Tag: Jobs

WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES FOR GOOD LEADERSHIP?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Comments on earlier posts regarding the emerging U.S. presidential race have touched on a topic that ought to be more sharply examined: just what qualities are needed in a good leader?

I’ve seen charts executive head-hunting firms use for corporate hires, which see different quality requirements to match a company’s situation. A small, fast-growing firm, for example, needs a much different kind of person than does a behemoth in a shrinking market. The compensation packages can vary widely, too, especially when considering the likely tenure of the hire. Somebody hired to shake things up might be expected to have a short and stormy span at the helm, unlike a more comforting presence for a smoothly functioning organization.

That said, back to political leadership. What qualities would you list as essential?

The ability to recognize talent and draw out others into a common cause has been suggested. Vision, compassion, intelligence, integrity, willingness to listen to critical perspectives and weight alternative actions are others. And then?

Maybe we’ve been overlooking the most obvious all along. What would you name?

CREDIBLE CREDIT?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve long been perplexed by some banks’ claims about credit-card business, especially after seeing their approaches to gullible college students and rates that can approach 20 percent a year if you’re not careful or get in a jam.

Those of you who have older kids or grandkids can share those worries.

That’s even before wondering about the vice presidents or higher-up executives who approve what seem to be high-risk strategies – and then come to the public for relief. You know, handouts, 20 percent annual rates, and protection from bankruptcy filings by average people. Or should we say Real People unlike the corporations?

A recent experience of trying to close an account with one of them was especially trying. In the end, I’m not sure who closed whom except that the clock was still ticking on the interest – on the consumer, of course.

And then less than a month later, I’m getting solicitations to open another account with them – “We’ve matched you with this exclusive offer,” as one proclaims.

No thanks. And by the way, the same day’s mail included one that would give me money back on the transactions. It’s not 20 percent, but it’s in my direction.

From my perspective, that one has some credibility.

Gee, and we haven’t even touched on the retailers’ complaints here. Let’s just say they have my sympathy.

 

 

HOUSEMATES AND CENTER CITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Those first years out on your own introduce their own drama. Typically, you split an apartment with others who just might also be friends. On that entry-level wage, your address will likely be in a rather marginal neighborhood. And then there’s the life on the street, day and night.

Maybe you move on to something better. Or maybe this simply continues. But it has its own unmistakably funky nature.

For me, it’s found in a few blocks near the Riverside. Stop over when you can. There’s always tea or coffee. We’re up on the third floor.

~*~

Riverside 1To see more, click here.

WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Even in the face of the outrages over the corrupting clout of the superrich investment in partisan politics, a fresh insight can prove haunting. And let’s not dignify that as “donations.” That’s my reaction to a passage from David Cole’s review of Burt Neuborne’s new book, Madison’s Music: On Reading the First Amendment.

It’s not just at the highest levels, either. When the infusion of cash hits smaller races, the whole system gets bought.

As Cole’s “Free Speech, Big Money, Bad Elections” (New York Review of Books, November 5) points out:

… increasingly sophisticated gerrymandering has ensured that many elected offices are sinecures for one of the two major parties. In the House of Representatives, only about forty seats, or less than 10 percent of the chamber, are filled in genuinely contested general elections. The results can be perverse.

I happen to live in one of those seats that’s become contested, after decades of being a Republican stronghold. Cole, however, presses his case that many of the general elections are rigged in favor of one side or another:

In North Carolina in 2012, the popular vote for House members was 51 percent Democratic and 49 percent Republican. Yet North Carolina’s delegation to the House consisted of nine Republicans and four Democrats. North Carolina’s state legislature had packed Democratic voters into four districts, ensuring that Republicans would win the other nine. …

So who’s really representing the people? And who are the winning officeholders really representing? It’s not just North Carolina, either, as Cole notes:

Democrats received more than half of the House votes in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2012, and did not get a majority of House seats in any of them. In what sense can such outcomes be called democratic?

Considering the low turnout rates in general elections – a consequence, as Cole details, of a sense of futility for many would-be voters or outright obstacles put in their path – an observer can wonder how much of the public the winners really do represent. That is, if 49 percent of a 40 percent turnout can win 247 seats in the House (this is a theoretical model, mind you), one could argue that the majority of the House of Representatives represents just 20 percent of the public. And if the Freedom Caucus, about 20 percent of that party, insists on dictating its ideology on the rest of the nation, that could be a mere 4 percent trying to run the country. In some places, that would be considered a coup.

Yes, I know the numbers wouldn’t all fall that neatly in one direction or the other. But it’s scary, all the same.

IS THE PRESIDENCY TOO VAST FOR A MERE HUMAN TO FILL?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Henry Kissinger once admitted that the realities of being Secretary of State overturned his expectations of the position. Before taking office, he saw the role as akin to being Zeus on Mount Olympus – the divine expanse of time and perspective to make wise decisions of long-lasting statesmanship. Instead, in the turmoil of relentless global crises, what he encountered was more like being an NFL quarterback on a Sunday afternoon in autumn. You had to do something fast and hope for the best before you got clobbered. Talk about high pressure? Lives were often at stake.

That insight comes back to my mind each round of presidential primaries where I live. Remember, the State Department is only one Cabinet position reporting to the White House. And it’s puny compared to the Pentagon.

Whoever wins in November 2016 will have to be able to find people who can fill these positions, and then find the time to manage their work. How can anyone possibly touch base with them even once a week, much less act with sufficient knowledge? Well, a quarterback has both the rest of the team and the coaches – plus a week to prepare and a lot of time on the sidelines, if his defense is doing its job. Not so the President, with rounds of dinners and photo ops and having to make public announcements on seemingly every news development as it happens …

I’ve seen reports on the time demands on the Chief Executive and how many of our recent examples have lived with no more than four hours of sleep a night. That’s inhuman. Period. Here’s one point where those arguing for smaller government could build their case. I’m listening.

FROM SCRATCH WITHOUT A RECIPE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a novel that could never have been written from an outline. I had to pour all the ingredients into a mixing bowl and start cooking.

No outline? No recipe! And no formula, either. Here are the ingredients, what are you gonna do with ’em? In this case, it starts out fantasy, of a sort, goes through steampunk, of a sort, and ends up dystopian, of a sort. Or somewhere close with a happier end?

The framework’s simple enough. Daily coded electronic dispatches between Bill, in the field, and his boss, in corporate headquarters – back in the days just prior to emails and the Internet – are soon augmented by a few trusted colleagues as Bill infiltrates the once bustling town of yrubBury. The goal is to covertly buy up the decaying riverside mills and, under the pretext of historic preservation, transform them into maximum security high-tech manufacturing.

For the record, I pursued the renovation angle from the earliest drafts of the novel, long before savvy investors bought up similar sites for small-business launch pads. In that regard, I feel vindicated by developments – including those where I now live.

As the conversations that shape the novel evolved, however, the conflict between small-is-beautiful and international conglomerates came into the fray.

When I first envisioned Big Inca, I was covering 14 states as a field representative for a Fortune 500 company. Or at least one of its subsidiaries. And I’d already been involved in management politics and thinking. Memos and checking in from the boondocks were already part of my repertoire. So all of that went into the stew.

There are other conflicts, of course, to contribute.

In the story, Bill’s a generalist in an age of specialists and fresh out of college when he’s sent into the field as a kind of entrepreneurial anthropologist. He’ll need detailed help along the way. He definitely can’t do it alone.

The town itself is populated with ancient ethnic rivalries – as well as some new ones, as Big Inca will demonstrate. The Old World and the New World are bound to collide, as they always have, especially in the most unanticipated places.

There’s even what’s legal and what’s shady to confront.

We have basic issues of making a living and making a difference and romance and intrigue to deal with. All thrown into the steaming cauldron.

Over the course of the novel, give them three years to simmer and boil.

Even if it took three decades to come together.

Inca 1~*~

The novel is available here.

 

 

A MILL RACE FOR SURVIVAL OR ELSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Water-powered mills, once the backbone of American industrial might, run as an emblem throughout Big Inca versus a New Pony Express Rider. The novel overlaps layers of history and ambition, geography and resettled ethnicity, growth and decay as they center in the once bustling town of yrubBury, where Bill is dispatched fresh out of college.

His mission is vague, misty, constantly shifting – and highly lucrative – even when he has no clue where it’s going. His coded messages to and from his boss in corporate HQ are his lifeline to the outside world.

It’s exciting, of course, to see preservation take shape. As what’s old becomes new again when his international conglomerate starts recasting a backwater town for its own ends, however clandestine. As we discover, behind the renovation of the decaying mills is a design for an isolated facility for a military-industrial behemoth.

At the heart of it all, Bill’s a solitary innocent puppet at the bidding of a distant boss pulling the strings from afar – a station agent out on the frontier. And then, running frantically along it.

Will he survive? And what of the mills?

Everything depends on the confrontation with the rival Big Inca.

Inca 1

~*~

The novel is available here.

TOO BIG FOR WONDER WOMAN? OR SUPERMAN?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

My thinking on this starts with the lone-ranger or small-time candidates for the White House, some of whom actually have some good ideas about governing or the direction to take on specific issues. But then it expands to the demands of managing the full scope of the job at hand.

You know, even on a single issue, there’s the gap between thought and action. Or more specifically, between having an idea and pushing it through a hostile Congress, on one side, and the layers of bureaucracy assigned the task, on the other. How do you really know what’s happening at street level? Or how it would work there?

We see many policies that look good on paper but when put to the daily test of everyday people just don’t work out. Think of income-tax credits that are still out of range of helping a minimum-wage two-worker household. Go ahead and add to the list.

In other words, something looks one way from the top and quite different at the bottom. It’s a malaise that affects every multilayered organization, too – if you want to survive in your job, you tell the boss what he wants to hear. Add to that the way we bend a report to fit our preconceptions – if you like it, you bend it fully to your side … and if you don’t like it, you reject the entire package. (That’s the theory of cognitive dissonance, if you want more.) If you’ve ever played the game of “telephone,” you see how it works going around a circle. The word or phrase whispered in one ear at the beginning comes out sounding quite different at the end.

Making a good decision requires solid information to begin with, and that means having alternative sources of data to cut through the skewering of upward filtration. But it also requires moving the information down, and that’s where the lone-ranger candidates are most vulnerable.

I’m always amused by those who show up in New Hampshire and plunk their registration fee down thinking they could run a country. Some have never held public office before – not even city council or a school board seat. Some have run a business of some sort, but nothing of a scale of a state government or major city, much less a Cabinet department. And they think they can get an entire cadre of people to move in step together? I want some evidence before we get to any on-the-job training in public administration. Especially when it involves the most demanding job in the world.

The reality is that the presidency is not primarily an ideas-focused position. It’s people oriented.

That’s where I start to look at the candidate’s ability to put a campaign team together. Yes, fundraising’s part of it. But so is recruiting smart, dedicated people. How disciplined are they? How reliable? How mature? What connections have you established?

All of this quickly winnows out the lone rangers.

More and more, though, it’s also making me nervous about those survivors who wind up, however briefly, on the white pedestal. I don’t think a mere human can fill the expectations. Maybe even the expanding requirements.

And unlike Plato, I sense a philosopher-king could never possess the essential knowledge of daily life in arriving at a decision or enacting it. Why do I get the feeling the lone-ranger candidates seem themselves in this role, anyway?

Sometimes daily life itself feels overwhelming – too big for anyone. Even retired folks like me. I wish the White House hopefuls well, all the same. I expect the Executive Mansion has excellent maintenance, run by someone.