Even though I told Al I would follow his wishes, I do have something further to say.
I want everyone to know that my issue is not with Mark Jones the man or any member of the Club. Mark is an accomplished, successful, driven man in his personal life and he brings great energy to the Club. He has done many fine things.
I still respect him the way I still respect Yann & Chuck, even though we had our arguments, we still at the end of the day got along.
What I quoted from the Cabinet minutes about Cabinet members getting more involved in how recruits are handled is from an incident where an Austrian recruit did not hear from his trainer for 11 days, so he sent a notice that he was quitting the Club. I followed up to see what the issue was and try to convince him to stay and found a new trainer for him. He said no thanks. In the meantime Mark started talking with him, as he was included in the email thread to try to convince him to join the AAA and stay in the Club, an email, even though he was my recruit, I was never copied on. It turns out and the recruit was included in this email that his trainer and the recruits email service were not talking to each other and in fact the trainer had followed up with him twice in those 11 days to see what was going on despite an incredibly busy work schedule and lack of internet access on the weekends. I was accused of not doing my job as army commander and following up with the recruit, even though I assumed everything was fine. I had company in town most of those 11 days and to be honest, I check in with my trainers after a few days and I did with this trainer and I was concerned a few days prior that something was wrong with him, as he is usually a dependable and prompt officer. The fact is, I trust my men to do their jobs. I don’t need to be all over them and telling them how to do their work or following up all the time with everyone.
Why does this concern me? Well grab a cigar, let us sit by the fire and I’ll take you back in time. Not everyone will remember, but the old iNWC that I had a hand in, when it was still around, had a lot of volunteers to run things for quite a number of years. But slowly, little by little attrition settled in. At the same time I had a lot of ideas to do things for the Club and started having a lot of tasks going on. My personal life took and dive and after two solid years and starts and fits with updates and other things, I called it quits and closed down the Club. One of the things I realized was that we had a lot of members, but because I was doing so much, a lot of them just sat back and did their gaming and never volunteered to help, not their fault, I simply never asked. The volunteers we did have, I still worked with very closely and would follow up with them, be involved et al. The thing I learned and have been trying to apply to all my dealings in these Clubs now is you can’t be everywhere and be everything to everyone. If you are so involved you set the expectations too high for the next guy who comes along. If you try to organize and run it all, even with a small group of people and not trust your other volunteers to do their work, you will burn out and the whole system will collapse around you. Trust me, I know, that type of Club will fail. The Cabinet is not meant to be involved in every aspect of the armies and nor should they even consider such ideas, you will simply make the system co-dependent and it will fail.
When I say simple rules, makes a simple Club, I mean it. That’s 10+ years of experience doing this saying that, not just some tag line…..
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