Barkings Of An Old Dog

Well, a friend sent along a quote or two from the latest “diocesan communication vehicle” (see, Clumber can play “corporate-hierarchy-speak” with the best of them), and a pointer to a rewrite (or what I think is a re-write of the original article by Garrison Keillor and I thought it might be fun to play a game and make a baloney sandwich. I further must pay homage to MP for his request for a translator to handle the tricky Diocese->Human language conversion.

The words “holistic,” “leadership,” “process,” “quality,” and “commitment” crop up everywhere (nobody talks about spuds here at all), and Terri reads aloud from the notebook sentences like “The commitment to quality is a holistic value structure throughout the leadership process which is accessed dynamically through all functions of the organization from the bottom up.” Sentences that are self-erasing: the moment you read them you forget what they said. There is a lot of that.

Your voices and thoughts heard through our Discovery and Summit processes have led to the identification of six Strategic Initiatives which will direct our future resources and energies at the Diocesan level. Our future as the Diocese will be directed by these initiatives - as evidenced in how we budget — the creation of a Strategic Change Initiatives grant program to fund innovative and creative ministries; and the creation of a Strategic Change Task Force which will Develop a plan during the next several months for resourcing and creating the ministries to support our initiatives.

In every organization, there are people who try hard to do good and people who try hard to look good, and you notice it is your least productive colleagues in the skin division who get enthused about this and learn to talk about the “team leadership curve” and the need for “iterative process” and “high-level roll-ups,” and it dawns on you that nobody at work will ever utter a simple declarative sentence again. That you might wind up spending half your time in team meetings discussing leadership process, every sentence upholstered with TQO gibberish.

And one last GK quote to add that seems appropriate, as perhaps there’s too much “summiting” and not enough doing:

Forty-six is late to be making a jump like that, but there’s a lot to be said for reality. People in Alaska don’t sit around the fire and discuss the holistic process of quality leadership sharing. They do real things all day, and at night they tell stories about them. That’s why Alaska is there: to give you an alternative to the monkey island of corporate life. You take a float plane from Anchorage and in two minutes you’re beyond the grid and out over moose country, out where people survive by observing carefully the workings of nature, out where the level of b.s., c.s., and h.s. drops sharply as reality rises.