The Sunday before last, there was a one-hour tribute on 60 Minutes to the recently deceased Don Hewitt. Don created and was the inspiration behind TV’s longest running show: 60 Minutes. While I don’t usually watch shows that pat themselves on the back, this one caught my eye. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the whole show.
I love to play Scrabble, but I’m not very good. My friends and work colleagues routinely outplay me. But I play on.
In Scrabble, there are only a few “q” words that don’t require the vowel “u”. One of those is “qat”. Until recently, I had only a faint idea about its meaning or significance.
That all changed when I read a short article in a recent NG. As it turns out, qat is a drug (stimulant) that is routinely used in Yemen and Africa’s Horn, but is illegal in the US and Canada. In other parts of the western world (including the UK), however, it is very much legal.
It would seem to me in this electronic age, the traditional committee and/or staff meeting is becoming outmoded. The evening of November 1, I attended a small gathering of individuals to listen to a lecture on Mormonism and the environment. After the BYU prof made his PowerPoint presentaion, there was a lengthy Q&A session. This latter activity was dominate by one very loud, overbearing, and foul-mouthed individual. While I didn’t disagree with most of her points, but why did she think her opinions were more cogent than those of others in the audience? By her dominating the conversation, we will never know what others attending were thinking. We will never know what the silent individuals could have brought to the discussion.
The following is an quoted from the book “Mountain Beyond Mountains:”
“Farmer (Paul) was learning about the great importance of water to public health, and he was conceiving a great fondness for technology in general, also scorn for ‘the Luddite trap.’ He liked to illustrate the meaning of that phrase with the story of the time when he came back to Cange (Haiti) from Harvard and found that Pere Lafontant had overseen the construction of thirty fine-looking concrete latrines, scattered through the village. ‘But,’ Farmer asked, ‘are they appropriate technology?’ He’d picked up the term in a class at the Harvard School of Public Health. As a rule, it meant that one should use only the simplest technologies required to do a job.
The book “The Moral Underground” was recently given a short review in Time Magazine (Dec. 14, p. 23). In her book, Lisa Dodson (BC sociology prof.) paints a rather dismal image of corporate America, who she feels is building wealth by abusing low-income workers. “Helping the less fortunate in this context becomes as a form of civil and corporate disobedience.” Time lists three of her examples: (1) supervisors who alter time cards so that employees can take better care for their families; (2) the school nurse who keeps cots in her office so those with bad home situations can get a few hours of sleep; and (3) the doctor who thumbs his nose at insurance regulations in order to provide medicine for an entire household. ”All see their behavior as necessary and moral acts of conscience.”
In a recent edition of SIVault, L. Jon Wertheim writes about the decision-making of the football coach for the Pulaski Academy Bruins (a high school located on the west side of Little Rock AR). For me the article, brought to my attention by my son, is more about life than sports.
Time Magazine (Sept 28, 2009) has an interesting short article on Wikepedia:
“. . . early in 2007, something strange happened: Wikipedia’s growth line flattened. People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages.”
At one of the 2009 SLC Sunstone workshops, a Weber State Professor — Michael J. Stevens — taught a short course in management. He described 4 types of managers ranging from disrespectful to respectful, and dominant to submissive:
Q1: Imposer — makes authoritarian decisions
Q2: Ignorer — avoids or postpones decisions
Q3: Ingratiator — wants everyone to be “one happy family”
Q4: Integrator — promotes self-direction in others
With the ideal being Q4.
I just gave my employer 40 hours (5 working days) that I can never get back. My sentence: Manditory supervisory training. The upside: It gave me a lot of time to contemplate my “philosophy” of management . . . and occasionally discuss it with the class.
An article in the blog “LDS Anarchy” proposes the concept of “congregational nullification.” It is based on the concept of “jury nullification”: or making a law void by jury decision. In congregational nullification, a church action is rendered void by ignoring it. “Simply ignoring all instructions deemed to be unjust, unwise, overbearing, tyrannical or humiliating nullifies the instructions. End of story.”