Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.
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2/25/2021

Bags o' Money Had I Once

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man with moneybags
A number of years ago I left a university where I had served for 15 years to take a position as the chief academic officer at a different school. Not long after I had started at this new place, some faculty and others darkly wisecracked about the “bags o' money” that resided under my desk. I heard this quip frequently enough that I have to admit that I did take a peek once. Nothing there but three paperclips, an old pencil, and a multigenerational family of fluffy dust bunnies.
Dust Bunny Graphic
​I called maintenance.

​Despite my disappointment, I have to admit that one of the nice things about this particular school was its solid endowment, and the fact that I did indeed have a decent sum of funds to distribute to students and faculty to meet relevant expenses. Virtually all of the funds were restricted, though, meaning their usage was predetermined by the donor for such purposes as student study abroad trips or professional development for faculty.


The burning question, then, was how to disperse these funds equitably while assuring that they would be put to their best use. Some faculty committees existed for just this objective, but they had been given control of only specific funds. A few gifts were controlled by school deans, who reported to me. The bulk came under no one’s jurisdiction in particular and therefore defaulted to my authority.

You may be thinking, “Well golly, Jim, that sounds like a good problem to have, big bags o' money under the desk,” but I found the situation most uncomfortable and not just because I value legroom. I did not want to be in the position of playing Solomon with gift funds—deciding who would receive them and who would go wanting, having to divvy up moneys, split the occasional baby, and undoubtedly tick everyone off. As unlikely as it seems, I just did not want moneybags under my desk, howsoever metaphorically.
money bag
The whole moneybags rumor stemmed from one of my predecessors who was known to dispense funds directly without going through the committees. To be clear, I am not implying that there was something illegal or even untoward about his practices. Both he and I were well within our rights to dole out the funds as we saw fit so long as we adhered to any restrictions the donors had imposed. Still, I did not like the potential inequity of such a practice, nor did I enjoy the responsibility of making such calls.

money bag with sprout
My predecessor, though, reportedly had few such compunctions. I am sure he had the best intentions, but what necessarily resulted was a perception of arbitrariness among the faculty that gave me the willies. Some faculty complained that only a select few had ever benefited from my predecessor’s largess. Whatever the reality, the mere perception of a specific in-group necessitates the conjuring of a corresponding out-group and fosters the growth of resentment. Moneybags, as it turns out, make a great fertilizer for sprouting suspicion and dissent.

The fact was that a few people were simply not shy about requesting funds, not that there is anything wrong with that. Others, though, were more reluctant to do so or not aware that funds were accessible upon request. I also learned that some of this second group habitually covered work expenses out-of-pocket, which was absolutely unacceptable.
I chose instead to avoid the appearance of inequity and aspired to see to it that the committees that already existed to distribute money fairly had access to most of the gift and endowed funds available to faculty and students. The moneybags under my desk were officially empty. 
hand over money held back by red tape
The problem with this scheme, though, was that it introduced a threat of equal but opposite potential, the unwelcome boogyman of bureaucratic decision-making. Instead of informally pitching requests to the chief academic officer, all faculty and students would now have to formally apply to the committees. They would have to fill out forms, mind deadlines, and earn approval. Plus, even after navigating all this seeming red tape, they still might not receive funds. The natural result: those who had previously had ready access to the erstwhile bags o' money were displeased by my decision while everyone else was chary of the new process.

Worse still, these funding committees had a fabled history of being too tight with the money, perhaps to counterbalance my predecessor’s relatively loose approach. They had demanded detailed applications and enforced deadlines without compromise, which did not always reflect the reality of student and faculty needs. They also had a reputation for rejecting requests on fairly flimsy grounds and with a hint of personal bias. One thing was clear. The prevailing mindset on the committees assumed that their charge was to “save money” by finding reasons not to approve applications.
I worked with the committees to assure that the application process was not onerous. My attitude, one I probably shared with my predecessor, Dr. Moneybags, was that the funds were donated for a reason, and it was our job to see that they were spent wisely and to great effect in support of the university’s mission. I made sure the committee members knew that spending the money unwisely or not spending it at all were two outcomes to be avoided. Donors donate because they want to see their money do good, not because they want to have it simply roll over to the next year.  For additional clarity on this point, read the Parable of the Talents, a basic primer on philanthropic expectations.
cartoon of Parable of Talents
Put those bags o' money to work!
It did not take long for the committees to get their acts together and change their mindsets. Faculty and students who needed funding for travel, study, equipment, books, and so on were able to access what was available while the committees balanced oversight and equity with minimized friction. Committee members made decisions strictly on the merits of the applications and did not penalize for petty errors. We had to have deadlines, but we also had provisions for retroactive decisions where necessary. The default position shifted so that the committees understood their charge was to distribute funds, not to horde them. In other words, I convinced them to always start with yes, one of my core principles.
The Lesson of Emptied Moneybags: The Arbitrary Is the True Enemy
In the process, I learned something about the nature of arbitrary decision-making. Lurking on the extreme edges of the old system were two enemies of equity. On one side, was my predecessor’s reputed predilection for handing out funds pretty much upon request with scant discernment. On the other was an overly bureaucratized committee system that did not allow for uncertainty.
​
I came to embrace a truth that has guided my building of processes and systems ever since. Higher ed, like most industries, is rife with laments about the unwarranted impositions of bureaucracy, and rightly so. Bloated bureaucracies, with their proscriptive and prescriptive unreason--the proverbial red tape--can be oppressive. 

Nonetheless, I learned that the enemy of efficiency is not bureaucracy, per se. Nor is the enemy the executive officer who directs activities with few checks (even while cutting a few checks). The true enemy of efficiency is the arbitrariness that invariably accompanies extremes of overly bureaucratized or overly capricious administration. No matter the size of the organization, the governance system needs to be carefully calibrated to be both benign and helpful in order to eliminate the inequity and arbitrariness of both extreme bureaucracy and extreme capriciousness. The task of a system-builder and leader is to find that sweet spot in the middle, build upon it, and maintain it.

Having control of bags o' money may sound swell, and it really is, but relinquishing control to a rational process is even sweller.

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2/18/2021

​You Can Sit on It: Integrity In the Cause of Excellence

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wooden chair disintegrating
Let’s start with a wooden chair. For the chair to be an excellent chair, it must have integrity. If I present a wooden chair to you and suggest that it lacks integrity, you would wisely be wary before you sit down. What does it mean, though, to say a wooden chair lacks integrity?
rickety wooden chair
A chair that lacks integrity is missing some key element and/or is not solidly built. Perhaps it is missing a leg, or the legs are all different lengths. Perhaps it is well put together, but the wood is fragile, like balsa; or, perhaps the wood is sturdy, like oak, but the chair is poorly constructed. The screws are not tight and the joints not properly glued. It could be that the seat and legs are solid, but the back is flimsy. Whatever you do, don’t lean back!

Any one of these qualities would be evidence that the chair lacked integrity.

To be clear, physical integrity has nothing to do with the fact that the chair’s size does not suit you or that the color is all wrong or that the chair is out of style. Integrity is not a matter of aesthetics or personal preference. Additionally, an uncomfortable cushion does not mean the chair itself lacks integrity although it could mean the cushion does.
broken chair
Physical integrity, as with our wooden chair, is a combination of wholeness, solidity, and reliability. If the chair is not whole or not solid, it is not reliable and lacks integrity. Indeed, the chair in question is entirely unexcellent. You should consider standing.

In contrast, when we talk about the integrity of a person, we usually do not refer to physical integrity. For instance, we would not say that a football player who is easily knocked down lacks integrity any more than we would say that the solid build of another player is an indication of his integrity. When we refer to integrity in humans, it is not physical but moral integrity we are citing, and moral integrity must be held internally as well as practiced regularly. Moral integrity, lived day in and day out, builds resilience and leads eventually to the achievement of excellence.
“Excellence is the result of habitual integrity.” Lennie Bennet
Moral integrity has to do with the practice and application of personal principles, values, and ethics rather than material qualities. It is a matter of a person’s inner choices and guideposts, which may develop from or be informed by a number of sources, such as parenting, religion, school, philosophy, or society. 

Human or moral integrity is not unlike the physical integrity we expect from a chair in that moral integrity too is marked by wholeness, solidity, and reliability. Integrity in a person must be complete. It must extend to every aspect of a person’s daily behavior and choices. To be whole, integrity cannot be compartmentalized: practiced in this situation but suspended in that other one. ​Moral integrity must be solid, able to withstand the buffeting it will face in daily practice. And it must be reliable, available to confront every challenging situation.
A Breaking Bad Interlude
Walter White chemistry
The popular television drama Breaking Bad is as much about moral integrity as about drug dealing. It starts with nebbishy high school chemistry teacher Walter White moving through life with an enhanced sense of his own integrity, having sacrificed a lucrative career for a life of normality and professional ignominy.  But his is not a solid integrity. A health crisis and related financial distress cause him to break with his own moral code. It turns out that all along his integrity was just a mask for stubborn pride. He even resents and rejects an offer of help from his former business partners who struck it big after he pulled out of their endeavor.

Walter white/heisenberg
What is his workaround? He turns to cooking and selling crystal methamphetamine and adopts a ruthless persona he names "Heisenberg." He is so far gone that he starts wearing a pork pie fedora and sporting a hipster goatee. The man clearly has no bottom.

Certainly a man of more solid integrity would swallow his pride for the sake of his family and accept the money from his well-to-do friends, not turn to a life of crime. His personal abhorrence of and moral objections to the meth he manufactures and sells are immaterial. Indeed, his overweening pride in his abilities, which masquerades as integrity, transmogrifies into an insistence that he produce only the very highest quality meth. Walter White does indeed achieve excellence but only in a most vile domain.

White’s integrity is also not whole. Even as he rises to become a drug lord, he tries to maintain a modicum of integrity in his interactions with his family, but this effort, of course, fails. His commitment to integrity is just too compromised and compartmentalized. Soon, White’s reliability as a husband and father dissipates as he sinks into the morass of corruption borne of his own poor choices. Even his wife gets caught up in his dealings, and his DEA agent brother-in-law ends up dead. White inevitably abandons his family but, in a perverse burst of paternal devotion, extorts his former business associates to assure that his wife and kids are financially secure. Finally, he sacrifices his life to save that of his drug-dealing partner and surrogate son, thus demonstrating that, in truth, there is honor among thieves, but it is really, really twisted. Walter White's brand of integrity is a grotesquerie.
Saul goodman
White’s lawyer, Saul Goodman (nee Jimmy McGill), is cut from a different cloth when it comes to integrity. In the Breaking Bad prequel series, Better Call Saul, Saul/Jimmy starts out life with a severe integrity deficiency, stealing from the till of his father’s store as a boy, only to mature into “Slippin’ Jimmy,” an inveterate con artist and grifter. He eventually straightens out, becomes a lawyer, and tries to stay in the moral lane, but the inchoate nature of his newfound integrity renders it weak in the face of temptation. His integrity lacks solidity.

Charles McGill
By contrast, his brother, Charles, also a lawyer, adheres to a strict interpretation of the law and the legal profession and regards himself as a paragon of integrity. Unfortunately his commitment to integrity, while solid as it comes, is not whole as it does not extend even to his brother, whom he undermines at every turn. In fact, it is a conceit of the show that Charles’ spiteful exertions of professional and personal jealousy repeatedly undercut his brother’s attempts to establish and maintain his own sense and commitment to integrity. When Charles' integrity finally fails altogether, he can imagine no other resolution than to end it all.

Saul/Jimmy’s integrity is not solid. Charles’ integrity is not whole. Neither of them are reliable.

These shows are fictional, of course, and dramatically hyperbolic, but they offer good examples of the perils of weak and incomplete integrity as well as good television viewing.

While moral integrity must be whole, solid, and reliable, like our chair, it is not merely a static intention. It is a practice, a continuous course of action within the guidelines of principles that must be attended and adhered to. As Albert Camus said, “Integrity has no need of rules," and thus these guiding principles, whatever their derivation, must radiate from within. Integrity is not subject to a set of external regulations or protocols but is intrinsic to the person. Integrity is the application of strength of character. 

Integrity is marked by neither stubbornness nor rigidity, which is why Walter White and Charles McGill lack it. They are too rigid: White in his personal pride and Charles in his professional pride. Their hubristic inflexibility causes them, when faced with challenges superior to their strength, to break.

In contrast, real and constant integrity builds resilience, that inner quality that enables one to snap back from adversity—even when that adversity is itself the result of a failure of integrity. Ultimately, integrity is a fount of many virtues.

As Lennie Bennet said, when integrity is so ingrained that it is a habit, excellence will ensue. Cutting corners, deceiving, shirking, evading, gaslighting, bullying, and bullshitting are all anathema to the habit of integrity. Anything built using these means and other fraudulent or facile methods, even if it succeeds, will be substandard, far less than it could have been.

​Have no illusions: applying and maintaining integrity is difficult, and, like any human effort, it can sometimes lead to unintended consequences that must be addressed. The advantage is that anything pursued or built with integrity in mind will, at its core, always be solid and whole. You can rely on it.
broken chair reassembling

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2/11/2021

There Is a Special Place in Hell for Bosses Who Yell

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Yelling boss montage
​Is it ever okay for a boss to yell at employees?

I am not talking about being stern or raising one’s voice. I mean yelling, as in flat-out screaming
 as an expression of anger and an attempt to exert control. Again, I am not referencing a slightly elevated volume or even harsh language. I am not speaking about stern looks or flinty expressions of disappointment or ire. This essay is about bosses who just yell.

​Take this instance of what I mean. I once had a boss blast me with the insult "I hate your words!" She then ripped into me so loudly that someone across the hall closed the office door. That is what I am talking about. Nasty, malicious shouting unleashed to silence, insult, or mortify an employee. By the way, I still have no idea what I said that set her off. She was just bonkers.
yelling boss 1
Is it ever acceptable for a boss to yell at an employee out of sheer exasperation or anger, as my former boss did, not to end an escalating outburst or protect someone but because yelling relieves the boss’s frustration or vents the boss’s rage or unnerves the employee In other words. is it ever acceptable for a boss to indulge in sheer obstreperous yelling?

The answer here is short.
No.

Of course, with all things management, there is a nuance to unpack. Some yelling may be appropriate or even necessary, but very rarely and only in very narrow circumstances. I can imagine scenarios where an employee is acting out in public or screaming at a colleague or  colleagues are screaming at each other and only the boss’s raised voice will halt the tirade. I can imagine these scenarios because I have lived them and had to, as a boss, loudly intervene myself. I had to noisily assert my authority to stop the shouting and then set about assuring that a more civil tone would prevail. Such things happen. If they happen often, they are a symptom of a larger problem. Whatever the cause, though, yelling should lurk at the very bottom of the boss's well-supplied tool chest.
On the other hand, it is never appropriate for a boss to yell at an employee simply because the boss is angry or annoyed or impatient or furious or irritated or insulted or anxious or offended or moody or bitter or contemptuous or hostile or livid or belligerent or frenzied or confused or in high dudgeon or hangry or simply mad. Sure, yelling will usually achieve immediate gains and succeed in intimidating and humiliating the employee and overawing any witnesses. But at what cost?
Yelling boss 2
A boss who yells purely in anger or animus, even if infrequently, is out of line, plain and simple. Yelling may provide the boss some degree of control but only temporarily. In the meantime, the humiliated employee and any witnesses will harbor a combination of fear and resentment that can gestate into raw contempt for the boss no matter how out-of-character the boss’s anger was. Unwarranted yelling is a sign of weakness. It is never more than an attempt to release frustration and exert raw power to overwhelm a subordinate. Because the employee is subordinate and usually has no ability to fight back, it is the crassest and most pathetic form of bullying and a mark of craven cruelty. A sincere, appropriately public, and well-timed apology may mitigate the resentment, but there will still be much goodwill to make up.
Yelling boss 3
Again, there are rare times when yelling is called for, but I am referring to when yelling is not necessary and happens just because a boss is pissed off and loses it. Those incidents are plainly abusive. If you have been on the receiving end of such a cowardly display, you know exactly what I mean. On the other hand, if you have been the one who occasionally or frequently browbeats employees, you need to listen up.
There is a special place in hell for bosses who yell.

​
The ramifications of a boss’s bullying can be massive and long-lasting. A boss who regularly yells will create deep divisions among employees. Most will cower and comply while others will hunker down and hide. The smallest group will want to stand up to the abuse. None of these employees will have any real respect for the boss who relies on fear to lead, though, and the rupture and discord among them is a sure mark of a failure of leadership and an unhealthy workplace. Expect sinking morale, decreased productivity, and rampant turnover.
Most employees with any degree of self-worth will not derive much satisfaction or sense of accomplishment because they have pleased a boss whom they hold in contempt. Those who do, because they lack core integrity and/or resilience, usually end up complicit and conform to and reinforce the culture of dysfunction that emanates from such a boss. These same people, should they ever become bosses themselves, are almost guaranteed to replicate their erstwhile mentor's heinous behavior. Like most assholes, demon bosses beget demon bosses.
Yelling boss  4
​In fact, perhaps the special place in hell that is reserved for screaming bosses is a perverse replica of the hell they produced in their own workplace. Maybe, for some of the worst, they will end up with someone just like them or even themselves as their own boss!

In "No Exit," Sartre made the point that "Hell is other people." I posit that for the particularly pusillanimous class of hell denizens, the yelling bosses, maybe the most deserved and torturous hell is just other yelling bosses.

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2/4/2021

​“Yet ev’ry distance is not near”: Bob Dylan Schools Us on Distance

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Dylan Train Tracks Painting
Bob Dylan, Train Tracks 2019--Dylan's numerous visual studies of train tracks disappearing to a vanishing point signify his intense interest in distance and perspective.
Anyone who knows me even a little knows that I am, um, somewhat enthusiastic about the work of a certain singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan. Yes. I am something of a Dylantante.

One of the many things I admire about Dylan is his ability to take conventional phrasing and views and convert them into a truly sui generis perspective. My recent post on nostalgia suggested that we often soften our view of the past much as the coarse surface of a stone seems to soften as we move away from it. It is an obvious comparison, but it put me in mind of some Dylan observations regarding distance that are, shall we say, counterintuitive, which naturally delights me.
Dylan at work up close
Dylan Performing
The mid-eighties production standards of Dylan’s song “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love)" muddies the recording and has limited its appeal, but the lyrics are superb. In the last verse before the final chorus, he tells us of the beating of a man in a “powder-blue wig” who is later “shot / For resisting arrest.” At the very end of the verse he states flatly,
What looks large from a distance
​Close up ain’t never that big
This could strike you as a bland non sequitur or a cleverly inverted profundity since we usually perceive something at a distance, say a traffic tunnel, as far smaller than it is. (Yes, junior, our big car will fit through that little tunnel.) In truth, though, the lines are a commentary on the incidental nature of most outrages. Dylan’s trick is to reverse the chronological order of the episode by introducing the concept of distance before the “Close up” event that proceeds it. 

You may quibble with Dylan here. I may quibble with him, for that matter. Perhaps an example is in order. We are all aware of the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers and the fact that video of that slow-motion murder sparked or re-sparked a massive national uprising and shifted public opinion. Applying Dylan’s take demonstrates that while Floyd’s murder loomed large in the public eye, for those experiencing it at the time, perhaps even for Floyd himself, it was just a series of discrete moments and decisions that culminated in homicidal tragedy. Floyd certainly sensed he was dying, but his cries for help (including, movingly, to his late mother) suggest that he held out hope that the police would relent or that there would be an intervention. In other words, he did not accept the inevitability of his circumstances because they were not inevitable. Any number of things could have prevented his death, from the mundane to the sublime. That none of them did was unforeseeable in that present, and any inevitability we sense in such a drastic scene is only imposed in hindsight.
 
I cannot know for sure what the experience was like for Floyd, his murderers, or his witnesses on the scene, of course, but that is how I read the situation. To Dylan’s point, as horrible and huge as that incident--what a shockingly inadequate word--as that catastrophe must have been for those present, not one of them, not even Floyd himself, could ever know how immense it would become for our nation. His homicide, unlike the tunnel that the car (or train) approaches, as monumental as it is up close, is even larger in the distance. In the song, the man in the powder-blue wig dies, also at the hand of the police, but in that moment no one could predict how substantial the atrocity, real or imagined, would become by being enshrined in Dylan's song. In other words, the act of witnessing or participating in such an abomination cannot indicate with any precision how significant such an event might become to those who are removed in time or space from it.

To be clear, my intent is not to diminish the murder of George Floyd by comparison to the fate of a likely fictional Dylan character but to demonstrate how his death led to and became something beyond all expectation. Would Floyd have chosen to die if he could know of the movement his death would inspire? Would anyone? W.B. Yeats ponders a similar conundrum at the end of "Leda and the Swan," which describes another violent catastrophe with vast repercussions:
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
As I said, I have quibbles with Dylan's lyrical claim. Plenty of disasters take place in anonymity. If not for the viral video, Floyd’s murder would likely have faded from public consciousness if it ever even made it to public consciousness, and the impact of its aftermath may very well have shrunken over time and across distance as so often happens. Instead, now it is an important highlight of the historical record of our day at the very least.

For his part, Dylan's philosophy of time and perspective remains remarkably consistent across decades. Nearly twenty years after recording "Tight Connection," Dylan closed his movie Masked and Anonymous with a voice-over monologue in which he asserts,
The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau and you'll see plunder and murder.
As with the doctrine of perspective he sketches in “Tight Connection,” this statement seems to upend our normal point of view. Isn’t it usually that the forest looks chaotic and confusing when you are in its midst but calm and orderly from a mountaintop above? No, in this monologue and in keeping with the lines from his song from the eighties, Dylan again suggests that distance can lead to greater insight, context, and understanding. By the way, this the exact reverse of the more conventional philosophy of perspective that Jonathan Swift utilizes in Gulliver's first two voyages.

The January 6th insurrection at the Capitol offers a perfect example of Dylan's philosophy at work. Several who participated later claimed that they were just swept up with the crowd and had no intention of entering the building let alone rioting. They speak of their experience as though they regarded themselves as unwelcome visitors on an unofficial tour, nothing more. They imagined that they were there as much to see the sights as to shout slogans. Like the mere tourists they feigned to be, they even took selfies with police and stayed inside the guide ropes. Step back to a distance (physical or temporal), and we can see that their mere attendance, no matter their intent, ensures that they contributed to the havoc. Their profession of unawareness does not exculpate them from the charge that they willingly joined a mob that committed acts of destruction, injury, homicide, and sedition. For these folks, though, it may very well have seemed just a particularly rowdy tour group at the time. Nonetheless, consider that one of the people who died during that attack was trampled by the mob. Anyone who was part of that unlawful crowd, whether they were in attendance in that moment or not, is culpable for her death because their presence alone contributed to the overall size of the mob and subsequently the stampede. There can be no mob to trample her if there are no people to create a mob, so every member of that mob is complicit in her death as they are in all the day's consequent deaths, injuries, and terror.

Interestingly, both of Dylan’s examples—a killing by police and “plunder and murder”—feature violence and occur at the end of the two works in which they appear. As always, there is a consistent thread in Dylan's art. In the movie monologue, the “fair garden” evokes Eden, and even the adjective “fair” seems archaic and vaguely biblical. The vicious disorder he describes evokes end times, which has long been a Dylan preoccupation. Even his 1980ish deep dive into christianity centered on a church that promotes an "inaugurated eschatology" with an apocalyptic bent. It is not surprising, then that Dylan would expand his view from a narrow focus on Eden to a wide-angle on a world of brutality and mayhem as if to suggest that we exist in a bubble or garden of false security. Prepare for a decline, all ye who bask in contentment! In fact, the sentence before this passage in the movie monologue uses the phrase “things fall apart,” from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which itself is eschatological in theme:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

I am not recommending that we stock up on bottled water, power bars, and duct tape to prepare for end times, no matter what Dylan’s view on the subject is. But there are useful lessons we can draw from Dylan’s insight into distance, perspective, and perception in these two quotes.

Down to the Brass Staples
brass staples
This blog is supposed to be primarily about management and leadership, so let me roll it around to that domain. If you are a boss, or even if you are not, it is important to be aware that your day-to-day, moment-to-moment choices and actions potentially have a larger effect on the future than you may expect. It is not just the cumulative effect of such decisions, but each one, no matter how small, could itself become enormous in its implications and impact. Think about it. An overlooked staple can wreak havoc on the inner workings of an office copy machine just as an inappropriate or insensitive comment could blow up into legal action or even termination.

One may be tempted to affect an attitude of sustained hyper-vigilance to forestall unwanted consequences, but this approach is neither practical nor ultimately effective. A general awareness though that one’s small actions can loom large in the future is in order. I admit that my truism here should seem boringly obvious, and yet how often is its objective veracity still overlooked or downplayed?

The only readily workable solution to the dilemma of unintended consequences is to identify your core principles and, if they are sound, stick to them. Be 
decent whenever possible. There is that word again, decent. Simply assure that you consistently work with integrity, and you will be largely protected from negative ramifications or at least will be prepared to address and counter them. Stick to your principles, and at they end of the day the consequences will be yours to own honestly. And always remember, as the bard says,
         What looks large from a distance
         Close up ain’t never that big.
A brief photographic study of Dylan's philosophy of distance and perspective

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    The Purpose of Tools+Paradigms

    Leadership Approaches to Make Management work

    Each Thursday I post my thoughts on a variety of subjects in hopes of encouraging readers to challenge their received wisdom and cultural assumptions. I offer Human Tools+Paradigms that are designed to appeal to shared values and guide readers as they make decisions, solve problems, and just navigate the daily world. While these pieces are aimed at leaders and managers, I hope that others will find benefit in them as well. I welcome comments and responses to my posts via the comment section at the end of each on or, if you prefer, directly to my email. Also, please use the social media links to share and comment.

    Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.

    I am a former English Professor and academic administrator with experience at several institutions in the U.S. and Canada. I have a broad background in management and leadership and have mentored countless faculty, staff, and students, by offering them Tools+Paradigms to help them rethink their assumptions and practices. The Human Tools+Paradigms I present in this blog capture what I have learned from working with them and from my experience and research. You can read more about me here.


    I am inspired by the conviction that the best mission-driven organizations are designed to spend their time and effort focused on mission because they have figured out how to work well together.
    Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.

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