Generalities on Leadership

While on the topic of “Leadership” in my activity director class, I picked up the autobiography of retired army 4-star general, Ann Dunwoody.  A woman general should have some insight on leadership, after all.  Now, a lot of the details in her book, A Higher Standard, are strictly military issues.  But, at the same time, Dunwoody explores how the military deals with staff: assignments, training, evaluation, advancement, and discipline, as well as planning, appropriations, logistics, and office politics.  All good stuff for an activity professional.

I was especially drawn to her assessment of the goals of training.  Dunwoody describes the irony of training to meet “standards.”  A standard might be something like being able to hit a target 65% of the time when you shoot a gun.  This sounds reasonable until you think back to school days.  What is 65%?  That’s a grade of “C.”  

Dunwoody points out, “We spend a lot of leadership time at the lower levels training and retraining soldiers so that all of our troops can meet the standards.  For what?  A whole unit of C students?”    P.28

She goes on to state her own goal of challenging her soldiers to make their own personal standards something much more than average.  And she feels it is important to “eliminate, separate, isolate, or retire those who are not willing to improve.”   P.30

She "wanted them to be proud of what they did and to be the best at what they did.” P.31

Obviously, Dunwoody didn’t lead where she hadn’t been.  Her personal standard was extraordinary enough to land her the position of general in charge of the U.S. Army Material Command (AMC), moving and tracking equipment and supplies all over the world.  In other words, she is an expert at organization and planning.  One of her major successes was in convincing the army to change the way it was doing things and adopt a centralized online tracking system.  That Culture Change allowed the AMC to move into the modern world, and it was just barely in time to meet the current world military situation.

Dunwoody wanted her soldiers to be successful, too.  She did all she could to make sure that the training she gave them (plus the right attitude on their part) could actually lead to success and advancement.  What a gift!

©Donna Stuart, ADPC             September 19, 2015

Dunwoody, Ann. A Higher Standard. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015.

The Great Chicken Rides Again

What do you know about the history of the world?  It’s chickens, symbolically, economically, gastronomically, geographically, politically, scientifically.  It’s all chickens.  At least you’d think it was after reading Andrew Lawler’s book, Why Did The Chicken Cross The World?  264 pages, not counting 42 pages of references, trace the path of chickendom across continents and oceans to its ubiquitous position on a Chick fil-A® billboard along a highway near you.

I grew up with chickens in the background.  They were my dad’s hobby and a source of extra income.  We lived in Buffalo, and I can remember my dad having to trudge to the chicken coop through the snow in order to thaw out their drinking water during the winter.  (He was a generation too early to cash in on the Buffalo chicken wing craze, though.  Nobody in Buffalo wanted to buy chicken wings back then.  He had to practically give them away!)

For my dad, the fun side of keeping chickens was to raise show birds.  Most people don’t realize how many dramatically different - looking chickens there are.  The prototype bird started out as a beautiful, but wily and fierce jungle animal, hard to catch, hard to domesticate.  Still, it seemed like every time humanity took a step, the chicken was carried along.  

Lawler documents times in the past when collecting exotic chickens was a tremendous fad.  Even Queen Victoria got in on the action.  But the fads faded.  There was real money to be made if someone could genetically build a chicken that matured faster and produced more meat or eggs.  So, of course, they did.  And these “industrial” chickens are warehoused, slaughtered, and delivered plastic-wrapped to our grocery stores without us ever catching a glimpse of the live bird.

Chickens were never my hobby, but I caught myself nodding and smiling as I read some of the stories.  They were never my hobby, but I was there.   If I were admitted to a nursing home and they were filling out my activity history intake form, I would never put “raising chickens” as something I had done.  But the memories - happy memories almost forgotten – would surface if I were exposed to an activity related to chickens.  Maybe, in providing  person-centered care, we need to ask what someone’s parents did for a hobby?

© Donna Stuart, ADPC   April 14, 2015

Lawler, Andrew. Why Did The Chicken Cross The World? New York: Atria Books, 2014.

Here, Rover!

(Continuing with the developments in Iran since their revolution)

Hooman Majd is an expatriate Iranian.  His father was serving as a diplomat under the late Shah.  When the Shah’s regime was toppled, Majd’s family found itself stranded in the West.  Majd, himself, became a journalist/author who is willing to analyze Iranian politics from an insider as well as outsider viewpoint.  Once in a while, he risks returning to his homeland temporarily so that he can write about it. This does not endear him to their current regime, hence the tongue in cheek title of his book:  The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay.

What Majd documents are the multiple versions of reality and denial that describe Iran.  Like Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, he questions whether the current situation promotes the expression of Islamic ideals or, conversely, invalidates Islamic expression because of coercion.  Was the time of the Shah the good old days or the bad old days?

Obviously, Iranians don’t control the market on multiple realities and denial.  We see it on a smaller scale in the “age in place” versus “retirement community” mindsets.  People have their preferences, but rigid thinking can lead to problems.  It can be nice to be in a safe environment surrounded by peers you can socialize with – until you notice how regularly they tend to die off and be replaced.  It can be comforting to stay in familiar surroundings, forget safety – until you find yourself trapped there alone.  Or maybe you’re the kind who doesn’t even notice these things when they happen.  That’s a problem in itself.

We can’t really solve this dilemma for our seniors, just as Majd can’t solve the Iranian dilemma.  Still, activity professionals are in the position to mitigate some of the negative aspects of senior community/institutional settings.  We can make things better in the places where we work.

p.s.  Majd proudly described the colorful Yazidi cultural group, as well as the increasing popularity of pet dogs in Iran.  Since I began reading his book, however, ISIS reportedly targeted the Yazidis for genocide.  And Iran’s Revolutionary Guard pushed through a new law allowing them to give 74 lashes to anyone they catch with a pet dog.

© Donna Stuart, ADPC    March 24, 2015

Majd, Hooman. The Ministry Of Guidance Invites You To Not Stay. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003.

You Just Don’t Know

Back in the 1930’s the WPA sponsored the Federal Writer’s Project.  Over 2,200 former slaves were interviewed for posterity’s sake about what life under slavery had been like.  Lynette Tanner showcases 42 of these interviews in her book, Chained To The Land.

This is hard reading.  Many times I’ve had to set the book down because I could not emotionally process the stories it held.  These are first person accounts of perseverance, pride, and even triumph, but with the background of abuse, loss, and hardships.

What chills the bones is the matter of fact way these survivors tell their stories.  Human beings, yes, you and I get used to the way things are.  At some level, we accept things as normal that should not be normal.  In this case, the storytellers had an even greater challenge.  They had to transition to a different normal, sometimes a different kind of bondage, after the war.    

It makes me wonder what story is behind each of our residents.  Part of the enjoyment I get from working with seniors is the fact that they each do have a story, one with lots of chapters.  They are books that just haven’t been written.  We collect some notes we call their “activity history” and put it in their file.  But we will never know the whole story.  ‘So and so’ never learned to write.  His neighbor was famous in his field.  This one over here has family who avoid her.  That one over there never married.  Some have led charmed lives, others struggled with each step.  Maybe the one who now curses his caregivers used to be soft-spoken and the former athlete just sits and watches.  Most of these folks have suffered many, many losses.  Yet, they still survived.  You just don’t know.

©Donna Stuart, ADPC        February 7, 2015

Tanner, Lynette Ater, ed. Chained To The Land. Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, Publisher, 2014.