Loving Monday – The Compassionate Enterprise

I’m originally from New Orleans, a Nawlins boy born and raised. But I haven’t lived there since I graduated from college, and that was…a long time ago. But my mother still lives there, in the same house since 1956; my older brother lives in what is now a northern suburb across Lake Pontchartrain; and I have relatives all over the city.

In late August of 2005, I was at a school function for parents. And I was thankful that New Orleans had been largely spared from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, particularly since my then-82-year-old mother and her older sister had refused to evacuate and decided to stay together in my mother’s house. I was listening to a presentation when my BlackBerry buzzed with a message from my younger brother, who lives in Houston. This is what the message said: “The levee on the 17th Street Canal has been breached. There are also reports that the London Avenue Canal has been breached.”

I knew exactly what that message meant. Exactly. New Orleans was flooding. The city had not been spared. It was everyone’s worst fears realized. The 17th Street Canal was a border between New Orleans and suburban Metairie, and it meant that some of the wealthiest parts of the metro area were flooding. The London Avenue Canal bordered the Ninth Ward, and it meant that some of the poorest sections of the city were flooding.

Then another message from my brother: the St. Charles Parish levee on Lake Pontchartrain had been breached. I knew what that one meant, too. The airport runways were going to flood. And possibly my mother’s house, which had survived every hurricane large and small for the previous 50 years without a drop of water inside the house.

The next five days were a nightmare. And my company, my Fortune 500 company that many people love to hate, demonstrated a depth of corporate and individual compassion that still amazes me.

The company has a large manufacturing plant on the river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The plant had done a phenomenal job of shutting down and protecting the facility before Katrina arrived. But a third of the plant’s employees – more than 200 people – lost their homes because of Katrina. They had no place to live, not even with relatives because a lot of their relatives were in the same predicament. So the company brought in trailers for all of the employees and their families. A fund was created for employees to contribute to help those who had lost their homes. The company made a large and generous donation to the Red Cross for relief efforts. And employees from the manufacturing plant who had boats became part of the rescue flotilla, pulling people from atop flooded homes and buildings.

And then there was me, a total basket case trying to figure out how to get my mother and aunt out of the city. Miraculously, while she lost electricity (normal for a hurricane) and water (not normal; water pipes had broken everywhere), she still had phone service (erratic but she had it) and her house did not flood. The flooding stopped a few blocks away. That week, my boss let me work the internet and the phone to get them out of there, track down other family members (scattered from Florida to Texas and as far north as Ohio) and become a mini-information center for people trying to find family and friends. I didn’t do one lick of company work that week, but I worked 12 to 14 hours a day.

We got them out; a neighbor who had evacuated to Lafayette snuck past the military and police roadblocks to check on his house. He took my mother and aunt to my nephew’s house in Lafayette, and my brother eventually got them to Houston.

And my company, well, my company demonstrated its compassion and generosity. It’s a side most people don’t see – the side that sent donations and resources when tsunamis hit southern Asia, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and when the earthquakes struck Haiti and Chile. It’s what the company does.

(Over at the High Callings Blogs, we’re discussing John D. Beckett’s Loving Mondays: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul. The discussion is led by Laura Boggess. This week, we’re focused on chapters 15 through 17, covering the ideas of the compassionate enterprise, extraordinary service and giving something back. Check here for last week’s discussion.)

Related posts:

Join today's discussion at HCB: What I Hold in My Hands.

L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone: You a Philanthropist?

A Different Story: Risky Business

A Picture Tells a Story

A few short years before the Impressionists burst upon the French art world, Edouard Manet painted a work entitled "The Dead Christ with Angels," and at first glance it seems a profoundly Christian treatment. But is it? There's some ambiguities about this painting that hold a caution for us today. See my post at The Christian Manifesto for the story behind the painting.

The Dead Christ with Angels, 1864, Edouard Manet. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Virtual (Good) Reading

I read lot of stuff online (ask my wife). I will admit to having 200+ sites in my RSS reader, and I check my blog roll on Blogger (some overlap between the two but not much). And I follow links that look interesting. Not everything I run across is good, of course, but it’s usually fairly easy to tell. I found a lot of good things this week.

Poems, for example. I love reading poems; I love finding them in unexpected places and coming from unexpected people. Here are only a few:
• Nancy’s “goodnight” – short, simple and with a beautiful illustration. She’s a poet with words and a poet with a camera.
• Two by Justinian at Discount Verbiage (although he calls his blog something else) – “Taliessin in the School of the Poets” and “On Continuing to Grieve” (this one is beautiful). I came across his blog several weeks ago because of a comment he made at another blog, namely the one by
• Phoenix-Karenee. This week she posted “Adrenaline,” which I loved.
• Two by Kathleen Overby: “Bottle Cries” and “Shattered Glass.”
• “How Arguments Go,” by my friend Maureen Doallas.
• Pencil Drawn and Paper Grown: Poems by Heather Truett. This isn’t a blog post; it’s a book of poems by one of our TweetSpeak Poetry jammers. I include it here because I found it linked from Heather’s blog.
• Sarah Salter’s blog post “For Girls Only: Naked.” In this post, Sarah combines poetry, prose – and pain. And it’s not for girls only.

Then I found two short stories, or actually, one short story and one five-part short-short story.
• “The Herd” by Bart Schaneman. Bart is a young writer originally from Nebraska. At his blog, Rain Follows the Plow, he writes short stories about his home state.
• “Mama Kept Staring,” by my friend Jim Schmotzer, posted at this blog, The Faithful Skeptic. For five days, Jim posted successive parts of his short story (so up need to “read up” from the first post on Feb 28).

And then the prose. There is so much good prose being written that this short list won’t do it justice. Some of it is serious; some is funny; all of it is good.
• “An Invitation to Hell,” by Billy Coffey, one of the best storytellers writing on the web. He has a novel called Snow Day being published later this year. This blog post is about writing, which lately he’s been writing about on Fridays. Writing about writing, that is.
• “Being Unintentionally Hilarious,” a blog post by Kathy Richards at Hey Look, A Chicken! Kathy is known as Katdish on Twitter, and if don’t follow her, you better. She rules. She also rocks.
• Two by author Athol Dickson. I’m a fan of Dickson’s. I love his novels, and in fact just finished River Rising this past week. He wrote a guest article for Novel Journey entitled "Forgotten Beauty," and it is good. On his blog, he posted “The American church is dying, and to save it we must join it.” And it is good, too.
• “They Are Listening,” a blog post by Erin at Together for Good. Erin is also one of our TweetSpeak Poetry jammers. All I can say is, she has an oldest son who sounds a lot like my oldest son, 24 years ago.
• “I Am Canadian,” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy. OK, so the Canadian hockey team won the Olympic gold medal. I mean, it’s just a medal, right? It’s just a game. We’ll get over it. Maybe. In the meantime you can read one Canadian’s soul-stirring tribute to her country, and (if you're an American) you won't feel so bad about who lost.

I Saw a Man, Walking

I saw a man, walking.
Not tall or short; not
fat or thin; no distinct
features, but
a shining blur, a
luminous presence. He
called to me, that
blur, that presence; his
hand, shimmering like
sunlit glass,
reached toward me.
Slowly my hand extended; I
reached to that shimmer and
saw the mirror, a darkness
surrounded by fire,
consumed by light.

I saw a man, standing.


Photograph by nAncY of Poems and Prayers. Used with permission.

The 21st Day of Community: Susan Etole

When things get hectic, or I need to calm down, or just be quiet, a good place to start is Just…A Moment, a site (and a person) I noted in a short paragraph summary in December but one I keep returning to over and over.

Just…A Moment is the blog site of Susan Etole. She lives in Minnesota – and you can tell by the photos she takes – lots of snow. And she takes absolutely beautiful photos.

But it’s what she does with the photos that are so special. Using few words, she wraps sounds and sights together, simply, elegantly and, yes, spiritually. Her posts are always like this.

Take, for example, the one she posted yesterday, entitled “Transitions.” The words are few and simple: “Sometimes the end of a thing is the beginning of something very beautiful.” The five photos posted with them are spectacularly clear. But you have to step back from the words and the photos to see them as a whole, and therein is the great thing she does – she creates poetry with those few words and those beautiful pictures. I’m in awe.

Another example: “Something to Ponder,” again, a short sentence and photos of the moon. Or a birthday song to her son – heartfelt words and a series of pictures of baby shoes. Just stunning. Or her post entitled “Kindness Leads” -- wonderful words, photos of a bird at a bird feeder. (You see lots of photos of birds on Susan’s blog, and she must sit for a long time to get exactly those photos.)

Just…A Moment is what I call a ministry, because it ministers to all who come there. You arrive at the site, and you immediately find yourself, as she says in About Me, “in the midst of quietness.” Sometime, I’d like to sit with Susan and talk, basking in the quiet conversation, and basking in the quiet.

Visit Just…A Moment and find out for yourself.

(In December, a number of us participating in the “Twelve Days of Community” - see the button at the top right - sponsored by The High Calling Blogs. The purpose was to highlight the blog or web site of someone other than ourselves during the season of Advent and Christmas. I liked the idea so much that I’m continuing to do that each week -- highlight a blog or web site of a person whose thoughts and writing have had an impact on me and others.)

Christa Parrish's "Watch Over Me"

Benjamin Patil is a sheriff’s deputy, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who is still struggling with the death of his best friend there. His wife, Abbi, is almost the antithesis of what one would expect a soldier’s wife to be – a peace activist who protested against the war her husband was fighting in, a health food advocate who has a serious eating disorder, and a wife who didn’t tell her husband until after they were married that she couldn’t have children. The Patils’ marriage is disintegrating, and the wonder is why it’s lasted as long as it has.

And There’s Matthew, a teenager who’s deaf and communicates by writing. Abandoned by his mother, he lives with his aunt and four cousins. Matthew is smart, the caretaker for his aunt’s family, a geek kind of kid whose gentle spirit has somehow survived a variety of adverse circumstances.

Then Benjamin finds a newborn baby abandoned in a plastic bag, and the lives of Benjamin, Abbi and Matthew will change forever.

Christa Parrish’s Watch Over Me didn’t turn out to be the kind of novel I expected. Instead of a straightforward romance, I found an incredibly fine novel and incredibly fine writing. I found characters I came to know and care about. And I found a story that absorbed me to the point that I had to finish it at 12:30 in the morning, long after I should have gone to sleep.

Parrish does not deliver the expected. She takes her story down paths that leave the reader wondering – and wanting to know more. She draw characters that are real, people whom you think you can reach out and touch, people who talk and behave and love and dream like real people do. And she writes about hope and forgiveness in a thoughtful and original way.

Now I have to order and read her first novel, Home Another Way. Watch Over Me is that good – you want to read everything this author has written.

What Is a Person Worth?

At the end of chapter 11 of Loving Mondays: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul, John D. Beckett says this:

“I’m convinced most employees want to see their companies prosper. They know their success depends on their employer’s success, and they will work hard to contribute. But they must be provided a dignified and supportive work environment. They must be viewed as valued, important, worthy. They bear God’s own image. If they are of infinite worth in his eyes, they certainly deserve no less from us than profound respect” (page 92).

Years ago, when I first became a “people leader,” I had all of three days to prepare for a people review session coupled with succession planning. As we gathered together for an all-afternoon meeting, things went much as I expected them to, except when we began to discuss one of my two new direct reports.

“Big Boss wants John fired,” my boss said.

What?

“He thinks he does mediocre work at best. We have to do something.”

Then the person John had reported to for five years before me spoke up. “Yeah, John’s a real problem,” she said. “It’s probably best that he leave.” Other heads around the table nodded in agreement. The HR person sat quietly, not saying a word.

I first had to resist an urge to reach across the table and slap John’s old supervisor. Then I said, “And how many times has John been told this in his performance reviews? How many times has he been told his performance is lacking? How many times over the past five years (a figurative instead of a literal slap) has he not gotten a bonus because of performance problems?”

Silence. An uncomfortable silence.

“The answer to all of those questions is zero, right?”

“It doesn’t matter,” my boss said. “He has to go.”

“I’m not going to fire him until he’s been told he has performance problems and is given the opportunity to improve.”

“I think that’s the wisest course,” the HR person said.

“You’re wasting your time,” my boss told me.

“You’re probably right,” I said. “But I have to do it this way.” I knew John’s performance problems as well as anyone. I knew them better, in fact, because I had done that kind of work and job before.

So I had a conversation with John, and explained the problem. He was surprised but not shocked. He had felt people’s expectations for him were low. And he struggled to do things better but was never given any guidance.

So we agreed on a 90-day plan. Part of that plan was for him to get himself familiar with a radically new approach to the work – which was one of the reasons I’d been put in charge of the team. There were other things he had to do as well. We had weekly check-in meetings to look at progress.

At the end of the 90-day plan, we had a talk. And I asked him how he thought he did. “I feel like I did great on some things,” he said, explaining. And I agreed. “But on others, like the new way to get the work done, I feel like I missed the boat. I see what you’re asking for, but it’s just not me.” And I agreed with that, too, asking him what he thought the next steps should be. “I need to find another job,” he said, “either here or elsewhere. But I expect you’re probably going to need to get someone in this job pretty quickly.”

Three weeks later, John left the company. We worked out a severance package of three months pay and medical benefits until COBRA kicked in. A few months after leaving, John found a job he was much better suited for.

The HR person asked me why I went through all the hassle, time and trouble when everyone, including me, knew what the outcome was going to be.

“You won’t like my answer,” I said.

“Try me,” the HR person said.

“Because I believe every one of us is made in God’s image, and because of that, we each have the same inherent value in God’s eyes. It doesn’t mean that our skills and abilities and talents are the same. And it doesn’t mean we all perform the same. But it means that I have to value people like God does, and treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve. And John deserved dignity and respect.”

HR didn’t know what to say.


Over at the High Callings Blogs, we’re discussing Beckett’s Loving Mondays. The discussion is led by Laura Boggess. This week, we’re focused on chapters 12 through 14, covering the ideas of individual value or worth, the blueprints for our lives, and trouble finding us at work. Check here for last week’s discussion.

Related posts:

High Calling Blogs: Blueprint (this week's discussion on Loving Mondays)
Monica Sharman's Snowflakes and Fingerprints
L.L. Barkat's Loving Mondays: Blueprints
Lyla Lindquist's Loving Monday: What are we doing here?