Coffee

Musings on a Monday Morning from Mike Mullin…

The weekly Newsletter of Without A Vision Consultancy LLC

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June 24, 2019 – Coffee

This is the final Monday of June — already! Have you been taking advantage of this abundance of daylight?  (Sorry, Brisbane, but you’ll get your turn!)Smell those Japanese lilacs!

• It’s parade season.
  • I love a parade, even a bad one.
    • What are the sociological phenomena of a parade?
      • Perhaps it’s somewhat like theatre, one scene unfolding after another, mysterious, anticipatory, with curtains on either end.
• Many of the hollow-core doors in our home were on the losing end of the kids’ temper tantrums twenty or thirty years ago.
  • Now, finally, with the help of an old friend, we are repairing a few of them.
    • Such a treat to watch an old-world craftsman produce results with wood, hinges, and a few expertly-managed tools.
• “Oh, she’s just the owner, she wouldn’t know.”
  • I had phoned ahead to make sure the old-fashioned butcher shop would have some fresh pork belly for sale.  I was making a special dish for special friends and I needed that particular cut.  I usually go to another purveyor, but this one was right on my route home.  “Yes, we have it,” the person said.  I pulled off the freeway and into the weedy, unkempt parking lot of the starting-to-look-rundown store.  I had been here many times before, but not in a few years.  From the outside it appeared to be closed/ out of business.  Once inside I asked the (very) young worker standing behind the old-fashioned refrigerated meat counter for four or five pounds of pork belly.  I know you’ve got it, I said, because I called ahead.  The worker was cordial, helpful, even eager.  But alas, there was no pork belly, he even checked places he normally wouldn’t.  “I don’t ever remember us having any.”  I showed him the exchange I had had earlier in the day with someone I had reached by way of the store’s web site.  The eager employee took one look and said with complete unabashed relief and confidence, “Oh, she’s just the owner, she wouldn’t know!”
• If there are more than seven billion people on Earth there are at least that many different possible paths to solving the perplexing relationship puzzle.
  • The imperative is you must want to have a relationship — and let’s presume, a healthy one.
    • In other words, it’s a decision — and a recurring decision.
      • If such is the case and if perchance the person with whom you want to have a relationship is similarly motivated, that is a pretty good beginning.
        • Still, the path to success is strewn with considerable debris and it will often be tempting to abandon the effort even if you’ve expressed publicly your decision to have and to sustain the relationship.
• Tens of thousands of books and probably millions of articles have been written on the subject of governance, whether for business or for non-profit organizations.  In some cases the governance function might be vested in an owner or a partnership rather than a Board, but the critical function remains the same.  Here is the Without a Vision synthesis of the literature and of best practices:
  • Safeguard the Mission
  • Support the Vision
  • Establish Goals
  • Allocate Resources
  • Monitor Progress
  • Evaluate the Chief Executive
• “The main thing is to make sure the main thing is still the main thing.” (Barksdale)
• “If you take risks you’re going to be wrong as often as you’re right — and that is the joy of life.”  (Lansing)

Coffee

By Michael A. Mullin
Freshly roasted, ground, and brewed coffee
as dawn is breaking is about as necessary and wonderful
a pleasure as a perfectly chilled and properly proportioned
martini at four o’clock in the afternoon enjoyed with
a good friend and a salty potato chip or two.

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