tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10051968753751235542024-03-11T11:34:17.050-06:00Harry Tucker - Observations and MusingsEmbracing transparency, collaboration and measurable outcomes in strategy and technology.Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.comBlogger714125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-60195066354045064012024-03-08T20:26:00.003-07:002024-03-11T11:33:44.324-06:00The Wrong Way to Catch a Bus<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><i>What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgements about these things. - Epictetus</i></p><p><i>We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. - Seneca</i></p><p><i>You have power over your mind not outside events, realize this and you will find strength. - Seneca</i></p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">I have lived a Blessed Life! A healthy family. A dream-career filled with accolades and awards. Amazing friends whom I would die for. Overcoming a terminal illness in March of 1996, walking away from airplane "incidents" that could have killed me and a number of other things that have caused many people to tell me how "lucky" or "God-blessed" I am.</p><p style="text-align: left;">My career has led me from a small town in Newfoundland to a Wall St. career, a company IPO plus other business successes, and hunting bad guys for various government entities in multiple countries.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I've been blessed to be able to entertain side gigs like paying for the court costs for battered women and supporting them in other ways.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Yes - I have it all.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Sure, there were some personal relationships that had run aground recently; surprisingly, abruptly and painfully. But this is Life, isn't it?</p><p style="text-align: left;">And yes, there were some concerns that my elevated white blood cell count was taking me down the same place where I was in March of 1996 when, at the time, I was told that I had three months to live.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But again, that's Life. We take the good and the bad in stride. We suck it up.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Especially if you're a man.</p><p style="text-align: left;">From the outside looking in, you would see a successful, confident, educated, businessman and community advocate.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Catching the Bus My Way</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">On Tuesday of this week, I was walking down the street in Calgary and I decided to catch a bus.</p><p style="text-align: left;">No - not the usual way at the bus stop like most of you. I wanted to step in front of it. </p><p style="text-align: left;">But at least I had the wherewithal to pause and wonder how I could make it look like an accident. </p><p style="text-align: left;">For some reason, that was really important to me.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I also had the wherewithal to wonder what the impact of this would have on the driver, scarring him for Life. I also took a moment to think about my family, my friends and colleagues. And after this "processing", which happened in seconds, I contemplated "catching" the bus anyway. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I stepped to the side of the street, paused and then waved to the driver as he drove by and he waved back.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And then I reached out to the Calgary Mental Health Help Line, saving both myself and the driver from a more complicated ending that would have tied us together for the rest of <b>his</b> Life.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I realized at that moment that I didn't remember any of my day nor could I remember anything I was supposed to be working on. I had run to the end of my journey, a journey that was not a marathon or two but rather, thousands of 100-meter dashes and I was too tired to continue. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I never slowed down until the day I decided those sprints would stop by my hand.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I was afraid. I had never thought anything like this in my Life and here I was in tears, shamefully admitting that I couldn't go forward. While chatting with Luke, the person on the other end of the help line, I notified some family and close friends that I was safe but was on the phone with someone who was saving my Life.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Luke was amazing. He was calm and guided me through a conversation that I never thought I would have with anybody. I have saved a number of people from suicide and yet here I was using "that shameful word to describe me". We talked about my career, especially in recent years with lots of photos of mutilated bodies, and he expressed empathy and concern for someone who could endure such punishment for so long. I felt love from Luke, a stranger, which is what I needed at that moment. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Meanwhile, my friends and family whom I scared the bejesus out of were all reaching out like crazy.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Luke gave me a lot of resources to explore, assured himself that I was ok and that I would be with other people and then made a promise to reconnect with me this week.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And so the moment passed ..... <b>or so I thought</b>.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>I've Done All the Right Things</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">My Life has always been high-pressured. To compensate, I released the energy through service to others. I am an avid Stoic philosophy fan. I study Buddhism and the Tao and practice breathing and meditation techniques. I try to exercise regularly although I haven't been behaving in recent weeks. I have my faith in a Higher Authority and pray regularly.</p><p style="text-align: left;">So I'm doing everything properly.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Right?</p><p style="text-align: left;">Not really.</p><p style="text-align: left;">My clever mind had found ways to hide a growing problem in my psyche from all of these helpful tools and techniques. It was like a computer virus that was designed to hide itself from various anti-virus technology.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I discovered that I was an imposter to myself and had been for decades despite my success in the outside world.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I realized that the persona (or facade) that I had projected to others for decades was in fact not the way I saw myself at all and every time I executed something towards another success, the schism in my brain that fought to see myself as successful grew wider.</p><p style="text-align: left;">On Tuesday of this week, my brain tore itself in half under the strain.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Thinking Through my History</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">As I explored the resources that I had been provided with by Luke and continued my own personal Tao exploration (including the excellent and Life-changing book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Inner-Peace-Diane-Dreher/dp/0452281997" target="_blank"><i>The Tao of Inner Peace</i></a>, by Diane Dreher), something else horrific came up.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Where to start ... My father was (and still is) a loving and hard-working man who raised 4 kids who themselves went on to meaningful careers. He was magic. Everything he touched was always the highest quality and every problem he solved seemed to be amazing to everyone. He also solved problems on his own, never needing the help of anyone. He didn't push his level of perfectionism on us kids but we absorbed it through observation. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>The lesson:</b> We solve our own problems and persevere as long as it takes to get things done. No matter what.</p><p style="text-align: left;">My mother was (and still is) a loving and nurturing woman who, in her younger years, had an occasional outburst of anger that could pierce the heart of a young child. I don't blame her at all. How she and my father kept things moving for all of us on the small salary he earned in the 1970s still escapes me.</p><p style="text-align: left;">My childhood was complicated. I was bullied from Grade 1 right up through my Senior Year in High School. </p><p style="text-align: left;">In elementary school, it was Cliff, someone who finally some years ago got his Life together but was killed in a tragic highway accident. Barry replaced him in Junior High, hunting me ruthlessly and relentlessly before and after school and during recess and lunch. In High School, I had an ever-capable group of damaged young men who would hold me on the floor and mock rape me every week in the locker room before gym class. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I have spoken to a number of them over the years since High School but none of them have ever brought it up or apologized for it. Paul, Randy, Stewart, Steve, Tony and others likely forgot or never cared to know the impact on me. While I thought I had moved past it, the fact that it came up so strongly this week told me that I hadn't moved passed it. The upside was that I often hid from them in the library, greatly expanding my reading repertoire.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I never told anyone back then. As the smallest kid in the class, I was terrified of my bullies and I was ashamed of what they were doing to me. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Speaking to some of my friends in the years since, I have discovered that I wasn't the only victim of these miscreants.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And not to leave anyone out, Jeff M. who, while asking me to deliver newspapers with him when I was 7, took me a LONG way from the paper route and offered me a nickel if I would let him show me what a "screw" was. He was insistent. I fled.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And then there was the stranger who thought it was a clever idea to share his stiff penis with me on the day of my First Holy Communion while inviting me to touch and kiss it. I fled again, much to his disappointment. So much for God.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>The Stage Was Set</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">So, as I left High School, the stage had been set. My sense of self had been pummeled to zero as I set off to launch a career.</p><p style="text-align: left;">In my early Computer Science years, I was blessed. I had a natural gift for technology and mathematics in the 1980s and I had a strong memory that was later tested and identified to be near-hyperthymesiac. This means that I have a VERY strong autobiographical recall of events including the senses associated with the memories, a gift that continues to this day. It is a mixed blessing.</p><p style="text-align: left;">These blessings gave me a fast track to success. I architected the first PC-based insurance system in Canada in the early 80s at the age of 17. Success in the technology industry came quickly and easily and soon my career took me from Newfoundland to New York City via Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.</p><p style="text-align: left;">But I had a problem. I had a ticking time bomb inside me.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I had been convinced through my early years that I wasn't worthy of anything and that anything I did did not measure up to anyone's standards.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And yet, here I am, generating success easily and without effort, oftentimes generating many multiples of quality over my peers because it seemed the right thing to do. Meanwhile, half of my brain kept yelling, "It is impossible to be creating this success."</p><p style="text-align: left;">But I was running 100-meter dashes and not marathons and so I never took the time to slow down to listen to the argument going on inside my brain.</p><p style="text-align: left;">This was my modus operandi through my years of building companies, helping other people build companies and serving others.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The schism in my brain from imposter syndrome, what I was producing vs. what I thought I should have been capable of producing (extraordinarily little), grew. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><b>But my resilience, taught to me by my parents and strengthened (I thought) by surviving the events of my childhood, never allowed me to feel that anything was wrong and I continued to be productive for decades.</b></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>But We Have Limits</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Fast forward to this week.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I had noticed that my performance had started to lag in recent weeks. </p><p style="text-align: left;">My concentration for solving problems wasn't as sharp. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I'm an avid reader and suddenly I couldn't read at all. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I was experiencing some chronic fatigue but just assumed it was the workload. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I was having trouble getting through my routine of the day but I blamed it on the fatigue. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Everything had a good reason as far as I was concerned and I somehow knew it would pass.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And then came the concern over my white blood cell count and I was nervous about it, reflecting on my last dance with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I played it down with people I knew but I was afraid. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><b>I'm a man - I can deal with it if I need to.</b></i></p><p style="text-align: left;">I moved closer to the edge but didn't know it.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The hematuria didn't help (blood in the urine).</p><p style="text-align: left;">Coughing up blood was also a little problematic but I was sure it had an explanation.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And then came a few personal relationship explosions.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And I teetered on the edge of a precipice but didn't realize how close I was.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Again, I'm a man. <i>Pre-GPS, we men rarely asked for driving directions until we were forced to. </i></p><p style="text-align: left;">When I was sick in March of 1996, I had had symptoms for over a year before finally going to a doctor and being scolded, "if only you had come in earlier". I only went in because my lymph nodes were so swollen that I couldn't walk properly.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The powder keg sat, primed for ignition. I had some routine stuff to take care of for my family. Small, innocuous things. Routine things that were so passé that they didn't even appear on my calendar. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Suddenly, the fuse of the powder keg was lit. I don't even know what the specific trigger was that lit it.</p><p style="text-align: left;">When it detonated, my brain, long the gift that I thanked God for, shredded. And minutes later, I was speaking to Luke. </p><p style="text-align: left;">The man I was, who had carried or served thousands of people over the years and who had always put everyone else first had unplugged and I couldn't have jump started my brain if I had run 10 million volts through my head.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><i><b>And equally alarming to me, I didn't care.</b></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>And Now the Real Journey Begins</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">As a man, I thought I was doing all the right things:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Leading stoically.</li><li>Pushing through adversity because that's what men do.</li><li>Absorbing difficulty in silence because only weak men signal that they are in trouble.</li><li>Solving my own problems since real men believe that if you want it done right, you do it yourself.</li><li>Never checking in with myself because I didn't have time.</li><li>Serving others before taking care of myself, forgetting that there is NEVER an end to the list of people who need help or who will use me for their own needs.</li><li>Ignoring warning signs since they can always be addressed later.</li><li>Defining Life success using my career and results as the gauge, in defiance of what I should have been learning from the copious texts that I was reading.</li><li>Never asking for help because real men don't do that anyway.</li></ul><div>In fact, I wasn't doing anything properly and not only did I suffer, I inadvertently created suffering in others around me. Some would be kind and say that's not the case. Some wouldn't be so kind. My only ask is to be gentle with me. Even we big, tough, successful (by someone's definition) guys who have it all together may not have it all together.</div><div><br /></div><div>According to my great friend, Leonard (an amazing therapist and author - I mention one of his books further down), I had accumulated a lot of difficult thoughts (especially from work) without processing them. With the right trigger, my brain reacted as if a dam had burst (hence the term 'emotional flooding') and my brain was overloaded trying to process years of difficult things all at once, mentally and emotionally paralyzing me.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sure, I've got some physical health issues to deal with and I will deal with them but the mental health issues to me seem more insidious, being invisible as they are and often seemingly not dangerous until it's too late.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you're a father, reach out to your kids and ask them how they are doing.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you're a brother, call your siblings and ask them if they need help.</div><div><br /></div><div>If your parents or grandparents are still with you, reach out to them more often to see if they need anything. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Sometimes your time is enough.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Reach out to a friend to say hi. They might be desperately waiting to hear from anyone.</div><div><br /></div><div>And while depression and other things can overrun men and women, I can only speak from the context of a man.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you're a man and you haven't gotten over your manliness, your so-called strength, your sense of self that doesn't need help and all of that bullshit that we as men have been told defines us, <b>I would beg you to pause and reflect</b>. I know I have a lot of work to do and while I've told people for years to "put their mask on first", I forgot to put mine on at all. That changes moving forward.</div><div><br /></div><div>Find resources that help you, like Diane's book that I mentioned earlier. </div><div><br /></div><div>Read great books like Leonard Szymczak's book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Power-Tools-Men-Blueprint-Masculinity/dp/B0C2SMCT3H" target="_blank">Power Tools for Men: A Blueprint for Healthy Masculinity</a>. </i>Join a men's support group.</div><div><br /></div><div>Find someone to talk to. Someone who will listen without judging. Call me if you have to.</div><div><br /></div><div>Call anyone.</div><div><br /></div><div>Otherwise, you might be catching a bus and you will be denying the world of the great man that you are and the great value that you bring to the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>And if you are already on the journey to healing, please reach out to those who might be struggling.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>We are all on this journey together.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>With love,</div><div><br /></div><div>Harry</div><p></p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-3919272090789832792023-09-15T10:43:00.001-06:002023-09-15T10:43:32.237-06:00There and Back Again<blockquote><p><i>You don't waste no time at all</i></p><p><i>Don't hear the bell but you answer the call</i></p><p><i>It comes to you as to us all</i></p><p><i>We're just waiting</i></p><p><i>For the Hammer To Fall - Queen - "Hammer to Fall"</i></p></blockquote><p>My dearest readers.</p><p>Almost 5 years, I retired my blog and walked away from it. At the time, I had said all I wanted to say and out of concern about being redundant, either with my own thoughts or anyone else's, I decided that I needed peace and quiet.</p><p>5 years later, my Spirit calls me to resume. Whether the blog continues here or on another platform remains to be seen.</p><p>What I hope, as always, is that my posts will encourage you to think, to ask questions and to challenge the status quo. We are at a point where we need more intelligent, passionate, connected people to step up to make a difference for our planet and for every living thing on it while there is still something worth saving.</p><p>This is what I hope to encourage.</p><p>As for my older posts, I noticed that some have had links, images and such disappear over the years. While I will not go back and fix these proactively, if there is a post that you would like "refreshed", please leave me a comment and I will take care of it.</p><p>Thoughts to follow in the coming days.</p><p>Take care and create a great day, because merely having one is too passive an experience. Passivity is not what the world needs right now.</p><p>Yours in service and servanthood,</p><p>Harry</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-6617109729205740032019-03-17T10:47:00.001-06:002020-04-15T15:41:40.431-06:00With Intentional Pause ....To my many wonderful readers.<br />
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My original blog, with its musings on politics, strategy, business and the like, with some societal warnings and inspirational material sprinkled in, had grown to over 700 posts and was, in my opinion, long overdue for a redesign. I've been told that my original blog infuriated those who hurt others or who used others as selfish stepping stones for their own greedy intentions, inspired those who needed help, provided appropriate warning for those who seek such things and helped people seeking guidance in strategy, technology, business and finance. <br />
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To the thousands of people who wrote to me over the years, to either thank me, condemn me or ask if they could reference my work in theirs, I am grateful to all of you. To those who went into hiding because their miscreant behavior had been exposed, I hope you took the opportunity to make yourself a better person. <br />
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And that brings me to another reason for not writing for the last couple of years. Many of the people I highlighted (mostly politicians) exhibited poor choices in either thought, word or deed and it was my intention to present their poor choices in the hopes that such things could be corrected. I believe in correcting the behavior rather than judging the person as I am aware of the impact of our environment on our personal development (especially in our formative years) and I recognize that I would exhibit behaviors similar to the behaviors I was condemning had I grown up in the same environment as the people whose actions I was judging. I don't judge those individuals and in fact, I often feel pity for them. However, people used my writings as a sledge hammer against the people themselves and this didn't make me happy when it was not the intention behind my posts.<br />
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My blog was also overdue for a redesign of purpose. With all of the great minds expressing their opinions in the world, there is a large amount of superfluous information out there. Some writers are not aware of this information overflow and share their thoughts as if they are new inspirations freshly discovered. Some know what they are about to share is already out there but they express those ideas again as their own or in the belief that they can express something that has already been said but make it fresh just because they said it.<br />
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There is also the burden of "everyone is talking, is anyone listening?" with the flood of information that is present and presenters of information must be cognizant of informing in order to create action as opposed to writing with the only result being that they have added more noise to the world. I found in my blog that I was starting to repeat what I had said before, the only difference being that I had a new example to use and this redundancy in idea expression didn't excite me.<br />
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Intelligent readers know that in the old days, knowledge came from knowing how to find and assimilate knowledge hidden in knowledge repository recesses. Now such knowledge is obtained by knowing how to filter out the noise and redundancy that exists in order to leave only the nuggets of knowledge exposed. I am sensitive to these things in thinking through the purpose of my new blog and hopefully, you will see these thoughts reflected in the new incarnation whenever it makes its appearance.<br />
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The words of Marcus Aurelius, expressing gratitude for the guidance of Rusticus, come to mind (from <em>Meditations</em>, Gregory Hayes translation):<br />
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<i>The recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character. Not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric. Not to write treatises on abstract questions, or deliver moralizing little sermons, or compose imaginary descriptions of The Simple Life or The Man Who Lives Only for Others. To steer clear of oratory, poetry and belles lettres.</i></blockquote>
My blog will eventually return with new content, with a specific purpose and in a format that is more conducive to effective reading / sharing / knowledge application / action based on your needs and interests (and mine).<br />
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In the meantime, thank you for your support and critiques, your patience and your input. Much of your feedback is being folded into the new blog design.<br />
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Take care and create a great day, because merely having one is too passive an experience.<br />
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Yours in service and servanthood,<br />
<br />
HarryHarry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-58027470951581856252018-01-08T15:31:00.000-07:002018-01-08T20:07:49.995-07:00Lip Service or Actual Service?<blockquote>
<p><em>Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up. - Oliver Wendell Holmes</em></p>
<p><em>The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other. - Thomas Stallkamp</em></p>
<p><em>I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. - William Blake</em></p></blockquote>
<p>While my blog writing has taken a backseat to a number of personal and professional projects over the last couple of years, I’m always intrigued by the stats of my readership and the reaction to my blog posts.</p>
<p>While I have mused on many things over the years including but not limited to inspirational stuff, business thoughts, strategic planning, tactical execution, warnings to society and such, by far the single largest group of readers and the largest amount of emotion that I generate come from posts where I call politicians out for doing something inappropriate against the best interests of the people they claim to serve or for allowing themselves to be placed in a position of compromise to the detriment of themselves, their staff or the people they claim to serve.</p>
<p>While many people have egos that would be inflated by the reaction I get from such posts, I am largely unaffected by the praise (or criticism) I receive because I write the posts for strategic, ethical and moral reasons and not for ego-based ones.</p>
<p>The other complexity from such posts is that many readers who are inspired by such posts think I write them because I enjoy skewering people (thus fitting into something they like to do). If they knew me personally, they would know that such beliefs are a gross misunderstanding of who I am.</p>
<p>The reality is that I don’t skewer people purposefully and I don’t enjoy the fact that it may appear to be my intention. In fact, the reason I write such posts is not to skewer the individual but to invite a correction or enhancement of behavior with an idea towards creating a better result. It is not my place to judge an individual although it may appear that I am doing just that when I critique their behavior – I leave it to Someone greater than I to judge the individual.</p>
<p>And so the majority of people who like such posts fall, sadly, into one or more of the following groups.</p>
<p><strong>Group One – The Call to Action Ends With Lip Service</strong></p>
<p>Many people love to complain and to have their complaint heard, whether in the coffee shop, in public demonstrations or on social media. Ask people to take additional measurable action to correct what upsets them and suddenly there is silence in the room.</p>
<p>Try telling these people that their frustration will grow unabated if they don’ take measurable action (instead of mistaking complaining alone for action), and they don’t hear you – they’ve already moved on to the next complaint or person who supports their complaint-centric model of execution. Many of these people also seek to be offended so that their need to complain finds a justification to attach itself to. As the old adage goes – some people aren’t happy unless they’re miserable.</p>
<p><strong>Group Two – I Have Too Much to Risk – I Need You To Take a Stand</strong></p>
<p>A lot of people send complaints, salacious comments, “dirt” or insider information to me and other people who are not afraid to use their voice and ask, implore or demand that I / we reveal it. When I inform them that stuff of importance to them should be revealed by them, I am told that “I’ve got too much to risk – you have to do it” (this includes people who serve on boards who discover inappropriate or illegal behavior and demand that people like me reveal it because they are “too important” to be involved in the imminent explosion).</p>
<p>I / we have things to risk also and what is a priority to someone else may not be a priority to me / us (and there is always the risk that someone else’s “irrefutable data” may be so vaporous as to put people like myself and others at risk).</p>
<p>By the way, this group also includes the people who believe that they can solve problems by bashing people while hiding behind anonymous social media accounts, email accounts, etc. Standing up for what you believe in has more credibility when you are willing to be identified.</p>
<p><strong>Group Three – I’m Too Busy</strong></p>
<p>If you’re literally too busy, then it means that the thing you are complaining about is less important than other things that occupy your day. </p>
<p>If that is the case, honor such priorities and stop complaining since we should put our time, energy and money into our priorities and avoid the things that distract us from those priorities.</p>
<p><strong>Group Four – I’m Not _________ Enough (insert connected, strong, etc.)</strong></p>
<p>History is filled with people that on first blush would have been considered not influential enough, smart enough, connected enough, etc. Ask the Google god for examples – they are too numerous to list here.</p>
<p><strong>Group Five – I’m Too Lazy, I’m Not Focused, My Own Purpose in Life is not Defined</strong></p>
<p>Rarely admitted by people who suffer from such random execution, their Life is like a guided missile roaming around looking for a target. Complaining is easy and requires little effort – strategic, intelligent and purposeful execution is neither. Enough said.</p>
<p>I’m sure there are other groups that people fight to be members of through their preference for complaining over action and results.</p>
<p>While specifics about what defines the reasons for inaction vary, we rarely solve problems by merely fretting or complaining about them or by mistaking any activity (including complaining) for productivity.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>Unless you’re in a country where participating in a public demonstration can get you shot or imprisoned, it takes little courage to participate in such actions. Although the actions may initially be useful, they require follow-up action in many situations to become truly effective.</p>
<p>Unless you choose to do something highly illegal, immoral or unethical (translation: something highly ignorant) by threatening people using social media, complaining on social media rarely accomplishes much. Social media has its place as a tool for sharing information or executing a call to action but action is still necessary after the “recruits” show up. In such situations, action is more than a hashtag.</p>
<p>Complaining in coffee shops will do little more than cause you to eat too many donuts or drink too much coffee.</p>
<p>Action matters.</p>
<p>Results matter.</p>
<p>Find a way to collaborate and if collaboration is rejected, ignored or soundly attacked, then find other strategic, intelligent and purposeful ways to accomplish your objective and create solutions in the world.</p>
<p>If you’re not interested in bringing your time, energy, talents, strengths, skills, knowledge (and yes, sometimes money) to the table to create solutions, please stop complaining. There’s enough useless, purposeless, negative noise in the world – don’t add to it.</p>
<p>If you’re complaining because in reality, you can’t honestly answer the questions “Who am I?”, “What do I stand for?”, “Why do I exist?”, “Where am I going?” and “How can I make the world a better place with the gifts that I have?” and your energy is therefore being misdirected into complaining or other negative behavior out of frustration over a misdirected Life, please find someone who can help you answer those questions in a healthy way. You and the world will be better off as a result.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>If I’m going to finish my day exhausted, having put every ounce of energy I have into creating what is within my reach to create, is it better to do so having moved the world the tiniest measure closer to something better or to have exhausted myself and those around me with meaningless complaints?</p>
<p>How do you like to view your results for the day?</p>
<p>How would you like others to view your results?</p>
<p>Does it matter or are you preparing to complain that you don’t like what I just said?</p>
<p>Create a great day because merely having one is too passive an experience.</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>PS:</strong> I am entertaining an experiment with an offer to a specific group of people. I will add additional info here when the experiment is complete.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-39374083276923231912017-11-22T09:52:00.000-07:002017-11-22T11:16:48.245-07:00Newfoundland–Problem Solving and Accepting Basic Realities<blockquote>
<p><em>Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. - Soren Kierkegaard</em></p>
<p><em>Fortune falls heavily on those for whom she's unexpected. The one always on the lookout easily endures. - Seneca</em></p></blockquote>
<p>When my grandfather was alive, he was once asked by a local merchant to build a chimney for him. The local merchant had a reputation for ripping people off and many people warned my grandfather that if he built the chimney, the merchant would likely find a way to not pay him.</p>
<p>Undeterred, my grandfather built the chimney but when the merchant inspected the work, he created reasons why he wouldn’t pay for my grandfather’s efforts..</p>
<p>When the merchant lit his first fire in the fireplace, the smoke, instead of rising up the chimney, billowed back into the room. A visual inspection of the chimney revealed nothing obvious that would cause this and the merchant called upon my grandfather to fix the defective chimney.</p>
<p>“Pay me first”, insisted my grandfather, “And I will fix it.”</p>
<p>The merchant reluctantly paid for the chimney, my grandfather climbed up onto the roof and dropped a large beach rock down the flue, breaking the pane of glass he had strategically placed across the chimney about half way down.</p>
<p>Some years later ….</p>
<p>One day when I was young, my uncle’s car battery had died and needed a boost. My father and my uncle had a single piece of wire (not a set of boosting cables) but as his father before him, my father was not without a solution.</p>
<p>They connected the positive terminals of my uncle’s car and my father’s, pushed the bumpers of the two cars together (they were chrome in those days) and the dead battery was brought back to Life.</p>
<p>How did this work? Because my father knew that the two vehicles were negatively grounded to the chassis (as they are now) and that pushing the two electricity-conducting chrome bumpers together would provide enough of a connection to accomplish the desired effect of boosting the dead battery.</p>
<p>Two hard-working, honest men, my father and my grandfather, who looked at the problem at-hand, accepted the realities of the situation and then solved the problem in classic, creative Newfoundlander style (Bell Islander style, to be precise).</p>
<p>I try to bring the same level of pragmatic, evidence-based, reality-accepting, problem-solving approach to everything I do.</p>
<p>And that’s why when I look at the current situation of my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, I wonder whether any kind of hope is warranted.</p>
<p>The evidence at first blush says no. Running massive deficits year-over-year is not a recipe for success and difficult decisions, always punishing one or more groups, are often “talked around” during election time since bad news doesn’t buy votes.</p>
<p>Providing schools to a sparse population spread around the coastline of the 11th largest island in the world seems impossible to do well. With little money spread over a large area, it not only diminishes equal accessibility of education but <strong><em>potentially</em></strong> the quality of it as compared to other jurisdictions.</p>
<p>Maintaining infrastructure in an environment with so many harsh elements and long distances to cover seems as hope-filled as the dog who hopes to catch its tail.</p>
<p>With the Province at or near the top in nasty health statistics such as heart attack, stroke and diabetes rates, the healthcare system is also strained since, like education, it is difficult to offer high quality services to a few people spread across such a large area.</p>
<p>On top of that, layer on one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, diminished revenue from its primary source of revenue (oil) and have one of the smallest tax bases in the country demand the same level of services as found anywhere in the country and you have a problem.</p>
<p>And that’s just for starters.</p>
<p>Such things are exacerbated by the complexities that politicians and bureaucrats bring to the situation.</p>
<p>Politicians and bureaucrats, typical of any human being, bring a mix of intention and competence to their role.</p>
<p>They range from the intelligent to the idiot …</p>
<p>.... from the public-serving to the self-serving ….</p>
<p>.... from the servant leader to the purely selfish ….</p>
<p>.... from the informed to the misinformed to the uninformed ….</p>
<p>.... from the innocent to the conniving ….</p>
<p>.... from the strategic to the hapless dreamer ….</p>
<p>.... from the tactically astute to the random executor ….</p>
<p>.... from the evidenced-based to the “instinct is better than data” crowd.</p>
<p>And on top of all that, there is another grim reality.</p>
<p>Human beings (voters) are not inspired by reality and in fact, will often avoid anyone who reminds them of it.</p>
<p>Reality rarely buys votes unless it is good news and that is often hard to come by in economies of places such as Newfoundland and Labrador.</p>
<p>However, in such situations, votes <strong><em>can</em></strong> be generated by sharing unsubstantiated dreams of gold-paved streets or pegging bad news (real or perceived) on the other candidate.</p>
<p>We are inspired by hope of a better future, the promise of great things and the belief that all things can be overcome and we run from people who can’t give us this.</p>
<p>And based upon this, politicians sell hope and bright futures without having the foggiest idea of how they will accomplish anything or even if anything can be accomplished at all (and some have no intention of trying to accomplish anything, running for office for their own selfish needs).</p>
<p>Would you vote for someone who told you that we faced gloom and doom with the possibility that our problems can’t be solved at all but if they can be solved, will require phenomenal sacrifice on <strong><em>our</em></strong> part?</p>
<p>Most would not. </p>
<p>Would you vote for someone who indicates “I have no idea what needs to be fixed or how I would fix it but give me a chance”?</p>
<p>Unlikely.</p>
<p>And so we accept the promises of politicians in blind faith and without evidence and get frustrated when the next round of politicians produces the same result as the last lot that we just threw out.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, politicians discover a few things (or knew them all along):</p>
<ol>
<li>Things like economies pretty much run themselves and cannot be turned on a dime as claimed during elections</li>
<li>Economies are not easily turned in a positive direction because of human interaction or desire</li>
<li>Economies <strong><em>can be</em></strong> easily turned in a negative direction because of human interaction</li>
<li>Reality doesn’t care what you think, especially when evidence is intentionally ignored</li>
<li>Things we don’t like have reasons for existing which we unfortunately discover once we are exposed to the history of them</li>
<li>Regardless of the state left behind by a departing politician and regardless (mostly) of the competence or incompetence of departing politicians, most find lucrative careers that far exceed the career potential that existed before their political career was launched.</li></ol>
<p>The final point reminds me of the old cartoon showing a doctor and patient having a serious conversation in the doctor’s office.</p>
<p>“I have good news and bad news”, says the doctor.</p>
<p>“What’s the bad news?”, asks the patient nervously.</p>
<p>“You have one month to live”, replies the doctor tersely.</p>
<p>Shocked, the patient exclaims, “If that’s the bad news, what is the good news?”</p>
<p>The doctor smiles.</p>
<p>“See that cute receptionist out front?”, the doctor asks, “I’m having sex with her twice a week.”</p>
<p>News, good and bad, is entirely perspective-based in its definition and impact.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>I have not found in the last 20+ years, a single politician anywhere, including in Newfoundland and Labrador, who can use an evidence-based position that the Province’s current and future situations are things to be feel comfortable about (with the exception of those who use politics to substantively grow their personal interests).</p>
<p>I have also not found a single politician who even likes to be asked for such things.</p>
<p>Fortunately for politicians, there are very few of us who demand evidenced-based answers and so we can be easily ignored.</p>
<p>I hear lots of rhetoric and shouting about having the answers while becoming angry with people who ask for evidence.</p>
<p>I see lots of finger pointing at the previous administration or the opposite side of the Legislature as the real reason why things are not working well.</p>
<p>I watch politicians who point at those of us who demand data and decry our “negativity” as a means of deflecting questions that are difficult or impossible to answer. That’s like a car driver suddenly exclaiming to a passenger in a car, “Hang on, the brakes just failed” and having the passenger respond with, “Why do you always have to be so dramatic?”</p>
<p>As my father and grandfather before me, I try to look at the situation at hand, the realities and complexities of the situation and the evidence that describes my reality before coming up with a solution.</p>
<p>If I don’t honestly acknowledge my reality, I have no way of creating a meaningful path to a solution or a better future.</p>
<p>I wish the electorate would do the same because if they did, we might actually start electing politicians who aren’t afraid to campaign on reality instead of fantasy.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Seneca’s words come back from thousands of years ago in timeless poignancy and appropriateness: <em>Fortune falls heavily on those for whom she's unexpected. The one always on the lookout easily endures.</em></p>
<p>I wonder if any politician could refute what I just wrote using evidence and deliver such a refutation in a thoughtful, respectful, evidence-based, solution-focused way.</p>
<p>Because any politician who can do <strong><em>that </em></strong>is the type of politician we need in larger quantities before we reach the tipping point where it won’t matter who we elect.</p>
<p>I think such people are out there (and there are a small minority who have already been elected) but the dirty, muck-raking, being on-call 24/7, thankless world of politics keeps most good people away.</p>
<p>I think we must do more than merely fret and complain about our reality and our future.</p>
<p>I think we must accept realities and demand that politicians speak to us in the language of informed realities and the language of evidenced-based solutions.</p>
<p>I think we must demand that politicians serve us and not their own needs.</p>
<p>There are many things that I think about but what I am more interested in is this.</p>
<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-52056107877020512852017-11-20T08:08:00.000-07:002017-11-20T08:19:29.824-07:00News Alerts and the Complexity of #FakeNews<blockquote>
<p><em>When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. - Steve Jobs</em></p>
<p><em>Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity. - Peter Bergen</em></p></blockquote>
<p>A lot of people who are quick to share opinions and slices of their genius have pointed out that the easy way to avoid fake news is to avoid websites like Alex Jones’ with his conspiracy rants, be careful of news feeds from Twitter and Facebook and do other similar “intelligent” things.</p>
<p>It’s simple, they say …. don’t go to the websites in question and you won’t be deluged with fake news.</p>
<p>So imagine my surprise this morning when my Android phone received an alert that the US Marine Corps had invaded CIA Headquarters with the intention of preventing the CIA from overthrowing President Trump.</p>
<p>I don’t hang out on conspiracy websites and I don’t give them the tiniest slice of my brain so my phone wasn’t offering me a snippet of data from some feed that I frequent or subscribe to.</p>
<p>But somewhere, a Google bot that gathers my news alerts was fooled by the disturbing rant of a seriously misguided individual and sent me a conspiracy-laden piece of trash as an important news alert.</p>
<p>Normal, balanced, healthy people will look at such an alert and either calmly disregard it or casually saunter over to CNN to see if it is really happening.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we are not all like that.</p>
<p>There are many who struggle with mental illness, many who fill their head with conspiracist garbage, many who are filled with hatred because of various inadequacies in their own Life and many who live in more than one of these scenarios simultaneously.</p>
<p>A certain percentage of these people are on a hair-trigger, literally, and their first reaction is to reach for whatever is in their gun locker. </p>
<p>React first, think later.</p>
<p>Some of those people would have Googled the headline and received a <b><i>lot</i></b> of hits, thus confirming some internal bias that this must be true, failing to recognize that it was a bunch of conspiracy websites all cross-posting the same article.</p>
<p>If some misguided individual this morning reacted to the alert, confirmed it with a quick Google search (or didn’t bother), grabbed his guns (or hers, but statistically more likely to be his) and went to his equivalent of DEFCON 1, the media would be having a field day analyzing the trigger that started the whole thing.</p>
<p>Of course, a conspiracist might tell me the story was planted by the CIA as a means of dulling our minds to the truth, that a constant “crying wolf” feed will eventually be used against us in some way that only they understand.</p>
<p>I guess we can make anything fit our circumstance, need and beliefs, can’t we?</p>
<p>And while I am not a fan of censorship and I recognize the slippery slope that comes when we censor the obviously wrong stuff (how that is defined is a slippery slope in itself), I wonder how we can do better to prevent such information from being passed off as an alert of legitimate concern.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>While I don’t believe in censorship in general, I believe there are certain things that shouldn’t be published, including things that promote abuse of children, violence against women, intentional spread of hatred, etc.</p>
<p>Most fake news are opinions cast off as news with an intent to send our brains in specific directions. Such information and intent to use information in devious ways has been around long before Facebook, Twitter and the like. On a side note, can you imagine PT Barnum with a Twitter account?</p>
<p>In such cases, the onus is on us to make sure our brain receives and interprets such information and intention correctly. </p>
<p>However, when emergency preparedness people tell us that we should have mobile phones handy as part of our emergency preparedness strategy and that same device alerts us to something that is potentially problematic (but which isn’t true), then we need better vetting of what our devices receive and push in our direction ….</p>
<p>…. before someone reacts poorly to garbage alerts and creates their own genuine alert or we all refuse to react to something important because we don’t believe it or because CNN hasn’t gotten around to analyzing it because they are too busy running for cover</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>PS</strong> I have friends who work at CIA HQ. They report that all is well there and that it’s just another day of “getting things done”. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but I will leave that with the conspiracy crowd to figure out.</p>
<p>The real irony here is that if an emergency were really occurring, the mobile phone network would be too overloaded to be used as a means of obtaining important information, as I noted in posts such as <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2017/05/statistics-mathematical-theory-of.html" target="_blank">Statistics: The Mathematical Theory of Ignorance</a>, but alas I digress.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-27398402354020999012017-11-17T17:30:00.000-07:002017-11-20T12:53:44.527-07:00#MeToo–An Incomplete and Inauthentic Dialog<blockquote>
<p><em>No one man can, for any considerable time, wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which is the true one. - Nathaniel Hawthorne</em></p>
<p><em>Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world. - Adam Grant</em></p>
<p><em>Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much. - Adam Grant</em></p></blockquote>
<p>I’ve been struggling with the <a href="http://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Ehashtag" target="_blank">#MeToo</a> dialog since the Weinstein explosion first erupted.</p>
<p>It’s not that the conversation is not important in the wake of revelations of predatorial actions by people with deviant beliefs or supersized egos fueled by their need for unnecessary exploitation of power. Such miscreants <strong><em>must</em></strong> be revealed.</p>
<p>It’s more that I find the conversation to be lacking or out of balance in some ways, expressed inappropriately in others and to be completely hypocritical in others.</p>
<p>There are the obvious public sources of confusion for me.</p>
<p>For example, people have questioned the morals of President Trump with his “grab her by the p___y comment” and yet welcome former President Clinton as a desired speaker despite credible accusations of rape against him and a long history of using his position of authority to exert inappropriate influence over women.</p>
<p>Clinton is, after all, much more affable than Trump – you’d be surprised how much this influences people’s perspectives about someone.</p>
<p>Senator Al Franken, who once expressed his concern over President Trump’s comment, now finds that he needs to defend himself against serious allegations that may be worse than a “mere phrase” (if you can call it that). I wonder how many other Trump haters are lying in the wings, petrified of their own behavior being revealed.</p>
<p>I am also concerned about the potential of some accusers destroying the careers of others before allegations are proven true or relevant. It seems that merely saying something can destroy a career without due process.</p>
<p>But as I examine my own career and experiences, greater sources of confusion arise for me regarding how long such issues have been incubating “in silence”.</p>
<p>Dave, a male client of mine at a Wall St. bank years ago, was notorious for belittling women and gay men and women. One time he, a Senior Vice President of the Bank, called a female VP into a meeting. When she arrived, he held out a sheet of paper and said “Here – I need 5 copies of this.” After she complied, he told her she was excused.</p>
<p>Stop being hyper-sensitive, some might say – it’s just photocopying.</p>
<p>Perhaps.</p>
<p>One day, Dave looked down the boardroom table and seeing Gary, a gay man with a ponytail sitting at the other end of the table, said, “I didn’t know we invited f*ing faggots to this meeting.”</p>
<p>We were stunned.</p>
<p>Am I still being hyper-sensitive?</p>
<p>When people reported Dave to HR, they discovered that he was more powerful than HR and that HR lived in fear that he might fire <strong><em>them</em></strong>.</p>
<p>He and his abusive, untouchable ways continued at the Bank for years until his retirement.</p>
<p>Meanwhile at another Wall St. client a couple of years later, I was consistently sexually harassed by my client, an alcoholic lush who seemed to need to sleep with every man in her presence. I was to learn that there was a method to her madness.</p>
<p>When I got tired of it, I reported it to HR. They first dismissed my concern, indicating that most men would feel flattered that a woman of such power and influence would want to sleep with them (a double standard for men facing harassment?). When I persisted, they indicated that a review process could only be initiated if her manager agreed to bring disciplinary action against her.</p>
<p>Requesting such an action would have been tricky – she had had an extramarital affair with every manager she ever had at the Bank, including her current one, and so there would be no action taken against her for fear of personal retribution (the method to her madness is revealed).</p>
<p>She had slept her way to the top or as one fellow VP told me, she had “sucked her way to the top”. Who was being more disrespectful, her or the VP with such an observation?</p>
<p>One time she brought in chocolate chip cookies on a Friday afternoon and distributed them to specific team members. I fortunately declined. I say fortunately because one of my colleagues called me from Washington DC the next day, totally freaked out and with no recollection of how he had gotten there.</p>
<p>It turned out that the cookies had been laced with hash and “other stuff” but it was “just in fun”.</p>
<p>Discipline against this woman was impossible.</p>
<p>She held sexual leverage over the only man authorized to do anything in the Bank and the police would do nothing without evidence.</p>
<p>Meanwhile …</p>
<p>I knew a bitter, man-hating member of NOW (the National Organization of Women) years ago who claimed that equality would only be achieved when women were in charge of everything. She based this assertion on the general level of disrespect that apparently all men dished out to all women.</p>
<p>Then one day, as a group of us were walking down the street and passed a man walking towards us in track pants, she turned to a colleague and said “Wow – did you see the one-eyed trouser snake on that guy? Look how he hangs in those pants – who wouldn’t want a piece of that?”</p>
<p>I called her on her inconsistency, that she demanded respect from the opposite gender while making remarks like that, and an argument ensued.</p>
<p>We never spoke again (by her choice).</p>
<p><strong>Meanwhile in the media world ….</strong></p>
<p>I’ve noticed over the last few years, a growing number of commercials that poke at the failure of men.</p>
<p>Examples include such things as handyman commercials promoting services to women to repair the incompetent work of husbands (or to do what their lazy husbands won’t do), alarm system companies describing wives complaining about the totally worthless system their incompetent husband insisted on installing, etc.</p>
<p>While some people may find such commercials amusing, as a man, I find them insulting.</p>
<p>How would women’s groups react if we ran commercials from the other side, describing lazy, stupid women who kept letting men down?</p>
<p>What would happen if we introduced racial or gender slurs into such commercials?</p>
<p>A windshield company in my area runs a commercial on the radio that ends with the catchy line “come in and show us your crack”, an obvious, intentional double-entendre.</p>
<p>If I went to that establishment, walked up to the woman behind the counter and said to her, “I came here to show you my crack”, she might call the police, depending on how I delivered the message. It’s fun to say it but not so much fun to receive it.</p>
<p>Watching a national network TV program the other night, four women were having a discussion about the post-Weinstein world and agreed that it was time for all men to feel the sting and shame of disrespect.</p>
<p>Do they really believe that an eye for an eye will solve anything or that punishing all men for the disrespectful behavior of a minority of men is fair?</p>
<p>They concluded by saying that we need laws in place to prevent problems in the future.</p>
<p>We do which leads me to my next concern.</p>
<p>I remember a few years ago as salacious stories leaked out of the Alberta Legislature of <strong><em>highly</em> </strong>inappropriate behavior by elected officials that included affairs between elected officials, elected officials and staff and elected officials and outsiders. I was shocked as the details made Fifty Shades of Grey look like a Dr. Seuss book. Interesting romps around the world on the taxpayer dime, oral sex in men’s rooms performed by elected officials at official functions while their spouses waited outside and the like were astonishing and disturbing.</p>
<p>When I spoke to my elected representative about my concerns regarding how people could be compromised into doing the wrong things against the best interest of the people if these secrets were used as leverage, he replied that he understood where I was coming from but that sometimes values and ethics needed to be put aside for the greater good of the Party.</p>
<p>Not to be outdone, rumors of everything salacious under the sun occurring in the Newfoundland and Labrador Legislature are common knowledge, with the same mix of affairs between elected officials, elected officials and staff and elected officials and outsiders (including lobbyists).</p>
<p>It’s such common knowledge that no one cares. In discussing it up with one elected official, I was told that you need to look past that and see the good in the person. I argued that I wasn’t seeing the bad in the person but I was concerned about the impact on innocent families and the potential for a secret to be used against an official in some form of extortion. My argument was rejected. </p>
<p>Another elected official complained to me (why me, I can’t do anything about it) incessantly about elected officials sleeping with each other, sleeping with lobbyists and even using sex in exchange for legislative support but when I pointed out that they could do something to put an end to it, the response was that this could compromise their position in the Party or impact future election possibilities and so it wasn't a realistic option.</p>
<p>A third elected official told me that the <strong><em>elected individual</em></strong> having an affair with a staff member was really the victim and that outing the individual would hurt their family unnecessarily and unfairly.</p>
<p>I’m sorry – that person has already hurt their family unnecessarily and unfairly.</p>
<p>The family just don’t know …. yet.</p>
<p>Two of the three elected officials I mentioned are women.</p>
<p><strong>Recourse is difficult.</strong></p>
<p>Bring such news out in the light of day and you face <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation" target="_blank">SLAPP lawsuits</a>, libel suits, etc.</p>
<p>Bring it to the press or some oversight group and you have to hope that they haven’t been compromised or you face the other possibility that the news is so common, that it’s a yawner of no interest to them. One reporter to whom such stories were reported to did nothing because he was having an affair with communications personnel working for the person facing some of the allegations. In another situation, an individual in an oversight group that protects women is best friends with many of the people being accused so justice won’t come from that corner either.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the people on the inside who aren’t participating turn a blind eye towards such behavior, often for personal, selfish interests or perhaps they face the reality that someone has something on them also.</p>
<p>I wonder what those people would think if they were on the receiving end, if their husband or wife participated in such things (or were extorted as a result) or if their mother, wife, daughter or sister got caught up with someone of influence exerting unnecessary power with their influence.</p>
<p>I wonder what the legal system would think if a private corporation had such things going on and where such activity was encouraged or ignored.</p>
<p><strong>And so the conversation is not as easy or one-sided as #MeToo would imply.</strong></p>
<p>My point with all of this is that this is not just a “women being disrespected by men” issue.</p>
<p>We have some serious underlying societal issues that, while surfacing because of Weinstein, go much deeper and broader than one gender being disrespected by another.</p>
<p>We have been overrun by a lack of respect for ourselves and for each other, regardless of which gender we represent, and a need to exploit others for personal or professional gain.</p>
<p>And until we get back to respect for each other, regardless of gender, race, religion, financial status, skin color, etc., events like the Weinstein moment, while media worthy, are only the tip of the iceberg.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>The sad part of all of this is that as people observe the #MeToo conversation explode, many can relate to stories much worse.</p>
<p>It’s easy for Hollywood types or other public figures to come out and admit they’ve been assaulted, they have considered suicide, they have faced gender bias, they suffer from depression, etc. They are worshipped and admired for their strength and courage.</p>
<p>The average citizen, unfairly and unfortunately, faces a much more difficult personal and professional battle making the same assertions.</p>
<p>Many people have observed such evil acts themselves and done nothing, either because they felt it wasn’t their business, someone had dirt on them, they didn’t want to compromise some potential gain for themselves or they were afraid of the repercussions of being vocal against ignorance. Many of those who reach out to me with observations or complaints, having the power to fix it and doing nothing with that power, get little time or respect from me.</p>
<p>The more painful stories for me are from the people who have been hurt by the evil or indifference of others and could not find a way to bring justice and peace into their lives.</p>
<p>Many have reached out to me in recent months and shared their stories.</p>
<p>They are staggering stories of abuse, mistreatment and abuse of power by people who should be in jail.</p>
<p>However, they are helpless, either for fear of their job, for fear of their Life or because, as in my HR stories, the people in authority could or would not take action.</p>
<p>We don’t need revenge and anger in these conversations – this doesn’t solve much and will likely make problems worse.</p>
<p>We don’t need apathy and indifference, either because we are lazy or because standing up doesn’t serve our own personal interests.</p>
<p>We shouldn’t accept that people need to hide in fear while others use or abuse them.</p>
<p>We don’t need more legislation to prevent abuse – we have plenty of it already.</p>
<p>We <strong><em>do</em></strong> need an environment where victims, men <strong><em>and</em></strong> women, can feel safe reporting their pain, regardless of the nature of their concern. </p>
<p>We need an environment where people are not forced into waiting for someone else to come forward first, creating a détente that produces silence.</p>
<p>We need an environment where observers can safely report pain when they observe it and where no one else within the environment will do anything about it (including the victim).</p>
<p>We need an environment where an individual’s power and authority, in business or government, doesn’t become a hammer under which people cower and refuse to stand up to them.</p>
<p>We need to acknowledge that not all men are to blame for all women’s problems, contrary to the point that one woman tried to make to me. When she told me this and I countered with all of the work I have done with battered women’s shelters and the like for years, she said that denial was proof that I was more to blame than I realized or that I did so because of a private guilt I was struggling with.</p>
<p>Hatred has no logic or reasoning and must be approached with caution since ulterior or misguided motives may be in play.</p>
<p>I know of many situations where women have contributed to women’s issues, either being the protagonist in a situation or doing nothing when another woman was in trouble. While this is the exception and not the rule, it happens more than we want to admit and must also be part of the dialog.</p>
<p>We need men and women of strong character, morals and values to stand together and out <strong>all</strong> poor behavior, whether it is perpetrated by their gender or the opposite side.</p>
<p>We need to listen more and be more aware of the plight of others around us.</p>
<p>We need to stop being hypocrites, accepting the hurt of others but only becoming angry if such activity ends up in our own world and affects us directly. Whether we realize it or not, all abuse affects all of us directly … always.</p>
<p>We need to respect ourselves and stand by our values more often and with unwavering courage, because if our foundational values are poor or we are afraid to defend them, then we won’t see the problems developing around us (or our contribution to those problems).</p>
<p>We need to recognize that seeing the good in people is not the same as turning a blind eye to the bad or evil in them.</p>
<p>And until we have these things, Weinstein will just be the tip of iceberg. Many will continue to suffer in silence while miscreants practice their twisted arts, relying on this silence to exploit others.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, others will take advantage of the noise and anger that has erupted for their own misguided reasons that have nothing to do with defending victims.</p>
<p>There are a lot of voices that are silent that shouldn't be and a lot of hypocrite voices that should put up or shut up.</p>
<p>Otherwise, we need to stop acting surprised, disappointed or angry when this stuff explodes or when we are directly impacted by it.</p>
<p>Because we will have been be part of the problem all along and not part of the solution.</p>
<p>Are you a part of the problem or part of the solution?</p>
<p>Are you sure?</p>
<p>Can you prove it?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><b>PS:</b> Readers who are quick to respond in anger regarding the notion that the majority of abuse is perpetrated by men against women are missing the point, should recognize that statistics aren't the point and that people who are in a statistical minority while experiencing abuse don't care that they are a minority. The point is that we need a healthier world for <b><i>everyone</i></b>.</p>
<p>If we can't get to an agreement on that fundamental fact, then we will never solve the problems facing us because someone will always be facing oppression or abuse.</p>
<p>On a side note, I have a personal belief that we are karmically responsible for actions that we take and actions that we don't take that were within our reach. For this reason, I believe that people who choose <b><i>not</i></b> to take action in the defense of others karmically owns the result.</p>
<hr>
<p><b>Addendum - The Overreaction / Inappropriate Reaction Camp - November 20, 2017</b></p>
<p>In Sweden, women are reacting to the assaults committed recently by primarily immigrant males by announcing concerts where only women, trans-people and non-binary people only will be allowed. This will allow them (so they claim) to guarantee that no sexual assaults will take place during the concerts. I guess this also implies that gay men may be on the radar to assault women since they are also excluded from the concerts.</p>
<p>Such over-reaction would be akin to having a male-only concert where we would exclude women so that the "sluts and whores" present would not tempt us or a concert that excludes all immigrant males because we "just know they are all inherently evil". The outcry would be significant (and warranted).</p>
<p>It goes to show that hastily embraced labels and generalizations that originate from overreaction or poor data create more divisiveness and problems than solutions.</p>
<p>But when has that stopped some people in the past?</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-13085609136806315782017-11-02T17:32:00.000-06:002017-11-02T19:13:49.852-06:00The Pitfalls of Poor Choice Selection<blockquote>
<p><em>Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. - William Jennings Bryan</em></p>
<p><em>We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals. - Stephen Covey</em></p>
<p><em>Choices are the hinges of destiny. - Edwin Markham</em></p></blockquote>
<p>The #1206 “fiction” series continues …</p>
<p>
<hr>
</p>
<p>Abigail sighed as she climbed into bed and slid under the inviting bed comforter. She had been straining for years to make some choices about her future and never quite seemed to make them. Her Life was sliding away and she knew it and yet she still didn’t make the choices that she knew her Life depended on.</p>
<p>She reached over to her nightstand, turned the light off and buried her head under the sheets.</p>
<p>“What’s wrong with me?”, she thought, anticipating another long, sleepless night and yet, despite the restlessness of her mind, sleep came quickly.</p>
<p>Or so she thought, waking with a start.</p>
<p>“Trouble sleeping?”, a voice to her left asked her.</p>
<p>She turned towards the voice and a man was smiling at her, his eyes twinkling.</p>
<p>“My apologies”, he said, offering a hand, “That was rude. My name is Gabriel.”</p>
<p>She shook his hand and replied, “My name is …..”</p>
<p>“Abigail”, Gabriel said with a smile, “Yes. I know.”</p>
<p>Abigail frowned and started to ask him how he knew who she was when she was interrupted by the sound of children.</p>
<p>She turned to her right and realized she and the stranger were standing in a parking lot in front of a candy store.</p>
<p>A group of kids were running out of the store, chatting back and forth as the store owner locked the door, turned off the “open” sign and disappeared inside the store.</p>
<p>“Ahhhhhh, kids”, Gabriel said, chuckling.</p>
<p>“They are always a great source of wisdom, don’t you think?”, he asked.</p>
<p>She turned towards him and noticed that he was staring at her, still with a big smile on his face.</p>
<p>“I don’t know”, she replied, “I’ve never really thought about it before.”</p>
<p>Gabriel pointed to the kids.</p>
<p>“Take a look at these kids”, he continued, “What do you think you can learn from them?”</p>
<p>Abigail shrugged as she looked at the children in front of her.</p>
<p>Gabriel pointed at the first one. “Take Tommy, for example”, he said, “He went into the candy store and not realizing he could choose anything he wanted, limited himself to something he didn’t like because he thought it was the only choice available to him. He suffers from <strong>choice by limitation</strong>.”</p>
<p>“Or”, he said, pointing to the little girl beside Tommy, “Jenny, who got so caught up in the process of evaluating her choices became a victim of <strong>choice by indirectness</strong> and ended up being left with choosing something from what little was left after all the other kids had already made their choices.”</p>
<p>“Then there’s young Gerald over there”, Gabriel continued as he pointed, “who was so focused on <strong>choice by elimination</strong>, weeding out each choice by criteria that only he understands, was left with something he doesn’t like because he had accidentally rejected the better options with his excessive and unnecessary criteria.”</p>
<p>“I don’t understand”, Abigail said quietly as she watched the children.</p>
<p>“Sure you do”, replied Gabriel, “You’re choosing not to understand. Observe.”</p>
<p>“Young Joel over there”, Gabriel continued, pointing to the smallest child, “didn’t make a choice at all and ended up with the last candy in the store even though he doesn’t like it, something I call the <strong>choice by default</strong>.”</p>
<p>“Little Vicky standing beside him had so many preconditions on what her choice should look like, something we call <strong>excessive conditional choice</strong>, that she ended up with a candy that she would gladly trade away for almost anything. The only problem is that she has too many conditions on any trade and so she won’t find anyone who would want to trade with her.”</p>
<p>“Meanwhile”, continued Gabriel, “Bobby embraces <strong>choice by reaction</strong>, where he worked so hard not to choose something that someone else wanted or that would upset someone, that he chose a candy that he hated but at least he took comfort in the fact that he didn’t upset anyone. Susan, on the other hand, using <strong>choice by consensus</strong>, asked everyone else which candy was best and ended up with a recommendation that she hated, fearing to act on her own needs and interests.”</p>
<p>“All of this from candy?”, Abigail, asked, “I don’t understand ….”</p>
<p>Gabriel silenced her by raising his hand.</p>
<p>“Patience”, he said, “I’m almost done.”</p>
<p>“Let’s see”, he said, scanning the crowd, “Who is left?”</p>
<p>“Ah yes”, he said with satisfaction, “Young William over there believes that orange gumdrops have magic powers and so he chose a large orange one using a process we call <strong>choice by adverse possession</strong>. Data, while important, is ignored and thus he consistently produces poor results based on choices that don’t even make sense.”</p>
<p>He paused for a moment before continuing.</p>
<p>“And then we have one child left”, Gabriel observed quietly.</p>
<p>Abigail looked over the crowd of children and saw a young girl sitting on the step, sobbing with her head in her hands.</p>
<p>“Why is she crying?”, Abigail asked.</p>
<p>“She suffers from <strong>choice by excessive permutation</strong>”, Gabriel said quietly, “Otherwise known as <strong>choice by over-processing</strong>. She is learning that when we spend too much time looking over every option incessantly or because we fear making the wrong choice, we often end up having all of our options removed from us for different reasons. In her case, she waited so long to make a choice that the store closed before she could make one and all of her options were suddenly removed. Many times in these situations, we end up having choices made for us or as in Abigail’s case, we end up with nothing at all.”</p>
<p>Abigail gasped, startled by the mention of her name and as she looked more closely at the child, she gasped again.</p>
<p>She was looking at herself as a child.</p>
<p>She started to speak when she suddenly realized that Gabriel was walking towards the little girl.</p>
<p>He knelt down beside her, hugged her and then opened his hand to reveal a bright red gumball.</p>
<p>The little girl looked at him hesitatingly and he smiled back at her, nodding his head approvingly.</p>
<p>She took the gumball from his palm quickly, expressed a quick “thank you, mister” and ran off to join her friends.</p>
<p>Gabriel stood up and watched the kids run off with their candy.</p>
<p>Abigail walked over to Gabriel and as she reached his side, he looked at her, the smile never leaving his face.</p>
<p>“Not everyone gets a second chance when they make the wrong choices or in this case, no choice at all”, he said, his dark glittering eyes staring into hers.</p>
<p>“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”, Gabriel asked her.</p>
<p>“I think so”, began Abigail but she was interrupted by Gabriel’s raised hand.</p>
<p>“You’re thinking too much”, he said, “I can tell by the look in your eye that you’re about to embark on a deep analysis when the answer offered here is closer to the surface than you realize. Act on it.”</p>
<p>Gabriel paused for a moment.</p>
<p>“Act on it”, he repeated, “No choice is a choice. Delayed choices often end up becoming no choice. No choice or an improper way of making choices will not produce the results you seek or deserve.”</p>
<p>Abigail said nothing for a moment, started to speak and then was interrupted by an unusual sound from behind her.</p>
<p>She turned towards the sound ….</p>
<p>…. and awoke with a start when she realized it was her alarm, beckoning her to return from the world of dreams.</p>
<p>She rubbed her eyes blearily, confused by her dream, and she reached over to turn off the alarm.</p>
<p>And then she saw it.</p>
<p>A shiny, bright, red gumball lay on the night table beside her cell phone.</p>
<p>To be continued.</p>
<p>
<hr>
</p>
<p>© 2017 – Harry Tucker – All Rights Reserved
<p><strong>Background</strong>
<p>This post came to mind after a series of meetings this morning and listening to explanations from different team members as to why they were doing what they were doing.
<p>It is also a long-distance dedication to <strong><em>V.</em></strong> and others who hesitate to make the choices they are called to make to maximize their potential.
<p>Many of us avoid making the choices that really matter through one or more of the following processes (borrowed from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Path-Least-Resistance-Kindle-eBook-ebook/dp/B004EEOPYK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509671453&sr=8-1&keywords=the+path+of+least+resistance" target="_blank">The Path of Least Resistance</a> and expanded upon):
<ol>
<li><strong>Choice by limitation</strong> - choosing only what seems possible or reasonable</li>
<li><strong>Choice by indirectness</strong> – focusing on the process instead of the result </li>
<li><strong>Choice by elimination</strong> - eliminating possibilities until only one one exists</li>
<li><strong>Choice by default</strong> - choosing to not make a choice, forcing a choice to occur by default</li>
<li><strong>Conditional choice</strong> - imposing preconditions on choices</li>
<li><strong>Choice by reaction</strong> – making choices designed to overcome / prevent conflict</li>
<li><strong>Choice by consensus</strong> - following the result of an informal poll that determines what everyone else wants or recommends</li>
<li><strong>Choice by adverse possession</strong> – choices based on a hazy metaphysical notion about the nature of the Universe</li>
<li><strong>No choice by excessive permutation</strong> – choices limited by sensory overload, causing no choice or a choice by default </li>
<li><strong>No choice by over-processing</strong> - taking too long to choose, devolving into choice by default (or none) – similar to no choice by excessive permutation.</li></ol>
<p>Few people are direct and purposeful with their choices, whether it be in selection, execution and follow-through.</p>
<p>Are you one of them?</p>
<p>Are you sure?</p>
<p>How do you know?</p>
<p><strong>Series Origin</strong>
<p>This series, a departure from my usual musings, is inspired as a result of conversations with former senior advisors to multiple Presidents of the United States, senior officers in the US Military and other interesting folks as well as my own professional background as a Wall St. / Fortune 25 strategy advisor and large-scale technology architect.
<p>While this musing is just “fiction” (note the quotes) and a departure from my musings on technology, strategy, politics and society, as a strategy guy, I do everything for a reason and with a measurable outcome in mind. :-)
<p>This “fictional” musing is a continuation of the #1206 series noted <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/p/the-1206-series.html" target="_blank">here</a> and is part of the Abigail / Gabriel series noted <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.ca/p/abigail-gabriel.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-49278340795903440742017-10-27T12:54:00.000-06:002017-10-28T14:03:09.377-06:00Clarity and the 12 Sins of Poorly Defined Outcomes<blockquote>
<p><em>It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion. - Rene Daumal</em></p>
<p><em>At some point, a flash of sustained clarity reveals the difference between what someone would have you believe is true, and what you know from the depths of your own heart to the peaks of your soul to be true. What happens after that is up to you. – Aberjhani</em></p></blockquote>
<p>A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of some intense frustration over some business intentions that have refused to cross the finish line no matter how much nudging and force was applied, I stepped away from social media.</p>
<p>I put my 25 million connections across different platforms on hold, exchanging the useful and the useless (read: mundane or inane) chatter for quiet and replacing the incessant online chatting with people I’ve never met with more high-quality, in-person time. An observation I made to <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition" target="_blank">CBC Sunday Edition</a> regarding this was read (in part) on their show last week. It is at 43:43 of <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&clipIds=,,&mediaIds=1078191683765,1078182467604,1078140483928&contentarea=radio&subsection1=radio1&subsection2=currentaffairs&subsection3=the_sunday_edition&title=the-sunday-edition-october-22-2017&contentid=1.4363726&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fradio%2Fthesundayedition%2Fthe-sunday-edition-october-22-2017-1.4363726&publishedTime=1508678794391&originaltitle=the-sunday-edition-october-22-2017&contenttype=audio&updatedTime=1508541408807" target="_blank">hour 1</a> and was in response to this interesting piece - <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-october-15-2017-1.4353223/the-anti-democratic-reign-of-facebook-apple-google-and-amazon-1.4353243" target="_blank">The anti-democratic reign of Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon</a>.</p>
<p>I also went on a diet from mainstream media. With President Trump dominating most conversation channels any, I didn’t think I would be missing much.</p>
<p>And in the blessed quiet that ensued, I applied a technique not often used in my industry to explore the delays plaguing my project.</p>
<p>As an uber-left-brained, ultra Type A personality, it is sometimes difficult for me to get the analytical side of my brain to just shut up, stop analyzing everything around it and allow the creative right side of my brain to have a go at something that intense logic alone can’t figure out.</p>
<p>Using a process that borrows from techniques that artists use to maximize their potential, I set about exploring the dilemma that plagued my teams.</p>
<p>The process goes like this, utilizing key strengths of each side of the brain in a structured, strategic way:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>First Insight</strong> - Back away from deep analysis of the problem and explore key insights with the right side of the brain (non problem-solving mode), allowing the brain to wander “aimlessly” around the problem.</li>
<li><strong>Saturation</strong> - Overload the left side of the brain with the background data, context, rules, constraints and other things associated with the issue but but do not try to solve the problem.</li>
<li><strong>Incubation</strong> - Wander away from the problem and work on anything BUT the problem, allowing the right side of the brain to creatively wander through the space, unimpeded by the analytical, logical side of the brain that insists it has the solution (an assertion unproven to this point).</li>
<li><strong>Illumination</strong> – AHA moments arrive suddenly and out of nowhere as the issue that has been bothering you suddenly has solutions presented from the creative side of the brain.</li>
<li><strong>Verification</strong> – Bring the left side of the brain back into play and verify that the AHA solution is appropriate, relevant, viable and actionable and use the left side of the brain to create a new strategy, guided by the creativity from the right side of the brain.</li></ol>
<p>For a deeper explanation of how this process works, I recommend <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive-ebook/dp/B005GSYXU4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509123813&sr=8-1&keywords=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain" target="_blank">Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive, 4th Edition</a>.</p>
<p>In the clarity and grey-matter wandering that ensued, I came up with 12 sins regarding outcomes that were being committed by all parties involved in my current project and armed with the list, I presented them to inside and outside teams this morning.</p>
<p>Here are the 12 sins – how many are you or your organization(s) guilty of?</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Unknown Outcomes</strong> – they have been defined but for a variety of reasons, are unknown to some key individuals or have been forgotten by them.</li>
<li><strong>Hidden / Obfuscated Outcomes</strong> – an outcome important to one or more people has been intentionally hidden from some people for reasons that benefit the owners of those outcomes.</li>
<li><strong>Poorly Defined Outcomes</strong> – almost better than having no outcomes but potentially also more dangerous than having no defined outcomes as they are missing key elements of evidenced-based assumptions, specific measurable components and date-sensitive completion targets.</li>
<li><strong>Undefined Outcomes</strong> – some people didn’t even bother to define them for their team(s).</li>
<li><strong>Conflicting Outcomes</strong> – outcomes from different individuals / teams are running at odds with each other because of execution or interpretation.</li>
<li><strong>Competing Outcomes</strong> – poor prioritization or focus has allowed outcomes to compete within the brains of a single person or team.</li>
<li><strong>Fluid Outcomes</strong> – outcomes that constantly change based on observation, perspective and the current weather forecast</li>
<li><strong>Rigid Outcomes</strong> – outcomes that should be redefined when data, context and situation call for an intelligent adjustment but people get locked on course, even if they are heading for an open pit.</li>
<li><strong>Immeasurable Outcomes</strong> – outcomes based on fuzzy things, emotions or feelings instead of being evidenced-based.</li>
<li><strong>Passive Outcomes</strong> – from the “I hope this happens / works” camp even when the data screams otherwise (if there is any data at all).</li>
<li><strong>Aggressive Outcomes</strong> – the steam roller approach, ignoring the negative impact on people, organizations and anyone / anything else touched by the results of such outcomes.</li>
<li><strong>Timid Outcomes</strong> – leaving important things on the table, unexplored and unleveraged, because a lack of assertiveness, confidence or information.</li></ol>
<p>In my early morning presentations this morning, I could have hammered and insulted everyone involved by actually pointing out who was guilty of one or more of these sins (myself included).</p>
<p>But great teams don’t need to be lectured – they know how to solve their own problems once they are pointed out. The book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Are-Your-Lights-Figure-Problem/dp/0932633161/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509124886&sr=8-1&keywords=are+your+lights+on" target="_blank">Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is</a>, written over 20 years ago but still relevant, has some useful information on how to encourage intelligent people to solve their own problems.</p>
<p>Having set my team back on course towards a successful completion of the tasks at hand, I took a look at what is trending on mainstream and social media this morning based on social media’s “what’s trending” links.</p>
<p>Let’s see … in the midst of the Harvey Weinstein debacle, I see that Ellen DeGeneres lit up social media with this <a href="http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/ellen-degeneres-blasted-for-sharing-unacceptable-katy-perry-photo/" target="_blank">item</a>.</p>
<p align="center">@TheEllenShow: Happy birthday, @KatyPerry! It’s time to bring out the big balloons!</p>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEuHwIUF0BpnH9M3FA6siUwK7V9nLR3XoSCW3IgDr5ajOW-OjEe_wxzckcX1YhrCII0uDVkMCSHBFs29b0hBcbD_xq_vftxb3YHwi2aJIub9StkpYQ5C_mvviHeE_I-jtKSwv2GhA2pQE/s1600/Ellen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEuHwIUF0BpnH9M3FA6siUwK7V9nLR3XoSCW3IgDr5ajOW-OjEe_wxzckcX1YhrCII0uDVkMCSHBFs29b0hBcbD_xq_vftxb3YHwi2aJIub9StkpYQ5C_mvviHeE_I-jtKSwv2GhA2pQE/s400/Ellen.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="800" /></a></div></p>
<p>Sure it’s only in jest and we are hypersensitive about everything these days. However, if a privileged Caucasian male (a certain President comes to mind) said this, Twitter would burn to the ground in indignation.</p>
<p>Consistency and fairness are important when we are addressing issues in our world, are they not?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, HBO severed ties with Mark Halperin over his own <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/i-dont-want-to-sit-on-your-lap-she-said-but-mark-halperin-insisted/2017/10/26/0baa883c-ba64-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?utm_term=.85fc30cb7a8d" target="_blank">indiscretions</a> and yet defended a comedy that they ran a few years ago that showed a child drinking from a penis-shaped water bottle. </p>
<p>Apologies for the offensive picture but it is offered to make a point.</p>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9gN1e4lEs3aIBtVgp6Sl09yZzb2XEgf4odm8SLae5AY0iCdOl2WcGw2z_y-aFN0D-hFeQ7jdkGBgMCWb5HXZQZLRijT2oFTaU3-c4pScQXWikOeNruEyBL0WzkRG-tGsckseRvK883kM/s1600/PenisBottle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9gN1e4lEs3aIBtVgp6Sl09yZzb2XEgf4odm8SLae5AY0iCdOl2WcGw2z_y-aFN0D-hFeQ7jdkGBgMCWb5HXZQZLRijT2oFTaU3-c4pScQXWikOeNruEyBL0WzkRG-tGsckseRvK883kM/s400/PenisBottle.jpg" width="400" height="400" data-original-width="225" data-original-height="225" /></a></div></p>
<p>I also explored this in the post <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2013/12/duck-dynasty-phil-robertson-and.html" target="_blank">Duck Dynasty, Phil Robertson and Ignorance Run Rampant</a>.</p>
<p>I see also that Hillary’s “The Election Was Stolen from Me” tour continues to trend highly and is either a form of therapy for her (<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/09/19/hillary_clinton_s_book_tour_is_a_dose_of_much_needed_therapy_for_her_fans.html" target="_blank">Hillary Clinton’s Book Tour Is a Dose of Much-Needed Therapy for Her Fans</a>) or a source of anger (<a href="http://theweek.com/articles/733127/fear-loathing-hillary-clintons-grievance-tour" target="_blank">Fear and loathing on Hillary Clinton's grievance tour</a>).</p>
<p>And finally, I see that the US Intelligence community continues to control the nation as President Trump acquiesces and allows certain JFK assassination reports to remain classified.</p>
<p>Not to be outdone, President Trump continues to stoke fears in many that we are all about to be wiped out in a mushroom cloud. Whether that cloud is nuclear or ego-based is still being debated.</p>
<p>On the social media side, I see a lot of conspiracy rants and an invitation to determine what my porn star name would be or if an algorithm can guess my age based on my song interests.</p>
<p>There <strong><em>are</em></strong> many useful and important conversations happening in social media but items similar to the ones shown above are the things being fed to many people who consume what is put in front of them rather than choosing to selectively digest that which improves their lives and the lives of others.</p>
<p>It’s too bad that irrelevant and nonsensical drivel drown important things out and that such noise prevents many people from seeing clarity in their own personal or professional situations.</p>
<p>It would be entertaining to reexamine measurable outcomes of society-at-large as it pertains to social and mainstream media, politicians, business and the like.</p>
<p>I would but I have accepted the caveat that such analysis will unlikely move the masses who prefer to deflect attention away from their own worries, laziness, ignorance, apathy or sense of inadequacy (the latter often being untrue or unwarranted) by filling their mind with such distractions.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>Clarity matters and often to obtain it, we need to create a gap between ourselves and the noise that prevents us from acquiring it. Unfortunately, too many people are afraid of quiet, solitude and the chatter within their minds.</p>
<p>That’s too bad, because many people have great things aching to be revealed that could make a tremendous, positive difference on this planet.</p>
<p>Measurable outcomes matter and those who refuse to define and communicate them appropriately often bore and irritate others who get tired of hearing them moan about results desired but not assertively, appropriately created.</p>
<p>Consistency in addressing our world problems matters – we can’t be offended by what people say or do if we say or do similar things, somehow holding people to a higher standard that we refuse to hold ourselves to.</p>
<p>And what we fill our brain with matters in regards to the results we create for ourselves and others.</p>
<p>What do you fill your brain with?</p>
<p>I wonder if your answer and your actions express the same thing.</p>
<p>Does it even matter?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood – create a great day because merely having one is too passive an experience.</p>
<p>Harry</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-30379050624867607272017-08-14T15:21:00.000-06:002017-08-14T15:21:18.062-06:00Divide and Conquer (Revisited)<blockquote>
<p><em>Terrorism is a psychological warfare. Terrorists (and politicians) try to manipulate us and change our behavior by creating fear, uncertainty, and division in society. - Patrick J. Kennedy (politician reference added)</em></p>
<p><em>He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. - Martin Luther King, Jr.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>The #1206 “fiction” series continues (a variant on an earlier post) …
<p>
<hr>
<p>The coffee shop was busy as it always was, with its typical mix of soccer moms, businessmen and little kids doing what they liked to do in coffee shops.
<p>In a private corner of the coffee shop, two men, overdressed for the hot weather in dark suits and white shirts, quietly observed the activity all around them.
<p>Finally one of them cleared his throat and said tersely but quietly, “It was a lot easier than we anticipated, wasn’t it?”
<p>The other looked at his companion and nodded, saying nothing.
<p>“After all”, the first man continued, “Who would have thought that they could have been manipulated this easily? It was almost like playing a game.”
<p>The second man looked at him with a frown. “Do you think it was that easy?”, he asked gruffly. “Coming up with a list of topics that we knew would resonate with different elements of society was <strong>not</strong> easy”.
<p>Still, as he thought about it, it was pretty easy. <p>Things like creating the United Nations, charge it with maintaining peace and well-being on the planet and then encouraging it to do nothing while having it incessantly make announcements about what they intended to do.
<p>Things like feeding different nations with the knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction and then feeding other countries with enough knowledge to be suspicious of them.
<p>Things like getting everyone wound up about climate change and then introducing enough evidence on both sides of the argument to confuse everyone.
<p>Things like creating structured religion to guide people morally and then have the leadership of some of the same organizations become the largest violators of those principles.
<p>Then there was the idea of terrorism, keeping everyone unsteady on their feet, leading to the brilliant wars in the Middle East and the subsequent economic strain around the world.
<p>The pro gay / anti gay / gender identity debate was tossed in for fun at the last minute at the suggestion of a team member who wanted to see how easily people could be manipulated in light of all the other events already occurring all around them.
<p>Social media was also having its effect, enabling a small minority of people, including their own agents of misinformation, to convey strong messages and evoke strong, polarizing emotions in large groups of followers while lowering the mental resistance of the majority.
<p>There were more things in play to confuse the people than he could even keep up with.
<p>And now people were divided, not just on one issue but each on a multitude of issues, strongly agreeing with some people on some issues while vehemently opposing the same people on others.
<p>A 2000-year plan was nearing its climatic end and the people were almost ready.
<p>One pillar of strength remained that had to be neutralized.
<p>As he thought about the final stages of their plan, he had a momentary thought that perhaps things were going a little too easily.
<p>“We are sure that the divisiveness over politics in the United States was not created by us?”, he asked his colleague.
<p>The first man chuckled and replied, “Don’t I wish? They are so confused now that they created this one on their own without any help on our part. Although I have to admit that I would have been proud if it had been my idea.”
<p>The second man grunted and was silent again. He didn’t like things happening that they hadn’t specifically orchestrated.
<p>The first man, sensing that his partner was over analyzing again, continued his thought.
<p>“The laws we need are in place. People are confused and fighting for survival. The separation by class, race, gender identity, financial standing and religious belief is complete. The Department of Homeland Security ordered 450 million rounds of armor piercing ammunition a few years ago for domestic use and military rehearsals demonstrate that they are in the final preparation stages to combat domestic unrest. Citizens believe that their President has checked out, is inept, is a racist or is unfeeling towards their plight. I think this demonstrates that the leadership and the people are in the final place of confusion and imbalance that we need them to be in.”
<p>The second nodded, pursing his lips.
<p>“It is curious”, he said to no one in particular, “that the people of this planet who excel in the concept of divide and conquer to oppress others don’t notice when the same principles are being used against them.”
<p>“Curious indeed”, replied the first, “but useful.”
<p>The second man nodded again as they both resumed their observation of the coffee shop in silence.
<p>To be continued.
<p>
<hr>
<p>© 2017 – Harry Tucker – All Rights Reserved
<p><strong>Blog Post Background / Supporting Data</strong>
<p>Watching two African-American men tear each other apart today over who was “more black” as they argued over President Trump’s reaction to the act of hatred in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-virginia-overview.html" target="_blank">Charlottesville</a> broke my heart and reminded me of an older blog post which I repost here with some minor modifications.
<p>Instead of being united against racism, they were allowing the evil tool of racism to divide them, keeping the attention on them and not on the people where the energetic conversations should be directed.
<p>United we stand.
<p>Divided we fall.
<p>Are we focused on uniting against that which undermines us or are we so distracted by other things that we allow divisions and the architects of those divisions to tear us apart?
<p>Someone stands to benefit from such division.
<p>Who do you think that is?
<p>How important is it to find out and neutralize their intentions before they neutralize a nation … or a planet?
<p>How important is it that we relearn how to talk (even passionately) and even more, to listen?
<p>How important is it that we focus more on what unites us instead of what separates us?
<p>I guess it depends on what kind of future you want for you, your children, your partner, your loved ones, your friends, your country and the world.
<p>What kind of future <strong><em>do</em></strong> you want?
<p>It doesn’t create itself, you know.
<p>The world is waiting for you.
<p>What are you waiting for?
<p><strong>Series Origin</strong>
<p>This series, a departure from my usual musings, is inspired as a result of conversations with former senior advisors to multiple Presidents of the United States, senior officers in the US Military and other interesting folks as well as my own professional background as a Wall St. / Fortune 25 strategy advisor and large-scale technology architect.
<p>While this musing is just “fiction” (note the quotes) and a departure from my musings on technology, strategy, politics and society, as a strategy guy, I do everything for a reason and with a measurable outcome in mind. :-)
<p>This “fictional” musing is a continuation of the #1206 series noted <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/p/the-1206-series.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-3344490290878742192017-08-10T09:44:00.000-06:002017-08-10T09:46:39.743-06:00Kim Jong-Trump<blockquote>
<p><em>There is a fine balance between paranoia and preparedness. Understanding the difference can make all the difference. – Harry Tucker</em></p></blockquote>
<p>A guest post by <a href="http://gwynnedyer.com/" target="_blank">Gwynne Dyer</a>, author, historian and independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.</p>
<p>
<hr>
</p>
<p>“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, Mr President, but I do say not more than ten or twenty million dead, depending on the breaks.” So said General ‘Buck’ Turgidson, urging the US president to carry out a nuclear first strike, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film ‘Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’</p>
<p>But nobody in Kubrick’s movie talked like Kim Jong-un (“American bastards would be not very happy with this gift sent on the July 4 anniversary,” he crowed, celebrating North Korea’s first successful test of an ICBM). They didn’t talk like Donald Trump either (“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”)</p>
<p>Kubrick’s film came out the year after the Cuban missile crisis, when the world went to the brink of nuclear war after the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles into Cuba to deter an American invasion. It was a terrifying time, but neither US President John F. Kennedy nor the Soviet leaders used violent language. They stayed calm, and carefully backed away from the brink.</p>
<p>So Kubrick’s fictional leaders had to stay sane too; only his generals and civilian strategic ‘experts’ were crazy. Anything else would have been too implausible even for a wild satire like ‘Strangelove’. Whereas now we live in different times.</p>
<p>Trump may not understand what his own words mean, but he is threatening to attack North Korea if it makes any more threats to the United States. That’s certainly how it will be translated into Korean. And Pyongyang will assume that the US attack will be nuclear, since it would be even crazier to attack a nuclear-armed country like North Korea using only conventional weapons.</p>
<p>Maybe the American and North Korean leaders are just two playground bullies yelling at each other, but even in their more grown-up advisers it sets up the the train of thought best described by strategic theorist Thomas Schelling: “He thinks we think he’ll attack; so he thinks we shall; so he will, so we must.” This is how people can talk themselves into launching a ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘preventive’ nuclear attack.</p>
<p>Is this where the world finds itself at the moment? ‘Fraid so. And although a nuclear war with North Korea at this point wouldn’t even muss America’s hair – the few North Korean ICBMs would probably go astray or be shot down before they reached the US – it could kill many millions of Koreans on both sides of the border.</p>
<p>A million or so Japanese might die as well (that would depend on the fallout), and a few tens of thousands of US soldiers in western Pacific bases (from targeted strikes). Indeed, as the scale of the potential disaster comes home to North Korean strategists, you can see them start to play with the idea of a “limited nuclear war.”</p>
<p>North Korean planners have announced that they are “carefully examining” a plan for a missile attack on the big US base on Guam. In that way they could “signal their resolve” in a crisis by only hitting one isolated American military target. Their hope would be that such a limited attack would not unleash an all-out US nuclear counter-attack that would level North Korea.</p>
<p>‘Limited’ nuclear war typically becomes a favourite topic whenever strategists realise that using their cherished nuclear weapons any other way means unimaginable levels of death and destruction. It has never been credible, because it assumes that people will remain severely rational and unemotional while under attack by nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Thinking about limited nuclear war, while unrealistic, is evidence that the planners are starting to get really scared about an all-out nuclear war, which is just what you want them to be. Nevertheless, we are entering a particularly dangerous phase of the process, not least because the other two major nuclear powers in the world, China and Russia, both have land borders with North Korea. And neither of them loves or trusts the United States.</p>
<p>What “process” are we talking about here? The process of coming to an accommodation that lets North Korea keep a nuclear deterrent, while reassuring it that it will never have to use those weapons. Because that’s what these North Korean missiles and nuclear warheads are about: deterring an American attack aimed at changing the regime.</p>
<p>They couldn’t be about anything else. North Korea can never have enough missiles to attack the US or its local allies and survive: it would be national suicide. But it can have enough of them to carry out a “revenge from the grave” and impose unacceptable losses on the US if it attacks North Korea. Deterrence, as usual, is the name of the game.</p>
<p>US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson briefly said that the US was not seeking to change the North Korean regime last week, although he was almost immediately contradicted by President Trump. In the long run, however, that is the unpalatable but acceptable way out of this crisis. In fact, there is no other way out.</p>
<p>
<hr>
</p>
<p>A guest post by <a href="http://gwynnedyer.com/" target="_blank">Gwynne Dyer</a>, author, historian and independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. Reproduced with permission from the author.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-11977207033604669432017-08-04T16:57:00.003-06:002017-08-14T08:33:33.201-06:00Feeling the Sting of Discrimination<blockquote>
<p><em>Too small is our world to allow discrimination, bigotry and intolerance to thrive in any corner of it, let alone in the United States of America. - Eliot Engel</em></p>
<p><em>Discrimination is not done by villains. It's done by us. - Vivienne Ming</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Today I experienced my first <strong><em>real</em></strong> discrimination that was directed towards me.</p>
<p>As a Caucasian, heterosexual male, standing 6’3”, with an athletic build, with all aspects of my body working as originally designed and with reasonable personal and professional success behind me, I hardly fit the bill of someone who might experience discrimination.</p>
<p>Of course, there is always the ignorance of people who happily tell me “Newfie” jokes when they “discover” my Newfoundland and Labrador heritage but the combination of a person very comfortable in my own skin and my Life track record allows me to not get upset over the ignorance of those who have not been as blessed as I have been.</p>
<p>This is why the events of today surprised me a little … or maybe a lot.</p>
<p>A couple of days ago in my blog post <a href="https://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2017/08/stop-being-offended-and-do-something.html" target="_blank">Stop Being Offended and Do Something</a>, I made some observations about people who live in fear of taking action or who run around being offended by the actions of others but who choose not to take any action themselves to address that which offends them.</p>
<p>The blog made reference to a little experiment at our office this week. In a meeting with my business partner, he happened to notice that I had vivid, pink nail polish on one thumb. While I was trying to conduct a business meeting, he was quite distracted by my thumbnail. Here is what ensued.</p>
<p><em>He looked at it several times with a light smile but said nothing although he was clearly distracted by it.</em></p>
<p><em>“You want to ask, don’t you?”, I said to him as I observed him.</em></p>
<p><em>“I do”, he said, smiling.</em></p>
<p><em>“Then ask”, I replied.</em></p>
<p><em>“Ok”, he said, “Why does the President of our company have a pink thumbnail?”</em></p>
<p><em>“Great question”, I replied, “Perhaps it is nice to be in touch with a softer side once in a while as we spend inordinate amounts of time being aggressive, assertive, Alpha males pretending to be kings of the universe as we make plans for our next conquest. What do you think?”</em></p>
<p><em>He paused for a moment and then he smiled.</em></p>
<p><em>“I like it”, he replied.</em></p>
<p><em>“Me too”, I replied, “And besides, since when did I care what others think of what I say or do as long as what I do gets the job done and honors others?”</em></p>
<p><em>“I really like it”, he said.</em></p>
<p><em>An hour later, my small action was greeted with applause in the boardroom.</em></p>
<p><em>And then one of the guys at the office went out to buy a bottle of vivid, bright blue nail polish to give it a try. </em></p>
<p><em>After all, blue is our corporate color.</em><br></p>
<p>We agreed that we would leave our little experiment in play until the end of the week.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the public reaction to my thumbnail, as noted in the other blog post, was also interesting.</p>
<p>Some examples:
<ul>
<li>It’s hot (or very hot)
<li>It’s cool
<li>I wonder how kinky he is
<li>It’s neat that he’s in touch with his feminine self
<li>It’s weird
<li>Normal men don’t do that
<li>**stare** / avert eyes when noticed / repeat (the cowardly passive-aggressive model)
<li>**stare** / freeze in place (as I held out money to pay for something)
<li>He’s probably a pedophile or some other type of sickie (from one mother to another as she moved her child closer to her in a coffee shop)
<li>He’s gay
<li>He’s “whipped”
<li>**snickers / laughter** </li></ul>
<p>That’s a lot of character analysis derived from a single, pink thumbnail.
<p>So when I went to donate blood today (whole blood donation # 136), imagine my surprise when a member of the Canadian Blood Services team looked at my pink thumbnail, frowned, shook her head and said, “I prefer my men to be real men.”</p>
<p>I was shocked.</p>
<p>First of all, I was not “her” man nor do I appreciate being evaluated as a candidate to be one as implied by the comment.</p>
<p>Secondly, there is nothing about the color of a thumbnail that defines the nature of any person, regardless of whether we are measuring character, ethics, morals, values, contribution to society, beliefs, gender or anything else.</p>
<p>However, wearing that one pink thumbnail somehow meant that I had fallen beneath some standard defined by this individual.</p>
<p>I wonder where not being a woman (obviously) but being less than a “real man” left me.</p>
<p>The conversation that ensued is not worth repeating.</p>
<p>However, when it was observed that my blood pressure was a little elevated, I couldn’t help but think, “You are surprised after that conversation?”</p>
<p>Ironically, I was experiencing diminishing, insulting discrimination at the hands of a visible minority.</p>
<p>I could have reminded her that nail polish has been worn by male cultural, religious, business and government leaders for many millennia, including Pharaohs and other people.</p>
<p>I could have reminded her that “male polish” is now an in-thing, worn by business and political leaders, celebrities and many other heterosexual men.</p>
<p>I could have reminded her that at a time when Canadian Blood Services is actively trying to bring more people in to donate blood, insulting dedicated donors like me could cause me to stand up and walk out (possibly never returning).</p>
<p>I could have reminded her that walking out could cause any other donors there with me to walk out as well.</p>
<p>I could have reminded her that as a visible minority herself, receiving respect as a minority includes giving respect to other people.</p>
<p>I could have reminded her that a place to give blood is not the place to have your religious, political or cultural views imparted upon others. I’m sure if I decided to tell her that I didn’t like her culture or race, I would have been thrown out (as I should have been).</p>
<p>But I was there to give blood, not go toe-to-toe with ignorant people.</p>
<p>I choose when and where to pick my fights and her ignorance will not go unnoticed.</p>
<p>Will going toe-to-toe with her or having her boss read a reprimand to her fix this person’s outlook?</p>
<p>Unlikely.</p>
<p>But if we choose to not step up and respectfully but forcefully defend against discrimination, then we allow it to continue.</p>
<p>And if we allow it to continue in silence, we could be accused of condoning it, supporting it or even spreading it. Our defense against such accusations would be weak since we didn’t take a stand when we could have.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>Discrimination in the 21st century, where humanity has allegedly reached the pinnacle of knowledge and insight, is a reflection of ignorance.</p>
<p>If we don’t step up and do something about it when we witness it or receive it, we are part of the problem and not part of the solution. If we accept that people can be discriminated against, then we also accept that discrimination can be applied against us at some point if someone chooses to use it against us.</p>
<p>To think the world works any other way is a reflection of ignorance and is the ultimate in hypocrisy.</p>
<p>Are you willing to take a <strong><em>real</em></strong> stand against discrimination in any form it arrives?</p>
<p>If so, well done.</p>
<p>If not, you will have to accept it if it ever comes your way - you will have earned the ignorance that is being reflected karmically back in your direction.</p>
<p>Be a force for good and a positive role model for others.</p>
<p>Anything else qualifies you as a member of a group of people described by Lieutenant General David Morrison who noted, “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”</p>
<p>What do you choose to accept?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood – create a great day, because merely having one is too passive an experience.</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>Addendum: What If It Were Someone Else?</strong></p>
<p>I have been reminded by quite a few people that what I experienced could be interpreted as a violation of the hate crime act in Canada. I don't know the intricate workings of the act but the feedback caused me to wonder what would happen if someone else had been on the receiving end of the comments that I received. It could create quite a bit of complexity for a lot of people.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, I was there to save lives and I will continue to be a proud blood donor and to collaborate with the great folks at the Blood Center.</p>
<p>I won't allow the ignorance of one miscreant to change my actions moving forward or change my perception of a great bunch of dedicated, professional, friendly staff.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Addendum 2 - A Followup - August 8, 2017</strong></p>
<p>A colleague and friend of mine posted some questions (see comment section) that I believe are worthy of a response in the form of an addendum. Here are the questions and my response.</p>
<p><strong>The Question:</strong></p>
<p>Thanks for the insightful post, Harry. I was interested in your experiment from reading about it in your previous post. You mentioned what other people's negative reactions were. Were there any positive reactions (other than the one's from your team)? Also, do you think the nail polish had the intended effect of being a counter balance to your "alpha maleness"? Was this beneficial to decisions you made and interactions you had with others? Did your team members have any interesting experiences with it themselves?</p>
<p><strong>My Response:</strong></p>
<p>Thanks for your thoughtful questions, Nathan. There were some positive reactions from many people although the gender divide was interesting (notwithstanding the fact that my data sample is small).</p>
<p>The majority of men seemed offended by it or rejected it although one praised it and said I should have done both hands completely and I was agressively solicited by a gay male. While some women seemed offended by it, the vast majority seemed intrigued (even tittilated) by it and many praised it.</p>
<p>I was surprised by the reaction from men because we generally don't care if another man is heavily tattooed, pierced or has unusual hair / beard color but a man with a painted nail created a source of irritation or offense for many of them when it should have been irrelevant to them in their lives.</p>
<p>As for a counterbalance to my alpha maleness, I will offer this observation. I have often claimed (and believed) that I don't care what people say and think about what I believe and do. I learned through this experience that I needed to resynch this belief. Men who do things like "walk a mile in her shoes" (where they wear women's shoes in a walk to raise awareness for women's abuse) do so with like-minded colleagues and so there is comfort in doing something "out of the norm" in the safety of numbers. Doing it with a small team where one is often alone in public requires a different type of courage that REALLY struck me.</p>
<p>I became aware of people watching me / looking at me / trying to figure me out and I knew it was because of the nail.</p>
<p>I felt firsthand what it was like to be judged and categorized by others who had little if any data about who I was, what I do, how I do it, who I do it for and why I do it.</p>
<p>I actually wondered what they were thinking and as described in this post, I felt the sting of disapproval (which surprised me).</p>
<p>And there is the reality of the scale of such categorization with such an insignificant piece of data.</p>
<p>The sting also opened my eyes to something. As I noted in my post, I am not a typical demographic for discrimination (although I was bullied in my youth) and while we can claim to defend those who feel discriminated against, we can't really understand it until we have felt it for ourselves. This experience has humbled me and taught me a valuable lesson in what it feels like to be on the receiving end of something less than positive.</p>
<p>My team members have expressed similar experiences "in the wild" and one was even drawn into a loud, aggressive argument with someone. He felt embarrassed afterwards that he allowed himself to be drawn into such an argument over something so unimportant but he felt that he needed to meet an aggressive evaluation with an equally aggressive response (which he acknowledged in hindsight as being incorrect).</p>
<p>We as a team and myself as an individual are still experiencing the lessons of humility and courage that developed out of this experiment. As colleagues who study human motivation and behavior, this has provided some interesting insight that we may continue to experiment with - that remains to be seen.</p>
<p>I can't say that the experience has altered my alpha maleness in terms of diminishment of assertiveness and the like (which some people might assume from doing something associated with women). However, it has heightened my sense of humility and courage to the point of needing to re-explore it. Some of this humility also stems from an awareness of potential vulnerability, something easily lost amongst a group of men "conquering the universe".</p>
<p>It was also a learning experience for people who made comments to me about it. As I explained to people who commented on it, for 5000 years, MEN of power painted their nails - emperors, pharaohs and the like. Men in the Roman legion painted their nails red before battle. Women were surprised to hear that this was a common male activity until recent history and so they learned something also.</p>
<p>This experience has given me some new insight that I will carry with me into my next venture which you are familiar with.</p>
<p>More thoughts to follow as they become coherent and useful.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-87955019433937038652017-08-01T09:57:00.000-06:002017-08-02T12:48:26.302-06:00Stop Being Offended and Do Something<blockquote>
<p><em>Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world. - Joel A. Barker</em></p>
<p><em>Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. - Thomas Jefferson</em></p>
<p><em>Action expresses priorities. - Mahatma Gandhi</em></p></blockquote>
<p>At 6am this morning, my local Starbucks was busier than normal. My Quiet Hour had ended and I was gearing up for another day of orchestrated chaos and the test of mettle that strains under the pressure of closing a complex business deal.</p>
<p>It was a typical day in any major city – people coming and going in haste, on the way to wherever, focused on whatever, as they stared straight ahead with expressionless or strained faces.</p>
<p>There were a couple of women passionately discussing Scripture.</p>
<p>And there was a homeless guy, keeping a watchful eye on his shopping cart outside.</p>
<p>It contains everything he has.</p>
<p>I hadn’t noticed him at first. What drew my attention to him were the two women discussing Scripture. Drinking their $5 lattes that stood beside their Michael Kors bags, they discussed how they were glad that being homeless wasn’t something that they needed to worry about. After discussing it for a few minutes, one followed the lead of the other, bowed her head and they both said a prayer for the homeless guy before returning to their idle chatter, complaining about the lousy nail salon in the area.</p>
<p>Seeing him sitting there, I got up, asked him if I could buy him breakfast (to which he said yes), I asked him what he wanted and brought it back to him. He said thank-you and proceeded to enjoy it.</p>
<p>It may be the only food he eats today.</p>
<p>As I walked past the two obviously affluent ladies, I stopped, politely interrupted them and said “Did it ever occur to either of you that perhaps instead of praying for him, that you were in fact the answer to someone else’s prayer for him?”</p>
<p>I don’t think they knew what to make of me and stared at me with nothing to say.</p>
<p>In the same coffee shop the day before (yes, my Life revolves mostly in my office, my lawyer’s office and the coffee shop these days with whatever is left over for family), I noticed a guy repairing the coffee machine. By a strange twist of fate, whether I am in the coffee shop at 6 in the morning or 6 in the evening, he is often there at the same time and he has seen me many times.</p>
<p>I was joking with the barista about being too hard on the machine (to which she laughed) when he turned to me and snapped, “I see you here all the time. Why don’t you get a job like a real man?”</p>
<p>He had taken an opportunity to speak his truth or what he perceived as his truth, based on the assumption that if I am there when he is there, I must be a “lazy sod” (albeit a well-dressed one) idly passing time there.</p>
<p>And so I took an opportunity to respectfully speak my truth back to him and when I was done, I received a mumbled apology as he stared at the floor.</p>
<p>My colleague was shocked by the repairman’s rude audacity but not at my response – most people get used to me over time.</p>
<p>The same colleague had been with me a few weeks before when two people sitting next to us spilled coffee on their table. They concluded their business, stood up and started to walk away.</p>
<p>“Excuse me, sir”, I sang out, “Are you going to leave a mess like that?”</p>
<p>One continued out the door without looking back but the other guy looked at me, said “I thought my partner was going to do it” (even though his partner was already ahead of him and out the door), cleaned it up and thanked me for calling him on it.</p>
<p>It was only fair – he was, in fact, the guy who had spilled the coffee in the first place.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, my colleague was shocked that I had spoken up.</p>
<p>“Was it wrong that he was leaving a mess behind?”, I asked.</p>
<p>“Of course it was”, came the reply.</p>
<p>“Were you upset that he was leaving a mess behind?”, I asked.</p>
<p>“I was”, came the reply.</p>
<p>“So why didn’t you speak up instead of merely choosing to be offended?”, I asked.</p>
<p>The light came on.</p>
<p>People in need don’t need your prayers alone.</p>
<p>They also don’t need passive-aggressive discomfort with a situation.</p>
<p>By the same token, problems at-hand or things that bother us are not solved if we just sit there being offended or bothered by them.</p>
<p>If you want to fix your world, then <strong><em>you</em></strong> must be the change you wish to see.</p>
<p>It reminds me of the time I became aware of a woman who had been compromised by a guy who, with his twisted interest in child pornography and other bizarre needs, had managed to secure some compromising photos of her. He used the photos and the threat of releasing them on the Web to deepen his control over her and it appeared that damaging her family or her company were next on the agenda for him.</p>
<p>I could have offered to say a prayer for her.</p>
<p>I could have given her a hug, whispering encouraging words about how I knew she would overcome this.</p>
<p>I could have done nothing but used it as a conversation topic with friends, waxing on about the scumbags in the world.</p>
<p>There are many things I could have offered or done of little value to her.</p>
<p>Instead, I fixed the problem as I described in the post <a href="https://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2014/09/answering-cry-for-help.html" target="_blank">Answering the Cry For Help</a>.</p>
<p>Deeds and results, unlike words, do not lie nor do they pass the buck, allowing someone else to fix a problem (hopefully) while we focus on how offended we are.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>When we choose to be offended or surprised and carry that feeling around all day without addressing it, we waste an opportunity to make a difference. Too many of us spend time wasting brain cycles that could have been used for something else more important, more impactful or more productive.</p>
<p>And then there is the problem of wasting time wondering what the answers / results should be for unasked questions and actions not taken.</p>
<p>This morning, my business partner was surprised to see one of my thumbnails with bright, pink nail polish on it.</p>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZPNP3R035M59Wp6gxvj9k36cRF0rHu9lf8bZkTKGFFOxqTMDaGPokZ95byBJVmELV3UHLR1-1NhwbWJqscwq5qi9-v8L1cW3mXkC-LydjZUt9K3Ft8pwg4HAASvpFWrRxSh8IIAXzRBw/s1600/MyNail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZPNP3R035M59Wp6gxvj9k36cRF0rHu9lf8bZkTKGFFOxqTMDaGPokZ95byBJVmELV3UHLR1-1NhwbWJqscwq5qi9-v8L1cW3mXkC-LydjZUt9K3Ft8pwg4HAASvpFWrRxSh8IIAXzRBw/s400/MyNail.jpg" width="300" height="400" data-original-width="692" data-original-height="922" /></a></div></p>
<p>He looked at it several times with a light smile but said nothing although he was clearly distracted by it.</p>
<p>“You want to ask, don’t you?”, I said to him as I observed him.</p>
<p>“I do”, he said, smiling.</p>
<p>“Then ask”, I replied.</p>
<p>“Ok”, he said, “Why does the President of our company have a pink thumbnail?”</p>
<p>“Great question”, I replied, “Perhaps it is nice to be in touch with a softer side once in a while as we spend inordinate amounts of time being aggressive, assertive, Alpha males pretending to be kings of the universe as we make plans for our next conquest. What do you think?”</p>
<p>He paused for a moment and then he smiled.</p>
<p>“I like it”, he replied.</p>
<p>“Me too”, I replied, “And besides, since when did I care what others think of what I say or do as long as what I do gets the job done and honors others?”</p>
<p>“I <strong><em>really</em></strong> like it”, he said.</p>
<p>An hour later, my small action was greeted with applause in the boardroom.</p>
<p>And then one of the guys at the office went out to buy a bottle of vivid, bright blue nail polish to give it a try. </p>
<p>After all, blue is our corporate color.</p>
<p>I wonder what people on the street will think.</p>
<p>I don’t care.</p>
<p>Neither should you.</p>
<p>Stop being offended by the world, wasting time and energy being upset by the actions (or lack thereof) of others.</p>
<p>Stop leaving questions unanswered, incessantly turning them over in your mind when you could be using the gift of your intellect to solve problems for you, your family, your friends, your colleagues, your country and your planet.</p>
<p>Speak your truth ….</p>
<p>…. dare to defend it …</p>
<p>…. and dare to live it.</p>
<p>The world is waiting for you to take action.</p>
<p>What are you waiting for?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood – create a great day because merely having one is too passive an experience.</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>PS</strong> As I wrote this today, a great friend of mine by the name of <a href="https://leonardszymczak.com/" target="_blank">Leonard Szymczak</a> came to mind. In powerful books such as <a href="https://leonardszymczak.com/inner-peace-books/" target="_blank">The Roadmap Home: Your GPS to Inner Peace</a>, Leonard reminds us all about the importance of living our truth – forcefully and directly but always delivered with peace, love and respect.</p>
<p>If only more people had the courage to do so.</p>
<p>Imagine what a world we could create.</p>
<p>Don’t wait to be asked.</p>
<p>Don’t spin on being offended.</p>
<p>Don’t waste time pondering the answers to unasked questions.</p>
<p>Perhaps consider the following questions I ask myself every day during my Quiet Hour?</p>
<ul>
<li>What do I do?</li>
<li>Where do I go?</li>
<li>What do I say?</li>
<li>…. and to whom?</li>
<li>What quality do I seek?</li>
<li>What quality do I create?</li>
<li>Who should I be?</li>
<li>Who am I being?</li></ul>
<p>Do something.</p>
<p>Anything.</p>
<p><strong>Addendum – A Memory From a Friend</strong></p>
<p>A friend contacted me after reading this post and asked if I remembered the time we were in a coffee shop where a table of women were howling with laughter - loudly and rudely. Everyone around them stared at them, shaking their head and muttering and one person who asked them to quiet down out of respect for others was ignored.</p>
<p>My friend and I went over and sat at the table next to them and howled and laughed louder than they did (over nothing in particular).</p>
<p>The key jester at the other table addressed us sharply and told us that we were being rude.</p>
<p>I told her that I thought that they were being rude in drowning out everyone else in the coffee shop. She replied that she wasn’t being rude and that she was trying to make an important point to everyone at the table.</p>
<p>I replied, “So am I.”</p>
<p>She got the message.</p>
<p>Oh the memories - I guess I’ve been a nuisance in public longer than I remembered.</p>
<p><strong>Closing Thoughts – Some Reactions to my Thumbnail</strong></p>
<p>After wearing my pink thumbnail for a day, I was intrigued and amused by people’s reactions, either communicated directly to me or from one person to another.</p>
<p>Some examples (with my thoughts in italics):</p>
<ul>
<li>It’s hot (or very hot) – <em>ahem - thanks </em></li>
<li>It’s cool – <em>sounds good to me</em></li>
<li>I wonder how kinky he is – <em>define kinky</em></li>
<li>He’s in touch with his feminine self – <em>nothing wrong with that</em></li>
<li>It’s weird – <em>by whose definition?</em></li>
<li>Normal men don’t do that – <em>see previous question</em></li>
<li>**stare** / avert eyes when noticed / repeat – <em>passive aggressive behavior never solves anything – be assertive</em></li>
<li>**stare** / freeze in place (as I held out money to pay for something) – <em>is there something wrong?</em></li>
<li>He’s probably a pedophile or some other type of sickie (from one mother to another as she moved her child closer to her) – <em>really?</em></li>
<li>He’s gay – <em>wearing pink nail polish is insufficient qualification criteria</em></li>
<li>He’s “whipped” – <em>you clearly don’t know me very well</em></li>
<li>**snickers / laughter** – <em>courageous and mature</em></li></ul>
<p>That’s a lot of character analysis derived from a single, pink thumbnail.</p>
<p>No one asked me anything but they came to some interesting conclusions in absence of data.</p>
<p>Some were titillated.</p>
<p>Some were impressed.</p>
<p>Some were frightened.</p>
<p>Some were insulted or offended.</p>
<p>And some questioned my sense of normality based on their standard.</p>
<p>When I see how poorly informed and easily influenced they were, based entirely on insufficient, incomplete and irrelevant data, it’s easy to see why so many people are lost personally, professionally, intellectually, emotionally, financially and relationally.</p>
<p>How do we fix this?</p>
<p>Should we?</p>
<p>Can we?</p>
<p>What happens if we don’t?</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-92195871615900460902017-07-31T08:27:00.000-06:002017-07-31T08:27:10.862-06:00Reservoir Dogs in the White House<blockquote>
<p><em>The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. - Ernest Hemingway</em></p></blockquote>
<p>A guest post by <a href="http://gwynnedyer.com/" target="_blank">Gwynne Dyer</a>, an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.</p>
<p>
<hr>
</p>
<p>Anthony Zurcher, the BBC’s North America correspondent, nailed it in a report on 27 July. “Where Abraham Lincoln had his famous ‘team of rivals’ in his administration, this is something different,” Zurcher wrote. “Trump White House seems more akin to the final scene in Reservoir Dogs, where everyone is yelling and pointing a gun at someone else, and there's a good chance no one is going to come out unscathed.”</p>
<p>Several walking wounded have limped out of the White House since then, including ex-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, but nobody would call them unscathed. And in has come Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director, who appears to have escaped from the same Quentin Tarantino movie. Maybe Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink.</p>
<p>Fun fact: Scaramuccia (literally "little skirmisher"), also known as Scaramouche, is a stock character of the Italian commedia dell'arte. He combines the roles of a clownish servant and a masked assassin carrying out his master’s will. He often ends up decapitated.</p>
<p>Things are falling apart in the White House much faster than even the keenest observers of Donald Trump’s behaviour would have predicted, and the important part is not the dysfunction. The United States would work just fine – in fact, rather better – if Trump never managed to turn his tweets into reality. What matters is that he is cutting his links with the Republican Party.</p>
<p>Trump was never a real Republican. As a genuine populist, he is ideology-free. If Barack Obama had fallen under a bus and Trump had chosen to run for the presidency in 2008, he could just as easily have sought the Democratic nomination.</p>
<p>Senior Republicans knew this, and they tried quite hard to stop him from winning the Republican nomination last year. After that they were stuck with him, and he did win the White House for them, so they have been in an uncomfortable partnership ever since. That is now coming to an end.</p>
<p>Part of the unwritten deal was that establishment Republicans get senior roles in the Trump White House. Reince Priebus, dismissed last Friday, was the most important of those people. He followed deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, communications director Mike Dubke, press secretary Sean Spicer and press aide Michael Short, all of whom had already been pushed out.</p>
<p>What’s left are alt-right white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, New Yorkers with Democratic leanings like Anthony Scaramucci, Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Gary Cohn, Trump family members (Donald Jr and Ivanka), ex-businessmen like foreign secretary Rex Tillerson (who may be about to quit), and a triumvirate of generals in high civilian office.</p>
<p>This is a recipe for paralysis, but who cares? Did you really want a White House team that enabled Donald Trump to impose his will (or rather, his whims) on the United States and, to some extent, on the world? Well, no, and neither do senior Republicans – but they do care very much about controlling the White House.</p>
<p>Republicans who think long-term are well aware that the changing demography of the US population is eating away at their core vote. This may be their last chance, with control of both Houses of Congress and (at least in theory) of the presidency, to reshape their image and their policies in ways that will appeal to at least some of the emerging minorities.</p>
<p>They can’t do that if they don’t control the White House, and the only way they could regain control there is for Trump to go and Vice-President Mike Pence (a real Republican) to take over. A successful impeachment could accomplish that.</p>
<p>It would be very hard to engineer such a thing without splitting the Republican Party, even if the current FBI investigation comes up with damning evidence of Trump’s ties with Russia. Nevertheless, the likelihood of an impeachment is rising from almost zero to something quite a bit higher.</p>
<p>It would be a big gamble. The Republicans in Congress couldn’t really get Trump out before November 2018, and the turbulence of an impeachment might cost them their control of Congress in the mid-term elections. In an ideal outcome, however, it would give the Republicans time to go into the the 2020 election with President Pence in charge at the White House and some solid legislative achievements under their belts.</p>
<p>What would Trump do if he faced impeachment? Maybe he would do a kind of plea bargain and resign, but that would be quite out of character. His instinct would be to fight, and he fights mainly by creating diversions. The best diversion is a war, but against whom? </p>
<p>Even Trump would have trouble selling a war against Iran to the American public. Despite all the propaganda, they don’t really feel threatened by Iran. Whereas North Korea says and does things provocative enough to let Trump make a (flimsy) case for attacking it.</p>
<p>If he thought his presidency was at stake, he certainly would.</p>
<hr>
<p>A guest post by <a href="http://gwynnedyer.com/" target="_blank">Gwynne Dyer</a>, an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. Reproduced with permission from the author.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-57308422812959453352017-07-19T09:12:00.002-06:002017-07-23T09:01:58.942-06:00The “Honorable Members” of the Newfoundland and Labrador Government<blockquote>
<p><em>Character is the only secure foundation of the state. - Calvin Coolidge</em></p>
<p><em>The qualities of a great man are vision, integrity, courage, understanding, the power of articulation, and profundity of character. - Dwight Eisenhower</em></p></blockquote>
<p>I used to muse a fair bit over the years about the Newfoundland and Labrador political scene but I found that for the most part, while my musings evoked a lot of emotion in people, those same people rarely took action, preferring to complain from the sidelines, on social media or in their local coffee shop. </p>
<p>My insane work schedule these days further limits my musings but occasionally something comes to my attention that bothers me so much that I need to work it out in a musing of some sort, whether it be in my journal or here in my blog.</p>
<p>I’ve been receiving a lot of communication over the last year or more regarding the activity of the Honorable Members of the Newfoundland and Labrador Government.</p>
<p>I’m not referring to the politicians themselves but rather, their “honorable members”.</p>
<p>It seems that the political world that exists in the Confederation Building has become overrun with predators who have learned at one point or another that one of our most basic primal needs serves as a useful tool to accomplish what they need (often to the detriment of others).</p>
<p>Stories of rampant infidelity trouble me but I’m not a prude, I’m not ignorant of the ways of the world nor do I judge people who prefer to throw their families and relationships under the bus as they (including Ministers of the Crown) roam the hallways of government, using their honorable member to satisfy their primal needs for sex and power (this includes certain female MHAs and their equivalent “portfolio”).</p>
<p>Judgment of their deeds, where appropriate and deserved, comes soon enough at the hands of others or the Ultimate Authority.</p>
<p>I don’t judge the married MHA who was confirmed to have an Ashley Madison account (verified by his own credit card).</p>
<p>I don’t judge the MHA who has a diaper fetish (not a need for adult diapers) and likes to be treated like a baby in private.</p>
<p>I don’t judge the spouses who have made the choice to turn a blind eye to the deeds of their partners in exchange for the benefits they derive from the power and prestige bestowed upon their partners. I do feel badly for the ones who don’t really understand what is happening – their families will be hurt at some point by the actions of their partners.</p>
<p>It is true that I have been known to make a few digs here and there, such as the time when a minister was honored with new court title and I asked him on Twitter whether he told his girlfriend or his wife first.</p>
<p>And yes, I do judge the senior Liberal bureaucrat who has helped protect a family member from prosecution. Many years ago, his family member had a paper route and had asked a 7-year-old boy if he would help him. For curious reasons, the paper route went off into the woods where the family member offered the boy a nickel to be allowed to be shown “what a screw was”. In the conversation that followed, the boy quickly determined what was happening and fled the scene untouched. Even at the age of 7, I wasn’t that stupid but I have since learned that the behavior of this individual continued for years unabated. Unfortunately, what I experienced cannot be used as grounds for charges and others must be willing to step forward. Speaking in hushed tones or in private confessions of a secret do not bring people to justice and justice would be difficult to obtain when that person is protected by someone with power.</p>
<p>Lifestyle choices, whether I agree with them or not, are the private business of those who choose them.</p>
<p>For the most part.</p>
<p>Where I do take umbrage to someone’s lusty, licentious needs is when such needs are used to intentionally harm others or when they open the door to creating harm for others. </p>
<p>When male MHAs offer or demand sex from female MHAs in exchange for favors or support of legislation, it opens the door to the female MHA (or the male one, if the female one is the instigator) feeling compromised, potentially threatening their work, their ability to retain their portfolio and their intention to serve the people as they were elected to do.</p>
<p>The fact that for some women, keeping their job (whether elected, appointed or hired) depends on their ability to be “a part of the team” is tremendously disconcerting. While we in the business world understand the ramifications of being caught making such demands, it seems that those who make the rules find no issue in breaking them. In one case where I have screen shots of the demands, I was told by police that the victim must come forward herself, which she is <strong><em>very</em></strong> hesitant to do. Too often the women in such situations are intimidated or humiliated into silence, some fear that their naivety makes them look stupid and yes, some women encouraged or allowed “an exchange” to happen for their own gain before they realized they had gone too far and now they can’t say anything for fear of personal disgrace.</p>
<p>What disturbs me equally are the many women who know this is going on but accept it and say nothing. They may express pain, concern or disgust over it in private but publicly they say nothing. They are the embodiment of Martin Luther King when he said, “One who condones evil is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.” or Lieutenant General David Morrison who noted, “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”</p>
<p>And as I noted previously, some are active, willful participants, harvesting their own benefits from such actions.</p>
<p>In addition to creating a toxic environment that would sink most businesses or business people who dared to partake in such miscreant behavior, there is also the potential that people who participate in such things open themselves up to extortion.</p>
<p>For example, If news of the MHA with the diaper fetish came out (or, God forbid, a photo of him), that MHA could be leveraged, with the person on the other end of the lever demanding cash or some sort of government gift in exchange for silence.</p>
<p>When MHAs, employees or consultants have been intimidated to put out or get out in order to accomplish their own work or when they could be compromised through extortion, government ceases to be of and for the people but rather, of and for the people who hold the secrets.</p>
<p>While this is not unusual for governments in general (to be at the whim of those on the other end of a secret), use of behavior that intimidates people or makes use of tactics that are illegal everywhere else should be considered unacceptable.</p>
<p>Shouldn’t it?</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>Secrets have always been a part of government and business and those who have been compromised regret the impact when those secrets are revealed.</p>
<p>But when those secrets hurt innocent people such as family members unaware of what is going on, MHAs being coerced into compromising situations in order to get their own work done, workers being intimidated into submission to keep their own job or similar evil acts, we have a problem.</p>
<p>When those secrets can be used to compromise a Minister into performing any task at the request of a master of extortion, we have a problem.</p>
<p>When people who observe it do nothing to fix it, we have a problem.</p>
<p>When people who believe they are a guiding post of ethics, character and morals and are a role model for young people demonstrate behavior that doesn’t portray any of these attributes, we have a problem.</p>
<p>The dilemma with problems is that they continue to grow in scale, frequency and impact unless we choose to do something to solve them. We may think these problems do not affect us but eventually our analysis is proven to be flawed and we claim surprise or indignation as a result.</p>
<p>The other dilemma is that there <strong><em>are</em></strong> many good people inside the Legislature, whether elected, appointed or hired, whose efforts and intentions are being bent, interfered with or thwarted entirely while people use their primal wiring of lust to satisfy their primal need for power.</p>
<p>Where is the courage for people to stand up and demand better, both inside or outside the Legislature or the courage of others to support those who would do so?</p>
<p>When do we demand better so that the people inside who are capable of doing better and who want to do better are free to execute without fear of intimidation or compromise?</p>
<p>What happens if the list of things I have seen, also in the possession of other people who are more motivated by personal power than I am, decide they want to take down a government unless they get what they want?</p>
<p>Where does it end?</p>
<p>With us, of course.</p>
<p>But that all depends on whether people have the courage, the strength, the wisdom and the will to stand up for what they believe in and to take a stand against behaviors that we are taught to be unethical, immoral and in many cases, illegal.</p>
<p>Or we can make this fodder for social media or coffee house chatter, marveling or being disgusted with it but doing nothing else until something happens that affects us directly.</p>
<p>Doing the latter doesn’t change anything.</p>
<p>In fact, finding a reason to justify why we can’t do something only becomes an excuse, an excuse that translate into ignoring the activity, then condoning it and then supporting it …. making us part of the problem despite our vehement protests to the contrary.</p>
<p>What <strong><em>does</em></strong> change things depends on whether people care and demand better.</p>
<p>Do you?</p>
<p>Be the change you wish to see or stop complaining about it.</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>PS</strong> Don’t bother asking me for the list of licentious behaviors and the names attached to them. There are plenty of people who have this information. Unfortunately, when such deeds are so rampant, there is no shortage of sources of information. However, my tweets in recent days referencing this behavior have produced calls, texts and emails from MHAs demanding to know who “their evil colleagues” are. Weakly disguised efforts to see if “I am on the list” only make the whole situation more comical and more pathetic.</p>
<p>I wonder what minor event becomes the tipping point that takes out an entire government, only to be replaced by another one that suffers from the same complexities.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Addendum – The Initial Reaction – July 20, 2017</strong></p>
<p>After my blog was posted, I was contacted by four MHAs, two men and two women.</p>
<p>The men were outraged at the content and the idea that I had publicly identified them. The curious thing was that I not only didn’t name <strong><em>anyone</em></strong> in this post, I wasn’t even thinking of these two in particular. When I tried to convince them of this, they didn’t believe me. </p>
<p>Awkward.</p>
<p>The two women provided curious responses also.</p>
<p>First of all, in an attempt to identify the people I was referring to, they named other people (consistent across both of them) that again, I was not thinking of. The plot thickens in an environment filled with rumor, conjecture and malfeasance.</p>
<p>The other thing is that they both found the environment incredibly difficult to survive in. They used words like intimidation, bullying and the like to describe actions directed towards them and other women. They freely named women who were targeted victims of intimidation and manipulation. They both identified women who “played the game” with multiple MHAs. They both admitted to having been offered sex by Ministers in exchange for “whatever”. They also admitted to having acts of jealousy directed towards them when, having refused the advances of someone, were then accused of doing so <strong><em>only</em></strong> because “they must be sleeping with x”.</p>
<p>They both agreed with me that women should never accept abuse in the workplace or anywhere else.</p>
<p>All good.</p>
<p>However, they both admitted that they were willing to accept all of this in order to retain their seat and to continue doing the work that they do. They also admitted that they had an acceptable tolerance level of abuse, “a price” as both named it, that allowed them to keep quiet.</p>
<p>Hmmmm …. didn’t they say that abuse was unacceptable?</p>
<p>Both had complained to someone else known to be an active participant in the environment. Their words won’t create change and they know it but they take solace in knowing that they did talk to someone about it.</p>
<p>Neither is willing to take a public stand against it.</p>
<p>I asked them both to consider the quotes from King and Morrison in regards to saying and doing nothing while acknowledging the toxic environment. I asked them also to consider how they would feel if they had a daughter, sister or mother caught up in such a situation. </p>
<p>They are not stupid people but their willful inability to see themselves in the quotes speaks volumes. I’m not sure either of them agree with my position – that to not take a stand outside of complaining privately makes them part of the problem. </p>
<p>That’s what we are told in the private sector!</p>
<p>I wonder if they have read the following Government-issued documents:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.exec.gov.nl.ca/exec/hrs/employee_health_and_safety/safety_moments/workplace_bullying.pdf" target="_blank">Workplace Bullying</a>
<li><a href="http://www.exec.gov.nl.ca/exec/hrs/working_with_us/Harassment-and-Discrimination-Guide.pdf" target="_blank">Maintaining a Harassment and Discrimination-Free Workplace</a>
<li><a href="http://www.exec.gov.nl.ca/exec/hrs/working_with_us/harassment.html" target="_blank">Harassment and Discrimination Free Workplace</a>
<li><a href="http://www.exec.gov.nl.ca/exec/hrs/employee_health_and_safety/vp_program_handbook.pdf" target="_blank">Preventing Workplace Violence</a></li></ul>
<p>I assume HR does nothing because they see elected officials as “their boss”. It’s a curious thing to me, working in an industry where HR heavyweights will sometimes lay into someone for looking at another person the wrong way.</p>
<p>In regards to accepting abuse in order to get work done, I wonder what would happen if one of my executive team were caught behaving as these people behave and when the police and legislators show up, I used the excuse, “You can’t arrest him – do you realize how much work he gets done?”</p>
<p>My team member would still be arrested and I would be humiliated and vilified - rightfully so for demonstrating such ignorance.</p>
<p>As I look at the SMS messages on my phone early this morning, I wonder if they could be used to establish a precedence whereby abuse was allowed in the workplace.</p>
<p>After all, if the legislators embrace it as status quo, why shouldn’t we?</p>
<p>Such thinking is dangerous, destructive and regressive.</p>
<p>Which makes me wonder why it is tolerated (and even embraced) within the highest authority in the Province.</p>
<p>Where are the public outcries amongst women’s groups who likely know this is happening?</p>
<p>Perhaps it serves their interests to stay quiet rather than risk offending “useful friends”.</p>
<p>And how do women expect to create respect in the workplace (whether in Government or elsewhere) when they are unwilling to stand up and demand it?</p>
<p>How indeed?</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Closing Thoughts (almost - I changed my mind later)</strong></p>
<p>I know from my contacts within the Government and from feedback that some MHAs have sent me to directly that once again, I have stirred up a hornet’s nest. I have been accused of being immoral or unethical (by the people who committed the acts) for making these observations while they fail to see that had they not committed the acts in the first place, there would be no observations to make. So in their mind, performing or accepting nefarious acts is not immoral – reporting them is.</p>
<p>I made some observations on social media about naming names, which was met by cries of foul from some who say that such actions will hurt the innocent. My response to this is that the innocent are already being hurt and that the number of people who are being hurt will continue to grow as long as miscreant behavior is not addressed.</p>
<p>I find the ultimate message here to be confusing – the contradictory rule that certain behavior is considered unacceptable except in the areas where it is considered acceptable (based on nebulous, fluid rule interpretations and damaged rationalization).</p>
<p>Perhaps someone smarter than I am can enlighten me.</p>
<p>Perhaps.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Addendum – Are You <em>Really</em> Surprised? Who Wants to Bell the Cat? – July 23, 2017</strong></p>
<p>When people act surprised about something, it’s always an interesting exercise to see if they are truly surprised or just feigning surprise.</p>
<p>A few people brought the story of Valerie Penton to my attention, a woman who was being sexually harassed by a fellow employee of the Government and who felt that Human Resources within the Government did little if anything to help her. </p>
<p>She eventually settled a harassment suit out of court and moved on to other opportunities. One writer writing about her story noted that the man who harassed her (and used access to DMV records to examine her personal records including her address) was still working there. I don’t know if that is still the case but most of us get fired immediately for such indiscretion.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, many of the stories written about Ms. Penton by the local media have been deleted (although some are still available in different web cache locations).</p>
<p>There are at least four articles that remain that don’t require exploring the web cache (at the time I write this):</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.ganderbeacon.ca/news/regional/2015/3/29/feeling-abandoned-4093935.html" target="_blank">Feeling Abandoned (Gander Beacon)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.southerngazette.ca/news/regional/2015/3/27/no-place-to-turn-4092764.html" target="_blank">No Place to Turn (Southern Gazette)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.lportepilot.ca/news/regional/2015/4/3/bad-behaviour-in-the-civil-service-4100106.html" target="_blank">Bad Behavior in the Civil Service (The Pilot)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.pinkwhitegreen.ca/news/davis-orders-external-review-of-harassment-policies/" target="_blank">Davis Orders External Review of Harassment Policies (Pink White Green)</a></li></ul>
<p>The people who came forward telling similar stories after Valerie Penton’s story became public indicated that HR did little if anything for them when their harassment was reported.</p>
<p>Those same people indicated that Ministers were slow to respond to their concerns and needed to be prompted multiple times to take action.</p>
<p>Some people inside and outside of Government said, after reading my post, that they have never heard of any type of harassment inside Government before I posted my piece.</p>
<p>And yet an external review was undertaken to review this very subject after Valerie Penton’s case became public.</p>
<p>So where is the surprise regarding any of this?</p>
<p>Maybe the answer can be found in a personal experience of mine.</p>
<p>Some years ago, I was on the board for an international charity when some significant indiscretions by staff members were discovered. When I reported them to fellow board members, I found out that they already knew.</p>
<p>When they discovered that I now knew also, they demanded to know what I was going to do about it.</p>
<p>When I asked them why they hadn’t already done something about it, they replied that they didn’t want to jeopardize their other board postings.</p>
<p>Ah yes … courage only when convenient and risk-free.</p>
<p>We need to find a way to encourage those who are victims to know that they have our support in ferreting out miscreants.</p>
<p>And we need to find a way to pressure those with authority to stand up for them.</p>
<p>Many of the latter have been coming to me demanding to know what I am doing about this.</p>
<p>I am asking them in return,“What are you doing about it?”</p>
<p>It reminds me of this story:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>A group of mice were arguing in a mouse hole one day about a cat that had been terrorizing them. With every passing day, the cat would sneak up on one of them without warning and would make off with the unsuspecting victim. The mice were now tired of this and were arguing about what to do about the villain.</em>
<p><em>One mouse suggested that if they put a bell on the cat’s neck, then he would no longer be able to creep up on them unawares.</em>
<p><em>Recognizing the brilliance of the solution, the mice spent considerable time congratulating themselves on how they had solved the problem when their celebration was interrupted by a lone voice in the back of the mouse hole.</em>
<p><em>“The solution may be brilliant”, observed a wise old mouse, “but who will bell the cat?”</em>
<p><em>Silence filled the mouse hole and eventually the mice went about their business, realizing that there is a big difference between being full of ideas and having the courage to carry them out.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>So … who wants to bell the cat?</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-49655364687507753942017-07-10T08:54:00.000-06:002017-07-11T13:48:56.089-06:00When the Little Things Become the Big Things<blockquote>
<p><em>It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen. - John Wooden</em></p>
<p><em>A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching. - Swami Sivananda</em></p></blockquote>
<p>I drive my teams crazy regarding the small details of our projects. While many self-described experts tell you not to worry about the small things, I have found over the years that the small things add up to the big things and can prove to be catastrophic in potential and impact if ignored. Sometimes the item believed to be small, insignificant or statistically unlikely becomes the thing with the greatest impact as I mused about in <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2017/05/statistics-mathematical-theory-of.html" target="_blank">Statistics: The Mathematical Theory of Ignorance</a>.</p>
<p>I recently declined an opportunity to work with a not-for-profit because they ignored the importance of the small things, creating documents with legal errors, leaving board members with little or no liability coverage should something go awry and allowing board members to sign documents that they knew contained legal issues. The board members didn’t seem to have an issue with this either so they had no interest in pushing back, demanding higher standards.</p>
<p>In my polite declining of the opportunity to work with them, they cited the mistakes as minor things falling through the cracks.</p>
<p>The problem is that they are not minor at all. Creating documents with legal mistakes in them and having board members who have no issue signing them, knowing that there are legal mistakes and loopholes in them, is a recipe for a disaster down the road.</p>
<p>And when the disaster comes, everyone will act surprised as is often the case.</p>
<p>Unfortunately in such situations, the innocent as well as the guilty are hurt and that is the greatest crime of all.</p>
<p><strong>The little things do matter.</strong></p>
<p>Take this example.</p>
<p>This is an airport at an undisclosed location – the photo was taken a few days ago.</p>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-BEWyGZL1keN1i_nLhFUDrREqglYjr-98mwhK-kXwo6qfAyVcsGhhVUHSlDnXIjzQQCi-gMPF4Vj__zmSwDN_43MtWQvkHKJE-TtGO5bRmSdjIxtQjbvktFi-v70j_6MFPUefVLVEOM8/s1600/Airport2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-BEWyGZL1keN1i_nLhFUDrREqglYjr-98mwhK-kXwo6qfAyVcsGhhVUHSlDnXIjzQQCi-gMPF4Vj__zmSwDN_43MtWQvkHKJE-TtGO5bRmSdjIxtQjbvktFi-v70j_6MFPUefVLVEOM8/s400/Airport2.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1383" data-original-height="1037" /></a></div></p>
<p>Note the excellent security, including cameras, multiple keypads, barbed wire – this entry point is secure within reasonable definition.</p>
<p>Go 100 yards down the street and you come across a second gate. Everything looks good (again within reasonable definition of security).</p>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirc2N8kTvVHh_0m58DpjMBpa88FwVSZTcMImieKiam27otvfox4ox3f3J3qd28WtknaF514YsKtOsVbeFR1w0O8Lo2phFv6rU3IAGW-lZNW1A6X0ttwuv8LGnvNwPDDMP3BHxOcK-UUnA/s1600/Airport1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirc2N8kTvVHh_0m58DpjMBpa88FwVSZTcMImieKiam27otvfox4ox3f3J3qd28WtknaF514YsKtOsVbeFR1w0O8Lo2phFv6rU3IAGW-lZNW1A6X0ttwuv8LGnvNwPDDMP3BHxOcK-UUnA/s400/Airport1.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1383" data-original-height="1037" /></a></div></p>
<p>Go another 100 yards down the street and you find this – no gate, no fence, no signs – nothing.</p>
<p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYEb-BtD3XjVClTb6hAR9lcQL5spajvTcYombhu7_gHUgv2Yj5wvu4TVK6cZR5MEOEH6DQzoDXoG0Gx5CqFGgAGW0fzgwDwbHdsK5QJ3-o4YADQ-vhk_oc3yPnLk8tUGvFiospQgFCla4/s1600/Airport3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYEb-BtD3XjVClTb6hAR9lcQL5spajvTcYombhu7_gHUgv2Yj5wvu4TVK6cZR5MEOEH6DQzoDXoG0Gx5CqFGgAGW0fzgwDwbHdsK5QJ3-o4YADQ-vhk_oc3yPnLk8tUGvFiospQgFCla4/s400/Airport3.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1383" data-original-height="1037" /></a></div></p>
<p>Some people will argue that there are likely hidden cameras in place to prevent miscreants from performing an evil deed. I would argue that if this were the case, you wouldn’t need the excellent security at the other gates either – just a camera and hope.</p>
<p>But if anything should happen at this airport, everyone will act surprised.</p>
<p>And hope is never a strategy.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>The little things do matter.</p>
<p>The art and science of knowing what is a little thing with great potential versus the little thing that is trivial in potential is worthy of learning.</p>
<p>Otherwise, when you claim that something fell through the cracks or you were caught by surprise as the little droplet of water developed into an overwhelming tsunami, you will have no one else to blame.</p>
<p>They won’t believe you anyway, especially when the details are revealed.</p>
<p>Do you allow the little things to go unnoticed or ignored in terms of potential?</p>
<p>Are you willing to take a chance that they are not as small and insignificant as you think?</p>
<p>Are you sure?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>Small things ....</strong></p>
<p>When I wrote this, I was reminded of these "small" experiences in airport security, noted in my musing <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2014/10/terror-vulnerability-through-decent-acts.html" target="_blank">Terror: Vulnerability Through Decent Acts</a>.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-64632128354860133052017-06-28T17:14:00.002-06:002017-07-02T00:56:18.466-06:00Character, Values and the Price of Success<blockquote>
<p><em>Knowledge will give you power, but character, respect. - Bruce Lee</em></p>
<p><em>Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character. - Albert Einstein</em></p>
<p><em>No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for lack of nobility of personal character in developing relationships. - Stephen Covey</em></p></blockquote>
<p>In the middle of a large deal, my team and I had the opportunity today to meet with one of the top lawyers in the mergers and acquisition space. With only a few minor minefields left to navigate, we were told that this person would be one of the best people to represent us in bringing our “little baby” in for a soft landing.</p>
<p>As is always the case, I always perform significant due diligence before such meetings and I was cautioned by more than one person to be careful of a peculiarity that this person had and so I went to the meeting as prepared as I possibly could be.</p>
<p>Sure enough, part way through the meeting and in the middle of his song and dance about why he was the best person to represent us, he suddenly started speaking with a fake Australian accent, telling us about how his clients had lived in fear and terror in such deals until he came along and “saved the day”.</p>
<p>The accent threw me off and I thought perhaps he was having a stroke but then the moment I had been warned about materialized. He reached into his bag and said “And when the other side brings a knife to the negotiating table, I say ‘That’s not a knife, this is a knife’” and he laid a large, Crocodile Dundee-like knife on the boardroom table.</p>
<p>No one said anything for a moment before I leaned over the table and said, “This is a friendly acquisition. Why do I need you to bring a knife, even if only symbolically, to the table?”</p>
<p>“You missed my point”, he said, somewhat aloofly, “I help people to get over their fear by showing that I have their back.”</p>
<p>“Really?”, I asked, “Why do you think I should accept the insult that you believe we would be shaking in fear without you or that intimidation is the best way to complete a friendly business deal?”</p>
<p>He said nothing and then I picked up his knife and asked him, “Would you put this knife up to your throat and shave yourself with it?”</p>
<p>“Of course not”, he replied, “That would be crazy.”</p>
<p>I nodded and laid his knife on the table. I had been warned of his presentation style and props and so I reached down into my bag and retrieved something specifically for the moment.</p>
<p>I laid my straight razor on the table beside his knife, its viciously sharp, unforgiving blade gleaming in the boardroom light. </p>
<p>“I shaved with this blade this morning”, I said, “Now tell me why I should be afraid of whatever it is I’m supposed to be afraid of and how you are going to guide me past this fear. And when you are done explaining that, I want you to tell us how intimidation trumps respectful dialog.”</p>
<p>I paused before continuing. “My point’, I said, “Is that suggestions of fear or intimidation becoming part of our team and how we interact with others are not welcome here. If you have anything else to offer, let’s continue otherwise the meeting is over.”</p>
<p>The meeting continued for an hour or so before we decided to take a break.</p>
<p>Everyone left the room except for one of his team who stayed behind.</p>
<p>As I caught up on my emails, she started some idle chatter about the need for the team to be at the airport before evening but as luck would have it, she was staying overnight.</p>
<p>I made a perfunctory response but she pressed the point, indicating that perhaps we could get together for dinner and drinks to smooth over any misunderstandings between myself and her boss.</p>
<p>I focused on my emails and she went for broke.</p>
<p>The offer, which I won’t get into here was direct and specific. The only thing I didn’t know was whether I would be allowed to stay in her hotel room for the rest of the night or if I would be dismissed after “the smoothing of misunderstandings” process had been completed.
I also wasn't sure what complexity the wedding band on her finger would offer, if any. It didn't seem to get in her way.</p>
<p>Plan B was in progress, given that the meeting itself was not going well.</p>
<p>I took out my phone, Googled some of the sex shops in the area and showed her the search results.</p>
<p>“Here’s what you need”, I said, directly, “The stuff they have in these stores is more in alignment with what you need. They don’t have any character or values either – they just exist.”</p>
<p>She was very angry and said that she would take this up with her boss.</p>
<p>“Go ahead”, I replied, pointing to the device in the center of the conference room table, “You forgot that we are recording this session today. I will play your offer to the team and invite you to explain it.”</p>
<p>She left the room without a sound but returned a few minutes later with “Crocodile Dundee”.</p>
<p>In the confrontation that ensued, it turned out that he wasn’t unhappy with what I said to her. However, he was VERY unhappy with the fact that I had turned her down.</p>
<p>“I get it”, I said, feeling my blood pressure rising, “You’re both deal closers. She closes the deal with me and then you close the larger deal for me.”</p>
<p>“Whatever it takes”, he replied.</p>
<p>I leaned in towards him, close enough to smell his cheap cologne.</p>
<p>“I don’t do whatever it takes”, I said, staring him in the eye, “I do whatever my values, ethics and character call me to do to deliver the best result possible for everyone around me.”</p>
<p>At the moment, the team began returning to the conference room.</p>
<p>I turned to the team and announced that we had decided that it was in our best interests to not work together and that he and his entourage would be returning to the airport ahead of schedule.</p>
<p>There were a few cries of surprise and as he left, he held out his hand.</p>
<p>“Sorry”, I replied, “I only shake the hand of people I respect.”</p>
<p>He left and I explained to the team what had happened, replaying the recording of both her offer and the lawyer’s subsequent challenge to me.</p>
<p>I wonder how many more out there are like him …</p>
<p>… or who don’t have the courage or the willpower to turn people like him away.</p>
<p><strong>Meanwhile …. related and not ….</strong></p>
<p>I had two interesting conversations with colleagues in the last week regarding similar subjects.</p>
<p>In one, a Government Minister whom I have the HIGHEST regard for in regards to character, values, ethics, Life purpose, service to others and other noble attributes, lamented that their results were being compromised because of the fine line they walk, where the balancing act of accomplishing great things for their constituents while towing the party line was difficult to manage, with the latter being complicated by the skullduggery, backstabbing and yes, adultery going on all around the Minister. </p>
<p>I challenged the Minister to live by their character and values (which far outshine the Minister’s colleagues). I will be curious to see what happens next - courage requires small steps at first. However, I was encouraged today when I received an SMS from the Minister, quoting Ruth Gordon:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Courage is very important Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>In the other conversation, a friend of mine, a subject matter expert on guiding organizations through change and transition, suddenly found herself being talked around in a meeting otherwise attended by only men. Even though SHE was the subject matter expert in the room, they talked around her as if she didn’t exist.</p>
<p>She reached out to me for advice on how to deal with such ignorance in the 21st century and this is what I told her.</p>
<p>“Go to a local adult store and buy the largest phallus you can find. Bring it to the meeting but leave it put away. If the same level of disrespect occurs and you can’t get yourself inserted into the conversation, take it out, place it on the table and express gratitude that you brought yours to the meeting also and thus deserve to be heard.”</p>
<p>“Or”, I continued, “buy the smallest one you can find, take it out during the meeting and make an observation that having presented the largest one in the room, you now have a right to speak and to be heard.”</p>
<p>After she expressed gratitude that I used comedy to give her the best laugh she had had all day, I replied that I wasn’t joking.</p>
<p>We must always take a stand against the ignorant and those who choose to limit the result of others who champion character, values, ethics, respect and higher standards.</p>
<p>We must do it directly and respectfully.</p>
<p>But we must do it.</p>
<p>The price we pay for not doing it is too high and grows every time we choose not to take a stand.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>In thinking through my event today, I wonder how many people would have taken the lawyer’s assistant up on her less than generous offer, especially if they thought they could do it without anyone knowing about it.</p>
<p>I could have accomplished that easily and no one would have been the wiser.</p>
<p>But I would have known - how could I demand that others live to a higher standard if I chose to live to the contrary?.</p>
<p>And an Authority that judges me would have known.</p>
<p>I wonder how many people may have turned down the original offer but then succumbed to the pressure that her boss attempted to exert under the confident “whatever it takes” banner.</p>
<p>Success is a tempting mistress and human frailty has undermined many a good human being.</p>
<p>The point is that when people collaborate with us or represent us, their character becomes a projection of ours. So when they sit before others at the boardroom table, no matter how much I try to live by a higher standard, the only thing the other people in the boardroom would remember me for would be this person’s character and values …. or lack thereof.</p>
<p>We are the company that we keep or whom we allow to speak on our behalf.</p>
<p>This lawyer’s projection on my behalf wouldn’t be acceptable to me.</p>
<p>Would it be acceptable to you that someone else would do “whatever it takes” in order to get something done?</p>
<p>Are you willing to literally do “whatever it takes”?</p>
<p>Are you willing to reap the harvest or pay the price for how you live your character and values (or how someone else represents them)?</p>
<p>Are you sure?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>Addendum</strong></p>
<p>I looked up her husband and discovered that he has a successful practice in Toronto. I wonder what would happen if I sent him a copy of the recording of his wife "in action". Would he be offended, hurt or would he respond with a "So? What's your point?"?</p>
<p>The young lady was also potentially setting herself up. What if I had agreed to the rendezvous just to use her and then turn down their offer to represent us? What if I was a nut who caught her by surprise and hurt her?</p>
<p>Then there's the possibility that if I had succumbed to such an offer, a recording of the event could have placed me (or them) in a professionally compromising position.</p>
<p>And finally, what if we had agreed to team up with this bunch of miscreants and the same tactics were used with the people we were negotiating with, potentially costing me a sale, a friendship or both?</p>
<p>The sad reality is that they likely had enough previous experience with some sense of success to believe that this was going to be a successful option today. What does this say about the people they collaborated with in the past?</p>
<p>So many possibilities, all of them wrong, but the possibilities having been created with the first terrible choice.</p>
<p>Coal miners often had a canary in the mines with them and if the canary died, it would be a warning that the air was unsafe and so they had to evacuate immediately. As a colleague said to me today, events such as this one are a "canary in the coal mine" in regards to how society is evolving (or devolving).</p>
<p>What do you think?</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-45074310834530118262017-06-23T17:38:00.000-06:002017-06-23T18:18:21.812-06:00Things I Wonder About–”Make Believe” Surveillance Oversight, Porn Extortion and Other Stuff<blockquote>
<p><em>Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up. – Oliver Wendell Holmes</em>
<p><em>Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean. – Ryunosuke Satoro</em></p></blockquote>
<p>By popular demand, I offer round 2 of “Things I Wonder About” (continued from <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2017/05/things-that-i-wonder-about.html" target="_blank">Things I Wonder About</a>).
<p>In between selling a large tech company and starting up a Foundation that will “help NPO’s “do good better” through fact-based decision-making and evidence-based outcome assessments” (quoting friend and colleague, Doug P.), I often have other distractions that cross my mind that I feel merit some attention.
<p>As a long-time Wall St. strategy guy, unsolved problems are always a conundrum for me, especially when the problems are significant in impact and are far / wide reaching in society. Problems in society affect us all at some point, even if we don’t feel the affect directly (or believe we don’t).
<p>However, I can’t tackle all these thoughts, nor should I (no individual is tagged as the “savior” of the world). That being said, they are worthy of thought and action and so, with the encouragement of very nice colleagues who kindly never lose patience with me when I muse about other concerns in the world, I’m going to occasionally toss some ideas out with the idea that someone else may feel inspired to own some of them.
<p>This is not a typical blog post for me such as can be found in the <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/p/the-1206-series.html" target="_blank">#1206 series</a>, the <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/p/abigail-gabriel.html" target="_blank">Abigail / Gabriel</a> series or any general post. It is a grab bag of thoughts that pass through my brain in the course of leading a busy Life.
<p>If you want to own one, I would be glad to help!
<p>A subset of my random thoughts this week:
<ol>
<li><strong>Winning (Losing) on Principle:</strong> How do we help people such as the person who contacted me this week, telling me an unfortunate story of how she has had compromising video / audio taken of her but she can’t report it to police? The information is such that her personal and professional reputation would be destroyed if it was made public but she has been informed that any action by the police against the miscreant will cause the information to be released to the public. After contacting the police, I was told that she needed to come forward and file official charges (of course). But the moment she does so, her Life is destroyed. The police say “but we will still arrest him”. The counter, that her Life is still destroyed while she “wins on principle”, doesn’t seem to matter much.</li>
<li><strong>Bureaucrats Who Don’t Think Things Through:</strong> The Liberal Government in Canada is planning sweeping legislative changes to curtail the surveillance authority of various law enforcement groups as provided by the previous government. Unfortunately, <strong><em>all</em></strong> of the laws can be circumvented, providing unlimited power to surveillance authorities. For information on how that is accomplished, observe how the <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/legal-loopholes-unrestrained-nsa-surveillance-on-americans/" target="_blank">NSA has dealt with similar “restrictions”.</a></li>
<li><strong>Our Over-Spend on Anti-Terror: </strong>Over dinner with <a href="http://gwynnedyer.com/" target="_blank">Gwynne Dyer</a> last week, I explained to him how billions of dollars spent annually on surveillance and decryption technology can be undermined using $100 worth of technology (I wrote about it in <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2013/10/national-securityarming-both-sides.html" target="_blank">National Security – Arming Both Sides</a>). He just shook his head. Why are we still pretending (outside of the fact that it keeps people “fat, dumb and happy”)? The money spent on this could be better spent on …. just about anything.</li>
<li><strong>Our Overstated Fear of ISIS:</strong> While random attacks using vehicles as weapons draw great press and create fear that can be used as leverage for various purposes, consider this the next time a “”frightening event” occurs. You are:</li>
<ul>
<li>6 times more likely to die from a shark attack (one of the rarest forms of death on Earth)</li>
<li>29 times more likely to die from a regional asteroid strike</li>
<li>260 times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning</li>
<li>4,700 times more likely to die in an airplane or spaceship accident</li>
<li>129,000 times more likely to die in a gun assault</li>
<li>407,000 times more likely to die in a motor vehicle incident</li>
<li>6.9 million times more likely to die from cancer or heart disease (<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrorism-disease-accidents-2017-1" target="_blank">source</a>).</li></ul>
<li><strong>The Disabling Effect of a Good Story:</strong> Someone used the story of the fisherman and the starfish on the beach (where the fisherman insists he can’t save all of them but he saves one by throwing it back into the ocean) to explain how every little bit helps. Many of these feel-good stories can also be used to justify minimal effort under the guise of making a difference when much more could be done.</li>
<li><strong>The Lack of Strategy In People’s Lives:</strong> Most people would never set out on a long drive wearing a blindfold, without a working gas gauge, without knowing how much gas they have in the tank and not knowing where they were going. However, if you look at how much effort goes into planning their Life, they don’t follow the same safety guidelines for their own Life. It matters – we all reap the reward and pay the penalty for each person’s brilliance, greed and ignorance. If you don’t believe me, ask your insurance company how your premium is calculated or how many stupid people it takes to get all of us to take our shoes off in airport security (the answer to the latter question is one).</li>
<li><strong>Realistic Use of Strategy:</strong> While many people generally accept the importance of strategy, many of those same people prefer to build plans in ignorance of where they are at the moment because where they are reminds them of some failure or shortcoming. This myopic, over-optimistic view causes them to not realize that knowing where you are going depends entirely on where you are starting from. If I call you and ask for directions to Penn Station in NYC because I need to be there in an hour, it matters if I am calling you from Chinatown (NYC), Seattle or Moscow.</li>
<li><strong>Failure to Use Data:</strong> Many people make choices regarding important things that involve risk (e.g. in investment, buying insurance, extended warranties, implementing new business strategies and the like) based on how they feel at the moment. Unfortunately, doing so using “your gut” instead of using data may cause you to be too risk averse if you just experienced a bad moment or not risk averse enough if Life is going swimmingly at the moment. Data doesn’t care how you feel, is not so easily biased and can prevent you from over/under reacting to a specific risk mitigation requirement or being coerced / influenced by someone else who tells you to do something “just because”.</li>
<li><strong>Be Proactive:</strong> Stephen Covey was right when he said Habit 1 is to be proactive. Look around you and ask yourself how often we apply this rule. Do you? Don’t forget – we all reap the reward and pay the penalty for compliance / non-compliance.</li>
<li><strong>Awareness of Psychology:</strong> Why do so many people have the ability to explain every nuance about how Facebook works but can’t explain the psychology of how people use emotion (particularly anger, fear, envy or greed) to manipulate them or how someone can debate them repeatedly into no-win choices that always benefit the other person?</li>
<li><strong>Multidirectional Respect:</strong> Why do people who insist that we all be respectful of one other tend to be the ones who least like counter ideas and opinions and shout the loudest to diminish the ideas of others? When the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire" target="_blank">Voice of Fire</a> was purchased by the National Art Gallery in Ottawa some years ago (containing three equally sized vertical stripes, with the outer two painted blue and the center painted red), many people stood in front of it and marveled at its insight, brilliance and creativity. I observed to the person next to me, quietly, that it looked like the artist had run out of paint. Apparently I wasn’t quiet enough because a security guard who had been marveling with the others came over and told me to keep my uninformed opinion to myself or I would be asked to leave the Gallery.</li>
<li><strong>Hyper-Analysis of Zer, Zim et al:</strong> If you don’t know what these mean, you have learned how to tune out the news (which can be a good thing) or you are living under a rock. We must be careful that we don’t get so distracted by the tail wagging the dog that other things in society (appropriate governance, health care, education, infrastructure, safety and security of society, etc.) are not forgotten. We thrive or die together. Focus and priorities will determine which way we are going. When politicians tell you that they are balancing everything well, ask them about unsustainable budgets, infrastructure security, health care waiting lines, failing grades for education performance …. well …. you get it. I find that when I use social media to ask (not accuse) a politician how things are going, they block me without trying to answer. Some in the meantime, will then tweet all day about someone’s cat that looks very cute.</li>
<li><strong>Airport Security: </strong>A cell phone battery and a glass of water can create a potentially dangerous situation on an aircraft (I won’t say how). People examining this situation are considering bans of laptops, tablets and potentially cell phones as well as potentially requiring you to submit them for safe transport (and obviously, examination). Don’t act surprised if this happens …. soon.</li>
<li><strong>And More Airport Security: </strong>I explained to someone today how a $60 drone purchased at Walmart can imperil everyone on a large aircraft at an airport. Bureaucrats who legislate against drone use close to airports ignore the reality that those of us with common sense don’t need to be told this and people who don’t care won’t be told this, so the legislation impacts very few people. We have avoided a disaster because people have chosen not to do something stupid but unfortunately, hope is not a strategy. And if something happens, we will still have excellent laws to charge the miscreant but as in the first point in this list, we will win in principle only.</li></ol>
<p>Do these things matter or am I just over-sensitive?
<p>Should we care that these represent symptoms of a society that is not ticking over as well as claimed by politicians or do we ignore them, saving our complaints and intention for action only when we are directly affected as opposed to when our neighbor is being pummeled instead of us?
<p>If they matter, what can we do about them?
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong>
<p>I’m a big believer in sharing thoughts and encouraging people to dialog about things with an eye towards taking measurable action. Good intentions and thoughts are worthless without measurable results.
<p>However, we can’t own everything that comes before us, even when it impacts us deeply. Some of us who work hard to make a difference in the world need others to share the responsibility, especially when many who put little into society want to reap the harvest that comes from a better world.
<p>It’s time for more people to be concerned about society and where it’s going …
<p>… while it’s still a going concern.
<p>In service and servanthood, create a great day because merely having one is too passive an experience.
<p>Harry</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-58191893896189761802017-06-05T15:24:00.001-06:002017-06-05T15:33:29.640-06:00Why I’ll Never Accept Your Apology<blockquote>
<p><em>Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions in the past. - Tryon Edwards</em></p>
<p><em>The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology. - Red Auerbach</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Mainstream and social media (is there even a difference anymore?), ever-hungry for blood, battery, humiliation and sensationalism, continue to carry news about Kathy Griffin’s act of stupidity in posing with a replica of the severed head of the POTUS.</p>
<p>Much has been made of her apology-turned-attack, where she has tried to turn an ignorant act into an act of self-defense, claiming she is the victim from the backlash when the original act itself has no excuse. Unfortunately, failure to recognize cause-and-effect has doomed many a career.</p>
<p>Many people have asked my opinion on the matter because of what they believe to be my curious stand on apologies.</p>
<p><strong>I never accept apologies.</strong></p>
<p>Over-sensitive people are often quick to criticize me for this but here is how I look at apologies.</p>
<p><strong>Rule 1 – The Good Person</strong></p>
<p>If you are a good person and you have done wrong by me with an honest mistake, then you have demonstrated your imperfection as a human being. As an imperfect human being myself, I also make mistakes so who am I to judge you for making one with me. For this reason, apologies are not necessary in such situations. Many relationships have been saved because of this approach.</p>
<p><strong>Rule 2 – The Bad Person</strong></p>
<p>If you are a bad person who got caught committing a heinous act and you are apologizing merely because you got caught, then likely the apology carries little if any weight (and likely doesn’t prevent similar incidents from happening again). If the apology carries little if any weight, then it is also unnecessary since it’s either a time-waster, an insult or a set-up to commit similar acts in the future. Much abuse has been avoided because of this approach.</p>
<p><strong>Rule 3 – The Rare “Come-To-Jesus” Person</strong></p>
<p>Very rarely, the bad person committing a heinous act has an epiphany, realizes where they have gone wrong and makes an authentic commitment to doing better. While people claim we should always accept any apology from anyone for any level of miscreant behavior on the off-chance that they will turn the corner, those same people haven’t studied history or human behavior to see the likelihood of such things occurring. While there are some success stories, a lot of people get used and abused repeatedly for this belief.</p>
<p><strong>Rule 4 – Past Behavior Demonstrates Apology Authenticity</strong></p>
<p>If you really want to know how authentic someone’s apology is, examine how they have been living their Life up to the moment the act requiring apology occurred. Past performance often predicts future behavior and provides deep insight into the reason and motivation for an apology. It will help you identify a good person, a person having an epiphany or someone who interprets you as an idiot to be played.</p>
<p><strong>Too Harsh?</strong></p>
<p>Many people who do not know me think that this is too cut-and-dried, too objective, too cold and the like. Later, I have to listen to them complain how someone keeps hurting them over and over.</p>
<p>The reality is that I don’t judge people because I accept that good people make honest mistakes and that bad people who make poor choices will eventually have to account to “Someone” for their deeds. I don’t have the time, the interest, the moral authority or the level of perfection required to judge them and so if I don’t judge them, there is nothing that requires an apology from them either.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line – Our Actions Reveal Our Authenticity</strong></p>
<p>While intentions are wonderful and words are easily produced for any situation, the reality is that our actions reveal the dialogue taking place in our brain and often speak so loudly that others can’t hear what we are saying.</p>
<p>When I see someone like Griffin with her latest stunt, or her previous stunt where she pretended to give Anderson Cooper oral sex on live TV during the 2013 New Year’s Eve Countdown, or when someone makes a derogatory comment about women, people of faith, gender choice, people of other nationalities, etc. and then quickly apologizes, they are usually thinking about their career and the ramifications of being caught. Rarely do they believe that the act itself was wrong. For them, the only thing that was wrong was being exposed.</p>
<p>There is a deeper issue when people commit heinous acts that require an apology. The fact is that they wouldn’t have committed the act if it weren’t already a seed in their mind.</p>
<p>Do you know why I could never insult an LGBTQ person, a person from another nationality, a person of a different faith, an indigenous person, a woman, a minority or pose in a photo pretending to hold the severed head of the POTUS?</p>
<p>It’s because such things don’t exist in my mind and if they are not in my mind, you won’t see them in my words or my actions either. If heinous thoughts are not in one’s mind, then one is less likely to experience the overused “lapse of judgment”, which in reality is less a lapse and more an x-ray into someone’s mind.</p>
<p>For those who keep surprising, disappointing and offending us and then promptly asking for (or demanding) forgiveness, they have revealed what is in their mind and having done so, it is up to us to decide how to interact with them and respond to them. In those situations, only we are to blame if we continue to be surprised, disappointed or angered by their actions.</p>
<p>As for the good people in our lives, they have made a mistake.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is one of many.</p>
<p>But are we so perfect that we haven’t any mistakes either?</p>
<p>Our actions, past and future, matter much more than trite, perfunctory apologies or fake ones meant to relieve us of the responsibility of acting like a proper human being.</p>
<p>Remember that the next time someone begs for forgiveness from you.</p>
<p>Or you beg for it from someone else.</p>
<p>In service and servanthood, create a great day for yourself and others because merely having one is too passive an experience.</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><b>Addendum - Who is the Injured Party?</b></p>
<p>Within minutes of this post coming out, someone wrote me and condemned me, saying that by refusing an apology, I was denying someone the right to feel better about a situation. When I replied that I thought the purpose of the apology was more to heal the injured and not just to remove the guilt, they never replied. I guess they wanted an apology from me and were disappointed to not receive one.</p>
<p><strong>Related Posts:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2013/07/mike-allen-politicians-and-apologies.html" target="_blank">Mike Allen, Politicians and Apologies</a></li>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2015/08/if-only-you-werent-so-stupid-youd.html" target="_blank">If Only You Weren’t So Stupid, You’d Understand</a></li></ul>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-87686452338859356792017-05-15T09:52:00.002-06:002017-05-15T09:59:28.847-06:00Love and Compassion in Action<blockquote>
<p><em>Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. - Dalai Lama</em></p>
<p><em>The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others. - Albert Schweitzer</em></p></blockquote>
<p>In the middle of the largest M & A (mergers and acquisitions) deal of my career and in the early incubation stages of a Foundation designed to serve the people who serve and lift others, I found myself unable to sleep at 3:30am and began the rigor and discipline of my day.</p>
<p>My day always begins with Quiet Hour, a time of reflection, contemplation, meditation, prayer and planning in preparation for a busy day but this morning, I felt compelled to go somewhere I never go for Quiet Hour.</p>
<p>I tried to change my mind but something kept calling me to go to this place so I finally acquiesced and proceeded to a local 24-hour coffee shop.</p>
<p>It was filled with the usual crowd in the wee hours of the morning, truckers beginning or ending their day, young people laughing, a few people working intently on laptops …. the usual mix.</p>
<p>It also had two “kids” sitting there, two young people in their late teens or early twenties, slightly dirty, disheveled and looking slightly uncomfortable or lost.</p>
<p>My Quiet Hour began as it always does, with my books, my journal and my cup of tea spread out before me and my noise cancelling headphones playing my meditation music du jour.</p>
<p>As my Quiet Hour ended and I changed my music to up-tempo music to energize my day, I noticed that a couple (maybe late 30s or early 40s) were talking to the kids. The man had an acronym on his jacket which I Googled (I’m a data guy) and I discovered that they represented a local outreach program for the homeless and for people who struggle with addictions.</p>
<p>I took one ear bud out of my ear and listened intently to the interaction.</p>
<p>I observed the gentle but persistent methods that the couple used in telling the kids about the options that were available to them, that there was no pressure or obligation and they if they wanted help, it was available to them.</p>
<p>The couple left and sat outside in their vehicle.</p>
<p>The kids discussed this back and forth as they wondered about it and dismissed it simultaneously.</p>
<p>Then they paused, looked at each other, shrugged, stood up in silence and went outside.</p>
<p>They picked up their bikes, proceeded to the couple’s vehicle and shared some words I did not hear with the woman in the passenger seat. The woman wiped her eyes and smiled, the man got out and helped them place their bikes in the back of the vehicle and they drove off together.</p>
<p>Perhaps someone’s Life was changing at that moment.</p>
<p>As I reflected on what I had just witnessed, I looked down upon the paperwork for the sale of one company and the creation of another and I realized that I had been given the gift of emotional fuel – a reminder of why I do what I do.</p>
<p>It reminded me of a colleague on the other side of my then largest M & A deal who said, “Remember, we are doing this for our families and for those we serve and not for the money – that’s why we do what we do.”. His observation changed how I finished the deal and everything I did ever after.</p>
<p>Just then I realized that a line from “Raise a Little Hell” by the Canadian music group Trooper was playing in my ear:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>If you don't like what you see, why don't you fight it?</em></p>
<p><em>If you know there's something wrong, why don't you right it?</em></p></blockquote>
<p>I just witnessed someone righting a wrong.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>It is easy to get caught up in the trials and tribulations of our Life, whether it’s a large business deal, screaming kids, the fact that our $5 latte and $8 cupcake doesn’t quite meet our expectations (seriously), our belief that our clothing is out of date, our thought that our car is just not new enough, our complaint that the food selection at the supermarket is “not good enough” and the like.</p>
<p>We get caught up in a lot of things in our Lives that others can’t even dream about. As we go about our day often ignoring the blessings and abundance all around us while simultaneously wondering how our Life should somehow be better “just because we demand it”, someone wonders if they will eat tomorrow, where they will sleep, how they will overcome an addiction ….</p>
<p>…. or if anyone cares at all.</p>
<p>The couple I watched today showed these kids that they matter.</p>
<p>I hope the love and compassion felt by these kids “sticks” and that they move on to create something greater in their Lives.</p>
<p>Experts say that sharing love, compassion and support touches specific parts of our brain and imparts important benefits upon us mentally and physically..</p>
<p>They also say that the same benefits are received by those who are on the receiving end of such gifts.</p>
<p>And equally importantly, they say that those who witness such an exchange are benefitted in the same way.</p>
<p>Was I “called” to be at this spot today to witness this or was it just coincidence?</p>
<p>It depends on what you believe.</p>
<p>Someone out there needs to feel love and compassion today, to be lifted when they feel no one cares for their story and their Life.</p>
<p>Are you willing to be that person?</p>
<p>Maybe you’re the person who needs it – don’t be afraid to ask for help.</p>
<p>Putting $10 in a donation box is one thing.</p>
<p>To get up, get out and serve is another – an act that could change your Life and the Life of someone else forever.</p>
<p>I am reminded of this quote by Bob Pierce (the founder of World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse) when he described “The Great Compassion”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Let my heart be broken by that which breaks the heart of God.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>What in the world so troubles your heart that you can’t bear for it to continue?</p>
<p>What are you willing to do about it?</p>
<p>The world and someone in it is waiting for you.</p>
<p>What are you waiting for?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-71221638904065694242017-05-12T12:40:00.000-06:002017-05-12T15:13:40.901-06:00Last Chances Don’t Come With Warnings<blockquote>
<p><em>We never really learn from the first mistake, second or third. It only hits us when we're given the last chance.- Wiz Khalifa</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Last night, I was reminded about the importance of finishing what you’ve started with a sense of urgency while you still have the time to do so.</p>
<p>Late last night as a small group of us stepped outside to wind down our evening, we noticed a lightning storm off in the distance. The lightning was beautiful and approximately 4-5 miles away according to the old “one-one thousand, two-one thousand” quasi-accurate calculation of distance.</p>
<p>Assuming it was safe to proceed with the storm safely off to the south, we began walking when suddenly lightning struck the ground all around us with blinding light, phenomenally loud thunder and a strange, loud sizzling sound in the air.</p>
<p>It wasn’t just one flash but several. I had fallen to the ground, saw it striking the ground all around us and I remember yelling “Get down, get down, get down”.</p>
<p>After the terrifying moment had passed, I noticed my colleague was still standing and shouting incoherently. When I asked “Why didn’t you get down on the ground?”, their response was, “I couldn’t – I was frozen and too afraid to move.”</p>
<p>“You <strong><em>always</em></strong> hit the ground when this happens”, I replied, shaken and frustrated at the same time while feeling grateful having survived my third near-strike of lightning.</p>
<p>I later morbidly tweeted that the shareholders would have been ticked off had we been killed so close to the conclusion of a significant deal.</p>
<p>This morning, my colleague still wasn’t feeling 100% as we discussed how close we came to an untimely end.</p>
<p>It got me to thinking about close encounters in my Life.</p>
<p>Bear with me for a moment – there is a method to my madness:</p>
<p>I have survived:</p>
<ul>
<li>5 aviation incidents - two RPM governance failures on takeoff, a near-miss on final approach, a structural integrity compromise during a violent storm (requiring an emergency landing) and a depressurization. The lightning strike I encountered on a flight once is considered normal. I mused about one of the incidents in the post <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-last-hour-of-my-life.html" target="_blank">The Last Hour of My Life</a>.</li>
<li>A bicycle crash that split my helmet in two when my temple hit the pavement at 25+ mph and left me with a serious concussion, a lot of cuts and abrasions and a destroyed bicycle. I am an official member of the “Saved by the Bell” club, a designation where a Bell bike helmet was proven to have saved your Life.</li>
<li>Another bicycle crash that occurred when I was clipped on the left by an SUV whose driver wasn’t paying attention to how close they were to me.</li>
<li>Two near misses by tornadoes, including one that touched down half a block from where I had gone out for a walk and one that formed over me in Vulcan, Alberta and touched down a short distance later. In the latter incident, I was so busy filming it over me that I didn't realize I was in significant danger.</li>
<li>A strike by a vehicle from behind where the vehicle was carrying a piece of lumber sticking out the passenger side of the vehicle. It was a rainy night and I was walking on the sidewalk when a voice to my left (right by my ear) yelled “look out”. I jumped to the right, startled by the voice and at the moment, the lumber struck me across the shoulder blades, knocking me out. A witness in a car behind the car that struck me told me later that he saw a flash of light right beside my head just before I jumped and thought I was jumping because of that. I was informed by police that had I not jumped at that moment, the lumber would have struck me in the neck and likely killed me. Who warned me?</li>
<li>Two mini strokes, one in my teens and one in my early 20s.</li>
<li>Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (stage 4) at the age of 30.</li>
<li>A near head-on collision with a large snowplow. I had come upon a single lane cut in a 20-foot deep snow drift, stopped, saw no one coming towards me and proceeded through it. Unbeknownst to me, a snow plow had decided to take a second run at clearing the snow and had backed up around a turn in the road in front of me in order to get some acceleration for the second run. As I was halfway through the tunnel, he came around the turn driving straight towards me. In a flash, I knew I could beat him to the end of the snow tunnel and so I accelerated towards him. I cleared the tunnel just as he entered it. I escaped but the van driving behind me took the full brunt of the head-on collision as the plow entered the snow tunnel and the driver of the van was seriously injured. People who witnessed the accident thought I was either lucky or crazy for accelerating towards the plow. Maybe I was both.</li>
<li>I’ve been attacked 5 times in New York City, 4 times by individuals and once by a group of 4 or 5 guys. Of the first 4 incidents, 2 of the 4 guys were unconscious before they hit the ground. Regarding the group, myself and another colleague were held up by a gang of miscreants who demanded our wallets as we headed home from Brooklyn late one night. When I refused, the leader (I assume it was the leader) told me that I couldn’t take all of them. I acknowledged the truth of this but said I would at least kill the first one. They looked uncertainly at each other and left the scene. Steve, my colleague, asked me if I would have done that and I said “Yes – we were going to die anyway. I gambled that I had to look crazier than they were and it worked.”</li>
<li>I was stabbed by a man with a mental health issue on a subway stop in Toronto who found a new use for the metal tip of his umbrella.</li>
<li>I hit a patch of black ice on a turn one night while driving 65 mph and went into a full spin (I still remember each rotation in slow motion). I missed all the oncoming traffic, bounced off an ice wall on the opposite side of the road, crossed the road again, missed traffic in both directions, hit the wall on the original side of the highway and then came back across the traffic. I stopped in the middle of the road, facing the wrong direction. My car didn’t appreciate the experience but I was completely unhurt.</li>
<li>I was almost struck by a vehicle while crossing a street in Calgary during a rain storm but was saved when someone else saw it developing and blew their horn to warn me. I mused about that in my post <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2013/05/angels-amongst-us.html" target="_blank">Angels Amongst Us</a>.</li>
<li>I was the passenger in 5 different high speed accidents in my second semester of college.</li>
<li>I have narrowly missed many accidents as a driver, with the vehicle in front of me or behind me being taken out by various incidents.</li>
<li>I was rushed to hospital last summer with a blood pressure of 190 / 130. Doctors were impressed that I hadn't had a stroke or heart attack. My blood pressure is now a normal 90 / 55.</li>
<li>15 minutes before the World Trade Center bomb exploded, I was standing on the very spot that was vaporized when the blast went off.</li></ul>
<p>All of these came to mind as I reflected on last night’s moment, my third near-lightning strike. The first one came as I stood on my lawn in New Jersey and watched a distant storm coming in. I suddenly felt “strange” as if something was inside me and at that moment, lightning struck a playground set about 50 feet from me, with the intense light and blast of thunder knocking me over. I was later told that a “streamer” was likely coming up through me, making me a candidate for the strike had it connected with a leader coming down from the storm cloud. Another time, I was riding on a bike trail that cut through a car wreck yard, trying to beat a storm home, when suddenly lighting began hitting the junkyard. I lay on the ground as lightning blasted all around me like artillery fire.</p>
<p>The funny thing is that I live a relatively low-risk life. I don’t sky dive, smoke, drink or intentionally put myself at risk in any way. I eat well, exercise and take care of myself emotionally, physically, intellectually and spiritually. I drive the speed limit and minimize my risk in business. I’m so uptight about obeying the rules that even jay walking is something not on my “can do” list.</p>
<p>And despite a low-risk Life, I have dodged a lot of things that many people succumb to on their first encounter.</p>
<p>As I discussed this with my colleague this morning, I made several observations:</p>
<ol>
<li>We’re still here so let’s not spend <strong><em>too</em></strong> much time navel gazing about it</li>
<li>Either “Someone” thinks we are not finished with our Purpose or we are very lucky – either way, we have to do something with this second chance (or whatever number I was up to, I’d lost count until I sat down to reflect on the moment).</li>
<li>The shareholders are still happy.</li>
<li>Let’s finish what we started.</li></ol>
<p>The reality is that once again, we’ve been given a reminder that our time here is borrowed time – we don’t know how much we are given to start with, we don’t know how much is left and once time is burned for good or for bad, it can never be reclaimed.</p>
<p>How much of your time are you taking for granted?</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>We exist for a variety of reasons, to love, to share, to learn, to teach, to grow, to lift / serve others, to create and for some, to be a lesson to others.</p>
<p>Whatever our Purpose, we may not have as much time as we think to accomplish it.</p>
<p>In fact, today may be our last day, with our final moments coming without warning (the blog post title is a quote from Rob Hill).</p>
<p>Are you willing to allow your legacy, your gifts, your talents, your family, your colleagues or your sense of Purpose to be allowed to languish or remain unfulfilled because you took your time for granted?</p>
<p>Do you need a warning shot for motivational purposes?</p>
<p>Don’t wait for such a warning because it may signify your departure, with anything in-progress remaining unfinished.</p>
<p>I end my emails (and many meetings) with “Create a great day” or “Create a great day because merely having one is too passive an experience”. Careful observers notice that I also always capitalize the L in Life.</p>
<p>I do it because I recognize that Life is a holy gift, without guarantees, and that we should create a great day because today may be our last.</p>
<p>Are <strong><em>you</em></strong> creating a great day right now?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood.</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>PS</strong> I am <strong><em>not</em></strong> a Nickleback fan <strong><em>at all</em></strong> but I was amused to discover that as I finished this post, their song, “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrXIQQ8PeRs" target="_blank">If Today Was Your Last Day</a>” is playing on the radio.</p>
<p>It’s just a coincidence, of course.</p>
<p>Isn’t it?</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-70434008790506922712017-05-10T14:25:00.002-06:002017-05-10T21:04:06.388-06:00Self Discipline–Why You Can Never Reach Me Instantly<blockquote>
<p><em>Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus. - Alexander Graham Bell</em></p>
<p><em>We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we're actually working hard. - Meghan Daum</em></p>
<p><em>The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present. - Glen Hansard</em></p></blockquote>
<p>I have a confession to make to the many people who wonder what the secret is to getting me to answer my phone.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>If you’re not in my calendar today, then don’t bother calling / SMS’ing me if you expect an immediate reply / comment. I won’t even know you called me until the end of the day.</strong></p></blockquote>
<p>In our world of always being connected, always reachable, I have noticed that a lot of people who complain that they never get anything done appear to exist to be at the beck and call of everyone around them, whether it be via phone call, SMS, Facebook, Twitter or whatever the current distraction du jour is.</p>
<p>That’s fine if you believe that you exist only for the needs of others or that you are willing to sacrifice your priorities in order to meet everyone else’s.</p>
<p>However, if you believe you exist to serve a Greater Purpose, using your strengths, gifts and talents to the greatest potential possible, you cannot exist this way at all.</p>
<p>When I plan my day (right after my Quiet Hour), I note who needs to call me that day and I set up my phone to allow calls and SMS to come in from those people or people associated with them.</p>
<p>Family members, my <strong><em>closest</em></strong> friends and colleagues / friends who are currently in trouble and need support are always on this allowed list.</p>
<p>If you didn’t make it to that list for the day, when you call or SMS me, you will be redirected. I won’t even be aware you reached out until the end of the day when I do my end-of-day wind-down.</p>
<p>While many have told me that this is unfair or uncaring for the people who might want to reach out to say hi, to ask advice or to complain incessantly about something they have no interest in addressing themselves (using me as the whipping post for their complaints), I reply to the criticism with these observations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>If I exist to be everyone else’s entertainment, company, source of knowledge or whipping post, at what point do I get to focus on who I am and why I exist?</strong></p>
<p><strong>If I have to be at everyone else’s beck and call “just because” but the other person reserves the right to reject speaking to me because they are busy or don’t feel like chatting, where is the fairness and balance in this exchange?</strong></p>
<p><strong>If I allow everyone else to monopolize my time, who is to blame when my work / play doesn’t get completed to my satisfaction or for the needs of someone else – the people who called me or the person (me) who allowed them to overrun my day?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Is my ego that weak that my sense of worthiness and self-value is established by the number of</strong><strong> people who reach out to me?</strong></p>
<p><strong>If it takes me 20 minutes to get back on track after a distraction, how much work can I really get done if I allow distractions to flow in through the day?</strong></p>
<p><strong>How respectful am I to you (or to someone else) if I keep pausing myself or interrupting them to check my phone?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Do the interruptions contribute to my day or do they just burn time that can never be reclaimed?</strong></p></blockquote>
<p>I chose one person in particular who didn’t understand any of these ideas (he called them selfish) and I called him daily “just to chat”.</p>
<p>After a few days, he understood, but not before getting angry with me first. After he calmed down, he got it.</p>
<p>According to my mobile carrier, my phone sends / receives 22,000+ SMS messages a month. I use SMS more than voice (unless the person I am interacting with prefers voice chats) because I’m busy and focused on meeting my goals as well as serving the needs of the people around me. I keep communication brief, direct and fact-focused. People not used to this eventually come to appreciate it and often adopt the same approach themselves.</p>
<p><strong>If you choose to spread yourself across your entire network without any sense of focus or discipline, how do you expect to meet your goals or the goals / needs of those whom you serve (unless you don’t have any goals, in which case wasting your time or having it wasted for you won’t feel like a crime to you)?</strong>.</p>
<p>By the way, many times when people call you to kill time, there is a possibility that you were the last person available to them. How does it feel knowing that your time is of such little value to them that spending time with you is only slightly better to someone than having absolutely nothing to do at all or that they called you simply because <b><i>they</i></b> were bored (regardless of what is happening in your day)?</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>The people who complain the most about not having enough time to get things done are often the same ones who have no sense of focus or prioritization in how they use their time or how they allow others to use it. They also don’t care if / how they waste the time of others.</p>
<p>Those of us who have the discipline to protect our time / results by shutting out distractions believe that we don’t have the time to complain and we don’t have the right to tie up other people’s time “just because” (since we don’t like them doing that to us). We’re too busy being grounded in gratitude to have the opportunity to create and collaborate and we are focused on creating results (whether for work or for play).</p>
<p>And besides, if I have a complaint to make, making it to someone who can do nothing about it infects two people with a negative attitude (instead of one) and meanwhile, my problem still exists. On top of that, the person whom I have just infected is now distracted, unproductive or spreading my negativity outwards like ripples in a pond.</p>
<p>We all have 24 hours in a day.</p>
<p>Do you use those 24 hours for balanced work / play / learning / sharing / loving effectively, do you waste them or even worse, do you allow someone else to steal them from you?</p>
<p>Are you sure?</p>
<p>I’d love to hear your thoughts but don’t bother calling / SMS’ing me to tell me unless you know that you’re on my calendar today!</p>
<p>In service and servanthood – create a great day for yourself and others because merely having one is too passive an experience.</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><strong>PS</strong> When I do entertain the complaints of others, I remind them that I am a “touch-once” person. When a problem comes up, we can avoid it, talk about it or do whatever we want with it. However, if we don’t adopt a “touch-once” policy and address it as soon as it comes up, it will always be there tomorrow.</p>
<p>So when someone comes to me with a complaint or they are seeking advice, they can only bring it up once. If they want to discuss the same topic later <strong><em>without</em></strong> having tried to resolve it, I shut them down. Lack of intention or effort on their part is not an excuse to burn up my time.</p>
<p>If we don’t focus on solving problems at the earliest opportunity, we may find we don’t have much energy / time left to address opportunities for creating and collaborating because we’re too busy being burdened down by the noise of unresolved problems.</p>
<p>And that only leads to more complaining.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-42737246738975033372017-05-03T13:08:00.000-06:002017-05-06T22:58:03.082-06:00Things That I Wonder About<blockquote>
<p><em>Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up. – Oliver Wendell Holmes</em></p>
<p><em>Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean. – Ryunosuke Satoro</em></p></blockquote>
<p>In between selling a large tech company and starting up a Foundation that will “help NPO’s “do good better” through fact-based decision-making and evidence-based outcome assessments” (quoting friend and colleague, Doug P.), I often have other distractions that cross my mind that I feel merit some attention.</p>
<p>As a long-time Wall St. strategy guy, unsolved problems are always a conundrum for me, especially when the problems are significant in impact and are far / wide reaching in society. Problems in society affect us all at some point, even if we don’t feel the affect directly (or believe we don’t).</p>
<p>However, I can’t tackle all these thoughts, nor should I (no individual is tagged as the “savior” of the world). That being said, they are worthy of thought and action and so, with the encouragement of very nice colleagues who kindly never lose patience with me when I muse about other concerns in the world, I’m going to occasionally toss some ideas out with the idea that someone else may feel inspired to own some of them.</p>
<p>This is not a typical blog post for me such as can be found in the <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/p/the-1206-series.html" target="_blank">#1206 series</a>, the <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/p/abigail-gabriel.html" target="_blank">Abigail / Gabriel</a> series or any general post. It is a grab bag of thoughts that pass through my brain in the course of leading a busy Life.</p>
<p>If you want to own one, I would be glad to help!</p>
<p>A subset of my random thoughts this week:</p>
<ol>
<li>How is it that the Newfoundland and Labrador Government can have as its top bureaucrat, Bern Coffey, who, while leading the bureaucratic corps of the Government, was also a lawyer representing a client who was suing a Crown Corporation of the same Government and a few years before, while a clerk of the Government Executive council, led a case against a Government health authority (details <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/dwight-ball-bern-coffey-resignation-news-conference-1.4093614" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/dwight-ball-settlement-labrador-grenfell-health-bern-coffey-1.4097915" target="_blank">here</a>)? While officials claim they are “just finding out”, the truth is that they knew for a while. Conflict of interest, anyone?
<li>By the same token, how is it that Tzeporah Berman can serve as a member of the Alberta Government Oil and Gas advisory team while at the same time, receive compensation for campaigning AGAINST the oil and gas industry in Alberta (details <a href="http://www.edmontonsun.com/2017/05/02/the-tzeporah-berman-optics-just-keep-getting-worse-for-notley-ndp" target="_blank">here</a>)? Conflict of interest, round 2.
<li>Premier Ball dismissed Coffey in the first scenario but Premier Notley refuses to dismiss Tzeporah in the second one. When such appointments with obvious conflict-of-interest are knowingly made, what does this tell us about the leadership skills of the people in the respective situations? Is it a reflection of poor execution, low intelligence, self-serving motives or an indifference to how things are perceived (or something else)?
<li>Are apologies or “sharp corrective action” from politicians acceptable because we believe that someone recognized their own mistake and want it fixed or are we being played as politicians attempt to harvest political points while continuing their inappropriate behavior? In my companies, you are fully supportive of the organization that pays you or you are not but if you are not, you work to make us better through compromise or you leave. You can’t play for me and against me at the same time. Why don’t we demand this of government?
<li>How is it in the Newfoundland and Labrador government, a blind trust for a politician can be run by a politician’s husband, wife, daughter, son-in-law or lover? There is nothing “arms-length” or “blind” about such a set-up. Who do you think benefits from this arrangement?
<li>How is it that Stephen Colbert can refer to the President of the United States as Vladimir Putin’s “cock holster” when a comment such as that, if directed at the previous President, would have required riot squads to be deployed (details <a href="http://decider.com/2017/05/02/stephen-colbert-donald-trump-cock-holster/" target="_blank">here</a>)? Why is it that the “tolerant left” has no issue when insults are issued against the one that they despise but they are quick to demonstrate in the streets should there even be the possibility that one of their own <strong><em>might</em></strong> be insulted at some point in the future? One must respect the Office of the President and if one disagrees with the President himself, Colbert’s approach is not the way to express it. Respect earned is respect given. Anything else leads to significant problems in society.
<li>How is it that very few people care about emergency planning, regardless of the source / scale of the emergency? Officials routinely warn of difficulties ahead, whether it be in the form of a cyber attack, a nuclear war, climate change-induced natural disasters and a plethora of other things and yet most people would be lucky if they could survive a minor inconvenience that lasted through a weekend. We have all seen people panic-shop at supermarkets when a storm is forecast. What if the “storm” came without warning. I mused about this yesterday in the post <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2017/05/statistics-mathematical-theory-of.html" target="_blank">Statistics: The Mathematical Theory of Ignorance</a>.
<li>How is it that US politicians can claim a triumph in the low unemployment rate when the vast majority of jobs created in recent years are part-time / low-paying jobs with little or no health benefit plans? When more than 50% of American families have $1000 or less in the bank, over 48 million Americans are on food stamps and over 98 million Americans are not working at all, how can we champion a recovery that benefits a small minority of people?
<li>Pursuant to the previous point, personal debt is growing and more than 50% of families have less than $1000 in the bank. Where is personal freedom and empowerment for these people?
<li>If people are happier than ever, why do we have a steady increase in the need for antidepressants?
<li>The next time you are in Costco, a supermarket or other place filled with abundance, ask yourself when you last helped someone who couldn’t partake in such abundance.
<li>It is estimated that we will work 80,000 hours in our lifetime. 1% of that (800 hours or 20 work-weeks) is a small amount to spend in planning our work Life but we don’t teach kids how to do it. In fact, if I told someone when I was 20 that I was about to spend 5 months planning my career, I would be told I was insane (even though it’s such a small number in the grand scheme of things). We teach kids phenomenally more than when I was in school and yet basic skills of Life strategy (including long and short term goal setting), financial strategy, respectful dialog when ideas are polar opposites and the like seem absent from the skill-set of many young people. We seem to insist that they learn these things the hard way. Why? Is it because we don’t know how to either?
<li>Many not-for-profits are phenomenally wasteful in how they spend their money and many people who work for them know how to steal from them as a profession but we don’t care. Why?</li>
<li>How is it that people put little or no effort into the things that matter in society but will spend an amazing amount of time watching videos of cats, sharing pictures of their oatmeal or losing their minds over how their favorite TV series ends?</li></ol>
<p>Do these things matter or am I just over-sensitive?</p>
<p>Should we care that these represent symptoms of a society that is not ticking over as well as claimed by politicians or do we ignore them, saving our complaints and intention for action only when we are directly affected as opposed to when our neighbor is being pummeled instead of us?</p>
<p>If they matter, what can we do about them?</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>I’m a big believer in sharing thoughts and encouraging people to dialog about things with an eye towards taking measurable action. Good intentions and thoughts are worthless without measurable results.</p>
<p>However, we can’t own everything that comes before us, even when it impacts us deeply. Some of us who work hard to make a difference in the world need others to share the responsibility, especially when many who put little into society want to reap the harvest that comes from a better world.</p>
<p>It’s time for more people to be concerned about society and where it’s going …</p>
<p>… while it’s still a going concern.</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><b>PS:</b>You will note that I didn't mention things like privacy, surveillance and the like. I believe that that fight is over. You needed to care 25 years ago to have made a difference in regards to that subject. Do you see what waiting accomplishes? This is also, as I noted, just a subset of the things that went through my mind this week in the 5% of my brain that I have left over from the projects that consume it.</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-40282902341230931172017-05-02T14:24:00.000-06:002017-06-09T11:03:35.517-06:00Statistics: The Mathematical Theory of Ignorance<blockquote>
<p><em>Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument. - Marilyn vos Savant </em></p>
<p><em>Statistics are no substitute for judgment. - Henry Clay</em></p></blockquote>
<p>The #1206 “fiction” series continues …
<p>
<hr>
</p>
<p>On a bright, sunlit Sunday in a medium-sized city typical of western civilization, children ran excitedly around, happily exploring police cars, ambulances, MedEvac helicopters and the like. It was the annual emergency preparedness presentation offered by the city to its citizens and as usual, a fairly large contingent of families had shown up.</p>
<p>“It was”, as one parent mused to another as they meandered by the exhibits, “a great way to kill a Sunday afternoon.”</p>
<p>At one of the exhibits, a group of families listened raptly as a government official explained the government’s latest advances in emergency planning.</p>
<p>“Two key things to remember”, he explained to the group, “Always make sure you have three days of food, medicine, water, toiletries and personal items on hand.”</p>
<p>“And”, he said as he held up his mobile phone, “Always make sure you keep this charged up. We have an app that you can download that will allow you to receive alerts from us. You can also use your phone to communicate with emergency officials and family members.”</p>
<p>A tall, thin, pale man wearing dark sunglasses was observing from the sidelines. When the presenter finished speaking, the thin man approached him.</p>
<p>“Everything you say may be true”, he said to the presenter, “But we all know that in times of emergency, cell phone systems often get overloaded as they are designed for enhanced coverage but not for enhanced capacity. You saw this happen for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and other situations. So it is likely that the people here won’t be able to make a call once an emergency event takes place because the networks will become saturated. Some SMS messages <strong><em>may</em></strong> get through but data and voice communication may become spotty at best so your app won’t work when it is needed most. As for duration, there have been many emergencies that were not resolved in three days.”</p>
<p>“Well”, replied the presenter, “That may be true but the likelihood of such an event is statistically unlikely.”</p>
<p>“Statistically unlikely”, the thin man said as if he were were digesting the words, “Interesting choice of words. I will come back to that in a moment. But back to the mobile systems, the average cell tower only has battery power for 8-16 hours so if a major power disruption of extended duration occurs, your mobile phone won’t be able to connect to anything anyway as the cell towers begin to die. So people may be prepared for three days but their ability to communicate will cease long before this.”</p>
<p>The presenter frowned at the stranger, clearly agitated by the thin man with his observations.</p>
<p>The thin man pressed his point more firmly.</p>
<p>“Back to your observation regarding statistically unlikely”, he said emotionlessly, “Likelihood is only part of the equation for emergency preparedness when one must also consider the potential scale of such an event.”</p>
<p>“What does that mean?”, asked the presenter.</p>
<p>The thin man frowned at the presenter as if feeling a level of frustration with the lack of knowledge being shown by “the expert”.</p>
<p>“Well”, the thin man pointed out, “If I have an event that is statistically likely or unlikely, knowing the scale of the impact <strong><em>AND </em></strong> to a lesser extent, the cost of preparing for or preventing the event is what determines how much effort goes into mitigation of the event. If I have an event that is extremely likely but has no impact of merit, then I don’t really care about preparing for it. If the same event is also expensive to prepare for, then I really don’t want to prepare for it.”</p>
<p>He paused for a minute and glanced around him. The crowd around him were staring at him in silence.</p>
<p>“Conversely”, continued the thin man, “If I have an event that is statistically unlikely, most emergency preparedness people use this fact as the reason to not prepare for it. If this statistically unlikely event is also very expensive to prepare for, then emergency preparedness planners claim to have a reason to ignore it completely even if the potential event they are ignoring has catastrophic potential.”</p>
<p>“As they should”, interrupted the planner.</p>
<p>The thin man raised his hand.</p>
<p>“Patience”, he said, “Please allow me to continue.”</p>
<p>“No”, said the planner, “Statistical likelihood and cost are the key measures for emergency preparedness planning.”</p>
<p>The thin man began to respond but was again interrupted by the presenter.</p>
<p>“Give me one example where a major event was unlikely but happened with great significance or impact”, he demanded.</p>
<p>The thin man frowned slightly.</p>
<p>“The event you know as 9/11, the nuclear reactor accident in Japan, multiple suicides by pilots flying commercial aircraft, Hurricane Katrina,some of which I mentioned earlier”, began the thin man but he was interrupted again.</p>
<p>“But we couldn’t have anticipated those”, the presenter said, now clearly exasperated by the thin man.</p>
<p>“Of course you could have and many people in your industry actually evaluated the possibility of them”, replied the thin man, “But they chose the likelihood of it happening as the primary rationale for whether a response plan was needed. They factored in cost plus the political unpopularity of acknowledging that such a thing could happen and then buried the problem as unnecessary to think about, talk about or prepare for. To insult people even further, they claimed to be surprised by every major event that happened even though they had evaluated such events and discarded them based on the criteria I just mentioned.”</p>
<p>The presenter turned his attention back to the crowd of people around him.</p>
<p>“Thank you, folks”, he said to the now silent crowd, “I have a brochure here outlining what I shared with you today.”</p>
<p>Members of the crowd took a copy of the brochure and dispersed, some of them looking at the thin man uncertainly.</p>
<p>“What was that all about?”, the presenter demanded as he turned towards the thin man.</p>
<p>“Did I say anything that wasn’t true?”, asked the thin man.</p>
<p>“No”, replied the presenter, “But we don’t like to tell people these things.”</p>
<p>“So you are lying to them”, replied the thin man, “And in doing so, condemning them to some real problems when a large-scale disaster occurs.”</p>
<p>“Not entirely”, replied the presenter, “But putting the people in a panic doesn’t help either.”</p>
<p>“Informing them of reality always helps people”, the thin man replied softly but forcefully, “You need to consider them as your allies and not your enemies, now and in times of emergency.”</p>
<p>“Some people can’t handle truths like this”, replied the presenter.</p>
<p>“Possibly”, the thin man said, removing his sunglasses and looking intently into the eyes of the presenter, “But given that uninformed people become a potential liability when and not if a significant event occurs, I would rather inform the masses anyway instead of choosing to not tell anyone just because a small percentage of people aren’t mentally strong enough to deal with reality.”</p>
<p>The thin man’s eyes were dark and glittered in the sunlight.</p>
<p>The presenter suddenly felt uncomfortable as the thin man stared at him with a strange intensity.</p>
<p>“I think you should leave before I ask security to ask you to leave”, the presenter said.</p>
<p>“No need to be rude”, the thin man said as he put his sunglasses back on, “Someday you will be forced to admit the truth. I hope that day doesn’t have other complexities that are difficult to deal with for you and your family.”</p>
<p>He turned and vanished into the crowd that was milling around.</p>
<p>The presenter stood in silence and watched him walk away.</p>
<p>He looked down at his cell phone, looked up at the cell tower he could see in the distance, thought about his own family and then pressed a speed dial button on the phone.</p>
<p>“Hi, honey”, he said when his wife answered, “We need to talk about a few things.”</p>
<p>To be continued.
<p>
<hr>
<p>© 2017 – Harry Tucker – All Rights Reserved
<p><b>Addendum - When the Data is Embarrassing (June 9, 2017)</b></p>
<p>In a report released this week regarding the fire at Fort McMurray last year, a number of embarrassing things were revealed leading up to and during the catastrophe. Had you asked people if they were ready to fight a fire, they would have said "yes" with great certainty. Despite this assertion, whoever was in charge of coordinating readiness failed Fort McMurray. The people, on the other hand, rose to the occasion as humans often do. What are the lessons here? Details regarding the report can be found here - <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/alberta-politics/communication+gaps+meant+province+poorly+prepared+fight/13434833/story.html" target="_blank">Fort McMurray wildfire reaction marred by communication gaps, says report</a> (Calgary Herald).
<p><strong>Blog Post Background / Supporting Data</strong>
<p>The title of this post is a quote from Morris Kline.
<p>Interestingly enough, this conversation actually took place a couple of years ago at an actual “emergency preparedness and planning expo”.
<p>The facts cited by the “thin man” are true. The possibility of disaster from a hurricane in New Orleans, the likelihood of an event like 9/11, the nuclear disaster in Japan, death of passengers by pilot suicide, and other items have all been evaluated and discarded for the reasons given – statistical unlikelihood, the cost to address and the political damage that could arise should such things be disclosed before they happen.
<p>The facts regarding the cell phone system are also true.
<p>How one prepares for an emergency, whether it be man-made, from Mother Nature, from outer space or from any other source, depends on how much knowledge one has. And by the way, emergencies are not limited to large scale disasters in our society. Emergencies can also come in the form of problems with relationships, in business, in personal health, in financial health and the like.
<p>Probability of occurrence is only a small part of preparation.
<p>Time, energy and money to prepare for or prevent the event are important considerations also.
<p>The government’s public promotion of preparedness and how it considers risks ends there.
<p>However, the scale and impact of the event is equally important when evaluating what one should prepare for. Many times when we are overrun by something, it is because we knew there was a possibility of it occurring but we ignored it for the reasons discussed in this post. <b>It is the thing that we choose to ignore rather than a surprise that often presents the greatest difficulties for us.</b>
<p>Aristotle often referred to a life well-lived as one that finds the golden mean of excess. For example, courage is the golden mean between rashness and cowardice.
<p>The golden mean for emergency preparedness falls between doing nothing and exhibiting extreme paranoia. It can only be found when one informs one’s self instead of relying on data presented by someone with an ulterior motive.
<p>Are you informed for the reason of acquiring knowledge or do you only allow others to inform you based on their needs, intentions and motives?
<p>The answer to this question will determine how prepared you are when, not if, a major event happens in our near or distant future.
<p>Do you care?
<p>How important is your family’s health and safety to you?
<p>What do you need to do, if anything?
<p><strong>Series Origin</strong>
<p>This series, a departure from my usual musings, is inspired as a result of conversations with former senior advisors to multiple Presidents of the United States, senior officers in the US Military and other interesting folks as well as my own professional background as a Wall St. / Fortune 25 strategy advisor and large-scale technology architect.
<p>While this musing is just “fiction” (note the quotes) and a departure from my musings on technology, strategy, politics and society, as a strategy guy, I do everything for a reason and with a measurable outcome in mind. :-)
<p>This “fictional” musing is a continuation of the #1206 series noted <a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/p/the-1206-series.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<p><Strong>Related musings:</Strong></p>
<p><ul>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2016/05/fort-mcmurray-lessons-learned-and.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Fort McMurray - Lessons Learned and Hopefully Not Lost</a> - May 8, 2016</li>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2015/02/when-emergency-preparedness-meets.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">When Emergency Preparedness Meets Reality</a> - February 25, 2016</li>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-game-of-emergency.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">The Game of Emergency Preparedness–Studying the Wrong Rules</a> - May 5, 2014</li>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2014/01/newfoundland-rolling-blackouts-and.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Newfoundland, Rolling Blackouts and Preparedness</a> - January 3, 2014</li>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2013/11/obamacare-duck-and-cover-part-2.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Obamacare–Harbinger of Doom?</a> - November 19, 2013</li>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2012/11/lessons-from-sandyare-we-listening.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Lessons from Sandy–Are We Listening?</a> - November 1, 2012</li>
<li><a href="http://harrytucker.blogspot.com/2011/08/irene-and-media-leave-millions-of-minds.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Irene and the Media Leave Millions of Minds Devastated and in Ruins</a> - August 29, 2011</li>
</ul></p>
Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1005196875375123554.post-25930506791579431122017-04-24T11:31:00.002-06:002017-04-27T11:52:14.408-06:00The Innocence of a Child–Seeing Unlimited Possibilities<blockquote>
<p><em>In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. - Friedrich Nietzsche</em></p>
<p><em>There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men. - John Locke</em></p></blockquote>
<p>When I was a child, I was challenged with a restless mind – a mind that roamed over an unlimited number of academic subjects. I couldn’t acquire enough knowledge, having read entire encyclopedia sets, studied military history and Roman and Greek history by the time I was 10 years old.</p>
<p>It was a mind that dared to dream, when being on a breakaway during a hockey game on the marsh, I could imagine that I had just taken a pass from Montreal Canadiens’ great Larry Robinson in game 7 of the finals against our archenemy, the Boston Bruins.</p>
<p>It created without fear of embarrassment of what others thought when I played with my Tonkas in the the sandbox, making the all-important sounds of engines, signal lights (dinker, dinker, of course) and even vocalizing the exchanges between the “drivers” of the trucks.</p>
<p>It created adventure where at the age of 7, I wandered around the car ferry John Guy on trips to my ancestral home of Bell Island as I pretended I was a member of the crew monitoring the status of the ferry. It didn’t seem obvious to me at the time that adults observing me knew that I wasn’t a member of the crew.</p>
<p>My childhood wasn’t perfect or without pain, but few people’s youth is.</p>
<p>As I reflected on these and other thoughts yesterday during Quiet Hour (a personal daily ritual of reflection, contemplation and planning), I emerged and presented a challenge to all of my teams. In a nutshell, the challenge was this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Describe a favorite thing you did as a child or a favorite memory that still brings happiness – something that made you come alive then and that brought joy to your childhood.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>There was, as always, a method to my madness in instigating such an unusual conversation.</p>
<p>With the obvious exceptions of children who bore great pain and anguish in their childhood, many of us are blessed to have lived pretty decent childhoods. We saw the world differently as children.</p>
<p>We were likely less biased, judgmental and skeptical (unless poorly formed by our parents or scarred by difficulty).</p>
<p>We were often less fearful and more open to adventure and possibility (again, with the same caveats).</p>
<p>We were (hopefully but not always) more accepting of others.</p>
<p>Most of us dared to dream impossible things for our futures.</p>
<p>And yet somewhere between then and now, many of us have acquired the baggage of fear of others, fear of how others perceive us, distrust, diminished spirit of adventure, diminished belief in potential, fear (not just understanding) of where the world is going, fear of disappointing others and a slew of other concerns, all of which have created a great disconnect between how we imagined our potential and how we live today.</p>
<p>All because we have allowed the difficulties of Life or the diminished outlook and beliefs of others to impair how we see our own potential, gifts and dreams.</p>
<p>I have told a lot of people over the years that I don’t care what others think of what I say or do (many of my colleagues marvel over this – I don’t know why). I don’t present this as a license to hurt others or a right to run roughshod over people, places or things. In fact, my belief that someday I will stand in judgment for everything I say or do prevents me from doing this.</p>
<p>However, I have found that the sharpest criticisms (excluding people correcting poor behavior on my part) of what I have said or done in the past are often from the mouths of people going nowhere in their own lives, people living with great insecurity or fear or people who have their own competing agenda and so they seek to diminish what they perceive as competition.</p>
<p>None of these are valid reasons for why I am not permitted to dream, to seek adventure, to create, to collaborate and to love.</p>
<p>And they are not valid reasons for you either.</p>
<p><strong>The Bottom Line</strong></p>
<p>A lot of people are going to their end of days with their song still inside them, unshared because of fear imposed on them by the diminished outlooks of other people or because they have not learned the lessons contained within the difficulties in their Life.</p>
<p>I believe the world is worse off because of this.</p>
<p>My great friend, author and psychotherapist, <a href="http://leonardszymczak.com/" target="_blank">Leonard Szymczak</a> once encouraged me to think about what I would say to “Little Harry” if I could somehow go back in time and share my lessons learned with the young person who dared to dream and in exchange, I could learn from the innocence of perception as shared by “little Harry”.</p>
<p>The question I asked of my teams is a variant of this suggestion by Leonard.</p>
<p>As I read and listen to the beautiful, powerful stories shared to me by my team members, I feel a responsibility to make sure that in some way, I encourage their childhood dreams and potential to be manifested in the projects we are collaborating on.</p>
<p>By encouraging a different way of seeing things, we also see new possibilities in how we create and manifest our potential, less inhibited by the baggage we have acquired, seeing things in awe and wonderment while simultaneously being more enabled by the wisdom (hopefully) we have acquired.</p>
<p>What dreams did you have as child?</p>
<p>What brought you joy?</p>
<p>Some of you are living your dreams and experiencing that joy as adults – be grateful for that opportunity.</p>
<p>Many of you are not blessed to live this way.</p>
<p>Are the reasons for not living your joy and not folding it into your personal and professional experiences as adults legitimate ones or are they only excuses?</p>
<p>Would your Life be any different if you decided to bring back some childhood innocence (not ignorance) into your adult Life?</p>
<p>Are you sure?</p>
<p>How do you know?</p>
<p>In service and servanthood,</p>
<p>Harry</p>
<p><b>Addendum - Robert Greene's Views On Seeing Things as a Child</b></p>
<p><blockquote><em>In his apprenticeship in the jungles of the Amazon that would later lead to his career as a groundbreaking linguist, Daniel Everett came upon a truth that has application far beyond his field of study. What prevents people from learning is not the subject itself–the human mind has limitless capabilities–but rather certain learning disabilities that end to fester and grow in our minds as we get older. These include a sense of smugness and superiority whenever we encounter something alien to our ways, as well as rigid ideas about what is real or true, often indoctrinated in us by schooling or family. If we feel like we know something, our minds close off to other possibilities. We see reflections of the truth we have already assumed. Such feelings of superiority are often unconscious and stem from a fear of what is different or unknown. We are rarely aware of this, and often imagine ourselves to be paragons of impartiality.</p>
<p>Children are generally free of these handicaps. They are dependent upon adults for their survival and naturally feel inferior. This sense of inferiority gives them a hunger to learn. Through learning, they can bridge the gap and not feel so helpless. Their minds are completely open; they pay greater attention. This is why children can learn so quickly and so deeply. Unlike other animals, we humans retain what is known as neoteny–mental and physical traits of immaturity–well into our adult years. We have the remarkable capability of returning to a childlike spirit, especially in moments in which we must learn something. Well into our fifties and beyond, we can return to that sense of wonder and curiosity, reviving our youth and apprenticeships.</p>
<p>Understand: when you enter a new environment, your task is to learn and absorb as much as possible. For that purpose you must try to revert to a childlike feeling of inferiority–the feeling that others know much more than you and that you are dependent upon them to learn and safely navigate your apprenticeship. You drop all of your preconceptions about an environment or field, any lingering feelings of smugness. You have no fears. You interact with people and participate in the culture as deeply as possible. You are full of curiosity. Assuming this sensation of inferiority, your mind will open up and you will have a hunger to learn. This position is of course only temporary. You are reverting to a feeling of dependence, so that within five to ten years you can learn enough to finally declare your independence and enter full adulthood.</em></blockquote></p>
<p><b>Source:</b> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Robert-Greene-ebook/dp/B007V65PBK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493315168&sr=8-1&keywords=mastery++robert+greene" target="_blank">Mastery</a> by Robert Greene. A powerful analysis of how one moves from apprentice to master in all walks of life, personal and professional. This is a highly recommended read!</p>Harry Tuckerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10329922320940535781noreply@blogger.com0