“Every organization is perfectly designed to produce the results it produces.”
Kids
What do they know?
They stumble around making babbling baby noises, running into furniture, and falling down. Next thing, they’re speaking a language. They don’t know subjects and predicates or present tense and past tense. They don’t study. They don’t know how to spell or even how to write. They just listen and repeat and start talking until it sounds right. They don’t have any idea how hard it is, or how long it takes, to learn a new language. Live in a multi-lingual house? No problem, they just learn two languages at once!
Kids.
The three faithful persistent bushes in the backyard
Orange Esperanza. I’ve been trimming and shaping, so not much to see for flowers.
Texas Lantana. Nothing I do slows this one down.
And Texas Firebush. This is the one that looked stone dead all the way down to the ground.
Pretty soon they’re going to have to carry on for the rest of the summer without us because we’ll be gone. They’ll be just fine though because they’re all natives, accustomed to this climate.
Prickly pear
The plants can get large and messy.
But the flowers are precious.
Geopolitics and the global order
Offshoring talent
Latest tech tools and technologies
Elevating the client experience
A fresh look at partner compensation models
31 hours of continuing education accomplished
The Engage 2024 Conference is over. Engage 2025 is already in my schedule for next year.
Quote of the day: “Kindness without accountability is a recipe for entitlement.”
I struggle with this one. I want to be able to be kind without demanding something in return. Entitlement as a result would be a disappointing unintended consequence. I’m still haunted by an episode of Anthony Bourdain. He was in Haiti doing a food segment. At the end of the event, there was food left over. What to do with that? Throw it out? There were hungry kids standing right outside the door. Give it to them. The best of intentions. Word spread at lightning speed. Little kids got pushed out of the way by bigger kids. Hungry adults pushed their way in. The police showed up and started beating people to restore order. Chaos. The best of intentions. Unintended consequences. That sucked.
But I still need to come to a conclusion for how I feel about the quote, “Kindness without accountability is a recipe for entitlement” I’m going to disagree with the premise. If I have to demand something in return for kindness, isn’t that more like a purchase? There can be negative unintended consequences as a result but it’s not an absolute. Sometimes kindness without accountability is just kindness.