The Sounding Board

As many of my colleagues, readers, and clients know, I have been heavily involved with a professional organization devoted to Virtual Assistants for a few years now. I’ve done a great deal of volunteer work for that organization including giving permission to publish my articles, assisting other members with article submissions for the organization’s own publication, providing text and audio testimonials, assisting with planning virtual events, making connections with speakers for seminars, etc. I did all of those things because I believed in the values and objectives the organization’s founder proposed. I wanted to help promote what I thought was a great and noble cause - elevating our profession and giving like-minded professionals a place to freely share ideas, inspiration, successes, failures, and mutual support.

We all know that any healthy organization must change and evolve over time in order to stay current and responsive to the community it serves. That is paramount to a healthy, sustainable business. However, when the organization’s core values, beliefs, and objectives evolve to such a degree that the organization is no longer recognizable from its original roots? Unfortunately, then it’s often time for key members to disengage and move on. This is the path I have found myself on over the last year - increasingly distancing myself from an organization whose core beliefs and objectives are no longer in line with my own. I simply cannot support, nor sit idly by, while a once vibrant and open community that celebrated critical thinking and intelligent debate becomes a community of censorship driven by a single dictator who makes no room for any opinion not in line with hers.

You would think that growth would be a positive thing and that growth which causes a separation in ideals is simply healthy maturation of an organization. Separation should be dignified and professional. You simply agree that you no longer see eye to eye and the best course of action would be to part ways and wish each other the best. Unfortunately, this is not the case with this particular parting. Instead, I find myself feeling betrayed and used. In the beginning, there were specific boundaries for where the organization would and would not go in terms of growth. There were things each of us understood to be unacceptable in terms of the kind of community we all wanted to help create and foster. I have operated under that understanding since the very beginning.  I have given freely of my time and my expertise in support of that goal…only to find that I was misled. The goals we all work so diligently towards were never the “real” intended goals. What was deemed “unacceptable” in the beginning is now the status quo and the goals for the whole organization. The “community” we helped to create has become the vehicle for promoting only one.

I cannot help but feel betrayed and saddened that one person could take such advantage of all those who gave so freely of their time and effort to build a noble, elevated community - only to have that community stripped from us so that one and only one person can reap the benefit of a combined effort. That, in my opinion, is the epitome of unethical behavior. It has also been a hard, painful lesson learned in terms of volunteering the time and energy, much less the image and integrity of my business.

Have you learned a similar lesson in your business? By all means, feel free to share your experience by posting your comments below.

I’ve finally done it! I finally updated The Sounding Board to Wordpress 2.5.1. (Thank you LunarPages - my host provider - for making the upgrade easy via their one-click install.)

I’m getting used to the new dashboard…trying to navigate and find all my favorite stuff. Not bad. It’s nice to see a new environment once in awhile. Like Spring cleaning and re-arranging the living room furniture. It’s nice to make an old space feel ‘new’ again.

There’s nifty new stuff you can do too! For one, no more do you need a URL for images in order to add them to a post. You can just upload the image directly from your PC. Cool. (See the image below? I did that by just uploading it from the company folder on my laptop.) Yeah! So many times I’ve wanted to add an image to a post, but I don’t have time to upload it to my site folder, or to a photo host, or whatever just so I can insert it. Now I don’t have to mess with that stuff anymore. Great time saver for me! :)

And I love the “kitchen sink!”

So many options that are easier to use now. I might have to play a little now…«»  (Can you tell I’m tinkering? lol…)

I’m currently re-reading Michael Gerber’s The E Myth Revisited. It’s an interesting read. Might want to get yourself a copy if you haven’t already.

In any regard, I was struck by a quote shown at the beginning of the Introduction. The quote is by Joseph Heller. It reads:

“I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowing going crazy.”

Ever feel like that when it comes to your business? I certainly have. I’m sure we all have. But why?

If you’re anything like me, it’s because you always have a million (and one) things going through your head at any given time. Ideas, partially formed plans, snippets of this, a dappling of that, oh! and I need to do some research on this, or learn how to do that better, I need to call so-and-so and ask about ____, remind myself I need to follow up with _______ on _____. OH! And! As if there wasn’t enough ’stuff’ clamoring for my attention? There are the multitudes of marketing and operational improvements or ideas jostling around for a position at the forefront. Some are for my own business, some are for clients, some are just there…they come and go with no apparent focus on who they should be used for.

Now, added to all of that mental debris floating around in my head, there are also the multitudes of real work I need to get done. Update a database for this client, research ISSN numbers for that one, compose an email campaign message for another, sort through a weekend’s worth of email for yet another.

Oh! And did I mention? There’s also my own academic commitments for my Accounting degree. And of course, my kids would like to see me emerge from the cave that is my office once in awhile - at least long enough to remind them that no, they are not yet adults, free to come and go as they choose…and no, I have not left them to fend for themselves for all eternity.

If all of that’s not enough to drive you slightly crazy? Hmm…than maybe you should consider running for President. (Something jokingly suggested for me by a couple of my colleagues a few days ago.)

Interesting that I should read that quote today. I guess there is some element of truth in it - although I don’t see where that’s such a bad thing. Crazy people tend to be somewhat non-conforming. It’s also been my experience that most of the truly successful entrepreneurs I’ve known are also non-conformists. We don’t do things in ‘conventional’ ways. Part of our success lies in finding newer, better, more creative ways to solve a variety of problems. It’s that innate ability to see things from a different perspective from everyone else that lends to our success. With that in mind, I’d say being a small business owner makes being crazy seem logical.

What do you think? Are you slowly going crazy and proud of it?