“Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned.
Just Mercy tells the story of EJI, from the early days with a small staff facing the nation’s highest death sentencing and execution rates, through a successful campaign to challenge the cruel practice of sentencing children to die in prison, to revolutionary projects designed to confront Americans with our history of racial injustice.
One of EJI’s first clients was Walter McMillian, a young black man who was sentenced to die for the murder of a young white woman that he didn’t commit. The case exemplifies how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching — a system that treats the rich and guilty better than the poor and innocent.”
25. May 2020 · Comments Off on Inc. Magazine’s Tom Foster interviews Mark Cuban on Re-opening Businesses · Categories: Uncategorized
This web video was recorded a little over a month ago, but I believe that the suggestions are still completely valid as they can help business owners in the current crisis.
Cuban fields a lot of questions from Foster that come from concerned business owners and Cuban answers with aplomb.
I heard a lot from Cuban about being honest and transparent with all stakeholders during the crisis to get a firm foundation to start with. Also, one of the first questions concerned how to keep a business afloat that is in danger of going under. Cuban stressed that honest communication with stakeholders (such as vendors or employees) may yield a great idea that could take the business in a different direction. Another suggestion is to negotiate for better contract terms.
Being adaptable, agile, and resilient were key terms that Cuban highlighted for business that will make it through the crisis with success. Conveying the steps the business is taking to get out of the crisis is super important. Get ideas from wherever you can. Flexibility with others is another trait that I picked up on as a good business practice from the video.
“Being nice goes so far” and we need to be mindful to keep good relationships intact both during as well as after the crisis.
Additional discussions involve Artificial Intelligence, Ambient Voice programming, Robotics, Precision Medicine, Innovative Products for America 2.0, and the book Healthy Buildings.
I was delighted to learn that Cuban is a “reading machine” and spends hours reading to stay a few steps ahead on business trends.
It is my immense pleasure to welcome back Justin to the blog! In this post he is going to walk us through what it is like to be a U.S. librarian in New Zealand.
This past October I made one of the biggest leaps of my life: my family and I moved all the way from the middle of Pennsylvania in the USA to Wellington, New Zealand for a library job. I’m here today to talk a little bit about that process, what we went through, how we got here, and now 6 months in how we’ve all adjusted to life, libraries, and more.
Up until my mid 30’s I thought that I had super powers of some sort. Everything that came at me was something that I could handle, process, and incorporate into my life. Things that entered my life had their period of adjustment and then quickly they became part of the daily routines that I had. But as time came at me things changed. I slowed down a bit. I turned away from the rat race of daily life and work. I got less involved in completely changing the world and instead focused on what I could work on and solve. This whole paragraph will make sense later on in this piece, but I wanted to plunk it down here now to set the tone. Consider the tone set.
It was an easy decision to move from the middle of Pennsylvania in the USA to one of the biggest cities in New Zealand. New Zealand has long held a special place in my heart. I visited this great country and got to interact with its libraries scene back in 2015, when I was lucky to be asked to be a keynote speaker for the LIANZA conference (https://lianza.org.nz) in Wellington, NZ. When I was here during that time I felt nothing but positivity, love, and the personal and professional growth I was seeking. Not only did I find those things but I saw a place where my family could live happily and grow. There was (and still is) so much to do, see, and explore in this country.
The interview and application process wasn’t all that different from what librarians can expect in the USA. I took part in a few over the internet meetings which required some time zone difference juggling on my part. That was probably the most confusing bit. I kept in touch with the interview panel through email the whole time through. And then, just kind of like magic after a few months I was invited to accept the job. Since my family had long been talking about this we had already known what our answer would be (spoiler alert we said yes but you already knew that from the beginning on this post) and we had already investigated what we would need to do to get here.
Here’s a short list of what we personally needed to accomplish to make this a reality:
Apply for and get the approval to get a work visa. Luckily my employer was on the list of accredited employers and that helped with the process. There was a lot of paperwork, background checking, doctors appointments, and much more that I’ve already forgotten about, but I will say this: applying for a visa to move to and work in a different country was basically like taking on a part time job on top of a full time job.
Sell our home and most of our belongings. To do this, we had an auction for the home and the belongings. As I write this, we are still working on selling our home but all of our belongings have moved on to new owners.
Organize our belongings to be delivered to New Zealand. This was huge and it cost over $7000 USD. On the last day we spent in Pennsylvania we loaded up a shipping container with the help of our friends and away it went on a 3 month journey across the sea. We cut out a lot of extra stuff from our lives, leaving only the very necessary things that a family of 4 could need and a few extra special things that we could not do without.
Prepare the travel plans: for us that meant going to Maine to be with family right before we left the USA and then leaving from there on the very long multi-day process of getting to New Zealand.
Setting up a temporary living situation; we rented an AirBnB for the first month or so that we were here. It was so helpful to have this temporary home to get us adjusted to life in a new country. Sure, it cost us a lot more than renting but it gave us the home we needed to have while we searched for a more permanent place to rent.
Now that I’ve given you all of that stuff I can finally now talk about what it means to be a librarian moving countries and working in a different culture. Long story short? Despite there being thousands of miles between the USA and NZ, there are a lot of common threads. There’s never enough staff to do all of the things that we want to do. There’s always budget issues. There’s always staff communication that needs to be worked through. There’s a lot of planning for things that may never happen. I think that’s just the state of libraries at the moment: we’re working on how to move ahead in this new world with the tools we’ve been given. At the same time we are imagining a world with more tools and seeing how we can get there. So there’s a common theme running through all of our libraries and it is that we are all trying to get to where we need to be.
As I adjusted to day to day life and to working for a bigger library over the past 6 months I got to fully understand that I did not have super powers anymore and that I was just a normal, average person like everyone else. I have limits on what I can do and who I can be. I can’t solve everything but I can always give it a shot. I don’t have the answer to every question. And I sure don’t have the energy that I used to have. Learning all about a new country on top of moving the lives of 4 individuals to a new country, starting a bigger management role in libraries, and then finally overseeing the opening of a new library branch over the past 6 months has reinforced the idea to me that I am a human being who has limits and a finite amount of energy. All of this sounds mighty depressing and defeated as I read what I have written, but let me be honest with you: I feel like I have been reenergized in a completely different way. I never thought that I’d feel like this, but my current career path has taught me just how important it is to take care of myself, to not care about libraries all that much, and to focus more on the people and the things outside of library work that make me smile. It only took a new country, 9,000 or so miles of travel, and a whole lot of library and work stuff to realize that. I don’t have super powers. I’m Justin Average Person.
Recently, I have come upon two sets of questions from the 8th Century Indian Buddhist monk known as Shantideva.
Mainly in addressing worrying Shantideva asks:
“If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good.”
A slightly different version of the question set is found on page 223 in The Book of Joy by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams.
“Why be unhappy about something if it can be remedied? And what is the use of being unhappy if it cannot be remedied?”
How important is Shantideva’s question set? According to the Book of Joy, again on page 223, “In this short teaching is the profound essence of the Dalai Lama’s approach to life.”
A modern version of this question set for me would be something like this.
If you can fix the situation, why worry about it? If you cannot fix the situation, why worry about it?
This is good practical advice that everyone can benefit from. Interesting to learn that this reasoning is integral to how the Dalai Lama lives.
In December 2019 I took a look at Lee Iacocca’s leadership style and learned about his 9 Cs of leadership (from pages 6 to 10 in his book Where Have All the Leaders Gone? ). The Cs are traits or actions Iacocca thought a leader must have or be able to perform.
Curiosity
Creative
Communicate
Character
Courage
Conviction
Charisma
Competent
Common
Sense
In January 2020 I took a look at General Mattis and his 3Cs of leadership from his book Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, pages 11 to 12. These were traits Mattis thought a leader must have:
Competence
Caring
Conviction
Iacocca and Mattis both share Competence and Conviction as
key leadership traits.
Caring is a leadership trait Mattis had, that could be added to the 9Cs of leadership Iacocca had.
So how about the 10 Cs of leadership? Combining the two lists we get the following:
The word initiative is used extensively throughout the book and will be most important to reflect upon. Leading by articulating your intent as a commander and letting subordinates take the initiative sums up what I learned from reading the book. My favorite quotes from Call Sign Chaos by General Mattis and Bing West are these:
p.12, “Value initiative and aggressiveness above all. It’s
easier to pull the reins back than to push a timid soul forward.”
p.21, “Because a unit adopts the personality of its
commander, just as a sports team adopts the personality of its coach, I made my
expectations clear: I wanted a bias for action, and to bring out the initiative
in all hands.”
p.42, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate,
and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t
broad enough to sustain you.”
p. 45, “Installation of personal initiative, aggressiveness,
and risk-taking doesn’t spring forward spontaneously on the battlefield. It
must be cultivated for years and inculcated, even rewarded, in an
organization’s culture. If a commander expects subordinates to seize fleeting
opportunities under stress, his organization must reward this behavior in all
facets of training, promoting, and commending. More important, he must be
tolerant of mistakes. If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in
your ranks only the risk averse.”
Page. 59, “Business management books often stress
“centralized planning and decentralized execution.” That is too top down for my
taste. I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning
and execution. In general, there are two kinds of executives: those who simply
respond to their staffs and those who direct their staffs and give them
latitude, coaching them as needed to carry out the directions. I needed to
focus on the big issues and leave the staff to flesh out how to get there.”
Page 88. “Note to all executives over the age of thirty:
always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.”
Page 96, “When things go wrong, a leader must stand by those
who made the decision under extreme pressure and with incomplete information.
Initiative and audacity must be supported, whether or not successful.”
Page 151, “Regardless of rank or occupation, I believe that
all leaders should be coaches at heart. For me, “player-coach” aptly describes
the role of a combat leader, or any real leader.”
Page 158, “If you don’t like problems, stay out of
leadership.”
Page 175, “Every few months, a leader has to step back and
question what he and his organization are doing.”
Page 179, “When asked how he would order his thoughts if he
had one hour to save the world, Einstein sagely responded that he would spend
fifty-five minutes defining the problem and save the world in five minutes.”
Page 184, “Commanders must encourage intellectual risk
taking to preclude a lethargic environment. Leaders must shelter those
challenging nonconformists and mavericks who make institutions uncomfortable;
otherwise you wash out innovation.”
Page 202, “In keeping with George Washington’s approach to
leadership I would listen, learn, and help, then lead.”
Page 237, “If you can’t be additive as a leader, you’re just
like a potted plant in the corner of a hotel lobby: you look pretty, but you’re
not adding substance to the organization’s mission.”
Page 238, “You must unleash initiative rather than suffocate
it.”
Page 238, “Strategy is hard, unless you’re a dilettante. You
must think until your head hurts.”
Page 240, “Resourceful leaders do not lose touch with their
troops. A leader’s job is to inculcate high-spirited, amiable self-discipline.
Leaders must always generate options by surrounding themselves with bright
subordinates and being catalysts for new ideas.”
Page 242, “Allowing bad processes to stump good people is
intolerable.”
Page 243, “Because maverick thinkers are so important to an
organization’s adaptability, high ranking leaders need to be assigned the job
of guiding and even protecting them, much as one would do for any endangered
species.”
Page 243, “Leaders at all ranks, but especially at high ranks,
must keep in their inner circle people who will unhesitatingly point out when a
leader’s personal behavior or decisions are not appropriate.”
20. January 2020 · Comments Off on Prediction come true: Passport Services at Pratt Library · Categories: Uncategorized
A little over 18 months ago in the first half of June 2018, I blogged about my prediction that the Pratt Library (Baltimore, MD) would take on passport services based on information contained in a Baltimore Sun article.
I was off on my timing. I was six months short. It would have been difficult to be precise on the start date for the service, but I gave it a good attempt.
Although I never studied Iacocca’s management style in great detail, my first boss would often repeat one of Iacocca’s mantras; Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way
A 1992 Chrysler commercial with Iacocca ends with this way of thinking.
See the video below
Let’s take a quick shot at breaking these three actions down:
1) Lead- What can I do to instill and inspire confidence in people to accomplish an audacious goal? How am I acting and communicating like a leader? What can I do so that people’s performance can improve? What support do I bring to the table?
2) Follow- If I am not the formal leader, what skill set can I provide to help people implement the leader’s goal? Where might I speak up to alert the leader to concern or important milestones?
3) Get Out of the Way- If you don’t have a thorough understanding of what is happening and you are not able to positively contribute to reaching the goal, it is best to let people do their jobs without your interference. Refrain from creating potential obstacles if you find yourself in this arena. There are times when things just need to take their course.
