Jack Holt, APR

I just saw this post and so while the blogging at Mountain Runner will be missed, the innovative thinking and collaboration will continue now within the U.S. Federal Government. Interesting times these are.

Congratulations Matt, and thank you for your commitment.

Jack

I hear “We need to change the culture!” quite a bit. While it makes a nice chant/rant it has makes little practical sense. You see you cultivate culture by acculturating people. Things change, people adapt. The underlying culture is the shifting because the underlying conditions are changing.

Dictionary.com has one definition of culture as:

the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.

The heart of the definition is “what is regarded as excellence.” The etymology of the word “culture” is from the Latin “cultura” meaning to cultivate. We cultivate what we consider excellence and then educate to acculturate others.
What is at issue now is whether our traditional institutions will adapt to the changing knowledge and conditions that are giving rise to the new artifacts to which human behavior is adapting.

To not adapt is to become irrelevant.

My Uncle Robert is a quiet, unassuming man. Very practical and a very strong in his beliefs and steadfast in his way. Not one to be trifled with, Uncle Robert is a very fair and focused man. He is one of the four most important men in my life.

He has lived through the great upheavals of the 20th Century; the Great Depression, the Dustbowl, the Internet and yet still conducts his business with determined vision, a steady hand, and great concern for his employees and their production. This has allowed him to maximize the use of his own facilities and his reputation is such that he has the use of the property of others with few questions asked. 

He treats his employees with great care. He sees that they have what they need, are well supplied and that their environment is as good as he can possibly make it. He’s always there to help, coax, and defend them when necessary and values their production no matter how small. Yet he has no tolerance for the unproductive. 

As a young man, I would look forward to the summers when I could work for him. It was truly a rewarding and fun experience. Uncle Robert was a man of patience and timing when it came to his business. Now, understand that Uncle Robert never had more than one or two people working for him at any particular time except during the summers when he would have somewhere around fifteen of us kids, cousins all, scattered across his operation. Yet his employees made him one of the most prosperous men in the community. 

You see, Uncle Robert is a farmer. The employees I write of are not necessarily those individual people but the individual seeds and the individual plants that brought forth individual products.

He knows the proper time to plant and that once planted you have to have patience. You have to wait to see which individuals survive the process. When the first shoots spring forth is only one indication of the process. Some will come up later than others and still others simply will not survive the process. The life of the organization is just not in them.

Those that do survive he cultivates. He sees to their needs. He insures their environment is all that it can be for them to thrive and produce. He keeps track of their production process, makes sure they are well supplied and values each and every little thing they produce. He knows that individual production is the key to the overall harvest. He also know what his return will be, because he knows what he planted; he reaps what he sows. We all do.

Are you cultivating or curtailing? Do you prune or do you prevent? 

If you don’t like what you’re reaping, change what you’re sowing.

25 minutes well spent. Brian Solis with Technorati’s Richard Jalichandara http://www.youtube.com/briansolistv

Ah! The Rhetoric. Do we understand it? Is this a rhetorical question?

Aristotle treatise on persuasion, Ars Rhetoricaexplains the three communication factors that govern rhetoric are Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Ehtos is described as the state of the speaker, Pathos is the state of the audience, and Logos is the state of the reasoning, or logic, of a situation.

We tend to think of these three factors as individual entities to themselves with a focus on one or the other dependent on the viewpoint. While this is true, it belies the fact that the point of communication is to move from one place to another. I see this the way an airplane pilot sees the forces acting on his aircraft in flight.

To fly an airplane, there must be four forces acting on the aircraft. Lift, weight, thrust, and drag. They are dependent on one another and the aircraft will not fly without all of them present and therefore the pilot cannot fly from one place to another. Wings will not generate lift without thrust. Thrust will create lift and drag. Lift is a function of gravity and drag a function of movement. To fly, the craft must be in movement, and the point of an aircraft is to move from one point to another. It is the work of the pilot to keep those forces in equilibrium and allow the ascendency of one or the other in order to move the craft for a successful, controlled flight from one place to another.

A rhetorician has the same function. To move an idea from one place to another the forces of communication must be in balance. Communication produces persuasion. Persuasion is a function of Logos. Logos will create Ethos and Pathos. The point of communication is to move thinking from one place to another. It is the rhetorician’s work to keep the forces in equilibrium and allow for the ascendency of one or the other to move the thinking from one place to another.

Why is rhetoric important? Perhaps to help manage chaos.