Brain Cuttings by Carl Zimmer

I must’ve heard about this book and its author on Radiolab. 

Say that reminds me, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with Radiolab, which I listen to as a podcast, and which I will therefore treat as a podcast moving forward. Every time I think I’m done, every time I’ve had it “up to here” with their gap-mouthed Millennial wonder about things that happened before 1980, every time they transparently let Jad’s sound design muffle what would otherwise be a clear-eyed approach to scientific inquiry, they wind up posting an episode that captures both my heart and my attention -- and those episodes usually have something to do with the human brain.

It was probably one of those brain episodes that either mentioned or featured Carl Zimmer, a “popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity.” His Brain Cuttings is a collection of fifteen fairly short essays, each on some subject related to neuroscience. They, like most collections of essays I’ve read, left me fairly flat. The most interesting thing about the collection, I think, is how Radiolab-ish they are -- in the sense that none of them dive very deeply into their subject, each skipping along across the surface with some genuine wonder, but with a disappointing lack of precision.

Here are the handful of things that caught enough of my attention to make note of them in the margin.

Blushing Is Shame

In the first essay, “Does Shame Excite a Blush?”, Zimmer explores the neuroscience behind facial expressions and the emotions that give them rise. Or is it the other way around, the facial expressions that give rise to the emotions? Turns out it’s not always so easy to tell, because the two things, your emotions and your facial expressions, are inexplicably connected. 

In other words, you don’t just make a sad face when you’re feeling sad. Making a sad face is an essential part of feeling sad. Take away the ability to make a sad face and you take away the ability to feel sad.

It’s another blow to our belief that we are thinking agents with premeditated volition. If one were to paralyze one’s face -- like through the use of Botox, a new craze at the time Zimmer was writing -- one would seriously limit one’s ability to feel emotions of any kind.

The Extended Mind

In “The Googled Mind,” Zimmer explores the concept of the extended mind, first posited by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. In a short essay they published in 1998, they…

...asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network.

Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

Clark and Chalmers argued that Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook. The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too. Clark and Chalmbers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

It’s a provocative idea to many, but needlessly so, in my mind (extended or not). Because, like a lot of pop-science, the provocation rests on the choice of words, not on the actual concept. People freak out because Clark and Chalmers called it the “extended mind,” and then went on to claim all kinds of logical interpolations based solely on that phraseology.

They argue that Inga’s brain and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same thing. But are they? They both allow a person to record and access information, so they are similar in that regard, but does that make them “fundamentally the same thing?” What if Otto is only visiting New York and he left his notebook at home in San Francisco? Or if he gets mugged and his notebook is stolen and he no longer even knows where it is? Is the notebook still part of his extended mind?

The vernacular trick is that phrase itself. The extended mind. Nobody would view it as controversial if Clark and Chalmers called Otto’s notebook an “information storage device,” even though that wouldn’t change any of their argument’s conclusions. But which essay are you going to publish? “The Extended Mind”? Or “Information Storage Devices”?

The Sloppiness of Time

In “The Music of Time,” Zimmer explores the everyday phenomenon of time seeming to pass at different rates based on our emotional condition. There’s some real neuroscience going on when we have this perception (obviously), but here Zimmer seems more focused on dispelling myths that don’t exist.

We don’t need drugs for our feeling of time to change, however. When we experience a moment of terror -- falling from a tree, for example, or watching a car veer out of control and come towards us -- time seems to slow down. In 2007, David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, and his colleagues set out to probe how this feeling arises. They found some hardy volunteers who were willing to climb a 46-meter tower and fall backwards down into a net. After the fall, Eagleman asked the volunteers how long it took to fall. Their guesses were 36% longer on average than the actual 2.5 seconds it took for them to hit the net. Time did indeed slow down.

Wait. What? Time did indeed slow down? It did? Is time what the mind perceives it to be? Or an external construct of the universe? Why is the language here so sloppy?

But let’s get back to my essential point. In the essay’s conclusion, Zimmer makes this comment.

The old notion that our brains are governed by a single, simple clock is gone for good.

Yeah, okay. But does anyone think otherwise? No, sorry, my brain contains a unalterable time piece, with the precision of an atomic clock, and everything I perceive is meted out by its regular and constant progression of clicks. Why is Zimmer arguing against something that no one believes is true? Next he’ll be telling us that our memory isn’t exactly like a movie camera recording everything we see and hear.

The Spectrum

Let’s end with this one. In “They Imprint Your Genes, Your Mum and Dad,” Zimmer makes this interesting comment.

One of the most striking contrasts between autism and schizophrenia is how they affect the ability to understand others. Autistic people have a difficult time figuring out what other people are feeling. Schizophrenic people, on the other hand, sometimes do too good a job. They may come to believe that a refrigerator is talking to them, for example, or that people are conspiring against them.

Is schizophrenia on the autism spectrum? I don’t think so. Zimmer is simply making a connection here. And in that regard, it’s probably important to point out that seeing such connections puts Zimmer decidedly on the schizophrenic side of that non-existent spectrum.

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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.

Dragons - Chapter 69 (DRAFT)

For the first time in years I was happy to go to work on Monday morning. I was up early after snatching only an hour or two of sleep in the wee hours of the morning, and I showered, dressed, and left as quietly as I could so as not to disturb anyone else in the house. I didn’t even peek in on Jacob before leaving, deciding that I couldn’t afford the sentimental luxury with what was likely facing me in the office that day.

Somewhere in the middle of the night I had become convinced that Bethany was going to quit on me. She was going to turn in her resignation, and might even make some kind of public scene, angry and dejected, both at the secrets we had shared and those that I had kept from her. I was at my desk in my tiny office long before anyone else arrived that morning, and I cringed each time I heard the elevator ding and a new gaggle of voices make their way onto our office floor.

I was hunched over my keyboard, pecking absently away at it when I finally heard Bethany’s voice -- not distantly as if just stepping off the elevator, but loud and present and in the very doorway of my office.

“All right, Alan,” she said, swiftly shutting my office door and perching herself on the edge of one of my plastic visitor chairs. “Now tell me. Tell me everything.”

I looked at her blankly, fear the only and overpowering emotion rushing through my veins. She was wearing a navy blazer over a white blouse, a big and beady necklace hanging tightly around her throat. But it was her eyes I noticed most, her bright and glaring eyes, filled with an incessant need.

“Everything?” I said, looking both ways to avoid whatever ambush lay waiting for me. “Everything about what?”

“About the interview!” she cried, as if I was the densest man she had ever met. “Where is it? What’s it for? When are they going to make you an offer?”

Oh. That.

I didn’t really want to tell Bethany about it. As I had already promised myself, I didn’t really want anything else to do with Bethany. But as I began to politely drip some innocent details of my adventure in Boston out to her, she responded with such eagerness, such willingness, and such desperation -- desperation, I realized, to imagine and vicariously experience something, anything better than the company we worked for -- that she pushed me completely off my guard. I had lost sleep thinking she was going to resign in anger, but I now began to realize that she might be thinking that I would be able to take her with me.

“So that’s it?” she said, after I had shared Steve’s parting words to me in the airport lounge. “They’re going to set-up another call with you? Have you heard from them yet?”

“Uh, no. It’s only Monday morning. Steve said his assistant would be reaching out to me sometime this week.”

“Steve,” Bethany said, somewhat dreamily. “It’s a good sign that you’re already on a first name basis with him. It sounds like he really respects you.”

Was I? On a first name basis? I was pretty sure that the next time I spoke to Steve I was going to call him Mister Anderson, but I decided not to share that with Bethany.

“Uh huh.”

There was a knock and I looked up and saw Gerald standing on the other side of my closed door. When he had my gaze he pointed at me and then held up five fingers, evidently wanting that many minutes of my time. I looked back at Bethany but she was turned around, also looking back at Gerald. Before I could say anything she was up and out of her chair. 

She patted me on the hand. “Let’s get lunch together today,” she said sotto voce, standing over me, her hips and shoulders intentionally blocking Gerald’s view. “I want to hear a lot more than this.” And then she leaned in even closer, so close I thought she meant to kiss me. “I’m so excited for you,” she whispered instead.

And then she spun on her sensible heel. She opened the door and stepped aside to let Gerald into my small office.

“What are you two conspiring about?” Gerald asked, his voice unpleasant, but no more than normal.

“Secret stuff,” Bethany said playfully and left the office, closing my door behind her.

Gerald did not look amused. Nor did he take a seat, simply standing there and scowling at me through his eyeglasses. He seemed stiff, much stiffer than normal. Gerald typically had an uncaring nonchalance about him, as if he floated above the petty concerns of us mere mortals. Something was definitely up.

“What can I do for you, Gerald.”

“I wanted you to know that I’m planning to leave.”

I heard the words, but I had a hard time processing them.

“What?”

“The company. I’m planning to leave the company. Next week if we can make the proper arrangements.”

His words were clear, but I still wasn’t connecting the dots.

“Wait. What? You’re quitting?”

“Not exactly, but something like that. A lot depends on you.”

My heart sank, the import of what Gerald was saying suddenly made manifest there if not yet in my brain. I was already covering for Susan and Michael. How was I supposed to cover for Gerald, too? I’d never fucking sleep. And what would Mary say? She and Don already blamed me for driving Michael out of the organization. How well would they take another resignation on my senior team?

Gerald appeared to be waiting for me to say something, but I was too occupied with my own panicked reactions.

“Do you want to hear more?” he said eventually.

“More?” I said, pushing myself back from my desk, my chair making another gouging scrape on the wall behind me. 

“Yes. When I go, I’m taking your client with me.”

That finally got my attention. I’m not sure how, but that particular combination of words just plucked me out of the sea of fear and worry I was drowning in and dropped me dry and clear-eyed on the deck on my own ship.

“What do you mean, you’re taking my client with you?”

“Just that,” Gerald said, still standing, and crossing his arms across his chest. “I’m hanging out my own shingle. I can run a business that runs circles around Mary Walton, and I’m going to prove it. I’m taking the biggest jewel out of her crown and building my own business with it.”

My thoughts were racing again, but this time the engine was my head instead of my heart. There were a lot of companies like the one we worked for out there, providing management services to non-profit and other organizations too small to manage themselves. It was not uncommon for smaller ones to splinter out of the larger ones, as the needs of the individual client organizations found themselves increasingly at odds with the needs of the growing management company that served them. Even what Gerald was suggesting was not unheard of; a client organization, dissatisfied with the minimal service it was receiving from an increasingly thin management structure, signing a deal with the person or the people it knows in the company for more dedicated and individualized service. But for something like that to happen, the client organization had to be dissatisfied, and as far as I knew the client both Gerald and I worked with was anything but. Mary’s entire focus was seeing to that. She was so much in bed with Eleanor, that I couldn’t imagine anything like what Gerald was talking about happening.

“Have you been talking to Eleanor?”

“No,” Gerald said, smiling devilishly. “Not Eleanor. Paul Webster.”

Paul Webster. The immediate past chair of the client organization’s board. The man with the gray hair and the blue suit that had questioned Mary and me about the circumstances of Susan’s and Michael’s resignations, and if we were responding appropriately to the staffing holes they left behind.

“He’s working on getting a majority of the board aligned with him. He wants to vote to cancel Mary’s contract at their next board meeting, and we need to be free and clear for the switch to be made.”

This was big. This was perhaps the biggest thing that had ever walked into my office, even if it had so far refused to take a seat. If more than half the board was in on such an action, then things had been in play for a very long time. Looking as shrewdly as I could at Gerald, I tried to remember all the times I had seen him in close and quiet conversation with members of the board. I always thought he was doing his job -- getting the leaders engaged in his department’s agenda. But now I re-imagined all those interactions with a different purpose in mind: selling them all on the idea that he could do the job better than Mary.

Wait a minute.

“Gerald, why are you telling me this?”

A look of pained exasperation passed over Gerald’s face. I could see him try unsuccessfully to stifle it, but it was there nonetheless.

“Because,” he said. “I want to take you with me.”

“You what?”

“I want to take you with me. I want you to quit your job here, too, and come work for me.”

No he didn’t. That much was obvious to me. He was saying the words, but he didn’t mean them, not in their entirety, at least. The pained look was still on his face, and for the first time he looked uncomfortable standing there in my tiny office in his pressed slacks and freshly ironed shirt.

“Gerald,” I said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

He looked at my plastic visitor chair, put a hand on its back, and then slowly lowered himself onto it. He did it without taking his eyes off of me, as if he was afraid that I might make some sudden move. 

“Gerald,” I said again. “What’s really going on here? You don’t want me to go work with you. You hate me.”

Gerald looked honestly offended. “Alan! I don’t hate you. Why would you say such a thing?”

I thought back on all the times that Gerald had been dismissive of me and my authority -- throughout the length of our doomed staff qualities effort, for example, or, still very fresh in my mind, the time he had questioned my ability to lead in front of others in our staff office in Miami Beach. I was under no illusion. Gerald thought I was an inexperienced hack. Why would he want me to come work with him?

“All right,” I said. “Maybe you don’t hate me, but you’ve never thought too highly of my leadership abilities. You’ve made that clear. Why would you want me to come work for you?”

Gerald pursed his lips tightly. “Look, Alan, there’s no simple way to say this, and it’s probably not worth beating around the bush, so I’m just going to lay all my cards down on the table.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“Paul said there would be no deal unless I brought you along.”

It felt like I was back to not hearing him clearly.

“He said what?”

“Paul said there would be no deal -- that they would not break Mary’s contact and sign on with me unless you were part of my team. Once the separation is made, I plan to recruit a lot of Mary’s team away from her. We’re going to need them if we’re going to preserve the kind of continuity Paul is demanding. But there’s one person he won’t allow me to leave to chance. You. You need to be on board with this or there will be no deal.”

I looked at Gerald blankly, hearing, and understanding what he had said, but not entirely believing it. Me? Why would they want me?

Gerald quickly rose to his feet.

“Look, Alan. I realize now that I’ve approached this whole thing wrong with you. I want you on my team -- not just because Paul is demanding it, but because I think you will have a crucial role to play in the future of both organizations -- both mine and Paul’s. I should have led with that, and I regret that I didn’t. Why don’t we get together for lunch today -- somewhere away from the office -- and I can lay out my plans and make you the formal offer that you deserve. How does that sound?”

“Ummm. Okay.”

“Grand. Meet me at the elevators at noon. And please, keep all of this under your hat, at least until we’ve had a chance to discuss this over lunch. Will you promise me that?”

“Sure.”

Then Gerald smiled at me, a weak and flaccid thing that spread across his face like a stain of raspberry jam. He nodded, turned, and left my office without another word.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

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://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt

“On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about sun-rising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven. There were five persons taken in one house, the father, and the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive … another there was who running along was shot and wounded, and fell down; he begged of them his life, promising them money … but they would not hearken to him but knocked him in the head, and stripped him naked, and split open his bowels. … There were three others belonging to the same garrison who were killed; the Indians getting up upon the roof of the barn, had advantage to shoot down upon them over their fortification. Thus these murderous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them. … One of my elder sister’s children, named William, had then his leg broken, which the Indians perceiving, they knocked him on the head. Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels. … It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves. All of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out. …”

That’s an excerpt from a seventeenth-century captivity narrative by Mary Rowlandson, describing events that occurred when European settlers of North America entered a cultural “Indian country.” Engelhardt cites it to make the central claim of his book, especially when he purposely contrasts it with the following similar excerpt.

“At 6:30 A.M. on March 16, 1968, all the enemy batteries installed around Son My started pounding the village for more than half an hour. The eleven choppers came in, strafing the locality and landing American troops whose sanguinary intention was visible on their faces. They shot at all that came in sight: men, women, children, elderly people, plants and animals, and destroyed everything: crops, fruit-trees, houses. … Vo Thi Phu, mother of a 12-month-old baby, was shot dead. … The baby, which tried to suck at its mother’s breast, cried when it found only blood instead of milk. The Yankees got angry and shouted “Viet Cong, Viet Cong,” and heaped straw on mother and baby and set fire to it. … After raping to death Mrs. Sam, a sexagenarian, the aggressors made a deep slash in her body with a bayonet. … Mui, 14, was raped and shut in her hut. The GIs set fire to it, guarded the door and pushed back the poor little girl who tried to run from the fire. … Worse still, the aggressors threw over one hundred women and children and many dozen old people into a canal dug in front of Mr. Nhieu’s house and murdered them with machine-gun fire and hand grenades. The victims’ corpses were disfigured beyond identification. … In one day only, 502 people including over 170 children were massacred, 300 houses destroyed and over 870 head of cattle killed. Our coastal village so green with coconut palms, bamboos and willows is now but heaps of ashes.”

This is a Vietnamese account of what would become known as the My Lai massacre. As Engelhardt points out, much like Massachusetts in Mary Rowlandson’s time, the peninsula on which My Lai sat was thought of as “Indian country” by the American soldiers.

And this transition, I think, is the overall point of Engelhardt’s book. It is the story of how “America” went from victim to victimizer, from righteous fighter against sneak attacks to sneak attacker and devilish marauder. This, and the cultural cognitive dissonance that resulted when an older generation continued to cling to their narratives of victory culture while a younger generation exposed them for the myths that they had become. 

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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.

Dragons - Chapter 68 (DRAFT)

For the rest of that awful Saturday and the entirety of the following Sunday, Jenny and I pretty much avoided each other. I did apologize, as soon as we got home and had the car cleaned out, but Jenny just sniffed at me and I knew it would take her a lot longer to forgive. Forgetting was probably out of the question.

Jacob was a different story. When I peeked in on him that evening -- scant hours after my irresistible force had met his immovable object -- I caught him again playing with his trains, an elaborate wooden track snaking in a hundred directions on his bedroom floor.

“Daddy,” he said, not taking his eyes off the long chain of cars he was pulling through a wide turn. “Can we build another race track?”

I knew what he was referring to. I remembered the time we had built a pair of long, sloping tracks and had raced his various engines down them -- and I remembered the tantrum and injuries that had inexplicably followed.

“Maybe later, buddy,” I said, moving fully into his room. “How about we do something else?”

“Okay,” Jacob said with bored ease.

In no time we had built a long straightaway on the floor and were testing how many cars one of his battery-powered engines could pull to its end without being dragged to a stop by the increasing weight.

“How many do you think, Jacob? Five? Six?”

“Fifty!” he chortled with his special kind of glee.

It was likely the biggest number he could think of and, as such, a placeholder for the biggest number there was. I like to think that it said something about the size of his little heart, and its capacity to both forgive and forget. When the little tank engine made it to the end of the track with eight wooden cars trailing magnetically behind it, he clapped his hands and threw his little arms around my neck.

Later that night, in bed, Jenny asked me about it. She had heard us playing together and had decided not to interrupt. But there were things she needed to know. In the dark her voice came stealthily, laced with both concern and contempt. How had Jacob seemed? Was he all right? Was he scarred? Had I broken his fragile spirit with my pig-headed selfishness? These words weren’t said, but they were there nonetheless.

“He’s fine,” I said, deciding to speak my lonely truth in as few words as possible. “And I’m sorry.”

“I hope so,” she said, rolling herself over and presenting her back to me.

I remember laying there in the dark for a long time that night, consumed with worry, sadness, and inadequacy. I didn’t know what was wrong with Jacob -- I didn’t even know if there was something wrong with Jacob -- but I was convinced there was something wrong with me. There had to be. I was broken, had been since I was Jacob’s age, broken and crushed by a world that had no room or sympathy for sensitivity or quirkiness or any but a strict and conditioned understanding of boys and men, sons and fathers. I remember crying, I’m not ashamed to admit it, but I also remember rolling away and stifling my sobs to keep Jenny from hearing them.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

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://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Stacking the Deck by David S. Pottruck

This is another one of those books that came with a speaker I heard at a professional conference -- this one at an event I attended in January 2015. I know that because when this book finally came up on my reading list and I opened it, out fell a dated letter from the colleague of mine that had sponsored the appearance of David Pottruck at the conference I attended. That was somewhat bittersweet, as that colleague has since passed away and, although I still go to the conferences of the organization in question, I haven’t seen this colleague there in a few years.

The subtitle of Stacking the Deck is “How to Lead Breakthrough Change Against Any Odds,” and that’s what David Pottruck, a past president of Charles Schwab, seems to specialize in. Here’s part of the blurb on the front jacket flap:

Change is a constant, and leaders must do more than keep up -- they must innovate and accelerate to succeed. Yet people are often unnerved by change. As a leader during a time of transformation, you may stand up before teams that are indifferent, or even hostile, and need to convince them that change is necessary and urgent. More than money, time, or resources, the ability to lead these people determines your ultimate success or failure. What does it take to be an effective change leader and increase the odds of success?

Stacking the Deck offers a proven, practical approach for inspiring meaningful, lasting change across an organization. Stacking the Deck presents a nine-step course of action leaders can follow from the first realization that change is needed through all the steps of implementation, including assembling the right team of close advisors and getting the word out to the wider group.

That is very much the book I read and, if I have any criticism of it at all, it is largely focused on who it seems to be written for. It certainly is not written for me -- the executive of a 12-person non-profit trade association. It is much more clearly written for someone like David Pottruck -- the leader at or near the top of a large, profitable business.

It’s not that the essential concepts of his nine-step “Stacking the Deck Process” aren’t helpful in thinking through how to lead change initiatives in my organization, it’s more that all of his tactical examples and suggestions for how to carry out those concepts assume a size and base of resources that smaller organizations like mine simply do not have. 

Here’s a good example, from Step Four: Planning Ahead for Known and Unknown Barriers.

Steve Ellis, CEO of Asurion, a technology protection service company, shared with me his theory about resistance to change and about people problems: “You’ll deal with three different groups of people and they are not evenly distributed. Often, we have 5 percent who are going to embrace the change and 15 percent who never will. Then we’ve got 80 percent who are in the middle, who can make the change, but need some help to do so.

“The people who are going to embrace change are the ones you’ve got to put in the leadership roles to drive the process.” As Steve said, the best breakthrough change processes he has seen “have very quickly gotten that group of the 5 percent focused on creating the Proof of Concept pilot. In time, the way is led by -- and infused with -- that 5 percent’s energy, vision, and passion.”

As for those “who are going to resist change no matter what, you have to identify them quickly.” Steve acknowledges how challenging this can be: “All too often, companies take way too long to face this reality because those in leadership positions want to make room for long-tenured staff in the future of the company. Often, the more tenured people just can’t make the changes you need them to make and will have to be replaced. This is the difficult job the organization is counting on you to do.”

But there is a payoff to this hard work: “If you ignite and empower the 5 percent while eliminating the drag of the 15 percent, you can move the 80 percent with astonishing speed.”

Now, it’s not entirely clear to me if by citing these 5/15/80% figures, they’re referring to the entire company or just those directly involved in the change effort. But either way, the maximum number for me is going to be 12, or really 11 since I am one of the 12 and probably don’t count in this kind of calculation.

That means I have just over half a person who will champion the change effort (let’s round up to one), one and a half who will resist it at all costs (let’s round up to two), and eight and a half who can adapt if led correctly (let’s round down to eight).

So now I’ve got one person “in the leadership roles to drive the process” and two people who “have to be replaced,” which I assume means have been fired. That means the already-limited bandwidth of my attention has been diverted almost entirely to finding their replacements and juggling all the work they used to do across the other ten positions in the company.

Ummm. No. That’s not going to work.

Far more useful for an organization of my size is the advice he gives related to developing and communicating a clear and compelling vision of the future. This excerpt seems to offer a much more crucial understanding of the role the people in your organization play in executing a vision.

People go hand in hand with more physical resources. Often the only way to combat a shortage of funds or labor is with an excess of passion.

If ever there were two sentences written with non-profits in mind, these are them.

This goes back to finding your pioneers and getting them on board quickly. You need people who are committed, excited, and willing to put in the extra time and effort. You need to get  twelve-hour days for the price of eight, seven-day weeks for the price of five. You need people who appreciate this project for its intrinsic value rather than solely for monetary compensation. Because the unfortunate fact is, success in breakthrough change initiatives doesn’t usually produce economic windfalls for the employees involved. It can, however, produce great amounts of psychic income that will keep the team engaged.

The mission and people’s connection to it can be enormous assets, whatever the financial budget -- of the company or of its people. Along those lines, Renee James is fully aware that many people in her organization have achieved financial success and are far from being driven by a monthly paycheck. Instead what keeps them coming to work is the understanding that their company “can change the world -- and that they have the possibility of changing the world every single day.” The impetus that this mission provides is powerful and compelling. The depth of the mission is also important, for as Terry Pearce frequently reminded me, “People will give effort for money but they will give their lives for meaning.”

True that. But it sounds a little hollow coming out of Pottruck’s mouth, since so much of the rest of his book is framed in the corporate doublespeak that keeps so many leaders from embracing the authenticity that is needed for such powerful concepts as mission, vision and meaning are to be embraced. People will give their lives for the opportunity to change the world, but there are few organizations on the planet that can actually live up to that promise. The best most of us can do is improve the lives of the people in our orbit. Aiming your rhetoric higher than that is a risky proposition.

And, as a quick aside, how is a leader supposed to be taken seriously when their day-to-day encounters are mediated with vocabulary such as this?

The first two assessments lead logically to the third: “how do we get there?” (HDWGT). That is, how do we get from where we are (WWA) to where we want to be (WWWTB)? The second assessment, WWWTB, is the vision question that we first discussed in Step Three.

When I first encountered these acronyms in Pottruck’s text, I had to Google them to see if they were part of some business school curriculum, or of his own creation. Either way, I tried to imagine someone actually using them in their day-to-day conversations around the office.

Tony, really, HDWGT? I mean, how do we move from WWA to WWWTB? Have you even considered that?

I would, David, but I’m too focused on HDWKGWWDTWC?

HDWKGWWDTWC?

Yeah, you know. How Do We Keep Growing When We Don’t Think We Can?

I joke. But, honestly, authentic communication is an idea that Pottruck comes to very late in the text. To his credit, he admits his own shortcoming in this regard. Here’s the anecdote that reveals how difficult it was for Pottruck to learn this lesson. When suddenly thrust into the President/CEO role at Schwab, he turned to what he thought was a speechwriter to help him sharpen his communication within the company.

When a colleague introduced me to Terry Pearce, a communication consultant and the founder and president of Leadership Communication, I thought I was getting a speechwriter. I had no idea what was really ahead.

For our first project together, I wanted some help with a speech I needed to give to the 200 top executives within our then 3,500-person company. I’d never worked intensively with a speechwriter and wasn’t sure what to expect. Whatever vague notions I did have were soon blown out of the water.

As I finished telling Terry what I wanted him to do, he interrupted me. “I can do that, Dave, but I don’t think what you have in mind is really what you want to say.” Truthfully, I was taken aback. He went on. “If we really want to inspire these people, I need you to spend some time talking to me about who you are and what experiences have shaped your life. I need to know what moves you, what your values are, what motivates you when you have won and when you have lost. I need to know who you are and why you care about all of this as passionately as you do. Then we can work on this speech you have coming up.”

I was flabbergasted. I wasn’t looking for someone to help me write an autobiography. I wanted a damn speech! My response was immediate. “Terry, I’m a really busy guy. This seems like a lot of busywork for a speech. Can’t we just discuss the message I want to deliver and then you find a really clear and compelling way for me to say it?” Frustration was entering my tone of voice.

“Sorry, Dave, that’s not really what I do,” was his reply. “There are lots of people who are good with words, and sometimes that works for articles, but that’s not what we need right now. Everyone knows the topic because you have been working on this change for a while. It’s less about what you say and more about how you say it and whether or not it is authentic. You need to deliver a message that will be compelling because everyone understands and believes your personal commitment to what you want them to do, and that you believe it is not only in your best interest, but in their best interest as well. Once they sign up for the values embedded in what you are suggesting, their actions will follow. Certainly the facts are important, but to inspire, you must be authentic and speak from the heart. After all, they are following you, not just the idea. Both are important -- and this is what leadership communication is all about.”

Pottruck learned an important lesson that day -- one that every leader should learn and position as a kind of north star for their communications. To inspire, you must be authentic and speak from the heart. After all, they are following you, not just the idea.

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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.

Dragons - Chapter 67 (DRAFT)

On the way home Jacob had to go potty. 

“Pull over, Alan. Jacob has to go potty.”

“Can’t he wait until we get home? It’ll just be another ten minutes or so.”

“Can you wait, honey? Can you wait to go potty when we get home?”

“NO! I need to go potty now, Mommy! NOW, Mommy!”

“Alan! Pull over! Find a place where Jacob can go potty!”

“All right! All right!” I yelled, craning my neck in six directions to make sure I could move the car safely out of traffic. We were on a major thoroughfare, moving out of the city and into suburbia, and were surrounded by strip malls and fast food joints. There shouldn’t be a problem finding a place to make a pit stop.

I pulled into a parking lot as Jenny continued to coo her soothing incantations to Jacob and his sensitive bladder. It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. Daddy’s finding a place. Just hold it a little longer. It’s okay. As I said before, Jacob was pretty much potty trained, but he usually waited until the absolute last minute to communicate his need to pee. He could have gone at Jenny’s aunt’s house, of course -- if he needed to go this bad, he clearly would have been able to go fifteen minutes ago when we were getting goodbye hugs from everyone in the foyer -- but that would have been the furthest thing from his mind. We’d been through this before, and there had been times when Jacob had wet himself in the car when we couldn’t find a bathroom quickly enough for him.

I stopped in front of a sandwich shop and put the car into park. In a flash Jenny was out of the car and the top half of her appeared in the back seat, quickly unbuckling Jacob from his car seat and dragging him out and down onto the blacktop. The door slammed shut and I watched as Jenny waddled hurriedly into the store, her arm tethered to Jacob’s and dragging him along behind her.

“I’ll just wait here,” I said to no one.

Initially I just sat there. Through the glare on the plate glass window I could see dimly into the sandwich shop, where there was a long line of people standing and waiting to place their orders, and my wife and child weaving their way apologetically through them until they disappeared around a corner and down the hallway where the restrooms were.

Part of me felt relieved that we had made it, that we had found a place and it looked like the accident had been avoided, but there was another and much larger part of me that was still steaming from what had happened back at the birthday party. No one had been able to determine how that accident had happened -- how the television set had been pulled down and broken -- the only two witnesses being Jacob and the even younger Hunter, and trying to get a credible account out of either one of them was a waste of time. When questioned, Hunter was unable to do anything other than cry, and Jacob seemed completely unaware that any sort of crime had even been committed. 

Jacob, what happened to the TV?

It broke, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.

How, Jacob? How did it get broken? 

It fell over.

Yes, but how did it fall over? Did you push it? Did you touch it?

It fell over, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.

It was infuriating, but I knew he wasn’t lying or consciously trying to cover anything up. He honestly didn’t know how the TV got broken. He was still too young. He lived in a world where effect didn’t follow cause. Things just happened around him. Any agency of his own was so focused on the satiation of his own overwhelming desire that it seemed to him more like animal instinct than the workings of a rational mind.

Nevertheless, I knew. I went to Jenny’s Aunt Carol to apologize on behalf of my overly rambunctious son and to offer to replace the set, but Carol would hear none of it. 

“Alan,” she said, a glass of white wine in one had and an oven mitt in the other, “don’t be silly. That old TV needed replacing anyway.”

I pressed her again, knowing from the size and the slim profile of the television that it had to have been in a box at an electronics store no more than three months ago. But she was supremely unconcerned. She just asked me to hold her wine as she bent over and brought the warm artichoke dip out of the oven. 

But I was still running the numbers in my head. I was going to buy them a new TV. I didn’t know where I was going to find the two thousand dollars, but I’d be damned if I’d let Carol brush this off like it was a broken dinner plate.

I was still stewing in those juices when I realized that a lot of time had passed since Jenny had gone into the store with Jacob. Longer, far longer that should have been necessary for that little man to empty his bladder. Was he pooping, too? Sometimes Jacob would take his own sweet time when he had to go number two, secretly enjoying, I thought, the extra time on the toilet. I held up my hand to reduce the growing glare on the store window and could still make out the long line of customers, but saw no sign of either my wife or child.

I fished my phone out of my pocket, thinking that I could call Jenny on her cell phone, but before I could dial I noticed her purse on the car seat next to me. Peering inside, I saw her phone nestled in next to her pocketbook.

Great. Well, his royal highness must be taking a shit, and if so, there was no telling how long I was going to be sitting there. My phone already in my hand, I flipped it open and began scrolling through my recent texts. And, of course, there they were, the texts Bethany had sent while I had been in Boston.

R U THERE?

I NEED 2 TALK 2 U.

PLEASE CALL ME IF U CAN.

I started deleting them from my phone and then realized that there were more from Bethany, still texts that she had sent me the last time I had been at Carol’s house. I deleted those, too, and actually considered, but refrained from deleting Bethany entirely from my contacts.

I hadn’t heard from Bethany at all that weekend -- not since our secret and somewhat abrupt conversation on Thursday night, the night before my interview in Boston. That shouldn’t be odd. As far as I could remember, we had never spoken to each other on any other weekend in history, but since she had started texting me, and since the time we had spent together in Miami, it felt like none of the old rules applied anymore. She had called my home, I now remembered. She had called my home looking for me, and had spoken to Jenny a few minutes before or after she had spoken to me. That still didn’t make much sense to me, but it felt way safer to let that sleeping dog lie than go over and kick it. I didn’t want anything more to do with her, outside the bounds of a professional relationship at least. I supposed I would see what she was thinking and feeling when I saw her back in the office on Monday.

There was still no sign of Jenny or Jacob, and now I was starting to get a little worried. Did he fall in? And did he drag Jenny down with him? What the hell were they doing in there so goddamn long?

I decided to go in and investigate. I turned off the car, got out and shut and locked the doors. I then walked around the back end of the vehicle and started making my way towards the glass door of the sandwich shop -- but stopped dead in my tracks. With the car shielding some of the glare on the windows I could see more clearly into the store, and I saw both Jenny and Jacob framed in the glass pane of the door. Jacob was red-faced, contorted, in the middle of a full-blown tantrum, and Jenny had her hands cupped into each of his armpits, struggling and somewhat failing to keep him from flopping down onto the floor. I pulled the door open and the force of Jacob’s cries hit me like a wall of sound. I hesitated just a second, supremely conscious of all the staring eyes around the scene, in a flash contemplating the feasibility of getting back in the car and driving away, but then I rushed forward, claiming, in front of witnesses, the screaming and broken child as my own.

“What the fuck is going on!” I found myself yelling, the rage overwhelming me in an instant, like a geyser of hot lava rushing up through my chest.

“He wanted a cookie!” Jenny screamed back, her voice matching the milky tears on her own face. “Help me! Help me get him out of here!”

I grabbed Jacob around the middle, his flailing limbs blindly kicking and punching me in the process, lifted him clear of his pregnant mother, and turned to leave the store with him. He was wet and hot, like a sick animal, and our movements threw me off balance, and I fell roughly to the floor. Jacob flopped out of my grasp and banged his head on the tile.

“Alan! OH MY GOD!”

If he was seriously hurt, Jacob seemed oblivious to it. He was in the throes of his all-consuming tantrum, a searing fire that burned at the heart of a super massive star. He screamed, but he was already screaming. He writhed about on the floor, but he was already writhing.

I scrambled back to my hands and knees and shot across the floor to him, scooping him up again, and holding him tight against my chest before attempting to stand. Using a nearby wall for support, I skooched myself up with him and then resumed my hasty exit. A new customer was just entering the sandwich shop -- an elderly woman with tightly permed hair and a magenta jogging suit -- and I barrelled past her, almost knocking her down the process -- desperate to get the two of us out of there.

“Jenny! Open the goddamn door!” I barked, meaning the car door, and in a moment Jenny was ahead of me. She pulled on the door handle and it popped out of her hand without budging.

“It’s locked!”

The keys were in my pocket and Jenny had to fish them out while I held Jacob tight, tying and failing to keep his hard rubber shoes from connecting with his mother’s head.

“JACOB!” I shouted in his ear. “CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”

His wet face had been pressed against mine, and now he gave himself another great twist, his head moving away, turning, and then coming swiftly back to smack me right in the nose, watering my eyes and causing blood to flow. If I had been strapped into the rocket ship of anger before, this mindless, useless, and oblivious action blast me off into orbit around planet fury. It took everything I had to stop myself from throwing him down onto the pavement and kicking him.

“It’s open!”

And so it was. Jenny waddled out of the way to reveal a wide open car door, a child’s fish cracker-encrusted booster seat and a pile of toys and torn activity books. I rushed forward again and body slammed him into the seat, his wailing temporarily stifled as the breath whooshed out of him. His kicking and flailing continued unabated and I tried desperately to both keep him pinned in place and snake the straps of his restraints out from underneath him. I could feel the blood dripping out of my nose, and I took half a second to wipe some of it away with an errant hand, but that just bloodied my fingers and made the job of manipulating and snapping the buckles into place that much more difficult.

“JACOB!” I could hear my own voice screaming -- screaming to the point of breaking, but still somehow muffled, as if I was under water. “STOP IT! GODDAMN YOU! STOP IT!”

He was inexhaustible, raging on and on, grunting and bleating now, his throat worn raw, the gyrating movements of his plump limbs expressing only his own helpless fury. He began to slide down in his seat, his shirt coming up to his neck and revealing his soft belly and sunken chest. I had to grab him by the armpits and move back into position, and his head rocked back and forth, unable to shake the fabric of his shirt off his face.

It was the moment I needed to finally get the buckles snapped over him, pinching his pink flesh at least once in the process. Secured and cinched tight, I was able to take my hands off of him and pull his shirt, thick with slobber, down from over his face.

“STOP IT!” I shouted at him again. “FOR FUCK SAKE JUST FUCKING STOP IT!” I was lost in my own rage and was oblivious to what was going on around me. In that moment I hated him, hated him and myself in equal measure, and I wanted to do something hurtful, something to show him who was boss, something that would get him from being the horrible monster he had become. 

Possessed with such wickedness, I began grabbing his toys one by one, holding each up in front of his face, and then chucking it, throwing it as far from the car as I possibly could. First up was his doodle pad, a purple piece of plastic with a stubby magnetic pen hanging by a cord. It sailed across the parking lot and smashed to pieces on the roadway we had so recently left.

“Alan!” Jenny screamed behind me. “Stop it!”

Next up was a coloring book, happy cartoon animals smiling at me, each smeared with a blur of color across its black lines. It flapped like a wounded bird and landed less than six feet away. The back seat of the car was so full of his junk that I had no shortage of things to choose from. I taunted Jacob with each item before it left, cruelly telling him it was gone, gone forever, and that he needed to stop his tantrum if he didn’t want to lose everything.

“Alan!” Jenny screamed again, now actually tugging on my shirt and trying to pull me away.

Nothing was premeditated. I was acting on instinct. An evil and base instinct, one that couldn’t abide anyone or anything getting the better of me. And they were. They were all getting the better of me. They were all spitting on me. My career, my job, my wife, my son, my own roaring sense of my own inadequacy -- they were all spitting on me, spitting their poison venom and hatred right in my goddamn eyes.

Suddenly Milo was in my bloody hand, the little blue puppy dog that Jacob treasured above all else. When the stuffed animal was thrust momentarily into Jacob’s face, his breath hitched and his eyes went wide, but I was too far gone to even notice that I had finally penetrated Jacob’s own cloud of rage. As quick as Milo appeared to him, he was gone, sailing across the parking lot and landing in the curb.

“Alan!” Jenny screamed again. “That’s enough!” And now she started hitting me, clubbing me on the back of my head and neck with her heavy fists and forearms. “Stop it, goddammit! You fucking monster!”

Grunting with desperate effort, she managed to shove me aside and I found myself stumbling and falling to the pavement. In a flash Jenny’s wide form filled the space of the open car door, and then she had Jacob in her arms, his crying loud but his tantrum over.

“Go get it!” she spat at me.

I felt like an alien abductee who had just been plopped back into a deserted cornfield. One second a tornado had been raging around me, a freight train roaring in my ears, and now I could hear the birds chirping and the warm sun on my skin. There were pebbles pushing into my palms, and over me stood a mother, her crying son in her arms. I thought I knew her. She seemed strangely familiar.

“Do it, you son of a bitch! Go get Milo!”

And then the shame filled me. Filled me so close to bursting that had there been a knife I would have cut my own throat. People were staring and she hated me -- and they were both justified. People should stare, and women should hate a monster such as me. Only slowly was I able to find my feet and stagger over to where the little blue puppy had landed.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

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://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Trouble with Reality by Brooke Gladstone

Brooke Gladstone is co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, On the Media. Yes, I know On the Media is a WNYC and NPR radio program, but I listen to it as a podcast, so there you go. Having heard that she wrote a book, I put it on a recent Christmas gift list and was surprised to discover that it is barely a book at all -- more a pamphlet. Big type and only 92 pages between its two paper covers.

And I wish I had more to say about it. There really isn’t much there. It’s subtitle is A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, and I guess that resonates with the left-leaning intelligentsia, but at the same time, it kind of misses the larger point that its title suggests.

The trouble with reality, after all, is that -- at least from a political point-of-view -- it is constructed out of ideology; of late, two ideologies, each in further and further retreat from one another. So only for some is there moral panic.

Perhaps you picked up this book because an icy hand grips your viscera; sometimes squeezing, sometimes easing, always present. And you suspect that this intimate violation, this forced entry, proceeds from something more profound than politics. You imagine that reality itself is engaged in an epic existential battle and you stand helpless against the onslaught, as the truth is trumpled into dust.

It’s telling that Gladstone went with “trumpled” instead of “trampled” -- because, of course, for others there is no moral panic. Truth isn’t being trampled or trumpled. Truth is in ascendance again, finally, after decades of being denigrated and demeaned.

President Trump is the demagogue that today stands for one side of that equation -- his moral superiority crushing any moral panic his opponents may be feeling -- and Gladstone will spend a lot of her 92 pages focused on his role in our current drama. And real questions remain as to whether he is the director or only another actor in that play. But the “trouble with reality” was with us before he arrived on the scene and will be with us long after he had departed.

For this, Gladstone appropriately pulls from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, who reminds us that the stakes were long ago laid out by two of our most recognizable dystopian prophets, George Orwell in his 1984 and Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World.

In Orwell’s vision, he notes, we are crushed by a merciless oppression imposed by others, whereas in Huxley’s vision, we are seduced, sedated, and satiated. We enslave ourselves.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

“In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.

“In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us…”

Orwell, who in 1948 was fixed on Nazi devastation and Soviet ascendancy, seemed to have nailed it. But thirty-seven years later, Postman saw that in our time and place, it’s unquestionably Huxley. He portrayed a world that leads ineluctably to the election of Donald Trump.

The sad lesson of Brave New World, of course, is that by the time the World State is established, it is already too late to do anything about it. Those within are happy to be there and it is only the “savages” who look at it from the outside who can see the crushing waste of it all.

By the same necessity, I suppose, Gladstone can only write her book for the savages, horrified by the slide into authoritarianism that they see as they are slowly pushed into the tiny reservations that exist outside the Trumpian bubble. She offers advice for what we can do to detect, dissect and categorize the leader’s toxic tweets, but when it comes to actually fixing the problem, she doesn’t have much to offer.

Meaningful action is a time-tested treatment for moral panic.

Focus on policies that matter to you. Congressional offices keep tallies of phone calls from their districts. Make calls. As for street protests, they feel great, but unless they are large and well planned, they’re not all that effective. Since the president actually may believe the polls are rigged, even the most exemplary protests are unlikely to move his needle.

But protests do raise funds. When the American Civil Liberties Union showed up at airports to assist travelers caught in Trump’s travel ban, it garnered six times the donations in a single weekend that it usually gets in a year. And they do spook legislators, especially in their districts.

Protests also have another impact: They transform observers into activists. As Brian Resnick of Vox wrote, “If people who are showing up to protests just because they are curious and sympathetic eventually move on to greater, more consistent action, the movement grows. And change can happen.”

But not soon, and not without sustained effort. Action is vital. Democratic progress stalls without that eternal tug-of-war. But activism alone does not address the bigger issue, the focus of this tract. You cannot march to a long-term solution to your reality problem with a cadre of like-minded allies. That is a solitary journey, and it never ends. You have to travel out of your universe into the universe of others, and leave your old map at home.

It’s up to you, she seems to say. Protest, agitate, donate, vote, yes, but more importantly, get out of your reality bubble and go live in the bubble of others, at least long enough to see what it looks like on the inside and gain the credibility needed to establish a dialogue with them.

But while you’re in there, I suppose you’d better watch out for the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. Although John the Savage couldn’t make the transition to the World State, there’s no guarantee it won’t seduce you.

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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.