Endless Knots

Medal of Freedom for the Freedom Fighters 50 years later

 

Next Monday, November 24, the three young men murdered by the KKK in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, will receive the Medal of Freedom from President Obama at The White House. Members of the families of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner will be there to accept the award, including my friend from college days, David Goodman. See his ongoing work with the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

The poignant note: None of their parents lived to see this day. Andy's father was the first to die, just a few years after he was killed, then Mickey Schwerner's father, then Schwerner's mother, then James Chaney's mother in 2007 (unable to find reference to his father's death), followed just a few months later, by Carolyn Goodman (post on her memorial service here.) Imagine if you can (I can't) the horror of being those parents, their children's whereabouts unknown for six weeks until their bodies were discovered mutilated in a ditch.

None of the killers convicted in the first trial served longer than six years of their sentences; in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen (yes, that's his name--"You can't make this stuff up," David said on the phone during the trial), who was described as the mastermind of the executions, was convicted of three counts of manslaughter on the 41st anniversary of the crime and is serving three consecutive 20-year terms. Mickey Schwerner's widow, Rita Bender, who was in MIssissippi as a civil rights worker herself when the murders happened, had the poise to testify at Killen's trial.

I've written a number of posts about the Goodmans. I met David the year after Andy was killed and just a short time after my own father died suddenly. Grief can create indelible bonds and so we have remained friends all these years. I can't wait to see the pictures, David.

On the 25th anniversary of my mother's death...

Here, from seven years ago, a repost with the letter she left for her funeral.

And a just-discovered Pottstown Mercury news item from Oct 30, 1945, announcing that this 34-year-old Brooklyn transplant, who'd been in Pottstown less than a year and who had an 18-month-old child, would teach adult ed classes in introductory and advanced lipreading for three hours each Tues and Thurs night at the Y. My mom.

And now the blog repost from Sept 9, 2007:

Eighteen years ago today, my mother, Ethel A. Lipnack, died at the age of 78. This morning, I had the chance to stand on the doorstep where she had passed so many times--at the corner of Myrtle and Clinton Avenue, where she was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. A Connectict Muffin shop occupies the candy store that my grandparents ran at the edge of what was then a very posh neighborhood. I write this tonight from our daughter's apartment, just a few blocks from my mother's original home. In all the years since she died, this is the first time I've been nearby on this anniversary. Sad and happy, all at once.

My mother liked to say that she started working at age five, delivering newspapers along Clinton Avenue. She was just 20 years old when she graduated from Hunter College at the height of the Great Depression. With a German major and a French minor, there weren't many jobs available yet she managed to turn her love of language into a lifelong career. She was one of the first teachers of lipreading in Harlem, a skill that she took with her to Pennsylvania when my parents moved there in 1945, founding the first lipreading school in the Philadelphia area. Coincidence: I married a man with major congenital hearing loss (60% loss in the speech range). My mother called my husband one of the greatest natural lipreaders she'd ever met.

In her late forties, my mother turned her attention to teaching high school English, where she got to spend her days with the age group she loved most--teenagers. She taught for many years at Daniel Boone High School, in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, where she eventually chaired the English department. After she retired, she continued teaching reading and English. She was leaving the business school class she'd just taught when she had a massive stroke on March 26, 1984; she lived for five-and-a-half more years, requiring round-the-clock care, but never losing her sense of humor and or her love affair with cigarettes.

I found a letter she'd written for her funeral in a drawer the day she died. About the young people she so admired, she wrote: "Teenagers are great sources of joy, but most people don't know that. They should take time out to discover this."

One paragraph from her letter stays present across the years, the last sentence so compelling that we made it the epitaph on her gravestone:

My big fight with our society has been against bigotry. It is unfortunately pandemic. I wish I had had a magic formula for eradicating it. I didn't, but I do think I raised people's consciousness about it. So we're different from each other. Good! Let's learn about the differences. They're fascinating. At least I've found them so. This is my legacy:

Love each other despite differences and because of them.

And now my mother's letter in full, which my cousin read at her funeral:

1989 

Dear Family & Friends,

I hope this is not a sad day for you. If I were with you, I would not shed one tear. I would, instead, say that I am glad for her. This is what she wanted and she finally got it. One can live too long and I think I did. When I could no longer work, I felt no need to go on. Life seemed pointless and endless, let alone empty.

My children and grandchildren have been a great source of joy to me. They are beautiful people and should be treated like fine crystal. These are the true values in life. The rest is all hogwash. Along with them were my students. I hope they knew how much I loved them and how I profited from knowing them. Teenagers are great sources of joy, but most people don’t know that. They should take time out to discover this.

Grieve appropriately but not too much. Just be glad we knew each other.

My big fight with our society has been against bigotry. It is unfortunately pandemic. I wish I had had a magic formula for eradicating it. I didn’t, but I do think I raised people’s consciousness about it. So we’re different from each other. Good! Let’s learn about the differences. They’re fascinating. At least I’ve found them so. This is my legacy. Love each other despite differences and because of them.

Let’s not have any more wars. They seem never to solve anything. All they do is make a shortage of men for our beautiful young ladies. O.K., I think I’ve said it all!! Make love, not war, grow and understand. Be happy today and in the future. I wish you all well. I’ve had the best of it—my children, my friends. I owe you all a great deal. I hope I’ve been a good friend to you—I wanted to be.

If I’m in Pottstown, I’m happy. It’s where I wanted to be. It’s not Paradise but it’s been home to me for over 40 years. Brooklyn is where my heart has been.

Your confidences were always safe with me as I’m sure mine were with you. OK—get it over with. Do not cry. I’m relieved—truly. Please respect my things, my books, my art, my collections. I enjoyed them. I hope you do too.

                               Ethel A. Lipnack

 

PS. Try to find an alternative to nursing homes. To do this, you’ll have to take the profit out of them. They’re horrors in their present state. People are segregated by age and they have very little in common. I have found them a terrible home. I’ve done the best I could but that’s not good enough. Had I been in this last mausoleum much longer, I would have gone mad.

And while we're on the subject of customer service...Sanita

You know those wonderful clogs, the ones you think come only from Dansko? Turns out the originator is the Danish company, Sanita ("we’ve been making cozy, comfortable clogs the Danish way since 1907"). If you're like me, you probably thought Dankso was the original. They've got a great story too and for a while the two companies had a strong partnership. Here's a bit of the history:

Since the early 1990s until August 2007, all Dansko Professional clogs and all Dansko Stapled Clogs had been manufactured by Sanita in Europe. The distribution agreement between Dansko and Sanita ended in August 2007. Shortly after that time, Sanita began distributing the same products directly in the US under their own name.

So what's the point? I had a pair of clogs that I loved -- brown, oiled leather -- that literally fell apart. I noticed this when I found chunks of the sole deposited throughout the house -- first from the heel, then from the toe. I thought this was rather unusual so I decided to contact the company to ask whether this was normal.

That's when I discovered that my Danskos were really Sanitas and...the lovely Sanita company was more than understanding and offered me a discount on a new pair of clogs, which I wasn't really seeking and which was kind of incredible since the clogs were at least seven years old. But alas when I went to use the discount, thank you very much, I found three pairs that I loved and couldn't figure out how to buy one at discount and the other two at full price. When I inquired, they said I could have all three at discount! Amazing! And generous!

One pair, the Darcy, which you can order here, continues to get compliments (the other two are regular ole' clogs, albeit in great colors--brown with red trim and steel gray) so here's a picture of it, an ad, if you will, because what they did is real customer service. And thank you to those customer service people at Sanita (Dan was one), whom I cannot write to personally because of this (such a sad face that there's no emoticon for it), which has resulted in my losing their emails. I promised I would write a post -- and I'm finally doing it.

 

 

Restorative justice with The Dialogue Project

About six weeks ago, I received an email with the subject line "Interest...:"

Good morning Jessica!

I was wondering if you do invited talks on working virtually?

I’m running an event for a senior team at [a well known European company] with whom I have a long standing relationship.

My expertise is in dialogue and perhaps we could consider doing an interview with you to close a two day session in late January? Or maybe you’d prefer to do a talk, in person or virtually!

Do let me know if it’s worth us having a chat on Skype or something about this.

By the way – I read your writing about Jeff on your blog and found it incredibly moving and eloquent. Thank you.

Yours,

Karl James
Director
The Dialogue Project
20 Temple Sheen Road
London
SW14 7QG
+44 (0) 20 8878 0929
Twitter: @2plus2makes5

What ensued were a couple of conversations during which Karl explained the engagement and we developed the kind of rapport one does with like-minded people whom you meet only over Skype or on the phone. I sent him an essay I'd written about New Zealand; he sent me a link to an extraordinary radio program he's done for Radio 4 in the UK, which airs today.

Listen to "A Different Kind of Justice." Keep yourself busy while listening in whatever way makes you comfortable but you don't want to miss this. Karl (by the way, also a theatre director, for example, Malvolio at the New Victory Theatre in New York right now) brings two people into conversation. And what ensues is remarkable. He should teach us all how to do it.

And, yes, I accepted the invitation, which turned out to have many unexpected gifts attached.

 

 

The astounding Mona Golabek

Are you in or near Boston? Can you get here by Sunday night? You must.**

"The Pianist of Willesden Lane" is theatre like you've never seen it, music you've never heard played this way, a story that will turn you inside out -- and perhaps give you clues to solving intractable problems of your own (it did for me). And I haven't even mentioned that it's a one-woman performance. One woman. Ninety minutes. A monologue. A concert. The story of one child, one very talented child, who survives the Holocaust because she was told by her mother to "hold on to her music."

Mona Golabek is the performer, the (in real life concert) pianist, author of the book, The Children of Willesden Lane (written with Lee Cohen), and the daughter of that very talented child, Lisa Jura.

As one of the people I went with tonight said, "It's possibly the best play I've ever been to." I agree. And I wouldn't have known about it had I not read this piece in the Boston Globe. A daughter telling a mother's story is power enough but when the story itself speaks to the horror and the glory and the transcendence of humanity all at once, that is art, that is beauty, and that is reason to be alive.

Go. And if you're lucky, you'll witness it in the kind of theatre that we did, merely 100 people, few enough that everyone was virtually in the front row, eye-to-eye with this extraordinary talent. Not to mention the post-performance conversation, tonight with the star speaking with an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor and the local head of the Anti-Defamation League.

Thank you, Mona Golabek, and thank you, Hershey Felder, for your collaboration (he's the director) in bringing Mona's idea to fruition.

**Why do you have to see this by Sunday night? The Boston show at the Paramount closes then, headed next for Chicago, then on to Berkeley apparently, and hopefully one day to New York, London, and the silver screen. I can't imagine that all this won't happen.

Danny Hauben's Beautiful Bronx

Yesterday's New York Times profiles Daniel (to those lucky enough to know and love him, Danny) Hauben, the realist/muralist/"touched with whimsy" (Times description) painter who won the commission to create the art for the new Bronx Community College Library. Stupendous.

The Times interactive page shows four of Danny's works with the ability to mouse over and see them in more detail. Click-worthy, for sure.

This photo, from Danny's website, says what words cannot, him painting, what he's painting, and how he paints it.

 

It was my good luck to meet Danny when he was a teenager. His brother, Eddie Hauben, and his wife Jan (Ward) Hauben, were our first friends in Boston, whom we met in the context of bringing Bucky Fuller to Boston to stage World Game here in the summer of 1970. The story, of course, has many twists to it -- Eddie worked for Bucky; Jan worked for Gus Jaccaci, a futurist who had previously been a Harvard admission's office who had tried to recruit my late husband, Jeff Stamps, to Harvard so that he would ski with the Harvard team. (FTR, he chose Dartmouth instead, where he lasted for less than a year--it was all-male then and far too conservative for him--before transferring to University of New Hampshire.) Gus was working at Boston College at the time and in his role as Arts Assistant to the President was able to sponsor World Game.

And it was evident from first meeting Danny that he was a major talent. Most people (everyone?) in our lifelong network of friends who grew out of that 1970 confluence of interests own Danny's pieces, including one of our house, a pastel from the perspective of the back yard, that has hung in the dining room since 1985 when I asked Danny to do it. Just superb.

Which all of this is.

A Nobel or "Milner" for Organizational Innovation?

"Cosmic Inflation" by Don Dixon

Best I know, no one awards a prize for breakthroughs in organizational thinking, never mind practice. I can't even remember an author receiving one of the literary crowns (authors don't receive money, remember, the largest bag of bucks being the Nobel for literature -- $1.1M-ish awarded to a mere 100 or so folks in all of the world's existence) to any book about business ideas. Wait. I'm a little uninformed and thinking way too narrowly. A serious foray into search reveals this award from Financial Times and Goldman Sachs, which appears to have been cashing out to business book authors (about $50K, not bad) since 2005.

But a quick skim of awardees indicates their works are predictably, given the grantors, about Wall Street, where of course the way the companies and people they write about are organized is not the point. What they're organized for, obviously, makes quite a good story (follow the money)... which suggests this question: Who's going to get the big advance for the book on what these companies' organizational structures might have to do with why they succeed and fail? Ah-hem.

Why is this on my mind? My personal newswire for interesting stuff around organizations, Tom Stewart, whose feed on Facebook often catches my attention, does so again. Today he posts about the new no-strings (so to speak)-attached-prize in physics -- a cool $3M, awarded to each of nine (9!) physicists working on cosmic "inflation," which arguably could also be given to someone on Wall Street. The awarder is one Yuri Milner, a physicist-turned-social-media entrepreneur (he's no dope). Need I tell you that part of his $12B fortune comes from his early investment in Facebook, where, naturally, I saw Tom's post about this prize?

Here's, in part, how Nature reports it (though they missed the string-theory twist):

“The intention was to say that science is as important as shares trading on Wall Street,” Milner told Nature. The prize money comes with no strings attached, although Milner hopes that the theorists will contribute to a new lecture series for the public. Milner also plans to create an annual $100,000 New Horizons prize for young researchers and an ad hoc version of the Fundamental Physics Prize that can be won at any time “in exceptional cases”, the website says. According to the rules of the prizes, anyone can be nominated, and future prizewinners will be selected by a committee of all previous ones.

So here's my message to the next Sloan/Insead/Said grad in management who figured out how to make something of him/herself. Start a prize for "quantum organizational breakthroughs." Even call it that and it will sound scientific so people will think it's important. There's a lot of it going around these days.

"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

The origin of good ideas -- again

Summer Turner, Director of  Organizational Development & Communication at Omgeo, has "turner-ed" me on to this excellent Steven Johnson video, taken from his book, Where Good Ideas Come From. With apologies to Mr. Johnson for a horrid over-simplification, he says what we know as group-lover cliches: two heads (if not more) are better than one, that ideas take a while to germinate (he does a nice riff on Tim Berners-Lee's 10-year gestation of the web), and that "the great driver in technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity." But he says it so well and with great examples.

We too have said this in a few of our books, even constructed a slide about it (see below) about a dozen years ago with clients at Shell Oil, that relates connectivity to the evolution of organizations. We've come a long way since smoke signals and tin cans. Technology innovation aside, connectivity even allows us to "innovate" -- invent, I guess you'd say, new organizations.

Great stuff, Steven. That your middle name is the same as my grandmother's makes me think that we're, how do you say, connected. Check out his website here.

 

 

 

 

"...Sign on to a big bold impossible enterprise"

Over the past six months, I've been working closely with Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, MA. Bostonians -- and many many others around the country, if not abroad -- know of the remarkable things DSNI has achieved in its nearly three decades of existence, including launching a land trust in the most blighted area of Boston, now 225 units of permanently affordable housing, lovely homes; encouraged the creation of gardens and parks and an enormous green house where chop shops used to be; and numerous convenings of its residents that have given rise to a striking theory of place-based change that truly works.

Most recently and working with Boston Teacher Residency, DSNI has been involved with launching the Dudley Street Neighborhood Charter School, an in-district charter school that is part of the Boston Public School system, which will open in September. (Unless you're an expert on Boston public schools, it's almost impossible to understand the fine-point differences between pilot schools, innovation schools, in-district charter schools, and whatever-the-other charter schools are but, in short, there are five in-district charter schools in Boston, including the new elementary school.)

All of this is prelude to the point of this post. As a result of my involvement with DSNI, I've gotten to know people in this beloved city where I've lived for my entire adult life, people whom I'd never have met if I weren't doing this work. Among them is Melinda Marble, deputy director of Barr Foundation. (if you go to the Barr link, you'll see a picture of DSNI executive director, John Barros, talking with Patricia Brandes, exec direc at Barr). Each of these people deserves a post of their own but...

Melinda has started a new blog, Change Practice, "a blog about changing practice – and practicing change – in the world of philanthropy and nonprofits," which, if its first posts are any indicator of what this will have to offer, is, shall we say, ratthhhher promising. I was taken with a single phrase from Melinda's tribute to Bob Hohler, an extraordinary force for change (he was executive director of the Melville Charitable Trust) who died suddenly in June 2011. I recommend Melinda's post about Bob, filled with wisdom and insight. This single phrase, the title of this post, comes from this sentence: "Bob realized that the great gift of a job in philanthropy was not to process grants, give other people’s money away, but to sign on to a big bold impossible enterprise.  His was 'finding and fighting the causes of homelssness,' the memorable tag line he composed for National Public Radio."

Isn't that what we all should/could/want to do -- sign on to big bold impossible enterprises? Thanks, Melinda.