Platano Power

The Dominican Republic is united like no other event could unite them. It’s the international baseball tournament and they are hoping to win again after the undefeated 8-0 run to the championship in 2013. On my weekend trip to the capital, every TV set there and in the city of San Juan de la Maguana was tuned into the tournament. Baseball is the national sport (well, apart from dominoes) and everyone is following along looking forward to the moment of victory.

Backing up a bit, the baseball team here is the shining gem in the community. Last year Bridges (the company I am working for here) got a member of the community to donate a piece of flatish land to the youth center they were building. After making it much closer to flat, they installed a backstop as well as cement stands on both sides. Though far short of even the most rundown fields in suburban US, it is unequivocally the nicest field in the area. Between the field and the 40 donated gloves, catcher’s equipment, and real bases, the youth of Derrumbadero have the most luxurious baseball set up for miles. And they play like a team that has won divine favor.

I’ve been to four or five games so far, and Derrumbadero has won every single one. The first game I witnessed I only saw the last three innings (they play 7 innings here), where we went from losing 4-3 to winning 7-4. The second, we came from behind 3-0 in the first to blow out the other team 17-10 or so. The third, I played first base for the first four innings, as it was the younger kids and they wanted to show off their Americano (my first game of baseball ever!!!) We came from behind 5-0 to win it 7-6 with two runs in the final inning. Next came a sunny Sunday game that gave me terrible sunburn on my legs but was worth every second of pain. We got down 7-0 in the first two innings and then suddenly turned on the power. By the fourth, we were up 8-7, and after getting up 15-7, coasted to a 16-12 or so win.

There are around 50 or 60 kids in the town who play on the two teams. There is little here in the way of adult supervision, role modeling, or attempts to build life-long learners out of the children. However the two managers of the teams are somewhat remarkable in how they run things. At once fun and firm, these young men are only a few years older than most of the players, and the same age as some of them. At 22 or 23, they are both part time students at a university a hour or so away. They keep track of the lineup, hold onto the extra baseballs so they don’t all disappear, and most importantly enforce team spirit and make sure the boys are all building each other up instead of fighting. One of my favorite moments watching one of the managers, Xavier, was when he got dressed down by the only father who ever watches (presumably because he had a broken arm, as I haven't seen him since his cast came off two weeks ago) because he had let two of the boys tell another boy that he hadn’t run hard enough for first base. The father insisted that teams don’t treat each other that way and that it was Xavier’s job to make that happen. Xavier took this lashing with his head held high and then replied that the father was right, he’d made a mistake, and it wouldn’t happen again. And true to his word, the next time something like that happened at a game that weekend, Xavier called a pause in the game, got the whole team around him, and told them they were one group and one family, and if someone needed to be told something like that, he would be the one saying it.

After the Dominicans came from behind 5-0 to defeat the USA, I admit I was a little upset, since I like winning. But I was also excited, for another win on the world stage at baseball would be great for the DR! I hope Platano Power takes them all the way to another undefeated championship!

Prognostications After a Week with President Trump

President Trump has so far been an irresponsible leader. As someone who is comfortable (and in fact enjoys!) arguing for the opposite point of view in order to spur on arguments with friends, I often find myself trying to think through the logic of a viewpoint with which I disagree. Some of my most firmly held beliefs that differ from social norms have arisen from this method. The best example is my stance on personal recycling (it's a form of tax, doesn't matter, and is morally licensing, so I'll stick to reducing and reusing thank you very much).


So though I harbored many differences with candidate Donald Trump, I am fully prepared, especially in the presence of so many smug Bernie supporters in my social circle, to try to react to his policies with analysis rather than anger. So far he has demonstrated his usual callous and un-Christian attitude towards others as well as several massive violations of wisdom abut leadership and American institutions which I hold dear, and which history has shown are worthy of respect and adherence. For a good list of these, check out this weekly record.

Russell Simmons wrote an interesting opinion piece on Huffington Post today that I think gives us part of the picture. I've seen a few pieces articulating that even if somehow Trump got impeached, Democrats are in for a long, hard four years. Even assuming something Trump does causes Republicans in power to somehow decide it's worth jumping ship and impeach him, it would take a long time. Even Liberals who are shouting and waving their fists like Robert Reich think it'll be a while before they dump him. And lest the passionate among Democrats forget, President Pence wouldn't be an alliterative leader that propels the country forward.

The timing here could be very interesting. Democrats seem to have little hope of winning back either the House or the Senate in 2018. If things stay this way, Republicans could very well hide behind a smoke screen of their normal obfuscation while letting Trump parade around for two years, and then announce after winning, potentially a filibuster-proof majority, that the voters had endorsed Trump's policies, even though reality says the map and seats up for election favor them. If Trump manages to learn which crazy things warrant backlash and protests, and which fly under the radar, he could manage to be propped up for the entire four years, helping usher in an even stronger majority for Republicans.

If, on the other hand, the protests and political activism that may be coming combine with one or more Trump decisions that break through the cognitively dissonant support of some of his voters, a few things might happen:

• President Trump, who we all know loves to gild things, might start believing polls that show him as un-liked. Protests and woke former Trump supporters might make these numbers sink further and break even more starkly. President Trump might turtle up and keep at things, or change, or just quit. He's a maverick after all, and has said many times he doesn't need this job.
• Slow-moving lawsuits (you actually can't sue the President for things he does as part of his official capacity, FYI) and petitions and eventually articles of impeachment might make it to the house floor. With only a simple majority needed, that's currently 26 Republicans siding with the Democrats, and would be less if it happened after midterms and Democrats picked up some seats. While it would take 2/3 of the Senate, which means a lot of Republicans switching sides and seems pretty near impossible, perhaps just the threat of getting it passed in the house would cause Trump to change course or jump ship given that Alec Baldwin consistently gets under his skin for doing an impression on air.
• The Democrats start offering more leadership and more young, Millennial voices the chance to become part of the party. If protests galvanize the Democrats in a similar way to the Tea Party, the Millennial generation can grab hold of political power. The Democratic leadership in the Senate has recently broadened, but even the Millennials willing to get arrested to change the party are advocating for a 75-year old to take control over a party he doesn't even identify as a member of. This would take Millennials rising up and denying the snowflake aspersions cast our way with little thought. I love this idea.
• Civil servants, judges, and large institutions combine to create a lasting resistance to the destruction of democratic and social norms in which President Trump is constantly engaging. From the "Resist" banner by Greenpeace to the rogue Tweets by NPS, EPA, and NASA employees, everyone everywhere makes sure that their one vote (that they probably were too busy or apathetic to cast, hence Trump winning in the first place) is followed with a few hours of dedication to the American Dream that unifies and uplifts, instead of President Trump's "American Carnage" inauguration address.

No matter what happens over the coming weeks, months, and years in our American political experiment, I know two things about myself for certain. First, I will continue to help out political campaigns for candidates I support by canvassing. I love the walking, the fulfillment I get from meeting so many good people, and the knowledge that while I only vote once, I can get many more votes cast by putting shoe leather to pavement. Second, I will keep reading and talking and being optimistic. If I stay informed, and keep reading, I will know more about why things are happening, and be able to help spread this information in my circles.

Run to the Middle. Every. Time.

Winning in wrestling is about discipline. I learned that lesson over and over again through my time as a high school wrestler and as a coach. For my junior and senior years, our coaching staff was graced by the panther-like presence of a man we called Coach Shoops. We usually had three coaches, our head coach was the middle weight, and then the assistant coaches would be split one for the little guys and one for the big boys. Shoops was big and quick. He weighed around 200lbs and was constantly carrying around a med school textbook as he studied for whatever exam was next.

Shoops had a variety of little techniques he added to my repertoire. Because he was technically sound where I was quirky, and much quicker than I, I don't remember picking up too many larger moves from him. What I did learn was a style of thinking and gamesmanship that helped me win matches.

Like I said, winning in wrestling is about discipline. The head coach, Quilty, made sure we worked hard enough to have physical discipline, and were sufficiently drilled in techniques to have technical discipline. Shoops made sure we were ready to get inside our opponents' heads and grind them into the mat. He made sure we had competitive discipline.

Some of his ideas were a little quixotic, but worked with practice. It took me a while, but eventually I managed to get good at pointing towards an opponent's shoe to make them think it had come untied, so I could strike while their attention was away from defense. One of my favorites of his was The Handshake Maneuver. If you act scared while warming up and then give a dead fish handshake, your opponent will underestimate your confidence and technique. If you are reading a book at the side of the mat and give him the double-handed nerdshake, chances are he will underestimate your strength. If you make exceptional eye contact while shaking hands, he might still be looking when the ref blows the whistle and you can strike first. The Handshake Maneuver was straight up fun for me.

The most effective and hardest of his recommendations was that whenever the whistle blew, no matter the score, run back to the middle of the mat. Some matches this wouldn't have much affect because it would only be at the end of the first and second periods. Other matches you'd be going out of bounds every ten seconds and having to restart over and over.

In those cases, you could win a match simply by running back to the middle. The first time you do it, your opponent might just think it's weird as he staggers/crawls back the 10ft to line up. The second, he might be a little irked by your unnecessary expenditure of energy. By the fifth or sixth, all he's thinking about is what it's going to take to make you break. If your whole team is doing this, you can track the morale of the other team as it sinks further and further. I know from personal experience that it's not easy to run back to the middle. It's even harder if you're losing. But if you can be disciplined enough to do it, you will win the mental battle and eventually, the physical one as well.

I mention all of this because I think if you cultivate discipline in any area, it will give you almost superhuman abilities. This doesn't take skill or money. All it takes is dedication and a desire to perform (and perhaps peers and mentors to help you get back up again when you mess up). If you want your employees to aspire to excellence, you have to teach them the basics and the techniques like Quilty did. You also have to give them the hard-knuckled fight and gamesmanship that Shoops taught.

A Retrospective Resolution - Carrying Around Luggage

Last year my New Years' Resolution was to make use of Scott Arizala's wisdom about unloading buses. As a camp director for years he had been frustrated by the lack of coherence and organization at his camp as kids arrived on buses and their stuff was carted to their cabins. While the kids were doing get-to-know-you activities and eating dinner, the bags would all be brought to cabins. One or two kids would "lose" their stuff for hours every week.

Scott hated how unwelcome it made the kids feel when they walked into their cabin and couldn't find their bag. For years he would remind staff on change day to be careful with the bags, but would spend his day all over camp while someone else coordinated the bag moving. It all changed when he got in the face of one young counselor who had made a mistake and the counselor cheekily replied: "If you care so much about the bags, why don't you do it."

So for the rest of the summer and all the years since, Scott has directed camp from the parking lot on change days. Personally welcoming every camper, and making sure no one's stuff gets lost. It may be a little trickier to deal with problems that arise with just a radio and a quick wit, but the kids feel welcome.

The lesson he taught (and I tried to internalize) was twofold: As a manager you have limited time, you can't be in charge of everything, and have to balance which things you do based on what needs to get done and what will give you satisfaction to complete. Secondly and more importantly, you will get better results from people if you realize that they may not care about the same things you do and calibrate your leadership accordingly.

Scott had many solutions available to him, and likely tried some or all of these:

• He could have added an object lesson to his staff training by having several of his staff's possessions get "lost" en route to a staff trip and then getting them to talk to the rest of staff about what that felt like (thus increasing staff motivation to do a good job with the bags). 
• He could have created or helped another staff member create a more organized method for bag moving - like drawing chalk lines in a grid on the pavement for each cabin (thus adding agency to a staff member). 
• He could have organized the registration communication with parents to include a request for color coded tape/ribbon on each bag depending on the child's cabin (thus showing parents his camp cared how their possessions were treated). 

In the end, he chose to take charge of the task himself. This past year, I tried hard to listen to myself when I got bitchy and either take charge of the project or task that was making me upset, try out an alternate method for fixing it like mentioned above, or let it go.

Losing and Gaining Employee Trust - Say Yes When Possible

Rank and file employees' trust in the good intentions of their bosses is a very fragile. It is slow to be earned, and accumulates through micro-choices, but can be lost in an instant when efficiency or bottom-line thinking supersede the human factors inherent in managing staff.

These pivotal moments are easy to identify in retrospect, but can be difficult to avoid as they spring into existence. Two easy examples, one from several years ago and one from today:

• Staff had been arriving back from their days off sporadically tardy, and it was becoming a drag on both the administrative end of things (scheduling them for an activity or responsibility is tough when you can't be sure they'll be back on time), and for the individual counselors who were being screwed over by their peers. As an administrative team, we had a productive and appropriate brainstorming session as part of our weekly long staff meeting on Sunday afternoons, and we came up with an adaptation to the days off scheduling (starting/ending at 9:15am instead of 9:30am). The change was shared later that evening at the weekly all-staff meeting. While staff followed the new rule, I learned in the end of summer feedback forms that this was a particularly discussed and maligned decision. Staff felt like we'd had one way of doing things, and we were screwing them over by changing the rules to their time off mid-summer. While we fixed the short-term, non-vital problem, the damage we did to their trust in the administrative staff proved irreparable. To be honest, this is just one example, as is to be expected in a long and exhausting season, there were many other micro-choices in that summer that also contributed to the overall distrust (more of an 'us versus them' than a 'we're a happy family' - we're not talking like huge trust issues here, just the subtleties of maximizing intrinsic motivation). 
• This evening was the last night of the first session, and traditionally we have had counselors stay on duty for an extra half hour in order to get a little extra time in with their campers on the last night. Instead of being off-duty at 9:30, they are free starting at 10:00pm. Right as all of camp was heading back to their cabins around 8:30pm, a bunch of the administrators gathered and it was realized that none of us remembered letting counselors know that Friday nights are a little different. Right as we were about to decide what to do (expediency was required), a first-year counselor piped up from the edge of the conversation group and said "I think most people were split on this, we were talking about it a couple days ago and staff was about half and half" - I replied "Well I'm glad you guys were thinking about it, that's the kind of question someone should ask Ad Staff, since we hadn't remembered and it would have been great...." Here I hope/think we made the right quick choice and I sent around the most easy-going and chill member of administrative staff to let people know that they would be covering until 10:00pm. Because a counselor had given us the information (or in the first case had we asked the counselors what they thought) we were able to make a choice that we wanted for camp and do it in a way that would assuage any potential backlash. 

I guess the moral of this post is one effective way of maintaining employee trust (and thus intrinsic motivation to perform at their highest level) is to find room for their preferences and desires to be expressed and met when possible. Or - Say yes when possible

Is it the parents?

This weekend we had a group of families staying over, about 30 people in all, and a dozen kiddos. In the morning we had several activities, including our giant swing. One mother arrived back on the property with her 11 year old around lunchtime. I spotted the girl walking across the main area crying from inside the kitchen, so I knew the mom who was flanking her was bee-lining to ask us to help fix something so her daughter would stop crying.

The mom asked me if we could set up and let her daughter get a chance on the giant swing since she had been at lacrosse all morning and missed out. Of course I said yes and at some point later in the afternoon a couple of my staff sent her up.

The problem here is that parents aren't teaching their kids that choices have consequences. If you are in a lacrosse league, and choose to go to the game Saturday morning, you may not get to do everything the other kiddos who didn't go to sports got to do. That's life. By teaching their kids that the world will shift to accommodate their needs, we are not raising them to be healthy, happy, strong adults.

It is hard for me to lay much blame on the shoulders of millennials when we all know that in our childhood, our parents borrowed more than anyone ever had before them to make sure they got to increase their living standards. American credit card debt rose throughout the 90s as millennials' parents insisted they deserved better than they were getting and just went out and bought those things.

While it may be true that mortgages are the single biggest factor in debt (according to this 2014 study, there is a .96 out of 1.00 correlation between size of debt and presence of a mortgage), this doesn't excuse our parents. Not everyone has the income to be a homeowner. Every parent, by biological necessity, wants the best for their children. "No", "You can't have/do that", and "Life's not fair" are three important lessons every parents should practice into the mirror every day until they can do a better job raising their children.

I think there are two really easy ways to think about this that will help (both, ironically, from the keynote addresses at the Tri-States Camping Conferences the last two years). First, change the way you talk about your life - instead of "I have to pay the bills / walk the dog / go to work ..." say "I get to pay the bills / walk the dog / go to work" - Bert and John Jacobs, Founders of Life is Good. This sentiment teaches us to recognize the privileges we have in all things, which encourages gratitude. Second, when asked how she could cultivate the ego necessary to be president while at the same time maintaining the humility to keep the common touch, Hillary Clinton replied that she reflected daily on a need for a "discipline of gratitude."

Crashing and Integrity

One of my staff crashed the golf cart into the pool fence today and didn't fess up right away. When Tim asked them all who/what happened, no one spoke up and so he had all of them go fix the fence. Later, the one who had crashed it this morning came forward and told him.

Not sure where to go with this, but it happened today.