Monthly Archives: August 2017
I’m not talking about credit cards or loans. I am talking about credit for accomplishments.
My corporate mentor taught that giving credit to others for work well done is unlimited, that giving credit does not diminish your own, and that it should be dished out liberally. This advice was given independent of the gender of the mentored worker. My mentor was male, and the strategy worked well for not only him but for many of us who worked for him.
A recent study says such a strategy can be a disaster for a female worker. Basically, it proves many senior men are happy to take advantage of women’s work, and don’t give credit in return. Does that mean females shouldn’t use a free credit strategy at all, or does it mean more men should use it more and that women should demand their own credit when it is due while continuing to give to others?
There is a game they teach in classes about highly effective leaders taught by Steven Covey. It has to do with “white balls” — giving positive credit or reference, helping out, playing nice, or “black balls” — negative support, sabotaging, moving to win in ways that force others to lose, working in ways that fall short of teamwork. There is a small credit for a positive ball , and a big credit for a negative ball, unless both people give negative balls in which case there is a large negative score for each. The character dilemma to study is who will throw negative balls and how will they game theory it?
My mentor, who grew up on city streets, tempted us saying to throw positive balls on all but the last round, then throw your single negative ball hoping and persuading everyone else in your group to throw a positive. But he had a bigger lesson in mind. He invented more rounds once we got back to the office. If anyone threw a negative ball on the last round, they learned the hard way the resentment is real and long lasting. His lesson: there is no “last round”. The only safe strategy is to throw positive balls. Corallary: once the negative balls start, it is really hard to get them to stop.
Recently Trump came to speak in Phoenix and there were many protestors, and the police had a challenge and a dilemma. Should they crack down on protestors and free speech to ensure civil peace? That would have been a negative ball as in the game above. The governor might have been more comfortable with that approach, but he let those working for him, including Police Chief Jeri Williams, use a more win-win and tolerant approach that respected freedom. Protestors on different sides were separated and the peaceful ones that followed orders were protected. The situation was agitated and dangerous, but no one died, in contrast to recent events in Charlottesville.
Even when it came time to disperse and it appeared some weren’t following police orders, the police used rubber bullets. No one died. No one that was keeping the civil peace appears to have been seriously injured. This is an actual result, not theoretical, that deserves a lot of credit, as it is major accomplishment. Most protestors kept the civil peace even though they really didn’t feel like doing so.
Thank you to Jeri Williams, every officer involved, to most of the people attending the rally and most of the protestors. Should Governor Ducey also be thanked? I thought so, working out of a spirit that credit is free and he did decide to trust his people. It is easy in a law and order state like Arizona to use real bullets with little provocation. When I moved here it was common to relegate free speech to a small back corner without microphones where it would not be heard. To the Governor’s credit, and against his own instincts, he allowed a different plan to execute, a more dangerously free plan. I thank him for that.
It is important to throw out positive credit right now. Once the negative balls are thrown, it takes a concerted approach to see positive balls again. Phoenix police chief Jeri Williams showed herself to able to command a tough situation with valor and balance. Others supported her. All should get credit. Take a minute and recognize what it means to be in a country able to hear both sides such an event, and to have no one killed while doing it. That is what a free country looks like on a good day. The best peace is free, not forced.
There are others that will want to investigate. Another one of my mentor’s sayings: every significant action is controversial to someone. Hopefully the investigation will help us be even more free next time, with a little less danger.
Photo courtesy of Simon Drory at Morguefile.com.
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers.
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In Honor of Dick Gregory
“The next time you put your underwear in the washing machine, take the agitator out, and all you’re going to end up with are some dirty, wet drawers!” Dick Gregory speaking to Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes
Dick Gregory, like Roger Williams, decided his purpose in life was to be an agitator. He found sharp humor to be at least as powerful as a sit-in in our modern world.
Agitation does not destroy the clothes in the washing machine when it is working properly. Similarly agitation in culture does not kill or maim. Heather Hyer should not be dead. Her killers demonstrate agitation gone terribly wrong, and her own agitation when respecting the civil peace should be protected.
Toleration does not prevent agitation, it enables it. A society that protects agitators is a society that respects a heart-felt conscience in protest and that ends up with cleaner, sounder character.
Christians are called to agitate using scripture as the power behind the agitation. We are all fallen, all dirty, all in need of agitation. Christian agitation is not hateful when done well, but is rather a call to sharpen our conscience, a love letter from our creator who wants us to trust Him, where the term “love” is defined as wanting our highest good.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled.
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Organization is the opposite of chaos. Left to itself the universe decays, becomes more random, unorganized in a process called entropy. Life is an opposing force to chaos, and life seems fragile. Fragile means easy to break. Life requires so many interconnecting working systems that it appears fragile, as one system breakdown impacts the others and so many must work together to sustain life. Death, taking out life, is permanent, a crash, a state from which there is no return by worldly forces.
At the same time, life is resilient. The organizing force that is life is a force that organizes around obstacles, that requires stress to grow stronger. The avoidance of challenge leads not to strength but to decay of skills, muscles, and spirit. Life is an amazing adapting force, so long as it persists. Life overcomes chaos because life struggles, while chaos just is. Lives interconnect in relationship, to creator and to each other, to increase resilience exponentially. Each individual life is finite and ever more fragile with age, but often leaves behind it more lives to carry on. Networks of life are stronger than a life, and a many types of life instinctually connect to other lives in relationship for survival.
Victor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning the most important factor in how resilient a human life will be is commitment to a purpose. He refutes thoroughly a theory of Freud’s that predicted suffering would lead us all to equal depravity with his painfully gained observations from Auschwitz. Instead, Frankl observed a divergence, a loss of some to depravity but a honing of character in other people that led to moral fortitude of enormous strength. Is that resulting strength the one of the creator’s purposes in allowing suffering?
Each life makes a decision: to live for self or to live for something larger. Living for self devolves to decadence, and living for something larger builds character.
From a Christian perspective, it is a decision to live for self in this world, or to live for the eternal objective of God’s glory. That eternal perspective can lead to fortitude to face the suffering of this day. Death in this view is permanent in that the decision made to accept and follow Jesus is permanent: we will spend eternity with him or not based on a decision made here in this life. All else is temporary.
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers.
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One of my favorite scriptures starts off “Test everything, hold fast what is good.” 1 Thes 5:21. If feels like like a license to explore, to find true limits vs. false, to not take everything at face value. Work to keep what is good, and reject evil, seems a license to fail fast and often, in order to succeed. Great practical advice, it seems, with a few guidelines. The first guideline is that “good” is consistent with the God’s revelation in scripture, not just “it works” in a short term sense. The second detecting evil is harder than it may first appear, since it is often cloaked in deception. Tests must be defined carefully, results measured with a true yardstick.
I was surprised to see the NASB had changed the meaning of this scripture! I was recommended the NASB about a year ago as more accurate and less political. So far we’ve gotten along fine, the NASB and me. Until 1 Thessalonians 5:21, that is. The NASB says “examine everything” instead of “test everything”. You have to read the footnote to find they admit Paul meant every teaching must be tested. Hmmm.
What is the difference? Examination carries a notion of knowing the right answer as you query a student to see if the student knows the right answer. Only God could examine us perfectly. Examination from the student’s perspective carries a notion of preparation and then regurgitation, a rather passive uncritical thinking sort of activity, the exact sort of thing we complain schools are making students do way too much of these days.
Testing, on the other hand, doesn’t care how good it sounds/looks on paper, we are going to try it out. We won’t just examine the wires, we’ll speak into the mike. We won’t just measure the kite, we’ll go see how high we can fly it. We won’t just review theory, we’ll look at the practical fruit. We even mimic the acceleration of time by creating or observing especially concentrated versions of the teaching, called a stress test. We disable primary systems to try out the back-ups peri0dically so that when we need them they operate. It is active testing that makes me believe a system works, not mere examination.
I suspect the author Paul meant “test”. Roger Williams’ forte was his courage to test an implementation of church and state separation, and to tweak it until the model could operate in stability. The difference matters. If we use NASB’s “examine” we might never try out ideas that are inconsistent with prior interpretations of scripture, and as a result we might never learn newer truer ways to implement scripture. Many of the best ideas initially appear impossible or controversial. That said, the arc of history is long, and some ideas that bore much initial fruit cannot sustain fruit-bearing over 10–14 generations. The test cycle is a very long one. Test carefully.
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers.
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