Ya sé como convertirme en viento

Esas palabras de 'El Alquimista' me siguen de lugar en lugar. Varios hechos últitmamente me hicieron recordarlas. En fin, me he convertido en el mero imagen de lo que nunca pensaba que iba a ser: el analista estadistico y presupuestario, no muy diferente del Santomé—protagonista de Benedetti,—aunque no me haya acordado a ninguna tregua conmigo mismo todavía. Es una cosa bastante desconcertante para un lingüista, de repente contar con tanta destreza matemática, pero no hay que complicar la felicidad. Falta un més para regresarme a casa, a Nueva York, digo, la casa en el Bronx ya no me queda abierto. Sin embargo, me encantaría regresar al lugar, o quizás un lugar cerca del mismo.

Today is Saturday, and it's an odd feeling. I finished, printed, bound, and packaged my capstone this past Thursday. I could have actually put it in the mail then, but I just didn't move fast enough to get out of the office on time, so it went into the mail yesterday (Friday). The required postmark date for the final draft is this coming Monday. There is only one other classmate of whom I am aware with enough forethought and planning to have completed the project at the same time, and she is to be commended. Every other classmate I've spoken with is steadily chipping away at the final version as I write this, or has already pleaded for an extension already cognizant of the fact that they won't be capable of making the deadline. I mention this because this blog, our cohort's studies, and even the entire point of this accelerated course is to train "leaders." Leaders prove themselves in the heat of battle, under the pressures of actually being in the lead, they manage their time well, know how to access the right resources at the right time, know who to call if they don't have the answer to a problem, and so forth. 

Leadership, in contrast, is not endemic to those with a haughty attitude, a practice of unprecedented self ascription of power, the inability to speak softly and wield a big intellect, or any of the myriad personality malaises which I've witnessed in excess along this very uneven and incredibly difficult trajectory. Of course, there are several people in my current experience that do not fit the disparaging commentary above. In point of fact, I can think of several. But I am distressed and disappointed by those that do. I feel sincerely that a poor choice was made in many cases, and that these individuals, in truth, do not belong in the position of access to power.

In reality, the whole purpose of this post was to announce that I had managed, much as I did with every other version, data set, or significant piece required by the professors, to turn in the final draft early. By all counts, mine arrived the date it was due, hard copy, through the mail, and an extra one sent to the folks so they can have it on their shelf. I had to maintain a personal standard, you see, though that has caused several of my cohort members great consternation. But, I can tell you, given that the chips were down, who I would rather have on my team.

Power

I've listed The New Teacher Project as this blog's out-link for a purpose; It's been roughly two months since I've posted something here, and in that time, the NUF mid-year conference has happened, at which we heard incessantly about leadership, what it means, precise ways for you to foment that within yourself, and what precisely to do with it after you've managed to get ahold of it. Gina Rudan spoke to us about how she helps others find the intersection of their skills and their passions, and that was an interesting conversation. David Mensah spent a great deal of time talking about finding your personal mission, and I realized at that particular point, that I hadn't really nailed down what mine was. All was not lost, however, as I realized shortly after my triumphant return to the Capital region what precisely that was.

One of my closest friends in New York has a brother-in-law that lives in the area, and inevitably, we've also become fast friends. His children likewise think I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. Once I was back there, interacting with youth, it came to me like a Mack truck to the face - the youth, the future of tomorrow. That is my mission: to make sure that they are raised well, that they are shown the proper way to operate in society, that they learn well how to be valuable members of our culture. To that end, I've begun to refocus my post-fellowship job search to ensure that it has to do with Youth Development or a position as Education Director for an institution.

Amusingly, I recently read about a program in Philadelphia that has to do with interpreting in the school system. At the same time, I found myself wondering if there has been sufficient forethought and planning gone into the program for them to select a director. I know that operating simultaneously in two fields that I hold near and dear to my heart would be closely akin to paradise. We shall have to see how close to that I manage to find myself.

I continually refer back to Collins' scale of Level 5 leadership for a reason. Having participated in martial arts, operated in a school system, studied leadership through this fellowship, performed as an interpreter, written as a citizen journalist, and a whole variety of interesting things during my professional life, I believe I have developed a sense of what the term entails. I know for a fact it is horrifically overused. I also know that a majority of people overusing it have generally done so for the purpose of powerful self ascription of importance. My particular issue is education, youth development, and within that language access. So, when I see like posting a list of nearly 5,000 teachers who will find themselves under the ax due to 'budget constraints' and other efforts meant to unwind collective bargaining are solely to the detriment of or nation, and most specifically the more than 1.1 million students in the NYC Department of Education's care, I know 'leadership,' due to its overusage, is losing any semblance of validity. There is a better way, and there are agreements to be made. Students of history remember that the first thing every cult of personality did in order to rise to power was to decimate the teaching force. TNTP has been complicit in producing proposals to that end, and it is apparent that their objectives are in line with the philosophy.

Leadership is not only in the professional field, however, and this is where I find myself in a quandary. Our capstone experience is potentially one of the most intense pieces of the entire fellowship, but having done one or two dedicated research papers while in my initial Master's degree at NYU, and very similar types of brain intensive work as a teacher for 12 years - curriculum writing, and major projects that I developed to be able to utilize in the classroom, - this was perhaps less of a stressful enterprise for me than it likely should have been. I turned in 51 pages (with 52 references) nearly a week before the due date, and dedicated the remaining time to advising and coaching classmates that might be finding themselves in a difficult place. This week, I also received word from one journal that I had pitched an essay to that they are willing to accept my writing. I'm incredibly pleased about this because, not only does it result in a publication credit, it also results in remuneration! This, I believe, is more the type of leadership - thought leadership - for which we should be aiming.

Next weekend, my sister, my parents, my closest friend from high school whom I have not seen in nearly 20 years, and his wife and children descend upon my small hamlet for the weekend. My sister is also participating in a range of events and conferences with the City Council Chairman of her town, meetings with Congresspeople, and so forth as she climbs the political ladder. There is an evening planned for the DC dozen to meet with her, the City Council Chairman, and several other key players in about a week, and it will be the first time I'm in the same room with so many noteables at once. I think this is the point at which I should feel apprehensive. My main preoccupation for the evening is to make sure that I have enough networking cards available to hand out at the encounter. I can almost guarantee that there will be interesting photos from the affair.

Not necessarily as interesting as a Mariachi band headed by Antonio Banderas, but, you get the idea...

Leaderblog

During my studies with the National Urban Fellows, I have been charged with a great many characteristics: gregarious, overly productive, at times mildly pedantic, literary; all of which I acknowledge and accept as things I need to either celebrate, or work on. Since my last post, I've been party to a whole host of leadership decisions, and perhaps have even been involved in a few, though I always hesitate to consider things 'leadership roles' until I've written about it, and perhaps that's one of my faults. In an interesting twist of fate related to that previous statement, one of our recent assignments was to develop a conversation using the Blackboard Discussion Board section of our Journaling class to properly treat the concepts of 'Reflection on Action, Reflection IN action, and Knowledge in Action.' How that has been represented in my agency varies in degree across the profile of personnel, however, I find it at once disturbing and amusing that Pope Benedict XVI would publish a statement using precisely the same terminology at the point in time when we had this assignment. A reflective practice indeed, and quite a serious set of circumstances.

As I wrote to my parents in an e-mail just this past week: "...the Integrated Workplace Management Software implementation heated up, the boss' 'transition team' meeting involved me, and his administrative assistant, and that's it, and strategic planning for the division is underway using the flow chart I designed..." of which I made light as though things had slowed down due to the holidays. But secreted away inside of that short summation of the last 5 days' events was a few kernels ready to pop on the hot surface of my race tuned, fabulous firebird funny car, nitro burning, quarter mile winning mind. That IWMS meeting I attended included, unless I miss my guess, every division head in the agency and me, to represent my division. I managed to gain some key insights, and introductions to the project team from the vendor. Luckily, I've made good friends with the Chief Information Officer, and I was able to ask him some of the hotter questions that remained as I left the meeting. Also, during the meeting, the announcement came of the selection of the interim Director, and they are not somebody at the even Deputy Director level, and that was a great deal more surprising than the mayor not simply picking a standing replacement. I also wonder, as Dove Seidman said in his article for Bloomberg News if this choice has the wherewithall to do that which is  "inconvenient, unpopular, and even temporarily unprofitable," or if there might have been a different purpose altogether.

Of course, this speaks to something that Professor Greg Sicek mentioned during a Brookings Institute presentation that the answer to our country's education dilemma is not something that is fast, cheap, and easy, and rather what we need to do is long, expensive, and difficult. In my training in the martial arts, these sensibilities are always expressed, nearly every lesson. There's no such thing as developing the necessary skills quickly, they are only acquired over time. "Repeating a technique 10,000 times, you begin to understand the reason..." and so on, and so on. A similar thing can be said to be visible in the current climate of 'Leadership training' or 'Business Leadership' wherein collections of people in groups large enough to be statistically significant enter into accelerated programs with pie-eyed dreams of leadership. "Tai Chi in 12 steps" as quintessential NYC personality Roberto Sharpe comments in the video below.

So, leadership, what does leadership mean? How can we assess who it is that has the prowess, training, and proper mentality in order to lead? The Harvard Business Review Blog carried a recent post entitled 'The Value of Ritual in Your Work Day,' in which the opening remarks contain a recollection of a scene in 'The Last Samurai' of a japanese warrior performing a tea ceremony. This, to the Western mind, is undoubtedly oxymoronic - a warrior arduously focusing on the minutiae of properly preparing something so effortlessly simple as tea. But, the author notes:

"This, I realized, was the source of the samurai's strength."

And I believe that is in essence the point of this post. Peimin Ni is a philosophy professor who periodically writes columns for the New York Times, and two of his recent posts are appropriate here. He starts by quoting an earlier article written by a visitor to the Shaolin temple in China:

In a 2005 news report about the Shaolin Temple, the Buddhist monastery in China well-known for its martial arts, a monk addressed a common misunderstanding: “Many people have a misconception that martial arts is about fighting and killing,” the monk was quoted as saying, “It is actually about improving your wisdom and intelligence.”

Not how easily 'fighting and killing' could be exchanged for 'being productive and making profits,' and 'martial arts' could be replaced with '[business] leadership training.' As is frequently the case, the leader of a particular school defines the character that such training will take: is it primarily technical, with a conveyor belt type approach, turning out finished students as fast as humanly possible? Or are there internal mechanisms that the teacher seeks to instill in his/her students before they are granted 'mastery'? Is the skill of passing on the acquired knowledge also instilled in the student? Or will the storehouse of knowledge for which they are now responsible remain solely with them? This begins to drive at the oft quoted ideallic state of 'creating leaders around you.' Though this is a rare and infrequent practice indeed.

Another story that Professor Ni relates is being invited to a dinner by a practiced and very effective martial artist, who had come to an impasse in a very philosophical section of a manual he had been reading. Knowing of Peimin's facility with Asian philosophical trends through history, the practitioner asked that he please decipher the text, and provide a certain level of insight into its meaning:

"I looked at the manual. It was on a martial arts style called xingyi quan. While the main body of the book was about postures and movements of the body and energy, which Mr. Wu had no trouble interpreting, the introduction was basically a treatise about metaphysics. It contained views derived from the Song dynasty neo-Confucian scholar Zhou Dunyi, in which an abstract concept, called wuji, the ultimate non-being, takes a central role as ontologically prior to taiji (t’ai chi), or “the primordial ultimate.” Oddly enough, the author offered no indication about how the ideas should be translated into the martial arts, as if it were all self-evident.

Thanks to Mr. Wu’s practical background and drawing on my own philosophical training and experience in the practice of Chinese calligraphy art — a form of kung fu which is deeply influenced by traditional Chinese philosophy — it did not take me long to convey the basic ideas to him and help him see the intellectual connection between the metaphysics and the martial arts, though we both aware perfectly well that it would take lots of cultivation for the connection to be embodied and manifested in the practice. The point is basically to empty oneself (including the metaphysical idea), so that, paradoxically, one can achieve unification of the self and the world! Mr. Wu sighed, regretfully, “Today’s martial arts practitioners focus too much on the surface performances. That is not real kung fu!”"
 
"Surface performance" or "performance measurement" or "metrics" or "profitability" or any of a host of other monikers that I could easily list here that readily demonstrate both the inherent callousness, and intrinsic fallibility of that system of thought. Tai Chi in 12 easy steps. What, precisely, has our efficiency gotten us? Robosigning and derivatives markets caused a global problem so severe that it will be a miracle if we ever manage to return to pre-2008 levels. The Washington Post's very detailed article of how we've become responsible for our own runaway extinction train is instructive, to say the least. Eight presidents in a row have touted initiatives to create American energy independence, and none have been successful. We expend far too much effort futilely attempting to create significant change at the margin, when it's the structure of the entire balance sheet that needs to be shifted.