Daniel

Our Passover Seder – Quotes

As I mentioned in my entry yesterday, each year at our Passover Seder we put together a series of readings and activities focused on a theme (or set of themes).

We pull the readings from an Haggadah named A Different Night.

In addition to going around the table asking people to read selections from the Haggadah we also pass around 3 x 5 cards with quotes on them that I have selected and Ellen has approved which each person reads and is encouraged to comment on.

The themes this year start with the broad issue of freedom from slavery which is the foundational message associated with Passover. We include some thoughts on the revolutionary activities going on in the Middle-East. We also will touch on the issue of how the Bible and the Exodus story deals with how Jews were dealt with as strangers in a strange land and the general issue of the ‘other’ in society. Finally we will talk a bit about the issue of the role of women in society. It remains my contention that how women are treated is a societal “canary in the coal mine”. That is, how well societies deal with women tell one a lot about the society in general.

The quotes we will be using follow:

Continue reading “Our Passover Seder – Quotes”

Our Annual Passover Seder

For a number of years now we have a Passover Seder at our house on the first night of Passover.

We have between 15 and 25 people (I recognize that is a bit of a range) including family, friends, guests from various sources, Jews and non-Jews.

Each year we try and focus on a few themes to focus the more general topic of the Exodus and its implications to us today.

The following is what we are sending out to the participants this year. In addition to the readings we do, we put quotes that at least loosely tie to the themes we are focusing on, on 3 x 5 cards. During the course of the Seder we ask participants to read the quotes and comment on them. Tomorrow, if I remember, I’ll post the quotes we are using.

Continue reading “Our Annual Passover Seder”

Leadership: Winning versus Avoiding Losing

I have written before about Leadership, most recently here, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2011/01/24/on-leadership/, though it is often on my mind these days in my role as the COO of a small, but mighty company, Powertek Corporation, www.powertekcorporation.com.

A few days ago I was talking to one of the employees about working with others and they mentioned how they felt a person had to earn trust and I realized that I took a slightly different perspective and at least to some extent this difference in approach reflected different leadership styles.

One way I differentiate leaders is between those who want to avoid losing and those who want to win.

The former tend to micromanage people, usually find someone to blame (other than themselves), are able to be successful though often as individuals which may or may not build an organization, and are not fun, at least for me, to work for.

The latter tend to tolerate failure, are more fun to work for, and I believe are more able to grow organizations.

Each brings their own price to the table. The losing-avoider finds it more and more difficult over time to find out accurate information since people are reluctant to provide information on problems only to get blamed. The same goes for risk takers who will always fail at least part of the time as their work ‘outside-of-the-box’.

The winning-desirer often will over-trust and often will not invest enough time in oversight activities, which is doubly important for someone who delegates a great deal of authority.

Both can be successful and if successful enough that alone will attract people to work for them. However in the long run it is those leaders who want to win that are most likely to create large and thriving organizations, because the resulting culture is larger than them. Losing-avoiders end up with organizations that are only about themselves as individuals.

Coming back to the conversation I mentioned at the beginning, it occurred to me that this was just one aspect of the same overall theme. Leaders who want to avoid losing lean toward having people earn their trust. Leaders who want to win lean toward trusting people unless that trust is lost.

Smart leaders who want to win remember to “trust, but verify” and I continue to strive to do both.

Our Excellent Adventure in Florida with the Washington Nationals – Day 2

We started our day at the Viera Hampton Inn. As we remarked more than once during the day; free Internet, free breakfast, and baseball. It is hard to imagine a better combination.

Before the game we were able to watch Chien-Ming Wang, a Nationals pitcher from Taiwan, who had crowds of Taiwanese press attending taking pictures and notes, and then the Nationals batting practice. While watching batting practice I also compared reading my Kindle with reading my newly purchased Motorola Xoom in the bright sun, reconfirming that the Kindle is much better than a tablet under those circumstances. And yes, Miriam, I recognize that only a nerd would do both of those things at once.

The Nationals played, and lost, to an Atlanta split squad. However, we had still another a great afternoon in warm, generally sunny Viera.

Two minor observations from the day:

* It is really, really (REALLY) great not to hear “O” shouted during the National Anthem. Of course, today the National Anthem was played by a trumpet player so shouting anything during it was not so easy

* Only in Florida, at least more often than in Washington, there was a slight delay in the middle of the game, caused by a swarm of bees that flew across the outfield moving all the outfielders into the infield and sending the right field crowd running for a brief period of time

Our Excellent Adventure in Florida with the Washington Nationals – Day 1

Yesterday, Thursday morning, we started our second annual Spring training visit to see the Nationals.

We were up at 5:15am to get ready to drive to the airport to fly to Florida. Starting with a temperature in the 20’s in Rockville MD, we landed to a temperature in the 70’s in West Palm Beach. We flew there since the first game we were going to see was an away game against St. Louis at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter.

After getting the car, and returning the unwanted but almost charged for GPS; “No we have two smart phones and two tablets and a laptop, somewhere in there must be Google Maps”, we were off for the game.

One of the great things about going to Spring training, since we are now experts having gone once before, is how close to the field you get and how informal the whole setting is; though I suspect with attendance going up each year for these games like everything it has pretty gotten a bit more formal. Heck, there were even scalpers outside the stadium selling tickets.

We were two rows from the field behind home plate toward the Nationals dugout and literally had the players within an arm’s reach of us. Whenever Pudge Rodriguez came out to hit, one father kept bringing his two year old to the netting and yelled at Pudge to turnaround so the father could take a picture of the two together. One fan yelled that the father should give the camera to Pudge and let HIM take the picture of the father with the son. Neither happened since actually during the game the players tend to focus on the game.

Mike Rizzo, the Nationals General Manager, sat in the row in front of us, so Ellen and I were able to ponder what secret comments were being made between him and the guy sitting to his left about his plans for the team.

The guy who was selling pretzels, who held a large plastic pretzel in his hand, spent his time walking around the stands and shouting things like “If you want the Cardinals to win, you have to buy a pretzel. If you want the Nationals to win, you have to … pray.” Or when Albert Pujols would come up, “Get your Pujols pretzels, only available for a short period of time.”, an inside joke for those who know that Pujols is an unrestricted agent after this year and may move to another team in return for some extradinary contract.

Nyjer Morgan, the Nationals projected center fielder for this year and who had what one might call a mixed year last year with altercations on the field and with fans off the field during games, was yelled at by one of the Cardinals fans in the crowd. Morgan, unlike almost all of the players, actually turned around to look at the guy. “Have your people call my people”, said the fan; to be honest I have no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it evidently annoyed Morgan who seems to flunked any charm school classes the Nationals sent him to in the off-season by then articulating a suggestion which was physically impossible to the fan and unprintable in this blog.

We were able to see the Nationals new “greatest player of all time”, confirmed when a fan yelled out “You are the greatest player of all time” as Bryce Harper came up to hit late in the game. Harper grounded out to second, though he ran very hard to first base after hitting the ball.

We saw why Albert Pujols might be the best player in baseball for now, until Harper gets into the majors, both by how well he did at the plate but also by how carefully he was pitched to.

And we saw some very strange fielding and running plays which hopefully will not be duplicated by the Nationals in the regular season.

Oh yes, the Nationals lost 7-5 but it was GREAT being here. As I mentioned to Mike Rizzo when he sat down, I could see why baseball was such a difficult sport to be part of. Participants have to spend a month each year in Florida starting in February playing a game out in the sun.

Astronaut Alvin Drew in China, Now at the Space Station

In 2009, our family went to China to see a solar eclipse. This was the second solar eclipse we had gone to, the first being in Turkey in 2006, but this time we also took our daughters, Miriam and Tamar with us.

In Wuhan, where we watched the eclipse we were joined by an American astronaut, Alvin Drew. Drew at the time was the US representative to the Russian space program and was stationed in Moscow for a year. He had read about our group in an article in the New York Times and decided to join us.

In this earlier blog post, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/23/a-solar-eclipse-is-much-more-than-just-a-visual-experience/, I wrote about the overall experience of watching the eclipse and included a picture of Drew with myself and another member of our group Howard Spero.

And here is a picture with Drew, myself, and Miriam and Tamar:

Drew was selected to be a member of the current visit to the Space Station, the last visit, http://www.nasa.gov/.

It was an honor to spend time with him talking about the space program and a thrill to actually have met an astronaut who has now flown in outer space. He even let us put on his special multi-million dollar sun glasses, a great guy.

Now if they would only bring back Firefly with new episodes, http://www.whedon.info/Firefly-Reruns-Join-The-Sci-Fi.html.

B&B Multiculturalism in Harpers Ferry

February 15^th was my 30^th anniversary, which I will likely comment on in a separate post.

Ellen and I decided that we would do our 30^th anniversary ‘stuff’ later this year. Not everyone would understand the following reference but this is not dissimilar to how many American Jewish families who don’t like the time of year their son or daughter’s birthday is for having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah event just move it to another time of year.

It occurs to me that all of this may have begun when we moved historical events to being celebrated on Mondays regardless of when they occurred that year and how this shows our modern culture isn’t willing to deal with the problems they need to face and would rather deal with the problems they chose to, but I digress.

In any event, as part of my mantra to do whatever Ellen wants in order to continue to encourage her to continue putting up with me, we decided to go to a Bed & Breakfast in Harpers Ferry over the President’s Day weekend, tying accidently into the Monday holiday thing.

Oh, I need to mention one other thing before actually getting to the Monday breakfast and the subject of the entry. On Friday, February 18^th, I appeared on the Francis Rose In-Depth show talking about the three stories I thought important relating to Federal IT that week, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=17&sid=2276999. Other than noting that Francis is still another person who has played APBA baseball for many years, why I bring this up will become clear shortly.

So that is why the morning of February 21^st, Monday, Ellen and I found ourselves at breakfast with two other couples around a table at the Jackson Rose B&B, http://www.thejacksonrose.com/, no relation to Francis. The Jackson part comes from the fact that Stonewall Jackson used the building as a headquarters part of the time during the Civil War, the Rose part comes from a reference he made in a letter to his wife referring to a pleasant rose that grew there.

One note at this point, I pretty carefully do not express any opinions that I might have about the backgrounds and/or the political positions that some of the members of the other two couples hold. That does not mean I do not have such opinions or in some cases that they might be different than those family members. It is merely because I wanted to focus on something else as will become evident.

To my right was a couple from Richmond VA. The wife’s family came from Armenia. Her grandmother was pregnant with her mother when Turkey forced the family, among many others, out of Armenia. From there they went to Beirut, Lebanon and then to the US. She has been very active with the American Armenian community interested in publicizing what they call the Armenia Genocide, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide. They were at the Jackson Rose because they came every year to visit.

Between that couple and we were a relatively young couple. The pregnant wife was from Palestine and is an employee at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, http://www.cair.com/. Her husband had come to the US some sixteen months ago from Egypt. During the course of the breakfast, the husband said that he recognized me. We both then realized that on Friday while I was at the radio station, he had walked by and said hi. He worked there supporting the IT infrastructure. They were at the Jackson Rose because, amazingly, the Egyptian husband had developed a fascination with the American Civil War and was in the process of visiting all of the local Civil War battlefields. Harper’s Ferry was one of the last one’s on the list.

And of course, there was Ellen and I, American Jews whose families had come from various locations in Europe. During the course of the breakfast we discussed the recent events in the Middle-East and our viewpoints on a variety of topics including the homelands of each of the couples. Ellen discussed a recent play we had seen at the Theatre J, located in the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, called Return to Haifa, http://www.washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/on-stage/10-11Season/return-to-haifa/ with the Palestinian wife.

The play, written by an Israeli, was based on a novella written by a Palestinian. It tells the story of two couples and a child associated with both. One couple were Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Israel and as part of being given a house to live in were asked to adopt and raise a child left behind when Palestinians left the house in the chaos of the departure. The second couple was the family that left. The child became an Israeli soldier. The play went back and forth between the past and the present telling the complicated narratives that represent the difficulties in coming to an agreed to peace in the Middle-East today.

When we attended the play, it was followed by a pretty highly-charged audience discussion with lots of disagreements. Audience members included Israeli’s, Palestinians, and US Citizens of various persuasions.

The Egyptian born husband was the first to remark that he felt that only in America could these three couples accidentally come together, in Harpers Ferry of all places, at a Bed & Breakfast, and have the conversations we had that morning. On this one point, everyone at the table agreed completely.

Advice Needed for Federal IT Stories This Week

Francis Rose is a radio host for Federal News Radio, 1500am, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=16.

Francis has a show called In Depth which is broadcast from 1pm – 3pm every day. The focus of the show as the title suggests is to look at topics that have been in the news but taking a deeper examination.

On Friday’s he does a Countdown from 2pm – 3pm. He invites two or three people to talk about the three stories each thinks is important for the week. First, the invitees go over their third most important story, then their second, and finally their top story of the week.

Amazingly over the weeks, the stories are only rarely duplicated.

If I might digress for a moment, there was a commercial that ran a number of years ago where a user got to the end of the Internet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ5vFvGllTI.

Evidently Francis actually ran out of people to have on the show, because he recently invited me to show up this coming Friday, February 18th.

So this is a long way of asking if anyone has suggestions as the week goes on as to which articles I should bring up to please let me know by passing comments on my blog or to any of my social networking pages.

Lessons From a Political CIO by Dan Mintz CIO, Department of Transportation

This morning in the Washington Post there was a column discussing the regular transition of political appointees, http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/fedcoach/2011/02/political-appointee-merry-go-round.html?hpid=smartliving.

For those of you are are thinking of becoming a political appointee or wonder about the process, it is worth reading.

In December, 2008, I wrote a column about what I learned from personally being a political appointee in President Bush’s Administration for FedScoop, http://fedscoop.com/2008/12/lessons-from-a-political-cio/.

I thought it might be useful to repeat it here:

“As one of the chief information officers who was politically appointed and thus will be out of a job January 20, 2009, I have been reflecting on the lessons learned that I might pass on to the CIOs who will have a chance to serve in the next administration. Perhaps a few of these thoughts may be useful to any political appointee.

I mention six of them here. I suspect given time I could come up with many more.

First, respect, reach out, and work with the career staff that report to you at the agency you serve. You will find them dedicated, caring, competent, and tremendously hard-working. You will learn much from them, and it will be only with their support that you have an opportunity to accomplish great things.

One of the real values that a political appointee can bring is to provide broad-based support (“high air cover”) for those career staff who want to cause change but are not empowered to do so. When you can use your connections to the departmental political leadership to provide that support, take advantage of those relationships.

Second, remember that political appointees can never speak in a whisper. A truly wonderful professor, Shelley Metzenbaum of the University of Maryland, who has done work supporting the Department of Transportation, provided me that insight. I have never forgotten it though sadly not always kept in mind. The point is that I have found that most career staff very much want to be as supportive as they can. However, if you are not clear in what you want accomplished, or if you are like me and think out loud, you will unintentionally provide inconsistent and confusing direction, especially until your staff gets used to how you operate.

Third, participate in the various groups that exist within the government to allow the exchange of information. These include the federal CIO Council and perhaps more importantly the committees associated with the Council. Also participate in those groups set up to allow information interchange between the Government and their partners including ACT/IAC, AFFIRM, ITAA/AEA/GEIA, and NAPA. If nothing else, you can learn what all of these abbreviations and acronyms mean and be entertaining at cocktail parties and other events. By attending and perhaps speaking at these meetings, you will meet truly interesting people who will provide advice that will make your job easier.

Fourth, learn to accept that you will not get everything done, and therefore make the hard decision to prioritize. If you have never been in public service before you will find that unlike the private sector where the goals are fairly simple and the stakeholders relatively consistent in their interests, the opposite is true in government. Private company goals are generally to make more revenue and/or reduce expenses. In the public environment, the goals are less distinct and more complex. Your many bosses on the Hill, in the White House, among the public, and within your own organization often will provide contradictory and ever-changing direction. Try telling a congressional committee or the inspector general that their issue was a low priority and let me know how that goes for you.

Fifth, reach upward as much as you can. The CIO position within government is often or even completely focused downward toward technology optimization. While this is important, the real value you bring is in enhancing your organization’s mission by looking upward. One clear emphasis of the next administration — on social networking and the use of the Internet — will provide new opportunities to make IT useful in enhancing the interaction of the government with the American citizen and other key external stakeholders. Seize the opportunity to be supportive of such efforts — become an Internet gardener.

Sixth, and finally, have fun. I can honestly say that the last two-plus years have been the most enjoyable and rewarding time I have ever had as a professional. I would not have traded one minute — well maybe one or two — for anything. You will have the opportunity to have great consequence at a place that itself has great consequence for the American public. Enjoy it and pass on that feeling to all you work with.”