The View from the Cheap Seats.
At a celebration banquet given by Queen Isabela of Spain on the triumphant return of Christopher Columbus, an advisor to the King was overheard saying, “Big deal. Eventually someone else would have run into the New World by accident.”

Columbus, being a man of the theater, just as much a visionary, suggested to the advisor that it is always easier to recognize obvious solutions to problems once the answers are known.

The aforementioned advisor, in a manner that could only be described as snooty, said, “Pish-posh, Columbus didn’t discover the New World, he tripped over a stone.”

Columbus then challenged the advisor and anyone else interested, to a contest of imagination. Columbus called to the kitchen for a dozen raw eggs which were quickly distributed, one to each of the skeptics.

In the voice and manner of a chief of state, Columbus charged the group with the task of standing the raw egg up right on the small end. After the grunts, whines, and undecipherable mumblings from the crowd subsided, Columbus said, “I can do it.” With that, the over-dressed, over-fed courtiers spent the next few minutes failing to accomplish the task.

“It cannot be done!”, one participant from the cheap seats shouted. Columbus ignored the growing laments coming from the throng of contestants, and with his egg in hand he moved to the head of the table between the King and Queen. Columbus turned his egg pointed-side down onto the table cracking the shell slightly. This left the egg standing independently up right.

Before anyone had time to react, Columbus said, “It’s easier to do anything once you’ve been shown how.”

The View from the Field of Play.
Second-guessing has become an American past time. The pundits and prognosticators from every news, sports and entertainment service speak with great elegance and wisdom about what should have been obvious to everyone, but was not.

Leadership and innovation are by-products of character and wisdom, not the residue of the obvious and the hackneyed. One organization has identified and developed a new product position between doing good works and getting measurable results.

Civitas is an organization designed to make a difference. It’s driven by a unique and wholly supportable concept, that children benefit from a community of adults who share a core of knowledge that promotes the care and well being of every child. As a national multi-discipline group, Civitas creates, produces, and distributes products and services that support those adults in that effort.

Civitas was initially founded by its chairman, Jeff Jacobs, past president of Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Entertainment Group, and has transformed itself into the next generation of not-for-profit foundations that produce profits.

Through its imagination and leadership, Civitas has positioned itself as the conduit between information and application, between philanthropic ideals and bottom-line marketing, and between adults and the children they love.

Essex Two has been a communication partner with Civitas since its inception as a translator, communicator and producer of products and materials.

For more about Civitas visit online at www.SX2.com/civitas1.html , civitas.org or see the October 2002 issue of Fast Company magazine.

Five Steps to Problem Solving.
While this procedure was developed by Laura Humphrey, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist from The Family Institute at Northwestern University, to help families solve interpersonal problems, it also will help individuals, institutions and businesses address those problems that seem to be unsolvable.

• Stop and think
• Say the problem
• Think of solutions
• Think ahead to the consequences
• Try and try again

Books worthy of your time:
"Working" by Studs Terkel
To read it is to hear America talking — Boston Globe

Next month:
Balanced Conflict; the capacity to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously and not be torn apart.