Even though waiting is a pain in the ass, it is worthwhile making it into a skill. Veteran Canadian journalist Howard Schwartz interviews an impatient man about waiting.

And if you missed it, listen to veteran Canadian journalist  Howard Schwartz’s first interview with Allon about “one size for all”.

.אין דבר יותר מתסכל עבורי מאשר ההמתנה

אני מאבד את הסבלנות ברמזור אדום. אני מתעצבן בהמתנה למעלית. אני לא אוהב לחכות לחשבון במסעדה. כששתי מכוניות  נמצאות לפניי ליד משאבת דלק, לחץ הדם שלי עולה. וכשמטוס מחכה על !!המסלול  חצי שעה (או יותר) ללא הסבר, אני ממש משתגע

זה לא משהו שאני גאה בו, אבל זה מה שזה אבל לחכות זה לא הצד החזק שלי

ועד לא מזמן לא הבנתי עד כמה חמור חוסר הסבלנות שלי עד שביקרתי באוגנדה. באוגנדה מחכים להכל. לעולם אל תסע לאוגנדה אם אתה לא יכול לחכות

גם אם יש לך ויזה אלקטרונית, זה לא אומר כלום; אתה עדיין צריך 20 דקות המתנה לאדם בשלטונות ההגירה, אז תעשה את החשבון אם אתה מספר חמש בתור

כן, יש 4 מסלולי יציאה לעמדת התשלום החניה בנמל התעופה של אנטבה, אבל שלושה מהם חסומים. היציאה משדה התעופה אורכת 90 דקות

המלון נמצא רק 12 ק”מ מהמלון שלך? לֹא! זה מרחק שעתיים וארבעים דקות

הזמנת כריך בשעה 19.00? השעה רק 20.00

האם אתה רוצה לשלם את החשבון שלך? אנא המתן, ה”מערכת” מושבתת; תחזור בעוד עשרים או ארבעים דקות. צריכים לתפוס מעלית? עלה במדרגות.
.וכן הלאה וכן הלאה

!כמעט הטלתי ביצה מהמתנה

בניגוד אליי, אוגנדים מחכים בסבלנות. כמעט בלתי אפשרי להאמין כמה סבלניים רוב האוגנדים (לא !!!כולם). הם לא ממצמצים עין בפקק של 4 שעות

הם מבינים שמעט מאוד ישתנה אם הם יתעצבנו. זו הגזמה. הם למעשה מבינים ששום דבר לא ישתנה אם הם יתעצבנו; במקרה הטוב, הם יהרסו להם את היום. לפיכך, יש מעט מאוד לחץ באוויר שכן התפיסה היא שזמן הוא משאב בלתי מוגבל

ההמתנה זה לא רק עניין של סבלנות. זו גישה, הלכה למעשה. המתנה אינה בהכרח גישה של כניעה. זוהי קבלה של המציאות, שימור העצמי.

אם יש תשתית לקויה וכל מה שאמור לקחת שעה יכול אורך חמישה ימים, מה זה עוזר לאבד את הסבלנות

כשמוזונגו (ילד או ילדה לבנים) מאבדים סבלנות, ההטיות התרבותיות שלנו צפות אל פני השטח במהירות רבה. המוזונגוס רוצה שדברים יעבדו כמו שצריך; אם הם לא עובדים כמצופה, יש לתקן אותם. עַכשָׁיו. הציפייה הזו מוזרה לאוגנדה. העולם שלהם לא מתנהל כך. כשמשהו לא עובד, יש לשמור על שפיותך. כפי שוולטר קרונקייט נהג לומר, “ככה זה

לפני הטיולים שלי לנמיביה ולאוגנדה, חשבתי ש”פשוט חסרה לי סבלנות”. הניסיון האפריקאי שלי לימד אותי שאני צריך לרכוש את המיומנויות והעמדות התומכות בהמתנה”.

זה לקח עצום לעיכול. ואני רוצה להשתפר הרבה יותר ביכולת ההמתנה. מעולם  לא חשבתי שאי פעם אודה בזה

There is nothing as frustrating for me as the act of waiting.

I lose my patience at a red light. I get upset waiting for an elevator. I do not like waiting for a bill in a restaurant. When two cars are ahead of me at a gas pump, my blood pressure goes up. And when a plane waits on the runway for half an hour (or more) with no explanation, I am fit to be tied.

It is not something I am proud of, but it is what it is but waiting ain’t my forte.

And until recently, I did not understand how severe my lack of patience is.

Then, I visited Uganda. In Uganda, you wait for everything. Never go to Uganda if you cannot wait.

• Even if you have an e-visa, it means nothing; you still need 20 minutes processing per person at immigration, so do the math if you are number five in line.
• Yes, there are 4 exit toll booths at Entebbe airport, but three of them are broken. Exiting the airport takes 90 minutes.
• The hotel is only 12 km from your hotel? No! It’s 2 hours and forty minutes away.
• Did you order a sandwich at 19.00? It’s only 20.30.
• Do you want to pay your bill? Please wait, the “system” is down; come back in twenty or forty minutes. Need to catch an elevator? Take the stairs.

And so on and so forth.

I almost laid an egg from waiting.

As opposed to me, Ugandans wait patiently. It is almost impossible to believe how patient most (not all) Ugandans are. They don’t blink an eye in a 4 hour traffic jam.

They realize that very little will change if they get upset. That’s an exaggeration. They actually realize that nothing will change if they get upset; at best, they will ruin their day. Thus, there is very little stress in the air since the perception is that time is an unlimited resource.

Waiting, I learnt, is not only a matter of patience. It is an attitude, a weltanschauung as it were. Waiting is not an attitude of surrender necessarily. It is acceptance of reality, a preservation of self.

If there is poor infrastructure and everything that should take an hour can take five days, what good does it do to lose your patience?

When a muzungu (white boy or girl) loses patience, our cultural biases float to the surface with great speed. The muzungus want things to work; if they don’t work as expected, they need to be fixed. Now. This expectation is strange to the Ugandan. Their world does not operate that way. When something doesn’t work, suck it up; preserve your sanity. As Walter Cronkite used to say, “that’s the way it is”.

Before my trips to Namibia and Uganda, I thought I “just lacked patience”. My African experience has taught me that I need acquire the skills and attitudes that support “waiting”.

That’s a huge chunk to digest, for me anyway. And I want to get much better at waiting. I never thought I would ever say this.

In this podcast, veteran broadcaster Howard Schwartz interviews me. Howard was a well known broadcast journalist for two decades, a corporate communications consultant and consumer advocate. He can reached at mediaman2000@att.net

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5xrzg0dy83wg81thfy1k8/Ep-I-10-24-Final-Mixdown.mp3?rlkey=gaytyaapz91eslvz79guw789p&st=m1unow71&dl=0

Transcript available.

Misbehaving children in the air raid shelter make as much noise as the missiles and/or Iron Dome exploding overhead. And they are just as annoying.

Just look at the parents of these noisy brats gawking at their cellphones with a zombie look on their face as their kids imitate the sirens, even after the sirens themselves have ceased splitting the air and piercing eardrums. What don’t they shut their kids up, or go out of the shelter to watch the missiles land?

The government sure knows how to make loud sirens, and collect taxes. Too bad they did not know about Oct 7^th.

The air in the shelter swelters with sweat, farts and dampness. It is too early to get out of the shelter as the order is to stay in the shelter until further notice. Christ, George just pissed on the floor of the shelter. He is recovering from a broken toe, and to make matters worse, he is 15 years old and suffers from canine dementia.

I run upstairs, get some paper towels, clean the mess amid the boom boom boom of incoming missiles. I then take the elevator up to my apartment, foregoing the protection afforded me by the shelter. Fuck it; I prefer the silence to the safety cum noise.

Later, I learn that there was a direct hit 1.5 km from my home.

In 1968, this was the choice that I made…I mean the choice I made to live here. In 1917, my grandfather’s brother and sister, Ida and Jack, also made this choice. Could it be genetic?

It is a choice that I never regret. Not for one second. “You and your Jewish holidays”, said our music teacher Ms. Bergstrom, moaning that the Jewish students did not attend class in September. “Who takes the Jew?”, referring to me as teams were formed in a football club. Quebec was a cruel place to be in the 1950’s once you put your toe outside the Jewish suburbs on Ville St Laurent or Cote St Luc.

Not regretting a decision certainly does not mean that this is a walk in a park on a sunny day. Well, not on a sunny day-the latest news is that I need to stay out of the sun, and I do not plan to challenge that advice which my dermatologist gave me.

Could the heartburn be a symptom of the stress? Certainly not. I am but 75 years old. I’m not that old! Or this is getting to me?

Is the stress accumulating to a point where it is almost intolerable?

The stress is intolerable, no doubt. Taubman’s book on Khrushchev is superb. I have just ordered a biography of Beria. I need to dig into the Soviet leadership a bit more. And the cinema club in Tel Aviv, what’s on next week?

And I splurged on a new Kindle!

“We had a 2 day session to improve teamwork. It consisted of a cooking class, feedback sessions and an exercise. Huge waste of time”.

There are a few misconceptions about teamwork I want to debunk.

Teamwork is not achieved by rallying around a mission. Mission statements are great products that sell well in the OD/Business consulting domain, and they have strategic value. Yet they are often too vague to mean anything when it comes down to issues of how to deal with team members who come from different disciplines.

Teamwork is not achieved by harmony. Teams are not a choir. Senior teams consist of domineering people with a high need for power, who are building their career, often to the detriment of others. In a senior team, there is no love lost between team members. It’s a battle of egos, clash of careers, a blame game and vying for attention from the boss and board.

Yet teamwork is a critical success factor without which organizations cannot minimize the over optimization of subsystems, which often throw teams off the cliff. Without teamwork, daily corrective actions are impossible because of mud-slinging such as long email threads on nonsense.

Teamwork is achieved by the distribution of power between team members that make cooperation worthwhile. When team members cannot bulldoze over others, and when constant escalation no longer works due to overdosing, team members will cooperate.

The most important derivative of this point is view is: ensure that short term interests between functions are aligned resulting in coalitions, and work with the CEO to ensure that power in distributed in a way that serves the tactical and strategic interests of the firm and minimizes pissing contests and overbearing behavior on the part of individual team players.

To illustrate: Head of Software Architecture presents a long term vision of the products functionality that is far beyond the capabilities of the present team, except for him. The R&D manager sets up a next generation team to counter the architect’s proposal. Finance proposes to reduce the number of $ spent on next generation in order to invest more in support. Head of Sales sells lots of new features, way off product roadmap.

What will drive teamwork? Short term goals, eliminating duplicate effort, chopping finances wings, and more involvement of sales in strategic planning. That is a long of hard work-not lovey dovey or formulation of airy mission statements.

Now here is the paradox. When power is balanced, relationships improve due to the acknowledgment of mutual dependencies, no doubt the ultimate goal of any organizational development effort.

PS. Several people have commented to me that strong relationships and bonding are majors enablers of teamwork. No doubt true. But the sustainability of bonding in a team without the proper allocation of power is limited.

Identifying with ideas on the very right or the very left of the political spectrum have become rampant. Sometimes I feel I’m listening to a script, provided in advance.

Similarly, people seem to have “opinions” which reflect wider social movements rather than more careful contemplation, manifested in such statements as “women make better leaders”, or, “diversity makes organizations stronger” or ” immigration is bad”.

In such a context, incongruity appears to me more of a value than a drawback. Holding incongruent views may indicate that someone is actually thinking, as opposed to parroting, or towing the party line.

Anyone who reads good biographers learns that many people have very incongruent aspects of their personality. Churchill, MLK, Gandhi, de Gaulle, LBJ, Mother Teresa. Their incongruousness are not contradictions, but rather when well explained, serve as a platform for the whole person.

I have held many incongruent stances in my life: I favoured the imposition of the French language on English citizens of Quebec, I believe that many of the core values of my profession are what holds it back from becoming more relevant, I believe that some countries would have been better off today had they been colonized at some point. I supported a two state solution yet also supported extremely harsh revenge for attacks carried out against Israeli civilians.

Far too often, I know what someone is going to say, based on what they have said before on different topics. Not only is it boring, but it shows up the ideology as opposed to the pragmatism/wisdom of the person. Life to me is like French grammar-a few rules and a million exceptions.

So, next time you hear something unexpected or an answer such as “it depends”…you may not want to jump to being overly judgemental.

Boss to Fred: Why haven’t you made deadlines? Fred to Boss: I’m still waiting for Mary’s input. Fred to Mary: You told me that after your trip to Chile, I would get your input. Mary to Fred: Finance did not sign off on my trip to Chile.

Interactions like the above are common. And unsynchronized communication in different time zones coupled with too many emails with cc’s and bcc’s have made buck passing and dodging into fine art. Simple issues that can be solved with the drop of a hat can take up to 80 or 90 emails to sort out.

There are several ways in which buck-passing and dodging can be mitigated, but they all have a price. Which reminds me that I recently took a trip to Namibia; I was advised to take anti-malaria pills with many possible side effects. Although I was reticent of these side effects, I was told, “Shevat, you don’t want to get malaria”. On the same note, I suggest to all my clients to deal with buck passing with a heavy hand because it can easily lend itself to everything getting stuck.

This having been said, here is the “prescription” for dealing with buck-passing.

1 Don’t put too much focus on roles and responsibilities. There is always lots of role overlap and complexity cannot be defined away. Focus on fostering cooperation, not on boundary clarity between roles.

2) For important issues, use WhatsApp ad hoc task groups to ensure that cc’s and bcc’s are avoided.

3) Hold meetings as soon as you notice buck passing. Lots of nonsense has been written about how wasteful meetings are, but there is no better way to nail down how things get done.

4) Call out buck passing. If organizations were to give buck passing 1/10th of the focus that is given to sexual harassment, buck passing could become far less prevalent.

5) Don’t optimize sub-systems; optimize mutual accommodation. In simple English, don’t play departments’ goals against one another, rather encourage them to achieve a shared goal.