When your perception only
equals that of your teacher,
you lessen the teacher�s virtue by half.
When your perception goes beyond the teacher,
only then can you express the teacher�s teaching.

- Fayan

From my daily readings:

A story is told about F.B. Meyer, the great Bible teacher and pastor who lived a century ago. He was pastoring a church and began to notice that attendance was suffering. This continued until he finally asked some members of his congregation one Sunday morning why they thought attendance was down.

A member volunteered, “It is because of this new church down the road. The young preacher has everyone talking and many are going to hear him speak.”

His name was Charles Spurgeon. Meyer, rather than seeking to discourage this, exhorted the entire congregation to join him and go participate… Meyer, even though he was an accomplished preacher and teacher, recognized where God was at work and joined Him in it. Can you imagine this story taking place in our competitive world today?

To quote something Thomas Mulready said to me, “Leadership isn’t about taking credit, Leadership is about giving credit where credit is due.” What happens when a ‘new’ leader ‘emerges’? Do we feel threatened? Or do we give them credit for galvanizing others and mobilizing them to action? You tell me.

I spent the afternoon and evening with my wife and Jack at the BK Smith Gallery where a bunch of artist are letting the public observe the creative process. It’s amazing to see the gallery transformed into workspaces, to walk through, meet the artists, talk to them about what they’re doing, why they choose that particular subject, and see their work evolve. Today is the last day the artists will be there, so if you can make it out to the Lake Erie College on 391 W. Washington St., you’ll find the BK Smith Gallery around the corner on Gillett St. You can always call the gallery at 440.375.7461 for directions. I think its a rewarding experience, and hope you will too. If you don’t make it out today, please try to attend the opening Fri 9-12 from 6-9PM.

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Global Broadcast of a Community Chalk Drawing. Does anyone remember Simon from Captain Kangaroo?

I’m proud of my wife, Tisha. This weekend she’s participating in 48 Hours of Art . From Cool Cleveland:

It’s the art world’s version of reality television when twenty-two artists convene at B.K. Smith Gallery for a weekend of creating art while living in the gallery for 48 hours starting Sat 8/30 thru Sun 8/31 from 12 Noon to 7:30 PM. The event is open all weekend to the public to meet the artists and discuss their work, giving audiences a glimpse into the complexities of generating art. Artworks produced will be installed in the gallery and remain on view through 10/3. This year’s group includes painter and CIA Assistant Professor Daniel Dove; Cool Cleveland.com Senior Editor and poet Tisha Nemeth, plus several experimental and visual artists including conceptual installation artist Blake Cook, photographer Hadley Conner, filmaker Cindy Penter, and sculptor/performer Doug Meyer. An opening reception Fri 9/12 with artist discussions will be open to the public at the gallery as well. This event is sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council and by the Harriet B. Storrs Fund of The Cleveland Foundation. At Lincoln Fine Arts Center on the Campus of Lake Erie College. For info call Lyz Bly, Director, at 521-8582

It’s one thing to write, it’s another to publish, a third to read, but to share a space with 20 other artists, share your work (she’s writing on the gallery walls) and have people follow the progress is a unique experience. It takes her to a whole new level in her career. If you have time, please stop in for a visit. Make sure you put the reception on your calendar as well.

Tisha Nemeth, a poet once stationed in Boston and Los Angeles has set down roots in Cleveland. With a BA in art history, her poetry is based on her work experiences in art galleries and museums: The Boston Museum of Fine Art, Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and the Frick Collection in NYC. Her poems have appeared in: HazMat Review (Rochester, NY) Peralta Press (College of Alameda, CA), RiversEdge (University of Texas), Curbside Review, This Hard Wind, Poet Magazine, Unknown Writer, Brutal Imagination, Cleveland’s own ArtCrimes, and other literary reviews. In 1997 she was one of fifteen poets selected nationally to present her manuscript to U.S. poet laureate, Richard Wilbur, at the Key West Writer’s Workshop in Key West, Florida. Currently, she’s the lit-obsessed Senior Editor for Cool Cleveland.com.

Aloft by Tisha Nemeth
(based on the works Terpsichore by Antonio Canova, and Erato by Charles Meynier at the Cleveland Museum of Art)

The eyes’ disjunctions travel
Over skin fluid as poured milk,
Where the lyre is hung, beauty lies

And the muse belies its high cost
From which men slake thirst’s ache over
Her marbled horizon; taken up

Positions among the periphery
Of life to orbit her with distant eye,
Speechlessness is her recompense.

Costly is her complex inspiration;
Charts its course absorbed in men’s
Curved cornea, her arms and legs

Hardened, bare like colonnades
Leave them ravenous, all at once
The poem’s words fall like accidents

Their worship is undue,
They are all her wounds, old and new.
She deserts her true self where

Their continuing longing clangs its praise
Until she sees their banishment, she will not rest
Not one beautiful thing escapes unpunished.
© 2003 Tisha Nemeth

Jack Ricchiuto posts:

“Some people blog and comment with an intention to broadcast their experience; others do so with an intention to spark and facilitate dialogue. I’ve now joined the emerging group of bloggers who are using wiki to create a unique and common space for people to dialogue.

Thanks to G and the GWIS guys for setting up a wiki page on DesigningLife.com. A wiki page is a page anyone can edit — a collaborative tool designed to facilitate shared mind. When you go there, you will see the link to the Wiki Wednesday page. Every Wednesday here at Gassho, I’ll pose a question for dialogue on the Wiki Wednesday page, and start things off with my thoughts there. In the meantime, feel free to post your comments to any day’s blog here or start or join the dialogue on the Wiki Wednesday page. Looking forward, as always, to the conversations.”

I’m looking forward to some lively discussions on the topics Jack posts. I hope you’ll join him too.

Traditionally, collaborative software has been used in business. Can you think of other ways it can be used?

After a discussion with Jack last night over a cigar and martini, I have a question about something Don Iannone posted at ED Futures. The topic is a conference titled “The Path to Stronger Communities: Expanding Economic Growth in Small Communities and Rural Areas”. My question: What is the role of organizations, the “developers, financial institutions, nonprofit organizations, and government entities” at the conference, in strengthening the community? Is it the same as the “community development practitioners, small business owners and operators”?

There’s lots of books on Community Building. I’d probably start with Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs, since that’s what we’re on about here at BFD.

Maybe it’s the headline or maybe it’s because it’s not the main topic of Steve’s post, but let me make it clear:

Case Western Reserve University is providing WiFi access to everyone for FREE

Hello! This is big news. Have you seen it on TV? Is it in the PD yet? Check this out:

�This is the first phase of blanketing Cleveland with free wireless Internet access�a project we call OneCleveland,� said CWRU chief information officer Lev Gonick, who has spearheaded the project. �We are working with our industry partners, Cisco Systems and Sprint, to complete the wireless network across University Circle, providing wireless access to everyone who comes to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, or any of the other cultural and educational resources in the neighborhood.� CWRU is calling the wireless Internet access one of the largest public wireless services in the world. The service will be available via 1,230 Cisco Aironet 1200 wireless access points spread throughout the campus and University Circle area.

Schwing! In case the magnitude of this hasn’t sunk in, this is the most ambitious civic digital infrastructure project in the world right now. How’s that for a first?

As I’ve been dwelling on leadership this week, a couple of old CrainTech articles came to my attention that I thought I’d share. The first is from Reinventing Cleveland�s Power Structure:

For over a century Cleveland�s large industrial employers have been synonymous with the city�s institutional foundation… That model was first shaken by the industrial recession of the late 1970�s and continues to be rattled by economic forces that have been unkind to Cleveland�s headquarters companies… it does suggest that we have invested a lot of influence — and responsibility — with corporate leaders who have become minority shareholders in our community… This also means that the process can be co-opted by those relatively few players who truly are stakeholders in the region�s future, giving them unchecked opportunities to enact strategies which will serve their own self-interests, wrapped in a cloak of civic-minded concerns. All of which leads to some interesting questions: What if the decisions affecting the area�s economy were being made by people whose companies are actually growing here? Would the community�s priorities be different? And who might those decision-makers be? The answer to the final question is the most obvious: It�s the area�s entrepreneurs and small business owners who are heavily invested here and are providing virtually all the employment growth here.

The other one is from Leaders Make the Difference:

A couple weeks ago, I got the chance to shake hands with one of Greater Cleveland’s innovative and committed young leaders in technology education…just before he got on a plane and flew home to Dallas. His name is Gregg Lowe. He grew up part of a big Catholic family on Cleveland’s West Side. He’s one of nine brothers to graduate from Saint Edward High School, where Gregg did well enough to attend Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s foremost engineering schools. He’s now a senior vice president with Texas Instruments, and lives with his family in Dallas. Gregg must be doing pretty well, because a couple years ago the President of Saint Ed’s flew to Dallas to hit him up for a big gift to support the school’s capital campaign. Gregg wasn’t too hot for bricks and mortar, but for the last several years he’d been wrestling with an idea: how to provide high school students with an introduction to basic engineering principles that might encourage them to pursue engineering as a college major and a career…There’s a trendy title for this sort of activity: it’s called venture philanthropy. But call it what you will, it’s a tribute to what can happen when one person decides the time has come to make a difference, and links up with a partner organization which shares his vision and enthusiasm. This kind of personal commitment happens every day in our town, sometimes on a grander scale, but rarely on a more personal and visionary one. It should remind us that people, not institutions, are the engines of positive change in our community. And celebrating and encouraging this sort of philanthropic activism can be a refreshing alternative to making massive investments of resources to prop up aging institutions based on obsolete business models. In the scheme of things, I’d trade a million person-hours of institutional collaboration and consensus-building for ten Gregg Lowes anytime.

I apologize to Chris at CrainTech and John Polk, because I cut out large sections of poignant writing to fit it into this place. Please follow the links and read the whole thing. I’m sure John’s been busy at the JCUEA, but I hope he has time for another column at CrainTech. I can’t think of a better time then now for it.

The Social Capitalist of Fast Company Magazine stops by BFD and leaves this comment (notice how calmly I say that?):

So what do you make of Richard Florida’s work?

Jack may be right that Cleveland has knowledge, but how good is the city (and this can be asked of any locale; I’m not singling out Cleveland) at attracting and retaining talent?

Fast Company’s Put Your City to the Test quiz may help you gauge that. It’s a question worth considering.

Not having read much of The Rise of the Creative Class, I’d appreciate some of you that have leave a comment or two. The one thing that did strike me most about it is this quote:

History shows that enduring social change occurs not during economic boom times, like the 1920’s or the 1990’s, but in periods of crissi and questioning such as the 1930’s — and today. The task before us is to build new form of social cohesion appropriate to the new Creative Age– the old forms don’t work, because they no longer fit the people we’ve become–and from there to pursue a collective vision of a better and more prosperous future for all

You know, now that I’ve taken the time to copy that from book to blog, I can’t think of a better mission statement. Don’t be surprised when you see a link to a wiki mission statement.

I digress. I think an interesting trend is something that Barbara Payne mentions in a comment:

Cleveland is uniquely situated to generate innovation and creativity because of so many who’ve come here or returned from other places (among those I’ve met in the last year are escapees/returnees from New York, Chicago, Boston, North Carolina, California and more).

I can’t explain it, but I meet more and more people who aren’t from around here. And that’s a good thing.

How about if one of you buys Off Message: Voices from the Business Underground and loan it to me when you’re done?

Tomorrow morning is the last Friday of the month already. That means a bunch of us will be getting together with Jason Therrien of Thunder::Tech to talk about being entrepreneurs. You should be there if you can make it.

Make sure you check out these titles on Young Leaders

Thanks to Sean Murphy for taking great pics.

Heath Row blogs about David Gurteen:

Fast Company Now: “Gurteen brings up the idea of a knowledge city — or a city ‘purposefully designed to encourage the nurturing of knowledge.’ “

Hello? Cleveland? Are you listening? We gotta get on the stick if we want to make something like this happen!

Editorial consultant and weblogger Jimmy Guterman rails in Business 2.0 about the absurdity of blogs for business. Among other things, he write, “Several years into the phenomenon…the blogging community is still, for the most part, self-absorbed and elitist. There’s only minimal evidence that anyone is using the blog format as a business tool.” Rick Bruner comments.

More on this when I get a chance…

I want to go to BloggerCon2003. Should I put up a paypal donation button? What’s it, a 10 hour drive? Anyone want to go with? Who knows of a good place to stay?

I’m going to need one of these Boston Travel Guides.

What does it mean to lead? I’m not even going to reproduce that definition, but I highly recommend you click through it. I thought I’d start with the dictionary definition:

lead�er�ship (ldr-shp) n.

1. The position or office of a leader: ascended to the leadership of the party.
2. Capacity or ability to lead: showed strong leadership during her first term in office.
3. A group of leaders: met with the leadership of the nation’s top unions.
4. Guidance; direction: The business prospered under the leadership of the new president.

Why does the language that we use focus around business and politics? Is that the nature of being a leader?

What would happen if we were to start with:

“I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” - Henry Ford

How would you produce more leaders?

What about the assumption of followers? If you’re talking about leading, who’s following? What if you were to act in such a way that you assume no one is following what you’re doing? I’m thinking of Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you would will your action to become a universal law”. How would that effect the way we think about leaders and leadership?

What about role models? Do all of our leadership role models have to come from business and politics? Are we forgetting servant leaders like Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and other spiritual leaders? Where are those men and women in our conversation?

I look forward to your comments. Thank you for your continued involvement in the discussion.

If you’re like me and don’t remember all the things you learned in Philosophy 101, pick up one of Immanuel Kant’s books.

I don’t have to say it because Tony Houston took the words right out of my blog:

“Sam Fulwood’s column is the talk of the town. Certainly interesting and provocative. TOBN is far from dead. It will take more than cutting-edge commentary, political niceities, warm handshakes and smiles to wrestle the juggernaut that we call power and influence from the hands of a few into the organizations and political yearnings of the many. Those who disagree with me, should refer to Dick Pogue’s comment that those who desire leadership should take the baton from his hands. Who among the emerging leadership in this town, is ready to do that? Anyone?”

I think the good ol’ boys need to realize that dawg don’t hunt. Check out these posts by Jack, Valdis, and entrepreneur expert Dave Bayless. I want to thank Dave for reposting this entry on his blog and adding BFD to his blogroll. It’s an honor to be included in such esteemed company.

I suggest some of us get these titles on Sharing Leadership

John Stickney posts this quote to Cleveland Poetics:

“I cannot serve those who make history; I must serve those who are subject to it.” - Albert Camus

Make sure you check out all of Albert Camus’ works

I was reading Clay Shirky’s post on Cornate about wikis (what caught my I was ‘Every time I show a wiki to someone who has never seen one, I invariably see the same two reactions: “That’s pretty cool”, followed seconds later by “It’ll never work.”) and thought I’d check for the entry for our city. Here’s what it says now:

“Cleveland, Ohio is a beautiful, vibrant city on the shores of Lake Erie. It got a bad reputation in the 1970s due to a series of unfortunate events, most notably the Cuyahoga River catching fire. Ok. It didn’t actually catch fire. Some debris floating on top did. Still, the name-calling continues (’Mistake On The Lake’ is a perennial favorite). Like any Rust Belt town, Cleveland has endured growing pains as it makes its transition from a manufacturing-based economy. What non-locals don’t often realize is that Cleveland’s long history of industrial wealth has left it chock-full of cultural riches.”

Is this an accurate and thorough description of our town? That site is getting tons of blogtime, is that what we want other people seeing?

I proposed that all of us get our wiki feet wet by heading over and contributing something, even if its a link to your favorite website.

If you need someplace to start try these Cleveland Travel Guides

What the heck is a non-hostile gunshot wound?! I’d say any gunshot wound is pretty darn hostile no matter how it happens.

William Zinsser in On Writing Well deals with the insideous jargon creeping into our language that results in useless expressions like the one above. I know. I’m guilty too. I need to tighten up my blogging. Another book I suggest is The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone’s Saying Anymore.

It must be quote day. This from Reason Express:

“He was the most courageous person I have ever known.” - Jello Biafra on the passing of singer Wesley Willis. Willis, 40, battled schizophrenia and leukemia over the years.

If you’re so inclined (and you should be. I saw him do a spoken word at JCU a long time ago) check out Jello Biafra’s prolific works.

I’ve added a daily email from the Bruderhof Community to my infoconsumption. From today’s:

Wishing Happiness
Joan Chittister

Try saying this silently to everyone and every- thing you see for thirty days: “I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.” If we said it to the sky, we would have to stop polluting; if we said it when we see ponds and lakes and streams, we would have to stop using them as garbage dumps and sewers; if we said it to small children, we would have to stop abusing them, even in the name of training; if we said it to people, we would have to stop stoking the fires of enmity around us. Beauty and human warmth would take root in us like a clear, hot June day. We would change.

Where do you go on a daily basis? I know many of you visit this page, which is one of the reasons I have a script that gives you a new quote every time you load the page. It’s generated from a database of over 450 I’ve collected over the years. I suggest you look through these books and pick out your own daily inspiration.

“Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.” - Mother Theresa

I’ve put up a wiki page about the get together we’ve been having on the last Monday of the month at Civilization in Tremont. If you’ve attended one, please add your thoughts. I’d like everyone who reads BFD to get some experience using wiki, so if you’ve never used it before, feel free to contact me.

Coffee has played a crucial role at various tipping points in history. It inspired the Islamic Whirling Dervishes, who slurped the stuff as a prelude to their bouts of religious ecstasy, and is thought to have precipitated the French Revolution. Because of the association with Islam, the Catholic Church pronounced the beverage to be the devil’s brew. Fortunately for European coffee lovers, Pope Clement was one of their number. He baptized coffee, giving it Christian status. For more interesting anecdotes, buy The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History