Am I a Freelancer? Part III

I’m learning that I’m not much of a freelancer; however, I am at least learning.

In this lesson I’m supposed to create a “List of 10 things I deliver to my client, things that aren’t the thing. Things like timeliness, confidence, respect, a story, etc.”, and the last bit of instruction, in purple, no less, 

“Be specific.”

Well, first of all I need to define my “client”. Since I’ve determined that I’m not a freelancer, and have no paying customers,

1.       Who do I serve

a.       My family: most specifically my Joy, my Barney, my Eric, and my Gidgy. Yes, my extended family, too, but these people are number 1.

b.      My colleagues (Those with whom I work every day)

c.       My “partners” in business. (I hate the term “vendors”. They are much more than that, or at least those I consider “partners” are much more than that.)

2.       What do I deliver to them?

a.       Overt and unconditional love

b.      Honesty

c.       Integrity, and yes, one can be honest and still lack integrity

d.      Transparency (as a dear friend of mine said recently, “No BS”)

e.      As in all healthy exchanges, everyone wins

f.        Humor

g.       Always a good story

h.      Genuiness (What you see is what you get)

i.         My undivided attention

j.        Opportunity

While most of these aren’t necessarily in any particular order, and I suppose over time one or two of them might change, letter "a" is indeed number 1, and by far and away the most important. I do love God, and I do love people. When it comes to loving people, I need to work on "overt" and "unconditional" for some of them.

Maybe I could be a freelancer after all.

Am I A Freelancer? Part II

Back to my freelancer’s course.

After a few more “lessons” from the Goden-meister, I get to my next assignment: What Do You Provide? 

What do I provide?

The first question under this topic is, What do people buy when they buy something from you?

I watched the series of videos leading up to this "quiz" several days ago, but haven’t been able to come up with a really good answer to this question until this morning – trust. I “sell” trust. If I don’t, everything else I do just isn’t worth doing. I suspect Mr. Godin was wanting something a bit more “hands-on”, but I don’t sell “hands-on” anything. I provide trust first, then everything else follows.

Maybe I’m not a freelancer.

The second and last question in this segment, which I’m finding even more difficult is, Leave out the easy, repetitive, generic stuff . . . What are you doing that’s difficult?

Well, certainly this course! It’s making me think in ways I’ve never considered. 

The whole thinking and research process for a potential alternative to Title IX funding is certainly a challenge, and there are the hotel / resident hall partnership discussions / decisions that are currently underway, and now a bond funding project to carefully research and implement. 

I guess now that I think about it, while I’m not so sure I’d call these “difficult”, they are most certainly challenging and they are not “easy, repetitive, generic stuff”. Actually, these kinds of things are the fun stuff!

Hmmm. Moving on . . .

Smart Phone or Just Dumb Me

It dawned on me the other day that I have become a slave to my smart phone. I’m convinced that they (whoever “they” are) call them smart phones because those phones have truly outsmarted all of us! Back when it was just a dumb phone, and only sent and received calls, it stayed in my pocket until I needed to make or take a call. In those days I was jealous enough of my limited minutes that I didn’t take every call, and was pretty careful about who and how long I talked when I called.

I was still the master of my personal phone!

                But, alas and alack, in the bowels of sterile laboratories in Cupertino, California, mad scientists like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak continued their wild experiments, and in less than a generation developed devises that were much more than phones. Now I find myself reading cryptic notes from other slaves, checking and rechecking the news every time I get a free moment, tweeting my occasional brilliant thoughts, tracking the blue dot that is me on the GPS, watching an occasional NCIS episode on Netflix, and a host of other things when I could be, should be, relaxing, or praying, or reading my Bible.

                Oh yeah, and I can read the Bible on the smart phone, too, although I’m not sure yet about texting Jesus.

                And it’s not just me. I watch people all across the Ohio Christian University campus, walking around, never looking up, glued to their smart phones, thumbs all ablur. The hapless few that are looking up have ear buds and brightly colored wires running down their chests into their pockets, connected to . . . you guessed it . . . their smart phones!

                So my daughter calls me this afternoon and asks, “Are you at home?”

                “No, I’m still at the office.”

                “Mom isn’t answering her phone again.”

                I get home and the phone is still in her purse from when we returned from a trip, a trip in which she did not use her smart phone one time, and subsequently forgot about it and let it run out of juice in her purse. Hmmm. Perhaps not everyone has become enslaved after all.

                Believe it or not, this isn’t an article about smart phones or our presumed dependence upon them. It about values for living, just like the name of this column implies. It’s about finding balance in our lives, and understanding what is truly important. Before smart phones, it was just something else.

                I’ll never forget back in the 80s when I was a pastor in Indianapolis. My daughter was somewhere between 8 and 10, and the two of us were in the car one Saturday afternoon, driving from parishioner to parishioner making pastoral calls. Back then I wasn’t a slave to smart phones. I was a slave to Indiana University football. (Why, I have no idea, because they weren’t much better then than they are now, but that’s what slavery does to a person.)

                Anyway, I was listening to the game between visits while my daughter chatted away about only God knows what. I sure didn’t know what because I was chained to that game, when I was suddenly and clearly aware of a “voice” and a “presence” beyond the game and my daughter’s chatting that said words to this effect; “You’re always asking for me to help you get through to Heather. Now she wants to talk and you’re chained to that radio.” I was so startled that I turned around to see if someone was in that car besides Heather and me. There wasn’t, or at least no one I could see.

                I turned off the radio, and focused my full attention to that wee girl, and never let anything interrupt a conversation with her again.

                Some may think this is a remarkable and possibly unbelievable story, and I get that; but I was there, and it changed the way I interact with children from that day to this.

                In Mark 10: 17 through 22 Jesus was approached by a young man who became a slave to his possessions, and instead of forsaking his stuff and following Christ, that young man went away sad because his smart phone, or his IU football, or his whatever, was just more important to him that the most foundational value for living of all; a relationship, not with his daughter, but with God’s son, Jesus.

                Don’t let it be so with your family and you, or more importantly with Jesus and you! Be smarter than the phone.

Am I a Freelancer?

I signed up for “A course for freelancers who want to move up” by Seth Godin, which is kind of odd because I’m not at all a freelancer . . . at least right now I’m not. It cost me $27.00, so I’m taking it pretty seriously. 

Anyway, after the first four lectures I was given the task to “Do these exercises online, in public. Blog them or put them on Facebook. Speak up. Speak out.”

Well now, that kind of creeps me out because I’m honestly a closet introvert, so sharing the answers to the six questions of this first quiz to the countless thousands that read this blog (*cough, choke*) is a bit intimidating.

Regardless, here goes!

What do you want to do? (Not your job, but your work, now, tomorrow, and in the future?

This first question really threw me and, to make matters worse, in an italicized asterisk-ed statement Godin said that “If you’re having trouble answering this, you’re going to have trouble moving up, because you’ve abdicated your dream to whoever walks in the door next.”  OUCH!

Had he asked “What do you want to see done?” instead of “What do you want to do?”, I would have said that I want to see the world in general, and Christian private higher ed in particular, to quit running to the government with hat in hand looking for yet another handout. I personally know of only two accredited colleges that have completely rejected the US Department of Education’s Title IV funding, and the myriad strings (or more accurately ropes and chains) that go with it. I marvel at their conviction and commitment, and the hard work it took to get them there. 

But what can I, a singular CFO at a small private Christian college do to see that happen at my school . . . or more importantly, across all of Christian higher education?

Who do you want to change, and how do you want to change them?

How can such a simple question make me sit here and think so long? It isn’t “who” I want to change, but “what” I want to change . . . or see changed. (I clearly haven’t accepted this as my personal responsibility yet.)

But then again, doesn’t “what” begin with “who”? I want to see college presidents and trustees change the conventional wisdom that their institutions must have those government grants and loans in order for their students to pay for their education, or in other words, for their institutions to survive.

How? Well, we know at least two colleges have already done it. Why not just ask? (Which, by the way, I have already done.) Why couldn’t every private Christian college do this, or better yet, why couldn’t a consortium of private Christian colleges create a gigantic grant / loan fund  similar to (but more efficient than) the government’s?

How much risk? (from 1 [a little] to 10 [bet everything]), how much are you willing to put at stake to make the change you seek?

I “preach” risk taking to my business and economics students, but personally am a rather risk averse person. What I’m proposing is a really big deal, and probably impossible when you consider all of the personalities that would have to be on board.

I can’t think of anything off the top of my head on which I’d “bet everything”, but on this project I might score myself a 5. For me, that’s the equivalent of “bet everything”.

How much work are you willing to do to get there? Be specific about the tradeoffs.

Well, what I do know is that ever since I visited Hillsdale and Grove City, I’ve not been able to get it out of my head, and quite frankly my heart. Passion about any idea transforms work into fun, but it’s still work and takes a lot of time, this being no exception.  My full time gig does position me well to pursue this to a certain degree, and my recent appointment to the ABACC  (Association of Business Administrators of Christian Colleges) board provides yet another venue. I would use those connections to begin the “preaching and evangelization” process.

Sitting here thinking about it for a few minutes, I realize that the “preaching and evangelization” process has actually been going-on for 2 or 3 years now, and following a recent list-serve dialogue with peers across the ABACC membership, Bruce Hoeker, the Chief of ABACC, has determined to set up a webinar to dig more deeply into it. What does that say about willingness?

Does this project matter enough for the risk and the effort you’re putting into it?

In the words of Tom Arington, a successful entrepreneur I highly respect, “It matters”. The real question is, “Can I convince enough other Presidents, CFOs, and financial backers into believing it matters?” That, quite frankly, I honestly do not know.

Is it possible — has anyone with your resources ever pulled off anything like this?

As I said earlier, it’s definitely been done, but not at the scale I’m dreaming. 

Thus ends the first assignment of this course, and I’ve worked off and on all weekend to get it done. Geez, this is worse than my MBA days!!

Truth

I’ll never forget Big D.

    He was a rather big fellow (hence, “Big” D) with kin folk trailing all the way back to the Dalton Gang, legendary outlaws of the post-Civil War period. Needless to say, he was an interesting character, with quite an index of aphorismic phrases he’d picked up from his mother. One that stuck with me all these years was his mother’s explanation for why she and Big D’s father divorced when he was just a wee lad. All she would say was, “Well son, there’s (sic) three sides to the story. My side, his side, and the truth, and it’s the truth that’s the hardest to get at.”
   
    I laughed out loud when he told me that, but the longer I let it soak into my brain, the more sobering the reality of it became, and my mind raced to the words of that gloomy old prophet Jeremiah who said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) If we are to believe Big D’s Mom, we can’t know it! We’re held so captive by our own sinful prejudices that our hearts fool us every time. It’s the primary reason I get cold chills whenever I hear advice like, “Follow your heart”, or “Let your heart be your guide.” If we are to believe Jeremiah then that advice will only lead us into trouble.

     Having intellectually and experientially come to believe the old prophet, I cringe when the television show therapist asks the actor-patient, “And how does that make you feel?” I’m sitting there in my chair shouting at the TV, “Who cares how she feels! Just tell her the truth?”  I know, I know, the therapist’s objective is to get her to realize the truth on her own, but don’t forget Jerry’s admonition that “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” If the old prophet is right, then how on earth can she get there on her own? Well, she can’t, but the good news is, there is a way, and interestingly enough, the “Good News” is that way.
The Bible is full of great wisdom and guidance to help us really learn and know the truth, things like “ . . . in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14), which takes us back to our TV therapist example; only find a therapist that’s actually going to tell you the truth!

    Then there’s one of my favorites, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and unbraideth not; and it shall be given him. (James 1:5), and I emphasize that “ask of God” part. Counselors and therapists are humans, too, so their hearts aren’t any more pure than the rest of us, and the best of them make mistakes; but God . . . now there’s the resource for truth, and all we have to do is ask.

    If you really want the truth, and you’re brave enough to ask (read James 1:6-8 for a better context of what I mean by “brave enough”), be ready, because the truth . . . not Big D’s Mom’s truth, or Big D’s Dad’s truth, but THE truth . . . is often quite a bit different that we think it is. I’ve seen people get so close to it that it started to hurt, and that’s when they walked away and continued to cling to “their” truth.

    It takes a remarkable man or woman to acknowledge their own prejudices and misconceptions, and Big D’s Mom was certainly a remarkable woman; but it takes a miracle of grace find and accept the truth.

    Fortunately, His grace is abundant.