Employee Engagement Needs a Little Clarity (by Ron Ricci)

Ron Ricci talks, in different words, about how best to support cognitive labour.  I don't really care what term ends up sticking, but the idea is definitely gaining traction.

One of the most useful books we read this year comes out of Cisco – The Collaboration Imperative. It’s a fantastic book that is overflowing with useful best practices in bringing people together for a common purpose. We asked one of the book’s authors, Ron Ricci, to weigh in on employee engagement. He delivers some really insightful lessons from one of America’s great companies, Cisco. Ron links decision making and engagement. This post is worth several reads. Enjoy.

 

Leaders have a lot on their plates, but nothing is more important than clarity. What’s important to your organization? Why? How are we getting the work done? When do we start? At each stage in the chain of decision making, ambiguity looms as the enemy of clarity; as leaders we’ve all experienced dis-engagement when things simply aren’t clear to our team. What can a leader do – especially in a world where hyper-connected employees can question and second-guess decisions instantly?

You can achieve transparency when you tell people three things about a decision: who made it? Who’s accountable for it? What does the accountability system look like?

Leaders have to understand that decisions are like best-selling novels; the greater the ambiguity around a decision, the faster it moves up the New York Times best-seller list. People’s natural curiosities and ambiguity seem to feed on each other. In worst cases, ambiguity leads to conspiracy theories and people actually work against each other. In most cases, work simply slows down while people seek out answers.

What if you could eliminate ambiguity? A lot is at stake. There’s more than enough evidence to demonstrate that teams produce higher results when they can align their individual work to the greater mission and strategy of the organization. When all goes right, organizations can produce discretionary effort – that amazing, hard-to-bottle effort people give when ambiguity is replaced by a sense of shared purpose.

In Cisco, our common vocabulary is called Vision-Strategy-Execution-Metrics.

Here are three things you can do bring clarity to your organization – and increase the odds of producing discretionary effort on your team:

1. Define what success looks like with one single-source of truth – an organization-wide taxonomy

People laughed when I first said “taxonomy” inside Cisco, but taxonomy is the fundamental building block to any organization looking to speak a common operating language. Taxonomy classifies and defines things; in this case, what success looks like. Focus on defining your operating model metrics like profitability, revenue growth, share gains and productivity; emphasize the specific, written definition of success; and show the outcomes and sources of data used in your organization to gauge success.

Try as hard as you can to tie these metrics to the performance management and accountability system of your organization. Publish this taxonomy on your intranet and push it to your internal communities.

2. Scale how you communicate decisions with a common vocabulary

Here’s a simple question: does strategy mean the same thing to everyone in your organization? What if the answer is no? That’s highly likely, because we’ve all gone to different colleges and had diverse work experiences. A common vocabulary provides a single context for decision-making. In Cisco, our common vocabulary is called Vision-Strategy-Execution-Metrics. Each decision element is defined and includes guiding principles to give people guardrails. It’s mandatory for leaders to communicate their priorities – that is, the decisions they have made – to their teams using this vocabulary. You can achieve transparency when you tell people three things about a decision: who made it? Who’s accountable for it? What does the accountability system look like? It’s hard to sacrifice around one vocabulary; imagine, though, the power of a single decision language across a global organization.

There’s more than enough evidence to demonstrate that teams produce higher results when they can align their individual work to the greater mission and strategy of the organization.

3. Engage your team on the “story behind the decision”

Taxonomy and common vocabulary tell your team what’s important; engagement is more driven by the human need to understand why decisions matter and how it is expected to be executed – what I call the “story behind the decision”. When you engage your team on decisions you’ve made (hopefully using a taxonomy and common vocabulary!), you have to answer three questions to satisfy “why” something is important: First, what process was used to make the decision? Second, what facts or data were used to support the decision? Third, what trade-offs were considered? The more your team knows this “story,” the faster teams move to execution.

At each stage in the chain of decision making, ambiguity looms as the enemy of clarity

I’m convinced that most people don’t wake up in the morning trying to second-guess decisions. Ambiguity is your enemy as the leader of a team. You can transform your team’s natural curiosity into a powerful source of discretionary effort – all it takes is a little clarity.

P.S., There is one final thing you can do as a leader to increase clarity on your team – tell your team how you make decisions. We all naturally make decisions differently. By sharing our authentic style of communicating and making decisions, you can diffuse a lot of unnecessary friction and built trust faster. Read a previous blog I wrote on this topic.

Connect with Ron

Ron Ricci is Vice President, Executive and Customer Engagement at Cisco. He and his team are responsible for the strategy driving how Cisco’s executive team engages with Cisco customers during the 14,000 visits to Cisco’s customer briefing centers around the world every year. Ron spent his first 12 years in Cisco reporting directly to CEO John Chambers with the charter of driving executive alignment and collaboration to Cisco’s top priorities. Along with Cisco colleague Carl Wiese, he co-authored The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential. Ron can be followed on Twitter at @RonRicciCisco.

Politics Today

Looks a little bit like this:



Haven't we learned yet that "each Party for itself" isn't going to work?

Purpose and Innovation: Communication ROI

 

Other questions may be "silly" in the sense that they rest on a conceptual confusion ("Are mountains divisible by zero?"), or because they aren't fruitful to pursue ("Are there any mountains exactly 1,942 feet high?"), but we typically make conceptual and empirical progress by asking questions, evaluating possible answers, testing them empirically when it's possible to do so and analyzing our successes and failures – not by delimiting the set of questions considered fair game. It matters that we ask the right questions, but we learn which those are as we go.

 

 

My four year-old loves to ask why.  He wants to know why he should brush his teeth, why he can't play games instead of going to bed, why some people speak different languages than he does.  His curiosity isn't malicious - he simply seeks the purpose of things so that he can understand them.  When he has understanding (teeth left unbrushed rot and make you sick, without sleep people get cranky and can't function, different people from different places learn different things that they bring with them wherever they move), the world makes rational sense to him. 

 

In the world of business and policy, you must always be able to answer the "so what" question to justify a course of action, an expense or an idea.  Without a clear purpose in place, activity is just spinning wheels.  If you can't explain what a project is for, nobody will support it.  If, however, you have a clear purpose, the "why" question from others can inspire you to find alternative routes to get where you're going. 

 

We demand our media provide us with pay-offs; stories must have narrative arcs that lead somewhere, justifying our emotional and attentive investment.  Jokes need punchlines; elevator-pitches need goals; even blog posts have to go somewhere, lest the reader stop tuning in.  Every religion has an end-game and a rationale for its required behaviour, be it right action and thought, donation or opposition to a viewpoint.  When there isn't a clear purpose for something (an accidental death, a devastating storm, an action of our own) we feel compelled to confabulate a meaning to make sense of it.

 

People are hard-wired to ask why, to seek purpose.  There's evidence that this drive to find reason is what sparked the move towards collaborative organization (society) in the first place.   This instinct to question is essential for communication; it gives us cause to engage proactively with others and find answers to our queries.  Without purpose, there is no justification for foresight, planning or action.  The inclination to seek purpose ignites the need to question, which leads to communication and collaboration on responses.  When differing opinions rub up against each other, questioning bridges the gap and allows for innovative solutions to emerge.

 

Without questions, there would be no discovery or innovation.  If nobody had ever bothered to ask why people get sick, society would never have developed medicine.  If nobody had questioned established medicine, the great innovations we've seen in the health care industry would never have happened.  From Copernicus to Galileo to Einstein, it was the people who sought to understand purpose that have revolutionized our collective understanding of the world.  Every bit of progress we've had, really, stems from someone asking "what makes that happen?" or "why do we do things this way?" and "how could we do it differently to achieve the same goal more effectively?"

 

When we stop asking why and revert to reaction, communication dies and progress grinds to a halt.  Instead of seeking solutions, we react to problems with an even more ingrained fight-or-flight instinct.  We're seeing that happen now in Canadian politics.  Queen's Park has been in a deadlock since the election because all Parties were committed to individual positions rather than seeking collaborative solutions; they were justifying why, rather than asking why.  Federally, the Harper government is so opposed to alternative viewpoints that they are actively stifling information, trying to remove the fuel that fosters questioning. 

 

In Toronto, poor Rob Ford refuses to question any of his positions and has tripped over one rake after the other as a result.  In perhaps the most infamous example, his response to gun crime was "kick the bums out" rather than asking what led people to commit such crimes in the first place.  It's the same sort of thinking that has fueled the notion of segregation throughout history; when you don't value the act of questioning (because you think you have all the answers) you react by trying to remove threats rather than ask questions and find solutions to them.

 

We're in a reactive mood, these days, a temperament that's being fueled by belligerent politics.  Innovation isn't what it could be and solutions feel much harder to come by.  Collectively, we're kicking the big challenges down the field, hoping someone else will do the proactive heavy lifting for us.  Instead of begrudging our lot and pointing fingers of blame, we would be much better served by asking why we're in this rut and collaboratively, start asking questions about how we can move forward once again.  It's facetious to expect a solution return if we aren't willing to make a communication investment.

 

 

Borgore and Miley Cyrus Do an American Gangnam Style?

 

Decisions, but I want it all so I get it all

I wanna eat the whole cake

I'm not sharing, I'm not sharing

You should have learned how to bake.

 

What does a video that features Miley Cyrus french-kissing a unicorn have to do with a Korean pop sensation?  Apart from being a cult-pop meme that's gone viral and inspired countless imitations, Gangnam Style is also a landmark song in the cookie-cutter Korean music scene.  It's a subtle social commentary, something unusual in a country where musicians openly declare popularity and profit to be their goals, rather than artistry or commentary.

 

Intentionally or not, Borgore (featuring Miley Cyrus) is doing the same kind of thing - spoofing modern club-culture and the Ayn Randian mentality of greed being the prime motivator, fueled by an insatiable need for sensation and status.  The dubstep tune Decisions is nothing remarkable in its lyrics or staging, but there's something sad and surreal in the carnival-like extremity of its experience that reminds me of  Surviving Picasso, a biopic of the artist based on Arianna Huffington's bio Creator and Destroyer.  Do these folk realize the absurdity of their situation?  Are they in on their own joke?  It's Gangnam Style with American flavour. 

 

I look at other products of the time, including films like The Great Gatsby or Cosmopolis and see an emerging theme of millennial fatigue. partially brought on by the popularity of shows like Jersey Shore and cynical politics.  What does it say when social commentary has become a meme of its own, when adoration is blindness?  What does it mean when would-be presidents can disparage 47% of their would-be constituents and still stand a good chance of winning, or independent auteur film makers turned corporate moguls sell their own empires into larger monopolies?

 

We've all become a bit stretched thin, like butter scraped over too much bread.  Alas, it's a cycle we've seen before.

Barack Obama: Leaders Stand with Their People

 

"The president has been outstanding in this and so have the folks at FEMA," Christie said on NBC's "Today."

 

If you're a cynic, you probably don't believe anyone, especially presidential candidates on the eve of an election, do anything that isn't self-serving. You might even think that's the way things should be; individuals duking it out for superiority. It's what Ayn Rand believed. It's what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan believe.

But it isn't leadership.

There's nothing like a natural disaster to test the depth of politicians' preference for small government.  Whereas Romney might have asked Donna Vanzant if she had her insurance paid and talked about how his policies would reduce red tape and allow her to better plan for the next crisis, Obama got right in there and responded to her not as a citizen or a potential voter, but as a human being. The hug, the reassurances, the positive redirection might seem like little things, if you've never suffered a loss - but if you have, it can make all the difference.

I guarantee that Obama gained her vote that day. His empathetic response to victims of Sandy (and they are victims, through no fault of their own) has renewed a lot of support for him.

People will follow true leaders into the depths of hell, knowing their Commander in Chief has their back. You can only make that level of commitment and inspire that kind of devotion if you believe in something greater than yourself, grander than your own aspirations.  It's too late when the crisis hits to think about preparation. 

Leadership puts 100% of the people first in times of feast and famine; they are proactive, not laissez-faire in their approach.  There's only one candidate for President who has a demonstrated ability to do that.

AND Obama shows where leaders get the hope they lead with - from their people.  Amazing.

On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace

 

Following his best selling, Pulitzer Prize nominated book On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, with Loren W. Christensen, present On Combat, a ground-breaking examination of what it takes to perform, cope and survive in the toxicity of deadly combat as a soldier in a foreign land, and a police officer in the mean streets of urban America.

Written by two warriors who have been there and done that, On Combat looks at what happens to the human body under the stresses of deadly battle — the impact on the nervous system, heart, breathing, visual and auditory perception, memory - then discusses new research findings as to what measures warriors can take to prevent such debilitations so they can stay in the fight, survive, and win.

A brief, but insightful look at history shows the evolution of combat, the development of the physical and psychological leverage that enables humans to kill other humans, followed by an objective examination of domestic violence in America. The authors reveal the nature of the warrior, brave men and women who train their minds and bodies to go to that place from which others flee. After examining the incredible impact of a few true warriors in battle, On Combat presents new and exciting research as to how to train the mind to become inoculated to stress, fear and even pain.

Expanding on Lt. Col. Grossman’s popular "Bulletproof mind" presentation, the book explores what really happens to the warrior after the battle, and shows how emotions, such as relief and self-blame, are natural and healthy ways to feel about having survived combat. A fresh and highly informative look at post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) details how to prevent it, how to survive it should it happen, how to come out of it stronger, and how to help others who are experiencing it.

On Combat looks at the critical importance of the debriefing, when warriors gather after the battle to share what happened, critique, learn from each other and, for some, begin to heal from the horror. The reader will learn a highly effective breathing technique that not only steadies the warrior’s mind and body before and during the battle, but can also be used afterwards as a powerful healing device to help separate the emotion from the memory.

Concluding chapters discuss the Christian/Judeo view of killing in combat and offers powerful insight that Lt. Col. Grossman has imparted over the years to help thousands of warriors understand and come to terms with their actions in battle. A final chapter encourages warriors to always fight for justice, nor vengeance, so that their remaining days will be healthy ones filled with pride for having performed their duty morally and ethically.

This information-packed book ploughs new ground in its vision, in its extensive new research and startling findings, and in its powerful, revealing quotes and anecdotes from top people in the warrior community, people who have faced the toxic environment of deadly combat and now share their wisdom to help others.

On Combat is easy to read and powerful in scope. It is a true classic that will be read by new and veteran warriors for years to come.

Table of Contents

Forward by Gavin de Becker (A Gift of Fear)

Section I The Physiology of Combat: The Anatomy of the Human Body in Battle

• Combat
• The Harsh Reality of Combat
• Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous System
• Fear, Physiological Arousal and Performance

Section II Perceptual Distortions in Combat: An Altered State of Consciousness

• The Eyes and the Ears
• Autopilot
• A Grabbag of effects
• Memory Loss, Memory Distortions and the Role of Videotaping
• The Klinger Study

Section III The Call to Combat: Where Do We Get Such Men?

• Killing Machines
• Stress Inoculation and Fear
• Sucking Up Bullets and Continuing to Fight
• Making the Decision to Kill
• Modern Paladins Bearing the Shield
• The Evolution of Combat
• The Evolution of Combat and Domestic Violent Crimes

Section IV The Price of Combat: After the Smoke Clears

• Relief, Self-Blame and Other Emotions
• Stress, Uncertainty, and the "Four Fs"
• PTSD
• A Time to Heal
• Tactical Breathing and the Mechanics of the Debriefing
• What to Say to a Returning Veteran and What to Say to a Survivor
• Thou Shalt Not Kill?
• Survivor Guilt

The Force Will Be With You in a Small World, After All...

Um, wow. 

Canada's Work/Life Balance More Off Kilter Than Ever (John O'Kane, Globe & Mail)

Despite years of warnings about striking work-life balance, Canadians are in a deeper rut than ever.

 

Almost two-thirds of us are working more than 45 hours a week – 50-per-cent more than two decades ago. Work weeks are more rigid, with flex-time arrangements dropping by a third in the past 10 years. To top it off, only 23 per cent of working Canadians are highly satisfied with life. That’s half as many as in 1991.

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These new findings are part of the 2012 National Study on Balancing Work and Caregiving in Canada, a survey of more than 25,000 Canadians from all provinces and two territories. It’s the third such study in two decades by professors Linda Duxbury of Carleton University and Christopher Higgins of the University of Western Ontario.

 

The study covered a vast swath of workload and work-life balance issues, from the role of gender in income and parenting-task distribution to the way work roles affect physical and mental health.

 

The findings provide various measurements of Canadians’ work-life balance. Among them: While workplaces have long talked about creating better work-life balance for their employees, one-third of Canadians feel they have more work to do than time permits. That number rises to 40 per cent when family roles are taken into account. “If we want to build the case of being the best country in the world to live, we’ve got to make changes to make that the case,” Prof. Duxbury said.

 

Younger Canadians are taking change into their own hands – by having fewer children. More than a quarter of respondents had no children, and of those, more than made that choice to put their career first. Participants without children were much younger than the survey average – and that, Prof. Duxbury said, was “a way to satisfy work demands.”

 

Those who do have children find themselves increasingly wedged between responsibilities – the sandwich generation that must take care of aging family members alongside children.

 

While family responsibilities weighed heavily on a quarter of respondents, workplace responsibilities took a heavier toll, and were more likely to eat into family duties than vice versa. Workplace roles placed a higher strain on women, who, despite having primary or equal responsibility to provide the family income in half of families, are still largely the primary caretakers of children.

 

More than half of the survey’s respondents took work home with them, putting in an average of seven extra hours a week from home. Nearly two-thirds spent more than an hour a day catching up on e-mails; one-third spent more than an hour e-mailing on their days off.

 

And while fewer workers doing the same tasks may make an employer’s budget more efficient, it doesn’t help workers’ efficiency. One-third of participants found that overloaded work and family responsibilities had a high tendency to cause them to lose sleep or dramatically reduce their energy levels.

 

This leads to everything from sick days to slower workers – perpetuating the cycle. “Organizations are fooling themselves if they think they’re getting increased productivity by expecting those who they have left to do more,” Prof. Duxbury said.

 

Striking the right balance can require serious life and scheduling changes. Nathalie Godbout and her family have made major adjustments in their lives to balance her job as a partner with the Saint John law firm Lawson Creamer. The mother of two children, ages 2 and 5, works intense days, often starting at 6:30 a.m.

 

To avoid the pressure of constant e-mails, Ms. Godbout has set an auto-reply letting people know she won’t respond right away. “The universe is kept at bay because they’re told that I respond to things at a certain time,” she said.

 

She builds family time into her schedule; her rigorous work days let her take a full week off every six to seven weeks. And at home, Ms. Godbout’s family has elected for her husband to be a stay-at-home parent. “It’s a non-traditional configuration that has, at times, been met with some skepticism – but it works ideally for us,” Ms. Godbout said.

 

One of the major limitations of the study may serve to make the results even more telling. Participants, largely public servants and not-for-profit workers earning more than $60,000 annually, skewed the result toward higher income than the Canadian average. (The median total family income in 2010 was $69,860, according to Statistics Canada.) The study found that the less-affluent the family, the more likely it was to feel burdened by excess workloads, so the higher-income skew could mean that the picture of work-life balance in the study – however gloomy – is actually a “best-case scenario,” Prof. Duxbury said.

 

The perception of flexibility in an employee’s workday significantly reduces how overloaded he or she feels, she added. Workplaces need to allow flexibility in hours not through policy, but through an understanding management, she said.

 

“To change workplace culture is a leadership issue. We need organizations’ leaders to not keep pushing this down to HR and saying, ‘Fix it.’”

The CAMH Mental Health Strategy: Prevention and Intervention

It's encouraging that people of the caliber of David Goldbloom are speaking about this stuff.  But is the private sector listening?  They have the money and the employees - work is the centre of life these days, not family.  It's in the workplace that these changes must be lead.

 

In any given year, one in five people in Canada experiences a mental health problem or illness – that’s nearly seven million Canadians, each with family, friends and colleagues.

 

This past May, I had the honour of launching Changing Directions, Changing Lives, the first mental health strategy for Canada developed by the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Implementing its recommendations will improve the health and well-being of tens of thousands of Canadians, contribute to our economic prosperity and help sustain our health-care system.

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This national strategy calls on us all to do everything possible in everyday settings to prevent mental health problems from emerging. When prevention is not possible, help must be available as early as possible.

 

We can and should provide intervention and treatment earlier. As much as 70 per cent of young adults tell us that symptoms of mental health problems began in childhood. By intervening earlier, through programs in schools and for parents of young children, we stand to avoid significant downstream costs. For example, preventing conduct disorders in just one of the 85,000 Canadian children currently affected would result in lifetime savings of $280,000.

 

The strategy focuses on enabling people with mental health problems and illnesses to recover a meaningful life with less reliance on acute care, and with less risk of developing complex and expensive social problems that can land them in jail or on the streets. This means strengthening services, treatments and supports in the community and expanding the capacity of primary health care. It also means doing more to increase the availability of housing, employment options and peer support. Over time, this will result in a more sustainable health system by reducing demand on its most expensive parts, as well as generating cost savings in schools, workplaces and across the criminal justice system.

 

A report this month from Public Health Ontario and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences indicates that the burden of mental illness and addictions in Ontario is more than 1.5 times that of all cancers combined, as reflected by premature mortality and reduced functioning. It’s not surprising that costs to the economy in direct services and supports and in lost productivity have been pegged at more than $50-billion a year – this figure does not even include money spent on mental health by the criminal justice system, the education system and social services.

 

Canada spends considerably less on mental health than several comparable countries, with seven cents out of every public health-care dollar (7 per cent) going to mental health. This is far below the 10 per cent to 11 per cent of public health spending devoted in countries such as New Zealand and Britain. That’s why our strategy doesn’t only call for making better use of current investments in mental health. It also calls for Canada to support the transformation of the mental health system by increasing the amount spent from 7 per cent to 9 per cent of health spending over 10 years.

 

A sustainable health-care system is one that addresses key cost drivers effectively and efficiently. The Mental Health Strategy for Canada lays out a plan. Now we need the will to do it. The argument that mental illnesses deserve equal priority, understanding and treatment to physical illnesses makes sense to every person, family member and friend who has seen their impact. And in a world in which prosperity depends increasingly on brain power and on a productive and dynamic work force, Canada can’t afford not to invest in the future mental health and well-being of its population.

 

David Goldbloom is chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada and senior medical adviser at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Michael Ignatieff on Our Fragile Democracy

"In the house of democracy there are no enemies.”

Of course, this is why Ignatieff failed as a politician - because we're in polarized times and we see only enemies.  He's right, though - when it becomes about standing against, democracy is lost.

Democracy is a shared endeavor - we move forward together.

Harper, the Fords - Hudak: Not the Leadership We Need, but the Leadership We Ask For

 

A freedom of information request shows Ford’s staff sought provincial funding for a single football-related project or program — a major renovation of the field at Etobicoke’s Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School, where Ford is head coach and where his summer team, the Rexdale Raiders, holds practices.

 

 

Mayor Rob Ford’s “retraction” of his disparaging comments about the city’s chief medical officer is so inadequate that council should punish him, the integrity commissioner wrote in a brief but blistering report released Monday.

 

 

Rob Ford is an obstructionist Mayor who doesn't know how to work with others.  His brother works the same way.  Their supporters will read the above quotes and say that they don't care, this kind of thing has nothing to do with governance; Ford is boss, his job is to be tough, he's cutting the gravy and they're happy.  What they need to ask themselves is, how would they react if it was David Miller advocating for personal causes through the Mayor's office?

 

The same thing is happening at the Federal level; diehard Harper supporters are saying so what to the complete erosion of Parliament, the partisan spending, the Budget Officer Fight.  So long as the guy they feel has their interests at heart is in charge, they don't care about anything else.

 

Well, that's what happened with the Mike Harris government, too - they disrupted education (no wait, that was the teachers), shot Dudley George (he shouldn't have been in the Park), screwed up energy (not sure who got the blame for that one) and Walkerton (all about the staff, nothing about leadership or funding).

 

When people ask where would Hudak take Ontario, I can pretty much guarantee that it would be more of the same.  Hudak has the profile of a man who never admits a mistake and can never accept advice from opposition.  He's thrown his own loyal stalwarts under the bus for his own gain, whatever it does to his Party or Parliament.  In short, Hudak will be exactly the type of leader we see with Harper and Ford, only probably somewhere in the middle when it comes to expressing his contempt for people not of his mindset.  He'll also be reactionary, penny-pinching and disruptive of services, because he simply won't care about the consequences. 

 

So, if you're happy with Harper and you love what Ford has done with the Gardiner, with the bump up in shooting or in solving transit, Hudak is your man.  If you actually care about the society you live in, though, you might want to look for a leader who understands ownership and responsibility. 

 

After all, you get what you ask for.

Frankenstorm

Stay safe, folks.  Don't take chances when it comes to weather.  Don't go out if you don't need to!  Prepare at home, too - get some ice, and the following:

Among items to consider for an emergency kit are:

• Four litres of water per person for each day of a 72-hour period (two litres for drinking, and two litres for washing)
• Enough non-perishable or canned food for each person for 72 hours, as well as enough food for pets
• A manual can opener
• A crank or battery-operated flashlight, with extra batteries
• A crank or battery-operated radio, with extra batteries
• Spare keys for the house and car
• A first aid kit
• Cash in small bills, in case power outages restrict the use of bank machines
• Other special needs items such as medications, baby formula, diapers and equipment for people with disabilities

The Canadian Red Cross recommends keeping the supplies in easy-to-carry containers, such as rolling suitcases, so they can be easily transported in the event of an evacuation.

CBC weather specialist Craig Larkins said Sandy, which is still a Category 1 hurricane, is 1,300 kilometres wide, making it the second-largest tropical storm in the Atlantic since 1988.