Month: May 2009

Blog salad

P8200016Most of my blog posts are a main course dish with one primary taste.  This one is more of a salad with a bunch of different tastes thrown together.

I did eat a salad for lunch today (nice transition) - radish, green onion, and goat cheese on spring mix greens, with poppy seed dressing.  Everything but the dressing was grown/made at Abundant Acres Farm, the provider of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share that I bought this season.  Friends Kent and Dori have again done a great job making fresh, local, chemical-free food available, and I'm grateful for it.  I don't have a garden on my own land right now, but having a bag of garden-fresh stuff delivered to me every week is hard to beat.  There's still quite a gap between my ideals about where my food comes from and my actual diet.

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My political aspirations

Update March 2011: I'm currently a candidate for election to Richmond's City Council.

At a local business networking event tonight, someone noted that they'd heard a rumor I might be getting involved in politics locally.  We had a good conversation about it, and I thought I'd use it as a jumping off point to share a little more about my own political aspirations.

Sometime during my college experience, I decided that I was going to run for the Presidency of the United States of America.  I was mostly serious. I mean, I announced it on the Internet for crying out loud, so you know I wasn't just messing around.  I figured out that I would be old enough to be elected President in the 2012 elections, and I dreamed my dream from there.

I've since figured out that national politics is probably not for me, at least not anytime soon.

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10 things about my approach to business management

DIY pen construction - finishWe try to keep Summersault LLC as "flat" as possible, with minimal hierarchy and focus on authority relationships, opting instead for collaborative roles and even aspirations of a tribal staffing model.  But in my role as "Principal," I still end up taking on what would traditionally be called a "management" relationship with other staff.

Recently, as a part of getting ready for some staff training, I tried to write down 10 things that might be helpful for a new member of the team to know about how I approach this role.  For better or worse, I now present them to you.  I don’t necessarily expect you to think that they’re good practices; I offer them as self-reflection, not advice.

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One Less Bike: Walk to Work Day

There was a lot of pressure in this country today to ride your bike to work, and frankly, I think it was a little overdone.  There's so much about the way our nation's transportation system is setup that favors cyclists, and it feels like we've shoved aside pedestrian thoroughfares and open sidewalks so we can accommodate the increasing number of bikes out there.  Sometimes the bike culture seems a little obsessive and insane - it's just a bike, a possession, you know?  But they're taking over the world.

So that's why I chose to walk to and from work today - a "walk to work day" if you will.  I represented one less bike on the road, and it felt good.

Think about all of the ways that bikes are harming our environment, our culture, our communities:

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Charitable giving with Twitter antics

I tried a little experiment with Twitter last week.  I see lots of folks talking about how to make money with social media exposure like Twittering, but hadn't yet seen anyone talking about how to give away money via the same.  So on Wednesday I put out a challenge that for each new Twitter follower I got  on my account between then and 5 PM on Friday, I'd donate $2 to the Boys and Girls Club of Wayne County.

What happened?

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The role of travel in establishing expertise

008_18.JPGAt a recent training I attended, some foofaraw was made about the fact that the facilitators had come all the way from Boulder, Colorado to Indiana to share their knowledge and expertise with us.  Those facilitators in turn made some note of the fact that their knowledge and expertise was derived from their own trip to meet with others at a training in the UK, and from some other journeys that they'd taken involving significant travel.

Around the same time I noted a historical reference to a 1959 headline in the Earlhamite, "Southern religious leader visits Earlham."  It was about a then only mildly well known Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting the College and speaking at the Meetinghouse there.  Being a religious leader from the South surely had different connotations then than it does now, but I was still struck by the headline's focus on the origin and destination of the speaker, less on his message or credentials.

Ever since, I've been thinking about the role that travel plays in establishing credibility and expertise for someone when they come to speak or teach on a given topic.

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