EVERYMAN A DEVELOPER

This morning I want to talk about the manifestations of our going public. At a deeper level that has to do with the dynamic of corporate effectivity that is called the team. I want to touch on four points, not about development but in the context of development, one having to do with the new orbit of development. The second has to do with the non­development centrum. The third has to do with the team as a dynamic of corporate effectivity, and fourth has to do with the development call itself .

When we tore the walls down between the centrums, I kept saying 'Walls make good neighbors." It just killed me to have that open. But it. is starting to get clear to me that that room does not communicate bureaucratic organization. It is more like a revolutionary wheel. The fact is that various posts are in there, that we have said are all in Development: Social Demonstration, Town Meeting, ITI, Facility. That does not mean that they are all in development, but it means everyone is doing development.

I died at the Global Priors Council, because we did a financial statement for nine months instead of a year and we missed the fact until the Council was over and there were about 10 of us in the building, that we had actually done the great 222 last year. It is shocking that around the world we did the great 222; that seemed like a mammoth amount of money to me, and it still does. We are now talking about the thrust of $10 million and even that looks like we may be shooting low there. Try to get your mind around the staggering financial amounts we are to talking about.

The last two years in Development we have learned a lot of things about sophistication. Also I mean that as an Order, though, having to make these calls forces you to learn quicker about nethodologies and financial consistencies. We have started to fool with the great 10 million which includes around the world an operating cost of some $2,300, 000. We started to figure up with these social demonstration projects, and it you put low figures on them, they add up to $7,700,000 which is staggering. The London House expects to raise a million pounds for the Isle of Dogs alone; then there is Trastavere, $250,000, Kawangware, $600,000, Taj Gunj, $800,000 of which $200,000 is already in or committed, Oombulgurri a million (it is really $1,200,000 committed from the government there), Jeju Do a million, Majuro

$2 million and Fifth City $1,296,000. I believe these figures are low and that we are actually talking in the arena of $15 million. If you add the $5 million that represents the support of our order, you are talking about $20 million represented by the movement next year .

The second major pole of this new orbit of development ­ raising the Religious House program money around the world ­ which is about $45,000 a month. Mind you, as an order we will continue to sustain ourselves, but this is program money that we literally took out of our hides to pay for program expenses like gas for travel. It has nothing to do with room, and board. As a movement we will raise that additional money to release people, particularly in North America, to engage in the Town Meeting or Community Forum.

It is strange that we as a group are budgeting $20 million and yet you can go on a call and somebody says he has never heard of you. We have been right not to seek notoriety, but we are now in the midst of making an unbelievably smooth transition around the world in terms of going public. I have to add parenthetically that we are not in any way infatuated nor intimidated by the establishment. These days feel more revolutionary than five years ago in Fifth City, and certainly more than when I was in the Peace Corps and had long hair and all that.

This non-development centrum at first was frightening. But it is intriguing. In the midst of everyone in that room (and you have to say in a way everyone in the Movement) no call is made except it is a Development call. Advocacy is worthless to us without actual commitment of money. Now that is a hard statement but the best advocacy throughout the year has been from people who've given us money. We have started to get a practical vision of how we just cut Development down to three staff next year. They sit in there and they can be the Development post or unit. And the rest of us are fully engaged, and with the back of our hand are raising money. That frightens me but I believe it is possible. Our experiment has to do with that practical imagery not just of releasing certain people or anything like that, but how we all be the 'going­publicness' that we have learned to do in Development. The commodities corporation is a part of that, and they're raising money. They called in and said they had $500) in hand and another

$5000 firmly committed. These commitments are good. Two years ago we used to go on these trips and we would come back with $10 in hand, then we had another category of "immediate" $7000 and then "long­range" $20,000, and it never worked.

In this hub you recall that we had the picture of the four posts, of the Social Demonstration Post, the Town Meeting Post, the Facility Post, and the ITI post all in there doing development, and then you have the remainder of the post that were Development. That is a cross­gestalt of the centrum. Not only are we practical1y shaving down to our three people but it is an intentional way of how we are out to alter the centrums themselves. I do not mean this stuff, you get from Religious houses that we are bureaucratic and running them, but that we are out to have the team. The centrums are quite unimportant compared to the team. You don't have to have, for the sake of revolutionary fluidity, a few people set aside who are just the money-men, etc. You don't have to have certain people that are just research­men. With that sort of cross­gestalt we can inject the sort of fluidity that creates missional units instead of bureaucratic operations. That is how we get the most effectivity out of our work, with that cross­gestalt. I believe it is working.

Raising travel money this year has just been tremendous. People say "Golly I don't know how to raise money, or I can't." It is tremendous that people have gone ahead and called family and friends (and you have fun as you weed out your friends). That has been a sign, an omen to me that there was not a group that can do development, but all of us raise money. Not for the sake of having money but like the Houses, where we can release more people to do Town Meetings, and so on. Even if we got the biggest grant in the world, a group of your colleagues could sit around the table, pray over the check and immediately spend it.

I have a fantastic vision of the non­development centrum, the non­centrum, so to speak, where the accent is on the team. I don't think anything has intrigued me personally for so long. The team is not to do with people? it is not to do with organizations. It is the sociological manifestation of tranarationality or to put it another way it is the socio­rationality, like battleplanning and that chart they did on the consult in a way that clarifies our wisdom on battle­planning like few other things have. We don't have that sort of clarity yet but you can smell it on the team. It is the sociorationality. Also it is the corporate­discipline and finally it is the flip side of this discipline. None of us are born self­starters. We learn to be self­starters, and therefore need the individual discipline that the team evokes. It is the means of care for the mission. When we were in Washington we had the experience of team work that was just incredible. You knew that in the team you had a way to subsume yourself intentionally as an individual. Yet you did not feel that you were working for anybody you felt like the universe was on your shoulders and that you did not have to worry about your colleagues and what you knew as a mammoth of problems and weight of tile world. In actually doing the task as a mlssiona1 unit sometulng phenomenal happened to you quite without any counselling. This was counselling ahead of time and it was the only way to possibly get done what one had to get done.

It is impossible these days for any of you to go out by yourself and do that. We have learned that in Development; we stave had the wisdom to send teams of two at least. This year in Development we are trying to structure ourselves in circuits. There are three teams of four, and three team leaders. When anyone hasn't filled out his accountability sheets we ask his team leader why not. [hat team of four operates as a battle unit together. In the Town Meeting post they've gone to teams, one team doing the two areas of the north and a team of three doing each one of the four United States areas. The team is responsible for that. They really don't get any center of the table directions but they get their directions from the other swirl of teams that are going on there. I believe that can work and that the on­the­roadness that a team creates is almost exciting. I mean that quite literally nothing is harder than constantly being on the pavement and that is where the revolution will be done. Only in the team can you do that and yet your only concern is the mission.

We were having a little bit of fun in there on the manifestation of what we learned on a development call. We wrote out ten things that are the ten commandments of a development call, and want to snare those with you. We've only learned these from disastrous calls. Each one of these ten I can think of a specific call in which I did not do this and the call blew completely apart in front of my eyes.

1. Always have interference on the call. That is, always have somebody at least set it up, if not go with you. The question is not just how great a call you actually make when you get there, but who got you there. I think our first learning experience in Washington was where we got an appointment with Congressman Mink early in our push there and the way we got it was that I conned the secretary. No interference - no other Congressman calling, no one going with us that we knew and it was a disaster. She ate us out from head to toe and just beat on us unmercifully. And it would have been so easy to ask Senator Stevenson, a Democrat, to call over and say "I know these men. I'd like you to see them." The call would have been totally different. There is no question in my mind. You ought not to make a call unless somebody has set it up or goes with you. It just ought not be made because you will spend your whole time trying to authenticate yourself.

2. Always be on time. Some people, no matter how much you are on time will make you sit out in the hall, but that is all right. That's a way of communicating that you have decided to respect their offer. I can think of calls where I showed up late and the guy let me know, especially in business. The flip side of that

is you stay as long as you say instead of saying, "I just need five or ten minutes of your time" and then planning to stay half hour.

3. Always ask for one thing. It is unbelievably hard how to stress this. Now you might have several points in your agenda but ask for one thing. One can think of calls where we asked for more than one thing and it is just horrible. You clutter up their minds, they think you are disorganized and finally a person is disposed to give one thing at a time. You can go back to them later but you want to leave with them knowing, still excited, the one reason that you are there instead of the five from which he can choose. Don't go fishing with "would you like to do this, this, or this" ­ and you always are tempted to try it.

4. Always be in the blue. At times I hate the blue suit but I know when I go out for a call that if your colleague is in a brown suit you will fell terrible. It communicates discipline, it communicates the team, and it saves work. A year from now, or maybe tomorrow you'll show up in some office some place in the world, and some other person in the blue was there. They've done a whole lot of work for you ahead of time. Finally it is our respectable way of acknowledging that. we are the religious. You are dead if you ever try to proselytize a person on a call but our garb says we are the religious, and any man who has made it in life respects it. It is hard to get your mind around why that is.

5. Always sit at attention. That communicates very simply that you are listening. If you sit back and cross your legs and flip ashes on his floor, you are communicating that you think you are waiting for him to get one so you can really get on to the business of the meeting. If you sit at attention he realizes you are interested, and we are interested or we wouldn't be there.

6. Always give a context before discussion. If you go in and sit back and let him run the meeting, no matter how important he is, you can not help but get irrelevancy from him and you will find yourself talking irrelevancy. You have to set the context before your discussion, tell him why you are there. You can come back to it but in the first five minutes tell him why you are there.

7. Always know your man. There are little gimmicks: you can go in and look at the books he read, and do a quick "ridding of the room. But it's very helpful to know everything about him or at least what Who's Who has. That is not always easy to find out but you have got to know just what sort of man he is. It saves you a universe of context if you know that.

8. Always leave only critical materials. If you leave a sheaf of stuff, they think "they must have a bunch of people that collate and print like mad at night." You only want to leave what you really want him to have. You can flash the other stuff, and you always have to have everything with you. But you only want to leave the critical material.

9. Always terminate the call before you are excused. This relates to always asking for only one thing. If yore are asking for more than one thing you end up extending the time of the call and you want to leave when that guy is most excited even when he has a lot of questions. You don't want to leave after he feels that he has asked every possible question and leas received every obscure answer, and therefore is unexcited. You want to leave when he's excited, and you've asked for your one thing. And you beat him to his feet. If he beats you to your feet, the call is finally a failure because it is communicating that something is more important than your being here.

10.Always post­brood, or reflect on the call. It is absolutely crucial. Because we work in teams you don't always have to have one guy speak fifty­one percent of the time and the other forty-nine. The first caller can talk the whole time and his partner can sit there and not have to get his manhood out and talk also. But that guy is the one who really heard what was going on, and you have to decide your follow­up immediately in that post reflection. If you wait for two hours to do that then you have forgotten the call. We do not make calls by ourselves for that one reason; you have no way of knowing what went on.

If we could come off with the team we would known universe of how to actually do a call, and we could cut ourselves in numbers here. Everyone can do development, everyone can do research. As I look at you as a group I believe we are on to something as a whole order. The Town Meeting foray proves that about the team and corporate effectivity.

­­Neil Vance