A Poem: Heartlight

I wrote this poem, on my creative outlet blog, about the need to be a whole person - in particular, in a reasonable emotional state. I know a few people who are of the view that it is sufficient to excel in one area of being human alone - in the case of those people (many from the past), their view is that being an intellectual genius justifies being rude, aggressive, or condescending. It doesn't.

So, from https://musingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/04/heartlight.html, here is my poem "Heartlight", written back in April:

You can not
shine from your mind,
unless you first
shine from your heart. 

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2020

Towards better definitions of leadership and governance

Having watched the Kevin Rudd government response to the GFC (a lot of the credit there goes, I understand to Swan), and read about Abraham Lincoln's response to the US Civil War, FDR's response to the Great Depression and World War (part) Two, John Curtin's response to World War (part) Two, seen and experienced similar responses by people I know who aren't famous to life changing events, and now watching Dan Andrews responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, I consider a key part of any definition of good leadership has to be:

Willingness to give up one's personal goals/ambitions for the sake of the broader wellbeing in response to a crisis.

I have been making some notes about a retirement project: a book on governance (to possibly be titled "Tweaking Governance"), and one of the aspects I have been thinking of is the mistake some people make of thinking lessons can be drawn from the military for good leadership of businesses.

Rubbish.

The military is about:

(a) logistics, which has administrative - not leadership - points that may be worth considering if they relate to the circumstances of the business concerned (and the military, for what it is worth, cannot afford to operate on - and has never done so - the "just in time" rubbish that has now been so thorough;y discredited by the pandemic);

(b) preparing people to kill - possibly not within sight, in the case of, for instance, artillery/bomber/naval crews; and

(c) establishing an authoritarian hierarchy for the purpose of ensuring members of the military will die when ordered to. 

Businesses do not operate in a war situation - ultra-competitive, unnecessarily so, destructively so in terms of the community's overall well being, and some heads of business organisations (I won't call them leaders) WRONGLY think that the authoritarian approaches of the military can be applied to business.

They can't: all military organisation/leadership can do in the non-military world is impose an authoritarianism that is inherently designed to crush the individuality and creativity of works - who, in the non-military world, can resign if they feel oppressed or stifled (that is subject to a few caveats about finances and discrimination around opportunities for employment).

This is made worse by my experience of most military people being bigots in one and often more ways. That sort of thinking and emotions just creates risks for businesses.

Another misapplication is sometimes people trying to draw on the "heroine's journey" myth to create the illussion of a nobler. greater purpose for business.

Again, rubbish.

Most businesses are about profit - end of story. Some also include a humanitarian aspect, but that can be overwhelmed by the profit motive - as we are currently seeing in privately run aged care homes.

Lockdown, transphobia and a couple of minor medical matters

I was aided by a couple of people at a supermarket recently who affirmed me as female without any problems whatsoever. I was, a couple of days later, served by two people in a chemist where I was treated with suspicion without any questions, challenges or problems - one was the affirming young man whose helpfulness is why I started going there.

So the chemist’s assistant who claimed, a few weeks ago, that they wanted to check extra details for me was lying. It doesn't help that that person didn't ask those extra questions for the other customers I've now seen them serve.

So the COVID-19 lockdown isn't a trigger for bigotry: what is happening is that people let the shields hiding their hate slip when they are tired, distracted, or so busy that they're both.

I also have a couple of questions / comments on medical aspects of the lockdown.

Firstly, instead of doctors showing how they’re allegedly clever by showing how they use tape and other work arounds for the problem of glasses fogging up when wearing a face mask (moving the glasses out is unacceptable as it creates a mismatch of focal lengths - just ask ANY optician / spectacle maker), how about fixing the bloody problem in the first place?

The main problem is that the flexible wire straps need to be longer, and there need to be two, maybe three, of them side by side.

Also, it would help if facemasks were bigger.

Is it really so difficult to think of fixing the problem, rather than ways of adapting to the problem?

Also, I would like to know that the levels of infection control being taught are suitable for this pandemic, and we’re not being taught near-surgical infection control, which requires consideration of bacteria, parasites, and other less inclined to self-destruct viruses.

(For what its worth, I consider what they’re teaching us IS appropriate, but there have been a number of misleading comments about masks [along the lines of not being necessary, when I suspect the situation was a shortage], and thus there is likely to be some snarkiness about this - on both sides.)

Knowledge transfers, management dinosaurs, and one aspect of bad management

In a recent discussion, a link was posted to an article from a conservative by an older person on an alleged downside of working at home: not being able to progress one’s career because of the lack of face to face contact.

This is my reply to that:

Knowledge transfer is important, but these days you don't need to be sitting beside each other to do that. I've been educating team members since around 2002 . . . who are not located in the same office without any problems - their careers have progressed very well. If anything, the current batch of tools like . . ., where you can share screens, has made this even easier.

My experience is that the most significant hurdles are actually finding - or making - the time to meet and discuss matters outside of projects (which our new mentoring scheme is helping with), and to make sure that opportunities to pass on learning during a project are taken (learning by osmosis is hit and miss) - and on that, the reluctance of some engineers of my era (Mesozoic) to do so is regrettable, but budgets and time commitments can also make this harder.

The article was written by a social dinosaur, in my opinion, who did more to show his lack of comfort with technology, a possible reluctance to share, and an adherence to a rigid, hierarchic way of transferring status that is confused for “transferring knowledge”.

Being understaffed makes finding the time and energy to transfer knowledge (particularly for those with what are euphemistically referred to as “home duties”) quite difficult at times, so that doesn’t help - but that is the case whether working remotely or in the office. Don’t portray a workload or some other matter for a block to teaching when it isn’t, and don’t conflate passing on knowledge with the conveying of hierarchical approval of change in status.

On that, a post I will probably not have the time or energy to do is how bad managers push costs out of sight so they don't show up in their KPIs - even if it increases overall community costs. This includes things like not passing on project codes for “a few minutes of your time”.

Another moment of history rhyming?

My eclectic reading has, today, including a little more on a biography of Thomas Meagher: “The Immortal Irishman”, by Timothy  Egan. In the section “To be Irish in America” (there’s a couple of minor  errors in the Section “To be Irish in Australia), the author describes the violently xenophobic “Know Nothing” movement (the title came from the advice they gave their thugs to tell the police that they “know nothing”).

Is this another moment of history rhyming? There seem to me to be parallels between the Know Nothings of the 1800s in the USA (and their parallel xenophobic and violently racist “White Australia” cousins of content of that era in my nation) and the more recent Tea Party and white supremacist movements - and, in fact, the whole so-called neoliberal movement, including its current distortion of the conservative party in Australia (also influenced by neochristians).