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