Anthologies have existed for a long time but they hitherto focussed on the “best of the best” work that had already been published elsewhere. The new kind of anthology that I am referring to is made up of the work of writers who (a) do not have sufficient material for a stand-alone body of work (b) have written about a narrow subject area that can only be noticed if highlighted in a collection with a similar theme (c) belong in a region or collective whose output is being showcased or (d) a combination of all of the above.

Indie publishers find this a convenient way to build a stable of writers who may go on to produce stand-alone work in future – catching them young, so to speak. The anthology’s niche theme also allows for the book to be finely targeted to interested audiences, and competition from bigger houses rarely comes into play. Also, if many of the authors in the collection are first-timers, they are likely to buy dozens of personal copies to sell or gift to their families and friends and “build their platform.”

This makes the editor of such an anthology a new power player in the publishing chain. Given the many authors who are involved in a collection of this nature, the publisher typically sets broad guidelines and offloads content selection and author negotiations on this editor who is often not from among the publishing staff but a person of influence (he may even be one of the contributing authors) within the anthology’s trading area.

Sounds good? But here are some pitfalls to be aware of, especially if you are a contributing newbie author. Check out how many authors will contribute to this anthology. “The more the merrier,” the publisher will say, for more books will be sold (or bought by the growing number of contributors) but “the more, the lesser” also comes into play, especially for the individual author. Try getting noticed in an anthology of 100 authors! And what level of writing prowess do these 100 others possess – will they drag you down or lift you up with the quality of their contributions? And how will you split royalties between 100 others? Would two cents a book satisfy you? Oh yes, on the subject of royalties, beware of the publisher who only pays the royalty to the editor who then keeps it all for himself, for after all, did this editor not have to curate the content, deal with a bunch of egotistical authors, meet deadlines etc….etc? And the authors get – well, they get the glory of having been published!

As in any commercial transaction, “Buyer, beware” applies. If you are purely contributing to get a publishing credit, then ignoring the above might be okay. However, if you are moving up the chain and are protecting your brand as well as building it, then checking out the anthology’s credentials before making a contribution would be prudent.

I recently wrote a novel set in a part of France I had never visited (my travels in that country up to that point had been limited to Paris and environs). With the assistance of all the online tools and data repositories available to me, I wrote copiously about Strasbourg and Metz, and not in our present day either, but around the time of the French Revolution. Something irked me on completing the book. I had not captured the soul of these places. So I travelled to those two cities and spent some time soaking in their atmospheres.

The first thing I noticed was how poorly I had estimated distance, especially if travelling by horse and carriage, and how differently the shadows fell on old buildings at certain times of the day; and the variance in colour of the Vosges Mountain range in the distance, for online photographs create their own hue and are never like the real thing. Dwellings had added an extra floor with each passing century and the ones I had to hunt down were the crumbling three-storey structures with wide doorways for carriages – these were the ones that harked back to the period depicted in my novel. I had to blot out the sound of motorized traffic and imagine the clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestone streets that still paved the inner cores of these cities. I sat on canal banks and watched swans whose ancestors had floated on those same waters three hundred years ago, waters carrying the blood of citoyen killed in the mass upheavals of those times. I was so absorbed in the scene that I thought I heard voices. Was I finally communing with the soul of this place?

From a young age I have always travelled abroad. I even set an ambitious goal for myself once, of visiting one new country for every year of my life. I am probably running two countries shy of that target, not brought about by a diminishing of interest but because there are not many new “safe” places to explore anymore, given that the world is caught up in a war between the haves and the have-nots, and “equalization” methods such as kidnapping and terrorism now extend to tourists as well. Even Mother Nature has been angry, unleashing temperamental outbursts at the most inconvenient times: I escaped the tsunami in Japan in 2011 by a couple of weeks, and was rocked and rolled by an earthquake in Costa Rica last year, then stranded due to a flood in Nicaragua on that same trip.

But I continue my pursuit, and to stretch my goals, I have just completed a novel set in Cape Town, circa 1794. Even though I used my trusty online tools to the maximum once again, visited the reference library several times, and had two South African friends fact-check my work, I know what is missing. Needless to say, when funds and time permit, I will be heading off for a date with the Soul of South Africa.

Will Francis follow the way of his predecessor from Assisi? Can the meek and humble lead the political and conniving? Even Jesus tried and paid for it with his life. The Church has been described in many ways, and the one that sticks in my mind is, “It’s like concrete, all mixed up and fixed solid; nothing can break it. That’s why it’s withstood 2000 years. And yet like a lonely concrete wall it is useless unless it props up a roof that can provide shelter to those who seek it.”

I once belonged to the largest religious denomination, the Christians (and I tested out four variants within that umbrella, including being baptized a Catholic). I now belong to the third largest (but growing) group – classified as non-believers. “Non-believer” is an oxymoron; we all believe in something. Even the most scientific among us ascribe that which cannot be explained as “yet to be researched.” We simpler folk decide to call this unknown “the spiritual,” “the God-like.” I warrant that many of the non-believers were once Christians too. My shift to the dark side was not brought about by a loss of belief in God but by the loss of belief in Man, especially Man in Power. Despite the powerful work for humanity that its field force has performed over the centuries, dark tales of the Church’s hierarchy throughout that same period make for a myriad of novels, not just the Dan Brown variety. Power corrupts absolutely and the Church, run by mortals, is not immune to its venom. I chuckled when my parish priest tried to advise me on how to be a good husband, when he had (according to the record) been celibate all his life. And I lashed out when pedophiles marched among the ranks of the men of the cloth back in the old country and we were denied whistle blowing because we had to “obey and bear our cross.”

How do you change an organization whose very existence is contingent on it not changing? Re-engineers and restructurers can bring about change in the corporate world. Plastic surgeons can do it in the medical world. Civil engineers can demolish and re-build entire cities. But an organization that has evolved over 2000 years, where the unofficial rule book may be a dozen times larger and more complex than the official one – how do you change that?

Incremental change will not do. Radical redesign is called for. The fundamental question needs to be: what is needed today, what structure do we need to execute the new design and who do we need to people it? Everything, and everyone, else is subcutaneous fat. It’s called Big Hairy Audacious Dreaming. And once implemented, the fallout could be seismic before light is seen at the end of the tunnel. Vatican II will look like a tea party by comparison.

Can the humble Francis do this? Can he dream big enough? Is it going to take a series of Francis’s to cut through the layers of dysfunction and bring the non-believers home? Hope sprang within me when I saw that one raised hand on the balcony, as if he were calling me back. Will we get there in my life time?

(Note: the title of this post is derived from the 1994 book Built to Last by James Collins and Jerry Porras)

It’s all about numbers: average handling time AHT (low), number of retained customers (high), amount of customer revenue earned (high), number of new products cross-sold (high), number of customers up-sold (high). Wait a second! There are some conflicting ratios here. Take the pissed-off long term customer who is calling to cancel her account because the company is gauging her with those ever increasing “fees.” If our hapless agent salvages the client, by first listening patiently to her vent, and then by giving her a rebate for the next 6 months, he has failed on all but his customer retention score: his AHT will be higher, his customer revenue is lower, and he dared not have up-sold or cross-sold anything more to this irate customer on that call. But he saved the company its greatest embarrassment: the customer badmouthing her experience to 20 other people, as is taught to us in all the text books that no one reads these days as everyone is so busy texting and twittering.

It gets worse. Bonus plans are introduced without considering long term implications. In the beginning, these plans promise great earnings potential; then targets get raised to the point that bonuses look like mirages in the desert, and then they are yanked away completely. Talk of motivation!

What about leadership? There are increasing occurrences of the leader who runs to his or her manager to get a decision and has to wait for that manager to run to his or her manager for the same thing, and so up the chain, until everyone is in the President’s office. And what started this frantic migration? Oh, the poor bloke at the bottom of the chain needed a day off! “Sychophant” should be a ubiquitous word in the corporate lexicon today, along with the usual buzzwords of “synergy,” “take-charge” and “pro-active.”

I tried to understand this shift. When I arrived in Canada in the late ‘80’s, we were told that employees needed to be kept motivated because there was nothing to stop them from walking across to the competition. We were told that employees left bad bosses, not bad jobs. It was an environment of employers chasing good employees. I felt so relieved at the time, because I had left the Third World where employees were treated like commodities and bosses had little or no leadership skills because they had often been appointed through nepotistic connections.

Now, thanks to globalization, automation, and a financial crash, the situation has reversed and the Third World working environment has made landfall in North America. And it’s been going on for five long years, so the change is more structural this time. The big losers will be the corporate leaders of tomorrow, the ones cutting their teeth in this new environment today, who are of the opinion that employees are disposable and leadership lies only with the Big Boss. It almost begs comparison with the concentration camps of WWII when the mantra was, “oh let ‘em work or die, there is another trainload coming in next week.” And the ambulances will be doing heavier duty outside. Even Dilbert will become more popular as one wonders whether it is a cartoon strip anymore or harsh reality portrayed in a digestible form.

So for all you pointy-haired bosses out there, pay heed, the world goes around in circles, gravitational and economic. Those former concentration camps were eventually razed, the slaves were freed, the perpetrators were punished and the world went into a cycle of unprecedented growth that we only lost five years ago. And that can happen again. What goes around, comes around, they say – so gird up your loins, dust off those management books of yore and be prepared to show some respect again, especially when mass retirements start in a decade from now and employers start chasing employees again.

I have been a great fan of Mr. Friedman, reading most of his books and articles. I admire his travels through hostile regions of the world and his powers of observation. But our Tom tends to portray the world as flat, except in America. How much more of an incursion into the affairs of one’s neighbours would his proposed solution be? It conjures images of aircraft flying into foreign lands, dropping propaganda leaflets. Given the current open questions of whether drone attacks are acts of aggression on foreign soil, and whether waterboarding is torture, do we want to compound the situation by openly turning social media, which one could argue was invented in America, into a weapon of mass change in states that don’t share western ideology?

America took over a hundred years to go from the Wild West to a “civilized nation,” and one could argue that with its continuing need for “the right to bear arms” and the mass shootings that occur from time to time, whether it is still not out of its Wild West days. So why not give these other nations, many of whom have just emerged from their liberating “springs,” the time to find their way and evolve towards becoming “democratic” and “civilized,” and all the other labels we smugly plaster ourselves with? Providing education to these nations on how democratic institutions work, explaining their pros and cons (for there are cons too, lest we forget), and then letting them decide, would be a better use of time and money than inciting the masses with the dropped leaflets strategy.

He goes on to propose how the Secretary could end nuclear proliferation, again using the sledgehammer approach, and I found that hypocritical. I was reminded of a club that says to new candidates, “You cannot enter our club, nor can you go out and form your own.” Why not disarm altogether, everyone, club members and non-members alike? And do it tomorrow. And let’s not forget who to-date has ever dropped a nuclear bomb(s) killing civilians; it reminds me of that truism that those who point a finger have four pointed back at them.

I don’t envy the new Secretary of State’s job. It’s a tough, demanding and often thankless job. But as America’s face abroad, the Secretary has the burden and the responsibility of being its ambassador of peace, the promoter of its values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It would indeed be demeaning of that office for the Secretary to be seen pursuing back-door end-runs on other heads of state, however flawed those heads may be. Perhaps it’s not this Secretary’s time to bring global peace, perhaps no one can, because humans, in America and abroad, are by nature aggressive, acquisitive and involved in the game of survival of the fittest, no matter how many trees we hug and how many hands we shake.

As for Tom, I will continue to read his articles for their out-of-the-box ideas, but I reserve the right to disagree with him when he proposes to walk us off the edge of his flattened world.

Without social media, my concentration would improve, that much I am sure. I would not be constantly interrupting my daily chores to go check that infernal device for the latest chat or inspirational message. My self esteem would mature for I would not have those “likes” to prop me up but would have to “like” myself instead. I could spend many hours with just me and my thoughts and reap the inspiration that comes from a stilled mind. I would not suffer from “too much information,” a syndrome that makes you skim the surface of everything, just to cope, and miss some of the major issues in the process. I will get to talk to people instead of sending them written messages even when they are in the next room. Friendships will be few but more lasting and not something to be activated and deactivated with the push of a button.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t be “famous but poor” anymore. Instead, I would be “unknown and still poor.” I wouldn’t get to play closet politician anymore for my audience will have disappeared. I’ll have to stand up in my little room and declaim, to myself. Or join a political party and schmooze my way to the top over a number of years, not in mere days that it took me in the social media world. I would not have a test market for my writing. I would not be connected to the pulse of my peers, forever unplugged from their thoughts, drives, fetishes and joys. I would not be let into their living rooms, introduced to their families, invited as a virtual guest to their parties, or exposed to their embarrassing moments when they suffered mental or wardrobe malfunction and decided to share (or bare) all via the instant photos uploaded to my “stream.” Yes, I would have to kiss goodbye to my voyeuristic but engaged life.

Someone recently told me that “there is no going back.” We seem to have crossed a threshold into a new pattern of social behaviour that is irreversible. And I am not sure we are unique in that respect. Did people go back on their old habits when new inventions collided with their social lives in the past: the telephone, the TV, the car, the supermarket, the microwave, and canned food? Digitization and sharing has now replaced the communal life of the village where everybody knows everything about everyone else. Even the anonymity of cities—something I used to love to escape to occasionally—is breaking down under the new rules of conduct, where city dwellers cooped up in glass towers and matchbox condos, ostensibly isolated, are connecting with each other like never before.

Okay, so there is no going back, we are the social media generation, suck it up and get on with it. But there needs to be some “information firewall behaviour” called for; the confidence to switch on and off when needed, without the pressure to be “always on” in order to be relevant, despite Facebook and Twitter sending you those “How are you doing?” messages when you are minding your own business, or Klout warning you that your score is dropping because you have been silent for awhile. Taking social media-less vacations is a good idea, and retreats from “always on” to just read a book is also good for the soul. And most importantly, selfishly carving out time for contemplation and meditation is paramount.

Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, where did leave my Blackberry…? There really is no going back, is there?

I made the exit from corporate life for saner pastures during the meltdown. When I returned to the corporation, intermittently, as a consultant in the post-meltdown, bailout-strapped stage, I began see these changes in behaviour. My observations below of the “slippage” is not an indictment on the survivors, but form a question in my mind on whether those days of corporate finesse will ever return, and whether we will end up developing a “next generation” for which the rougher edges of conduct are all they will have experienced and will replicate.

The first casualty was the administrative assistant, the person who got everyone – including the boss – organized, who arranged meetings, travel, prepared expense reports and made sure that all the equipment in the office worked. Without this major domo, inexperienced executives were now double and triple booking into meetings, surfing inflexible online tools to book travel and record expenses, wondering why the heck they had not carried their passport and were being denied boarding at the airport, and scratching their heads over where to hide that pesky mini-bar bill that had crept up on their credit card statement. Broken printers and fax machines sat around because no one knew who or where to call, or had the time to do so.

Meetings had become expensive time wasters. There were time-waster meetings even in the pre-collapse days, especially the infamous “meeting to decide if we need a meeting” meetings. But some form of human interaction is required to conduct a meaningful enterprise. I would challenge the person who says that he, or she, can run an organization with only a virtual meeting tool, a conference phone line and a laptop loaded with e-mail, internet browser and productivity tools like Microsoft Office, and without human contact. Managing relationships become crucial as you navigate upstream in the organization, and the person who interacts only with his machine will soon face his limitations. And yet, confirming attendance at a meeting and not showing up because one is quadruple-booked is becoming commonly accepted. “Oh, he must be busy!” is the cop out. “Well, aren’t I? The one who showed up?”

I remember declining people for jobs in the “old days.” I would write to all the interviewed candidates, thanking them for their time and effort, even making suggestions to improve their marketability for their next attempt. I later even hired some of those candidates I had declined earlier. Now, silence is the message for “you did not make the cut.” Non-answered e-mails are virtual firewalls that an executive surrounds himself with, like a “do not disturb” sign or a “thanks, but no thanks” banner. I’m even told that firing is done via e-mail. How tacky!

The business trip is now the most scrutinized expense and several levels of pre-approval are needed, when once it was just your boss who approved, or not. Admittedly, excessive business travel, especially to survey one’s corporate empire (which can change in the flicker of an organizational change), team-building trips, or those R&R (Reward & Recognition turned into Rest & Recreation) junkets are suspect. But major client visits, project kick-offs, and vendor negotiation meetings still need to happen – face to face, please!

I wonder whether some day in the future, my adult grandchildren will think that I am a fairy tale spinner when I sit on the back porch and tell them stories about my “romantic” corporate life, when we returned phone calls within the day, e-mails within 24 hours, attended every meeting we accepted and offered alternative times when unable to, said “no” without hiding, hired and fired in person, and travelled the world to do business while maintaining a healthy work life balance. Yes, it might sound like a fairy tale.

I was heartened, because when I came to this country a quarter century ago under the category of “skilled worker,” lured by the first world, “Brand Canada” lifestyle that was on tap, there were no such dating sites. All the Canadian High Commission in my native homeland had to work from was an outdated, typed list of required skills, among them, Undertaker and Sales Representative. Well, as I have a slight problem working with dead bodies, I qualified as a sales representative. When I arrived here, I got a bit of a shock: there were sales reps coming out of all nooks and crannies, including the mass produced ones from those dreaded telemarketing sweat shops. Thankfully, I used my “selling skills” to land myself another job, not one on the High Commission’s list, thankfully.

I was petrified at this news headline, because I have seen that first world lifestyle erode over the years, where the skilled workers of my generation have been reduced to a nation of Walmart and Dollar store frequent flyers, where training and retraining for displaced workers have been cut, where the unemployed or underemployed are those now 50-60 year old once-skilled workers and their progeny, the 20-30 year-olds who received a university education and an attitude as a reward from their parents; a whole segment of the middle class relegated to the wings while a new crop of skilled immigrants replace them. The dating game will make it easier to say, “Screw the locals, they cost too much and have higher expectations, let’s bring in the lean, mean and hungry.”

I still believe in the immigrant dream. It’s a rich experience that grows the soul, if not the pocket book. But Canada’s status as an “immigrant country” does not absolve it of its obligations towards preserving that first world lifestyle – its key selling point to newcomers. And that includes growing and maintaining a healthy middle class. And there is no free ride in not having to pay for education and training within the country and merely plucking the best and brightest from overseas who have been educated at the cost of their national governments, capitalizing on a foreign tin-pot dictator or corrupt regime that do not see the value of their human resources.

And the caveat emptor for the wannabe skilled immigrant is, “Are you willing to get only about 20 years of benefit from this system (that is, if you arrive before the age of 30. If you come later, the reaping period is exponentially shorter) before you are put out to pasture or forced to use your entrepreneurial skills to start your own business?” Skills atrophy over time and today’s skilled worker is tomorrow’s re-trainee. If we cut the re-training, there is an even shorter shelf-life for the skilled worker. Re-training should also be comprehensive to recognize the aging worker; we cannot always be on an upward career trajectory: the careerist should be trained for jobs that go up the ladder and others that descend gracefully with age, maintaining dignity and respect for the individual at all times– another hallmark of the first world lifestyle.

Ah, but then all this could be too much to ask, when the temptation is there to slink back to that dating site and lure another skilled sucker to our shores.

I completed writing another novel this year (my sixth yet-to-be-published one, in addition to the four already published and the hundreds of shorter pieces published in various magazines, blogs and e-zines). I’m reconciled to being a posthumous writer if my estate will summon the energy to publish my unpublished tomes after I have made the Great Exit. I have learned that there is a time for mining, and that rich veins of imagination do run their courses, and that to be distracted by trivialities (like earning a living) at these times can interfere with this flood that comes from the “other side,” a God-given gift. And for me, that time is now. I also realize the cost that comes with heeding the words Jesus spoke to his twelve buddies when he said, “Come follow me.” He never mentioned a rose garden or a fat purse at the end of the line. By taking up the cross (or the pen, in this instance) we signed on for lean times, rich only in personal growth.

I’ve seen the younger generation in my family move on and expand their horizons this year – a point of pride, given that theirs is the generation we robbed with our grandiose plans of “Me First, and damn everything else, including the environment” – by buying houses, upgrading jobs, moving countries even, to where the prospects are brighter. And it reminds me of when I took this same trek through the desert from the third world to the first world in search of greener pastures, a long time ago it seems now. And I too moved this year, right into the heart of downtown Toronto, in the hope of new horizons opening for me. Moving ever so often is good, for it clears the cobwebs. And hope is a good thing to have, always.

I’ve seen old friends start to falter, even die, reminding me of the long, lonely journey we must all make one day, a journey that converts our daily pre-occupations into trivial pursuits and calls into account the most important things we did or should have done, and makes us gnash our teeth for not having done them when we should have. These friends at the head of the curve give us pause, and we are richer for having known them, for in their passing they have given us the gift of self-examination.

I’ve seen artists flourish this year when we published an anthology of writers, poets and painters. It gave us an opportunity to go into the small towns and villages in our part of eastern Ontario and present our audiences with a calling card that was welcomingly received. And I have seen writers look up in hope when I stood before them and said that technology has not doomed us but liberated us from the slush pile. There may be no more money, but there is no more waiting.

It is always good to pause at this time of the year and look back on what we accomplished and what we did not. A time for understanding the incompleteness of life, which in itself gives us the fuel to go on and dot some of those “i”s and cross some more of those “t”s. Yes, the world is a rough place but humans are resilient beings, and those who roll with the punches will survive.

Dear friends, thanks for continuing to read my blog. I wish you and your loved ones a joyous Christmas and much wisdom in 2013.

It was at this point that Jim and Sam got off at the next station. Or did I get off at that station? I can’t remember, the conversation was so engrossing! Come to think of it, did those two guys really exist, or was I dreaming the whole thing up? Oh well, I’ll be on the subway tomorrow too and if those fellas show up having a similar conversation, I will know!