I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth by Lou Holtz

The Rules of My Universe

The Rules of My Universe

by Kristin Neva

In maintaining the rules of the world I’ve created with strokes of a pen, I have a better appreciation for why God doesn’t always intervene in our lives.

Different genres of literature are set in various times and places, and it’s important for authors to maintain the rules of their particular universes. In Historic novels, they can’t utilize technology that hadn’t yet been invented. Authors of Fantasy and Science Fiction must describe the limitations of their universes and stick with them, otherwise, they won’t be able to effectively create tension or the readers won’t be able to suspend their disbelief.

I write contemporary fiction because I love the real world—but I also hate it. When I drive my kids to school, I glory in the beauty of the sunrise over the Portage Canal, but I despise ALS and the toll it takes on caregivers and people with the disease who don’t have basic needs met.

We’re in a better situation than many, and I appreciate the support from family and friends, but life is still hard as a full-time caregiver for my darling husband, who is now paralyzed. Meanwhile, I battle my own chronic health issues, and I cry out to heaven, “Jesus, won’t you please come back? God, this is too hard. Why won’t you heal Todd? At least heal me so I can better care for him and our kids. Help!”

I pray for a cure for ALS, some medicine that would at least stop the progression. Better yet, I’d love to see divine intervention. A miracle. Poof, ALS is gone, and my best friend can walk. We’d go on vacation and build sandcastles on a beach in Florida with the kids.

Alas, those are not the rules of the universe we live in, nor of the universe, I’ve created on Copper Island. My characters experience the pain of life, and they’re frustrated when there are no easy answers.

One of the hardest parts of writing is to resolve tension and conflict organically, to let it play out. As I write, I get to know my characters, and they become friends. I want good for them—after all, there’s a lot of me and others I love in them. But inevitably, because of the world in which they live, my characters get in situations where they feel like there’s no hope, and as the author, the god of my fictional universe, I don’t even know how they’ll find a resolution.

With the stroke of a pen, I could employ deus ex machina, or god from the machine, a literary device used in Greek tragedies. At the dark moment, when all hope is lost, a crane would lower onto the stage an actor playing a god, who would resolve the conflict and conclude the drama. But if I tried this, it wouldn’t feel authentic.

Instead, my characters must grow through whatever tragedy they face. And growth is hard. Just as there are no easy transformations in our real lives, change doesn’t come easily in my fictional world. I write my characters into a corner, and they need to work through the messiness of life.

In my novel Copper Country, I would’ve liked for Aimee to have the kind of relationship she wanted with her dad, but there’s no easy cure for narcissism in real life. I would’ve liked for Russ’s parents to embrace Aimee, but the Saarinens held firmly to the sectarianism of their church. Anything else wouldn’t have felt true to character, true to the universe I created. So instead of these situations getting better, Aimee gets better and perseveres.

When my daughter was eight, I was reading her a story from a Children’s Bible in which Adam and Eve disobeyed God, ate the apple, and sin entered the world.

“It’s all their fault,” she bemoaned, absorbed in the story. And then she remarked, “On the bright side, there wouldn’t be mysteries or exciting movies if they hadn’t sinned.”

There is no story without conflict.

In our story, God subjected all of creation to futility. There’s a cosmic battle between good and evil, and an internal battle within our hearts and minds. We face loss. Tragedy. Broken relationships. Health issues. Internal angst. We struggle with faith in a God who can seem distant and absent. How can a loving, all-powerful God allow his children to suffer?

I can’t answer that question, but when I press hard, it gives way to a different question as I consider my creative pursuit of writing. Could have God created a different world in which we didn’t suffer?

Perhaps God could have written our story in a different genre, with different rules for our universe, but in doing so the world as we know it would cease to exist. We would cease to exist as we are.

My life story takes place in a messy, broken, sorrowful world, but it also contains beauty, joy, glory, and love. But when this story ends and the book is closed, I’ll enter a new world where the rules of the universe contain no evil or suffering. Only love.

The Truth About Happiness

The Truth About Happiness
by Bryan J. Neva, Sr.

We are happiest when we give to others, when we care, share and have compassion. When we live our life for a greater purpose, and when care for others is balanced with care for self. 

- Emma Seppälä, Ph.D
Co-Director, Well-Being, Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence | Faculty Director, Women’s Leadership Program, Yale School of Management | Science Director, Stanford University Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education | Author: The Happiness Track | www.emmaseppala.com | TEDx on Breathing Happiness

$10 Billion a year! That's how big the self-improvement industry is, and it's projected to grow by nearly 6% annually. So there are ten billion reasons why that industry doesn't want you to know the truth about happiness.

If you were to ask others what would make them happy, they'd typically answer with such things as, winning the lottery, buying a car or home, or going on an exotic vacation. These material externalities are fleeting and temporal. Others look for happiness within themselves, going so far as a Tibetan monastery high atop a Himalayan mountain to find it. However, lowering your expectations or denying the reality of life only numbs the pain.

The word itself, Happiness, implies circumstantial conditions, like happenstance, or luck. However, Joy is so much more important than happiness. And joy is much closer than you might think.

Joy can be found in your heart, words, and actions. A heart for God seeks to obey his commandments for life, the greatest of which are to love God and your neighbor. Put God first, others second, and yourself third.

My younger brother Todd is one of the happiest people I know, and he’s a complete quadriplegic with ALS. He’s mostly confined to his home, but he lives his life in service to others. He helps his wife, Kristen, with her fiction writing and her YouTube channel The ALS411. He volunteers with his church as a webmaster and graphic artist. He speaks and maintains a blog, nevastory.com, on topics of grief and suffering.

I've asked him several times how he remains so happy, and he can't give me an answer. But if you look at his life, he puts God first, others second, and himself third. He strives to live a godly life by obeying his commandments, and he seems to have joy in spite of his circumstances.

Suffering in life is a given. We all must suffer in some way, physically or mentally, at some point in our lives. If we love others, we’ll suffer all the more through our compassion, but we can still have joy. Rather than running away from our problems, embrace them and run toward the problems of others by helping them carry their burdens in some way.

This is not to diminish the need for medical help when needed. If you're sick, go to a doctor and take your medicine. If you're depressed or anxious talk with a confidant, a clergyman, or mental health provider and take their advice. Depression and anxiety can be due to chemical imbalances in the brain, and thankfully medicines today can relieve some of the symptoms. If you’re struggling with addiction, find a twelve-step program. Don’t suffer in silence. Give others the opportunity to live outside themselves and come alongside you and help you carry your cross.

Suffering, sadness, and happiness are all parts of the human condition. Find joy in all those situations through your heart, words, and actions. We all must suffer. So embrace your sufferings but do your best to overcome it. You'll never appreciate the mountains until you've traveled through the valleys.

Accepting our sufferings gives us hope and meaning in our lives and ultimately leads to joy and happiness.

The Church in Laodicea

The Church in Laodicea
by Bryan J. Neva, Sr.

I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, "I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing;" not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. I correct and discipline those whom I love. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. 

- Jesus' message to the Church in Laodicea, circa 95 AD (Revelation 3:15-20)

Laodicea was an ancient Roman free city in Asia Minor; the ruins of which today are located near the modern city of Denizli, in Southwestern Turkey. It was one of the Seven Churches of Asia mentioned in the New Testament Book of Revelation. Many of Laodicea's inhabitants were Jewish and in the first century were Christianized by disciples of St. Paul (possibly by St. Epaphras who was mentioned in his letters to the Colossians and Philemon).

Laodicea was a very prosperous city which benefited from its location at the crossroads of economic trade routes and had large financial, black wool, and agricultural industries. It was a cosmopolitan city with a taste for the arts and literature. It also had a great medical school which specialized in diseases of the eye (ophthalmology). In addition, it had an impressive aqueduct system which carried hot mineral water from several miles away into the city; but by the time it got to the city though, it was tepid or lukewarm.

When Jesus talks about them being neither cold nor hot, he was probably making an analogy to the tepid, lukewarm water Laodicea was known for. As a character trait, being tepid is synonymous with being apathetic, unenthusiastic, indifferent, or uninterested. When we drink water or soda we want it to be cold, and when we drink coffee or tea we want it to be hot. Room temperature beverages just don't taste good; in fact, they can be quite unpalatable. What do we do when we've discovered our coffee has cooled to room temperature? We spit it out. "Cold and hot" are desirable compared to being lukewarm.

Holocost survivor Elie Wiesel once said, "The opposite of love is not hate...it's indifference." And indifference is treating others as if they didn't matter. All around us are people that society treats as inconsequential, having no value or importance, such as the homeless, the poor, the illegal immigrant, the handicapped, the old, the unborn, and many others. But more importantly, we become indifferent or apathetic towards God. We say we believe in God or we have faith, but our actions don't match up with our beliefs. We may go to Church on Sunday, but we don't live our faith during the week. If we're like this, then our faith and works are lukewarm and unpalatable to God.

When Jesus talks about the Laodicean's poverty, blindness, and nakedness, he was probably making an analogy to the city's wealth, medical science, and their black wool. Materially the city was wealthy, but spiritually they were poor; their medical school specialized in ophthalmology, yet they were spiritually blind; they made black wool, yet they were spiritually naked. And why were they spiritually poor, blind, and naked? It was because of their pursuit of material wealth that they didn't see the poverty all around them. The purpose of wealth is not to raise one's standard of living but to help improve society as a whole. By sharing our wealth with others we help cure society's ills and make life better for everyone.

The developed world today has become just like The Church in Laodicea. We're wealthy beyond our wildest dreams; we have some of the longest life-spans due to our medical science, and our closets are overflowing with clothing. Yet we're spiritually poor, blind, and naked just like the Laodiceans because we've become apathetic towards God and our neighbor and we've forgotten about the welfare of those less fortunate.

Companies drive themselves into spiritual bankruptcy when they pursue profits at any price forgetting about the people who helped make those profits. Our lifespans are getting shorter because we're working ourselves to death in pursuit of material wealth. We've become spiritually blind to the sufferings of the world by looking the other way when we see poverty, homelessness, chronic unemployment/under-employment,  corporate greed/dishonesty, and government inaction.

The solution to our society's spiritual poverty, blindness, and nakedness is to change our paradigms. Companies must stop maximizing "shareholder" value and instead maximize "stakeholder" value by spreading the wealth around. They could start by paying their workers a living wage and sharing their profits; if they did they'd prosper even more materially and spiritually. If they'd stop trying to avoid paying their fair share of taxes our society would have more revenue to address society's ills such as chronic homelessness and poverty.

If each of us would keep our priorities straight by putting God first, others second, and ourselves third we'd live more meaningful lives. If we'd each do our part to take care of the disenfranchised and marginalized in our society, we'd become spiritually rich beyond our wildest dreams. The works of corporal mercy are to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless and welcome the stranger, visit the sick, visit and ransom the captives, and to bury the dead.

Finally in Revelations 3:20 when Jesus says, "Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me." he's simply asking each of us to let him into our hearts and lives by repenting and changing our ways. We routinely invite our family and friends into our homes to eat with us; Jesus too wants to have an intimate relationship with us and he's knocking at our heart's door asking to come in. Jesus can change our lukewarm indifferent hearts so that we'll no longer pursue futile material wealth but true and lasting spiritual wealth through our love of God and our neighbor. 

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH EVIL IN THE WORLD?

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH EVIL IN THE WORLD? 
by St. Pope John Paul II (1920 - 2005)

Your words open up for us grand and fascinating prospects that, for believers, are certainly further confirmations of their hope. And yet, we cannot forget that in every century, at the hour of truth, even Christians have asked themselves a tormenting question: How to continue to trust in a God who is supposed to be a merciful Father, in a God who-as the New Testament reveals-is meant to be Love itself, when suffering, injustice, sickness, and death seem to dominate the larger history of the world as well as our smaller daily lives? 

Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (The Cross remains constant while the world turns). As I stated earlier, we find ourselves at the center of the history of salvation. Naturally you could not fail to bring up that which is the source of recurring doubt not only in regard to the goodness of God but also in regard to His very existence. How could God have permitted so many wars, concentration camps, the Holocaust? 

Is the God who allows all this still truly Love, as Saint John proclaims in his First Letter? Indeed, is He just with respect to His creatures? Doesn't He place too many burdens on the shoulders of individuals? Doesn't He leave man alone with these burdens, condemning him to a life without hope? So many incurably ill people in hospitals, so many handicapped children, so many human lives completely denied ordinary happiness on this earth, the happiness that comes from love, marriage, and family. All this adds up to a bleak picture, which has found expression in ancient and modern literature. Consider, for example, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, or Albert Camus. 

God created man as rational and free, thereby placing Himself under man's judgment. The history of salvation is also the history of man's continual judgment of God. Not only of man's questions and doubts but of his actual judgment of God. In part, the Old Testament Book of Job is the paradigm of this judgment. There is also the intervention of the evil spirit, who, with even greater shrewdness than man, would judge not only man but God's actions in human history. This too is confirmed in the Book of Job. 

Scandalum Crucis (The Scandal of the Cross). In the preceding questions you addressed the problem precisely: Was putting His Son to death on the Cross necessary for the salvation of humanity? 

Given our present discussion, we must ask ourselves: Could it have been different? Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ's Cross at the center of that history? Obviously, one response could be that God does not need to justify Himself to man. It is enough that He is omnipotent. From this perspective everything He does or allows must be accepted. This is the position of the biblical Job. But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and-to repeat once again-Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man's lot and participates in his destiny. This brings to light another inadequacy, the completely false image of God which the Enlightenment accepted uncritically. With regard to the Gospel, this image certainly represented a step backward, not in the direction of a better knowledge of God and the world, but in the direction of misunderstanding them. 

No, absolutely not! God is not someone who remains only outside of the world, content to be in Himself all-knowing and omnipotent. His wisdom and omnipotence are placed, by free choice, at the service of creation. If suffering is present in the history of humanity, one understands why His omnipotence was manifested in the omnipotence of humiliation on the Cross. The scandal of the Cross remains the key to the interpretation of the great mystery of suffering, which is so much a part of the history of mankind. Even contemporary critics of Christianity are in agreement on this point. Even they see that the crucified Christ is proof of God's solidarity with man in his suffering. God places Himself on the side of man. 

He does so in a radical way: "He emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave, / coming in human likeness; / and found human in appearance, / he humbled himself, / becoming obedient to death, / even death on a cross" (Phil 2:7-8). Everything is contained in this statement. All individual and collective suffering caused by the forces of nature and unleashed by man's free will-the wars, the gulags, and the holocausts: the Holocaust of the Jews but also, for example, the holocaust of the black slaves from Africa.

WHY DOES GOD TOLERATE SUFFERING? 

The objection of many people to the previous response is well known-the question of pain and evil in the world is not really faced but only displaced. Faith affirms that God is omnipotent. Why, then, hasn't He eliminated-and does He persist in not eliminating-suffering in the world He created? Aren't we being presented with a sort of "divine impotence," the kind spoken of even by people who are sincerely religious, though perhaps deeply troubled in their faith? 

Yes, in a certain sense one could say that confronted with our human freedom, God decided to make Himself "impotent." And one could say that God is paying for the great gift bestowed upon a being He created "in his image, after his likeness" (cf. Gn 1:26). Before this gift, He remains consistent, and places Himself before the judgment of man, before an illegitimate tribunal which asks Him provocative questions: "Then you are a king?" (cf. Jn 18:37); "Is it true that all which happens in the world, in the history of Israel, in the history of all nations, depends on you?" 

We know Christ's response to this question before Pilate's tribunal: "For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth" (Jn 18:37). But then: "What is truth?" (Jn 18:38), and here ended the judicial proceeding, that tragic proceeding in which man accused God before the tribunal of his own history, and in which the sentence handed down did not conform to the truth. Pilate says: "I find no guilt in him" (Jn 18:38), and a second later he orders: "Take him yourselves and crucify him!" (Jn 19:6). In this way he washes his hands of the issue and returns the responsibility to the violent crowd. 

Therefore, the condemnation of God by man is not based on the truth, but on arrogance, on an underhanded conspiracy. Isn't this the truth about the history of humanity, the truth about our century? In our time the same condemnation has been repeated in many courts of oppressive totalitarian regimes. And isn't it also being repeated in the parliaments of democracies where, for example, laws are regularly passed condemning to death a person not yet born? . . . 

God is always on the side of the suffering. His omnipotence is manifested precisely in the fact that He freely accepted suffering. He could have chosen not to do so. He could have chosen to demonstrate His omnipotence even at the moment of the Crucifixion. In fact, it was proposed to Him: "Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe" (Mk 15:32). But He did not accept that challenge. The fact that He stayed on the Cross until the end, the fact that on the Cross He could say, as do all who suffer: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15:34), has remained in human history the strongest argument. If the agony on the Cross had not happened, the truth that God is Love would have been unfounded. 

Yes! God is Love and precisely for this He gave His Son, to reveal Himself completely as Love. Christ is the One who "loved to the end" (Jn 13:1). "To the end" means to the last breath. "To the end" means accepting all the consequences of man's sin, taking it upon Himself. This happened exactly as the prophet Isaiah affirmed: "It was our infirmities that he bore, / We had all gone astray like sheep, / each following his own way; / But the Lord laid upon him / the guilt of us all" (Is 53:4-6). 

The Man of Suffering is the revelation of that Love which "endures all things" (1 Cor 13:7), of that Love which is the "greatest" (cf. 1 Cor 13:13). It is the revelation not only that God is Love but also the One who "pours out love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit" (cf. Rom 5:5). In the end, before Christ Crucified, the man who shares in redemption will have the advantage over the man who sets himself up as an unbending judge of God's actions in his own life as well as in that of all humanity. 

Thus we find ourselves at the center of the history of salvation. The judgment of God becomes a judgment of man. The divine realm and the human realm of this event meet, cross, and overlap. Here we must stop. From the Mount of the Beatitudes, the road of the Good News leads to Calvary, and passes through Mount Tabor, the Mount of the Transfiguration. The difficulty and the challenge of understanding the meaning of Calvary is so great that God Himself wanted to warn the apostles of all that would have to happen between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. 

This is the definitive meaning of Good Friday: Man, you who judge God, who order Him to justify Himself before your tribunal, think about yourself, if you are not responsible for the death of this condemned man, if the judgment of God is not actually a judgment upon yourself. Consider if this judgment and its result-the Cross and then the Resurrection-are not your only way to salvation. 

When the archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin of Nazareth the birth of the Son, revealing that His Reign would be unending (cf. Lk 1:33), it was certainly difficult to foresee that those words augured such a future; that the Reign of God in the world would come about at such a cost; that from that moment on the history of the salvation of all humanity would have to follow such a path.

Only from that moment? Or also from the very beginning? The event at Calvary is a historical fact. Nevertheless, it is not limited in time and space. It goes back into the past, to the beginning, and opens toward the future until the end of history. It encompasses all places and times and all of mankind. Christ is the expectation and simultaneously the fulfillment. "There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved" (Acts 4:12). 

Christianity is a religion of salvation-a soteriological religion, to use the theological term. Christian soteriology focuses on the Paschal Mystery. In order to hope for salvation from God, man must stop beneath Christ's Cross. Then, the Sunday after the Holy Sabbath, he must stand in front of the empty tomb and listen, like the women of Jerusalem: "He is not here, for he has been raised" (Mt 28:6). Contained within the Cross and the Resurrection is the certainty that God saves man, that He saves him through Christ, through His Cross and His Resurrection.

Fast-Tracking

Fast-Tracking  

by Bryan J. Neva, Sr. & Allen F. Laudenslager, Jr.

Accelerated promotion is when a manager is instrumental in advancing an employee based on their merit and long-term strategic thinking. Fast-tracking, on the other hand, is when a manager is instrumental in advancing an amoral, sycophantic employee who delivers short-term results.  In the former case, the manager invests time and effort in mentoring the employee. In the latter case, the manager does not invest time or energy but just demands results from the employee.

With accelerated promotion and fast-tracking, an employee must fit the organizational mold of the kind of person they want in management. In the old days, the mold was usually a tall, lean, healthy, handsome, hardworking, white male with an impressive education. But today with Equal Employment Opportunity laws, the mold has evolved to a tall, lean, healthy, hardworking, attractive person with an impressive education.

When an organization finds themselves top heavy with non-minority men, they'll fast-track minorities and women. Ideally, if they can find a minority woman, that would cover all the bases. This is what is called "The Token Minority" and it has more to do with protecting their backsides from an EEOC complaint or lawsuit than advancing the corporate agenda. 

But generally speaking, short, heavy, unhealthy, unattractive people with so-so educations and unpretentious personalities are rarely fast-tracked. Those who aspire to executive level positions based solely on their merit and hard work are usually left sorely disappointed and passed over for significant positions. The organization wants to keep them in their place to do the hard work and heavy lifting ... they just don't want them in charge.

Many organizations have formalized mentoring programs for employees. Typically if an employee wants to participate in mentoring in order to earn a promotion, the company will either assign them, or the employee can choose, a mentor at least one level above them. Minorities and women typically will be assigned a mentor several levels above them (possibly at the Director or Vice-President level) in order to accelerate their promotions. And when the mentor gets promoted, they'll typically pull their mentees up with them. Now, this can work against them too if they have a mentor whose career has stalled. There are other things organizations do too such as offering a leadership development program where they'll send employees to leadership classes and have them shadow senior executives. The reason for these programs are once again to create, at least the illusion of, fairness in the workplace and protect their backsides from an EEOC lawsuit. 

In our research for this article, we were unable to find any studies that tried to correlate the success rate of people who were accelerated or fast-tracked. In fact, it would be quite difficult to compile that type of data because they're rarely documented in personnel folders and records are kept confidential because of privacy laws. It's like an intelligence agency's list of secret agents: it's a closely guarded state secret and only certain people have a "need to know." Consequently, we have to think about accelerated promotion and fast-tracking anecdotally. 

General Colin Powell graduated from The City College of New York in 1958, receiving a commission in the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) upon graduation. Powell's first tour in Vietnam was as a South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) advisor from 1962 to 1963, but he was wounded when he stepped on a punji stake which resulted in a serious infection. This caused his foot to swell and made it very difficult for him to walk which shortened his first tour. In his autobiography, Powell said he was haunted by the nightmare of the Vietnam War and felt that the leadership was very ineffective.

The officers promoted during the Second World War and the Korean War were selected for their performance as combat officers. During the interwar years, between Korea and Vietnam, the qualities of a peacetime Army were very different than combat leadership. Officers became more like managers and administrators than combat leaders (at least at the higher ranks). Any problems caused by the troops could leave a black mark on their COs evaluations and they tended to view their troops as problems rather than resources and team members.

During Vietnam, both higher and lower-ranking officers were cycled on  6-month rotations to give as many people as possible combat leadership experience. This lead to officers being more concerned with their next assignment and "punching their tickets" rather than with the welfare of their troops. Men like Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and many other young leaders in Vietnam later tried to change these practices as they progressed up the chain of command.

But just as in civilian organizations, in the military the people with the best political skills get promoted. The big problem is separating the politically savvy officers from those who also have the ability to lead troops into combat. 

Powell joined Dwight D. Eisenhower and Alexander Haig as one of only three generals following World War II to achieve 4-star rank without commanding a division (April 1989). General Powell was selected as the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989 -1993). In addition to being the youngest Chairman at age 52, he was also the first ROTC officer to become Chairman and the first African-American. After the military, Colin Powell went on to become the 65th Secretary of State under President George W. Bush (2001 - 2005).

Colin Powell benefited from accelerated promotion and he helped shape the U.S. Army into what it is today. But did he make mistakes? Nothing really noteworthy. He was, in fact, a very good leader as well as a savvy politician. Some might argue that he was the "Token Minority," but we believe his record of accomplishments speaks for themselves especially his performance in the first Gulf War and he earned the respect of the majority of Americans. He is without a doubt an American hero!

After graduating from the University of Illinois with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1960,  Jack Welch went to work for GE. After a year on the job, he almost quit but was persuaded to stay by his manager. And despite an explosion at a factory under his management in 1963, he didn't lose his job but remained on the fast-track to the top of the organization.

When Welch finally took over GE in 1981, he was the youngest person in the company's history to become CEO. The company was a stodgy, bloated, industrial organization with 411,000 employees and a value of about $13 billion. When Welch retired in 2001, GE had just 70,000 employees and a value of about $300 billion! The way Welch accomplished this feat at GE was he essentially fired everyone and selectively brought in new talent which is why he earned the nickname "Neutron Jack" (in reference to the neutron bomb, he eliminated all the people but the buildings were left intact). Welch was a very controversial CEO with his "profit-at-any-price," "throw the baby out with the bathwater" business strategy, and he epitomized the sycophantic, psychopathic, sociopathic, and narcissistic behavior so common among CEOs today. He was singularly focused on the shareholders of GE rather than on the welfare of all the other stakeholders of the company (especially the employees).

We believe Welch was fast-tracked to the top of GE because the top management was acutely aware of GE's problems as a bloated, bureaucratic organization and they wanted Welch to come in and shake things up, take names, and kick ass! They didn't want the status quo, and Welch exceeded their wildest expectations. In a way, you have to hand it to him for transforming such a large organization into a lean one, but the way he went about it was very inhumane.

In August 2014, Welch and his wife Suzie published an article entitled, "Five Ways to Fast Track Your Promotion."  These are 1) Over-Deliver - consistently deliver great results and deliver them right  away; do more than you have to (translation: work 80 hours a week); 2) Don't Make your Boss Play Defense - don't do anything careless so your boss has to defend you (translation: make your boss look good by not doing anything stupid); 3) Love Everyone - play politics with everyone (translation: win a popularity contest with your superiors); 4) Volunteer for Tough Duty (translation: work 112 hours a week); 5) Seek Mentors... Everywhere - play politics with your superiors (translation: win a popularity contest with all the managers in the company by being a sycophant).

So what can we conclude from all this? First of all, we have to ask the question, is fast-tracking even ethical? We believe that it is NOT! In fact, fast-tracking has consistently been used to exclude minorities and women from executive level positions for decades. Fast-tracking is just another name for old-fashioned favoritism and cronyism or the "good ol' boy's club." And what is cronyism? Its the promotion of friends and associates to positions of authority without regard to their qualifications or merit.

Are formalized programs such as accelerated promotion, mentoring, and leadership development programs ethical? They certainly can be if promotions are based on merit rather than relationships. But when career development and accelerated promotion degenerate into nothing more than formalized fast-tracking they're no longer ethical.

I (Bryan) have a friend who once worked for a company that practiced a quasi-mentoring program. My friend once got into an argument with a mediocre performing colleague with an abrasive personality. Unfortunately, his colleague, who was being fast-tracked or "mentored" by a higher-level executive than he was, saw to it that my friend's career stalled. Eventually, his colleague was promoted over him. 

Second, we believe the practice of fast-tracking is a symptom of short-term thinking rather than a stand-alone problem. Too many senior managers suffer from what we call the superstar syndrome. This most typically occurs were everyone around the so-called superstar is paid to say "Yes." In the case of fast-trackers, the staff is paid to make it possible for the superstar to do anything that strikes their fancy and to insulate them from the results.

If the superstar wants to drive drunk the staff's job is to help them get away with it rather than to say “No!” In much the same way, a senior manager will surround themselves with a staff of sycophants and enablers: people who will accept the instructions and carry them out without trying to stop what may be an obviously bad choice. Whatever fast-trackers are told to do they'll do it without question. 

I (Allen) once worked for a large,  west coast defense contractor. A Vice-President was walking through the hallway and noticed two senior engineers reading the Federal Procurement newspaper that advertised government contracts open for bids. Knowing that they were well-paid engineers he asked them why they were doing that kind of work? They told him that they were not currently working on any projects and were looking for contracts to bid on. So in his infinite wisdom, the Vice-President decided to lay them both off in order to save money (after all, they didn't have any work to do). A year or so later, there was a federal contract that the Vice-President wanted to bid on but couldn’t because, you guessed it, he had laid-off those two engineers off. They were the only two people who had the expertise and security clearances to perform the work. And of course, by that time the two engineers had found new employment, and they couldn't hire anyone with that type of talent so the company lost a very lucrative contract because of the short-sightedness of the Vice-President.

Looking back, the Vice-President surrounded himself with sycophants who wouldn’t challenge his decision to lay-off those two engineers. That Vice-President was so focused on short-term gains that he took his eye off the long-term needs of the company. (As an aside, the Vice-President was never held accountable for his bad decision, and those two engineers went on to work for competitors.)

Third, there's no proof that accelerated promotion or fast-tracking is any more of a predictor of success than picking a racehorse. We believe that Colin Powell would have been successful regardless of his accelerated promotion. On the other hand, we believe that Jack Welch would have weaseled his way to the top regardless of fast-tracking. Both Powell and Welch were both successful, the difference was that Powell proved to be unpretentious while Welch proved to be an unethical sycophant. So roll the dice and see if you can predict who'll most likely succeed.

Finally, fast-tracking is simply not good for business. When employees figure out that promotions are based on favoritism and cronyism, they'll stop trying to improve because they know that no matter how hard they try, they'll never get promoted. Fast-tracking leads to employee disengagement which leads to lower effectiveness and productivity and greater turnover.