Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

I knew nothing about Dreiser or Sister Carrie when I picked up this book. My paperback copy, indeed, belongs technically to my wife, but it got mixed in with all the books I plan to read when our marriage and single family home brought us together.

I regret not getting to it sooner, as Sister Carrie is a remarkable novel and, I suspect, Theodore Dreiser may be a remarkable author.

In Sister Carrie Dreiser, the faithful reporter, presented the facts of existence in a segment of a new American city as he had known them. True, he had written a novel about a girl who, with few qualms, lives with one man and then leaves him for a more glittering seducer. Seduction, adultery, bigamy, and theft are presented as natural actions on which it is useless to moralize. Worse still, no one is punished for them. These actions had been events in the life of Dreiser’s sister; if the events were true, why should they not be touched up a bit and made into fiction? Dreiser had no idea that he had written an immoral book and that there might be trouble ahead for it.

This is from Willard Thorp’s afterword which, coming at the end of the novel, helped me appreciate something that I suspected while reading the novel itself.

She conceived a true estimate of Drouet. To her, and indeed to all the world, he was a nice, good-hearted man. There was nothing evil in the fellow. He gave her the money out of a good heart--out of a realization of her want. He would not have given the same amount to a poor young man, but we must not forget that a poor young man could not, in the nature of things, have appealed to him like a poor young girl. Femininity affected his feelings. He was the creature of an inborn desire.

Sister Carrie is not a moralizing novel; a novel that takes pains to ensure that the virtuous end up flourishing while the wicked suffer and atrophy. The characters are not good or evil. They and their actions, instead, are natural. Creatures of inborn desire. Natural processes unfolding as natural processes do.

Yet no beggar could have caught his eye and said, “My God, mister, I’m starving,” but he would gladly have handed out what was considered the proper portion to give beggars and thought no more about it. There would have been no speculation, no philosophizing. He had no mental process in him worthy the dignity of either of those terms. In his good clothes and fine health, he was a merry, unthinking moth of the lamp. Deprived of his position, and struck by a few of the involved and baffling forces which sometimes play upon man, he would have been as helpless as Carrie--as helpless, as nonunderstanding, as pitiable, if you will, as she.

And in this natural world, success and failure are not tied to moral precept, nor even moral action. Involved and baffling forces sometimes play upon man, and they, not man’s philosophical speculations about them, determine who succeeds and who fails. Who lives and who dies.

It is a theme Dreiser returns to again and again as he introduces the characters that populate his narrative; as he does above about Carrie’s first seducer, Drouet, and as he does below, most expansively, about Carrie herself.

Among the forces that sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is not yet wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life--he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected. We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free will, his free will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance. He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against them. As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces. In this intermediate stage he wavers--neither drawn in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free will. He is even a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other--a creature of incalculable variability. We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free will and instinct shall have been adjusted, when perfect understanding has given the former the power to replace the latter entirely, man will no longer vary. The needle of understanding will yet point steadfast and unwavering to the distant pole of truth.

In Carrie--as in how many of our worldlings do they not?--instinct and reason, desire and understanding, were at war for the mastery. She followed whither her craving led. She was as yet more drawn than she drew.

It’s a novel with a thesis and, despite some fossilized allusions to “free will” and “good and evil,” it’s a radical thesis at that. In this way, Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s first novel, published in 1900, was wildly ahead of its time. As Tharp describes in his afterword...

Why had Mrs. Doubleday and most of the reviewers in the genteel journals been so horrified by Sister Carrie? Why did the word get around that Dreiser had written a “dirty” book? After all, seduction has been an item in the stock-in-trade of novelists since the first novel in English, Pamela, appeared in 1740. But there were regulatory conventions and taboos, all of which Dreiser had ignored. Seducers must be punished or reformed. Yet Carrie’s first lover, Drouet, is more prosperous at the end of the novel than at the beginning. Hurstwood, who steals Carrie from Drouet, does, it is true, go slowly down to poverty and suicide, but Dreiser is careful to explain the reasons for his decline. His seduction of Carrie is only an incidental cause. If he had been a young man, able to start life over in New York, he might, we gather, have become again a manager of a saloon as elegant as Fitzgerald and Moy’s.

Convention permitted a number of solutions for the case of the fallen woman. Carrie might have had to endure a series of terrible misfortunes, in order that she could be redeemed in the end by a good man. Or she might have gone irremediably to the bad. She might have entered the limbo of the demimonde, where she could be sealed off from decent people, prospering, but secretly and constantly grieving. Dreiser used none of these approved recipes in cooking up Carrie’s seduction. Already in love with the gauds of the big city, unable to find work which will provide even her minimum wants, she falls like a ripe plum into Drouet’s kind hands. There is no struggle. There is no passion. A steak dinner and “two soft, green, handsome ten-dollar bills” do the trick.

What most particularly shocked many of the first readers of Sister Carrie was the matter-of-factness of the seduction. Dreiser warned them in Chapter 1 that it was inevitable. “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” Here is the shocker. Dreiser is implying that in the throbbing big cities of the land there are many--how many?--Sister Carries. This no right-thinking American was prepared to believe. Soon Carrie compounds her felony by deserting Drouet and eloping with Hurstwood, a man with a family. Again there is no extenuating passion. It is simply in Carrie’s nature to move up and Hurstwood is, to her, more refined than Drouet, more a man of the world. “The constant drag to something better was not to be denied.” As Hurstwood slowly sinks downward to destitution and suicide, Carrie again moves up, this time into the world of the stage. Instead of punishment, in the end she is accorded success, of a kind, as the charming little Carrie Madenda, who has smiled her way out of the chorus line.

But Dreiser, in the end, actually does have some moralizing to lay at Carrie’s feet--not with condescension because of her sexual freedoms, but with a kind of sympathy because of where her inborn desires have taken her and for what purpose.

For throughout the novel, throughout the several transitions that Tharp has summarized for us in his afterword, Carrie is chasing something, dazzled by it, pursuing it with longing and naive jealousy, as she does here with her initial glimpse of Broadway and the society that surrounds it.

Carrie stepped along easily enough after they got out of the car at Thirty-fourth Street, but soon fixed her eyes upon the lovely company which swarmed by and with them as they proceeded. She noticed suddenly that Mrs. Vance’s manner had rather stiffened under the gaze of handsome men and elegantly dressed ladies, whose glances were not modified by any rules of propriety.

Wait. Stop right there. Whose glances were not modified by any rules of propriety. Dreiser fills his novel with wonderful turns of phrase like this, capturing base thoughts and actions in the idiom unique to his time and culture. Perhaps my favorite comes when Dreiser describes the thoughts of a young man who is “favorably impressed by Carrie’s looks.”

“Good-looking,” he said to himself, and proceeded to visions of condescensions on her part which were exceedingly flattering to himself.

Glorious. But back to Carrie’s reaction to Broadway society.

To stare seemed the proper and natural thing. Carrie found herself stared at and ogled. Men in flawless topcoats, high hats, and silver-headed walking sticks elbowed near and looked too often into conscious eyes. Ladies rustled by in dresses of stiff cloth, shedding affected smiles and perfume. Carrie noticed among them the sprinkling of goodness and the heavy percentage of vice. The rouged and powdered cheeks and lips, the scented hair, the large, misty, and languorous eye, were common enough. With a start she awoke to find that she was in fashion’s crowd, on parade in a show place--and such a show place! Jewelers’ windows gleamed along the path with remarkable frequency. Florist shops, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners--all followed in rapid succession. The street was full of coaches. Pompous doormen in immense coats, shiny brass belts and buttons, waited in front of expensive salesrooms. Coachmen in tan boots, white tights, and blue jackets waited obsequiously for the mistresses of carriages who were shopping inside. The whole street bore the flavor of riches and show, and Carrie felt that she was not of it. She could not, for the life of her, assume the attitude and smartness of Mrs. Vance, who, in her beauty, was all assurance. She could only imagine that it must be evident to many that she was the less handsomely dressed of the two, It cut her to the quick, and she resolved that she would not come here again until she looked better. At the same time she longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal. Ah, then she would be happy!

Ah, then she would be happy! Time and again throughout the novel this is Carrie’s lodestone, the weight that pulls her forward and drives all the narrative action. She leaves her hometown in Wisconsin, goes to Chicago, gets connected with Drouet, leaves him for Hurstwood, eventually leaves him for the stage--all because she is chasing a happiness she is unable to find within herself. Happiness, to Carrie, is always something shiny and distant.

How vexing it is for her, then, to meet a young man amidst all her desired glitz and splendor who represents the absolute opposite ideal.

As the waiter bowed and scraped about, felt the dishes to see if they were hot enough, brought spoons and forks, and did all those little attentive things calculated to impress the luxury of the situation upon the diner, Ames also leaned slightly to one side and told her of Indianapolis in an intelligent way. He really had a very bright mind, which was finding its chief development in electrical knowledge. His sympathies for other forms of information, however, and for types of people, were quick and warm. The red glow on his head gave it a sandy tinge and put a bright glint in his eye. Carrie noticed all these things as he leaned toward her and felt exceedingly young. This man was far ahead of her. He seemed wiser than Hurstwood, saner and brighter than Drouet. He seemed innocent and clean, and she thought that he was exceedingly pleasant. She noticed, also, that his interest in her was a far-off one. She was not in his life, nor any of the things that touched his life, and yet now, as he spoke of these things, they appealed to her.

“I shouldn’t care to be rich,” he told her, as the dinner proceeded and the supply of food warmed up his sympathies; “not rich enough to spend my money this way.”

“Oh, wouldn’t you?” said Carrie, the, to her, new attitude forcing itself distinctly upon her for the first time.

“No,” he said. “What good would it do? A man doesn’t need this sort of thing to be happy.”

Carrie thought of this doubtfully; but, coming from him, it had weight with her.

“He probably could be happy,” she thought to herself. “All alone. He’s so strong.”

But Ames does not become a major figure in Carrie’s life. She does not cling to him the way she clings first to Drouet and then to Hurstwood. She sees Ames only once or twice more, and he seems to pass in the night, Dreiser signaling, I think, that the simple satisfaction that comes with happiness in oneself is beyond Carrie’s acquisition and appreciation.

But, as Tharp tells us, Carrie neither suffers the prescribed fate of her moral choices nor succumbs to the destitution and despair of her inborn desires. In the end, rather, she achieves success and, if not happiness, certainly a kind of simple wisdom.

Some of Dreiser’s closing paragraphs are worth revisiting, as they seem to summarize both his overarching theme and how Carrie has represented it throughout his narrative.

And now Carrie had attained that which in the beginning seemed life’s object, or, at least, such fraction of it as human beings ever attain of their original desires. She could look about on her gowns and carriage, her furniture and bank account. Friends there were, as the world takes it--those who would bow and smile in acknowledgement of her success. For these she had once craved. Applause there was, and publicity--once far off, essential things, but now grown trivial and indifferent. Beauty also--her type of loveliness--and yet she was lonely. In her rocking chair she sat, when not otherwise engaged--singing and dreaming.

That’s the story. Now, the theme.

Oh, the tangle of human life! How dimly as yet we see. Here was Carrie, in the beginning poor, unsophisticated, emotional; responding with desire to everything most lovely in life, yet finding herself turned as by a wall. Laws to say: “Be allured, if you will, by everything lovely, but draw not nigh unless by righteousness.” Convention to say: “You shall not better your situation save by honest labor.” If honest labor be unremunerative and difficult to endure; if it be the long, long road which never reaches beauty, but wearies the feet and the heart; if the drag to follow beauty be such that one abandons the admired way, taking rather the despised path leading to her dreams quickly, who shall cast the first stone? Not evil, but longing for that which is better more often directs the steps of the erring. Not evil, but goodness more often allures the feeling mind unused to reason.

Some many turns of phrase; so worth remembering. The long, long road which never reaches beauty. Not evil, but longing...more often directs the steps of the erring. This is Dreiser’s theme and he has created one of those rare masterpieces that fully incorporate a theme into a narrative plot.

Although he waxes a little epic at the very end, poetically but unnecessarily summarizing his intent.

Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward, onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.

Hmmm. Might be worth rethinking whether Carrie truly prospers as a result of her actions--moral or otherwise.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Limitations of Crowd-Funding for Associations

In many ways, associations are the original crowd-funded organizations. Long before the term became popular and proliferated across digital kingdoms like Kickstarter and GoFundMe, associations were gathering money from many to support programs and services that were valued by all. The economies of scale were and still are powerful. If everyone chips in a few bucks, then we can all benefit from a service that none of us are willing or able to fund on our own.

But this model has its limitations. I've written before about two essential relationships that an association typically develops with its members. In the first, the transactional relationship, where the member pays the association a fee for service, the crowd-funding model reigns supreme. The more leverage an association can create through crowd-funding its dues revenue, the more satisfied the members seem to be. Look at how little I pay in membership dues, and how much the association gives me in return! Not just services I can get elsewhere, but, indeed, some I get can't anywhere else.

In the second relationship, however, the aspirational one, the logic and expectations of crowd-funding can often work against the association. In this relationship, the association is not delivering a program or service to its members, it is instead pursuing some aspirational goal on behalf of the industry or profession it represents. Advocating for friendly legislation, perhaps, or developing a training program for future practitioners, or conducting consumer-based marketing for the profession.

There is usually wide support for these activities from the association's membership. There is a recognition that a portion of their dues or donations support these activities, and the members' representatives on the Board of Directors often use their governance role to codify specific strategic objectives related to these activities.

But in the pursuit of these aspirational objectives, the association will sometimes find itself taking actions that inure to the benefit of a small subset of the members, or, worse, are interpreted to go against the short-term interests of most of the membership. I'm not even talking about the willful manipulation of the association's instruments to bring those conditions about (although that sometimes happens, too). I'm talking about people--volunteers and staff alike--acting with the best of intentions. The legislation requires less-friendly compromises to pass, or the training program results only in better hires for those close to the training site, or the consumer-based marketing can be placed in some markets but not others.

When those things happen, members who find themselves on the wrong side may rightfully question what their dues dollars are being spent on, and they might be quite vociferous about it. If they look at the association through the lens of their transactional relationship to it, they won't like what they're seeing. They'll feel like they're getting to short end of the stick.

This is, in part, what makes the aspirational work of an association as difficult as it often is. On the transactional side, the value proposition is always clear. Even tiny or incomplete improvements are viewed positively, as the association slowly rolls out more and better transactional programs to all. On the aspirational side, however, these "baby steps" can be viewed as victories by some and as defeats by others, depending on how universally their benefits can be enjoyed.

It's a balancing act, then; one of many that association leaders have to walk. Make progress on these aspirational goals, but do it in a way that preserves the transactional relationship you have established with your members, and to which much of their loyalty to your organization is tied.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://www.eventmanagerblog.com/crowdfunding-for-events

The Distributed Periphery

I was flipping through the pages of a favorite book this week and came across the following quote:

The trick is to ... recognize that the power to achieve great things lies more in the work of the distributed periphery than in the inner workings of the center.

It's one of those leadership lessons that I need to remind myself of more often. Truly great organizations don't cluster leadership only in their inner circle; they distribute leadership throughout their entire system. This allows any piece of the organization, especially those pieces on the periphery, to make decisions, to take action, and to more immediately satisfy the needs of the organization's stakeholders.

But in reflecting anew on this quote, I came to realize that there is bias in its very phraseology. Although the term "distributed periphery" has a certain poetry to it, it betrays the inclusive spirit the quote is trying to convey. Different parts of an organization have different tasks to perform and responsibilities to uphold, and, frequently, organizations will perpetuate a set of hierarchies among those responsibilities; but it is only through the prism of those hierarchies can it be said that one part of the organization is the center and another part is the periphery.

In essence, that's what an organization will look like if you view it from the inside through its organization chart.

But if you ask an external stakeholder--a customer--what each part of the organization looks like, they are likely to offer a very different perspective. From that view, what you may call the distributed periphery may very well be the only part of the organization they touch. The only part that matters.

So the quote is not only a refreshing call to redouble your work of better distributing leadership and decision-making throughout your organization, it is also pointed reminder to view your organization the way your customers do. Not from the inside out, but from the outside in.

I think I'll start flipping through old books more often.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://www.archdaily.com/373422/outside-in-meir-lobaton-corona-ulli-heckmann

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Game is a book about children in adult situations, and for that, Card has evidently been heavily criticized.

I recall a letter to the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in which a woman who worked as a guidance counselor for gifted children reported that she had only picked up Ender’s Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book. She read it and loathed it. Of course, I wondered what kind of guidance counselor would hold her son’s tastes up to public ridicule, but the criticism that left me more flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic. They just don’t talk like that, she said. They don’t think like that.

That’s from the author’s introduction that appears in my “Author’s Definitive Edition” of Ender’s Game, and it’s evidently typical of the criticism the novel has received. But Card is unapologetic.

Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender’s Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality. In fact, the novel’s very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story’s vision of the world is so relentlessly plain. It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.

Yet I knew--I knew--that this was one of the truest things about Ender’s Game. In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me … to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult’s.

I’ll give Card props for sticking to his vision. Despite its critics, Ender’s Game remains one of the seminal works in all of science fiction. My delay is getting around to reading it is evidence more for my neglect of the genre than it is a commentary on its merits.

But whatever Card’s intentions for writing the book, having now read it I’d have to say that Ender and the other major characters in the novel have to be children, not to honor any intent expressed by the author, but simply because Ender’s Game, ultimately, is a book about growing up.

Ender Wiggin is six years old when the novel opens--a gifted child just as Card promised in his introduction--and he is recruited into Battle School, where children are trained to fight their society’s generations-old interstellar war. He’s recruited by a character named Colonel Graff, who, strangely, believes that Ender might be the only person in the universe that can actually win the damn thing. To test that belief, he subjects Ender to tougher and tougher challenges, risking both Ender’s life and the lives of the child soldiers that come to “fight” under Ender’s command. In this process, Graff is guided by a simple philosophy.

“Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way. He must believe, to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves. If he does not believe that, then he will never reach the peak of his abilities.”

And Ender’s story is very much one of waffling back and forth across the spectrum Graff and thus defined. Sometimes he is frightened and frantic for comfort.

He awoke in darkness, and he was afraid. Then he calmed himself by remembering that the teachers obviously valued him, or they wouldn’t be putting so much pressure on him; they wouldn’t let anything happen to him, nothing bad, anyway. Probably when the older kids attacked him in the bathroom years ago, there were teachers just outside the room, waiting to see what would happen; if things had got out of hand, they would have stepped in and stopped it. I probably could have sat there and done nothing, and they would have seen to it I came through all right. They’ll push me as hard as they can in the game, but outside the game they’ll keep me safe.

And sometimes he is stoic and resigned to his fate.

There was no doubt now in Ender’s mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

And it is in this waffling that Ender conducts his journey toward adulthood. He comes to understand the way society actually works, and it is neither the way he was told nor the way he would have designed it.

What am I doing? My first practice session, and I’m already bullying people the way Bonzo did. And Peter. Shoving people around. Picking on some poor little kid so the others’ll have somebody they all hate. Sickening. Everything I hated in a commander, and I’m doing it.

Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that’s so.

No, Ender. You don’t inevitably become whatever your first commander was, but the Game (or life) has rules, and those rules dictate certain behaviors, and those behaviors provide the key to the finite and predictable ways of winning.

Over and over he thought of the things he did and said in his first practice with his new army. Why couldn’t he talk like he always did in his evening practice group? No authority except excellence. Never had to give orders. His informal practice group didn’t have to learn to do things together. They didn’t have to develop a group feeling; they never had to learn how to hold together and trust each other in battle. They didn’t have to respond instantly to commands.

And, understanding it, he comes to master it and bend it to his own will.

And he could go to the other extreme, too. He could be as lax and incompetent as Rose the Nose, if he wanted. He could make stupid mistakes no matter what he did. He had to have discipline, and that meant demanding--and getting--quick, decisive obedience. He had to have a well-trained army, and that meant drilling the soldiers over and over again, long after they thought they had mastered a technique, until it was so natural to them that they didn’t have to think about it anymore.

By then he had finally accepted Graff’s conditions and all of its ramifications--even those Graff does not expect and cannot visualize. His journey complete, Ender, then only thirteen, is totally and irrevocably a grown-up.

But there is another way to understand Ender’s journey. Not a developmental journey but a spiritual one, where Ender grows out of his dependence on a belief in an all-powerful entity (God, fate, the universe, take your pick), and comes to rely fully on his own will and ability. In this interpretation, Ender’s older brother Peter comes to take on new metaphorical role. Always an antagonist to Ender, in this spiritual realm he comes to represent the forces of darkness and choas.

“Peter tortures squirrels. He stakes them out on the ground and skins them alive and sits and watches them until they die. He did that for a while, after Ender left; he doesn’t do it now. But he did it. If Ender knew that, if Ender saw him, I think that he’d--”

“He’d what? Rescue the squirrels? Try to heal them?”

“No, in those days you didn’t--undo what Peter did. You didn’t cross him. But Ender would be kind to squirrels. Do you understand? He’d feed them.”

“But if he fed them, they’d become tame, and that much easier for Peter to catch.”

Valentine began to cry again. “No matter what you do, it always helps Peter. Everything helps Peter, everything, you just can’t get away, no matter what.”

In line with the metaphor of a spiritual journey, Peter’s actions can first be ascribed to conscious, diabolical intent, but, as the novel progresses, slowly, Ender and those that surround Peter comes to understand that they are simply a manifestation of the entropic principle of the universe. Chaos reigns, and the wise (or mature) person will lose both his fear and his desire to conquer it.

On these two levels I found Ender’s Game an interesting read. But that doesn’t mean I liked it. I didn’t. A lot of it felt forced, and the fact that Ender, his friends, and his antagonists were all children was pretty much lost on me because they simply didn’t act like any children I knew, despite Card’s constant reminders that they are, in fact, children.

Here’s how it breaks down, as simply as I can say it. Ender et. al. are children in the sense that they are young, six, seven, eight years old. But, as Card frequently points out, they are gifted children. Not just bright and precocious for their ages, but literally geniuses--smarter and better at everything than everyone else, even the adults. This, to me, is one of the staples of fantasy and science fiction--the gifted youngster, with powers beyond his own understanding, slowly coming to grips with the reality that surrounds him and then mastering it. We’ve all seen that movie before. But in Ender’s Game, it’s not just Ender who fits this mold, but his brother Peter and his sister Valentine, and all the children who lead him and who he comes to lead at the Battle School. They are all superheroes, struggling to understand themselves.

And none of them have my sympathy. I don’t care about any of them, because none of them seem very real or vulnerable to me. They’re all, in the end, bullies.

Early in the novel, when Colonel Graff first comes to recruit six-year-old Ender into the Battle School, Ender reflects on how he doesn’t want to be a soldier.

Ender didn’t like fighting. He didn’t like Peter’s kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn’t like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.

Well, speaking as a member of the weak and stupid people, I’d have to say I don’t like Ender’s kind either.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Defining the Right Ends Takes Time

That's one the observations I took away from my association's latest Board meeting. Defining the right "ends" (i.e., the high-level outcomes the association is in the business of achieving) takes time. And by time, I don't mean hours or days. I mean years.

Hear me out.

My Board adopted a modified version of the Carver Policy Governance model five years ago. As part of that adoption, they wrote their own Governance Policy, which attempted to spell out, as clearly as possible, the differing roles between the Board and the staff executive when it came to strategy and execution. Here are the actual clauses from that document:

“Ends” determination is a pivotal duty of the Board. The Board will determine what results are to be achieved, for whom, and at what cost, and clearly express these “ends” in the mission, strategic priorities, ends statements, success indicators, and budget of the association.

Tactical responsibility is delegated to the CEO. The “means” employed to achieve the association’s “ends” are the responsibility of the CEO and the staff members and association volunteers he or she assigns and recruits to assist him or her. In providing needed direction to the CEO, the Board will only describe the “means” that are unacceptable, and will neither approve nor micromanage staff-level activity. The Board will rigorously monitor the performance of the CEO, but only to the degree that identified “ends” are being achieved without violating the unacceptable “means.”

These ideas were first written down and approved in October 2011. The Board then immediately turned its attention to its part of this new strategy and execution model: determining the ends (the results that were to be achieved, for whom, and at what cost). They quickly adopted a series of statements to describe these ends and to provide direction to me, the CEO, regarding tactical directions to pursue.

Going back and looking at some of those early statements, I realize now that they were very much less statements of expected outcomes and much more statements of expected areas of activity. Examples of those early statements include:

• Promote competitive advantages of fluid power over other technologies.
• Drive and support pre-competitive fluid power research.
• Develop and connect members to talent pipelines.

It may seem obvious now, but these were not ends statements at all, and it took us some time to realize that. We eventually came up with a new term to describe them: strategic priorities. They were priorities the association needed to focus on, and each required a significant allocation of time and resources by the CEO, but if the Board was going to take its responsibility for determining the ends seriously, they still needed to craft specific statements describing our expected outcomes.

Looking back through the record, it would be three years before the term "ends statements" made it into our lexicon, with an attempt in October 2014 to create not just clear statements about expected outcomes, but also associated metrics (or success indicators) by which we could determine objectively if those ends were being met.

To continue the example, the statement above describing the need to "Develop and connect members to talent pipelines had, by this time, evolved into the following strategic priority: "Build and connect our members to an educated fluid power workforce." Within it, however, the Board now defined three statements of specific result or outcome:

• Young people understand fluid power’s potential as a technology and as a career path.
• Technically-trained individuals have successful pathways to long-term careers in the fluid power industry.
• NFPA connects its members to the talent they need to grow their businesses and advance fluid power technology.

These are much closer to true ends statements, each describing a desired future state while remaining agnostic about how such a state should be created. For clues in that direction, the Board needed more specific statements of strategic intent, something we would call success indicators because they would define the measurable areas of progress that would tell us if the end they supported was being achieved. In the example of "Young people understand fluid power's potential as a technology and as a career path," three such success indicators were identified:

• Young people are accessing information on how fluid power works and its impact on the quality of life.
• Number of middle and high school students participating in fluid power-themed curriculum and extra-curricular activities is increasing.
• Number of graduating high school seniors enrolling in curriculum that includes fluid power at 2- and 4-year colleges is increasing.

Now, if you look at some of those statements in outline form...

I. Strategic Priority: Build and connect our members to an educated fluid power workforce.
     A. Ends Statement: Young people understand fluid power's potential as a technology and as a career path.
          1. Success Indicator: Young people are accessing information on how fluid power works and its impact on the quality of life.

...I think you can begin to see how these different statements about priority, result, and metrics have come, in the overall, to represent what I'm now calling the strategy agenda of my association. In the above example, I've shown the outline for one success indicator, within one ends statement, within one strategic priority. At the time those shown were approved by the Board, there were three strategic priorities, seven ends statements, and twenty-six success indicators. That made for a longer, but still digestible, agenda for what the association should be tooled to achieve.

And although that's the basic framework that the association has been in since, over the intervening two years, each Board meeting has been an opportunity to discuss and revise the statements themselves, bending them ever closer to true statements of priority, result and metrics. The strategic priorities have become more generic, defining wide, but finite areas of association activity. The ends statements have become more results-focused, stripping out many of the still-embedded means and focusing solely on the intended outcomes. And the success metrics have become ever more aligned with the ends themselves, providing a clearer and clearer tactical pathway to follow in order to achieve the strategic objectives of the association.

It's been a journey of five years. And although I doubt we'll ever be ready to carve any of these statements in stone, we've clearly made a ton of progress. The Board is much more adept at discussing and defining what must be achieved, and I am in a much better position to define and allocate the necessary resources with confidence. We're on the same page with regard to what should be achieved and what it will take to get there.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Who Drives the Granularity of the Discussion?

I heard something on a recent video posted on Seth Kahan's visionary leadership website that really resonated with me.

When it comes to strategic association Board agendas, it is the job of the staff executive to make sure the Board members themselves are driving the granularity of the discussion.

By which, I assume Kahan meant that the Board members have to be the ones who decide what to dig into, and how deep to do the digging.

To which, all I can say is yes, yes, and YES!

Here is what I attempt to do at every one of my Board meetings.

First, present and lay out the status of the organization. We already have a plan, with goals and action plans designed to achieve strategic objectives. How are we doing on that plan? Where are we succeeding? Where are we failing? And what explains the differential between areas of success and failure?

Second, give the Board time to discuss the status just presented. Let them ask questions and provide only what you perceive to be factual responses. In my experience, they will drive quickly into the areas of greatest concern, probing and investigating until they understand the core issues.

Third, present and lay out the strategic challenges facing the organization. These can be, but often aren't, connected to the failures revealed and discussed in the operational plan. More frequently, they are much bigger issues--strategic inflection points in which the organization has to make a choice, with those choices having significant ramifications on the use of association resources. Generally speaking, don't provide solutions to these challenges (at least not at this time). Focus instead on explaining them fully and describing the perceived impacts of the choices facing the organization.

And fourth, give the Board time to discuss the strategic challenges. Again, let them ask questions and provide only what you perceive to be factual responses. Here, as before, they may surprise you in driving quickly towards the area of most pressing strategic need. And as those areas are revealed, the immediate objective is not to resolve them, but to devise a mechanism for discussing and resolving them in later portions of their meeting.

This whole process takes about two hours, and effectively allows the Board to set their own agenda for the rest of their meeting. In doing so, they have and will continue to drive the granularity of their discussion, deciding on their own how deeply they need to dig into each item.

Too often, when I have tried to dictate this granularity for them, deciding ahead of time where they will and will not focus, the meeting very quickly goes off track as Board members rebel against the topics that have been selected for them.

So take Kahan's and my advice. For truly useful strategic conversations, let the Board itself decide what does and does not need their attention.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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By Sorrow’s River by Larry McMurtry

Book 3 of McMurtry’s Berrybender Narratives, so called because they relate the trials and tribulations of the members of an English family named Berrybender as they make their way in the frontier American West of the 1830s.

The primary Berrybender is named Tasmin, a beautiful and fierce-spirited woman married to Jim Snow, an American frontiersman with a famous non de guerre.

“Why would Jimmy want to talk to you anyway, monsieur?” Tasmin inquired. “He ain’t French, and he ain’t nice to strangers.”

“But our readers, madame! Our readers!” Clam insisted. “They know of your famous Sin Killer. They know, but not enough. We will disappoint all of Europe if we come home with no news of the Sin Killer. In Europe he is more famous than Hawkeye, or Natty Bumpo, or any of the characters of Mr. Cooper. It is said he was struck by lightning and feels it is his mission to wipe out sin. They say he can shoot a bow like an Indian, or the rifle like Hawkeye. So please, Madame Snow--when do you expect him to return?”

Yes, Jim Snow is the Sin Killer, introduced in the so-titled first volume of this series. And his mission, indeed, is to wipe out sin.

Tasmin, who had grasped Jim’s arm, felt him stiffen suddenly--his face became dark with anger and he moved so quickly that no one, later, could remember the exact sequence of his actions. Suddenly the pole was in his hands--a pole that they had sharpened to make a goad for their slow and sleepy ox. The pole was Signor Claricia’s. He used it to jab the ox, when the ox seemed about to stop altogether. He had been holding the pole nervously when Obregon approached. But suddenly the Sin Killer had it; Obregon could do no more than open his mouth in shock when Jim hit him in the face with the pole so hard that he was knocked completely off his mule. The pole broke. Jim threw it aside, caught Obregon by his feet, and dragged him to the gully, across from where the renegades waited. Blood poured from the unconscious man’s broken mouth. None of the renegades moved a muscle. Jim pushed Obregon over the edge--he tumbled a few times and lay flat on his back, at the bottom of the gully.

“It’s a bad sin, selling people!” Jim yelled. “Tell him that when he wakes up.”

As I’ve written before, Jim Snow is a kind of wild man’s Natty Bumpoo, a Pathfinder, not just through the wilds of the American West, but through the unforeseen currents and eddies of human morality.

Except Jim has abandoned Tasmin in By Sorrow’s River, gone off to scout a better way forward for their party in hostile Indian territory. And in Jim’s absence, Tasmin relies more and more heavily on another metaphorical frontiersman, Pomp Charboneau.

“Ma said I was born by sorrow’s river,” he said. “I seem to carry a weight. It keeps me from being quite like other men.”

Pomp’s “Ma” is Sacagawea, the historical Indian woman who had accompanied Lewis and Clark on their famous journey, and Pomp is the baby she had carried on her back for most of that journey, grown now to young adulthood in McMurtry’s fiction. In Jim’s absence, he becomes Tasmin’s lover, a relationship that culminates at Tasmin’s prompting, not his. And to Tasmin, Pomp is a vexing lover indeed.

She told herself she had better not rush him. Once he learned more about passion he would surely be more active. She must be patient with him, a hard resolve, because she was by nature impatient. Now that she had had a little of what she wanted, she saw no reason not to have more--yet she knew it might be best to accept his shyness, for a time. She tried to brush away the shadow that dappled her happiness. What if Geoff was right? What if Pomp valued calm more than passion? What if in his depths he just wasn’t sensual? His body had responded to her, but even then, his soul he seemed to keep for himself. He was a man without strategies. Even Jim Snow, no very refined seducer, had more guile and much more temperament. She continued to hold Pomp and kiss him, but she couldn’t quite get his sad words out of her mind. He had been born by sorrow’s river--he seemed to carry a weight other men needn’t carry. What could these words mean? She hated all such reflections.

Yes, Tasmin hates all such reflections, but McMurtry doesn’t, for he has clearly set Pomp up as a kind of anti-Jim Snow, an anti-Sin Killer, a man of quiet and melancholy reflection, not spirited and moralistic action.

And it is in Tasmin’s vacillation between her love for these two opposite men that McMurtry is able to spin his fiction, telling us something about America in the process, especially the American West of the time period he is describing.

Tasmin, shaken by a homesickness the more powerful for being, in immediate terms, hopeless, just kept walking, heedless, into the empty prairies that lay between her and all that she desired: English order, English privilege, English intelligence, English lanes, even English clouds. The great prairie sky that had thrilled her so the first time she beheld it, on that first ecstatic moment of the banks of the Missouri, now seemed a brutal thing, a sky under which the worst barbarities were enacted--indeed, might yet be enacted on herself, her siblings, and her child unless they were lucky. She wanted to be again in a place where men saw themselves as lovers of women, rather than killers or trappers.

It is, to Tasmin, and to us, a foreign place with brutalities unimaginable. It is not to be survived, but to weather it McMurtry is telling us one must either be a Jim Snow or a Pomp Charbonneau, a man of action or a man of reserved indifference.

Occasionally, at night, Pomp found that he wished his old tutor, Herr Hanfstaengl, were with him so they could examine the interesting questions that arose in the course of the day: for example, that he, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, had readily caressed a bear but had declined, on more than one occasion, to caress Tasmin Berrybender, a woman he both cared for and admired. They had made love once, he and Tasmin--she had easily drawn his seed into her body, their pleasure very sharp. Most men would have hastened to repeat this pleasure--repeat it as often as possible; and yet Pomp hadn’t. In fact he had done what he could, short of insult, to avoid further embraces with Tasmin. Herr Hanfstaengl, possessed of a stout wife and eleven children, would surely have been curious to know what he had declined to pursue this love affair. Was it because Tasmin was the wife of his friend? Was it from morality that he abstained? Or was it merely that his temperament was to stand apart?

Pomp contemplates the proper course of action: to grapple with the moral conundrums of his world, or stand apart from them? And in doing so, he evokes another famous contemplator of the same subject. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them. This is the fundamental question of By Sorrow’s River, philosophy dressed up in the idiom of the bawdy and brutish American West.

And, of course, let’s not forget that famous opening line of Hamlet’s soliloquy. To be or not to be.

Captain Reyes advanced toward Pomp until he stood at point-blank range. Only then did he raise his musket. For a moment he allowed his gaze to meet that of the young man he was about to kill. The young man’s eyes were unfrightened, undisturbed. Once he looked into his intended victim’s eye, the captain, to his great surprise, could not turn away, for in the young man’s eyes he seemed to see understanding--even sympathy--neither of which Captain Reyes had ever been offered in his life. It was as if the condemned man, the favorite, saw it all: the early glory, then the bitter failure on the plains, the stalled career, the dull cadets, the dust. He saw it all; he understood.

Captain Reyes is an (unfortunately) underdeveloped character, a Spanish soldier that holds a grudge against William Clark for evading him with his Corps of Discovery, who enters late in the narrative with a vendetta against Pomp Charbonneau.

Then, while Captain Reyes was considering the possibility that he had misjudged this quiet, sympathetic young man, a gun went off. Pomp Charbonneau fell, as Lieutenant Molino had fallen. The understanding eyes went blank. Captain Reyes turned, to see what fool had fired, and realized, to his shock, that the drifting smoke came from his own musket. He had fired.

Several other characters have been killed, and now Reyes kills Pomp--the weight carried by Pomp through life giving him the ability to recognize those weights in others but, ultimately, not the ability to prevent his own demise. Immediately thereafter Reyes kills himself, overcome with the grief and futility of his existence. And as the bodies pile up, McMurtry can’t resist giving the reader one final clue as to what he’s been toying with in this narrative.

“Why it’s like the bard,” Lord Berrybender said, looking around him. “Dead men everywhere you look. Exeunt omnes, or pretty nearly.”

Exeunt omnes, indeed. The novel ends a page later, and we’ll have to wait for Book 4 to see how Jim Snow reacts to all this carnage. Unlike Pomp, as we are sure to be reminded in that final page, Jim is a fighter, someone who would have “scattered these poor shivering Spanish boys” of Captain Reyes’s “like quail.”

The fact that McMurtry decided to title the next volume “Folly and Glory,” however, tells me that the Sin Killer’s chosen method for grappling with the world may not come off in the end any better than Pomp’s. If Pomp is Hamlet, one must wonder, will McMurtry paint the Sin Killer as the manipulated Othello?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.