Pen Thoughts

  Rot and Renewal, Week 6. Two faith-based institutions, twenty years apart. One decided. One did not. The ledgers I joined the finance department of a regional church network a few weeks after the "July war"  ended in 2006. I was twenty-five. My job was to report on a humanitarian program that was rebuilding water and sanitation systems in the south and getting farmers through a season that had been destroyed along with everything else. It was not the biggest thing I had worked on. As a junior auditor I had carried client portfolios worth many times it. But those were other people's books. I read them from the outside, wrote my report, and left. This was the first time I was sitting inside the institution the numbers belonged to, and I was glad to be there.  It took me about a month with the ledgers to understand that the institution carrying it was dying. The problem was arithmetic, and it was not a secret from anyone who could read a balance sheet. The cost of running ...

  Why aging organizations fail at technology, and why it is almost never the technology Fifth in a weekly series on how institutions fail and how they come back. Twenty-five years ago I helped install a working system inside a factory that died anyway. Nine years ago I ran a training with no strategic purpose whatsoever, and it turned out to be the thing that carried an organization through a digitization it never asked for. The difference between those two stories has nothing to do with software. The question There were diapers on the desk. Four or five brands, cut open, laid out across the table so the layers could be compared. Somebody in that room had been doing real product analysis, the unglamorous kind, with a blade and a ruler. I was there because the invoicing had just been automated. A software firm I had brought in a few weeks earlier had installed a stock and sales system, and for the first time in the history of that company the sales invoices came out of a mach...

  A parable and a confession Fourth in the Rot and Renewal series. What follows is a parable, narrated by an old lioness. The mechanics of it are not invented. The tenure lengths, the expulsions, the cubs, the year of nothing: all of it comes from what researchers have documented in the field. Only the voice is mine. Afterwards I will tell you why I wrote it, and where I appear in it. The third takeover - the parable I am old now, and I am still here. That is not a boast. The lionesses are always still here. We are born into this pride, we die in it, and in between we watch the males arrive and leave. I have lived through three takeovers. I want to tell you about the third, because it was the one we could have prevented. When I was young, the arrangement was so ordinary that nobody thought to describe it. We hunted. We held the ground. We raised what was born. The male walked the border and met whatever came from outside it. That was his work. It was not a small thing. It wa...

  At 6:06 in the evening on August 4, 2020, I was in my office, streaming a stand-up special while I worked through some financial paperwork. An unremarkable afternoon, the kind Beirut teaches you to treasure precisely because nothing is happening in it. Then the room shook. First like an earthquake. Then harder, until the walls themselves were drumming. I heard what sounded like aircraft. In Lebanon, that sound has never meant panic; we grow up hearing jets break the sound barrier over our heads, and we learn, the way you learn anything you cannot control, to keep working through it. That is what pacification actually feels like from the inside: a sound that should stop your heart, filed instead under background noise. This one did not stay background noise for long. I ran to the window and saw a white cloud rising over the port. Before I could work out what it was, I heard the real sound. The second one. I watched a shape climb into the sky that some part of me recognized be...