St Thomas Roasters In the Afternoon

The west hanover shop is quiet in the afternoons. Bad for business but good for meetings.

I came here to meet with Pastor Joel for our regular weekly meeting, but I'm guessing that he is tied up with two new babies in the last 72 hours. This location and the location in Lingelstown for St Thomas are where I like to have my meetings. Meeting people in public is about a couple of things for me - transparency of almost all that I do, not forcing people to meet me on my terms on my turf and lastly my hatred of institutional ivory towers.

This period of my life reminds me a lot of the two years I worked and taught at rpi, it is a lot less ferentic and a lot more contemplative, though stress levels are the same just different. What RPI taught me in those two years was the value of engagement and the valuelessness of institutional loyalty.

Like all institutions RPI was an ivory tower filled with people who believed that you had to come to their office to get things done. And they never left those offices, from staff to administrators and for the most part the faculty with some noticeable exceptions like Joe Flaherty. In 24 months I taught them the value of roaming the campus to get things done, though despite all of the publishing that was done then it was clear they never appreciated it. How do you know what people are like, what they want, what they need, without going native where they live and work?

Prior to this in the startups of Boston in the early 80's I learned the value of meetings. that the law of diminishing returns applied to them as well, whether it was a consensus building meeting or an authorative meeting, or an instructional meeting. After 60 minutes there was an immense drop off in value. And that was with that generation, i suspect it is less for Derek's generation.

By the late 80's I had added the concept of "one screen thinking", if your email didn't fit into an 80x25 screen (i'm dating myself) then it would never be read, formatted it should fit on one piece of paper double sided in memo form on paper.

I guess I'm having these thoughts because I talked to Seth, and commented on his organization.