governance - Quaker Ranter

What Chairs can learn from the Quaker Business Method

Martin Kelley — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 14:27:54 +0000

The author Shivaji Shiva isn’t talking about the furniture we sit on but rather the leader of board meetings. The section on the role of a clerk is very useful, covering sections like “Humility,” “Contributions and ‘air-time’, and “Navigating conflicting views.” He concludes:

If some of these approaches are less familiar to you, why not find out more about Quaker business methods and how a governance tool kit used for more than 350 years could work for you?

What Chairs can learn from the Quaker Business Method

Earlham College seeks to roll back expense budget by a decade after president’s resignation

Martin Kelley — Sat, 04 Aug 2018 20:18:29 +0000

From Inside Higher Ed:

Worries mount that the college has strayed too far from its liberal arts core. Suspicions run high that college leaders reached recent important decisions without regard for one of the key governance principles rooted in its Quaker identity: consensus.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/01/earlham-college-seeks-roll-back-expense-budget-decade-after-presidents-resignation#.W2Ixczv6vJc.facebook

Seeing how it goes

Martin Kelley — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 17:22:56 +0000

It seems a lot of conversations I’m in these days, on social media and IRL revolve around how we should be responding to Trump’s election. I know there’s a certain danger in being too deterministic, but a lot of answers seem to match where individuals are in the vulnerability scale. Some are counseling patience: let’s see how it goes after the inauguration. Maybe we don’t know the real Donald Trump.

Well, I think we do know the real Trump by now, but what I don’t think we know is the actual flavor of a Trump presidency. Have we ever seen a president elect who was so thin on actual policy? Trump rode his lack of policy experience to victory, of course, citing his independence from the people who govern as one of his chief qualifications. But it’s also his personality: on the campaign trail and in his famous 3am tweets from the toilet he often contradicted himself.

He’s a man of high-concept ideas, not detailed policy. This means the actual policies–and the governance we should and shouldn’t worry about–will depend disproportionately on the people he hires. Right now it seems like he’s trolling lobbyists and a handful of neocon dinosaurs that started the Iraq War on forged documents. He’s bringing the alligators in to “drain the swamp” and in the last 24 hours they’ve already signaled that a lot of key campaign pledges are open for reconsideration. How much we have to worry–and just what we have to worry about–will be clearer as his team assembles.