steveiman.com

 Trust issues are important to relationships everywhere -- from emerging face-to-face relationships to hammering out associations in the global order. Trust issues invade our politics and are the number one criteria used by CEOs in selecting top corporate leaders in America.  Trust recedes to the background as we focus on other relationship issues. But in understanding and not being blind to trust issues, we can build it and maintain it. Old institutions are being left behind in part because their power and hierarchy were institutionalized forms of distrust.

 Trust is a huge issue with businesses right now, whether they 'get it', or not. I don't remember a time in my life when public trust in top managers and institutions was lower.  Obama's call for transparency and openness is striking a chord with the public, and the widespread derision of chief executives flying corporate jets to Washington to ask for bailout money, or dishing out the billions as the public covers corporate losses -- the issues may continue to build and corrode the faith needed to sustain us.

 Trying to build a classroom into a performing organization is a challenge I love. Getting at the process keeps my brain alive with all kinds of parallels. Each session provides links of memory to so much of my experience that it's always fun. 

 As I get older, things get clearer and my thinking is more direct. The process is highlighting some things for me as I organize teaching in these last years of my professional life. What's exciting is how relevant I find some of the premises I stumbled on early in the field of organizational development and the application of knowledge. Among some of those ideas were values of experiential learning and an awareness of the necessity of responsibility and accountability in the learning process.

Have you ever met someone and felt you knew them most of your life? That's the way it was with Carl and Norm in Petersburg West Virginia, and it's sure the way it was meeting Pat Vaseska In Waterloo. My partner doesn’t altogether trust my interest in family. "These people really don't know you", he insists. And yet to me there is a leap I make, and people who share an interest in these old bloodlines are close to my heart pretty much without reservation. I suppose it's something to be on guard about.

Puppies grow fast. Teile ("Tei" for his sister TeiPu, "Le" for his brother LeRoy) was born March 13, and here he is early in June -- a couple of weeks after we first saw him at a flea market outside Shepherdsville, Kentucky -- a suburb of Louisville. A full Shih Tzu, this unusual little white beast has touches of brindle coloring on eartips. We suspect that when it's all over with he'll grow to be a little larger than the 10 pounds estimated by his breeder. There's more about our flea market dog in  other blog posts. (more following the break.)

We've long known of Merritts – a key provider of parts for old clocks. We had little idea though what we were getting ourselves into in trying to hunt them down. Many miles out small, two lane roads, to a very rural part of Pennsylvania, there is what looks to be an old farm with lots of buildings, and acres of antiques and clocks. We arrived early in the morning as they were just opening and walked the dogs out to the cow pastures before scouting out the many rooms of inventory.

The Mississippi River valley was French territory for generations while the settlers of what was to become the United States filled in coastal areas and started migrating in westerly directions. Incredibly fertile areas along the edges of the river often flooded but produced unlike most farmlands of the nation until the Army Corps of Engineers much later reconfigured the land from one of many lakes to rather bland drained plots.

In the 1720's there was little established government in Pennsylvania. The British held court quite infrequently, though upon several occasions took over Postlethwaite's Tavern, which has been constructed first about 1725. Lancaster's first court was held here on Long Lane in 1729, with John Postlethwaite working to have this setting defined as the center of an emerging Lancaster County.

Lancaster prides itself on it's history and the settlement of so many "Deutsch" farmers from the beginning.  (It's sort of ironic that while many think of "Pennsylvania Dutch" as hailing from Holland simply because they often spoke "deutsch", the reality was that most of the German migrants in early waves were actually Swiss who had spent time along the Rhine as only partially welcomed farm laborers.