In lieu of Conch Shell's Thursday post...

Our favourite street...

Strumming past the graveyard

I attended a funeral on Monday. I didn't know the deceased, but it was nice to be there to support his grieving widow.

Her husband died Friday night from pancreatic cancer. All tremendously sad. There were many tears as a silken-voiced guitarist strummed out a balm of gentle notes.

It occurs to me that the departed took his final bow as Coyote and I were enjoying a rare concert by the incomparable Daniel Johnston, a cat who's probably used up at least five or six of his nine lives.

I found the show inspiring, in part because Johnston has long struggled with mental illness. Everyone from Nirvana to Bright Eyes has covered his songs. Some are heart-tuggingly touching. Others are just plain fun, even when it comes to death. As a prelude to the funeral mass, it seems fitting that Johnston sang his cheeky little gallows-humour riff on Bruce Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch: Funeral home, funeral home / Got me a coffin, shiny and black / I'm goin' to the funeral and I'm never comin' back.

Management by magazine

Lately his Esteemed Baldness, Larry, has hired business gurus to help with his 'thousand days of change 'visioning' thing over at City Hall. (I hold a certain distaste for people 'verbing' nouns like that, but I will forebear digression -- just this once.) I suspect this exercise to be an outgrowth of that little book about 'corporate excellence and change' that he read, Execution: The Discipline of getting things done. He got so excited he publicly urged all the city councillors to read the sucker.

I suspect the mayor's infatuation with this book may be a, ummm, textbook variation on management by magazine. As excited as he is, he treads a very well-worn path. I'm a very old coyote. Old enough to have seen a buncha business cycles, a buncha companies and a buncha hotshot executives in action. And y'know, all of 'em seem to blather on faddily about cultures of excellence and paradigm shifts and methods for ensuring organizational quality. All sounding strangely repetitive after awhile.

Remember The Rules? A book of instructions that, if followed to the letter, would allow a women to snag herself a ma-yun? Heard it mentioned much lately? I thought not. It's pretty much the female dating equivalent of business guru's books on corporate change.

I'm gonna heretically suggest that this may be because so many captains of industry don't have a hot clue what the fuck they're really supposed to be doing to make their companies successful. Sure, they've gotten the MBAs (or in Larry's case, gone to Algonquin College) and they've learned to project that take-charge outer confidence that investors and voters love, but they're really as clueless as the rest of us.

Having aligned themselves with the people they believe to be the smart money, they don't want to admit that their fates depend as much as they do upon dumb luck. I can almost guarantee you that every rich guy whom I've ever visited of a night to tip over their trashcan, fondly thinks they've succeeded because they're such darn smart businessmen. They just don't get how much dumb luck is involved, and don't want to know. Because that would mean they're schnooks like the rest of us, not steely-eyed captains of their own fates.

Which leads us to management by magazine. At some level, everybody's insecure. Everybody's looking for a guru. Everybody wants to believe that someone else can tell 'em - preferably in fewer than eleven chapters - all of the rules for success in life and business. Because they don't think they know 'em themselves, and they find it heartening to think that someone else can tell 'em. A ton of writers are out there, willing to feed 'em that same old recycled bullshit, too.

Bad news: Today's guru, as soon as the next hot flavour-of-the-minnit comes out, is tomorrow's has-been. Guys who write these books are just as clueless as the people who buy 'em. But at least they're gettin' paid publishing royalties for it...

Mid-term Review for the Award

With the cancellation of the Emergency Meeting due to the failed quorum count, and the impending arrival of the Amazon, the Chair and I decided it would be a good time to have a Most Improved Person mid-term review.

You might say that as the prize is awarded in September, we should have had our mid-term review in March, but if we were the sort of people who managed to do everything we ought to do when we should, we wouldn't be competing with each other for a Most Improved Person award.

The Amazon wins most years. I won the year I started pirate school. You might have thought my graduating would have given me the award, but I didn't finish in the top 10% of the class and the Amazon went through a home renovation without losing her boyfriend.

"We were talking," the Chair told me before the Amazon arrived, "and for you to win this year, you're going to need a show-stopper."

I shrugged. Since the Chair has never won, I'd probably have given it to him if he filed his taxes on time. Of course, the Amazon isn't going to let it go to one of us that easily.

And that's what she told us when she arrived. Before she sat down she announced, "I've got Most Improved Person in the bag."

She asked if we wanted to know why and we said we did.

"I've hired a life coach. We met for the first time today and I've already got a set of objectives."

"We're going to need to see those objectives," I said.

"What are they?" asked the Chair.

"I don't remember," she said. "I think one was that I need to not be so swayed by what other people think, I need to be more self-directed."

"You need to be more self-directed? That would be like me saying, I need to eat more Mars bars," I said.

"Or do you mean it would be like you saying you need to know how to tell people 'you are wrong!'" she said to me.

"You are wrong," I said, "okay, maybe it would be like that."

The Amazon then promised to bring her objectives to our next meeting and we moved on to quizzing the Chair about the progress we'll need to see from him. This is always the fun part of the mid-term review.

Emergency Meeting: Friday, May 4th

Called by: The Chair
Venue: Not the Usual Spot
Present: The Chair, 4th Dwarf

Absent with or without the usual lame-o excuse: Eigga, Coyote, Conch Shell, The Independent Observer
Guest: The Amazon
Food: Wings, Chicken Sandwich
Beverages: Beer, Coke

Major Topics: Conch Shell Blogs !?!, Audrey Blogs !, Coyote’s word count

Minutes

The Chair called the meeting to order at 17:32.

A point-of-order came from the floor. Transcript follows.

4thDwarf: Mr. Chair. I believe we may not have quorum.

Chair: I will take the roll call. Thank you. All those present say aye.

4thDwarf: Aye

Chair: Aye

(Crickets chirping)

The Chair agreed that there was no quorum and promptly adjourned the meeting.

The Amazon arrived at around 18:00 and all three moved to a mid-year status report on who has improved the most in the last year among the three.

(4th Dwarf to follow with a summary report)