Endless Knots

Essential ingredient for a great book club

I got a note from a friend whom I know from book readings and book parties with good questions about starting book clubs.

Hi Jessica,

I recently got asked to join a new book group. A friend is trying to put one together. I know yours is highly successful.

What do you think is the essential ingredient for a great club (aside from great books of course). Any suggestions.

How do you select the books, where do you meet, and how often…. Etc.

Thanks so much.

So I went to the source, our Fiction Book Club, and got replies from two thoughtful and dedicated members. Anyone else have pointers for new book clubs? Chime in, please.

Here's the first:

Some thoughts based on my experience with our book club.

1. Meetings: We meet once a month, rotating among our houses. The host provides beverages, snacks and dessert after the discussion.

2. Timing: We meet at 8 pm and generally the discussion ends sometime between 9 and 10. We also have a picnic meeting in the summer which is pot luck and starts earlier.

3. Book Selection: We've tried different systems, including keeping a list of potential books, but we seem to usually fall back on suggesting books at the end of the discussion and we pick one for the next meeting or sometimes two meetings. We also decided to focus on fiction only.

4. Social Time: Dessert provides the time to catch up with each other and is important for more than the calories.

5. Focus: We work hard to keep the discussion period focused on the book.

6. Intensity: This is probably the most important item for a new club to think about and get right. We have great discussions without any "pressure to perform". Everyone's views are respected, and there is no "conclusion" or "summary" to be achieved.

And here's advice from another member, Ruth Nemzoff, herself author of Don't Bite Your Tongue: How to Foster Rewarding Relationships with Your Adult Children:

As for what makes our club successful. Usually everyone reads the book! We respect each others perspective and never argue about what one person sees in the book. Rather, we expand our own limited visions by hearing what others got from the book. Also the fact that we don't have to prepare in advance a speech like in some clubs takes pressure off, that would be the kiss of death for us busy folks!

I think also that we keep the food simple. No fancy entertaining,( though we are getting more fancy.) But I mean, we don't have to show-off...those who enjoy baking, mmmmm....June's pies, do, and the rest of us buy or cook when we are in the mood or don't when we are too pressured.

Spirit trotting

Received this today from my friend, Aron DeBacco, who writes: Celtic Spirit (commonly referred to as Spirit) is a retired race horse we've been fostering for about a year.  Because of school, I didn't have time to spend with her until the last few months.  I have a good friend who is teaching me to teach Spirit to be "just a horse", to slow down, walk, trot, stop when asked.  She is intelligent, responsive, alert and willing.  Learning how to enter into a partnership with her that works for both of us is one of the profound pleasures of this delicious summer.  It is still unclear if we will end up being her "forever home", but at the very least we will help her build the skills to find the place she gets to stay and be loved.

My Antioch

From The Independent:

DAYTON, Ohio - Former faculty at Antioch College, which is temporarily closing amid financial problems, plan to teach in coffee shops, bookstores and parks to keep alive the spirit of the private school known for its pioneering academic programs.

Scott Warren, former associate professor of philosophy and political theory at Antioch, said 22 ex-faculty members have formed the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute in the village of Yellow Springs, where the college is located.

Warren said the institute will follow the Antioch formula of offering progressive liberal arts courses while encouraging learning for life, humanitarian acts and collective decision-making. "It's an educational vision that keeps the DNA of Antioch College alive pending its resurrection," he said...

Scrabulous no more?

Got this when I clicked on Scrabulous* on Facebook this morning:

Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.

Then I sent this message to my Scrabulous opponents.

My Scrabbie buds,

What are we going to do? It would appear that Scrabulous has been taken down on FB due to the impending lawsuit from Scrabble/Hasbro.

Feels like I can't get my morning cuppa.

Sadly,

xjiimvr - approx  letters on my last tray :(((

*Scrabulous is a version of Scrabble on Facebook invented by two brothers in Calcutta. Has reported 500k-2 million users; Hasbro is citing infringement, which according to Chicago Trib article, has only 8600 Scrabble users on Facebook.

Image from Camelotonline.net - thanks

Outstanding job posting: Associate Director, Our Bodies Ourselves

I've had the privilege of working with Judy Norsigian, executive director of the group that wrote, produced, distributed, and has kept in print (while publishing many more books) the ground-breaker, Our Bodies, Ourselves.

What brought Judy and me together originally was a conference I organized with Joan Labby (who now works at University of the West): Choices in Childbirth. This was in the years when there were few alternatives for women who wanted drug-free deliveries: New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Mass., was then the only place in Boston that had a "birthing room," which meant that you could give birth in the labor room without going to the "delivery" room, in truth, the operating room. Midwives were still regarded as itinerants without proper medical backup; doctors who attended homebirths did so at some risk to their credentials.

On the weekend of the Great Blizzard of '78, 350 people turned up for the conference (at the Harvard Science Center) to hear Judy, Norma Swenson, doctors, midwives, authors, mothers. (Somewhere I have the brochure.)

The conference led to my working on a few writing projects with Judy and the group. My mother happened to be in town for one meeting, and, because she too was interested in women's health, she came along. Typically, while facilitating, contributing ideas, and periodically jumping up to find exactly the right article to support a point, Judy stuffed, addressed, and stamped envelopes. "She never stops," my mother said on the way home.

All these years later, this Radcliffe graduate, world traveler, tireless activist and boundlessly-engaged family member still guides the organization and the many books it has published, including the updated original now in dozens of languages, mostly recently, Russian, Albanian, and Tibetan.

Jeff Stamps and I devoted a whole chapter of Networking, our first book, to Judy and the group.

Now comes the news that an anonymous donor has funded "a new position of Associate Director for 3 years." I wish I were in a position to take it. What an opportunity.

Download obos_assoc_dir_job_descr.doc

or jump to the rest of this post for details.

Maybe we need better meetings

Rob Oakley, a frequent commenter here, left an interesting note in reply to "Eight years at the airport" that bears repeating:

I have been lucky enough in my career not to have to travel very much lately. Once upon a time, in the late '80s, I did. It was almost pleasant being in contact-suspension once or twice a week.

Things change. Lately, certainly, being treated as a potential murder suspect every time I get near an airport gives me pause. In the last couple of years? Maybe three times I've flown to seminars and training. None of them lived up to the hassle, I'm afraid.

Maybe I need to get invited to better meetings?

What about you? Was the last meeting you had to take off your shoes for (American travelers) or undergo the third-degree for (European travelers: What are you here for? Who are you meeting with? Why are you having this meeting? Are you being paid? - just to mention a few questions I've been asked) WORTH IT? How good are your meetings?

We're working on a crash project at the moment that will, ostensibly, include two face-to-face sessions. Although the first of those is still a bit in the future, we've already held two all-team conference calls supported by web screen-sharing and there've been a few one-on-one meetings. Oh, I almost forgot. We also have an online team room up and going, which proved especially useful when both of those conference calls were disrupted by the power going out, once on our end, the other on their end. We had enough redundancy built in that we continued undeterred. In the first instance, we switched from Polycom to my cell using the speakerphone and followed along with printouts; in the second, we called into someone else's cell and they followed along, having printed out materials for the meeting in advance as well. Materials were current because everyone is using the team room instead of shipping documents around via email.

And, we've already agreed to a draft agenda for the four days of face-to-face that has been modified, allowing time for additional changes, invitees, and the like. I expect those meetings to be very productive. The fewest number of people is traveling, reservations were made in advance thus fares not sky-high (even if most of the flights between Boston and the destination have been canceled, meaning that flight times are inconvenient), and, barring unforseen difficulties, this project will come in on schedule, if not before.

 

Why I garden

Payoff comes right around this time every year in New England. Here, a bouquet of herbs from my garden. See what you can pick out. Person with the best guesses gets a dried bouquet at end of season.

Writing on walls

Who has not been touched by the remarkable affirmation of life that Randy Pausch brought in the face of death? If perchance you haven't seen his Last Lecture, you must. Every now and then, a person is very clear about the meaning of life and if that person happens to be a happy one, who is articulate, smart, and warm, all the rest of us are very lucky. Dr. Pausch died of pancreatic cancer this past Friday at 47. Too young, too sad, and hearts around the world are encircling his wife, Jai, and their three small children.

Beyond the inspiration that his life offered, there was one thing in his NY Times obit that resonated here: "In his lecture, he praised his parents for letting him paint pictures on the walls of his room."

If all of our family pictures were digitized (not), I would be able to post photos of the room our daughters shared when they were little and which our artist daughter remained in after her older sister moved down the hall when the latter was thirteen. Relevance? They wanted to write on the walls. As did their friends. Always forbidden, according to modern, intelligent parenting. I'll fess up to this one: we said yes. Write, paint, scribble, tag - all the graffiti you want.

And so the walls of that room were covered, every one of them (the room is oddly shaped so there were in fact six separate surfaces), top to bottom, in black, red, green, blue, and every other color, words, designs, portraits, caricatures, "i love (names omitted for privacy's sake)" until the artist was well into her teens and wanted a more grown-up environment, whereupon she painted it a deep red. And she's grown into a very fine artist.

How about a little sociology with that technology?

My Google alerts for virtual teams and collaboration runneth over, thanks to the high price of oil. Who'd'a thunk it?

Many reporters, for example, The New York Times's fine one, Steve Lohr, whose article, "As travel costs rise, more meetings go virtual," took the headline earlier this week. Nothing wrong with Lohr's article, good, solid reporting with news for the newbies to the area: Cisco's telepresence offering, high price tag aside, makes participants feel like they're "there;" "companies of all sizes are beginning to shift to Web-based meetings for training and sales;" and this, worth the pull quote:

A report last month by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, a group of technology companies, and the Climate Group, an environmental organization, estimated that up to 20 percent of business travel worldwide could be replaced by Web-based and conventional videoconferencing technology.

Twenty percent? Me thinks a lot higher. But, numbers aside, where Lohr's article is like all the rest - and where it misses the point - is in this: Technology alone does not solve the problem. I've harped on about this before. Our old motto, "90% people, 10% technology," is being drowned out by the reflexive action whereby companies/organizations throw technology into the hands that once held airline tickets.

It's not enough. Virtual meetings, including those conducted by Cisco's telepresence, can be very good indeed but I wager that the technology only contributes a small fraction of the reason attendees deem these meetings as good. It's the process by which the meeting is conducted, the inclusiveness of their facilitators, the hard work of the leaders - and their exemplary virtual behaviors - that make such meetings sing.

I've written about this a lot - here's an old favorite, "Bored on conference calls? Relief!"

Eight years at the airport?

A colleague told me an astonishing statistic yesterday. One of the units of her multinational (sorry, I can't share its name and, no, it's not the one you might think) did a survey of how much time its professionals spend traveling. Including the end-to-end bits, meaning leaving the house, waiting at security, flight time, car rental or its equivalent plus travel to the destination, the average business person in said firm spends EIGHT YEARS OF HIS/HER LIFE ON THE ROAD!

The next statistic I'm looking for: how much of that time did the traveler find meaningful? Some people like traveling for the sheer solitude it brings; others, imagine, actually find the meetings they go to worthwhile.

Which brings the question I ask often: how many of the meetings you've traveled to recently were worth the trip? I'm traveling today - but it's only across town and I KNOW this one will be worthwhile (just in case the attendees are reading).