LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS.

1 Reflections on Power, Competition and Ambition Jill F. Kealey McRae STM-118 Exercising Authority: Power, Strategy and Voice LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 2 1. Some people are made uneasy by thinking about power, competition, ambition or winning and losing, and they hear them as taboo words from the world of selfishness. How about you? Dag Hammarskjöld once said this: I am not one to blow my own trumpet, but woe betide the man who does not recognize my worth. I am of Hammarskjöld’s number. I know my limitations, yes, but also my capabilities. Should I have no particular brief for competitiveness, it is because I get off on risk instead. You might say my dance card is already full. The truth is that taking risks makes me sort of schitzy and up-in-the-air on some narcotic little puff of chemical -once the stuff hits the neo-cortex I'm away. Got it? I don't do competitiveness unless I'm in the mood for blood sports though sometimes get into a I-shall-blench-at-nothing mood, when I think this: it is not enough that I succeed, others must fail. Dearie me. Competing with others is diverting for a while, but is not my tasse du the because of not being generative. Since I am addicted to risk (the small nakedness of the word!), I have constantly to reinvent myself, to improvise, to command parts of me which hitherto have lain dormant, much as one of those prophets who waves a rod of divination, commanding seas to part. This way my life is always a frontier. I am ever striking West, to verify that I am alive. Why, wither else but straight ahead? An exhausting business, but I would not wish it other. Am I ambitious? God, I suppose the evidence is overwhelming. My old man worked for the New South Wales Railways, and my mother was an untrained nurse at Narrabri Hospital during the War, and here am I at Harvard. I rest my case. Once, a long time ago, they put me in the slow learners' row because I could not keep up. It cost me dear to escape this destiny, and to resume my place. Getting back to the relative safety of anonymity taught me a large lesson. On the whole, life requires a super-human effort. Relentlessly, I am still consumed with proving that I am worth something. I was a dreamer, you see, and there are penalties for that, especially in the unforgiving Australian shire of my childhood. I will answer you this: I am compelled to validate my worth, by whatever means at my disposal. Ambition: and ardent desire for rank, fame or power, so says Mr Webster. And if I claim this potent trio as mine, then it is because I am never far from those afternoons of flies and heat, when I poured over The Brown Reader, unable to assemble meaning from its pages, terrorized by confusion and shamed by ineptitude. Do you think of power as something good or bad? Something you want or don't want? The good thing about having achieved almost fifty years is that you know more than most people; plus, on the whole, life has stopped surprising you. The mere act of survival imbues one with a sense of power. It has me, any rate. I have fought too hard and waited too long to deny myself the fruits of struggle. I have chalked up impressive losses, and this too is empowering. People who have nothing more to lose are curiously inviolable. You can take nothing from me which I have not already lost. Therefore it is perfectly natural that I should wish to exercise what is my due. My only concern LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 3 now is that the dispensation of power has certain responsibilities, otherwise you end up making a complete fool of yourself and blowing the lot. Since I plan to enjoy mine, necessity compels a judicious acuity. There are few blueprints for women regarding the appropriate management of power. We cannot look to history because history, it must be said, has elected to ignore us. As a woman who desires power and is powerful, I have had to create my own maps. It makes for potholes and dead ends, yes, but the cartography is uniquely mine. Who attributes power to you? Are you comfortable when this happens? Do you envy the power of others? Do you find gratification in supervising a staff of subordinates? Would you rather be an advisor to a powerful person or a powerful person in your own right? Which role is more familiar? The first I find a difficulty in adjudicating -I have something called presence, yes, and people often attribute power to me on its behalf. As often as not I am abashed by this manifestation, perhaps because of having a quite pragmatic view of power. In the main, it serves as a means, rather than attracts me as an end. Of course the dynamics are endlessly fascinating and even instructive, but I am much more invested in observing others than understanding how others perceive me. The view muddies when it comes my own participation, not from disinterest or disdain, but because I cannot be degage in this context without encountering a great awkwardness. To say I have a degree of ease in exercising power is not to claim I am, ipso facto, powerful; rather, it acquaints me with its attributes, without further defining my relationship. It is possible to exercise power and still to feel lost and fearful. It is hardly a feat of Holmesian detection to locate my awkwardness in this conjunction. I am not a person given to envy in a large way (its being one of the seven deadlies has nothing to do with my aversion), so I have little experience of envying power in others. The one exception has to do with artists; in particular, I envy those writers who are touched with genius, in fact stand in awe. Perhaps it is because genius has always seemed to me to be God-given and therefore doubly powerful. Whether or not I enjoy being the boss depends on the task at hand. I manage consultants whom I have contracted to deliver the Australian Government's program of international development assistance. In areas where I have more expertise than my colleagues, irrespective of their rank, I expect to be in charge. I am guaranteed autonomy in this regard and find it suits me well. Sometimes I would rather be an advisor to a powerful person because I have other agendas to pursue. I work well in the subordinate role while ever there are things to learn. This I regard as the honeymoon phase. Once I have subsumed the skills/knowledge sufficiently, however, I want to try my hand, often to disastrous effect. No matter. By this means I have achieved interesting, though not always impressive gains. On occasion I have seized the initiative; other times I have been ejected willy-nilly from the nest. `Fly!' they have yelled down at me. And I have. It's either that or ker-splat! 2. Describe a competitive situation you were in and enjoyed winning. To say I enjoyed winning an admission to Harvard University is to understate the case. I gloried LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 4 in it. With an air of studied nonchalance, I let it be known in certain circles, at my leisure. I rubbed it in. I used it to leverage loans, inspire envy, compliments and congratulations. I called witnesses to earlier catastrophes and gave them an update. My Christmas card list tripled overnight, burdened with its tidings of Success at Last. I even told the postman and the lady in the corner shop. I worked the crowd at several farewell gatherings, and in a transport of political correctness, gave up smoking and slurs on America's greatness. What more can I say? Where do I stand on questions of what is good, worthwhile and valuable? If you want values, I expect the Sermon on the Mount is as good a place as any to look, not that it is about absolutes. I'm with Soren Kierkegaard there; what else could You-Know-Who have been instructing Abraham on with that sacrifice Isaac or else business? Worrying about my soul gets on my nerves quite dreadfully these days. I say to people, `Look, how are you minding your soul?' I've been where people's souls are as quickened as skin. Deep in the Tanami Desert lives a group of Aborigines called the Warlpiri. Their Dreaming is charged with unfamiliar mysteries; every Warlpiri inhabits a world that brims with significance from another realm. Their ritual life is 80,000 years old; Warlpiri lives have meaning. Ahem. This is like the confessional. As a recovering Presbyterian, I know little of such things, so must give rein to that old warhorse, my imagination. Only connect! thundered E.M Forster. All right for some. I suppose you are expecting bumph about friends, children, and significant others, are you? Sorry to disappoint, but I'm a bit on the miscellaneous side. I like other people, but only up to a point. Much of the time I find myself thinking, `I'd rather be somewhere else.' Not that I can't get interested; for instance interviewing is my fulcrum to prize open lives, to gull the unwary. It legitimizes intrusion, and so if you are like me, ineffably curious and with the scruples of a snake-oil salesman, you will perfect a line in honeyed phrases and pick off the next victim. I light on them like a tick on a vein and am not above treading on august persons in my hurry to attach. I track down little truths in women's lives, hoping they might amount to something on the profound side. I want meaning on tape, have a liking for what Francis Bacon called the brutality of fact. Poor dead Francis hungered for tragedy, vast as the vastest darkness. Because why? Because it gives authenticity to experience, and scale, dummy. I am of Francis's number, though mostly probe my own scabs. `You have quarantined yourself,' said the shrink. `Yes,' I said, `I am too frightened not to stand alone.' The most that can be said of me is that I am a loyal friend, and kind, I think, though never remember birthdays and hate what the glossies call entertaining. Pray God I have been to my last dinner party. Since the breaking of bread is for the privacy of one's own home, I loathe restaurants; it is ritual I want, not ambience. Ditto hobbies, though if ever I get my hands on a garden again I shall out-plant Eden. Logan Pearsall Smith said, `They say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.' In my library are 4,000 volumes which I have termited through, the favourite of my childhood Robinson Crusoe. I trust you are getting the picture. Youngsters are valuable. It is nerve-wracking to be around unadulterated hope, but one must offer a tender interest and try to remain unshocked. Some will be pathfinders. I have admired dignity, perhaps because there is much that has shamed me. LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 7 What has meaning and importance for me and what is trivial or secondary? God dwells in the details, so spoke Mies Van Der Rohe. I have this theory that everybody eventually gets lost from everybody else, and must constantly strive to prevent this happening. So we make nests and guard the hearth. We confide words like home to the evening still and fall back on old remembrances. When I want my Nanna back I think up her dressing-table, right down to the smell of her Faulding's Lavender and Musk Cologne. Details. What is important is my guardianship of the past for in it are places and times that I must revisit. My sense of wonder is important also, for being my passport to other worlds. Solitude too, for allowing my secret life its space, where I can be the fool, to no one's notice, play unregarded and make things up and dream dreams. These are my heart's best times. Solitude is where I live loudest. Myths are important because I think they may be the language of souls (mine!). Teaching also because sometimes when I teach what I need to know, the earth shifts on its axis. `I don't find solitude agonizing,' said old Sam Beckett. `On the contrary. Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.' If they locked me up, paper is what I would crave. I wrote myself out of madness once. I hate gush, and passion, at its broadest, does not interest me; it is too much like a destination and not enough like a feeling. Since I will have none of it, passionate people tire me to excess. I have intensity instead. You should try living with that, my friend. Mine is not exotic mittel-European angst, but more intemperate, fuelled by anxieties that are on a holding pattern in the stratosphere. Every now and then I have to be among true believers. What helps me find my bearings in the work I do? What is worth taking up the responsibilities of authority to try to accomplish and what not? Over the body of Desdemona, Othello says, `I have done the state some service.' Like the Moor, I serve the state, well I think, despite a rise that is less than meteoric. Regulations, policies and what have you are the shoals and cays among which I must steer my little craft, careful of how I trim her sails, watchful of the weather. What others regard as frustrating is a challenge to my wits. Sometimes I pretend to myself that I am the Iron Duke, after Waterloo, and say, `It was a damned near thing.' A long while ago I discovered that if you cannot change policy, you can at least make sure you implement it circumspectly. If you are efficient, and I am, it is possible to appropriate a satisfying degree of autonomy. Right under the nose of the Director-General, I was head-hunted by the World Bank for a consultancy that netted me more salary than the D-G's, and was accomplished on the sly. An organization which is dominated by a male hierarchy has the acuity of a dinosaur; the corporate bottom-feeders are too preoccupied with whatever it is they do all day (meetings, I've heard) to notice much. Should I add that I make it a rule never to take on a fight I cannot win? My organization is quite full of make-my-day exigencies; you would be surprised. In the bullpen I am known to be fearless. Why not? It's like pulling the wings off a fly, if you want the unvarnished truth. Either you have the stomach for it, LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 8 or you do not. I am tractable enough until obstructed by stupidity or inefficiency; both make me cross. These days, people have the good sense to stay out of my way and let me get on with things. `We cannot live our dreams. We are lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts we can feel that it has been nobly done.' Thanking you Oliver Wendell Holmes. From time to time I have the chance to give a sample of my best. Accomplishments? Modest increments, in the main. For example, my organization has no policy addressing Pacific island languages. Beginning in 1986, I began to channel small amounts of money into anything which supported the vernacular. Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Western Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Niue, the Cook Islands have now have sufficient desk-top publishing skills and technology to produce books in the vernacular. The tide is not turned, but the decline in languages, some seriously under threat, has stabilized. People are fighting back. I detest having to work on any project where I am not in at the conceptual level; this has little to do with control and everything to do with credibility. Taking over someone else's aid program half way through disturbs my equilibrium because I am uncertain about cohesion and viability. My sense of authority rests on knowing how solid the ground is; programs have holes, and it is my job to know where they are. What is my portion, my particular talents, strengths, weaknesses as well as the factors and conditions which determine aspects of my capacity, the nature of the time in which I live and so forth? As for the times in which we live, I think this: we are in the death throes of the modern age. I shouldn't wonder if we end up back in the evolutionary potting shed. Modernism has run out of juice, quite, and the signs are everywhere. The question we must ask ourselves is: what next? I'm voting for another Golden Age. Since my earliest labours were in the mines of language, I own a large, writerly affection for words. A strength: I have a knack for turning pigsties into palaces. People say I am bereft of malice. Weaknesses include doing things to excess because I lack moderation altogether. I would rather initiate something than carry it through, and have a kind of siege mentality, which means I cannot tolerate criticism and tend to collect slights. For the longest time I thought he was keeping something back. `Teach me the trick,' I said to my shrink. `Mine has been a life of saying yes when no would have been better, and vicky verka, plus I never know where to put the bastards (I meant boundaries). Teach me.' When he said no, it was not a matter of teaching I knew him as a liar. There was no doubt boundaries were among the missing, else why had I invested so much in control? Behind the drawbridge however, one has the illusion of safety; besides, who is there to contradict? (You have to construct a retreat beyond the mortar fire of sundry intimacies). Whatever might remedy my boundary-less state was beyond my imagining. I watched other people with a genuine puzzlement: did they get something from the placenta that I did not? It takes a while to realize that their energy is not being vaporized, that they do not harbour enough rage and humiliation to bring down the sodding firmament. LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 9 When my father died this is what happened: with a frightful patience I settled in to wait. Why not? What I thought was he's just lost somewhere, and set out on journeys mighty and middling to track him down. (For these infringements I was punished, so it brought me more than a peck of trouble). Later, when we moved to Narrabri, I worried that he would not know where to find me. It took an age for hope to die off, and to know with a terrible certainty that he was never coming back. I expect the deafness that afflicted me then was a sort of ritual vandalism to the self. A piquant situation, no? There was progress though; finally, finally, I stopped peeing the bed, though not, they tell me, restless sleeps, the nights of mewling communications with nothing; like a herd of sickly cats, it was said. But, you see, a damaged child, as I was then, who clings to recovery like a limpet mine, has a wall between herself and rottenness, between herself and longing for a dead old man, between herself and the destitution of despair. I never knew to protest, to give up my dreamed-on avidity for the future. That is the measure of me then, and I daresay, now -a grim little inventory of plucky smiles and politeness. So. In my lexicon, abandonment bulks larger than love. Plus, when you have the sheer bad luck of getting stuck with the gin-inspired lunacies of alcoholics and their slow-motion suicide, you will absorb ratbaggery -to wit, an emotional register that veers from passive to hostile with no middle ground to speak of. In short, you are about as stable as liquid nitrogen. You understand -do you? -that it was difficult to fashion a self that is composed of crispy, laundered edges. It matters not that I hate booze. A colder fact is that I may as well have been a cupboard tippler (my mother, as it happens); a dignified, self-righteous abstention hasn't saved me from the effects of the bottle. For most of my life I have been as anxious as a cat at its ninth termination. Precisely what is so threatening? This: that there will never be enough, of anything; love is a Will O' the Wisp, never coming any nearer than the moon. Might have needed it, but want it? Nahr. Price too fucken high, Mista. What my kind learn is that love is a bummer. Still we bellow Gimmegimmegimme! Like living with Kaiser Bill, that. The pity of it is, sooner or later you contaminate everything; you become a toxic dump. Ironically, people will mistake the result for someone of independent spirit. O my God. What it masks is a fundamental inability to relate in a healthy way to man or beast. Sorta rules out intimacy, don't it? A further cause for despair: even had I wanted to learn, it was already too late. A capacity for intimacy is something you acquire early, like baby teeth. Should I carry a leper's bell: Unclean! Unclean! Almost by accident I realized that when someone is invading, anxiety darn near snaps my head off (the old reptilian brain, up to the usual). Ergo, I reason, if I am feeling threatened, then probably it is because there is violation afoot. From this I deduce it is bound to be boundary plonking time. Elementary, my dear Watson. Now that I have hang of it, I barrel about with the opprobrium of those model trains, plonking down parameters and stop-signs and what-have-you. If you must know, they look like those yellow-stripey things the roadmenders use. The oddest thing: I kept saying to the shrink, `When I walk now, my feet aren't quite on the ground. I feel floaty.' For six weeks I told him this, then I got used to waking up to floaty-ness and LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 10 stopped thinking it might leave. It took an age to understand that this was wholeness; this was the end of the siege! In its stead came something calm and generative which replenishes itself nightly at some secret well during my sleeps. No longer afraid of others because I need rescue, no longer hating them because I am so poorly provisioned, I am intact at last. Glory! Glory! Listen, I wrote the book on manipulation; one does, my dear, when one's back is to the wall. And alas, there was no indignity I did not court. I have begged, yes. I have waited until my stock of hope has been all but exhausted. I have persisted in the face of outright rejection, denial and aloofness, never knowing when to turn back, or how. I have been dismissed, stood up, abandoned and rebuked until my damn head has reeled. I have waited when it has gone against every instinct in me, when it cost me all of my dignity and most of my self respect (O, ashes in my mouth!) and until I have wept in despair. I have kept on when I thought just one more day of it would turn me to stone. All of this has been in the name of a blighted quest to be whole. Every encounter was booby-trapped. In the end, you lose because whoever is selling you the stuff might cut off the supply, a fear so preposterous that you must provoke a scene where there is repudiation and wounding of a high order. The irony is, the better the stuff you are on, the more you sweat. Of course, a solution is to hook up with someone you do not care for much, and then you have nothing to lose. Once I made a marriage on these grounds once; the affair did not prosper. The hunger (your actual feeding frenzy) for all those goodies that life has denied (ie the stuff I couldn't get my hands on for keeps) is hardcore, hence there have been bouts of gunboat diplomacy. A taste for cannibalism is not what makes things dangerous in the water, Hunny. Have a care. Lovers I have known, but lotsa times it was a ploy to get them to be Papa for a while. I can remember basking in my father's gaze. Cry of the vanquished: it is like being a blind person who can remember the light. I have asked myself whether it is less cruel to be born sightless, not to know what you are missing. My shrink said no, it is better to remember. No longer do I search the horizon for the cavalry because now I am this clever clogs with a bunch of boundaries under her arm. Oh, and did I mention that I have come off self-help books for good? Resigned from my very last twelve-step program? I kept looking for answers, right? (higher education rewards stalwarts who take a tidy, problem-solving approach to life). This means for decades you are down a dead-end, missing the obvious, which is meanwhile signalling away from the pit of your being like some frantic, malfunctioning radio beacon. Eventually I picked up the beeps. I've kicked self-hatred, too. Heavens if this keeps up, I'll be just too normal for words. Shall I, do you think, be expected to give up dreaming? I believe I have no gift for friendship; certainly I neglect what friends remain to me (lifers do not complain, but latecomers do). Perhaps it is leisure that I have no knack for (my shrink again; last vacation? try 1983). My complaint is this: I do not know anyone who wants to do things that I find interesting. Meeting friends for coffee, gossip, a show, an exhibition or whatever bores me to sobs. I start feeling trapped after three milliseconds. I think it has something to do with a threshold of boredom LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 11 that is about level with my nose. I have learned about boundaries, yes, I have learned how to be safe with people, but that is not the same as wanting to be with them. In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellowmen, with few exceptions, are worthless. It was S. Freud said this. Surprise! Do I hold with Freud? No. I'm with Beckett, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for a body of work that has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation. Now that is a notion of surpassing strangeness. It may seem that I have not addressed the topic in with an eye for the specifics of the task; I would claim to have found my way though most of what is required, putting emphases where best they illuminate, and leaving aside those aspects that do not yield to my touch. In an obstinate way, I have wanted to put boundaries in the context of slabs of life, and not of events as such because it is always the broader picture that draws me. I am not one for snapshots. ??? LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 12 The Meaning of Life: Intimations, Fuzzy and Otherwise Jill F. Kealey McRae STM-118 Exercising Authority: Power, Strategy and Voice LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 13 Where do I stand on questions of what is good, worthwhile and valuable? If you want values, I expect the Sermon on the Mount is as good a place as any to look, not that it is about absolutes. I'm with Soren Kierkegaard there; what else could You-Know-Who have been instructing Abraham on with that sacrifice Isaac or else business? Worrying about my soul gets on my nerves quite dreadfully these days. I say to people, `Look, how are you minding your soul?' I've been where people's souls are as quickened as skin. Deep in the Tanami Desert lives a group of Aborigines called the Warlpiri. Their Dreaming is charged with unfamiliar mysteries; every Warlpiri inhabits a world that brims with significance from another realm. Their ritual life is 80,000 years old; Warlpiri lives have meaning. Ahem. This is like the confessional. As a recovering Presbyterian, I know little of such things, so must give rein to that old warhorse, my imagination. Only connect! thundered E.M Forster. All right for some. I suppose you are expecting bumph about friends, children, and significant others, are you? Sorry to disappoint, but I'm a bit on the miscellaneous side. I like other people, but only up to a point. Much of the time I find myself thinking, `I'd rather be somewhere else.' Not that I can't get interested; for instance interviewing is my fulcrum to prize open lives, to gull the unwary. It legitimizes intrusion, and so if you are like me, ineffably curious and with the scruples of a snake-oil salesman, you will perfect a line in honeyed phrases and pick off the next victim. I light on them like a tick on a vein and am not above treading on august persons in my hurry to attach. I track down little truths in women's lives, hoping they might amount to something on the profound side. I want meaning on tape, have a liking for what Francis Bacon called the brutality of fact. Poor dead Francis hungered for tragedy, vast as the vastest darkness. Because why? Because it gives authenticity to experience, and scale, dummy. I am of Francis's number, though mostly probe my own scabs. `You have quarantined yourself,' said the shrink. `Yes,' I said, `I am too frightened not to stand alone.' The most that can be said of me is that I am a loyal friend, and kind, I think, though never remember birthdays and hate what the glossies call entertaining. Pray God I have been to my last dinner party. Since the breaking of bread is for the privacy of one's own home, I loathe restaurants; it is ritual I want, not ambience. Ditto hobbies, though if ever I get my hands on a garden again I shall out-plant Eden. Logan Pearsall Smith said, `They say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.' In my library are 4,000 volumes which I have termited through, the favourite of my childhood Robinson Crusoe. I trust you are getting the picture. Youngsters are valuable. It is nerve-wracking to be around unadulterated hope, but one must offer a tender interest and try to remain unshocked. Some will be pathfinders. I have admired dignity, perhaps because there is much that has shamed me. LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 14 What has meaning and importance for me and what is trivial or secondary? God dwells in the details, so spoke Mies Van Der Rohe. I have this theory that everybody eventually gets lost from everybody else, and must constantly strive to prevent this happening. So we make nests and guard the hearth. We confide words like home to the evening still and fall back on old remembrances. When I want my Nanna back I think up her dressing-table, right down to the smell of her Faulding's Lavender and Musk Cologne. Details. What is important is my guardianship of the past for in it are places and times that I must revisit. My sense of wonder is important also, for being my passport to other worlds. Solitude too, for allowing my secret life its space, where I can be the fool, to no one's notice, play unregarded and make things up and dream dreams. These are my heart's best times. Solitude is where I live loudest. Myths are important because I think they may be the language of souls (mine!). Teaching also because sometimes when I teach what I need to know, the earth shifts on its axis. `I don't find solitude agonizing,' said old Sam Beckett. `On the contrary. Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.' If they locked me up, paper is what I would crave. I wrote myself out of madness once. I hate gush, and passion, at its broadest, does not interest me; it is too much like a destination and not enough like a feeling. Since I will have none of it, passionate people tire me to excess. I have intensity instead. You should try living with that, my friend. Mine is not exotic mittel-European angst, but more intemperate, fuelled by anxieties that are on a holding pattern in the stratosphere. Every now and then I have to be among true believers. What helps me find my bearings in the work I do? What is worth taking up the responsibilities of authority to try to accomplish and what not? Over the body of Desdemona, Othello says, `I have done the state some service.' Like the Moor, I serve the state, well I think, despite a rise that is less than meteoric. Regulations, policies and what have you are the shoals and cays among which I must steer my little craft, careful of how I trim her sails, watchful of the weather. What others regard as frustrating is a challenge to my wits. Sometimes I pretend to myself that I am the Iron Duke, after Waterloo, and say, `It was a damned near thing.' A long while ago I discovered that if you cannot change policy, you can at least make sure you implement it circumspectly. If you are efficient, and I am, it is possible to appropriate a satisfying degree of autonomy. Right under the nose of the Director-General, I was head-hunted by the World Bank for a consultancy that netted me more salary than the D-G's, and was accomplished on the sly. An organization which is dominated by a male hierarchy has the acuity of a dinosaur; the corporate bottom-feeders are too preoccupied with whatever it is they do all day (meetings, I've heard) to notice much. Should I add that I make it a rule never to take on a fight I cannot win? My organization is quite full of make-my-day exigencies; you would be surprised. In the bullpen I am known to be fearless. Why not? It's like pulling the wings off a fly, if you want the unvarnished truth. Either you have the stomach for it, LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 15 or you do not. I am tractable enough until obstructed by stupidity or inefficiency; both make me cross. These days, people have the good sense to stay out of my way and let me get on with things. `We cannot live our dreams. We are lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts we can feel that it has been nobly done.' Thanking you Oliver Wendell Holmes. From time to time I have the chance to give a sample of my best. Accomplishments? Modest increments, in the main. For example, my organization has no policy addressing Pacific island languages. Beginning in 1986, I began to channel small amounts of money into anything which supported the vernacular. Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Western Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Niue, the Cook Islands have now have sufficient desk-top publishing skills and technology to produce books in the vernacular. The tide is not turned, but the decline in languages, some seriously under threat, has stabilized. People are fighting back. I detest having to work on any project where I am not in at the conceptual level; this has little to do with control and everything to do with credibility. Taking over someone else's aid program half way through disturbs my equilibrium because I am uncertain about cohesion and viability. My sense of authority rests on knowing how solid the ground is; programs have holes, and it is my job to know where they are. What is my portion, my particular talents, strengths, weaknesses as well as the factors and conditions which determine aspects of my capacity, the nature of the time in which I live and so forth? As for the times in which we live, I think this: we are in the death throes of the modern age. I shouldn't wonder if we end up back in the evolutionary potting shed. Modernism has run out of juice, quite, and the signs are everywhere. The question we must ask ourselves is: what next? I'm voting for another Golden Age. Since my earliest labours were in the mines of language, I own a large, writerly affection for words. A strength: I have a knack for turning pigsties into palaces. People say I am bereft of malice. Weaknesses include doing things to excess because I lack moderation altogether. I would rather initiate something than carry it through, and have a kind of siege mentality, which means I cannot tolerate criticism and tend to collect slights. For the longest time I thought he was keeping something back. `Teach me the trick,' I said to my shrink. `Mine has been a life of saying yes when no would have been better, and vicky verka, plus I never know where to put the bastards (I meant boundaries). Teach me.' When he said no, it was not a matter of teaching I knew him as a liar. There was no doubt boundaries were among the missing, else why had I invested so much in control? Behind the drawbridge however, one has the illusion of safety; besides, who is there to contradict? (You have to construct a retreat beyond the mortar fire of sundry intimacies). Whatever might remedy my boundary-less state was beyond my imagining. I watched other people with a genuine puzzlement: did they get something from the placenta that I did not? It takes a while to realize that their energy is not being vaporized, that they do not harbour enough rage and humiliation to bring down the sodding firmament. LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 16 When my father died this is what happened: with a frightful patience I settled in to wait. Why not? What I thought was he's just lost somewhere, and set out on journeys mighty and middling to track him down. (For these infringements I was punished, so it brought me more than a peck of trouble). Later, when we moved to Narrabri, I worried that he would not know where to find me. It took an age for hope to die off, and to know with a terrible certainty that he was never coming back. I expect the deafness that afflicted me then was a sort of ritual vandalism to the self. A piquant situation, no? There was progress though; finally, finally, I stopped peeing the bed, though not, they tell me, restless sleeps, the nights of mewling communications with nothing; like a herd of sickly cats, it was said. But, you see, a damaged child, as I was then, who clings to recovery like a limpet mine, has a wall between herself and rottenness, between herself and longing for a dead old man, between herself and the destitution of despair. I never knew to protest, to give up my dreamed-on avidity for the future. That is the measure of me then, and I daresay, now -a grim little inventory of plucky smiles and politeness. So. In my lexicon, abandonment bulks larger than love. Plus, when you have the sheer bad luck of getting stuck with the gin-inspired lunacies of alcoholics and their slow-motion suicide, you will absorb ratbaggery -to wit, an emotional register that veers from passive to hostile with no middle ground to speak of. In short, you are about as stable as liquid nitrogen. You understand -do you? -that it was difficult to fashion a self that is composed of crispy, laundered edges. It matters not that I hate booze. A colder fact is that I may as well have been a cupboard tippler (my mother, as it happens); a dignified, self-righteous abstention hasn't saved me from the effects of the bottle. For most of my life I have been as anxious as a cat at its ninth termination. Precisely what is so threatening? This: that there will never be enough, of anything; love is a Will O' the Wisp, never coming any nearer than the moon. Might have needed it, but want it? Nahr. Price too fucken high, Mista. What my kind learn is that love is a bummer. Still we bellow Gimmegimmegimme! Like living with Kaiser Bill, that. The pity of it is, sooner or later you contaminate everything; you become a toxic dump. Ironically, people will mistake the result for someone of independent spirit. O my God. What it masks is a fundamental inability to relate in a healthy way to man or beast. Sorta rules out intimacy, don't it? A further cause for despair: even had I wanted to learn, it was already too late. A capacity for intimacy is something you acquire early, like baby teeth. Should I carry a leper's bell: Unclean! Unclean! Almost by accident I realized that when someone is invading, anxiety darn near snaps my head off (the old reptilian brain, up to the usual). Ergo, I reason, if I am feeling threatened, then probably it is because there is violation afoot. From this I deduce it is bound to be boundary plonking time. Elementary, my dear Watson. Now that I have hang of it, I barrel about with the opprobrium of those model trains, plonking down parameters and stop-signs and what-have-you. If you must know, they look like those yellow-stripey things the roadmenders use. The oddest thing: I kept saying to the shrink, `When I walk now, my feet aren't quite on the ground. I feel floaty.' For six weeks I told him this, then I got used to waking up to floaty-ness and LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 17 stopped thinking it might leave. It took an age to understand that this was wholeness; this was the end of the siege! In its stead came something calm and generative which replenishes itself nightly at some secret well during my sleeps. No longer afraid of others because I need rescue, no longer hating them because I am so poorly provisioned, I am intact at last. Glory! Glory! Listen, I wrote the book on manipulation; one does, my dear, when one's back is to the wall. And alas, there was no indignity I did not court. I have begged, yes. I have waited until my stock of hope has been all but exhausted. I have persisted in the face of outright rejection, denial and aloofness, never knowing when to turn back, or how. I have been dismissed, stood up, abandoned and rebuked until my damn head has reeled. I have waited when it has gone against every instinct in me, when it cost me all of my dignity and most of my self respect (O, ashes in my mouth!) and until I have wept in despair. I have kept on when I thought just one more day of it would turn me to stone. All of this has been in the name of a blighted quest to be whole. Every encounter was booby-trapped. In the end, you lose because whoever is selling you the stuff might cut off the supply, a fear so preposterous that you must provoke a scene where there is repudiation and wounding of a high order. The irony is, the better the stuff you are on, the more you sweat. Of course, a solution is to hook up with someone you do not care for much, and then you have nothing to lose. Once I made a marriage on these grounds once; the affair did not prosper. The hunger (your actual feeding frenzy) for all those goodies that life has denied (ie the stuff I couldn't get my hands on for keeps) is hardcore, hence there have been bouts of gunboat diplomacy. A taste for cannibalism is not what makes things dangerous in the water, Hunny. Have a care. Lovers I have known, but lotsa times it was a ploy to get them to be Papa for a while. I can remember basking in my father's gaze. Cry of the vanquished: it is like being a blind person who can remember the light. I have asked myself whether it is less cruel to be born sightless, not to know what you are missing. My shrink said no, it is better to remember. No longer do I search the horizon for the cavalry because now I am this clever clogs with a bunch of boundaries under her arm. Oh, and did I mention that I have come off self-help books for good? Resigned from my very last twelve-step program? I kept looking for answers, right? (higher education rewards stalwarts who take a tidy, problem-solving approach to life). This means for decades you are down a dead-end, missing the obvious, which is meanwhile signalling away from the pit of your being like some frantic, malfunctioning radio beacon. Eventually I picked up the beeps. I've kicked self-hatred, too. Heavens if this keeps up, I'll be just too normal for words. Shall I, do you think, be expected to give up dreaming? I believe I have no gift for friendship; certainly I neglect what friends remain to me (lifers do not complain, but latecomers do). Perhaps it is leisure that I have no knack for (my shrink again; last vacation? try 1983). My complaint is this: I do not know anyone who wants to do things that I find interesting. Meeting friends for coffee, gossip, a show, an exhibition or whatever bores me to sobs. I start feeling trapped after three milliseconds. I think it has something to do with a threshold of boredom LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 18 that is about level with my nose. I have learned about boundaries, yes, I have learned how to be safe with people, but that is not the same as wanting to be with them. In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellowmen, with few exceptions, are worthless. It was S. Freud said this. Surprise! Do I hold with Freud? No. I'm with Beckett, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for a body of work that has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation. Now that is a notion of surpassing strangeness. It may seem that I have not addressed the topic in with an eye for the specifics of the task; I would claim to have found my way though most of what is required, putting emphases where best they illuminate, and leaving aside those aspects that do not yield to my touch. In an obstinate way, I have wanted to put boundaries in the context of slabs of life, and not of events as such because it is always the broader picture that draws me. I am not one for snapshots. ??? LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 19 Living Without a Mission or Task Jill F. Kealey McRae STM-118: GROUP B Exercising Authority: Power, Strategy and Voice LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 20 GUESS WHO CAME TO DINNER? Everyone is at the table except her, the chair empty. From time to time the people talk to each other from but she forgets to listen, afraid of what she might hear. The only thing more dangerous than staying invisible is to be noticed. There is nothing left of her from that time because she was invisible. After the accident, for a long time the purblinded eye is covered by a patch, white, gauze, soft. It is the best way to be. She likes the bandage because other people can see that part. `Sorry,' they murmur, and she wonders if she should be too. She does many wrong things. All the time she is bad. She has done something so terrible she must be punished over and over. Even the dreaminess offends. She must never be allowed. She guards against wanting things, knows that books are better than people. They do not speak her name, except in rebuke. The sound of her name is as frightening as hands, or the dark. Her existence is a secret. Nobody knows her except the dead. They think it is her at the table, but it is not. She failed to thrive, and someone else came on in her place, some other child, who is not to be cared for. The first one knew too much, had to cease, because of remembering. You must not remember in case it makes you sick and you die. Anyway, off she went, on the lookout, never to return. So now there are three at the table, and not four, as we might suppose. It's okay though because she does not know there are other ways to be. She thinks everyone is like this. She is afraid only of being caught, or of hot migrainey afternoons when light and pain are one, times that are not to be spoken of. The wretchedness is her affair. It does not matter. Someone might come, she thinks. One day. ??? LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 21 Expanding My Repertoire Jill F. Kealey McRae STM-118: GROUP B Exercising Authority: Power, Strategy and Voice LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 22 What have I learned from my participation in the large class and from my role in the small group about the limits of my own repertoire with regard to speaking and acting with authority? A few weeks ago I did a voice analysis during our large class, listing all uses of words like fear, anxious, afraid, nervous, etc; there were fifteen over about half an hour. May we conclude from this that something nasty is abroad and it lurks in Room 150? I do not ask what people are afraid of, but wonder that it has this county's best and finest on the ropes. Whatever is propelling the dynamic in 150, it is bringing few blessings, and hovers, stalled, invasive and untouchable. I like to say my say, but for the last two sessions have kept to silence because I cannot see up ahead. I sit close in and watch like a cat over a mouse hole. For what? I am watching people who are seduced by that flirty old whore called Revelation. It is a giddying dance, the waltzers whirling on by, pulled away at the very last moment by forces they cannot stare down. My own voice is brash with daring, though, from time to time leads me where I had not thought to go. Once I found grief, my old companion-of-the-road, waiting at the bend. Up from the bleachers I called him a name and then wept a little in surprise. To think I had forgotten! I do not mind taking a hundred people at time in to where my hurts live, though this does not mean I trust them to understand. I do it because I am a woman, and have not learned to counterfeit disclosure. Last year I interviewed five women (May their tribe increase!) who are survivors of the Holocaust. They showed me how it was they achieved the salvage of their battered, clandestine but unsurrendered faith. If one exempts the more timid memories, what they gave utterance to were heart-stopping tales, at once so tough-minded, at once so audacious, as to outrun all our ideas of women's lives. My innermost instincts were in the capture of details which, once heard, have become ineradicable. This is the belly of the beast. They took into it, with no thought of courting my compassion -nothing so fickle -but because they were asking me to bear witness, to be there while they remembered. Against terrible odds these women, no more than girls at the time, had prevailed, their success signifying the hopeful things that confirm faith in our own humanity, reminding us that in the darkest night of the human soul, some light could be made to flicker. It cannot be received as a right state of affairs to ignore this reality; we would do so at our peril because we would be marginalizing the staple fare of courage and its entourage. This it too much to banish from our agenda as thinkers and feelers. I have encountered the strength of my own sex and know it as very nearly shocking. I make this claim not as one bent on creating new sanctities, but because exceptional deeds merit recognition; it violates our sense of due proportion to have it otherwise. And so, when I speak up in class, I am acknowledging five women who are now living in the very suburban, apparently benign civilization of greater Boston. I am asking people to witness, nothing more. In a modest, private way, I am celebrating my strength and voice because five women who were strangers taught me that this is the way women are. LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 23 Who can I learn from in the class or small group about directions to expand my repertoire? Sometimes I find myself thinking, They are Americans, and must behave like this, and live in a state of anxious growth. It is as if their brains undergo a profound molecular re-arrangement because this is their home. At such moments a gulf of indifference separates me from the class, and I feel yarded off and inherently alien and sullen. Always I think of the class as they, not we. It is better in the small group where I say many vulgar things in a carrying voice and laugh a lot, and where, despite my customary caution, I seem to be making friends. I like it best when we are jolly and unguarded and share the erratic trajectories of growth and experience. In this respect, latterly, we four women are setting the pace and daring the blokes to keep up, though (and this is not to carp) that would require more investment in candour than they have hitherto been willing to make. What do they know how to do that you do not? They know the secret language of the Americans, the arcana of alliance behaviours and tactical and strategic moves. These I can manage convincingly in my own milieu because I have internalized the axioms; here I must guess my way through encounters large and small, hoping not to embarrass myself. These things are what the Americans know and I do not. Perhaps, if I liked it here, I would trouble to catch on, to assemble a cheat-sheet, but I don't, you see. Instead I parade my difference because it offers me an excuse for not trying to crack the code. Every now and then (quite often, the truth be told) I bash people over the head with a hammed-up, stage Australianness that would make those who know me at home hoot with derision. It is a form of homesickness, and I confess this as one who will not return to Australia for a very long time. I miss Sydney, but not my life there. I cannot like America, but enjoy my life here. It is a paradox that is not without its comic moments. In my small group people know how not to be surprised by academic life here. Often they condemn aspects of the larger class, to which I listen-up. This is because I am trying to understand what passes muster, what does not. Keepers of the flame, they brave the thickets of political correctness that bedevil every dialogue, sooner or later. Observing this exhausts my patience (not my long suite, it must be said). Seen through the distorting lens of their lives and milieu, America is a place of surpassing strangeness. They know why our teacher is angry with us most of the time and why he is not kind. They know why Terry makes her voice harsh. Do I see any parallels between my behaviour in the large class and my behaviour in my work life regarding authority relationships? What have I noticed about how other people in the large class relate to the instructors as authorities? Are these behaviours similar in any way to the attitudes and behaviours of people in your own organization toward the authorities there? Oh dear. I see this about the large class: it is taxed by those who have not yet made essential connections between living and feeling and thinking. I have given up hope, quite, of hearing about what LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 24 I most need to connect with -their lives. Let me explain: As the graduate of ALANON, I have this to say about twelve-step programs: they make a listener of you. Whatever their limitations, the programs are redeemed by the skills which they engender, and listening is paramount. The children of alcoholics will go to any lengths to avoid a central fact of their existence: it is their lot to be parented by those who are indifferent to them; when lives are reduced to the next drink, all else is secondary. Since denial is something I have a flair for, my avoidance of this reality went on until I was, oh, middle-aged, I suppose. So. By the time you sidle in to your first ALANON meeting, hoping not to meet anyone you know, your self-delusion is already rusted out. You sit. Someone begins to speak and you hear a stranger telling your life, coruscated slabs dragged holus bolus into the light of day. Know this: at ALANON meetings those who speak have the unassailable authority of people driven to locate coherence, so that their lives might become more liveable. There is a roomful of people listening as if their futures had vanished entire, and they have this moment only. The way a bulimic craves food, they want the equation of authenticity, as little by little they learn to connect feeling and thinking with experience. In the pin-drop quiet their listening is palpable because it is a lifeline. Though they be strangers to you, they envelop you in the intimacy of needs and longing. In such a place you may not dissemble without knowing yourself at once as an impostor and fraud. ALANON is where I learned a way of saying things so they mean more than words. I am enough of a bellwether to want this to happen in Room 150 because all else is dross, mere bagatelle. Authenticity is an important way of enabling, and if my voice is authentic it is because it observes the corollary between thinking, feeling and experience. Perhaps unconsciously I have hoped to show by example. Perhaps I thought this: I will speak as I try to understand and know -by observing the equation, though not in a self-conscious, finicky fashion, but as one allowing things to connect in their own way. Instead of joining me, my fellow students have chosen to thank me instead. I am so glad you shared that, they say, planting themselves in front of me when I least expect it. (Really, it is more disconcerting than you would think, since an appropriate reply is something I must fumble for). What I want to say is: Would it surprise you to know that I do not want your gratitude, that I do not wish it at all? It is your company I desire. I want you to take your imagination and your courage out of the shallow end! I came hoping to know the Americans. There is nothing self-seeking or voyeuristic about my curiosity; understanding how other people go about their lives is a way of thinking about my own. I thought, Here we have the nation's brightest, and they will show me their lives. I will know them better this way than from books and movies; in this manner, we will learn about each other, make friends, even. Adroitly they turn everything into an issue right before my eyes. Or they tell me what they are feeling until I feel as though I am at a Baptist revival meeting. Feelings are not enough. Neither am I interested in those who behave as though in holy orders for some New Wave thing. Only sometimes do the people in Room 150 talk of experiences; for the most part there is little coherence and even less LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 25 authenticity. I have stopped listening for it. Such are the lacuna, I quickly lose my way. By way of explanation they say this: It is not safe to speak out. He has made it unsafe for us. They mean our teacher. Yet this very ordinary man is someone who once repeated before an assembly of his peers an age-old oath: I will do no harm... My classmates need a petty tyrant, un monstre, so have turned him into someone he is not. Having a Svengali to deal with excuses one's own timidity, no? It dignifies one's failure to seize the moment, to defy Daddy, to send in the assault troops, to climb Everest, and so on. Whether out of conceit or ignorance, I do not know, but these classmates of mine cannot find their way to old words like love and desire and evil and goodness and anger. Taxing my patience sorely, they bury them under muddied, fashionable terminology, all the time wishing the simple ones gone because they are frightened of their power. Perhaps it is that they have not born witness, in silence and immobility, to great suffering. I have been with women who have lived on will alone. I have witnessed; it is my human credential par excellence, and it has taught me that living is not the same as analysing. I never live by talking, or teach by it either. The Heifetz experience is making me acknowledge the source of my authority -that I am unafraid to be authentic, and to take others to the heart of the matter -something which has escaped my notice hitherto. I have a catchment of humility, but that catchment is not for the workplace. And if I am arrogant it is because there is nobody with the wit or wisdom to pare down all my rinds; I have seen too many emperors starkers. In my work life I am known as a chancer, a maverick, and a bit of a heller, but perhaps that will not surprise you. It is difficult to frighten someone who has been to the kingdom of the damned and come back alive. I will not be silenced. The upper echelon is often discombobulated by this someone -me! -who is often brazen. Like a cat with a facility for seeing in the dark, I have an instinct for knowing how far I may go, and then pushing past it, just a tad. The disrespect which Australians bear towards authority is legendary, and irreverence is part of the nation's DNA, like an extra chromosome. For example, during both world wars, the AIF is on record as behaving as a rabble because the enlisted men would not salute the British officers; indeed sometimes they did not salute their own. Waltzing Matilda celebrates sheep-stealing and in our catalogue of heroes a bushranger hanged for killing a trooper is king. It is my belief, for which, admittedly, empirical evidence is rather shaky, that a fundamental difference separates our attitude towards authority from that of the Americans. We are ruthlessly egalitarian, often to our detriment. We prospered in isolation for so long, you see; we were a populous, independent people before ever we had sufficient contact with the rest of the world to understand that being high-born counted for something. In my organization it is taken for granted that you will exercise a healthy contempt for authority. From time to time we have had poor bosses, with the result that the staff has consolidated, and taken the running of the place into its own hands. Why not? We are a satellite, separated from our parent organization in the nation's capital. It makes for more autonomy, more room to manoeuvre, than we could otherwise expect. Constantly threatened with closure, we have developed a survivor's instinct for LEADERSHIP ? AUTHORITY: PEARLS 26 negotiation and alliance-building. To be perfectly blunt, our institutional intelligence is acute, and we dance rings around the Canberra juggernaut. In dedicating a portion of our corporate acuity to outwitting HQ, we are, it must be said, besting a not-very-clever dragon. The people in Room 150 would like to outwit our teachers but are handicapped by a fear of what might happen should they storm the bastions. The tension in the classroom is generated by people who are frustrated by impotence; and in focussing so much on le monstre, they are, of course, excusing themselves from getting on with the realpolitik of dealing with a power struggle of their own manufacture. Hence, they are donating our teachers limitless amounts of authority, and then falling into a resentful, carping huddle as a consequence. It is all rather tiresome. They have caused our teachers to metamorphose into creatures who embody their worst doubts and suspicions. A fear of failure courses like a river through all this, freighting its own coercions and discords. In order to trust, my classmates must let go. Since the investment cannot be controlled once that happens, it is a risk only a very few are prepared to take. ??? PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT :)