More holiday season disappointments

Ah, the sweet blessings of anasthesia. I had to go for a surgical procedure on the 20th and spent most of the next two days meandering in and out of oblivion, clutching lightly to the coattails of beloved Euphoria as she flitted twixt and fro, finally depositing me back with ever so light a clunk into reality in the wee small hours of the 22nd. Some people suggest that I don't handle anasthetics well at all. I suggest quite the opposite, but this time-- I immediately knew that danger was afoot.

The world ended on the 21st. Those miscreant misanthrope Mayans promised!

As I stared up into the darkened room a ghastly and pallid figure suddenly loomed over me in my bed. I leapt into action, ripping the ridiculous faux wood top off of that stupid thing they always have beside your hospital bed that is too small to use as a table and too big to not be in the way. I swung with all my might, clearing the brain-sucking zombie's head off of it's shoulders with one gruesome bloody swipe. Advantage Alcorn, you cadaverous fiends. Or so it seemed to me; to the nurse checking my blood pressure I probably looked like some feeble weakling groping helplessly for a Kleenex. No zombies. No zombocalypse. Quelle disappointement! (I don't think that was really French, but it looked cool there)

By dawn, I had come to realize that it was true, I was just another guy stuck in post-op and the world was chugging along as usual. I became bombarded several time a day with insistent whiny demands that I: get out of bed, go for a walk, sit in an armchair, live on jello and sit in an armchair. They were big on the armchair. These demands were foisted upon me by usually rather attractive (in that cookie cutter vacuous stare kind of attractive way) young women who apparently had received post-secondary educations that included learning to speak to your patients like your working at BP's or TGIF's or Appleby's (Hi! I'm Kandra, I'm going to be your nurse this morning! Isn't that great? Would you like a couple of minutes to look over the....no, wait, that's the other job...) Converssations tended to go like this:

"OK, let's get you off that bed and sitting in the chair"
"Uh, sitting really hurts, how about if I get off the bed and just stand around?"
"Great! then after that, maybe we can get you sitting in the chair!"

That was pretty much the level of conversation across the board. Try getting solid food out of such folk when somebody wrote liquid diet on your chart 2 days before. "But that was two days ago, I'm really hungry"..."Great, maybe we can get you to go sit in the chair!" I actually got to hear a physiotherapist telling a man who was close to 60 to do his breathing exercises by ....brace yourselves..."Smell the flowers, blow out the birthday candles" Like asking him to inhale through his nose and exhale out his mouth was going to be too hard for him to understand. It made me yearn for the zombies.

But all's well that ends well and after four days that felt like a month I escaped the clutches of those ham fisted poltroons which are the best and the brightest of socialist medical care and was escorted home by a friend, well, acquaintance. Please don't get me wrong. This fellow did me a huge favor and I am sincerely grateful. The drive home, however, should have been prefaced with a couple extra shots of morphine so that I could have really enjoyed the nuances of the conversation. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed the the end-of-the-worlders, New World Order alarmists, and general conspiracy theoristas all seem to fit under one big happy down filled blanket together? I got to listen to "well turns out the Mayans had it wrong this time,...." I'm not kidding. It's the EMP that's going to get us, he's been studying Nostradamus' predictions. He's also convinced himself that his 99 Caddy is one of the few cars that can repel the giant EMP when the rest of the world is blacking out or frying or whatever is going to happen. I asked him what good that would do him with everyone else dropping dead behind the wheel at 70mph simultaneously. It stumped him long enough to get him restarted on North Korea starting the next global conflagration. The only thing missing is the tinfoil hat. But it also made me think, this guy seems happiest when he's got the end of the world to worry about. I'm pretty sure he's not alone. We can rail and shake our fists at the sky and curse our lack of political leadership over the wrongs of our world. We can shed true and sincere tears for those who fall for no apparent reason in harm's way and legislators turn a blind eye to the real problems behind the symptoms. We can feel nauseated by the hatred and discrimination, racism, sexism, blundering bureacracies (health care!) but the end of the world?  Hey, whattya gonna do?

After having had a couple of days to sleep off my usual caste of cynicism and my decidely jaundiced view of the world, I realized something else. We are learning more and more every day to be desensitized to real world ending events. The news beats us down with mass shootings, with children being murdered, with some nut job shooting at firemen, with serial rapists and murderers romping around willynilly.  Why? Why is a culture of violence not only tolerated, but celebrated? When I was a child John Wayne was going to save us, he didn't but Clint and Charlie and Bruce and Sly and Arnie all stood in line to take his place and whoever is the matinee idol now. So we celebrate violence as a way of life. Want to stop the shooters? Shoot them! Utah school teachers are being offered weapons training. Have we really come to this?  When I was a child I was taught that my father's generation stopped evil and used violence to do it. Maybe that ingrained the notion in our minds, but then something much smaller in scale, but perhaps not scope happened and I think it influenced a world's thinking and that impact is still felt. Novemeber 22, 1963, Dealey Plaza, Dallas Texas. If someone can kill the President, then it's ok to kill..... Maybe the world did end, we're just the last twitching nerves. Certainly, if anyone reading this believes that we were created by some manner of Supreme Being, what we are today cannot be what that Being envisioned.

On a somewhat lighter note, what is up with those stupid little rolling bedside table things in hospital rooms? All of my life, except from changing the tops from an ugly puke green metal to an ugly fake woodgrain metal, they've never changed. Do you think somebody that...like..makes things could go...hey, these tables are too  narrow to be good for anything and start making them a few inches wider? Seriously, this could be a big business if somebody just got on it. You could even recylce the old ones to make new ones out of the parts, eco-friendly. Where are all the budding entrepreneurs out there?

The American Dream

Have you ever wanted to kill someone? I mean been really hurt emotionally or really angry and just wished you could take them out? I hear people say it all the time, "oh, I could just kill him when he does that" "My old lady ever run around on me, I'd kill her" Of course, I hear people say they love pizza, too. I hear people love and hate a lot of things and perhaps if they'd read more in school they would have more descriptive vocabularies in order to communicate their true feelings. I enjoy pizza.

Back to the first question, though. It seems lately, a lot of people have wanted to kill someone and they did. There is a huge uproar once again in the United States over gun control. I want to state emphatically and for the record that all my life I have been a hunter and a firearms owner and I believe in the freedom of the individual to live her or his life as seen fit and have been opposed categorically to gun control Well, I've changed my mind.

Let's look at some of the arguments that the gun control opponents throw out there. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. If these crazies really want to kill someone, if they don't find a gun, they'll just find another way. What about cars? Cars kill people, should we take away people's right to drive?

OK, but if I want to kill someone and I have to use a knife or a blunt instrument, I might get a couple of victims, but everyone else is either going to run away or hide. I can't possibly chase down, oh say 27 people. I can stand in one place and shoot that many though. That kind of takes care of the first two arguments, I think. Also, if I am armed with something less than a firearm if might be easier for someone to throw a text book at me, and certainly for the police to stop me a lot more easily if I don't off myself. If someone is under the influence, or has certain proven medical conditions that require specific medications, in most regions they do have their right to drive taken away. Society can't monitor everyone all the time, and I honestly haven't heard of any psychopaths trying to kill groups of nursing students or high school kids by driving into them with a car. They go get automatic weapons instead. It has to stop. Some readers may feel that I'm harping on too much about the US and that here in Canada it's nowhere near that bad. Update your statistics, sports fans, the prevalence of gun violence has actually gone down in most parts of the US, it's on the rise all over Canada.

Before I move on, I have the last great argument of the gun supporters. Of course, the average Joe Hunter/Teabagger/Minuteman doesn't have to lobby the government himself with this, the NRA pays lobbyists and darn good lobbyists to do that work for them. I wonder who the biggest sponsors of the NRA might be, gun makers maybe? But we all know what that argument is right? Their Constitutional right to bear arms. The 2nd Amendment. Well, here's exactly what it reads as:

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

I have bad news for those guys hiding out in the forests of Vermont and mountains of Montana with their camoflage undies and  double lighting bolt flags--that is gun control. If your militia is well regulated, that militia would do more to keep the guns out of crazy people's hands than the police are doing. "Necessary for the security of a free state"--that's what it says. I wonder how free people feel going shopping in Oregon this week or wanting to go to school in Connecticut. Hey, all you gun owners--great job protecting the security of the free state. We're all proud of you guys.

Hey, maybe I'm too late, there are enough guns out there to stock several armies. Gun control in and of itself might be a pipe dream because the  other argument is that the bad guys and the crazies will always find a way to get a gun. So, since we can't possibly stop them, apparently the argument is that we shouldn't even try because it will inconvenience the rest of us. There are 18 dead children and 9 dead adults in Connecticut this week. I don't know how many mourners and grieving families that equates to, but I could handle a little inconvenience if it had stopped one guy, and I like buying guns. Maybe we can't stop these kinds of people, but at least, let's try to slow them down a little, give the good guys a chance. In the meantime, all you guys and gals out there defending the second amendment in America, like I said, keep up the good work.

No Shortage of Idiots

Have you ever wondered why rhetoric is often referred to as empty? Well, read on and I will do my level best to provide an answer.

It seems to me that in these tough times, the fear of 'shortages' lives large in peoples' hearts. A couple of years ago, I recall that a media panic over a potential rice shortage caused people to run out and buy up all the rice they could possibly store. Not surprisingly, it caused a rice shortage.

The one thing there never seems to be a shortage of is stupidity. I read an article today on how the US government is not doing enough to deal with people who have been caught behaving unethically or illegally on a very large scale. The millionaire and billionaire fraud-mongers get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar and precious little is done to them. There are more and more cases popping up all the time too, apparently. The person who wrote the article and the people who posted online responses seemed to me to be probably of the same socio-economic demograph and thus, quite probably, the same political stripe, as the people being written about. Ah, the one street where there is no such thing as 'street cred', Wall Street.

"What is he prattling on about?" asks the bleary-eyed blog visitor, "Damn it, man, make your point!"

Alright, I understand young people not having the patience to read an entire article and I don't have any pictures or links for this one. Here we go: one of the respondents to the article likened Obama's failure to act against these white collar criminals as having something to do with his class warfare. If you want to stick around for the rest of the article, here's the spoiler alert-it's going to be me ripping that nonsense apart.

First: if the person who wrote that response really thinks there is class warfare going on in America now, what's he going to think when half starved, starry-eyed fanatics dressed in battle fatigues and carrying AK-47s kick down his front door looking for food? Or the keys to his Mercedes? Or when they decide to firebomb his front yard? Class warfare doesn't look like you having to put out money for your gardener's health care benefits, it looks like what I just described. Maybe it looks like a little like Occupy Wall Street was just a sniff of what's coming and now you're scared. When your daughter comes home from college for the holidays, have your security personnel pat her down for weed and any writings by Che Guevera, know what I mean?

Second: Hey, how much do you think that the majority shareholders in companies like Remington and Colt and Savage are worth?  So, don't complain to me when those class warfare-istas show up on your doorstep armed to the teeth. I bet those company owners voted just like you did and I bet you guys are the first ones to step up and protect Second Amendment rights in America. Good for you! A well regulated militia is exactly what you can call the security company that keeps your gated community free of these riff-raff. Teabag that, you ruffians! Hey, wasn't that ...back in the 1700's...a bunch of people opposed to the Crown? Wouldn't that sort of make what happend a ..class warfare? Oh yeah, only for the foot soldiers, not the officers. Oh well, I tried.

Third; And this one is kind of important, a few years ago the US Senate had a problem with the practices of the biggest accounting firms in the world, so they put together one of their little subommittees they are so fond of and said, "we're going to regulate your affairs" The accounting firms said "go ahead, you do that and we'll just close our doors and move to Europe and watch your economy collapse from over there". The Senate, understandably did what they're best at....nothing. If the big accounting firms can get away with that, what chances does the US government have against the big banks? Seriously.  There are threats and there is empty rhetoric. Those banks do not answer to the federal government, it's the other way around. In fact, the only guarantee the government has of staying in business is the fact of where they get their revenues from...taxpayers. If you think the fiscal cliff is dangerous to the global economy, (and it's really a myth) it's not even a scrach on an elephant's hindquarters compared to banks the size of Bank of America or CitiGroup shutting down. Why do you think no one went to jail for that giant scam in 2008? Exactly.

So there we have it, empty rhetoric versus real threats. Nikita Kruschev took off his shoe and pounded it on a table to try to impress upon John Kennedy how scary he was. Only slightly over 40 years before him, the people that put his political system in place slit the throats of the Romanov family to seize power in Russia. Kruschev was empty rhetoric, the Bolshevik Revolution was real class warfare.

Reflections from some Bitter Waters

I have been fortunate recently to have met several rather intelligent people. Well educated, erudite, and willing to debate or converse on matters that are, let's say, on the upper levels of dear old Doctor Maslow's hierarchy. It's quite pleasant and very educational for me. I do not hesitate to contribute my humble offerings to the conversations, but I am certain that I am taking more than I am giving in terms of intellectual contributions.

These conversations generally embrace a few basic tenets of managing other people, in one way or another, or monitoring other people's behavioiur. I have had the experience where it was my job, albeit on a much smaller scale than most, to do both. Several of these conversations and debates have already contributed to my offerings here on the blog. Two of my articles even elicited responses. Huzzah!

The nature of these conversations, as I was writing a moment ago, usually involves ethical matters, personal morals, the culture of various organisations, complaince with regulatory bodies in the business world, teams of people working in unison. It can be fairly heady stuff for the unintiated, but again, the concepts that work do so for large or small organisations, so having had some experience, I can at least keep up.

Reflecting on some of these topics has given me pause for thought (and I intend to bring it up with these gurus and rabbis of the business world but I brought it here first) about the infamous and ubiquitous job review. Also, some of my earlier meanderings on life in the Interent world may have some influence on what I have to say here.

To begin with, most people are nervous about the boss calling them in for a review. I have met very few people who are sure enough about the job they've been doing to walk in and plunk themselves down all eager for the pat on the back and the accompanying pay raise. I've met a few who could fake it, but they are usually the first ones to start falling apart at the least bit of criticism. It doesn't matter to this conversation, what matters is, it is stressful, usually for both parties. As the employer, one should have some manner of  scoring system that treats employees fairly and justly across the board. Liking or not liking the individual cannot come into play when scoring their job performance. Performance is the key word here though, when one talks about their organisation behaving ethically, one can look to the regulatory compliance acts for guidance. Did the employee always work up to the code of the Residential Tenancies Act or the Counsellor's Code of Conduct? Were client confidentialities protected as according to the bounds of the Personal Privacy Act? And so on. As long as there is some kind of legislation accorded to the work the employee does, the employer can score them highly when the answer is yes. If one is working with some kind of numbered scale from 0 to 5 and 5 is brilliant, by all means there must be a 3.5 right there. Both people can go away from the meeting feeling pretty darn good about it, about each other and about themselves. That's a bucket that's about to spring a few leaks.

My first question is: Does the bare minimum make for a good employee? As long as you didn't break the law, you did ok? That's kind of sad. How about encouraging an employee to express him or herself ethically, yes showing morals and principles that go beyond what the law demands?

That was just my first question, try this one on: What about ethical or principle matters that do not have any regulating legislation? What is ethical behaviour? In most cultures, and this really sucks by the way, if everyone else is doing something or close to everyone else, it must be ok to do it. That is sad but it is human nature just as sure as romance blossoms in the spring. If anyone out there walks into an office as a new manager and finds an employee who has been sitting there for twenty years talking about everyone else's private lives behind their backs with whoever is having coffee with her, guess what? She isn't going to stop. How do you put trustworthiness, or lack of, on a scale of  1 to 5? How do you measure the possibility that you suspect a higher ranking employee will betray you with a lie the first chance they get, for whatever selfish purpose it might serve them? Put that on a scale of 1 to 5.

Those are both attributes that can exist within any organisational culture and be so ingrained that there is virtually nothing a new leader can do to change them. Changing culture is the most difficult task for anyone to accomplish coming in to the 'big office'. Don't take my word for it, go read a book. A book on that subject would be most helpful. Pretty much anyone writing on organisational culture is going to agree.

With the advent of social media, skyping, chatting, texting and even good old email (still not that old to some of us) there is another aspect to the entire trust question and it engages employee performance issues as well. How much time are employees using on their computer?  Obviously, so many jobs today are computer based that for an employee to be perched in front of a monitor all day is more the norm than the exception, but how much of that time is spent working? How much hanging out? Do you, as the employer, spy on your employees? What kind of culture does that establish if you do? If there was little trust before, whatever was left just went out the window.  Do employers, employees, Boards, or the people who provide the spyware know that there are Supreme Court rulings about how one may spy on a computer? Or how one can disperse the results?

The  part that I mentioned earlier comes into play now. I wrote an article (scroll down) on the compartmentalization of our society. With that compartmentalization comes a sense of apathy toward one's fellow man that any leader, ethically, I think should struggle to keep out of the workplace. Combine apathy toward others with selfishness though, and the die is cast. Is this inevitable? It may well be in workplaces where people have been allowed to skate by on the bare minimum in terms of ethics and competencies. In an environment where gossip and character assassination already reigned, albeit, subtly. If that environment includes people who look for love on dating services and take their Facebook acquaintances more to heart than the person standing across the desk, well, nothing much left to say. How does the leader trying to affect positive change and boost morale compete? I can sit here typing away and reflect on people I have met in my own life to whom I would love to direct these questions, but I doubt they would ever take the time to read something this lengthy (sad), some of them would never catch the references (sadder) and I'd bet none of them would reply(saddest...no actually, I'm ok with that) Oh well, like Journey said ...don't stop believin'

cyber life, friendship, love

Here I go again.Now, I'm thinking that I have called this blog sceptical view and maybe, just maybe, some readers are finding me not sceptical enough. Perhaps, not critical enough. Well, I never intended to write personal attacks, so if that's what anyone is looking for, look elsewhere now. Also, I won't publish personal attacks if people post them to the commentary section of any post.  Further, I believe in informed and civil debate and I do attempt to look at more than one viewpoint on any subject before I post. I'm getting grumpier with the winter weather, though, so all that could change in a heartbeat.

A subject that I have touched upon previously in other publications is the compartmentalization of our society. I think that when most people read that, they conjure an image of a huge apartment tower in some major urban centre where neighbours go about their day to day lives and ignore one another and crime victims' pleas for help are falling on the deaf ears of the uncaring. I may have just set a record for run on sentences, too, but that's another matter and it was a damn good sentence. Getting back on track, I would like to suggest that the image I wrote above isn't necessarily wrong, but I believe that compartmentalization is far more broad spread than that and far more insidious. I have three main culprits in mind and I am going to attempt here to lay the appropriate degree of responsbility at the feet of all three.

First: the work place. If one looks at the job market in this day and age it is a wonder to behold. Long gone are the days of the "jack of all trades" in the blue collar industries, or the "generalist" in the white collar fields. Recruiters (bless their scurrilous little souls) seem to gasp in wonder that a person could actually have been in charge of budgets and in charge of staff discipline and in charge of media relations all at the same job! To imagine someone doing all of those things seems near impossible to them; to imagine one person doing them all well is nigh incomprehensible. When one looks at job descriptions these days, or even some job titles, it becomes apparent how "specialized" work has become. Almost every task seems to have taken on it's own meaning and, this is where things start to get ugly, it's own jargon. If I want my work to appear 'specialized' as in--that makes me special--one of the important parts of doing that is that other's really don't understand what I'm doing. It's working. Sadly, proof of that is the fact that recruiting agencies (bless their salacious little viewpoints) even need to exist. But, I'm wandering here, the important point is that language is the basis of culture. It always has been and it always will be, so there. When I was helping people start small businesses, clients came to me with their business ideas from another agency just a couple of blocks away and said that they would rather work with me than with the business development officers at that other agency. Was it because I had a better business plan? No, actually at the outset business planning is pretty generic. Was it because I had better funding opportunities that I could make available to them? No, on the contrary, the other organization had $75,000.00 interest free, forgiveable loans with the requisite that the new entrpreneur work with their people! I had no money to offer. Enough!, cries the eye-weary reader, what was the reason? Quite simply, I spoke to the clients in plain English and explained to them what they needed to do in plain English. The people they had been dealing with spoke to them in terms that would have resonated perfectly at MBA grad schools all over North America, or on a stock exchange floor or at a bankers' luncheon but were basically meaningless to the clientele. Ironically enough, the clients could have done the same in return if they were looking to start a business that required any level of specialization. I would dare one of those MBA's to try to understand the basics of home renovations or auto mechanics. The world of work has created a paradigm where people understand other people doing the same job as they do at other companies better than they understand their own co-workers. Thus, how much do people engage with one another in the workplace? Less and less all the time.

Second: Television. You remember television, right? It's what everyone in the western world worshipped between the death of God and the birth of the Internet. Entire families found a solution to bickering and arguing, get a second tv! Put one in every room in fact, you aren't going to have a family fight if you don't have to talk to one another. If you don't believe me, try this simple experiment. Have a couple of friends over and sit around having coffee or drinks and strike up a conversation. Now, watch how well the conversation progresses, then after ten minutes or so, click on the tv. The conversation will, 90 times out of 100 fizzle out faster than it became 'engaged' and soon will switch either to what is being watched or someone suggesting changing channels.  This is McLuhan's global village. A village where no one comes out of their own hut. Mission accomplished, compartmentalization is now in full swing.

Third: The Internet. Seriously, put work and television on steroids and shake. Still not even close, you can work from home, you can chat on social media, you can watch movies, porn porn porn, if that's what you're looking for, there is no end, literally, no end to what the Internet can do. The grandfather of the tweeterverse is still robust and going strong. In the entire history of western culture nothing else has actually caused a decline in television viewing. That, dear reader, is power. Compartmentalization is complete, those on Twitter and Facebook are quick to learn....learn the language. It started with the LOL's and OMG's of chat rooms, but it is now replete. Get on board or get left behind.What else has the Internet provided us? I do not deny that there is plenty of good done and plenty of good yet to be done, but I doubt with all my dubious doubting ability that the compartmentalization of which I speak is good for anyone. The Internet has also brought courage for the fearful and an outlet for the outraged. The power of anonymity is scary. In my opening paragraph, I mentioned informed and civil debate. There aren't very many places one is going to find that out here in cyberspace. Put your opinion on a news site or a political blog and you're sooner or later going to get: $#@@%$##% you! (-username-) and the flaming and personal attacks begin. No one is held accountable. Do you even know who's attacking you? Ah ha, compartmentalization suddenly starts to show it's failures. I haven't gotten to the big problem yet, here it comes.

We're social animals. We have been ever since we found out that two of us can wrestle food away from a saber toothed tiger better than one and that we need the other gender for baby making purposes. That whole "language basis of culture" thing had to kick in so we could learn to get along. Now, recent research has shown that social needs are far more basic than originally posited by the good doctor Maslow. We get lonely, so where do we turn for companionship? yep, the Internet can provide that too. Am I the only one hearing little alarm bells? Go ahead--post your profile online, on MyFace or SpaceBook or Twitcher or whatever. Or, get more specific, there's plenty of fish in the cyber sea and they're all swimming in a lava lamp waiting to meet you and me!  Honestly, I'm not hearing alarm bells for people here, I'm horrified. The most recent research I've read on social psychology, which mind you is only research and can still be disputed, suggests that up to 3%  of the overall population of adult North America are sociopaths. Yay! That means, if you are wondering, that out of every 100 people you know or may meet, 3 could watch you drop on the sidewalk in front of them and walk away not caring if you live or die. I had to address a group of young people last year about the dangers of sexual exploitation. A group of about twenty between 10 and 18 years of age. A quick show of hands and sure enough, everyone had a Facebook page. Facebook, the company that happily sells your information to advertisers. I told them from the point of view of someone trolling for victims, Facebook is a wet dream come to life. Go ahead and screen those people that respond to your profile (or your ad) do you really think they're going to put on their profile: Hi I'm a sexual deviant who can only find arousal by chaining you up and slowly carving you to pieces? Probably not, probaly wouldn't get a huge response that way. If you really are lonely enough to want to meet a date on the Internet (where over 20% of modern day relationships start! they happily brag, they don't talk about how quickly some of them end) then I suggest you think about that 3%. Not all sociopaths are sadistic killers like on Criminal Minds. But all the sadistic killers are sociopahts or psychopaths ( a distinction that won't matter to you after the fact), they're predatory. Where do predators go? Where the prey is. Your choice, our world has become a smaller colder place for sure, but maybe breaking out of that compartmentalization is something people might want to start doing in person. Remember when friends used to introduce friends to each other at social gatherings and not with a tweet? yeah... or cast your line out there in that ocean of availability. It no longer smacks of ostracism as it once did, to most, because we've all ostracized ourselves already. It's kind of like working for the bomb squad, there's a unique job, you only get to be wrong once though. Don't be shy about sharing your thoughts here, I get to read them whether I publish them or not and so far I've published them all and you're protected by the anonymity of the web.

How much is enough

My opinions on political and economic resolutions to what is wrong in our societies may surprise some. I am thoroughly convinced that fairly consevative fiscal efforts can be combined with fairly robust social programming and a lot more can be accomplished for all the people all of the time. Most of my interest lies in Canada of course and any 'social' programming one risks suggesting south of the border will probably be met with rampant and rabid hatred. Damn commies! One has to find a way to sneak it in on them; tell them it's a cookie or something.

I started thinking about this and about my headline for this because I just watched Warren Buffett on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Don't get him confused with Jimmy Buffett' they're totally different kinds of pirates. Warren comes across as this kindly old curmudgeon that one could imagine sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with and he'd wear one of those porridge colored cardigans with leather elbow pathches and a plaid shirt. Grandpa Buffet is, some say, the richest man on the planet. Whether that is actually true is really difficult to determine simply because he is so rich it becomes difficult to calculate just how rich he is. He is definitely in the 1% of the1% of the 1%.  No wonder he's so happy, right? But wait kindly old patron, along came America's economic collapse and the creeping socialists of the White House want you to pay more tax! (cue dramatic upswell of music)

Now, still with me? Do you recall a rock band from way back in the 1980's or even maybe the late '70's out of Ireland that became really big hits for awhile there? Apparently, they're still filling concert halls. U2 they call themselves. At one point and possibly still because it's another thing difficult to track, but nevertheless they were considered the biggest rock group on the planet. Yeah, remember those guys? Cool names like Bono and the Edge.Then along came, now I'm really showing my age, Napster! The evil bad guy of the music industry. (cue dramatic upswell of music again!)

Then, of course, because I'm on my successful people roll, there' the indefatigable Mr. William Gates, this guy took the second best product in it's industry and sold it to the entire world, youngest billionair ever until that FaceBook kid came along,and there's some debate about whether he's going to stick or not. Back to Gates, while compiling his multi-trillion dollar empire, Bill found out that most of the children of the world are hungry, don't have medical care, stuff like that and decided he might be in a position to do something about. Him and the Mrs. tired of playing on Windows.

Here's the thing:Buffett, (accursed traitor to his elitist brethren) told the whole world a few weeks ago that of course anyone who makes the kind of money that he does should pay more tax and it would bekind of crazy for the American government to not tax them more.

A few years ago, the entire music industry was up in arms about Napster stealing artists' royalties by scoring all the free downloads. Bono said 'good for them if they want to download U2's we've made plenty" Then, he went off to join Bill....

Yep, Gates, that Bill, who along with his wife has decided that they are going to keep giving to the needy until it's all gone. That's their commitment, at least that's what it said in the TIME magazine I read. Microsoft keeps making things, paying him his share, and he can just pass it around.

Now, here something I know, economic models, free enterprise or socialist are designed around capitalism, that is controling the production of the society. Capitalism is based on greed. Neither system works and Keynes has always been on pretty shaky ground. What will it take to get economic modelers, 'job creators', political leaders and the captains of industry and commerce to follow leads like theirs? How much is enough?

Am I the only one who notices these things?

With all the hoopla over the last year and a half or so that good old Mitt Romney wanted to be the guy in charge of the free world, he was on everybody's tv screee every day. Am I the only one who noticed he looks like Perry White? Clark Kent's boss?

an article from a forum on compliance and ethics

A lot of the postings that I've read here seem to come down to: compliance and ethics would be a lot easier to keep in place if compliance officers got the respect and authority they need from upper management. I agree, however, an awful lot of the North American workforce do not have such a thing as a compliance officer, or an HR manager, or an IT department, The day of the management generalist is very much still with us with companies and organisations that simply don't have the capacity to hire beyond one or two professional directors.
The other point I often hear is that training and/or leading by example is the best way to teach compliance to employees. To a degree I will say yes, but honestly, culture will inform new employees attitudes far more. Behaviour learned over coffee breaks is going to be far more influential than anything one can come up with in a training package. If a small organisation has a couple of 20 year employees who gossip about everyone over coffee, it will spread as would the veteran employee who gets away with sneaking in late and out early on a regular basis.

I know of one leader who found himself in a situation where compliance to legislation was an absolute must. He oversaw the delivery of social services, on the taxpayers' dime, including addictions counseling, at risk youth counseling, family counseling, anger management workshops. and more. Of course this employees had to guarantee confidentiality, and have appropriate credentials for the work as well as provide timely, confidential and accurate reports to him. When he started, very little of that was in play.He undertook a three pronged approach 1) some people had to go, the ones who were in violation of all 3 of those criteria, they were well ensconced in their positions and would not accept any 'feedback' their damage to the organisation had to be considered as well, 2) he had to be sure and model that ethical behavior, especially confidentiality to all of his employees every day 3) he found that he could show the employees that there was value in following regulatory directives and complying with ethical standards, not just in terms of job security but that their clients would value them. It took several weeks to get this new mindset working but for a couple of years it worked, drastically improving the organisations public image. Unfortunately, a new and greedy board of directors learned about directors liability insurance. Soon nepotism, conflict of interest and board interference ruled. When this manager tried to call them out, they created an excuse to get rid of him. No ethics among the lot. Interesting that his teaching about the value and the modeling only worked as far as his level of influence held sway.

I have a question

I always do. This question is about reading. People's ability to read and, more importantly, the ability to comprehend what one reads and attach the appropriate relevance to that material.

If I've already lost you, I understand. Click off my blog and go watch some porn, I hear it's free. For those of you still with me, let me explain what got me started thinking about this. Some middleaged model, I forget her name, can still 'rock' a bikini (by the way I though she looked emaciated), several other pop stars, models, actresses have also rocked their looks' in similar articles. Supposed news sites are rife with these stories. The other side of that coin is that they 'flop' or 'disappoint' in whatever they're wearing. How can I possibly be disappointed in what some Hollywood starlet is wearing? I can be disappointed tha I'm not the guy in the tux beside her, but in either case, I really don't care what she wears. Also, what exactly is 'rocking' one's appearance? Overworked, that's what it is, a horribly overworked phrase.

Someone must want to read these things, though, otherwise they would evenutally stop posting them. The same is true for all the little entertainment blurbs that are happening on MSN and Yahoo and such outlets, where some gossipy little wench is just gushing for a chance to just 'dish' about whatever some celebrity said or did or whoever they kissed or whatever they wore (the females are just as bad). It's even too much work for them to spell out celebrity, it's just celeb. Oddly enough, celebrity is rooted in the word celebrate, as in someone who is significant enough to us that we celebrate their life. Uh-oh, my list just got a lot shorter.

Of course, back in the days when we had coffee percolators in our kitchens, Wile E. Coyote on TV and pterodactyls coasting over our heads as we ran and dodged our way to school, the equivalent of these 'news' outlets was the checkout stand at the store. They're still there, by the way, but who wants to get ink stains on their fingers or pay $1.99 to find out that Oprah's an alien or that Justin Bieber is actually a clone of the real Justin or whatever, when the information is free online. My bigger question about all of it is who cares? and, why do they continue to put this stuff out?  Why worry about the ink stains on your hands, they'll wash off; better to worry about the stains being left on your mind.

The truth is for many it is mind candy. Oh yes it is, some people are to junk news like a sugar addict is to a candy store. They'll consume until they're ready to puke it back up then come back for more. Further with this example; just like with food, if you fill up on crap you have no appetite for anything substantial. People like to stare into the lives of the famous because it gives them something to either a) criticize, or b) fantasize about. Either way, it takes their minds off their own lives briefly. This is also a fairly clear explanation for the morbid fascination with reality television. This is great news for three disparate but all relatively important groups of people.

The first group is the people who write, produce,edit, host and publish or broadcast this stuff. If people weren't paying attention, advertisers wouldn't advertise with them and they would be unemployed. Trust me, you don't want to know how much money some of these people make. Of the three groups I am referencing, this group is, to me, the least relevant.

The second group of people remain largely silent on the subject because they're the people making real news. I don't mean the people writing or reporting real news stories. They are all painfully aware that whatever they have to tell the public is second to whatver Kim K said to Pink at the Peoples Choice Awards. They've accepted it. I'm referring to the people that newspeople want to report on. In a world where some people don't get to eat as well as their political leaders housepets, the people that could do something about it don't want you to think about it. That's just one example, why bother going on with more? There are thousands. The reality is, people with power want to hold on to that power with the least resistance necessary. The less the general population pays attention, the less they complain. I mean really, who wants to watch a televised plea for 'adopting' a child in a third world country when one can watch reruns of Family Guy instead? It's the same concept, although reading does give one that opportunity to slow down and analyse the information one is receiving.

The third group for whom this is great news? The consumers of course. The ninety plus percent of western society who want to go through life feeling strangely secure that whatever is wrong in the world, someone will look after it for them. Pardon me if I am appearing to be on my high horse here as well, I haven't done a heck of a lot to improve anyone's lot in life recently, either. Mea culpa. Nevertheless, let's congratulate ourselves on knowing all about Justin and Selena's breakup while we can't really say how many people died of dysetnery while we were reading this. One day that world will arrive on our doorsteps and we will have been warned. There's a little thing people can click underneath these postings to reply;almost no one ever does. I've thrown what I think are some pretty good quotes up on this blog with some of my articles. Here's one from my childhood:

"Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, crying like a fire in the sun
Strike another match, go start anew
It sure is all over, Baby Blue" --Bob Dylan

What's on your reading table?

Beliefs

Nope, not Santa, not Jesus or Mohammedan. The things that one believes in on a day to day basis. Maybe one or two of those three I just named helped inform some people's belief systems, but do they really carry one through the day?

I have been studying a calendar of possible university courses and ethics pops up as the title or part of the title for many of the courses. I joined a group on one of the social media services to discuss 'ethics'. Personally, I'm finding that too many people are trying too hard to have one exact definition.

How many ask themselves in any given situation, what is the right thing to do? The best thing to do, not only for myself, but possibly my family, my organisation, my community? Ad infinitum. Better still, if there is conflict between outcomes for say organisation or community, which way will I turn?

Someone posed the question "is it possible for a person to develop their own creed of what is right and wrong totally separate from that of the person's society?" My answer is no because if that person is part of a group, any group, that person's decisions are going to be informed by what was learned through group contact. It's inevitable. Nevertheless, that person can form a creed or set of personal ethics by which he or she lives life. Just the reality is, it will be influenced by others. I have no doubt that the biggest influence on my own ethical behaviour to this day is still my parents and I am certain that love me as much as they might, if they were aware of some of the things I have done 'unethically' in my life, they would be sorely disappointed in me. I do not profess nor pretend to be the harbinger or ideal of what ethical, principled or moral behaviour should be. I will say however, in my defense, that I do not gossip, I do not "backstab" friends and I submit to the consequences of my own action. I live as much as I possibly can by my own creed and have withstood the sometimes less than favorable responses for having done so. If my personal beliefs wander away from the law of the land, I will stick with my beliefs and if it causes me legal troubles, I accept that. Does that do me any good? It doesn't keep me awake nights.

When I consider how our legal system has developed and where our laws come from, I'm quite satisfied with myself for taking this stance. Canada's system is supposed to try to do everything it can to address the wants, demands, and desires of as many of it's population as possible. Democracy is based on the idea that the majority is always right. Spare me. The majority are roped in to voting in to power the best campaigner and/or somebody who supposedly stands for the same principles the person marking the x does. As often as not, in our elections, a vote for one candidate or party is simply a vote against another. This is not a group of people I want to have doing my thinking for me about right and wrong.

So, since I clearly have little interest in what legal behaviour has to do with ethical behavioiur, what is ethical behaviour? What should a person or group of people believe? Well, once upon a time, an organisation I worked for hired a man who, on his way into the interview, found ten dollars on the street. He went out of his way, before his interview, to get the money back to the rightful owner. We didn't know about it when we interviewed him, but that would have locked the job for him as far as i was concerned. It was no surprise to me that his integrity never once wavered, to my knowledge at least, the entire time he worked there. By the same token, another man who worked for that same organisation found his personal life being  unfairly --and possibly illegally--scrutinized by his employers. He went to bat for his rights and stood up to the person responsible. I was stuck in a position where I could do nothing to help him and watched as that person and several supporters did everything they could think of to try to get rid of him. He stood by what he believed was right until the day he resigned on his own terms and I have always admired him for that. In truth as much as I tried to help him from 'behind the scenes' my pleadings fell on deaf ears and I always wished I could do more for him. So those are just a couple of examples, I have others some bigger some smaller. I once worked through my lunch break and was quite hungry by midafternoon. I was in the staff kitchen area and noticed a sandwich in the refrigerator. Another employee was there getting herself coffee and I asked her if she knew who the sandwich belonged to. She said "well no, but if you're hungry why don't you just take it. Who'd know?" I responded, "I would" To me that is the essence of following one's ethics. Someone once said, 'the law is what you obey when someone is watching, your ethics are what you obey when no one is watching" I think it was Kant and I'm paraphrasing  but moving along.  I guess my question to anybody who thinks ethics/principles/morals...because I don't want to even bother with the conversation of where one ends and one begins...is this....do you do what you do because it's the right thing? or do you do what you do because you're sure you won't be found out? In honesty, I've done both in my life, I regret the latter, but being a pragmatist at heart  I simply try to mitigate and minimize the damage I might have done.

In hopes of bringing my case to some kind of rational closing, I find myself returning to the legal standpoing again. Someone once said, "The more corrupt a society, the more numerous it's laws" A lot of people don't want to believe that but I do. I believe it because people will either break laws or find new ways to debase themselves, thus creating a need for more laws, because of greed and fear. If it was not so, I suggest that we'd only need one law and all of our ethics could stem from it. You've probably seen or heard it before. "Do unto  others only as you would have them do unto you." All that is required is that everyone obeys it, good luck with that.

your business' front door

When I did small business development, in what seems to me like a lifetime ago sometimes, one of the anecdotes I used with my clients was about a fellow who owned a convenience store and I rented the apartment above him. Late one spring night, I was out on my balcony and I could hear someone scraping snow off the front sidewalks. Sure enough it was the owner. This is a man who I was certain had made quite a financial success of his busines. He wore jewelry that was worth more than the car I drove at the time. My lesson to my clientele was this: when you're the owner, every job is yours, never forget that. Scraping that snow might be the most important thing he does because he wants his front door to be attractive to those passing by tomorrow morning when he opens again.
Today, anyone who is serious about succeeding in business should realize that their front door opens to the entire globe and is possibly 15" or 17 or 21". It's called your homepage and I can promise this, I don't care how much time you spend on your graphics or your theme, (and I can hook you up wiht someone very good at that sort of thing, but I digress)  whether you've gone wild or subtle or whatever-- if your business partners,customers, funders, whomever see difficult navigation, pages not being kept current and primary school spelling errors, they are not going to 'like' you on spacebook or flitter, or whatever. You're a cyberlaughingstock to professionals. The amount of effort required to address those issues is generally a lot less than what it takes for someone to remove the snow from your physical front door, but I would assume you made sure that was done. Or had the grass behind the building cut and weeds pulled in the warm seasons. Yet, as an organisation or company, a decision was made to put yourselves out there to the world and your 'best effort' is sadly lacking if that's what your homepage looks like. I think too, with a lot of comments I read on websites where people have the guts to be as nasty as they want because they can hide behind the anonymity of a user name, that there are a lot of biases out there that want to accuse our people of laziness. Why give them an opportunity when we know it's a lie. We know that, right? Your homepage, your image of yourself that you want to broadcast to the world and you're not taking time to proofread before you publish? You're listing last August or September in upcoming events? I'm supposed to be from the generation that got caught by surprise by this whole wwworld, (although my generation did kind of lay the ground work) so, you've probably got someone on staff a lot younger than me supposedly in charge of that site. maybe it has something to do with some people's work ethic from that generation.I don't know, but I suggest if that's your portal to the world, you might want to take a little Windex to the glass occassionally

Remembrance Day

 

 

 

I am posting this for the man who taught me what he went to war to fight against; the man who warned me that our nation would one day become that very thing he'd fought. Wounded in action in by shrapnel fire in Holland, October 31, 1944< John S. Alcorn  1916--1964. Rest in Peace, Dad.

 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

--John McCrae

A Brief Treatise on the Effectiveness of Treachery

 

 

"No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution."--Machiavelli

 

Well, if anyone should know it would be Machiavelli, but I will probably refer to a few others for wisdom beyond mine before I'm done with this piece. I suppose for the sake of this piece we could exchange 'enemy' in the quote for 'victim.' I suppose too that the classical references I will be using seem overly dramatic to most, but in this day and age, how often are the lowest ebbs of office politics as damaging to one as more traditional betrayals have been in the past?

 

If you are reading this with the notion that there is going to be a moral at the end of the story or that it is going to be a discourse on ethics or principles, please read the title again. The effectiveness of treachery has nothing to do with the right or wrong of treachery. In point of fact, I believe that most people who engage in betrayal, treachery, and/or treason have convinced themselves that it is the right thing to do in their circumstances. Call to mind Brutus pushing his dagger into Caesar or Judas kissing Jesus on the cheek in the Garden of Gesthemane. Machiavelli is, after all, also the man credited with being first to use the expression "the ends justify the means." Of course, really well thought out and executed betrayal takes teamwork and the players can reassure each other of the righteousness of their actions Traitors generally though have two motivations for their behaviour that none of them are willing to admit to another person, first that they are afraid to confront the person they are betraying and second (and equally important to them) they will not have to face consequences for their actions. One will also find that there are any number of greed related motivations for treachery and betrayal and often people involved in the same act of treachery will have varying circumstances surrounding their own motives. Thus, no philosophical discourse is required because there is no right involved, but if it is a path one wishes to embark upon, is it effective?

 

"All war is based on deception"--Sun Tzu

 

Most people who can suffer themselves to believe their own (or their fellow traitors') lies that it is the appropriate action will have also convinced themselves well beforehand that it is effective because if it isn't going to work, there will be those frightening consequences to face. These are generally short term thinkers who are most easily spotted by the way they fall back into their familiar patterns and breathe sighs of happy relief if after some period of time, weeks or months, the victim seems to have withered away and failed to respond. Of course, one of the more nagging concerns that these people now have is an awareness that they have surrounded themselves with people they cannot trust. Obviously, if they were part of the team who betrayed one person, what is preventing other members of that group from turning on them?  The other reality of course is in the quote above by Sun Tzu. If someone or some group used treachery to dispatch me, then that person or group has essentially declared war on me. Even the feeblest thinkers among us must know that one should never underestimate one's enemy. The passage of time is meaningless unless that enemy has been well and truly destroyed. Let's go back to our first source, since he's credited with writing the handbook on treacherous behavior and see what we can learn.

 

"If an injury is to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared"--Machiavelli

 

Now, this is where I begin to question the effectiveness of using underhanded means to attack someone. If you are the person undertaking one of these schemes, and we'll look into that a bit more a little further on, ask yourself this question. Can (_____) ever come back on me for what I did? Because be assured, that person (____) will figure out that you were the traitor or at least part of the betrayal.

 

The actual treachery is not generally a difficult thing to figure out.  All it takes is a couple of friends, there are other methods, but the best ways have always involved betrayal by someone the victim really cared about. Again, ask Christ, ask Caesar. Let's call our victim Joe. Joe has some level of authority or power. People envy him for that. Joe may have control over a lot of resources including money. People are greedy and jealous of that. Joe has made some enemies and has a few intimate friends. If Joe makes a mistake of hurting even one of those friends, two is better from the enemies' viewpoint, they now have their mode of attack. The enemies which Joe is aware of dial up their usual assaults, whatever they may be:slanderous attacks, constant public complaining about Joe's work, more and more demands on the resources for which Joe is responsible--this keeps him distracted, and then they have the embittered friend develop the final attack. Something so defaming that Joe is ruined in public and with his friends and family, and removed from control over the resources he had influence over and the job is done.The fix is in. But is it really? Sooner or later, the so-called friends will show their hands and Joe, quite embittered himself now, will recognize them for what they are. As far as good quotes go, remember this one:

 

"there is no knife that cuts so sharply and with such poisoned blade as treachery" --Ouida

 

And of course, the question that it was recommended one ask one's self earlier, is Joe so thoroughly defeated that he is no longer a force to worry about? There is another old expression about people refusing to learn from the mistakes of history. I believe I alluded to short term thinkers earlier in this article. Very few people have the fortitude to deliver the 'final blow' at the risk of sounding melodramatic to our "Joe". That shouldn't be a surprise considering that the treaachery is usually hatched by a cabal of cowards to begin with and if they do not have the presence of mind to take measures to protect themselves from the fallout of the treachery it is to their own undoing. They are probably too busy worrying about one another's treacherous personae than to worry about the damage they've already done. So, is the activity effective or even efficient for the participants?

 

"I am justly killed with mine own treachery"--Laertes in Hamlet by William Shakespear

 

One of the great murders in all of literature, Laertes died from the poison he had applied to a sword with which to kill Hamlet. Perhaps there is a moral to this story after all or lessons to be had from history. Brutus was destroyed by Caesar's nephew's army and 'fell on his own sword'. The Rome he meant to save from an ambitious Caesar became the empire of quite possibly the most ambitious man in history. Judas hung around after the crucifixion. Benedict Arnold hung around after the American Revolution. A final thought, aother quote from out of time:

 

"Treachery, though at first cautious, in the end betrays itself"--Titus Livy



Community Boards---Community Concerns

The proliferation of volunteer driven community organizations across our country is a really telling indication of how things ‘get done around here’. They are the backbone of this country and a driving force in our economy. Ethnic groups, special interest groups, cultural societies, philanthropic associations, educational and political organizations and trade associations are all maintained by volunteer boards as are countless other groups too numerous to mention. These groups range in size and scope from small sports organizations that struggle every year just to keep their children playing to organizations with a specific mandate to provide services to a target group and budgets that can run into millions of dollars. This article is really intended to address only those organizations that are overseen by an elected board of volunteers but managed by a professional staff on a day to day basis.

It is a given that the focus of the board of directors should really be governance and policy. Realistically, why would a board pay for an executive director or CEO if they want to do that person’s work themselves? Of course, that individual cannot be left with carte blanche and should still report to the board on a regular basis. Unfortunately, although this is great theoretically, there are often some encumbrances to applying the notion in reality.

Firstly, if the organization has a well written, solid constitution and an engaged management team, policy and governance issues will be few and far between. Board members who are giving up their evenings to meet will become, pardon the pun, bored members and simply stop coming. This creates a situation where the paid director and other board members may have to actively recruit people who want to sit on that board and then, of course, providing some training relative to the mandate of the organization and existing policy.

Secondly, new board members often have a difficult time recognizing boundaries and knowing that interference with day to day work is not only detrimental to the organization, but often a violation of the by-laws. These scenarios can be even more difficult for the paid director because the onus will be on him/her to draw the attention of the entire board to the situation, thereby risking the ire of one or more of the ‘bosses’.

Thirdly, a less than scrupulous paid manager can get a lot of mileage out of reassuring board members that everything in the day to day realm is fine and that they don’t need to concern themselves with issues that are not policy or governance. Again, the organization is risking the potential tyranny of that individual equating too much freedom to act with power.

So, what steps can the organization take to avoid these pitfalls? The first suggestion that comes to mind is active recruiting of board members. Recruiting, however, can have its’ own downfalls and the savvy manager and board should remain aware of them.

I want to preface the remainder of my commentary with these two notes. I believe that anyone willing to sacrifice his or her time to sit on a community board deserves the gratitude and respect of the community. There are occasional exceptions wherein the individual has a personal agenda-- whether it be an axe to grind with management, some delusion of power, or some misguided sense that they stand to profit financially by serving, but they are the minority and for the most part board members are there because they care about what the organization is doing. Also, I was taught by one of my mentors a number of years ago that a volunteer board can be an organization’s greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time. I have had to work for a board for a number of years to realize the truth of that statement. A grassroots board is the organization’s greatest strength because it truly is democracy in action. No one can deny that the board members speak for the membership of the organization. That same board can be the greatest weakness of the organization by simply not learning the policy, not working towards professional standards or possibly having ulterior motives for being in place. The landscape can be rife with possibilities for failure. This, in fact, leads me back to my original suggestion: active recruiting.

If one wants to be successful with recruiting then certain concerns should be addressed up front:

1. What exactly does the organization need
2. What skills and or experiences can the individuals being approached bring to the table
3. What relationships currently exist between individuals being recruited and current board or management members

Clearly, if the organization has found that capacity is lacking in certain areas, those would be skill sets to recruit. If financial reports and documentation are a foreign language to most of the board, then they might want to look for someone with a background in accountancy or financial services. If the constitution is full of loopholes, there may be someone with a legal background or constitutional experience available and willing to serve.

Previous experience with other boards will most likely provide the recruit with some knowledge of what issues the board is there to address. Professional experience in areas like those listed in the previous paragraph should most surely be welcomed by existing members. A couple of things that are essential and really dependent on the new person are: a sincere desire to be part of the team and help and a personal stake in the goals of the organization. Simply, all of the professional designations in the world aren’t going to matter a whit if the individual is viewed as being not part of the community that board is mandated to serve.

Existing relationships between current board members and management with any new recruit will turn out to be a huge issue. If the perception in the community is that management is stacking the board with supporters, that manager and the board won’t last beyond the next election. Most likely, nepotism and conflict of interest guidelines already exist within the constitution and should be adhered to zealously. This can be a very difficult issue to address, particularly in small communities where the talent pool might be quite limited. One must bear in mind that an interest and willingness to serve are the first criteria.

Thus, those people who are compelled by personal interest to serve that specific board, have no possible conflict of interest issues with current directors or employees and have professional backgrounds that best serve the board’s needs are just sitting at home waiting for the phone call. Perhaps not. In any case, boards should have a practice in place of being willing to review letters of interest from organization members who may want to serve and should review those letters as a group. That way if there are board resignations between general elections of the organization, the seat can be filled by the best possible candidate.

Many community boards will struggle along as best they can because those perfect candidates simply do not exist. The next suggestion to enhance board productivity is training. The organization can certainly direct management to seek out cost effective training in areas such as governance, constitutional law, human rights legislation, financial planning, or proposal development. The last one can be especially helpful if the paid staff is already working to capacity. Board members can help find the dollars necessary for their own training or other projects as well. Networking with other non-profit agencies is another good way to find the types of training that one may require. Generally, similar organizations are going to face similar issues and there’s a lot of hard work and a distinctive lack of glory in being the second guy to invent the wheel.

Of course, there is something to be said about the organization that doesn’t know anything is wrong to begin with. This is often the case with organizations where the board has not had any new faces at the table in some time. I would suggest that any board of directors regularly schedule a review of their own processes and achievements. It doesn’t hurt to ask if the organization is meeting its’ mandated goals and if not, what can the board do to improve the process? It may be replacing employees, but more likely will involve re-focusing board energies. It would behoove anyone following this path to engage a neutral outsider to help.

Most probably, a combination of recruiting for skills and training current members will resolve a lot of concerns. Certainly the growing pains as the organization moves forward through some of these issues are an object lesson on their own. The other possibility is that experienced managers and board leaders have found this entire article redundant or irrelevant, in which case feel free to line your parakeet’s cage, but hopefully some readers out there will find a bit of what their organizations are seeking. They are, after all, the backbone of this country.

Stuart Alcorn

2011-09-02

Portage la Prairie, MB

Wordcount: 1,513

copyright

I have a problem with this

 

 

 

Again, this entire article is going to be based on my personal opinions. A lot of the things I am going to say can be corroborated by evidence elsewhere but I'm not going to go dig it up.I suppose the preface to this piece goes back to the election next week in the US again, because of the possibility of deep and fundamental change taking place in American society. When the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold. If you, dear reader, want to look up anything, I'd recommend checking out a snapshot view, depicted with graphs that Fortune Magazine put out showing changes in the US economy since Obama took over in 2009. He's not quite the bogeyman that his opponents have been portraying him to be. Having said that, no political leader has ever been singularly successful at rescuing their country's economy, but they all want the credit for it when it improves and to shift the blame when it worsens. Economies tend to cyclical independant of political thought but that seldom gets remembered during an election campaign.

 

That's not even what this article is about, this article is about a US president of all people talking about the 're-distribution of wealth'. The bloodcurdling screams of 'rampant socialims' Hitler! better dead than red! (an oldie but still a goodie), class warfare, and the list goes on ad nauseum, reverbated around the globe. I even read a post on a news-site that Obama is a Marxist-Hitlerian. Seriously, who could even think that up? What's frightening is the lack of basic information that so many people posting on the Internet seem to have regarding political and economic thought or history. People given to hitching their star to extremist dogma are fated to become easy pickings for others who put forward an almost cult figure type of charisma. It's formulaic; play on your follower/audiences' fears, exploit them to the nth degree worst case scenarios, find a common enemy and lay the blame at their feet. Everything will get better when we get rid of X, X is the embodiment of everything you've been taught is wrong in the world, X is a tool from the devil's workshop, and, my favorite, X is a handpuppet of the real masters of the New World Order. Thus, we have the advent of tea-baggers, thus we have Occupy Wall Street. Voltaire, credited as being one of the people who ushered in the Age of Reason in Western thought, once said "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." Worthy of consideration' I think; know who'd agree with him? Himmler, Lenin, Manson, Jones, Hitler, Koresh, Robespierre (llik them up, you can't expect me to do all the heavy lifting around here)

 

Let's break one thing down right now. If the New World Order exists in any of the guises or manifestations that I've had described to me over the last couple of years, then they are far too powerful for anyone to do anything about and we're all screwed.So forget about it and go on with your life.

 

And what a life it is! If you can afford a computer to sit at and read this, or the time to sit at someone else's computer or a public computer, you're doing ok. Now, please recall that a whole three paragraphs back I titled this "I have a problem with this"  I didn't say I had a solution and I don't. Also, dear reader, I can't possibly know or guage your opinion or opinions if I'm lucky enough to get more than one. Did you cheer for the Occupy movement? Do you think that Teabaggers are spot on with their  well publicized revulsion at government interference in their lives?  Redistribution of wealth is, after all, a scary concept. If I come out of my bank late at night with a stack of twenties still in my hand, reading my transaction record and there's a guy standing there pointing a gun at me, you can bet I'm going to be more than willing to redistribute my wealth. On the level of an entire nation though, who decides how much wealth gets distributed where and what does that do to the extremely wealthy elite who don't want to share any more and believe that because they earned their money, they don't have to share? I don't know the answer. What about the fact that whatever percentage of the overall wealth is controlled by the one percenters, there's still far more distributed wealth in 21st century North America among the other ninety-nine percent than at any other time in the known history of the universe?  There is no doubt in my mind that life can become very harsh for an unemployed person in Canada or the US. Mortgages get foreclosed, debt piles up and the stress of debt collector harassment can be overwhelming. Families can literally go hungry in the streets. A condition I never thought I would see in my day. But, that is not the case in most situations, because even our unemployed are better off than an awfully large chunk of the global population.

 

 

Certainly in the age of the information superhighway and entire communities' livelihoods being outsourced to the Far East and middle class Canadian teenagers having at least a nodding acquaintance with what 'Bollywood' is, one dares not refute McLuhan. The global village exists and it is right outside our doorway and inside our homes. We brought the concept home like a wee schoolgirl bringing home a vicious, flea-bitten feral cat and announcing to her parents that it's her new pet. Awareness, some would say, equals responsibility.

 

We are all aware of what living conditions are like in the best and worst places on the globe. How much do we do about it? How much of our own personal wealth should we be willing to redistribute and what assurances do we get that our help will go where it is supposed to? I don't know. I do know that my dog gets better nutrition and better health care than an awfully large percentage of the human population and that some of those humans live very close to home. I know that government controlled agencies--in more than one country--have allowed crops and produce to rot in storage in order to influence market prices, driving supply down drives demand up. I know that tying aid to trade has proven to be a failed policy over and over again, but Canada, among other 'have' nations, still adheres to it. I suspect that on Sunday mornings when people tend to relax over an extra cup of coffee and start flipping channels on their 50 inch flat screen, that the pleas of all those celebrity charity endorsers fall on deaf ears for a good reason. I can't afford it? No. I can't trust them to make sure the money goes to the needy? No. All of these international charities are just scams? No, and please Alex Trebek participating in a scam? I think not. These poor people on the tv screen are too far away to be a threat to me? Bingo, move to the front of the class.Or, ask yourself, what about the people who are that needy who aren't so far away? What happens when they start listening to some charismatic leaders dogma, it's a simple formula remember.  So, do I want to give up my little piece of the dream that I've scrabbled hard all my life to get? Not a chance, I'm not that altruistic. Could I? Probably if someone gave me a well defined plan to adhere to, but for now, all of my revenues are tied up in grocery futures. Are there solutions? I hope so, and I hope that someone starts using these global communication tools for something besides checking out the Kardashians latest fashion faux pas, maybe we can get some dialogue going out there among people who do have the answers.

I thought, after sharing thoughts and arguments on a number of 'news' based websites and watching how quickly people diminish the conversation by lowering themselves to base name calling and insults that perhaps, if I started a conversation and said, let's  talk like this...let's be civil, it might work. My hope is that there are others who think somewhat the same way. That in the day and age of tweeting and texting and im'ing and forums and chat rooms, perhaps we could corrrespond. That is, in it's most basic defnition, to respond to one another and to the world around us. I thought that perhaps we could use prose, real sentences in real English. The language as my generation new it may be in  it's death throes, but it's not dead yet.

I will post here as opportunity permits and I will point out things that I believe are right and wrong in our society as I am aware of them. I may offend some with my points of view, but I am not looking for fans, followers, or Facebookers, I am looking for structured, well thought out conversation. I will welcome opposing points of view provided the authors meet certain criteria. The first being, please check for typographical, spelling and grammatical errors prior to posting, we are adults. Second, please provide your point of view in a rational and civil manner. I believe that in conversation the person who throws out the first insult is rather like the person who throws the first strike in one another's physical presence. That is the person who ran out of ideas first. Let's not do that, lets' bring ideas here. Corroborating your point of view with actual data would be ideal, I will try to do the same, but a lot of my opinions-- at this age especially-- have been baptised only in the fires of personal experience, and in such cases, I will admit as much. Also, I will delete any responses that I deem laced with 'isms'; it's my blog, it is my editorial right. I will not tolerate racism, sexism, elitism, et cetera. Etceterism is particularly distasteful. I am the world's greatest fan of humor and the humor I admire and enjoy the most is wit. I hope that people out there will  respond to this overture in a positive way and I will enjoy reading your postings. Stay tuned, I am not terribly technically literate, but I am definitely opinionated!