Drifting Like Gas

The return to work has given me perspective.

I am actually enjoying myself. We're up against it. This is the make or break year (2009). I actually enjoy being up against the wall. I admit it. My relief pitcher, come from behind, get out of jam with the bases loaded , attitude is really where I prefer to be.

How much of a role I will play is suspect. I know what I do well which is to get out in the organization, get close to the folks who are the leverage points and make the right thing happen. A thousand pushes. My strategy is not based on that one big meeting. It never will be.

Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars Of Wisdom

Here was a pompous, professorial beginning. My wits, hostile to the abstract, took refuge in Arabia again. Translated into Arabic, the algebraic factor would first take practical account of the area we wished to deliver, and I began idly to calculate how many square miles: sixty: eighty: one hundred: perhaps one hundred and forty thousand square miles. And how would the Turks defend all that? No doubt by a trench line across the bottom, if we came like an army with banners; but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind; and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so we might offer nothing material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target, owning only what he sat on, and subjugating only what, by order, he could poke his rifle at.


My war, if it could be called that, is one of constant nibbling at the edges. I can do far more with a hallway conversation or a late in the day one on one than I an do with a revised policy and procedure, a compensation strategic, a cell phone or a computer. These are all necessary tools but I can't use them as much more than currency.

I have freed myself from title, pay and position (this is different than title but that is a whole other entry). I am also not attached. If the I am asked to leave then I leave. I stay because I am compelling not because they think need me.

For now I am in play. How long that will last is relative because what I do is portable.
For the moment I have access and intent, the two key elements for intervention.