How complacency becomes a killer

In April 1996, an emotionally troubled young man went on a killing spree at a busy tourist spot known as Port Arthur (Tasmania, Australia). It remains one of the world's bloodiest, resulting in 35 deaths, 28 injured. The gunman did not turn the gun on himself and is currently serving 35 life sentences. Although his motivation remains a guarded secret (thanks to his family and attorneys), he did persist in asking how many he'd succeeded in killing.

Our own NRA extended its reach into Australia's public reaction to this atrocity — by supporting the gun lobby. Like America, Australia does have a "frontier and a gun" component to its culture. But overall the Australian government's reaction was swift and conclusive: According to Policy Mic, "in the wake of the 1996 shootings, support for further gun control measures swelled to 95% of the population. Spearheaded by Australia's conservatives (yes, conservatives), the laws banned rapid-firing long guns and launched an extensive gun buyback program that removed over 650,000 guns from the public. It also tightened laws and regulations surrounding their sale, registration, and storage. The whole package cost about $500 per gun and was compulsory.

"As a result, some estimates say 20% of Australia's total guns were eliminated and ownership by household halved. In the U.S., a similar law would get rid of 40 million firearms. The decreasing homicide rate in Australia declined even faster, and mass shootings stopped entirely. Before the gun laws, Australia had seen 13 mass shootings, 112 resulting deaths, and 52 injured in the previous 18 years. Australia's never seen a similar massacre since. Meanwhile, the firearms suicide rate fell dramatically from about 492 a year to 247.

"Americans don't have a comparable experience because there are 89 guns for every 100 citizens in the country. In the U.S., a 2013 study found that an increase of firearms ownership by 1% translates almost directly to a 1% increase in death by firearm."

I realize Australia's a smaller continent with a different culture. What troubles me — makes me heartsick, in fact — is this: What is our American culture? Don't we deplore terrorism? We submit ourselves to ceremonies of grief over 9/11. So since when did American culture, rich and diverse, say it was okay to stand by helpless and passive as children are gunned down at school? There have been 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook (http://everytown.org/article/schoolshootings).

How sluggishly we have responded to this escalating death toll by gun violence. It was naturally confounding at first, but then twenty first-graders were slaughtered and instead of implementing a practical backgrounds-check amendment that would've solved a fraction of the overall problem, our politicians pocketed money from the NRA and looked the other way. Many more have liberalized gun control restrictions. The senator from my district earned nearly $400,000 for his inaction, and my state governor signed a bill that won him accolades from gun enthusiasts and "2nd Amendment patriots," even as two more shooting incidents occurred in Georgia, within 24 hours of Isla Vista, and a couple days before two cops were shot in cold blood in Vegas.

Between the arrogance of those who would rate and pay our public servants based on fealty to their own interests, and our own public passivity, the problem of gun violence in America will only worsen — it's been getting worst every month. Public outrage is expressed on social media, but not directed at those who've been empowered — by us — to make the laws that would ultimately aid and represent the greater good. 

Complacency kills, because it eradicates the two things that make us human: curiosity and empathy. We need to be aggressively curious about finding solutions, and extending far more empathy for those who've been so cruelly bereaved by gun violence.

It takes less time to contact your elected leaders than it does to watch your favorite sitcom. Most have online forms so you can correspond from their web sites. If you don't know who your elected reps are, put your zip code in at this site: http://whoismyrepresentative.com/. And if you're writing for gun control, all you have to tell them is #notonemore.

Polishing the Apple

Thank you so much to the Koch brothers for donating $25 million to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF). It'll provide scholarships for "3,000 exemplary students," with spare change left over to help fund operations for all historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the UNCF. Coming from guys worth $100 billion, this is indeed noisy generosity, given the Kochs typically shroud most of their financial maneuvers in mystery.

As gilded PR stunts go, there's some presumption that $25 million will look fantastic to the average schmoe — us — until you put it in context. This nation has over 100 HBCUs with a total enrollment of approximately 324,000 students: the National Association for College and University Business Officers reports that the combined value of the top 10 HBCU endowments equals $1.5 billion, while the top 10 endowments of predominantly white colleges equals $154.7 billion (Stanford alone: $18.7 billion). The heart of the problem isn't just cash; the Department of Education has to revise the Parent Plus loans that basically tightened lending criteria and shut out middle-class black parents.

I would tell those 3,000 exemplary HBCU students to respect the scholarship, study hard, write the Kochs a heartfelt thank-you note every month of your life, graduate, and then — as professionals or private citizens — bust your chops to recover the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since last August the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity has spent $44 million on Congressional races. In other words, regain the vote and fight voter suppression as much as you can, because your Koch-backed degree won't mean much if this democracy becomes an oligarchy where you come from a demographic that's being gerrymandered out of the vote. Call me an old softie but that's how I feel about it. #‎baloney

Give a Buck

The Moral Comfort Zone of Doing Absolutely Nothing

The last thing I want to do is politicize my blog about soft skills in the workplace, but our workplaces do not exist in a vacuum. I wrote this upon hearing about the latest shooting rampage at Seattle Pacific University. I welcome your comments but just ask that you keep it civil; bad enough that bereaved parent Richard Martinez has been accused of being a "media whore."

In this life, the response that annoys me the most sounds like, "It can't be done," or "It's never been done this way before." 

These rationalizations spawn complacencies that sound like practicality but are in fact moral laziness. It's a way of saying, "Why bother, it's too much work, so why even begin effort?" This latest shooting in Seattle reminds me of all such notions. "We're never going to gather up all the guns, so why bother.... Gun ownership is an American right, so don't even dare try.... Hey, let's not overlook the sanctity of the 2nd Amendment!... (and that morally exhausted old nellie) Guns don't kill people, people kill people." 

So, okay, let's just leave the situation as is. Let's not attempt any interim solutions to establish background-check protocols, to help the mentally ill, or to mitigate the stupefyingly easy access to automatic weapons already blessed by powerful special interest groups. Let's tsk-tsk-tsk but do nothing while our public servants are graded and bought up by those same groups. We'll just pretend that brazen self-service won't happen when they try to leverage political power on the next set of issues we feel strongly about .... We'll just keep fighting between ourselves, jutting out our chins as we parade our semi-automatics in public restaurants and retail stores, and calling each other out for stupidity when we line up on both sides of this argument. But here's the point you and I keep missing:

Both sides of the argument should be affronted that the gun violence discourse is no longer democratically owned. 

Whichever you believe, take a stand. Write or call your elected officials. Donate money to the group advocating the side of the argument you believe in. Maybe the politicians will listen to moderate centrist views versus the barking of the extremists. Encourage civil discourse on Facebook so everyone walks away learning something new versus feeling justified in polarization. 

We've got to start somewhere. The current situation is untenable and it's only getting worse. Fixing the gun violence problem is supposed to be hard work. The same
thinking that got us to this point of escalating death tolls is not the same thinking we'll need to get us out of this (literally) bloody mess. We are not going to please everyone, which is a tough way to begin collaborations, but I'd rather collaborate with you in the most contentious way than watch passively as special interest groups define the argument. Or stand with you, graveside, watching another parent bury a slain child.


If we continue to do nothing, to remain passive, then each of us — pro- and anti-gun control alike — should be prepared to look in the eye of every parent who's lost a child to gun violence, and say, "Here is what I believe. Now what are you going to do about it?" Try that and then talk to me about courage under fire. #notonemore

The ending of things

Over 20 years ago this month, my friend and colleague Nathan ended his own life. He was only in his early 40s and it was a terrible shock to all of us who loved and respected him, and about a year later his mother, only in her early 60s, passed on as well, no doubt from a broken heart.

Nowadays, as I see the approach of her age coming up in my own years, I think about how and why things end.

Things end when people believe they've run out of options — or ideas. They're tired of trying, of problem-solving, of looking for alternatives. They're tired of the problem, that it exists at all.

Things end when people feel the burn of a constant disagreement and know they can no longer "agree to disagree." The state of disagreement becomes untenable.

Things end when it's healthier for an untenable situation to close, simply close. Sometimes the pain of ending things is less than the pain of living them out to no discernible conclusion.

In my job, I am constantly looking for solutions for my clients; it would be unacceptable for me to ever tell a client, "I'm sorry but that can't be done".... If Plan A is a bust, then let's try Plan B, or Plan C, or a hybrid of Plans C and F. And because that's the way I've lived for nearly 30 years, it's hard for me to accept it when people stop trying—or don't even begin to try at all. Coming up in the world of self-employment, I learned the try is what makes every risk and effort worthwhile of hope; but I've also learned that we each have different notions of "try." And so there's another lesson that comes with age: acceptance.

Acceptance. Finding one's own resilience again (and again, and again). Hope for the future. And peace to my friend Nathan's spirit, wherever he is.

"Would it upset you if I told you...um...your hair is burning?"

Recently, in a spurt of utter frustration, a friend asked me, "Are you this brutally honest with everyone? Someone shows up in a new dress and asks your opinion, and you tell her, 'Yeah, it looks like a sack on you.'"

No, of course not: none of us are universally one unyielding level of conduct in every aspect of our lives. I think this would be a pretty rigid, unresourceful personality. And there are different levels to the truth people seek in their lives, and varying levels of presumption and ethical action in how we choose to respond.

Pretty little white lies
It's easy to tell social white lies: we're not real stakeholders, the other person wants to keep feeling good about an innocuous private decision, and no real harm is done. In fact, greater harm might be done by giving an unvarnished truth ("Your new dress is a terrible mistake")....Social white lies abound: the friend in the awful dress may not really be asking for my opinion; maybe she just wants me to join her in feeling good.

But what if she's a friend and a colleague, about to represent our interests in pitching a critical new account? or she's about to head into a job interview for a position she really wants?

Ersatz vs. authentic kindness
Most humans are well-intentioned; most want to be kind. But throughout my life, I noticed there are people who feel obligated to be kind, or who are only kind when it's easy to be kind — they may in fact garner some pretty good personal PR. Just as there are social white lies, there's a shallow social sort of kindness that people enact out of short-lived good intentions or a fuzzy sense of moral obligation. While it's true "it takes nothing to be kind," the illuminating, life-changing kindnesses I've experienced in my life have come from individuals who took huge risks by giving me an unvarnished truth, not because it pumped their egos to deliver it, but because I needed more info, another way of looking at things, or, more drastically, to keep me from a terrible mistake. And I've found the authentically graceful people of the world are those who go uncredited — who are kind when no one else is looking, and no one else will know the grace they've bestowed on the rest of us.

The unvarnished truth for everyday moral dilemmas
I had to take a "co-parenting seminar" when I filed for divorce, and the one great take-away was this: "You will face many difficulties and dilemmas as a parent, where you won't know what to do. Any decision you make in the best interests of your child will have been the right decision." Somehow that unvarnished truth held me steady for 20 years, especially when my own pride and ego threatened to get in the way.

So when people in my classes talk about the small but troubling moral dilemmas they face at work, where there's more gray area than not, where matters of ego and turf cloud good judgment, I tell them, "You have to form a clear picture of what's going on, get advisory you trust, size up the risk, and do what's best for your organization. No one can misconstrue your motives if you can explain how your actions are in the best interest of the organization." For those who serve as agents and consultants, this means the wellbeing and best interests of your client's organization, if they're at the heart of the matter.

What "ASSUME" can mean
Insecure leaders usually gravitate towards yes-men and sycophants; we all know this. Human nature. Happens all the time. At a point in our socio-political history where good leaders are harder than ever to find, each of us can be a leader by being unafraid of reality. Especially in times of organizational crisis, where gray areas abound, and noisy scrambling egos threaten to muddy good judgment, be prepared to take a calculated risk. Don't be afraid to confront half-baked good ideas or outright poppycock.

•  Gently but firmly challenge points of unclear thinking, where you feel solutions have not been thought through. Ask for "groupthink" to work out options and contingencies. You should do this immediately and relentlessly if your department will be held solely accountable for results and outcomes.

•  Be unafraid to raise questions or confront delicate issues. Solutions often fail when touchy issues are left unconsidered. (Embarrassment is uncomfortable but remember that discomfort is temporary. And if you don't have a dog in the fight, don't play devil's advocate just to polish your own apple; you'll just come off looking like an ass).

•  Give and ask for concrete details: "If this, then what happens next? What should happen next?" A college professor once advised, "When you deliver a job to the next person in the production chain, explain it from their point of view, and do it explicitly. Pretend the other person's an imbecile, even when you know they're not. Be specific and clear so there's no room for unasked questions or easy assumptions."

In other words, be prepared to unleash "brutally honest," because assumptions aren't solid.

Bottom line? ASSUME can make an ASS out of U and ME.

Do you get it?

Clients regularly ask me to vet the assorted vendors who court their business. Some obvious questions:


•  How well does this person/organization understand collaboration? Project teams are usually cross-media, often not in the same region or time zone. In addition to expertise, effective collaboration requires access, responsiveness, and skillful listening.

•  How does this organization perceive themselves? Is there a clear vision and value proposition? Is this a group given to tough self-assessments, or are they narcissistic and in love with themselves?

An old Dr. Phil remark: "Be someone who gets it."

So . . . do you get it?


You can tell a lot about an organization by how they deliver their proposals. Proposal behaviors epitomize job performance. Even if judgments are processed unconsciously, most clients regard the speed, scope, and physical presentation of your proposals as indicative of job performance — ie, attentiveness to details, no bait-and-switch tactics, clear and reasonable expression of your insights (on any project-related issue).

•  Speed + accuracy = Motivation. Get that proposal in quickly, or ask the client when it would best serve them to receive it (and then beat it by a day or two, so you can discuss it before it's advanced to additional decision-makers). Imagine how it looks to a client to be ardently wooed for work, then made to wait days for your proposal. Hearing you say "It's been crazy around here but I'll get that estimate out to you!" may be a nifty sign (you're busy), but one shade away from hearing excuses  why you've missed a deadline (you're disorganized).

•  Appearance = Pride in work and gratitude. Is your estimate/proposal on your letterhead, or in an email, just a pile of numbers without an expression of gratitude for the opportunity, or even a signature? Many organizations require that clients sign on the dotted line before work can begin — fine if you need it, but personally I feel that if neither of our  handshakes are any good, then we probably shouldn't work together.

•  The "Tenzing Norgay" thing*. How have you defined the project and how you see process occurring? Do you suggest options and contingency plans for worst-case scenarios? Have you demonstrated why you're the right "sherpa" for this project journey?

"Give the client what they asked for, but tell them what you think they need." Your proposal/estimate is a great opportunity for showcasing how well you perceive their unstated needs, for defining both how you interpret the problem and the sort of solutions you think the client should consider.

You won't get every proposal, but every proposal is a great "venue" for showcasing how well you've listened to your client's briefing, and what you can do for them. If you're tired of the price game, stop giving clients mere numbers — instead, give them ideas, critical thinking, and strategies.

* Google it.