Giving an A

At the University of Southern California, a leadership course was taught each year to fifty of the most outstanding students out of twenty-seven thousand in the school, hand-picked by each department. At the end of the semester, the grader for the course was introduced to give one-third of the student A's, one-third B's and one-third C's--even though the work of any member of this class was likely to surpass that any other student in the university. Imagine the blow to the morale of the eager and hard-working student who received the requisite C.

Not just in this case, but in most case, grades say little about the work done. When you reflect to a student that he has misconstrued a concept or has taken a false step in a math problem, you are indicating something real about his performance, but when you give him B+, you are saying nothing at all about his mastery of the material, you are only matching him up against other students. Most would recognize at core that the main purpose of grades is to compare one student against another. Most people are also aware the competition puts a strain on friendships and too often consigns students to a solitary journey.

Michelangelo is often quoted as having said the inside every block of stone or marble dwells a beautiful statue;one need only remove the excess material to reveal the work of art within. If we were to apply this visionary concept to education, it would be pointless to compare one child to another. Instead all the energy would be focused on chipping away at the stone, getting rid of whatever is in the way of each child's developing skills, mastery, and self-expression.

We call this practice giving an A. It is an enlivening way of approaching people that promises to transform you as well as them. It is a shift in attitude that makes it possible for you to speak freely about your own thoughts and feeling while, at the same time, you support others to be all they dream of being. The practice of giving an A transports your relationships from the world of measurement into the universe of possibility.

An A can be given to anyone in any walk of life--to a waitress, to your employer, to your mother-in-law, to the members of the apposite team, and to the other drivers in traffic. When you give an A, you find yourself speaking to people not from a place of measuring how they stack up against your standards, but from a place of respect that gives them room to realize themselves. Your eye is on the statue within the roughness of the uncut stone.

This A is not an expectation to live up, but a possibility to live into.

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Bird Dog Biscuits

Rewarding people, and not just employees, for referring new hires to your company is both economical and effective. If you think about how much a search firm charges for finding warm bodies (20 to 30 percent of the first year's compensation), doesn't it just make sense to be willing to reward other people you know for doing the same thing? Many organizations, particularly technology-based ones, are paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to successful bird dogs, which is a bargain when you consider what these organizations are getting. Over 40 percent of Microsoft's new hires come from employee referrals. Nearly 65 percent of Silicon Graphic's new hires begin as referrals from current employees.

Statistics also hires begin the employees will generally refer higher-quality candidates than other sources because their reputation is on the line as well. Similarly, most people with whom you do business and with whom you have developed a relationship (vendors, customers, suppliers, etc.) will also be judicious in the types of people they refer. Current employees and others with whom you do business can be your best recruiters (and screeners) because they already know and understand what you do, your values, your culture, and all those intangibles that cannot be as effectively communicated in an ad or through other traditional sources. In any event, isn't it the job of human resources to screen and select the best people? This just improves the odds for them.

In fact, one of the best times to ask employees for referrals is when they are newly hired. Not only do they want to please their new employer, but they just left another organization for some reason, and there are probably others in the new hire's circle of influence who may also be interested in improving their lot in life. This isn't limited to former coworkers; it could also include spouses, friends, mentors, and many others. (Just as an aside, if you ask for references, you know that they are always going to speak well of the candidate, so instead of just asking them for their input, see if they are looking for a job, too.)

Most companies require more than just a warm lead or a name. In some, bird dogs are expected to talk with the candidates before the interview to tell them about and sell them on the company, to host them during their visit (also see "Birds of a Feather"), to talk with them afterward to see if they have any questions or concerns, and finally to talk with them after an offer is extended to help close the deal.

Another important twist on this concept is in how you pay the bonus. In order to improve and reward retention as well as hiring, some organizations pay the bird dog bonus in installments. In other words, the bird dog might get half of the bonus on the date of hire and the other half six months to a year later, or some other variation of the installment plan.This give the bird dog (friend) a stake in keeping his or her referral with the company long enough for you to realize a return on your investment. It encourages an ongoing, supportive buddy system. It also creates an incentive for the bird dog to stick around because if the bird dog leaves, she or he loses too. Both the new employee and referring employee must stay if the referring enployee is to get paid in full.

One company actually pays the bird dog a second bonus after one year if the employee he or she referred receives an excellent performance review. (Also see "Headhunter Hostage Pay.") There are even some companies that pay different amounts based upon the level and difficulty of the position (s) to be filled. In other words, for "commodity" talent, you might pay a few hundred dollars, but for "rare" talent, it could be thousand. Again,if you compare the cost of traditional sourcing, this is an obvious bargain.

There are also companies that will pay a special bounty for stealing talent from the competition. In fact, some are particularly interested in stealing the competition's top internal recruiters, because this not only improves the company's recruiting ability, but also cripples the competition's recruiting efforts for a while.

Lastly,some organizations enter referring employees into a drawing (the more referrals hired, the more entries in the drawing) and periodically award somethi8ng really grand, like a new car. MCI WorldCom gave away a brand new Porsche and was even smart enough to display the car in the lobby where everyone had to walk by it every day.

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Politics

IN 1921, Semaoen wrote a novel, Hikajat Kadiroen (The Story of Kadiroen) This sentences is from the preface: "I hope this tory that I written in prison with tears of misery will be enjoyed by many, namely all readers and ordinary people".

It's not known whether many people enjoyed it at the time. Actually, the novel was not intended to entertain. It was more like propaganda for the Communist Party an engrossing story. Speeches, statements, predictable dialogue; all were important aspect of the body of text. Written in clumsy Malay, the novel indeed probably had no other ambition. Literature, at this stage, was no more nor less than a project of politics. But it is interesting that Hikajat Kadiroen, a book about a youth who becomes attracted to communism, illustrates something, rather strange about the fate of a tale.

Semaoen was more of a leftist Sarekat Islam activist than a writer. Just prior to writing this novel, he was imprisoned for four months because the newspaper where he worked, Sinar Hindia, published an article by the socialist figure H.J.F.M. Sneevliet titled "Hunger and the Show of Power". This novel, which labelled itself with the old noun "hikajat" ("story"), was a story about a youth who wanted to become an assistant resident but then, as a "satria" (an old word for noble warrior), become attracted by communist ideas--a combination of the "old" and the "new". The story is loaded with ideals of liberation from traditional customs of the nobility and colonialism--yet strangely, at its end we do not find a class struggle. There is also no criticism of the Dutch as the figures of colonialism. An assistant resident is depicted as someone who "loves the Natives". But maybe because of this Hikajat Kadiroen was not one of the books banned at a time when anything sounding "leftist" or mentioning revolution was frightening. It became one book lined up among others, routine, like a character without a stage.

Probably a tale indeed ends up tending to take on its own development. It escapes from the initial planning of the author. Whether ideas or ideology, intention or program,perhaps it is like a command, an Utterance. But this command eventually finds life on the journey, where bends and slopes are unpredictable.And this is just what happens in a political novel, a work of propaganda moreover, which usually must be straight and thunderous and effective, for politics means a struggle for victory.

But what is politics, actually? If we listen to Semaoen and others of his time, the word has connections to the "struggle" of "satria". Kadiroen tales shows a moral story, this one at a time of smothering colonialism. But there are also others that show politics is by nature concerned with trifles.

One day in 1970, an American poet came to Indonesia and gave a disappointing talk. He was speaking on the relationship between a writer and politics, but what he read out was a short essay about his experience with recycled bottles. Don't get me wrong. This poet came from a small town in California. That town had a population of only fifteen thousand, and at one time he became a member of the local parliament. He submitted his nomination,campaigned and won because he had an interesting program about how to recycle bottles that where thrown away after people had been drinking in the parks each weekend.

He is talk was actually amusing and clever, fresh, and semi self deprecating, but members of the audiences in Indonesia grumbled and asked: what, is this politic? Isn't "politic" in Indonesia almost synonymous with the work of Making History and Changing the World? In other words, something serious, boisterous, tense, -something,whether carried out or not, having heavy consequences?

Maybe this is why Mao's interpretation--coming from a country similarly precarious--sort of fits with our context in Indonesia, when he said that politics is war without the spilling of blood.Even though it is not entirely true, of course.For blood can also spill. Indonesia has a long history of "politics" as something that can make someone exiled or imprisoned,kidnapped and murdered. In other words "politics" is drama. And in a dream like this there are inevitably those read and heroes, those seen as victim, those appearing as cowards, and those heard of as traitors. From this viewpoint, 'politics' becomes something fused with grand narratives and large scenarios, not with recycled bottles.

But perhaps this will not always be so. One day, Indonesia will enter a time when politics has lost drama, and any kind of grand scenario will become an Utterance--an ideological formula or big plans--which will not be capable of creating an absolute, straight journey. And when it is that the Utterance becomes dull, then politics will inevitably become routine. What will then be important will no longer be a number of brave heroes, but rather people who are patient.And there, what will have a role to play will no longer be yells of battle, but rather negotiation. Negotiation will become normal, and people will begin to see the wisdom of compromise. There will no longer be an atmosphere shaped by crisis, no longer an atmosphere of emergency so that the army comes to feel of obligatory to enter the arena, with its guns.

Certainly this process will become bland, a bit like organizing bottle recycling. But it will mean a loss of meaning? . No. For no matter what, this is an activity that is tied to the desire to nurture life within a frame of community,within a police, which is where the word 'politics' comes from. And there it will be possible for 'satria' to be born, who are called in the Hikajat Kadiroen--in a rather confusing sentence--those who 'renounce all their own needs for the common people'. Even without a stage.

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