’s their way of testing if they have the capacity to become world’s Champion.

In my younger years, I can still recall an old Tagalog movie featuring ‘Yoyong Martires’, the speedy point guard of Utex Wrangler of the PBA. His biography depicted a young Yoyong running against carabao. Later, in his prime, he became the  quickest and the fastest point guard the PBA has ever produced.

Now, going back to my quotation above, it was taken from the Bible in the  Old Testament. Jeremiah, the Prophet, was called by God to give the Message . Just like in our times, the government then was corrupt and there were so many injustices.

The prophet Jeremiah was also involved in a pierce competition- but it was with idolaters and wicked priests. He was responding to the Lord’s call  to condemn Judah and to predict her downfall. He became so discouraged  that he asked the Lord, “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why are they happy?”

That’s when God said to Jeremiah, in essence, “The competition has just begun. So far you’ve been dealing with minor issues (running with footmen). How will you handle it  when the really tough  stuff comes (contending with horses)?”

Perhaps you’ve run into some difficulties recently: your boss, an illness, conflicts in the family. You’ve pleaded with the Lord for relief. But He may have said in response, “Toughen up. Dig in. It may get worse.”

When He asks you to ‘run with horses’, He will be with you to strengthen and sustain you.

That’s what God does.

See you in NB 21k this coming Sunday.

God be Praised!

SUPER MOM

Superwoman, everyone said.

Super Competent, her appreciative employers said.

Super Reliable, her impressed clients said.

Super Talented, her professional peers said.

Super Boss, her devoted subordinates said.

Super Bitch, her jealous frustrated passed over colleagues said.

Super Shrewd, her business rivals said.

Super Fit, her fitness freak buddies at her gym said.

Super Sexy, her admirers said.

Super Lover, her lovers said.

Super Achiever, her teachers and professors said.

Super Parent, her children’s teachers said.

Super Friend, all her acquaintances said.

Super Daughter, her parents and in-laws said.

Super Wife, her husband said.

Super Mom, her children said, but secretly they wished she stayed home like their granny who was always there for them.

VIKRAM KARVE

Copyright © Vikram Karve 2009

Vikram Karve has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied… This higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.

If the individual’s wants are to be urgent they must be original with himself.  They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied.  For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground.  One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.

The fact that wants can be synthesized by advertising, catalysed by salesmanship, and shaped by the discreet manipulations of the persuaders shows that they are not very urgent.  The latter are effective only with those who are so far removed from physical want that they do not already know what they want.  In this state alone men are open to persuasion.

And, by the way:

And, finally, some entertainment from George Carlin:

we all live by them, to some extent

Our values help us define who we are, they help us decide on what’s important in life, how we react in different circumstances. And, yet often we are unconscious of the values that we value. They are programmed in to us as we grow up by the society around us, by the people who love and care for, but equally by those who don’t. Our values form an unwritten script that we follow and act upon whether we like it or not, because as I said at the start our values help us define who we are.

But what if we decided to re-write that script, to analyse those values that have been a part of us since we began to become responsible for our actions and consciously chose to try and enact some values that are contrary to those we have absorbed by the society around us?

Rather than having a dogmatic ‘vision’ statement or such-like, many of the organisations I respect and have been inspired by over the last few years, have grounded themselves on a set of values. See here and here for examples.

If it works well for an organisation or network, why can’t it work for individuals, or at least a small community such as a family?

I was reminded recently of series of theses composed for a theological conversation by Walter Brueggemann. I’ll post the theses at the bottom of this post if you with to see them, and for more information with some audio of him answering questions on them, see here.

My wife and I have decided to embark on a journey of attempting to define some values that we will live by, that capture the things that we consider important, rather than what society has defined for us as being important, as Brueggemann might suggest, re-scripting ourselves. It therefore seemed like a good starting point to spend some time reflecting on Brueggemanns theses as a way into this whole subject, and therefore a series of blog posts along those line is where the proper blogging here begins.

Walter Brueggemann’s 19 Theses:

“1.     Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or explicit. It may be recognized or unrecognized, but everybody has a script.

2.     We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process of nurture and formation and socialization, and it happens to us without our knowing it.

3.      The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializes us all, liberal and conservative.

4.     That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism) enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.

5.     That script has failed. That script of military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the unhappiest society in the world.

6.     Health for our society depends upon disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of military consumerism. This is a disengagement and relinquishment that we mostly resist and about which we are profoundly ambiguous.

7.     It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us. That is, too enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.

8.     The task of descripting, relinquishment and disengagement is accomplished by a steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we say can make us happy and make us safe.

9.     The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and is enacted through the tradition of the Church. It is an offer of a counter-narrative, counter to the script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism.

10.  That alternative script has as its most distinctive feature, its key character – the God of the Bible whom we name as Father, Son, and Spirit.

11.  That script is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent. Partly it is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because it has been crafted over time by many committees. But it is also ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because the key character is illusive and irascible in freedom and in sovereignty and in hiddenness, and, I’m embarrassed to say, in violence – [a] huge problem for us.

12.  The ragged, disjunctive, and incoherent quality of the counter-script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless. [I think the writer of Psalm 119 would probably like too try, to make it seamless]. Because when we do that the script gets flattened and domesticated. [This is my polemic against systematic theology]. The script gets flattened and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism. Whereas the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism is all about certitude, privilege, and entitlement this counter-script is not about certitude, privilege, and entitlement. Thus care must betaken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irascible self.

13.  The ragged, disjunctive character of the counter-script to which we testify invites its adherents to quarrel among themselves – liberals and conservatives – in ways that detract from the main claims of the script and so too debilitate the focus of the script.

14.  The entry point into the counter-script is baptism. Whereby we say in the old liturgies, “do you renounce the dominant script?”

15.  The nurture, formation, and socialization into the counter-script with this illusive, irascible character is the work of ministry. We do that work of nurture, formation, and socialization by the practices of preaching, liturgy, education, social action, spirituality, and neighboring of all kinds.

16.  Most of us are ambiguous about the script; those with whom we minister and I dare say, those of us who minister. Most of us are not at the deepest places wanting to choose between the dominant script and the counter-script. Most of us in the deep places are vacillating and mumbling in ambivalence.

17.  This ambivalence between scripts is precisely the primary venue for the Spirit. So that ministry is to name and enhance the ambivalence that liberals and conservatives have in common that puts people in crisis and consequently that invokes resistance and hostility.

18.  Ministry is to manage that ambivalence that is crucially equally* present among liberals and conservatives in generative faithful ways in order to permit relinquishment of [the] old script and embrace of the new script.

19.  The work of ministry is crucial and pivotal and indispensable in our society precisely because there is no one [see if that’s an overstatement]; there is no one except the church and the synagogue to name and evoke the ambivalence and too manage a way through it. I think often; I see the mundane day-to-day stuff ministers have to do and I think, my God, what would happen if you took all the ministers out. The role of ministry then is as urgent as it is wondrous and difficult.”

The Beginning

I love him and then I didn’t. I loved it and now I hate it. I loved it, then I lost it. The switch happens at times without notice. Normally, we move from one mode of thinking to another. Some call it growth, others call it fickle. No matter which side of the path you walk there are always borders trying to keep you steady. Sigmund Freud and his theories busily boxed in your emotions, tendencies, social parameters, and answered the whats and whos of normalcy. If he were alive today would any of us be normal? So why not create your own normal. Throw out the mirror stage with the paradigms. Release yourself for one day. Dive into his perception of madness, just for a second. Dare to see someone else in that mirror and see what happens. Now do not go out and commit some heinous crime for giggles. This is an internal deconstruction. Keep it neat. Go back and rewrite the messages you were fed from birth. In other words, re-become self. I chose to exaggerate this methodology because it must be a complete, no holds barred washing. Embrace the Afterdeath experience.

Going through a trial shakes loose everything we know and love about ourselves. Standing on line at a food pantry for the first time puts one in a place outside of the self we knew already. Picture a construction worker, Mike, who has made a good living for 15 years. In his mind, this life will go on forever – he is still young at 33. There are 3 cars in his driveway; one family car, a brand new pick up, and his toy. He may also have a boat. Not yacht size, but still a sign of prosperity as neighbors pass his neatly kept home. He has three children; 10, 7, and 3. His wife, Ellen, has never worked since their marriage. Before that, she was a waitress in a corner restaurant.

Ellen watches the home shopping channels between clipping coupons and catching sales at the malls. Their home is a collage of Southern Living, Better Homes & Garden, House & Home, and Chicago Home & Garden magazines. Lunch with the girls is always at her home. It always concludes with a replication of the latest infomercial, along with product demonstration and price. The girls fawn, and one by one excuse themselves for another appointment.

 Mike falls from a 15 ft. ladder at work and is rushed to the hospital. His leg is fractured in three places. No matter, he has also severed his spinal cord on a metal shard poking out of the ground. Mike has minimal health insurance, which includes a $500 co-pay. There is no savings nor retirement plan deep enough to cover his rehabilitation or mortgage costs.  After two years, the couple is financially, mentally, and socially dead.

The couple has sells their home to pay for hospital and aftercare costs. Their lives in the small apartment on the other side of town, affords them little after rent and utilities. Ellen is forced to seek out the food pantries in her area. This is the beginning of her life in the Afterdeath.

I had a great time chairing an event on Monday for National Freelancers Day. 40 odd people, meaty dialogue,  and freelancers ranging from coaches to consultants, IT contractors to piano tuners and beyond. One conversation of particular value concerned ‘trust’, which is a fundamental prerequisite for most people in close relationships, work or non-work.  So-far-so-obvious….

The sense I got from the discussion was that the creation and/or presence of trust was crucial to all freelancers, both in terms of maintaining existing client relationships and generating new business.  If there was a shared assumption that trust exists and is important, how it manifests and how a freelancer can proactively create trust in their relationships was less evident. So I came up with a Top 10 tips for building trust, specifically with freelancers in mind.

Let’s start with the basics.

The dictionary definition:

1. “reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.”
2. “confident expectation of something; hope.”

In other words, we expect the person we trust to do what we expect. Trust and its subtleties are subject to a huge amount of ongoing research e.g. a social science perspective would be that:

 ”trust is a mental state, which cannot be measured directly”.

Equally, and this is where it gets interesting, fellow freelancers, there is a distinction made by some thinkers that:

“trust can be betrayed, while reliance can only be disappointed.” 

Bottom line: we are talking about a co-created relationship between individuals, configured by their respective personal histories and capacity to trust. Each relationship is different, and one size does not fit all. The following is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope it helps.

Top 10 Tips for Building Trust as Freelancer.

1. ‘Walk your talk’
   Be reliable, and follow through on what you say you will deliver. If there is a difference between reliance and trust as suggested above, this is a prerequisite to trust in your business relationships.
2. Be authentic  
   Don’t put up a front to the extent that your client feels they have no sense of who you really are. That will only get in the way of trust creation.
3. Don’t tell lies 
   A killer in any relationship, business ones included.
4. Work with integrity
   What values do you bring to your work? What will that mean to your client? What would make you walk away from a client, ‘ethically’?
5. Develop your Emotional Intelligence (EI)
   Take responsibility for who you are, your behaviour, your history and how that impacts and influences your relationships. Many ways to do that, from courses, through to coaching and books.
6. Challenge the behaviour not the person
   Help your client(s) to learn, don’t just label them.
7. Be honest
   If you cannot do something, or disagree with a client, tell them. Straight conversations are a prerequisite for high-performing working relationships.
8. Listen
   If you can’t pay attention to your client, why would they trust you?….
9. Don’t gossip
   Never pleasant in the playground, certainly not big or clever in client relationships.
10. Build rapport
    You do not have to like someone to trust they can do a job, but it helps.

I received this inspiring email today…

“One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We were
driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a
parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his
brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches! The driver of
the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us. My taxi
driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was really
friendly. So I asked, ‘Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined
your car and sent us to the hospital!’ This is when my taxi driver
taught me what I now call, ‘The Law of the Garbage Truck.’

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around
full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of
disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it
and sometimes they’ll dump it on you. Don’t take it personally.
Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don’t take their garbage
and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.”

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take
over their day. Life’s too short to wake up in the morning with regrets,
so….Love the people who treat you right. Pray for the ones who don’t.

Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it!

Have a blessed, garbage-free life!

Truly thought provoking one… isnt it?

Updated 2009-11-25
Well oil went to just under $150 which really makes the original publication even more relative. Even now oil is around $80 which is 8 times as much as it was in 2003 when I originally posted on this issue. This is one of my pet peeves. We can do something, it  is simple if the political will was really there. You just subsidise the good with taxes on the bad. It is amazing how money seems to suddenly find a way to make things work. We have subsidized the bad for far to long. Let’s try something different and promote the good for a change.

I am embarrassed by the Canadian record on environment and wildlife. The reality is most Canadians don’t know what large corporations are doing to the lands. properties are clear-cut just to a point where you can’t see it from the road. Many companies work away from the public so we are not aware of the damage being done. Once we find out the company simply moves to another country and leaves the mess for us to clean up($$$). We need the agencies that are supposed to protect these things to have the power and ability to enforce the rules. It seems virtually all these agencies have been destroyed either by no budget or no enforcement power. The people in these roles are trying but there is only so much they can do until the government motivation clearly shows them that they have the power, money and backing when push comes to shove. Like many other governments ours seem to talk the talk but is barely crawling let alone walking. Things like the tar sands are not helping things. Sure jobs are made but at what cost. Companies have to be held accountable for the damages their products create. We really need a “cradle to grave” solution so companies that cause the most damage pay the most.  

Published 2003-03-10
It’s funny to think that numerous cultures, hundreds of years ago had better power solutions than we have now.

First off, we have more available power than we need in the foreseeable future. All we have to do is look outside the oil/nuclear box for far superior solutions. Once governments around the world subsidize clean, renewable sources instead of oil/nuclear the advances will be far beyond any of our expectations. 

The biggest problem I see in providing clean, renewable sources of power is governments lack of commitment. Sure they all talk environment but then subsidize the large corporations creating dirty, non-renewable sources of power. In Ontario, Canada the provincial government subsidizes Hydro… Technically they don’t… They tell Hydro what the rates will be to the consumer and if Hydro over spends it can borrow the money from the government. This has been going on for over 30 years and now Hydro owes our government billions and is forced into charging $0.043 per KWH for the next 5 years. Far less than the “cost” of the power and it’s distribution. How can renewable sources compete. 

Furthermore, infrastructure has to be put in place to promote better solutions. Perhaps a surcharge for non-renewable, dirty fuel that directly passes to discounts for renewable, clean sources. The only way to succeed is to make the old ways expensive and the new ways profitable. Only then will society change in mass numbers. We could also expect more investment would create cheaper methods of harnessing power. Thus creating an increasing demand for cleaner power. 

The key to future success for any society will be their ability to create infinitely renewable environmentally neutral power sources. Societies that base their power solutions on oil, nuclear or plant sources will eventually fail. Societies that generate more power than they use will become much more powerful in the near term future.

Given what we already know about future power requirements wind, solar, water and lightning are going to be in demand. Once electric cars become more popular these renewable sources may become a necessity. 

With Canada’s resources we should be one of the largest power generators in the world. We have large space to put up wind and solar farms, huge water sources, geo-thermal sources and of course then there is lightning. I would like to see us provide enough power for the world. If it were possible to get all the world governments together just think of the solutions… Desserts, mountains and oceans would become huge power generating locations.   

We have everything we need to provide unlimited clean, renewable power. Now we just need the political motivation. Countries like Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden are leading the way. As a Canadian I am embarrassed at our lack of commitment. I would easily pay double the cost if it ensured future generations had clean renewable power sources. It will never be cheap but sometimes you have to consider more than money. I do not want future generations paying for our lack of foresight. In this case even the stupidest person can see clean renewable sources are the way to go.

Internal combustion engines must die. Inherently they “burn” fuel and create emissions. Even solutions like fuel cells may increase precipitation as they emit water droplets. There is little need to use “burning” solutions given all the available options. They have demonstrated long-term unacceptable impacts on our environment.  

Below are several power sources and my simplistic assessment of each.

Oil/Natural Gas Sources
Sucks up valuable natural resources, creates an environmental nightmare and there is a dwindling supply. Is there anyone that thinks this is a long-term viable solution any more? I certainly do not! The recent mess where oil has gone from $10-$40 only emphasizes how little supply is really available. To rely on this power solution will only ensure a collapse of a society… Just a matter of when. A transition away from this form of power must be immediate. Dwindling supplies will only increase the cost unless alternatives are found.

Nuclear Sources
What are you crazy??? They have demonstrated their impacts already… Just waiting for the next disaster.  

Plant Sources
To burn plants for fuel does not make sense. They can be used for much more productive uses. “Burning” for power will create problems even if it is as slow as global warming and should be avoided where possible. Besides we need these sources to enrich our current soil without chemicals.

Geo-Thermal Sources
Taking heat generated from the ground is a great power source as long as we only take heat from the first 1km or less of earth. If we start going deeper for thermal sources I have concerns about eventually lowering the earth’s core or creating a man-made catastrophe. Countries like Iceland where this source of power is everywhere are showing us how to benefit. They have so much extra heat they heat roads and sidewalks in cities. No one has a hot water heater in their house, hot water comes direct from city water. They also use it to generate electrical power. Unfortunately not many countries have the abundance that Iceland has but this concept can be applied in every country. 

Wind Sources
The next 3 of these were used thousands of years ago to harness power but somehow we got sold on the “cheaper” bang for the buck in oil. Wind is infinitely renewable and has no known environmental impact. It does have some draw backs… You need wind to generate power, the current wind mill is not pretty and consumes real estate. I have often wondered why no one has created a fan similar to venting fans you see on house roofs. It would seem to be a more effective solution to catch cross flowing winds. Used with solar or water sources makes a complete solution.  

Solar Sources
Solar is infinitely renewable and has no known environmental impact. It does have one draw back… You need sun. As technology improves this solution will certainly become common place. Used with wind or water sources makes a complete solution.  

Water Sources
Water is infinitely renewable and has no known environmental impact. It does have one draw back… You need constant flowing water. The problem is not in the power source but our implementations to harness it. Large power plants like Niagra Falls and super damns should be a thing of the past. They were implemented so only certain people would control power. We need to integrate into the environment to obtain our needs, use the natural flow of water, not force it. As technology improves this solution will certainly become common place. Good water flow can make a complete solution by itself. 

Lightning Sources
The power of lightning is awesome. Working on ways to harness this power would seem to be a worthwhile adventure. Creating a world net that draws power from lightning could in itself provide all the power the world needs in the foreseeable future. This has the potential that usage of power is promoted rather than conservation(at least for a while ). Only concern is that we might draw too much electricity and somehow our planet becomes negatively charged.

Very thoughtful and touching article.  Gives you the theory as well why people hang on to older Macs.  Click here to read.

I do not like “the holidays”. I know that there are more like me out there, but the holidays are such a part of our childhood and so much ingrained into our commercial culture that we are supposed to like them, and even pretend to like them even when we don’t. It’s like going to Disneyland -a little garish and expensive and boring as hell, but an American tradition. We do it because we don’t know not to.

Thanksgiving is OK, though. It’s just about enjoying food and each other and realizing that there but for the grace of God … so I’m OK with that except for one small item: the Detroit Lions. Why can’t that city produce a good team?

Then follows Black Friday, and the ugly stuff begins. The people who line up for Wal-Mart to open at 5AM must have very empty lives. All of this crap leaving stores on Friday makes me ill. We don’t need any of it. And it is crap. It is poorly made and meant to be thrown away and replaced.

Stuff. Stuff. Stuff. We gotta keep buying stuff, or the economy will not work properly. Something is very wrong with us.

I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything. We draw names on one side of our family. But buying a meaningful gift for an affluent American is torture. Giving should have meaning … a very wealthy Christian right winger I know in Billings one year bought a box of 144 sets of winter gloves and then gave them to homeless people. That was a simple gift that had meaning to the recipient. It came from his heart.

We got enough. We have food, family and friends. It would be so nice if we could just forget about the stuff.

My early New Year’s resolution: To imitate my wealthy right wing Christian friend in Billings. He figured it out.

I’m not usually a germophobe, but the last few months I’ve been walking around opening doors with my elbows and washing my hands constantly. I’ve been freaked out by the constant updates on Facebook about what my friends/friends’ kids have come down with now. So far, my immune system has held up pretty well, but I always worry that H1N1 is only a doorknob away.

These are trying times for corporate immune systems too. The economic meltdown has exposed corporations to all sorts of risks they don’t deal with in the regular course of business. Many corporate immune systems have failed, putting millions of people out of work. It begs the question: how resilient is your company? And how can you make your corporate immune system stronger?

I got to thinking about this corporate immune system concept after reading the new book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo. In this fantastic book, Ramo (former foreign editor of Time Magazine, now a foreign policy/strategy consultant at Kissinger Associates) offers his thoughts on what we as a society need to do to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Ramo talks a lot about the idea of creating a stronger global immune system. Here’s what he means:

“What we need now, both for our world and in each of our lives, is a way of living that resembles nothing so much as a global immune system: always ready, capable of dealing with the unexpected, as dynamic as the world itself. An immune system can’t prevent the existence of a disease, but without one even the slightest of germs have deadly implications.”

Ramo presents this in idea in the context of how we protect ourselves from a scary world– terrorists, rogue nations, nuclear proliferation, and all that, but the concept applies well to the corporate world as well– tough competitors, fickle customers, shrinking budgets– we corporate folks have our own demons.

So how do we shore up the ol’ immune system? Ramo refers to the philosophy of building resilience or “deep security” into the organization.

“Learning to think in deep-security terms means largely abandoning our idea that we can deter the threats we face and, instead, pressing to make our societies more resilient so we can absorb whatever strikes us. Resilience will be the defining concept of twenty-first century security, as crucial for your fast-changing job as it is for the nation. We can think of resilience as a measure of how much disturbance a system can absorb before it breaks down so fundamentally that it can’t easily return to the way it once was.”

Not surprisingly many of the most resilient organizations Ramo mentions in the book share a lot of characteristics familiar to us from the open source way. I’ve pulled out five ideas I think may be valuable for those interested in strengthening their company’s immune system.

1. Failing fast and often makes you stronger.

According to Ramo, the most resilient organizations are constantly challenged, with either people on the inside (or sometimes enemies) seeking out “bugs” in their system. This constant challenge is the way that many terrorist organizations have become as resilient as cockroaches– when you are always under attack and your weak points are exposed, you are always looking for ways to shore up the weak spots.

Each failure, whether one you cause yourself, or one caused by outside forces, makes you stronger. The faster you push the organization to the breaking point, the stronger you can become. Ramo thinks the most resilient organizations spend much more time analyzing their failures than they do celebrating their successes.

2. Create a meritocracy where power is shared.

In the traditional organization power resides at the top. But in a resilient organization, power is distributed to the places where it can be most efficiently used, and this actually makes the whole system stronger. In the open source world, we often talk about creating a meritocracy where the best ideas rule, no matter where they come from. I always think of meritocracy as a way to ensure the best ideas see the light of day, but Ramo also believes that that power distribution can actually help the organization become more secure and resilient in a world where you can not plan for every challenge you will face.

“It involves accepting that the most important things cannot be predicted with any great accuracy. It involves radically refiguring the balance sheet of power in such a way that the aim isn’t to hoard power but to give away as much of it as possible so it can be mashed, mixed, and used in new and decent ways.”

3. Empathize with the vision.

Ramo studies some of the most successful venture capitalists in the world, including Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital. I was very interested to see the weight that Moritz puts on being able to empathize with the original vision / mission / values of the organization.

“Moritz cultivated a skill few engineers cared about: the ability to empathize with company founders. It was crucial to see their dreams exactly as they did, he believed. Even if they were deluded, you had to know how and where to adjust their imagination. And sometimes– usually in the case of the most brilliant ones– they were on to something.”

When you are on the outside, embracing the vision requires empathy. When you are on the inside, it simply requires deep understanding and passion for the mission.

4. Create a culture that naturally  “swarms” problems.

From the book:

“Swarming is, of course, the classic immune-system response. It’s what happens when your blood clots after you slice your finger cutting cucumbers, and it’s what’s going on in your sinuses when you sneeze. This kind of self-organization, the ability to pull off an “all hands on deck” reaction, exists in many of the most efficient and resilient systems in our world.”

The funny thing is, the traditional corporate organizational model makes it almost impossible to swarm a problem. How many times have “that’s not in my job description” or “I have to stay in my lane” stopped people from collaborating to solve problems that can not be tackled by one part of the organization alone?

The open source movement has many examples of problems that have been solved by contributors swarming, not just within an organization, but among organizations. The Linux operating system itself is probably the most famous. And that swarm started here (or see my analysis of it here).

5. Create a compelling architecture of participation.

It seems like every book I read these days has at least one section about open source. Here’s what Ramo had to say:

“Take, for example, what economists call “peer production,” which is the previously unimagined economic twitch for sharing work that has built Wikipedia, file-sharing systems like BitTorrent (which now accounts for at least 50 percent of all Internet traffic), or “open source” operating systems… “Peers” can be producing anything from decisions to software, but what matters is that these efforts are largely bottom-up, which, strangely, makes them more efficient rather than less.”

First Ramo talks about how peer production creates ownership and engagement in places where it didn’t previously exist:

“Once users step into active engagement, the dynamics of the system shift forever: users stop being consumers and become participants. This pushes the opportunity for innovation to the edges of a network, where users reside, instead of leaving it in the hands of some slow-moving, committee-oriented, centralized manufacturing center.”

And where most organizational architectures began to break down from stress as they get larger (think bureaucracy), a decentralized and open architecture of participation actually becomes stronger as it gets bigger.

“The more users a centralized system has, the closer it comes to exhaustion… But the more users a decentralized system has, the more efficient it becomes, since work can be spread around or picked up by whomever can do it best and fastest…. The best resilient systems… don’t just bend and snap back. They manage to get stronger because of the stress. They capture the good from avalanches of change without letting the bad wipe them out.”

So what’s the punchline? How can you strengthen your company’s immune system? My observation is that a lot of the ideas you see above will be implemented within the dark matter of organizations– in the corporate vision, the brand, the culture, the communities that surround and define what the company is all about.

Investing in these things may be the key to creating a resilient 21st century organization, yet doing so requires a leap of faith.

You may be hard pressed to find traditional business metrics that support these investments. But while you might not be able to find reliable metrics, the evidence of their impact is all around you. Seek out examples in books like this one, or The Starfish and the Spider or The Future of Management, among others.

And of course I’ll continue to bring you the evidence as I find it.