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Notes for
the by Dr. Paul Pribbenow |
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Philanthropy is a journey. Let JGA be your guide. Johnson, Grossnickle and
Associates LLC
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Volume
Two, Number One (October 2000) ****** "What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how." (W. Wordsworth, from "The Prelude") NOTES FROM READERS >>What you think<< This issue of my Notes
marks the first anniversary of my efforts to share with a growing number
of friends and colleagues some of the ideas, readings, musings, and
words that inspire me, give me hope, and help me be a reflective
practitioner. I am grateful
to all of you who take the time to read these occasional newsletters.
I know by your responses that some read the Notes as soon as they
arrive, while others put them into that pile for weekend catch-up time
or airplane trips. You are
a diverse group in so many ways, but what you share is a commitment to
thinking about what you do and why.
I often receive substantive comments on topics raised in my
Notes, which I appreciate greatly—I am always happy to share your
comments with other readers. But
sometimes I also get other sorts of responses—responses that tell me
important things about our shared commitments and concerns.
Sometimes you tell me:
What I’ve been
thinking about is how we might ever hope to overcome the short-sighted,
negative images of philanthropy and fund raising that we find all around
us (even among our professional colleagues), and I realized that we will
never change those images with a broad-based public education effort
(though there would be nothing wrong with such an effort).
Instead, we need to change ourselves—our own perceptions of
what we do and why—and then, through our advocacy and example, we
might begin to change those with whom we work—donors, volunteers,
colleagues, fellow citizens. Hank
Rosso called it the “concentric circle” approach to
philanthropy—it works for reflective practice as well.
It begins with you. I am pleased once again
to welcome many new subscribers to Notes—I hope you'll all be active
members of our community of reflective practitioners.
Occasionally, I (or my colleagues) refer to items from previous
issues of Notes. If
you have not been a subscriber previously, and wish to review our
conversations, past issues of Notes are available on-line at www.jgacounsel.com.
I thank my friends at Johnson,
Grossnickle and Associates for their abiding support for our
reflective practice. ****** REFLECT ON THIS >>Learning
and difference << A graduate school
colleague of mine recently suggested that we live in a moment of great
tension in the world. On the one hand, we marvel at the globalization of our lives,
the breakdown of boundaries, the ease of communication and travel, the
wonderful richness of life in various countries and cultures. On the other hand, he pointed out, this also is a time when
we are fixated on our differences, the things that separate us from each
other, the ways in which we are not alike.
How ironic that as we are more and more able to participate in a
global community, we also are more and more fragmented by our
differences. I have learned much
about how I think about difference from the elegant writings of Mary
Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist whose parents were Margaret Mead
and Gregory Bateson. Mary
Catherine Bateson’s works include “Composing
a Life” (Reissued in 1990, Plume Books) and “Peripheral
Visions: Learning along the Way” (1994, HarperCollins).
In “Peripheral Visions,” Professor Bateson explores how
“the quality of improvisation characterizes more and more lives today,
lived in uncertainty, full of the inklings of alternatives” (p. 8). Dr. Bateson spent many
years living and teaching in Iran.
She talks about her initial visits to the Persian gardens of
Iranian colleagues and how she learned to improvise in the gardens:
“That day in the Persian garden has come to represent for me a changed
awareness of learning pervading other activities.
Meeting as strangers, we join in common occasions, making up our
multiple roles as we go along—young and old, male and female, teacher
and parent and lover—with all of science and history present in shadow
form, partly illuminating and partly obscuring what is there to be
learned…We are largely unaware of speaking, as we all do, sentences
never spoken before, unaware of choreographing the acts of dressing and
sitting and entering a room as depictions of self, of resculpting memory
into an appropriate past…What I tried to do that day (in the Persian
garden), stringing together elements of previous knowledge, attending to
every possible cue, and exploring different translations of the
familiar, was to improvise responsibly and with love” (p. 6). Improvising and learning—responsibly and with love—what a remarkable way of thinking about how we respond to diverse situations and people. Read the passage again and again, let it sink in—it describes a way of life that looks a lot like reflective practice. >>Teaching
and the challenge of translation<< I am teaching
undergraduates this semester in a fascinating course called “Cultures
and Traditions.” The
course is taught to all our sophomores, and surveys history, literature,
and the arts in pursuit of a deeper understanding of abiding human
questions. It has been good
fun and has occasioned reflection about how much of what we do as
members of organizations is a form of teaching.
All of us teach—and learn—and in our teaching and learning we
are part of a community that extends from classrooms to street corners
to boardrooms to offices. How
wonderful. I have been struck by
how teaching is so much about translating ideas and values.
We teach so that those with whom we are engaged might share our
excitement and passion for those ideas and values.
For example, when my students had trouble with the idea of myths
and how they shape culture, we talked about Bobby Knight and the myth of
basketball in Indiana. Translation?!
A recent set of interviews in “Fast
Company” (October 2000) confirms some important characteristics
about this idea of teaching as translation:
An apple for all you
teachers. >>Ensembles
and companies: the arts and leadership<< I had the privilege of
serving for several years on the boards of directors for a dance company
and a theater company in Chicago. I
always marveled at the ways in which the idea of an “ensemble” or
“company”—the accepted way of describing a group of artists
performing together—had important things to teach all of us about
common purpose and organizational forms. Several recent articles
describe how the arts offer compelling models for leadership.
“Leadership
Ensemble” (“Fast
Company,” May 2000) tells the story of Orpheus, a chamber
orchestra based at Baruch High School in Manhattan that performs without
a conductor. As the group
rehearses for its public performances (and it performs in very
distinguished settings), it practices self-governance and consensus
building that have become a metaphor for structural change. The article describes how Orpheus has learned important
things about motivation (a sense of intimacy and connectedness that
brings great satisfaction to individual members); decision-making
(everyone serves as a leader, but not all at the same time…leadership
is passed around); performance (listening carefully to each other often
leads to random acts of leadership…orchestra members show leadership
by adapting, offering constructive criticism, and taking on new roles);
and work (successful performances without a conductor require intense
and hard work—everyone must do his or her part for the group to be
successful). In a different
direction, Henry Mintzberg, a professor at McGill
University in Montreal, writes in the “Harvard
Business Review” (November-December 1998) of how
managing professionals and knowledge workers can be informed by the
experience of orchestra conductors.
He describes how orchestra conductors must deal with the lack of
control—control and structure often come from the guild of musicians
or professionals—conductors may direct, but they don’t necessarily
control. Conductors also
must learn to provide covert leadership—genuine leadership may be more
invisible than we think. Orchestra
conductors also know that the culture of an organization is imbedded in
the system—leadership does not need to focus so much on individuals
but on sustaining the cohesion of the culture of an organization.
Finally, orchestra leaders know that they must manage “all
around”—a word here with that second chair viola player, an alliance
with important outsiders, picking up an instrument yourself and playing
it as you want others to play it—these are the various ways in which
leadership is practiced among professionals. At the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I taught nonprofit arts
management, I also learned that sometimes words weren’t the most
effective tools for leading an organization. An image, a picture, an event, and a performance—perhaps
all of us need to expand our repertoire! ****** PRACTICE
THIS >>Fallacies
we live by<< As an ethicist, I know
of many fallacies that plague theories about morality and moral
argument. We use them all
the time to justify behavior and the decisions we make. A fascinating article
in the U.S. Airways “Attache” magazine (April 1999), entitled
“Name that Fallacy,” pointed out the sorts of fallacies that are
often used in business meetings to persuade, defy logic, make
excuses—you name it. The
author suggests that by leaving these fallacies unchallenged, we allow
the disruption of the process of getting from an accepted starting point
to an agreed conclusion. He
recommends that conversations will be more successful and genuine if we
learn to recognize and challenge fallacies that are meant to keep us
from finding common ground. Among the most
often-used fallacious strategies:
Examine yourself, O
fallacious ones—and then begin to listen for all of the ways in which
good conversation and common work is undercut by fallacies that go
unchallenged. >>Trust
me, if you are able<< I
have written here before of the centrality of trust to the well being of
communities and organizations. It is such an elusive part of our common lives, but so
essential. Sociologist
Robert Bellah and his associates write in “The
Good Society,” (1991, Alfred Knopf) that “Trust…is never to be
taken for granted. In our
relation to the world, trust is always in conflict with mistrust…(and)
if we are dominated by mistrust we cannot attend or interpret
adequately, we cannot act accountably, and we will rupture, not
strengthen, the solidarity of the community or communities we live in.
But how can we trust?” (p. 284) To
this question—and it is the question we must struggle with—the “Harvard
Management Update” (Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2000) offers some
very concrete suggestions for building trust in organizations. First,
we must be able to describe some of the forms that trust takes in an
organization. They suggest
three:
If
these three types of trust are evident in organization—and they can be
nurtured—we will begin to build what the authors call “transactional
trust,” the relationships of trust that undergird healthy and
successful organizations. (1)
Develop your own capacity for trust first.
Learn to depend on yourself, and others will perceive and respond
to you as a trustworthy person. If,
on the other hand, you do not have the confidence of your abilities or
convictions, others may share your lack of trust. (2)
Build trust behaviorally and incrementally.
Don’t trust too little or too much, without evidence that trust
is warranted. Celebrate and
reward trustworthy behavior; hold colleagues responsible for
untrustworthy actions. Don’t
expect or put faith in large leaps of trust—trust builds and sustains
itself more fully when it happens incrementally. (3)
Tackle betrayal head-on. Mistrust
is natural—and sometimes healthy.
People will betray us. We
will learn more about how to trust if we work through betrayals in a
healthy way. Don’t deny
that it happened, face it and learn from it. All
of us have many trusts to keep—with each other, colleagues, donors,
the public. When you
experience trust, recognize and celebrate it for it is a gift that all
of us must care for. Bellah
joins the great Czech playwright and citizen of the world, Vaclav Havel,
in challenging us to be “ambassadors of trust in a fearful world.” Maybe then we can hope to build a good society! ****** PAY
ATTENTION TO THIS >>Some
new resources<< Who knows how we arrive
on all these various listservs and the like, but occasionally I’m
pleased to be included. For the past few
months, I’ve been receiving an interesting email newsletter entitled “Observations
in Philanthropy.” It
is produced by an organization called ChangingOurWorld.com,
at whose website you can subscribe.
The newsletter offers some solid, accessible analysis of trends
in philanthropy, suggestions for other philanthropy-related links, and
so forth. Recent topics
included a nice multi-part
series on “venture philanthropy.”
Check it out. Here at Wabash, we have
established a new Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, funded (as I
may have mentioned last issue) by a generous grant from Lilly Endowment.
We are excited by the possibility of building public awareness of
what the liberal arts is and why it is important.
Our first promotional venture is an email newsletter that we hope
to launch in November. Called
LiberalArtsOnline, it will offer occasional comments on public issues
that relate to the liberal arts. I
will subscribe all of you to LiberalArtsOnline unless you ask me not
to—it should stimulate an intriguing conversation, led by some
distinguished voices—about teaching, learning, and living in the 21st
century. >>California
dreaming<< Thanks to those of you
who kindly responded to my call for poetry.
My friend, Joe Price, who teaches religion and serves as special
assistant to the president at Whittier
College in California, sent along several good poems. Joe is a wonderful teacher and one of the most
entrepreneurial academics I’ve ever met.
One of his continuing projects is his effort to sing the national
anthem in every major league baseball park.
He’s getting close to meeting his ambitious goal, helped a bit
by his work on a new book, “After the Final Out: Rituals of Closure at
Baseball Stadiums,” which has enabled him to procure press
credentials! I told you he
was entrepreneurial. My favorite of Joe’s
recommended poems is from Tony Hoagland’s collection, “Donkey
Gospel” (1998, Graywolf Press) and is entitled
“Self-Improvement.” Here
are a few stanzas: “Sometimes we are asked to get good at something we have no talent for, or we excel at something we will never have the opportunity to prove. Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of just what happens, and in this way, what we are practicing is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in.” We read Job in my class
last week and talked a good bit about growing graceful in the exigencies
of our lives. We all have
so much to learn. Thanks,
Joe. >>Subscription
information<< Subscriptions to Notes
are simple to establish. Send
me an email at pribbenp@wabash.edu,
ask to be added to the list, and you will receive a confirmation from
the mailserver at Wabash College
that you are on the list. Please
feel free to forward your email versions of Notes to others—they then
can subscribe by contacting me. I
also am happy to send Notes as an MS Word attachment to an email, if
that would make reading it easier for some of you.
Just let me know. The
current and archive issues of Notes are available on-line at www.jgacounsel.com. >>Topics
for the next issue (December 2000)<<
(c) Paul Pribbenow, 2000 |
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