Hasta La Gadget!

By Ives Galarcep, Goal.com

HARRISON, New Jersey – From the time the U.S. national team’s send-off series was announced, the matchup against Turkey was seen as one that would provide the kind of stiff test the Americans would need in order to prepare for the World Cup group of death.

Whether or not Turkey actually provided that stiff competition on Sunday is up for debate, but the U.S. team passed the test comfortably, posting a 2-1 victory at Red Bull Arena thanks to goals from Fabian Johnson and Clint Dempsey.

Johnson scored the first goal of his national team career, running onto a perfect chip pass from Michael Bradley in the 26th minute and slotting home the opener.

Dempsey made it 2-0 in the 52nd minute when a botched clearance attempted by a Turkish defender left him with a look directly in front of goal. Dempsey’s quick reaction helped him beat the Turkish goalkeeper to the ball for the finish.

Jurgen Klinsmann gave several players their first appearance in the World Cup send-off series on Sunday, including John Brooks and Julian Green. Brooks impressed in central defense, playing alongside Geoff Cameron and cutting out several Turkey attacking forays. Green was somewhat quiet, but did appear to draw a penalty only to have the referee wave off demands for a penalty call.

The Turkish team spoiled the shutout in the 90th minute when a handball in the penalty area called against Cameron gave the visiting side a late consolation penalty kick.

The U.S. concludes its World Cup send-off series on Saturday against Nigeria in Jacksonville, Florida.

Charleston Southern University associate professor Paul Roof says the school fired him Friday after his bearded visage appeared on cans of Holy City Brewing’s Chucktown Follicle Brown.

“They said that this was not an image for the Christian environment and that it may seem to students that I am endorsing the use of alcohol,” says Roof, who taught at the university for seven years and also founded the social club Holy City Beard & Moustache Society. HCBMS hosts beard and mustache competitions as charity fundraisers for ovarian cancer patients and their families.

Expectations of volunteers serving on a nonprofit board are often thought to be lower than necessary. Paul T. Hogan, Executive VP of the John R. Oislei Foundation, recently agreed with this position,

Because board members…are volunteering, their time to serve on a board, there is a tremendous hesitancy to ask them…to devote additional time, (especially for learning.) … Respect them enough to teach them what they’ll need to know to (fully) contribute (what they have to offer)*

Hogan’s point is a good one. Management and staff’s continued deference ** to the board can lead to an unhealthy power equilibrium that can weaken the organization’s performance.

Here are some thoughts on the challenges involved:

• The Board-Management Compact: Nonprofit CEOs and staff often feel that they have to defer to boards for various reasons.*** They can view the board as possessing ultimate powers, and its members having unusual insights because of their working positions. Many nonprofit managers, however, have much more management experiences than board members who work as independent contributors such as professors, physicians, attorneys and accountants. Also just because a board member works for a large complex commercial or nonprofit organization doesn’t mean he or she has had management education, experiences or has acquired the strategic know-how necessary to contribute to a state-of-art NFP board.

Excessive deference to the board can, in turn, lead board directors to passively accept lower performance standards, especially when it is a nonprofit with a human service mission, as Hogan has noted. (In some instances, CEOs even prefer this arrangement! It reduces their responsibilities, as a number with whom I have had contact, have openly admitted.) From my decades of experience as a nonprofit director and consultant, I have seen the development of an unwritten compact between nonprofit boards and managements, with each tolerating minimal performance from the other. Where subtly or overtly present, these compacts need to be eliminated in the 21st century. The organization needs a relationship between the two that provides an equal partnership, with a clear trust and respect for the differences in the required roles.

Directors’ Learning:

• Volunteer Time: Currently Baby Boomers and Millennials are the two age groups from which board candidates are being selected. Except for the leading edge of Baby Boomers, now beginning to retire, both cohorts have time-restricted schedules in terms of work-family obligations. Asking them for more time to formally learn about the nonprofit through traditional orientation sessions or classes, in my opinion, has a little potential to develop long-term learning.

There are alternatives that can be adopted. One is to first make certain that the board has a subgroup of directors with experiences in strategy development, management assessment, governance processes and the field of the organization’s mission. Then ask the “veterans” to become informal mentors for newly appointed directors.

Example: Ask these mentors to meet informally, or by phone, with the neophytes to review, for example, governance obligations for due diligence other important issues. (In some cases, the CEO, CFO or other senior managers can become mentors.) After a year, proactively schedule a series of brief convenient conferences or conference calls to enable the new directors to pose unanswered questions and make certain all are reasonably acquired the knowledge needed to effectively contribute. This shouldn’t be an unreasonable task, if about three to four new directors are elected each year.

• Teachable Moments: During the course of board meeting or committee meetings, issues can arise on which new directors may have little background. It should be the obligation for the board chair or committee chairs, prior to or after the meeting, to make certain that new directors are properly briefed in a non-judgmental manner on these issues.

Recently, I encountered a nonprofit board where the board chair, an experienced senior business executive devoted to the organization’s mission, privately complained that there was no one on the board who understood strategy development. The board was largely composed of millennials stressed with work-family obligations. They completed specific helpful time-limited projects in professional manners but just couldn’t find time to become involved in the essences of board responsibilities. Board turnover was high. In my opinion, it was a compact-type situation where the board performance was low, but the staff met goals that might have been higher.

Obviously the board needed a better balance with experienced directors having time to act as mentors for these busy millennials and to eventually eliminate the culture of deference to the board, its strong chair and to eventually form a true partnership culture between board, management and staff.

*Paul T. Hogan (2014), “Boards Cannot Be Sacred, Staffs Cannot Be Saints, and Founders Should Never Be Martyrs,” Nonprofit Newswire, May 20th.

**Hogan referred to the board as being “sacred.” I consider that to be excessive “deference.”

*** Compacts between students and faculty also have been reported in university settings, under which faculty require modest educational rigor in exchange for students providing their class room instructors with superior teaching ratings. See: Richard Arum & Josipa Roksa, (2011) Academically Adrift, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press p.5.

In an interview last week with NBC’s Brian Williams, NSA secret-leaker Edward Snowden set himself a low bar and claimed success: His leaks, he said, have gotten us talking about these important issues. Mission accomplished? Let’s think about that…

While Snowden has in fact displayed several admirable leadership qualities – like taking bold action, operating in integrity with his stated beliefs, and communicating (to Brian Williams, anyway) with gravitas – he, like many would-be-good leaders, has fallen short in the results department.

Good leadership takes balancing of cost versus benefit to achieve something. The measure of such a costly breach of national security as Snowden committed, then, should be significant positive change, rather than fresh fodder for our hapless Congress and paying NBC’s bills for a few news cycles.

For example, for Snowden to be seen as a good leader there could follow a thorough and unbiased audit of our intelligence services showing specifically if, and in what ways, the US Government discarded its checks and balances and/or hindered our constitutionally-guaranteed protections and freedom. Such an audit would then need to result in reform.

Similarly, for the US Government to be the leader here, it would need to show, rather than simply assert, that Snowden’s admittedly criminal actions have created harm, and also show that it has used its powers in strictly constitutional ways.

Neither will happen. Instead, Snowden’s sensational actions reflect the naivety of an ideologue: Someone intensely devoted to a cause, yet guided more by the image of perfection than by the real world. This “national conversation” is more likely to fester and fizzle than to lead to policy reform — after all, that’s the status quo state of the union these days.

Whether he was a patriot or a traitor in leaking NSA secrets is a dumb question being asked by smart people in the media who know better, but need to sell cars and paper towels. Patriot or traitor? He, as perhaps others in government who may have given themselves too much power without adequate oversight, are both and neither. The two sides here are more alike than not.

The ultimate question of leadership in the dark arts of intelligence is an elusive one. We can’t and shouldn’t ever know what great leadership looks like when it comes to the content of collecting and analyzing intelligence to prevent violence and terrorism. Yet if Snowden’s actions are to be seen as good leadership, then bring it on, Snowden: Let’s see the benefits that more than cover the costs of what you have done.

Prior to Microsoft’s recent tablet-related event there were a lot of rumors floating around about the Surface Mini. Apparently the company was gearing up to launch a smaller tablet as well alongside the new Surface. That didn’t happen. Several reports claimed that the launch plans were axed very close to the actual announcement because CEO Satya Nadella wasn’t happy with the product and wanted to avoid a repeat of the Surface RT. But it doesn’t look like this tablet has been shelved altogether, at least not to analyst Rhoda Alexander at the IHS.

Rumors suggested that the Surface Mini would actually be the star of the show, with its 7.5-inch display and a digital pen. It didn’t get the privilege in the end and it was the Surface Pro 3 which got all the attention.

Alexander says that Microsoft is continuing to work with the supply chain on this tablet. Apparently some 20,000 units had already been manufactured prior to the decision of not unveiling the Surface Mini. She believes there’s a chance it might hit the market later this year.

She spots a surge in orders for 7.5 inch panels from Microsoft. Alexander’s calculations also show that 100,000 of these displays were shipped to Microsoft by supply chain partners. Orders were seen spiking up in the last two months as well so its possible that Microsoft could be building up inventory ahead of a possible launch a few months down the road.

While analyst predictions can often turn out to be true there’s always the possibility that the company involved might change its mind. There’s no comment from Microsoft on the future or even existence of its Surface Mini tablet, so now its merely a game of waiting and watching if it ever announces the 7.5-inch tablet.

Microsoft Surface Mini Could Be Launched Later This Year

, original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Tablets, Microsoft, surface mini, surface pro 3,