Caught Between the Dog and the Fireplug, or How to Survive Public Service by Kenneth H. Ashworth

Author:Kenneth H. Ashworth [Ashworth, Kenneth H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780878408474
Google: EvNKDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1202226
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2001-01-15T06:57:50+00:00

re: More on governing boards

You cannot order people to think. You cannot order people to cooperate. People have to want to do these things.

— Admiral Arleigh Burke

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of an enemy.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

If I agree with you, it’s administration; if I disagree, it’s policy.

— A board member’s comment

OCTOBER

Dear Kim

As I said in my last letter, there is more I need to tell you about working with a board or commission. So I’ll get right to it.

When you get some new members to your governing body, try to meet with them one on one. Go to where they live, visit them in their offices if you can. Get them to tell you about themselves and their interests and what they value most. This will help you to understand them, and by going to them, not having them come to you, you also show them the respect they are entitled to. Let them know you want to meet with them alone to permit them to ask you any questions they might not feel comfortable asking in a group as new board members. Most new board members are a little intimidated as they come on a board that has more seasoned members. They will appreciate the chance to talk with someone privately about the responsibilities they will assume.

I have never failed to learn valuable things about my board members by doing this. One member told me a story over dinner about her family that she later wrote into a book at my urging. Her father, at the age of two, had run out into the streets of New York City when his father was murdered. He was lost, and since his father had just brought him from Germany and he spoke no English, the police could not locate his family. Consequently, he was raised in an orphanage and moved to Texas when a teenager. He had nearly grown children when a colleague sorting mail with him on a train suggested he run an ad in a Chicago German-American newspaper about his childhood. I had goose bumps when my board member told me how an elderly lady in Indiana opened the paper one day and exclaimed, “Ach, Himmel, I think we have found Otto.”

Your first goal with new board members is to gain their trust. You will recall how I told you that I had underestimated the educability of a bloc of new members whom the governor had appointed with instructions to fire me. Perhaps equal to their ability to learn was the trust they grew to have in my staff and me. I’ve sort of been guided by a categorical imperative: Never treat another human being as a means to an end but always as an end in himself. (Kant said something close to that.) I have found that if I always respect my board members, they will rarely if ever use me or abuse my staff or me. And a byproduct of

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