Thursday the 17th

As we've read on Writer's Almanac.

It's William Carlos Williams birthday today. Here are his words:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

We were asked to respond to Peter Drucker's quote that said organizations and enterprises have the ability to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things. I wrote about the need for extraordinary people to create these organizations; of course one needs collaboration to make things happen, but groups also need a burst of individual energy. I wonder what other people think. Here is my post:


My friend, Doc, was appointed to represent the Outward Bound School in a Florida Coalition meeting. This group, mostly consisting of politicians, environmentalists, and activists joined to discuss how to protect the Florida Everglades, especially as the sugar industry was polluting Lake Okeechobee. As the first day of the meeting went on, no one seemed to listen to Doc; they seemed to discount his opinion because of their perception of Outward Bound and of him as an instructor.

Before the panel discussion on the second day, Doc slipped into the conference center and wrote the same question on each participant’s notepad. It read, “Are you creating the future that you want to see or just reacting to the sugar industry?”

When the panel discussion started, one panel member huffed into the microphone, “Who wrote this?” No one responded. He continued, “I just want to address this right now. I am not just reacting, I’m creating the future!”

Someone from the audience asked, “Well, how are you creating an image of the future instead of just reacting?” And with that reaction, with that question, the conversation shifted.

Although I agree with Peter Drucker that when the working well, “Organizations and enterprises enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things,” I’d also like to challenge it. Sometimes, I think that it takes extraordinary people to shake up, create, or re-create the extraordinary organizations and enterprises by finding creative ways to ask big and difficult questions or shift conversations.

Additionally, the world needs the spark of visionaries such as the physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer, who helped start Partners in Health, which is working to fight tuberculosis and other health issues in the poorest nations in the world. It needs innovators to lead the way and create new technology or ways of thinking.

Conversely, if someone is focused on being the extraordinary person, then organizations run the risk of falling into what Maurice Evans identified as “process loss” in his forum post. Feeding status or personal goals instead of feeding the direction of the organization creates a stagnant or even failing organization.

There was another paragraph about Presidio, but that seems less relevant to the subject. Here is a link for a 15 minute Parker Palmer interview. If you go to the second section, the link that says, "The Divided Life and the Quest for True Self" is the free excerpt. It was a nice reminder about making a single mission that everything else (work, relationships, spirituality) feed into.