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What's New
It's been months since we published a newsletter and updated this What's New space. Where have we been? In the last edition, we announced our impending marriage. That happened as the finest example I have ever experienced of a community coming together to create a shared event. Our continuing gratitude for all of those who showed up and made a real difference. Late last fall we went on our honeymoon, visiting the Czech Republic, where we fell in love with Prague and the Czech countryside, and Italy, where we split our time between Rome, Umbria, and Tuscany. We watched the olive harvest, met delightful people, and visited St. Francis' Hermitage, where we planted an insignificant-seeming acorn that might grow to take its place among its centuries-old ancestors. The background over the last months has been a noisy combination of rattling sabers and slinking markets. We have been visiting with many in our community who have been displaced by these events. Our business, too, has felt the uncertainty which seems to have overtaken the unbridled optimism of the late nineties. We find ourselves focusing our business upon reassuring and cooperating. As Yahoo senior executive Tim Sanders says in a recent Fast Company piece, and in his newly published book, Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends (Crown Business ), competition seems to be the chief casualty of these troubling times. See his recent Fast Company piece here: link See, too, my recent piece, Improving Process In Troubling Times, originally published in the February 2003, Minnesota Council for Quality Stake holder Update newsletter. link The Blind Men and the Elephant - Mastering Project WorkIn August of 2002, I entered into an agreement with Berrett-Koehler Publishers of San Francisco, to publish my book, The Blind Men and the Elephant, Mastering Project Work- How To Turn Fuzzy Responsibilities Into Meaningful Results. Working with Berrett-Koehler has been a delight every step of the way. If you'd like to see a description of a congruent company, peruse the Berrett-Koehler web site and read their story. linkMy book is scheduled for an April, 2003 release and will be available on Amazon, Powell's, Barnes and Noble, Borders, your favorite local bookstore, or directly from the publisher here. Those of you who have attended my Mastering Projects Workshop will find a few familiar stories in this book, and many, many new ones. Those who have not attended MPW will find a taste of that experience inside. The book discusses the Master/Slave relationships often experienced on projects and presents some strategies for co-opting such systems so they can work. The book tells what you can do without anyone else's permission to improve the quality of your project experiences, and so the quality of your project and its results. It does not empower so much as remind the reader of the power they already have (and always did have) to influence the quality of their experience and their projects outcome. Here's a brief excerpt: FESTINA LENTE - HASTEN SLOWLYThere's always someone at the start of every project. Someone's not ready, while everyone else strains at the reins. When we set to work, this one drags his feet. He complains about irrelevant things and seems not to be hastening slowly or otherwise. He's a pain in the butt.Most ignore him and get on with their real work. Some try to push him off his dime. Sometimes they succeed in getting him moving with the others, but he engages hesitantly, as if he has left something important behind. Later he will seem to have forgotten about whatever felt so very important at the beginning, but the memory of it will occasionally return to inconvenience him, and his reaction then will inconvenience those around him. We might be taught to hasten slowly at the beginning, to cautiously consider before proceeding, but most of us quickly figure out how to ditch any roadblock between us and full speed ahead, leaving the careful considerer behind. We take a deft sidestep or an innocent about-face, but we usually avoid the wall that so evidently blocks progress. A wall marks the start of every project. Pay close attention, look carefully, or you'll miss it. After you've seen it, you might wish you could make it disappear. This wall can become a useful feature of your project, but it always first appears as an inconveniencing barrier to meaningful progress. We are taught to hasten slowly for one very good reason - not to encumber progress, but to acknowledge and address one insignificant-seeming issue that later might seem anything but insignificant. We are not simply milling around as we struggle to make our first steps more deliberate, we are making our purpose explicit. Without an explicit purpose, project work tends to shift from raging enthusiasm into utter meaningless. Projects make this shift so imperceptibly and so inexorably that we are utterly disabled from slowing down to discover our purpose once we achieve full momentum. We will have one devil of a time recapturing that moment should we manage to hasten quickly through it. From The Blind Men and the Elephant-Mastering Project Work © 2003 by David A. Schmaltz Berrett-Koehler Publishers. San Francisco. ISBN: 1-57675-253-4 For a longer description, some endorsing comments, and to order from
Amazon link
here
BeyondLeadershipIn my last What's New, I announced the end of the Weinberg and Weinberg Problem Solving Leadership Workshop, a tradition that I had been associated with as a participant and a faculty member for over ten years. Amy and I held several long conversations with many in the True North and PSL communities about the need to fill the void left by PSL. Since PSL was truly one of a kind, we don't aspire to replace it. We found broad interest in the idea of creating a wholly new offering, though. With the advice of many long-time supporters, we have built upon what we've learned from PSL, combined it with the best of our other learnings and experiences, to create a leadership program that promises to meet the needs of both the True North and PSL communities. Our BeyondLeadership program (it really goes far beyond 'just' a workshop) includes working with sponsors to help set objectives for strategically leveraging the program for the organization as well as for the individual participant. This includes selecting and preparing candidates, before and after residential coaching, and an intense five and a half day residential experience.BeyondLeadership departs from the framework that teachers are the source of leadership training. We've designed, instead, a program that focuses upon the individual's ability to discover their own, unique leadership style and how to powerfully deploy that unique style in their real world. We will pilot this experience in September, 2003, at the Sylvia
Beach Hotel on the beautiful Oregon coast. If you would like more information
on sponsoring participants for this program, contact
us. If you'd like to know more about it, use these links to download
the summary
or full
.pdf brochures.
Project Weblog - ProjBlogI've been fiddling with the idea of creating a weblog of emerging project ideas. I have not announced it yet, but I have a prototype on the Heretics' Forum. Please take a look and comment there, if you'd like. It seems that I'm continually running across some absurdity in the public perception of project work, and this might be the place to comment and prompt some chatter. Here's the link.Thought Leader GatheringsLast year, Amy and I subscribed to the most remarkable series of experiences, sponsored by Craig and Patricia Neal of the Heartland Institute. These gatherings are the practical application of dialogue and circle meeting technology, which means that they are, unlike most of the workshops and seminars we attend, organized in ways that encourages the creativity of each participant. We have attended five of these gatherings now, some in Minneapolis and some in Silicon Valley, and have never left one anything but moved at the power and creativity at our disposal. They are inspiring, empowering, and immensely reassuring gatherings.I cannot fully convey here the power and benefit of these experiences.
In these gatherings we have met some of the most influential people
in business today: Meg Wheatley, Peter Block, Marjorie Kelly, Elisabet
Satoris, and Marilyn Tam. Follow this link
and considering joining us in these remarkable glimpses into the future
we are actively creating.
AppreciationsI usually list my appreciations in the body of the newsletter, but my story ran long in this edition, so I will list them here.Amy Schwab for choosing to make this part of the journey with me. Dr. Patricia Snipp for facilitating the last PSL with me. Marco and Marina, the Estrucian, for welcoming us to Roma and for introducing us to Napoli! Matt Riley for taking the leap and coming to the last PSL. Liesl Andrico for taking interest. Rich and Elizabeth Van Horn for putting up with us, er, for putting us up. Elissa Rabellino for the light hand preserving my voice. The BeyondLeadership advisory group for listening and for tolerating the long silence starting up. Be careful when my voice returns. Patti Danos for inviting this blind man in. Brian Lassiter for publishing the piece on troubling times.
Reading To Consider
"The Aristotelian "mean" was no compromise, but rather a state so different from either polarity that it was in essence the opposite of both polarities." Have you ever, in a moment of confusion or desperation, gone to a library or a bookstore and simply let synchronicity guide your eye? Several of the most profound discoveries of my life have occurred while laterally sliding along library stacks or bookstore shelves. Last summer, I visited my local bookstore, Earthlight Books in Walla Walla, which is one of the two or three best bookstores I've ever known, in one of those confused states. We were having a gathering of some of our community at our home, and the conversations were sticking. I recommended that we all stop by Earthlight and see what a little random browsing might bring. It brought this delightful book. I am no friend of time management books. Time has always seemed like a wholly unmanageable entity to me. I realize that this makes me an anomaly in today's world, where time is routinely sliced, spliced, and spindled as if it is a physical presence rather than an abstract concept. I've found a sympathetic and understanding ear in this author, someone who seems to have faced the same confusions I have found and managed to make more meaning than I thought possible from his relationship with time. He introduces the calendar designed in the French Revolution, which divides the year into 360 equal parts, comprised of twelve months of 30 days each, where the fifth day of the fifth month, for instance, falls on the same day of the week each year. A calendar that is easily manipulated with mathematics, and better tracks with the seasons. He uses this framework to discuss time's history and the dilemmas we all face in our experiences with time. I for several month after acquiring this book, assaulted my friends,
family, and community members with pithy quotes, of which this book seems
to have an inexhaustible supply. My copy is now so dog-eared and filled
with little notes to myself as to be almost unclosable. Yet each time I
open it, I discover another universal truth, quotable quote, or shocking
idea.
Peter Block
Imagine a world-renowned consultant who, when asked how long his proposed initiative will take to implement, replies, "Longer than you would ever tolerate." What should we do with a well-respected practitioner who, when asked how much his proposed initiative will cost, replies, "More than you would ever willingly spend." These and more shocking practices form the guts of Peter's story in this delightful and empowering book. Of course, all of us experienced practitioners understand that the above questions never have discrete answers. Those asking them understand this, too, just as we do. At some deep, shared level, we all understand the artifice we employ to talk ourselves into doing what we know is right. We justify, even though the right action is rarely justifiable. We conspire with each other to either initiate or avoid what we know is right action, under the guises of cost-justification and path projection, also known as project management. The truth lies within us as well as between us. Some will say that only someone with this author's reputation could make such audacious comments and survive. His story here centers around a level of authenticity that is too often discounted. He asks, "If you knew the world would end tomorrow, would you plant a tree today?" Well, would you? I had the immense pleasure last summer of attending two of Peter's presentations in the Bay area. His presentation at the July Thought Leader Gathering (see above) and, later that evening, at an Essential Dialogue co-sponsored by the Heartland Institute, Presideo Dialogues, and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, left those attending vibrating with the possibilities that more genuine relationships might bring to this world. I cannot recommend this book and its message highly enough.
Marjorie Kelly
Even though I have for most of my adult life, made my living working with large corporations, I've always felt that there was something kind of fishy about how corporations operate. There's this sense of entering an exclusive club, one run for the benefit of a small number of acknowledged stake holders, and I've rarely felt included in that number. Marjorie Kelly has for a decade now been publishing Business Ethics magazine, a journal imagining different methods of governing corporations. In this book, she expands her thoughts to provide another way of looking at corporate ownership and citizenship. She believes that the present form of corporate governance imprisons corporations and those working within them, suffocating the real opportunities offered by a more genuine market democracy. She claims, and backs up her claims, that the pursuit of stockholder earnings co-opts the real power and genius offered by a market economy. She asserts that focusing upon making profit for stockholders to the exclusion of everyone else's interests is a form of discrimination based upon property and wealth. She makes a powerful argument for new property rights, new forms of corporate citizenship in corporate governance, and new ways of looking at corporate performance built upon democratic and market principles. I think Marjorie's ideas have application to how we organize and guide
our projects, too. The community our projects serve is wider and deeper
than the sponsor and the customer, as we have been demonstrating in our
workshops for years. Those projects able to leverage the real power of
basic democratic principles thrive on the inherent power of their community,
while their aristocratic counterparts natter about cost over-runs. This
book says a lot about how it might be at a corporate level, and how you
might make it at a project level.
Pray for peace and understanding. David A. Schmaltz
Copyright © 1999-2005 True
North pgs, Inc.
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