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!

Using Emotions to Temper Decisions

Our days are filled with decisions. Some are important, but most just involve the minutiae of what we eat, wear, say, or do. Chances are you don't even notice many of the decisions you make each day. How we decide is a combination of our emotional state and our logical expectations about the social and practical functionality of the options. As a culture, we are against deciding things entirely because of emotion. This comes from Enlightenment thinking, colonial survivalism, and the threat of extinction due to an overly emotive leader with access to nuclear warheads. 

Modern consumers are subjected to a daily barrage of surreptitious emotional messaging designed to make us buy things we don't need, but surely want. Two recently effective advertisers have been Apple and Coca-Cola. Apple sold "cool" for many years when the iPod and iPhone first came out, while Coca-Cola still has a stranglehold on the idea that when you open a can of coke, it brings happiness, family, and unbridled joy.

These nuclear and consumption based reasons might make you hesitate to ever use emotions when making decisions. However, I think that there is a space where you can use your emotions to make incredibly effective decisions.

We tend to ignore metallurgy in our expressions about 'temper.' People 'lose' their temper, can be in a 'bad' temper, or can have a 'fit' of temper. When talking about metal, it means to harden by heating and cooling. Imagine if we spoke about our emotions in terms that involved self control, strength, and conditioning, rather than unbridled fire. A blacksmith knows that a low and slow temper produces the hardest and brittlest metals while a hot and fierce temper produces softer, more flexible metal. So when you "lose your temper" it means you've lost control of your temperature and are either too hot or too cool.

When you are making important decisions, they should involve logical assessments about the costs and benefits of each option. This analysis should compare and contrast the short and longer term effects as well as who will be effected. One common method parents teach their children for important decisions is a pros and cons list. This involves a logical and equivalency based approach to deciding.

One of the most important decisions we make each summer at camp is our cabin assignments. Many camps assign their counselors different cabins based on seniority, or allow them to apply for a specific age group. Since our camp is small, and puts so much weight on community, we wait until most of the way through our staff training week before assigning cabins. Each cabin gets two counselors, who live and work together for the following 8-weeks.

This decision process always has a similar formula, but feels very different depending on the temper of the administrators. We will try to figure out the cabin pairings for one gender, then when emotions are overtaking logic, we switch genders. It takes 2-3 passes to get to a point where everyone is comfortable with the cabins. Sometimes the process can get contentious, and erupt in shouting and crass words. Far more often it is a passionate but reasoned discussion where we try to use our feelings about individuals, their histories and prospects, and the needs of the campers and camp to combine into a logic storm of happy goodness.

This decision is made without a time limit (besides getting tired) and with the promise that we will be unified at the conclusion. So while the stakes are high and potentially the success of the whole summer program lies in the decision, we can take our time, think things through, and rely on our cumulative wisdom to find a good solution. In this way, we can let emotions temper our decisions.

In an emergency, two things you don't have are time and the ability to come to consensus. You need a plan and a straightforward set of directions so that you can produce the most reliably good result that helps the most people and hurts the fewest. To prevent rash decisions you should bottle up your emotions during a crisis. Despite this, emotions have an important role to play in emergencies.

In general emotions are more useful in situations where there are multiple possible correct decisions, each with marginal benefits. We use a system of values to guide us in how to apply our emotion. If we feel strongly about something it may mean a particular solution’s marginal benefits should be chosen or discarded.

For 10 months spanning 2009 and 2010 a friend and I prepared for a 5-week trip to the Alaskan Bush. We weighed gear, compared caloric contents of various substances, and read volumes on wilderness survival and Alaska. We also created an emergency plan. We listed as many potential emergencies as we could, and then, from the calm of our own computers thousands of miles apart, debated and doctrinized our responses. This method allowed us the chance to inject emotion and values into our emergency responses without accessing that emotion during the emergency. We had already agreed what we do if one of our backpacks gets washed downstream, or if some of our food spoiled. This meant that as frustration or anger or hunger clouded our vision on the trip, we would still have the tempered response available.

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.

Brotherhood and Pain - A Call for Fellowship

I learned a lot through pain as a high school wrestler. That first week of practice each year was a revelation. We would start with warmups that were more intense than an entire soccer practice, drill basic techniques and more advanced counters for 45 minutes or so (never letting the heart rate fall), and then wrestle live until it was time for conditioning. That first week, it would be somewhere during the drilling that I would hit "The Wall" - my physical limit where my body said "I can't do this anymore!" and I would have to push through with mental toughness, visualization of success, and camaraderie from my mat brothers.

Each year I would turn in homework that week with a different handwriting than the rest of the year. My entire body would be so spent from exertion and musce fatigue that no matter how I sat, some portion would be holding me up and twitching from the effort.

Gradually my wall would get pushed farther and farther back. We would do less and less of the drilling and technique and more of the live wrestling. By a month into the season, we would be managing to wrestle live for more than an hour a practice. Together we would push our walls back and fight through sore muscles, head colds, parents who wanted to overfeed us, and all the other problems life can throw at you.

Each time you got your hand raised in wrestling, it brought a compelling feeling of success. Wrestling is a mano-a-mano sport where you are each the same size. Winning means you stand victorious when all you had to rely on was yourself. It is also a team sport.

People not on the team often made fun of us for wrestling. For being homos, for wearing spandex costumes, for caring so much, and for not eating whatever we wanted like the rest of the boys in high school. I had it easy (our team was state champs all four years I was in HS, so critics were kept mostly to snide whispered comments), but I can imagine how it must have felt to have those jokes amplified.

The only other team I have heard described the way I think of my wrestling team is football. With 90 players on the roster and 11 on the field engaging in carefully choreographed plays, you must place your well-being in the hands of your brothers every time the ball is snapped.

We build bonds as men together when we sacrifice, overcome hardship, and ultimately learn that we are stronger through fellowship and mutual reliance than we ever would be alone. We need more wrestling, more football, more fellowship, and more initiations into a common brotherhood.

I do not know what form this future fellowship should take for me, I only know that I am open to it.  I will readily embrace the chance to build strong bonds with men in my life and to mentor those younger than I in their journey towards manhood. I am reminded here of two interpretations of manhood that I have considered seminal that lack this sense of mutuality - and hope to find one that does: If by Rudyard Kipling, and It Takes a Man by Chris Young.

Millennials Giving Back

As a generation we have a pretty bad rep. Whether it's our parents, employers, or the news, we seem to have been labeled, judged, and receive regular shaming. While I acknowledge much of this judgement is accurate, I think it is much more a reflection on those who came before us than it is a reflection on us. It is our duty to use our circumspection and faults to give back more than we've received.

I didn't choose to get participation trophies at the YMCA as a kid; expecting a seven year-old to refuse a trophy at the end of a season is ridiculous. Those trophies came about as a result of parents demanding that their child was special and so deserved a trophy no matter what. As a child, I, like many people I've talked to, knew that those trophies weren't worth anything. I had two shelves for my trophies, one for the YMCA ones that didn't matter (and even those I had arraigned to put the one or two trophies from "good" teams at the front), and one for the trophies from other sports leagues. This second shelf was much smaller, and its contents far more precious.

Our parents and our parents' generations have let us down in many ways. Complaining about it won't get us anywhere. Pointing it out is a decent step towards realizing what actually is the problem, but is likely to lead to much more awkward visits home that include far less congeniality.

The solution is something that many millennials have already taken to doing - making sure that what we do for a living reflects the values we hold as a generation. While this can mean a hippie approach to living which is unfeasible (or undesirable) for many people, it can also be done in almost any workplace through conscientious adherence to a set of values.

It's a done deal for us millennials that people can be whatever gender they feel fits them most. It's a no-brainer that people should be able to love whomever they love, people are people and love is what saved Harry Potter after all. Millennials are so cynical about institutions and the establishment that it sometimes hurts us, but often it just gives us a highly refined bullshit meter that lets us ignore the partisan hackery coming equally from Fox/Brietbart/Drudge as it does from MSNBC/HuffPo.

Millennials may be ignorant about many facets of world history, husbandry, home ec, or the energy industry. We do, however, know that war kills people and shouldn't be a political tool used by political tools. We do know that large companies who pollute are failing to incorporate the externalities of their products, and that is wrong. We haven't realized yet the tremendous cost of our haphazard destruction of the environment and workers rights because of companies like H&M and Forever 21 - we have yet to learn how to buy and repair quality goods. We can identify the damage and insidiousness of monopoly powers throughout American industries, even if we refuse to label companies like Amazon as such. Our disdain for wealthy liars and the lying politics they employ is massive.

We have not yet come into our own and demanded that the diversity and equality embedded in our values become a permanent part of the American experience. We will soon. Millennials are getting older and our startups are getting bigger. We are getting promotions and starting families, and we won't make the same mistakes our parents did - we will make our own, new, and idiotic mistakes! We won't settle for a status quo that gives so much to so few while leaving so many without a chance to succeed.

The one silver lining about the incoming Donald J. Trump administration came from my father. He said "It would be a shame if whoever comes after him just goes back to doing everything the same way we used to." I agree. I am terrified of the things he will do and the damage that he will cause as our "precedent". But I hold out hope that as we millennials grow up further and take the reins of power from our elders, we will forge a more inclusive, rigorously honest, and caring country. One that looks after its citizens instead of locking them up. One that refuses to let insurance companies determine healthcare policy and demands that all children have a chance to learn a profession and if needed, go to college.

I do not know what I want to "do" with my life. The idyllic notion of joining a company and staying with it for life and pension isn't gone, but it does require sacrifices that many millennials are unwilling to make. If we want to live in a country that embodies our values, we need to be disciplined and over time demand that our governments, institutions, and workplaces reflect those values. The best way for us to give back and deserve the privilege we inherited as 21st century Americans is to demand through our jobs and social lives that our society leap forward to meet our challenges and take advantage of the technological paradise in which we live.

(Get Dirty to) Validate Your Staff's Roles

Lots of managers badmouth the jobs their staff do. You can draw a direct line from how much the boss validates the staff jobs to how motivated the staff are to do their jobs.

If a manager believes any job is 'beneath' him or her, then the staff won't want to do that job. If a manager believes that the hardest, dirtiest, most complicated task should be their own, then staff will aspire to do the hardest, dirtiest, most complicated task they can. If a manager attempts to use their authority to rest, do less, or have privilege, then the staff will seek to rest, do less, and have privilege. 

At camp this is really easy to see and to avoid by action. One tactic I use all the time that works wonders (and is fun to boot!) is to play with kids. If you make it a habit to play with the kids as often as possible as an administrator at camp, then not only does that validate the counselors' role of playing with kids, it helps them visualize what it means to get really good at their jobs - most administrators became administrators because they were really good at the "lower" job. In some jobs and roles it's not practical to go do the work of your entry level staff, which means you have to be much more cognizant of the words you use to describe their role and job, as actions speak much louder than words.

A second valuable tactic for this at camp (and I recognize not everyone would choose this one, but you could pick your own gross/stressful job that you happen to enjoy) is that most days I would jump down in the kitchen and help out a counselor who had the chore of doing the whole camp's dishes. I love the machine efficiency of using an industrial dishwasher, and knew that the dreaded dishes was often something that a new counselor had a lot of apprehension about. If I stepped in and helped out, something they thought would be a drag on their day and take up part of the coveted Rest Hour would instead be done in 20 minutes with little fuss. Knowing your boss has your back, gets your apprehensions, and is willing to get dirty to make sure you have a good day builds loyalty.

Using Biases to Win

Whether you're preparing for a meeting, changing your organization, or attempting to corral unruly employees/campers, you will be much more successful if you make use of people's cognitive biases. People like to feel street smart. They like to feel important. They like to believe that they have understood what is going on and have made an informed, intelligent choice based on that comprehension.

If you set things up cleverly, you can take advantage of this and are more likely to get people to choose whatever results you want. In addition to getting the result you desire, you are also giving people a feeling of agency, which enhances their buy-in and perseverance.

For a few marketing examples of decoys, check out this blog post. For a comprehensive and easy to read list of cognitive biases, read this.

I have often found that you can blend together a bunch of biases to get things going your way. Before you jump to some kind of "wow that's manipulative" conclusion - check yourself - this is how we do things all the time, I'm just talking about being more deliberate and increasing your effectiveness. If you genuinely care about people and want the best for you/them/the institution, then you're not being manipulative, you're being effective. Here are a few examples I've found useful over the years:

• I take really good notes for each staff member's exit interview each fall/winter. This helps people feel like they are important and that they have a say in how things go.
• Once I have a library of notes, I make sure to quote people to each other as often as possible. This means frequently re-reading the notes and is a time commitment, but people can imagine you quoting things they've said to others, which ensures people feel like they have agency and importance. It also makes people want to be mentioned in the future by you so they will focus more and try harder to impress you or be memorable.
• If I had an idea of a change I wanted to happen, I would ask a bunch of people what they thought about it. After the first person, I would be able to use the quote method mentioned above too! When I instituted the change later on, no one would question it, as most of them had already had a chance to express their opinion - and their opinion was tempered and massaged by the fact that I chose to quote peers whom they respected who agreed with the change or peers whom they didn't respect who disagreed with the change.
• People prefer to be happy - if you emphasize positive aspects of something in a way that expresses how long it will make them happy, they will be more likely to believe you. Since we start and emphasize that "Camp is for the Camper", I will also often mention how what you do with kids this week will stay with them for the rest of their lives. If your extra little bit of effort today results in lifelong positive changes for a kid, you are likely to put in that extra little bit of effort.
• People will take risks to avoid negative outcomes. If a counselor is worried about their cabin  not getting along or meshing, they are much more susceptible to suggestions that involve creative solutions. This doesn't work for positive outcomes, if a counselor is optimistic about being able to get their cabin back on track, suggest things that involve less risk. This logic works exactly the same when dealing with a camper - if they are afraid of not making friends they are willing to take more risks to get friends, if they expect to make friends, they will be more likely to respond to suggestions that don't involve as much social risk.
• Say it in a new and inventive way and people will remember it. Say it with a pun or a rhyme or an unusual physical flourish and it will be embedded in people's memories.

I think I'll have to do a series of posts moving forward digging deeper into how we use cognitive biases in a variety of ways and settings. Most social interactions are filled with overlapping biases, and people who are aware of and make use of the biases in themselves and others are powerful and effective.

Wordsmithing for Evil or for Good?

William Shakespeare was the consummate wordsmith. I always loved reading his plays in school, and given my penchant for passionate exterpolation, I have never limited myself to preexisting language when expressing myself. A good word play, portmanteau, or entendre can bring a moment from banal to blingin' in a sentence.

But there is danger in creating language too. What we say and how we say it to each other isn't just good fun. I have struggled with finding the hidden misogyny in my language since college (did you notice toughies like sportsMANship? Sometimes hidden misogyny is a manwich, sometimes it's manspread, but misogyny is everywhere man).

Richard B. Spencer is a dangerous man, and a dangerous wordsmith. As the progenitor of the phrase "Alt-Right," and leading voice in the white nationalist and neo-nazi movement, he has committed his life to hate in a way that damages the fabric of our nation. This Chrome ad on has just been created to help you out in correcting the linguistic damage currently being done by Spencer's abhorrent wordsmithing.

If this kind of nomenclature interests you (and you like movies like Pulp Fiction or have read some Sci Fi), I highly suggest you pick up the book Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. The main character has some incredible moments with regard to how we speak and what we call things - I will leave you with a quote from the book that I believe sums up the danger and the power of words:

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Insulate Your Workplace

There are many variables in the world around us. From the social and interpersonal to the physical and environmental, there are thousands of factors that we keep balanced throughout every day of work and life. If, for even a minute, we stopped to consider all of the variables we are juggling, we would become unstuck, so our brains do a good job of hiding all of the calculations and action-reactions going on all the time.

I think that one part of why I enjoyed working at camp so much is that the number of variables shrinks so much that we are able to control more of what goes on around us and choose consciously what we want to do.

For children (who are by necessity discovering the world around them and placing themselves one lego block at a time into  an unfamiliar and scary world of variables) there is often little control over most environmental and social aspects of their lives. They don't get to choose their classmates, classes, classrooms, meals, homework, or often much else at all in a normal day.

At camp we let them choose, for hours a day, what to do. Obviously we are limited in some things based on the number of campers and sandbox property. However, the self exploration embedded in our mission statement and daily living provides a great guidepost for how you can motivate your employees in a non-camp setting.

As a manager it is important to give your employees a chance to do meaningful work with people they like. Sometimes there are jobs and chores that have to happen regardless. But there is almost always something for which it makes sense to give latitude to employees for how they pursue the ultimate goal. I would recommend using this type of framework to figure out if something can be made into an insulated work space for self-exploration, realization, and ultimately motivated accomplishment:

1. Agree on the starting point - meet or brief working group on where you are now.
2. Give benchmarks that you require, whether timetables for completion, details about reporting progress, or important components that are required for completion.
3. Agree on the substance of the final goal.

Make steps 1 and 3 as specific as possible. The more latitude you can give your employees in proceeding in between, the more empowered to explore how they work want to work. When they feel that they are responsible for a meaningful task and have the agency to make decisions within a framework that is provided, they will respect your authoritarian outline whilst working to keep pace with peers and impress their superiors with the product.

What is Cheating and Who am I to Judge?

As a high school wrestler I spent a lot of time saying the following sentence “Wrestling isn’t a sport, it’s a lifestyle.” While a little cheeky, this saying embodied a sentiment about the totality of dedication necessary for performing with your body at the highest level. As a wrestler I woke up standing in front of the bathroom sink holding a cup of water about to drink it on many occasions. I have vivid memories of standing in the shower manually closing my mouth because I couldn’t afford to take in the water weight of a few mouthfuls of greywater flowing down from my scalp.

I was not someone who had to cut much weight; I wrestled at or around my natural (though beefy) weight throughout all four years of high school. I know explicitly the dedication and self discipline needed to stay fit and lean by eating a proscribed diet, working out for hours a day, and never compromising, even for Thanksgiving dinner! That’s what it took for me to be a champion, and that’s what it took for me to master my body.

The mano-a-mano attitude that saturates wrestling is part of what makes it so compelling to me. There are no excuses on the mat other than that you are not as good as the human being having their arm raised while you slink off in defeat.

In combination with this respect for discipline, I have a healthy dose of libertarian notions about personal choice. I always used to say I could beat someone who is any two of the following: Stronger, Better, Tougher. As long as I could identify in which category I had an advantage, I would find their cracks and expose them through mental and physical warfare during the 6 minutes we had on the mat. I’m not trying to brag, but with a 94-18 record through 4 years, I won 84% of the time with this approach.

One of the other wrestlers on the team with me was two years older than I and much better. He had more talent, was stronger, and was really tough. I rarely if ever scored a point on him. Sometimes just because he could, he would hold both hands behind his back and brush me or others off throughout a whole period of “live” wrestling during practice with only his forehead and temples. When he graduated, he joined the military, and I believe became a Green Beret or Army Ranger, or some level of national service even beyond the exceptional dedication necessary to put your life on the line for our glorious country.

He also often reeked of vodka. He was not (to my knowledge) drinking during the day or before practice, but especially reeked when we had practices during school vacations or extra hours other than our usual 3pm-6pm Monday-Friday. The alcohol came out of his pores as his body cleaned up from his previous nights’ debauchery. I do not know how good (or how emotionally unstable) he would have been without drinking. I do know that I treated my body with the utmost respect and demanded every day that I improve my performance, and drinking or doing drugs would have inhibited that.

What does it mean to cheat? Where is the line between performance enhancing and performing at your best. Who is to say that he would have been better without his vices, and who is to say that his vices held him back? When we let rules be our guides rather than performances and facts, we lose the opportunity to express ourselves fully. I believe that systems are an integral part of how we relate to each other, and institutions should be strengthened through time. However, those same institutions should also be curated to allow us to ascertain which rules exist to restrict and which exist to enable.

Single Sentence Precepts

I used to do Goju (a particular type of Karate created in Okinawa) for a few years. All throughout the training there were a few phrases that really stuck out to me and I refer to all the time in how I think about problems and the world around me. One of them was "Kihon is fundamental" Since "基本" is the Japanese character Kihon, which means fundamental, it's kind of a rough platitude to wrap your head around. But bear with me - another way to say it is "truth is truth," or "All of Goju can be summed up in a single punch."

These sentences are meant as a guide to help us cut through all of the clutter. When you are punching, there should be nothing else, your body should act as one fluid drawing strength from the earth and placing all of your energy at the tip of your first and second knuckles. If you leave room for other thoughts or extra actions, you will reduce the ultimate power of your punch.


Stephen Mitchel's translation of the Tao te Ching says this in a particularly interesting way: "When it rains there is only rain." Give yourself over fully to what you are doing.

While it is nice for your organization to have a fully fleshed out mission statement, and you certainly should trot it out regularly to prevent yourself from losing sight of it, it is important for you to create single sentence precepts for your projects, team, and organization. These precepts give people a chance to all start from the same place. These sentences will be accessible enough to give you the chance to correct your employees or groups when they begin to stray from the path you think is best.

Additionally, if you create a strong enough sentence, or simply repeat a mediocre sentence enough, people will come to see the concept as its own entity. Once this happens, you will not be the person making them do something, the concept will be, thus freeing you up to focus on fine tuning rather than enforcing your broad organizational goals.

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

Building Ethic Instead of Details

I remember reading a leadership article a while back that talked a lot about KITA (Kick in the ass) managing - it provides stimulus, but doesn't persist after the kick has faded into the background.

This week has been an amazing example of managing by building ethics instead of building detailed information based lessons that are underpinned by KITA. For example: we have not mentioned tardiness or attendance since the first day, when people were shown and told clearly that we show respect for each other by being where we are supposed to be when we are supposed to be there.

By setting the standard of you are being disrespectful to others and the institution when you are late, it has (so far) made people want to be on time in order to show that they care and that they want to be here. Instead of it being me or another administrator getting angry and acting childish (and that anger being a KITA), which would mean that staff would only care about being on time when they thought a manager was watching or would notice.

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.