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Nearly half of executives in a new study report their company has a chief risk officer (CRO), up from 33% two years ago. The elevated role in the C-suite has resulted in CFOs losing the top spot as the primary owners of risk management.
The survey of nearly 400 executives, conducted by Accenture at the beginning of this year and released today, reports that only 14% of finance chiefs hold the ultimate responsibility for risk management, compared with 34% two years ago.
In addition, more CEOs can claim ownership of risk. Accenture reports that 23% of the survey respondents, who are all C-suite executives, say their CEO owns the responsibility for risk management, compared with just 13% in 2009.
Steve Culp, managing director of Accenture's risk-management consulting line, says the change is partly due to the rise in CROs in general as businesses have expanded globally and risk management has moved beyond a compliance and modeling exercise. "The overall size of the complexity pie has increased," he says.
Moreover, CFOs shouldn't feel they are losing any authority. Rather, just as the finance chief's position has evolved in recent years beyond number crunching, so has the CRO role, Culp says. "When we look at the financial-services sector, we have seen a higher percentage of C-level executives responsible for risk separately," he says.
In contrast, a recent survey of risk managers and executives by Marsh reports CFOs have the primary responsibility for risk. Nearly 30% of the respondents reported their finance chiefs carry that role.
Any shift is most prevalent at financial-services firms, which were forced to thoroughly reevaluate their risk-management programs following the financial crisis and the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act last summer. A recent Deloitte survey of financial institutions reports 86% have a CRO or equivalent, and most of them report to the board of directors, the CEO, or both.
Accenture also sees the rise of the CRO as a sign that risk management has moved up in importance on the overall corporate agenda and is demanding wider attention beyond the finance department. Smart companies are using it to gain competitive advantage by factoring it into their strategic planning, the consultancy claims.

subset: commoncrawl


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NBC's Andrea Mitchell Implores Chuck Schumer: 'Is Something Meaningful Going to Happen on Guns?'
NBC's Andrea Mitchell, on Thursday's edition of MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, implored liberal New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer to push for more gun control. After noting that students from Sandy Hook Elementary School had finally returned to class after the tragic shooting, Mitchell pressed Schumer: "Is something meaningful going to happen on guns this year?"
An appreciative Schumer responded: "I hope so."
The following is the relevant exchange from the January 3 edition of MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports:
ANDREA MITCHELL: Senator, the children from Sandy Hook are going to school today for the first time, in another school, in classrooms that have been recreated to look like their own. I know that Carolyn McCarthy is going to introduce symbolic, largely symbolic legislation on the House side. The Senate side we're expecting Dianne Feinstein to introduce her legislation around the time of the Inaugural. Is something meaningful going to happen on guns this year?
SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: Well I hope so and President [Obama] has appointed Joe Biden to be head of this commission and he believes something reasonable. You know, you can put reasonable limits on who gets guns without interfering with the legitimate Second Amendment rights that are enshrined in the Constitution. We on the liberal side of things have to accept that. But you can put reasonable limits on any amendment. The First Amendment. You can't scream fire falsely in a crowded theater. We have anti-pornography legislation. Those are limits on the First Amendment. Limits on the Second Amendment that prohibit criminals, the mentally infirm, spousal abusers from getting guns and tightening up those laws, as Senator, as Congresswoman McCarthy's legislation does and I carry that in the Senate, make reasonable sense. And I hope we can come together in the middle. Not an extreme legislation that will scare those who believe, who have guns, use guns, hunt for self-protection but at the same time will make our country safer. I think there's a possibility for real compromise here.
-- Geoffrey Dickens is the Deputy Research Director at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow Geoffrey Dickens on Twitter.


text: Biohazard - Umbrella Chronicles - Platform: Wii Bonus scenarios: ---------------- Successfully complete the indicated task to unlock the corresponding bonus scenario: Beginnings 1: Successfully complete Train Derailment 3. Beginnings 2: Successfully complete Beginnings 1 with an "A" or better rank. Dark Legacy 1: Successfully complete Fall Of Umbrella 3. Dark Legacy 2: Successfully complete Death's Door and Nightmare 2. Death's Door: Successfully complete Racoon's Destruction 3 with an "A" or better rank. Fourth Survivor: Successfully complete Dark Legacy 2. Nightmare 1: Successfully complete Mansion Incident 1. Nightmare 2: Successfully complete Nightmare 1 with an "A" or better rank. Rebirth 1: Successfully complete Mansion Incident 3. Rebirth 2: Successfully complete Rebirth 1. The 4th Survivor: Successfully complete Dark Legacy 2. Special Stage mini-game: ------------------------ Successfully complete all scenarios, including the bonus sub-scenarios to unlock the Special Stage mini-game. Infinite ammunition: -------------------- Get an "S" rank in all scenarios. The message "Unlimited Ammo Deactivated" will appear. This is a glitch, where "Deactivated" was used as a mistranslation for "Unlocked". Ignore the error, and enter the "Customize" menu to purchase the level 5 (unlimited ammunition) upgrade. Cooperative mode: ----------------- Successfully complete Hunk's "The Fourth Survivor" scenario to unlock Cooperative mode in all missions. You can now select the double pistol icon at the character selection screen to play with two players. Note: Both players will use the same character. Handcannon: ----------- Play Hunk's "The Fourth Survivor" scenario. Locate the secret room next to the front doors of the police station lobby. Watch for Hunk to look briefly towards the doors that lead to the secret room as he walks past. Quickly shoot the doors to open them. Enter the secret room, and get the Handcannon from the desk on the left side. Control loading screen: ----------------------- During the loading screen, you can shoot the Umbrella logo where it will eventually fall. It will bounce around as you shoot it. Easy "S" ranks Use the following trick to get easy "S" rank unlocks. Play Wesker's Mansion Mission (Rebirth). Play the first scenario repeatedly. Once you find all three files, all you need to worry about is time and critical hits. It is also a short mission. Once you get the three files, getting an "S" rank each time is easy. The best time to get all your critical hits is after going up the steps. Once the zombies begin moving, aim your crosshair until the red circle blinks, then fire for an instant critical. Defeating the Giant Worm: ------------------------- The Giant Worm will be moving left and right at the beginning; however, this is just to confuse you on which side it will be attacking from. Its weak point is in its mouth. You should be using the assault shotgun, Magnum, rocket launcher, or MRL. It will go underground a few times to attack you. Dodge this attack. When it comes back up, Carlos or Jill will look up into the sky. Shoot the rocks coming down, and repeat the process. It will jump into the air a few times. Shoot its mouth to send it flying to the side. You must dodge one of these attacks later. Once its health gets down to half, shoot all four MRL rockets into its mouth. If it is still alive, finish it off with the assault shotgun. Note: In one of its attacks, it will throw cars at you. One of them will be a bus, which takes away about half of your health. Shoot them to make them explode. Defeating Nemesis: ------------------ You can use anything against the Nemesis because he has no weak point. Make sure you have a Magnum (level 4), assault shotgun (level 4), and MRL (level 4). Use the Magnum first. After you shoot him enough times, he will jump onto the rooftop and run to a certain spot, where he will shoot his tentacles down the wall and pop up directly in front of you to attack. This cannot be dodged. He will then jump up and attempt to crush you. Dodge this, and repeat the process. When you run out of ammo for the Magnum and assault shotgun, use the MRL. Shoot all eight rockets at him. If he survives, finish him off with the handgun. Note: He can grab you and hold you in the air. This will damage you until you die or shoot him enough times to make him drop you.


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The Secret Weapon to Scaling: Sales Operations
I was speaking at an event last night and met a young woman at a large public tech company that was thinking of moving into startup land. She wanted to know whether her skills would be valued in a smaller, growth company. I asked her what role she was currently playing and my eyes widened when she replied, "sales operations". "Holy crap!" I exclaimed, "You'll be the most valuable hire a growth stage company could ever make." When the people around us looked puzzled, I realized that not everyone appreciates that sales operations is the secret weapon to scaling start ups.
One of the largest friction points to rapid scaling is the sales force. Very few companies have a business model that enables frictionless revenue growth because of their successful implementation of a freemium model - e.g., Bettercloud, Cloudflare, Dropbox, MongoDB - and even those that do eventually hire a sales team to move up the ladder on deal size and improve upsell, cross-sell and renewal rates. When you begin to scale a sales force, you desperately need to create a sales operations function. Here's why:
- You need to hire, train and make productive a lot of new salespeople - fast. Your sales directors and VPs find it hard to take the time to sit with internal and external recruiters and write job descriptions, screen candidates and develop the systematic training and monitoring and coaching programs for new sales recruits. The difference between ramping a productive salesperson in 3 months versus 6 months could be life or death for a scaling startup. That's the role of sales operations.
- Your VP of Sales is a great leader, but not a great operator. Most VPs of sales are strong leaders of people, recruiters and individual "rain makers". But they don't typically love staring at spreadsheets, analyzing metrics and working out optimal compensation systems that align incentives with strategy. That's the role of sales operations.
- Sales and marketing alignment is important - but hard to execute in the trenches. The sales directors and VPs are too busy chasing deals and coaching their reps in the field to be back in headquarters walking marketing through the latest in competitive intelligence. The field staff struggles to be patient enough to explain and identify what sales tools are lacking as well as tracking what happened to certain cohorts of leads to improve lead generation. And wrangling over the latest in pricing and packaging schemes is never fun - and not something you want your sales team distracted by. That's the role of sales operations.
- The insights from your sales CRM system is strategic, but cumbersome. Having an in-house whiz at salesforce.com/SugarCRM/NetSuite is required to develop those fancy pipeline reports, prepare for the weekly sales calls as well as report to the executive team and the board on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis a snapshot of what is happening in the field across all territories and all sales teams. That's the role of sales operations.
- You want to invest in technologies to make sales efficient, without slowing down sales during technology implementation. Sales organizations are full of technology that need to be mastered - CRM, dialer, email platform, analytics tools - and asking each sales rep to develop proficiency in each tool and provide the IT team with feedback on how to optimally configure each tool is a distraction for them. That's the role of sales operations.
The best sales operations leaders allow the sales team to spend more time selling and less time worrying about reporting, cross-functional coordination and operational management. Sometimes known as the Chief Revenue Officer's chief of staff, the mole for the CEO to figure out what's really going on in sales, the executive who prepares all the board reports on sales - whatever you want to call it, that role is the absolute secret weapon that every company needs to rapidly scale sales.
As an aside, here are a few job descriptions recently posted for directors of sales operations at rapidly scaling startups that I liked on LinkedIn to help bring the position to life:


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Mobile Trainers Scottsdale
Personal Trainers Scottsdale
Mobile Trainers is the only certified in-home personal training expert in Scottdale. We go to great lengths to ensure you enjoy the best home fitness training experience possible. Our entire process centres around you as we create a customizable home training program, nutrition program, and overall experience tailored to your goals, expectations, and preferences. Aside from our team of talented and motivated trainers, we also provide the best in-home personal training experience by leveraging cutting-edge technology. Our team is more results-driven than any other trainers you'll find. We have a passion for fitness and body transformations and are as committed to seeing your goals take shape as you are.
Scottsdale may refer to:
Alterra, Ancala, Arabian Green, Aviara, Briarwood North, Buenavante, Cachet At McDowell Mountain Ranch, Casa Privada, Central Scottsdale, Cholla Vista, Country Trace, Cox Heights, Desert Shadows, Foothills At Ironwood Village, Gainey Ranch


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It's easier to do what we are told than to think about what we are doing. Every decision is a risk. Our business environments and standardized practices steeped in policy encourage us to keep our heads down and charge ahead. But, real problem solvers use their intellect.
There is a message that I have tried many times to convey to colleagues, associates, peers, friends, and employers. It's challenging because it is such a large and broad idea that it's difficult to simplify into a platitude or simple fable.
I'll start by explaining that one of the greatest failures of many improvement efforts is also the greatest failure of many failed product designs and struggling or failed businesses. We get so caught up in the quest to improve something that we forget to maintain our focus, or even set our focus, on the truly important elements.
This phenomenon manifests in two critical ways and consequent failure modes. The first is that we improve that which does not need improving, or at the cost of what is truly critical. The second is a failure to make a decision, or to make a decision with the proper perspective.
Another way to say it is that we get so focused on what is important to, or easy for, our own little piece of the world, that we lose sight of what the business needs or the customer sees valuable. Additionally, because we don't consider the picture beyond our own little puzzle piece, we either don't feel comfortable making a decision, or we make poor decisions.
As I said, I don't know how to make such a broad concept easy to convey except to share a myriad of real examples to try and demonstrate the breadth and coincident simplicity of the mistake. So, here we go.
Example 1: a process improvement example
Consider a production process, where a combination of substances is baked into a structure that becomes the final product. The preparation for the baking process is very time consuming and requires a great deal of labor. It also creates a clearly wasteful byproduct because the substances are combined in a disposable paper or foam "boat" or fixture that holds the proper amount to be baked for each individual portion for final product.
This process design is an "improvement" over the previous process in that the product is portioned out before baking; whereas, the previous design, separated out portions after large quantities were baked in larger tubs. The previous process did not require as much throw-away material, so the cost of wasted material has gone up with the process change.
As a lean advocate, looking at the waste produced by the new process, the impulse is to try and devise a way to eliminate the disposable "boats." A quick look at some basic numbers reveals that re-useable boats cost more in maintenance and cleaning, and require more floor space and capital equipment than the disposable ones.
Waste from disposables can be economically mitigated by either recycling paper "boats" or by compressing and cooking foam trays. One thousand foam trays can be fused into a solid block about the size of a pair of shoeboxes for less energy and with smaller, cheaper equipment than washing re-useable trays. Also, washing produces waste in the form of polluted water rather than paper or foam solids; it's a trade.
However, the real lesson is elsewhere. While we would all like to eliminate the use of trays and the production of any waste, the economic cost of that waste is miniscule compared to the potential revenue increase and the measureable reduction in post-baking processing and overall process time to make the product; in other words, while the obvious opportunity is to eliminate the physical waste, that physical waste is a small thing compared to the productivity improvement it enables.
It is a fallacy to eliminate the obvious waste at the expense of the productivity improvement it facilitates. But, the first reaction of everyone that looks at the process is to re-hash the numbers for that waste and try to show how costly it is and to recommend eliminating it by post-processing. The minute the collective process knowledge owners lose sight of the whole process equation, the recommendation will be executed and the process will revert to a poorer, more costly, performance.
It is important to understand what metric represents what is most important and to maintain that focus. As process improvement agents, we must always remember to consider what is best for the whole process, not just the piece in front of us, or just the most obvious opportunity.
Example #2: forgetting what is at stake
A group of engineers is asked to look for opportunities within its realm of influence to cut costs for the business. One suggestion that is accepted and put into motion is to change to a re-useable, universal test fixture.
The incumbent method is to custom-build a mounting fixture for each and every new design to be put through dynamic testing. It costs around $300, give or take, for each fixture, for each test. A handful of tests are done each year, so a $1,200 re-useable and adjustable fixture would pay for itself after less than a year and save a couple of thousand dollars a year after. Sounds like a winner, maybe.
Here is the important business risk that wasn't considered. It costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 to $12,000 to conduct each test. Recall that the tests are dynamic tests, often resulting in the destruction of the test samples. They are extremely harsh and the re-useable, adjustable fixture must repeatedly survive these tests.
To be adjustable, the fixture was constructed of channels, tracks, and slotted holes with numerous bolts and wing nuts. The engineers simply couldn't get it to be solid enough to complete the dynamic tests without falling out of adjustment. The test would be invalidated by the failure of the fixture.
The engineering manager and engineering team made a judgment mistake by deciding to risk $10,000 tests to eliminate the cost of a $300 fixture. They lost focus on where the real expense and risk was. It costs a great deal more to re-test than to build a throwaway, but foolproof fixture.
The good news is they never did use the re-useable fixture, because they recognized the problem before finding out the hard way. However, if they had just considered the potential savings in perspective of the real costs and the risks of incurring those costs they might have saved themselves the trouble and expense of building their prototype.
Example#3: didn't consider the problem
NASA engineers spent three years designing a treadmill for the international space station. It never went into space. To dampen the vibrations of a person running on a treadmill, and prevent damage to the fragile station, they had to make it so heavy and bulky it was impractical to launch into space or find room for it.
Vibration is only one challenge to overcome. How do we power a treadmill in an environment where electricity is in limited supply? How do we keep an astronaut on the treadmill in zero gravity? How do we make it small enough to fit in a very constrained space? How do we make it light enough to ride on the shuttle or rocket for delivery to the station? That's only a few.
I presented this problem to some third, fourth, and fifth graders at an elementary school discussion on problem solving. One astute fifth grader asked the all-important question. "Why were they building a treadmill for the space station?" Why, indeed! Why didn't the NASA engineers spend more time answering that question?
The fourth graders decided that a hamster wheel would at least solve the energy and vibration problems and would work the arms as well as lungs and legs. The third graders decided that exercise bands (giant rubber bands) would solve every problem and produce a good workout. The fifth graders decided that spring-powered exercise equipment would be a better starting place than a treadmill.
Why did elementary school students come up with better, more probably successful concepts than NASA engineers? I led them to focus on the real problem: astronauts need exercise in zero gravity. Not, "Astronauts need a treadmill."
Sometimes we get so focused on solving the problem presented to us that we don't take the time to consider the real problem. Admit it, in one context or another we have all done it. We must step back and, before we begin, make sure that we are focused on the real issue, not just the one presented to us.
Example #4: failure to make a decision
Years ago, I led a collection of engineers, managers, marketing leaders, and quality and production personnel through a value analysis of a new product concept. The business had decided to modify existing product designs to compete in a different market segment.
We had just completed competitive teardowns of the competitor products in this market and were finalizing our project objectives and product concept based on our analyses when the program manager indulged me and allowed me to map out our findings and our plans into the value analysis chart.
Everyone engaged in the teardown analysis and project plan meetings and, therefore, also in the value analysis, agreed that the analysis was well done and we agreed with the results.
Our analysis clearly showed that our product concept was not distinctly better than the competition's existing products, and that at least one competitor would sell at a lower price. It was obvious that we needed to identify at least one feature or function that the competition didn't offer, or to outperform the competition in at least one important aspect, if the product was going to capture any market share. We discussed it at length.
We proceeded with the design and development of the new product without addressing the findings of our value analysis, in spite of the fact that almost every project team member was part of the analysis. It was easier to do what we were told and to march toward a deadline, than it was to discuss changing our marching orders. The product didn't meet the revenue needs or expectations of the business.
For my part, I pressed the issue until I was told to drop it or face consequences. It's not easy to change directions once we start, but it sure is easy to waste a great deal of energy and resources and time working on a project set up for failure. We must be courageous and make hard decisions instead of easy ones if we are going to change culture, change behavior, or make business improvement.
It's easy to decline to make a decision and let the blame fall on the one who did, but that's not a helpful behavior. We absolutely must check our own attitudes and behavior and must not fall into that trap. Then we must expect our peers, our leaders, and our personnel to do the same.
I witnessed a major in the U.S. Marines once tell a bunch of boy scouts, "Never be afraid to be the only one to do what's right." Those are true words of wisdom.
Example #5: focused on easy for me, instead of best for business and customer
A customer has opened a supply contract up for bid among competitors. The incumbent business finds itself in the unfortunate, and uncomfortable, position of having to bid for a contract it has had for many years.
One very expensive and difficult aspect of the industry is that the product must be certified and qualified with an industry regulatory agency in order to be sold, and the customer must have traceability for that certification to use that product as a component for its products. Naturally, there is a significant amount of red tape involved.
While discussing that particular challenge and how to make things easier, the proposal team, along with engineering and certification advisors, decided to bid the contract with new part and model numbers to create a clean break in product history and simplify documentation and red tape.
Overhearing the outcome, one individual who had not followed the group discussion into a fixation on what was easiest for the individuals, stepped forward and pointed out the mistake from a business perspective. The single greatest advantage the business had as the incumbent on the contract was that the existing model numbers and part numbers were already certified.
If the business simply made a revision change to existing models to accommodate the new performance requirements then the customer could avoid tens of thousands of dollars in re-qualification process and testing that comes with changing the model numbers. Also, since only the changes need to be qualified, the process would take a few weeks instead of several months.
The greatest advantage the business has for reclaiming the contract is the preservation of the model number. The person intervening still had her mind on what was best for the customer and, therefore, the business, while the others on the proposal team and those advising them, had fallen into the trap of considering what is easiest for them.
We fall into this trap all the time. In fact it's very similar to the mistake of the first example. We only look at a single piece, not the whole equation. In this case, we focus on our own piece without thinking about the real focus, the customer.
So what do these examples have in common, and what's my point? In each of these examples, we saw individuals or teams that lost perspective, or failed to achieve perspective, of what was really needed, what was really intended, or what was really important. The failure is in blindly doing what we are told, neglecting to ask why something is the way it is, forgetting what is most important, or in fearing to make a change or a decision.
All of those failure modes are brought on by the impulse to do instead of think. Thinking about our actions before acting is a difficult thing to explain, and an even more difficult thing to teach. After all, if we all had a magical crystal ball to see into the future, the world would be much different.
The best advice I have to offer is this. Make a habit of asking questions like the following as a matter of daily or hourly course.
- What is the real problem?
- Why am I doing this? What's the real intent?
- Before I change this, do I understand why it is the way it is?
- What is best for the customer/business/process?
- This helps whom?
- If I (or he or she) don't want to make this decision, why is that?
- What's the right thing to do?
- What's the most important thing?
Try to keep perspective with regard to every action and decision. Focus on what is most important, rather than what is easiest. Keep in mind that we are hired not to get tasks done, per say, but to solve problems. Problems are solved best when we think, not just when we do. Our best asset is our ability to think things through.
After all, are we really paid the salaries we have, especially those of us with considerable experience, to shut up and do what we are told? Or are we paid for our experience because we are expected to use that experience, that wisdom, to make better decisions? Hopefully, you agree that we are the latter. If so, then we are paid to think and solve problems, not ignore them or avoid them, regardless of what the environment might enable or encourage.
Become more effective by thinking about your actions and assignments. Focus on intent and that which is important before getting caught up in instructions or what is easy. When you have mastered this for yourself, begin working on your coworkers. Help them to do the same.
Stay wise, friends.
If you like what you just read, find more of Alan's thoughts at www.bizwizwithin.com.


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When the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School wanted to design the first class specifically targeting the CFO role five years ago, it turned to its own executive-education students for ideas. The result was "The CFO: Becoming a Strategic Partner," now a twice-a-year staple on Wharton's open-enrollment schedule.
Little did Wharton know in early 2002 the changes in the CFO suite that lay ahead — changes that have been duly recognized by regular adjustments in the curriculum, according to John Percival, who has been at Wharton since 1971 and now serves as academic director and an adjunct professor of finance.
Stripped to its basics, the course has evolved into an intensive exploration of the finance chief in two key functions: communicating clearly the financial implications of alternatives being considered among all corporate leaders as they plan for the future or deal with emergencies, and identifying what Percival calls "the right kind of growth."
Everyone wants growth, but "it's one thing to see opportunities, and another to determine that it's the right opportunity for us," he says. "It has to be profitable growth, and must come with an understanding of what our competitive advantage would be."
And perhaps surprisingly to the Wharton educators who designed the course as the new century was beginning, it has had to include a careful examination of the division of time between this strategic finance role and the return — after Sarbox changed everything — to the accounting functions that CFOs had longed to pass down to controllers and other subordinates. All the while, the new strategic needs ballooned to include ramifications of lightning-fast globalization, shortening product life cycles, the rise of private equity, and a broader definition of risk management.
Indeed, the greatest gift for the 35 to 40 executives in each week-long "Becoming a Strategic Partner" may be more wisdom about how to adjust their work weeks to the fast pace of change in a post-Sarbanes-Oxley world, according to Percival.
"There aren't enough hours in the day, and perhaps the greatest wish of CFOs is that they could do better at allocating their time," he says. A recent survey by the Knowledge at Wharton organization, measuring how finance chiefs divide their work schedules, "validated what we, on a more ad hoc basis, are finding in the class."
The Students Teach
"In executive education we try to listen to our customers and find out what's going on. And we're looking for opportunities," says Percival, recalling the early signals emerging from Wharton's five-week-long Advanced Management program as the decades changed. "One thing that came up in those sessions was that companies were facing very important issues about the future, and there was a role for the people in the CFO seat to fill when they came to the table with the CEO."
And not just the CEO. "We had lots of conversations with senior marketing folks; there was a big problem between marketing and finance," says the professor. Marketers "were magnanimous, and realized that a lot of the problem came from their side. But they felt also that financial people weren't listening the way they could and should."
What began to develop was the need for a finance course focusing "not so much on technical things" but on what CFOs bring to the strategy table and how they present themselves. "My job as a CFO would not be to say no, but rather to make sure everybody knew what the financial implications were," he says. And among all the possible strategic themes, the most important was growth.
"That was the backdrop for the week," says Percival. "It was not to be a general management program, but it wouldn't be technical finance stuff, either. It was focusing on cooperating and communicating positively."
The new program, which today costs the company sending finance executives to Wharton's Philadelphia campus $9,200 per head, drew from some existing courses. "We picked some stuff from strategy programs we already had, and from courses like Negotiations," he says. "But you couldn't get this in any other program as a package." Attendees are a mix of "CFOs and CFO wannabes, like controllers." They come from companies of all sizes.
From the beginning, scenario planning has been among the most popular elements of the course. "As a CFO there are some 'Yeah, but so what?' questions to deal with," Percival notes. A historical look at the railroads early in the century, for example, highlights the industry-changing threat from the automobile. "But so what? If I'm a railroad, should I get into manufacturing automobiles?" The very discussion led to choices like railroads serving to move cars from place to place, for example. "Somebody should have been talking about how we create value and how we earn our cost of capital from that."
Today's strategic issues, however, require more contemporary examples than other executive-education courses use. (Professors often like older cases because it takes years to see the consequences of various choices.) Cases now are as recent as 2005, although there's still a need to be able to discuss outcomes. "People say, Oh my God! That's what the company did? How did it work out?" says the professor. Without discussing specifics of the cases studied, Percival says they are disguised real situations — though sometimes not particularly well-disguised.
"The companies we look at are sometimes good, wonderful companies, but often their decision-making process isn't a good one," says Percival, who has a fondness for knocking the aircraft-development choices of both Boeing and Europe's Airbus. "Sometimes," he adds, "they succeed in spite of their poor decision-making."
Along Comes Sarbox
As Wharton was fine-tuning its program to reflect cries for the strategic CFO to spend less time on traditional scorekeeping functions, passage of Sarbox forced the professors to reevaluate things. "With Sarbox came personal responsibility for the accounting," Percival notes. "CFOs were certainly feeling this dilemma. Unfortunately, in the short run you have to spend considerable time, if you don't have the forward-looking systems required by the Sarbox era. Once you've got them, then it's important to think about reallocation of time."
While the course began dealing with the new balance of responsibilities, it didn't turn into a legislative primer. "We don't have to make these folks experts on Sarbox; they already are. What we could do was help them allocate their precious time."
Other changes in the program focused on risk management. Its traditional definition as currency risk and financial risk "is a very small part of risk management today," according to Percival. Increasingly, issues of operational risk began to put CFOs in the position of COOs. "If you mess up on one of these risks, it's not just financial; it could have tremendous implications for the whole company."
So now, separate sections exist on risk. Plus, more time has been given in recent years to real options.
The approach of choice for "Strategic Partner" is scenario planning, in which students study how to improve the communication of ideas in integrated sessions. But role-playing is not stressed. Rather, "it's taking a look at some important decisions that corporations actually made. Let's say it's a huge investment, and the board of directors has to sign off on it. If the board asked you to make a recommendation, how would you analyze this?" Attendees experience how, even if the board decides to go in a different direction, it will do so with financial wisdom about the implications of the choice.
Often with such an approach, friction between the CFO and CEO develops. "You've got CEOs with vision and CFOs with a view on the ramifications of the resulting decisions. You've got political issues when you have strong CEOs with a vision of what they want things to look like," says Percival.
"We've increased the number of real options we examine, and we've fine-tuned real-options thinking and application," he adds. "My CEO wants to go aggressively and rapidly into China. That may or may not be a good idea. Maybe we should go in small, not big, and then have what amounts to a call option, and add capacity. That kind of perspective often doesn't come in unless it's from the CFO." Such analysis brings in the pluses from being a first-mover, as well as the minuses.
An emphasis on "execution, as opposed to strategy" has also developed in recent years, says the professor. "In executive education in general, we overemphasize formulation. It's sexy and involves a crystal ball," he explains. "But execution — the blocking and tackling — is vital. And CFOs tend to be to some extent the nuts-and-bolts kinds of people," so this is a change to bring out their natural strengths.
There's also been an increasing emphasis on information technology, again stressing practical lessons for dealing with the company's IT function.
"It's a very labor-intensive program," says Percival of the week of classes, mostly constructed as half-day programs. "There are 10 different faculty involved during the course of the week, which starts on Sunday afternoon."
Sessions for 2008 are planned for April 6-11 and Nov. 2-7.


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Larry Kudlow Again Says That US Debt Isn't a Problem
Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said Tuesday that in his view the $22.5 trillion national debt is not a pressing issue. "I don't see this as a huge problem at all right now. [It's] quite manageable," Kudlow told CNBC's Kelly Evans.
Kudlow has not always been so sanguine about the national debt. In 2009, he sharply criticized the Obama administration for its efforts to stimulate the economy through deficit spending that increased the debt. "The families of America take a look at this budget and these humongous deficits and the doubling of the debt and so forth and the out of control spending ... this is the most unbalanced fiscal story coming out of Washington, really in our history," Kudlow said at the time.
Kudlow also claimed that the Republican tax cuts were largely paying for themselves. "I would argue strongly that the corporate tax cut has already been paid for and roughly 2/3rds of the overall tax cut has been paid for," he told Evans.
Although this is a frequently repeated talking point in the Trump administration, most economists say the Republican tax cuts have not and will not pay for themselves, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that they will reduce federal revenues by $1.9 trillion over 10 years. Reviewing a recent analysis of the issue by the Congressional Research Service, Howard Gleckman of Tax Policy Center concluded that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act have fallen "wildly short of paying for itself in growth-driven new revenue."


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Afghan Security Insider Speaks at UW and Northwest College
Daoud Yaqub, a key participant in Afghanistan's unfolding history and recent political transitions, will speak at Northwest College and the University of Wyoming in October.
Yaqub, the former executive director of the Afghanistan Foundation, speaks Wednesday, Oct. 10, at 4 p.m. in Room 70 of the Fagerberg Building at Northwest College and at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11, in the UW Education Building auditorium.
A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and current Ph.D. candidate at Durham University in the United Kingdom, Yaqub held numerous posts in the Afghanistan government. He played a significant role in building the Afghan National Security Council into a major security and policy organization of the Afghan government.
Yaqub's lecture is part of the statewide Global and International Studies Lecture Series and World to Wyoming Initiative. It is funded by a U.S. Department of Education Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language grant to UW's Global and Area Studies Program in partnership with Wyoming's seven community colleges.
The UW International Global and Area Studies Program, and the Wyoming Humanities Council sponsor the lecture series.
This is event is free and open to the public. For more information, email Manuela Hofer-McIntyre at email@example.com or call (307) 766-3415.


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I've been digging to some old inventories and noticed that all Bohrok from the Bionicle theme contains this piece:
I'm pretty sure I have this piece in my collection, probably from a Bohrok. At that time, I think I might have dismissed it as not a LEGO piece and I might have tossed it. Turns out, it is. I'm pretty sure this piece wasn't mentioned in the instructions booklet itself. Within this Bohrok set, what is it used for? And how is it used in other sets? Bricklink lists this as a belt/rubber band holder, but I'm not quite sure how it can be used as such.


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Poland Poll Reveals Stubborn Anti-Semitism Amid Jewish Revival Hopes
A majority of respondents in a recent Polish national survey believe that there's a Jewish conspiracy to control international banking and the media. And 90% of these Poles say they've never met a Jew.
The national study, conducted by the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University, found that in Poland, the belief in a Jewish conspiracy remains high – 63% in 2013 – and relatively unchanged from 2009 when 65% of respondents held this belief.
The study also found an 8 percent increase in more traditional forms of anti-Semitism, including blaming Jews for the murder of Jesus Christ and the belief that Christian blood is used in Jewish rituals. Some 23% were found to hold such traditional, religious-based beliefs about Jews.
The study's findings were presented to the Polish Sejm, or parliament, on January 9 by Michal Bilewicz, director of the Center for Research on Prejudice. Bilewicz, an assistant professor on the faculty of psychology at the University of Warsaw, is co-author of the report.
In an email, Bilewicz said that most members of the Polish parliament praised the study and many suggested education measures to fight prejudice. The one skeptical voice, he said, was that of Dorota Arciszewska-Mielewczyk, a center-right Law and Justice Party member, who "suggested that Polish Jews are represented by the Knesset rather than the Polish parliament."
In January 13 phone interview, Arciszewska-Mielewczyk claimed her remarks were taken out of context. Speaking through an interpreter, she said she had expressed her hope that representatives from the Knesset would come to Poland and join the campaign to stop calling the Nazi camps in Poland "Polish concentration camps" — a common complaint among Poles, especially on the right, who take umbrage when camps set up and operated during World War II by the German regime in occupied Poland are labeled as Polish.
According to Arciszewska-Mielewczyk, a Jewish group that was present when she spoke had a "negative and allergic reaction" to her remarks. They also claimed "they had nothing to do with the Knesset," she said, adding that she then asked for clarification about the Knesset's status as a body that represents the Jewish nation worldwide.
Arciszewska-Mielewczyk's remarks reflect a belief common in Poland that Israel's national legislature represents all Jews.
Geographically, the new study's findings suggest that the provinces of Lublin and Lodz in southeastern Poland are the most anti-Semitic regions of the country. This is where the largest Jewish communities existed before the war, and where the ruins of many synagogues still stand, though virtually no Jews live there today.
"It's worse there than in the western parts of Poland," Bilewicz told the Forward in a telephone interview.
Bilewicz noted that hundreds of cemeteries in this region of Poland have been desecrated and proposed that the high level of anti-Semitism in this part of Poland helped explain why — a kind of anti-Semitism without Jews.
"We know that it is based on a very deep anti-Semitism that is so embedded in people's minds that they don't consider it problematic," he said.
Before the Holocaust there were 3.2 million Jews in Poland, compared with an estimated 10,000 Jews today.
According to Zuzanna Radzik, a devout Catholic who supervises the School of Dialogue, a program that seeks to recapture the lost history of the Jewish presence in Poland, the biggest news in the center's survey was the increase in traditional anti-Semitism. She believes it's always existed, but that Poles now feel more comfortable expressing it.
Poland's archly conservative Roman Catholic Church has historically been blamed for perpetuating traditional forms of anti-Semitism. Bilewicz's study, however, finds that anti-Semitism is equally common among believers and those who are not religious. Furthermore, church attendance has declined slightly between 2009 and 2013, a period during which the proportion of people holding traditional anti-Semitic beliefs has risen.
Professor Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, who has been investigating the persistence of blood libel beliefs in eastern Poland, argued that the Church nevertheless continues to play a key role. In an email to the Forward, Tokarska-Bakir contended that in school, where Catholic religious classes were reinstituted after the fall of Communism in 1989, students are exposed to lessons that are permeated with anti-Semitic themes.
Despite these high levels of anti-Semitism, there are signs of hope.
The official opening of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews is scheduled for September 2014. The City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage financed its construction. The museum's exhibits show the Jewish contributions to Polish life during the more than 1,000 years that Jews have lived in Poland. Workshops for students are already underway.
Radzik's School of Dialogue also seeks to recover Poland's Jewish past. It deploys educators throughout Poland to make students aware of the places in their towns where Jews once lived and worked, and where there were synagogues and mikvehs. The school also teaches young Poles about Judaism.
The opening of a new Jewish Community Center in Warsaw last October was another step toward the revival of Jewish life in Poland.
Contact Don Snyder at [email protected]


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Warren professor of American history James T. Kloppenberg, a specialist in the intellectual history of the United States and Europe and now chair of the history department, observed the 2008 presidential election from afar: he was teaching at the University of Cambridge. As he lectured on the U.S. political tradition and studied Barack Obama's writings, he began to see three strong, but unexamined, themes. The first is Obama's sophisticated understanding of America's history and its continuing democratic experiment. The second is the idea of pragmatism--America's principal contribution to Western philosophy--which was first elaborated by William James and John Dewey, themselves advocates of deliberative democracy. The third is the shaping force on Obama's writings of the intellectual currents that swept through academia during his years as a student and professor.
That realization prompted Kloppenberg, in his new book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, to focus on the president's ideas: "Locating Obama's development in the frameworks of the history of American democracy, the ideas of philosophical pragmatism, and the intellectual turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s," he writes, "reveals how Obama thinks and why he sees American culture and politics as he does." Along the way, Kloppenberg explores Obama's personal experiences across and among diverse cultures; the pluralistic worldviews arising from the work of scholars such as anthropologist Clifford Geertz and historian of science Thomas Kuhn; the monumental effects of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, when published, critiqued, and refined, and of new interpretations of American history by Gordon Wood and others who stressed the idea of "civic republicanism"; the authors Obama read in college and law school, and the articles that appeared in the Harvard Law Review during his editorship; and more. At their broadest, Kloppenberg describes the contending ideas at stake as "jarring conflicts between universalism and particularism, timelessness and historicism, science and hermeneutics."
The following excerpt is adapted from the beginning of chapter three, "Obama's American History." There, Kloppenberg explores the view of the Constitution not as a settled, set arrangement for American governance, but as a creative compromise among its diverse authors. The Founders, in this perspective, were attuned to a deliberative, open-ended way of conducting public life: an ingenious, if imperfect, solution that has endured even as similar experiments in other countries have not, precisely because it is premised on accommodating differences and changing people's views, not embedding them in stone. As Kloppenberg notes, James Madison himself emphasized remaining "open to the force of argument." A second excerpt from a few pages later explicates Obama's perspective on the American democratic idea of melding individual views and interests into the community's common good. ~The Editors
Excerpted from James Kloppenberg's new book, Reading Obama, to be published this month by Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
Barack Obama is a mystery. To critics on the left he seems a tragic failure, a man with so much potential who has not fulfilled the promise of change that partisans predicted for his presidency. To the right he is a frightening success, a man who has transformed the federal government and ruined the economy, a man whose presidency threatens the foundations of the American social order. Obama antagonizes the right for some of the same reasons he fails to satisfy the left. He stands for principles that have attracted American progressives for a century: individual autonomy and greater equality, the gradual expansion of the principle of one person, one vote, from the political to the social and economic spheres. But other features of Obama's sensibility distinguish him from many politically engaged Americans, progressives as well as conservatives.
Obama is drawn toward the ideas of anti-foundationalism, historicism, and philosophical pragmatism. As an anti-foundationalist, he questions the existence of universal truths. As a historicist, he doubts that any ideas transcend the particularity of time and culture. Finally, as a philosophical pragmatist he insists that all propositions, positions, and policies must be subjected to continuing critical scrutiny. Whereas many activists on both the left and the right proclaim their incommensurable principles with the fervor of true believers, Obama sees things differently. He believes that anti-foundationalism, historicism, and philosophical pragmatism are consistent with the principles of civic republicanism and deliberative democracy on which America was built and for which it should stand. In his speech marking the end of U.S. military engagement in Iraq, on August 31, 2010, Obama declared, "The greatness of our democracy is grounded in our ability to move beyond our differences, and to learn from our experience as we confront the many challenges ahead." That single sentence encapsulates Obama's commitments to deliberative democracy and pragmatism, the signature features of the approach to American history and politics he adopts in his writings and his speeches. Where did it come from?
Obama was educated in two of America's leading colleges, Occidental and Columbia. He earned his law degree at Harvard Law School, then taught law for more than a decade at another top-flight institution, the University of Chicago Law School. In his books Obama never explicitly addresses his education or his teaching, but his writing clearly reflects his experience as a student and as a professor in turbulent times. His books manifest his serious engagement with the life of the mind. Obama's worldview emerged not only from his family, his friends, and his colleagues in the sharp-elbowed worlds of community organizing and electoral politics, decisive as those surely were. His sensibility was also shaped by the debates that rocked the campuses where he studied and taught, debates about ideas as well as politics. Much as he might need to mask it on the campaign trail, where he demonstrates his impressive skill as a politician, his books make clear that Barack Obama is also very much an intellectual.
Of Obama's two principal books, many people prefer Dreams from My Father, a meditation on his personal identity and the problems of race and cultural diversity in America. To understand Obama's ideas about American culture and politics, however, his personal story must be placed in the framework provided by The Audacity of Hope, a book in which one can identify the echoes of earlier and more recent voices in the traditions of American political thought. Particularly important are his discussions of the Constitution, antebellum American democracy, Lincoln and the Civil War, and the reform movements of the Progressive, New Deal, and civil rights eras. From his well-informed and sophisticated analysis of those issues emerges a particular conception of democracy.
Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who studied and taught constitutional law, Obama writes incisively about the United States Constitution. Near the end of Dreams from My Father, he describes the law as the record of "a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience." In The Audacity of Hope Obama's argument is less lyrical but even more provocative. Against those conservatives who invoked the idea of the founders' so-called original intent, a set of determinate meanings that are said to limit what legislatures and judges can legitimately do, Obama points out--accurately--that the Constitution resulted from a series of compromises made necessary by the depth of disagreement at the Constitutional Convention and during the process of ratification. Moreover, Obama correctly observes that the decision to leave the document open to amendment testified to the framers' realization that the nation's Constitution would have to change with American culture, albeit slowly, in order to survive.
The failure to provide a mechanism for such alterations, the framers understood, had doomed earlier republics to failure--as we can see now that it doomed later republics, such as the first several republics proclaimed in France--when they proved incapable of adapting to changed circumstances. Obama quotes a crucial passage from James Madison concerning the value and the necessity of open-mindedness in democracy. Reflecting on the process of reaching provisional agreement at the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote, "no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth." Everyone remained "open to the force of argument." That passage expresses Obama's understanding of democracy as deliberation.
Madison himself, although often credited with having framed the Constitution, did not get the Constitution he wanted. His own position on crucial issues such as the Senate and the authority of the executive changed not only during the convention itself but also during the debates over ratification, particularly when he became convinced by his friend Thomas Jefferson that the Anti-Federalists were right about the strategic necessity, and perhaps even the desirability, of a Bill of Rights. The Audacity of Hope contains no footnotes, and Obama rarely mentions the scholars whose work has shaped his ideas. It seems clear from his discussion of Madison and the Constitution, however, that he rejects claims about original intent and also sees beyond the 1950s-era obsession with Madison's so-called realist pluralism: the view that Madison wisely abandoned aspirations to political ideals and settled instead for an institutional structure that would merely facilitate and accommodate the clash of competing interests. That interpretation served to justify the political moderation of the post–World War II era. Although that view still appeals to many scholars, including those on the right who praise Madison's prudence and those on the left who accuse him of selling out democratic ideals, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Recent historians of Madison and the Constitution, such as Jack Rakove and Lance Banning, legal scholars such as Harvard's Frank Michelman and Laurence Tribe, Yale's Akhil Amar and Obama's longtime Chicago colleague Cass Sunstein, and Supreme Court Justices such as Stephen Breyer, have all demonstrated why the ideal and the practice of democratic deliberation proved at least as important for the acceptance and durability of the Constitution as did the checks and balances built into the new nation's institutional architecture.
The older, conspiratorial view of the Constitution as the product of scheming elites out to dupe the unsuspecting and virtuous masses, an interpretation that originated with Charles Beard a century ago, still makes compelling drama; it persists among many historians committed to the idea that the deck was stacked against "the people" by "the interests" from the beginning. But the record of the debates in the Constitutional Convention and afterwards is much more complex. Neither the neo-Beardian conspiracy theory nor the sepia-tinted portraits of the founders trotted out by conservatives eager to preserve the status quo captures the dynamic process of writing and ratifying the Constitution.
Madison himself went into the Constitutional Convention self-consciously committed to constructing a democracy, and he came away from the ratification process convinced that the result, despite his misgivings about it, was the best that could be attained through a democratic process. In his first speech to the Constitutional Convention, Madison argued that a federal government, because it would "expand the sphere" of representatives' horizons beyond their local preoccupations to the needs of the entire nation, "was the only defense against the inconveniences of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government." Notice Madison's use of the terms "democracy" and "democratic" in that sentence. The familiar notion that Madison envisioned a republic rather than a democracy is widespread, but it is false. He did envision a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy, and the elaborate checks and balances of the federal framework appealed to him in part for that reason. But his preference for representative democracy hardly makes him an antidemocrat. Other contemporaries who shared that preference included Jefferson and Thomas Paine, two thinkers often contrasted to Madison but with whom he had much more in common from the 1770s through the 1820s than is usually recognized.
Madison aligned himself with those who opposed the idea that delegates, either to the Constitutional Convention or later to the United States Congress, should be bound by instructions from their constituents. His position derived from his faith in a particular form of representative democracy, not his distrust of its potential. He believed that the process of deliberation, if it remained open-ended, could produce results different from, and superior to, any of the ideas that representatives brought with them to an assembly. As his own letters after the convention confirm, Madison had experienced in Philadelphia the creative potential of deliberation, a potential short-circuited by demands that representatives must follow precisely the preexisting preferences of those who sent them. It is true that many Anti-Federalists cherished a different conception of democracy from that embraced by Madison, Jefferson, and Paine. Many Anti-Federalists distrusted the idea of delegating authority to those they elected to serve in a distant assembly. But their vision of democracy is as difficult to translate into a national framework as their critics at the time contended, and the preference for a federalist form of government did not necessarily make its champions opponents of ordinary citizens. Some Federalists, notably Alexander Hamilton, did distrust the people and did seek to limit their influence. Madison's commitment to the Constitution, by contrast, sprang from his deep desire to see democracy survive.
In his description of the Constitution and the way it was constructed, Obama shows his familiarity with one of the most important developments in American scholarship since the 1970s, during the years since Gordon Wood and other historians sparked the revival of civic republican ideas and legal scholars such as Michelman and Sunstein brought it to law schools. Not only constitutional lawyers but also political theorists are now rediscovering what Madison, Jefferson, and Paine already knew: representative democracy is not a bastardized or second-best version but instead a distinctive variant of democracy that values persuasion over the rigid, unyielding defense of preferences or interests. Representative democracy is designed to substitute the dynamic process of making reasoned arguments for the simple tallying of votes dictated by constituents' preferences. In Obama's words, not only did the size of the new nation mean that "an Athenian model of democracy was out of the question" and that "the direct democracy of the New England town meeting" was "unmanageable." It was not just practicality that dictated representation.
The process of deliberation, particularly when it brought together people with diverse backgrounds, convictions, and aspirations, made possible a metamorphosis unavailable through any other form of decision making. People who saw the world through very different lenses could help each other see more clearly. Just as Madison defended the value of delegates' willingness to change their minds and yield to the force of the better argument, so Obama explicitly echoes the arguments of Madison--and, strikingly, of Hamilton in Federalist number 70--concerning the importance of encouraging the "jarring of parties" because such differences of opinion could "promote deliberation and circumspection." He points out that scholars now agree that the Constitution was "cobbled together" from heated debates and emerged "not as the result of principle but as the result of power and passion." The ideas of Madison were never identical to those of Hamilton. No unitary meaning or intent can be found. Instead the Constitution shows traces of competing arguments drawn from sources including the Bible, the English common law, Scottish philosophy, civic republican traditions, and the Enlightenment idea of natural rights.
Obama the law professor concedes that such a conception of the founding appeals to him because it encourages us to emphasize the contingency of the original document and to appreciate the contingencies that lie beneath our own invocations of high principle. His constitutionalism fits neatly into the historicist framework that was displacing older verities in the academic communities of Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge, and Chicago during the 1980s and 1990s. Such historicism, he writes, might free us to "assert our own values unencumbered by fidelity to the stodgy traditions of a distant past." In other words, it might tempt us to proclaim that constitutional interpretation is a question of Clifford Geertz's shifting conventions or Thomas Kuhn's shifting paradigms. But Obama admits that such freedom makes him uneasy. He describes it as "the freedom of the relativist, the rule breaker," or "the apostate," and he concedes that "such apostasy leaves me unsatisfied." Facing that conundrum, where can a conscientious scholar of constitutional law such as Obama turn?
He can, and he does, turn to philosophical pragmatism and to American history. What we need, he suggests, is a "shift in metaphors," a willingness to see "our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had." Madison did not give us a "fixed blueprint." Instead he provided a framework that cannot resolve all our differences but offers only "a way by which we argue about our future." The institutional machinery of the Constitution was intended, Obama argues, not to solve our problems once and for all but "to force us into a conversation." The Constitution gave birth to "a 'deliberative democracy' in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent." It would be hard to find in William James or John Dewey a clearer statement of the conceptual and historical connections between philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy in the American political tradition.
Obama's arguments about American democracy rest on a solid scholarly foundation. Sunstein argued in the 1989 Harvard Law Review article "Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State" (when Obama was newly on the editorial board) that Madison envisioned the clashing of arguments in American legislatures as a uniquely productive process, a process whereby representatives found their own convictions, and those of their constituents, challenged and changed. Madison sought, as the historian Marvin Meyers argued decades ago in a brilliant essay cited by Sunstein, not merely stability but new understandings of the common good, understandings unavailable to any individual but emerging from the processes of contestation and deliberation. In Obama's formulation of this crucial point, the founders wanted above all to avoid "all forms of absolute authority," and the most perilous moments for the new nation occurred when that fallibilism was threatened by attempts to freeze the dynamic process of democratic deliberation by stifling debate. Through this process of making arguments, encountering objections, rethinking our positions, forging compromises, and testing our ideas against a resistant reality in which our schemes succeed or fail, Obama concludes, we learn "to examine our motives and our interests constantly." We learn, in short, that "both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible."
Balancing the historicism of cutting-edge constitutional scholarship against his lingering desire for something more substantial than quicksand, Obama makes use of the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism: we should debate our differences, and test provisional interpretations of principle, not by measuring proposals against unchanging dogmas but through trial and error, by trying to solve problems creatively and then democratically deliberating, yet again, on the consequences of our experiments. "We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn," even if we realize that "we have betrayed them more often than we remember." Our democratic values, deliberation and truth testing, constitute the American people as a nation developing over time. Our commitments to freedom and equality are "our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people." As individuals and as a nation, we are constituted by the values we cherish, the principles we seek to realize, and the democratic process whereby we attempt to reach those goals.
But we must not pretend that the meaning of those shared principles has ever been anything but contested. As the pragmatists James and Dewey insisted repeatedly, and as more recent philosophical pragmatists have confirmed, democratic principles should not be confused with unchanging dogmas. They must remain subject to criticism and revision. In Obama's words, "our values must be tested against fact and experience." Freedom and equality had one set of meanings in the agrarian settlements of the seventeenth century, another set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they are destined to have new meanings for every generation. That is the challenge of democracy, and that is the reason why the philosophy of pragmatism is uniquely suited to democratic decision making. When our understandings no longer conform to the facts of lived experience, as has been the case over and over in American history, it is time for critical inquiry and substantive change. Ritual invocations of earlier nostrums, as if such formulas could help solve problems earlier generations could not have imagined, deflect attention from the hard work of democracy.
The need for such hard work derives, at least in part, from the deeply flawed institutional structures put in place by the Constitution. Although subject to amendment, the Constitution nevertheless erected formidable barriers in the way of those who would alter the framework of American governance. Of all the flaws, the most serious was the founders' failure to address the outrageous practice of slavery. In Obama's words, the generation of John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison bequeathed to their successors "a form of government unique in its genius--yet blind to the whip and the chain." A second antidemocratic feature of the "great compromise" between the North and the slave-holding South was the provision for electing two senators from each state. That arrangement has given those chosen to represent small, sparsely populated states--then Rhode Island and Delaware, now Vermont and Wyoming--equal power with the most populous. In 1790 Virginia had 10 times the population of Rhode Island; California now has more than 70 times the population of Wyoming. Madison--himself a Virginian--opposed this feature of the Constitution because of its antidemocratic quality, as does Obama. From the beginning, the Senate has tended to resist change more vigorously than has the more representative House.
The way in which the structure of the Constitution has facilitated some forms of change and blocked others remains as clear as ever. As president,Obama has demonstrated already the depth--and the perils--of his commitment to philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy, particularly in his handling of the protracted debate over healthcare. His flexibility and his willingness to compromise infuriated some of his supporters on the left, and the refusal of his intransigent Republican opponents caused many observers to mock the president's repeated appeals to negotiation, bipartisanship, and creative compromise. As savvy pundits left and right pointed out repeatedly, it takes two to compromise, and efforts to negotiate are futile when the other side shows no interest. But Obama's steadfast insistence that he was open to suggestions, that he was willing to meet with his adversaries and consider their ideas, and his repeated invitations to Republicans to propose alternatives served a purpose that few commentators seemed to notice as the debate wore on. He was displaying, over and over, with a patience that outraged his allies and bewildered his foes, an iron fortitude that his critics mistook for weakness. In The Audacity of Hope and in many of his speeches since he wrote that book, Obama has acknowledged that Americans are deeply divided on the issue of healthcare. Even those who agreed that our system does not work disagreed bitterly about how to fix it. Obama pointed out that calls for a single-payer plan, a comprehensive, government-run program patterned on national healthcare systems firmly entrenched elsewhere, diverged too dramatically from the traditions and practices to which Americans are accustomed. Americans happy with their doctors and their insurance plans, he promised repeatedly, should be able to keep them. In The Audacity of Hope he proposed trying out multiple options, notably what he called "insurance pools," taking advantage of the nation's federal structure to conduct a controlled experiment in the states. After evaluating the results, the nation could opt for the most successful solution available.
That proposal, advanced several years before Obama was elected president, suggests one way to frame the outcome of the lengthy negotiations in 2009–2010 that culminated in the passage of healthcare reform legislation. Thanks to Republican Mitt Romney, then governor of Massachusetts, the Commonwealth had been conducting for several years an experiment in state-mandated health insurance, with encouraging results. Obama was careful not to replicate his predecessor Bill Clinton's mistake of declaring too early--and too dogmatically--what must be done to solve the problem. He let the debate proceed, at times it seemed interminably, while his supporters shrieked and his foes gloated. The plan Congress eventually adopted in March 2010--the plan Obama worked tirelessly in the final months to enact--more closely resembles the Massachusetts model than any of the other options under consideration. If that model did not suit Republicans in the House or Senate, not long ago it appealed to one of the most prominent Republican candidates for his party's presidential nomination in 2008.
When paroxysms of anger, even threats of violence, followed the passage of healthcare reform, many Americans expressed surprise. But given the intensity of public disagreement on the issue, that response might have been expected. It also suggested the reasons for, and perhaps even confirmed the wisdom of, Obama's strategy: wait patiently until the deliberative process had run its course and the House and Senate had hammered out their misshapen, unlovely bills. In his State of the Union Address, he pointedly chided Republicans for failing to offer their own ideas and invited their proposals. He later convened a much ballyhooed day-long summit to give Republicans a chance to explain their objections and present alternatives. When those overtures were greeted with even more strident refusals, it became apparent that Obama's sustained efforts to encourage, and to engage in, deliberation as a way to identify a common good had been categorically rejected. At that point he threw himself into the battle.
Like Social Security in 1935 and voting rights, Medicare, and Medicaid in 1965, the healthcare reform measure of 2010 is a product of the sausage factory that we call representative democracy. It will need to be revised as its flaws become clear. It might also be the best bill Obama could have gotten through Congress. As a student of American history, Obama knows that the election of 2008, although historic because it put him in the White House and gave his party a majority in the House and the Senate, was hardly a landslide. The political scientist William Galston, a veteran of Clinton's White House, has pointed out that Obama's own electoral majority of 7 percent was only 1 percent greater than Clinton's in 1992, and Obama was running at the time of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Democrats held 60 seats in the Senate. By contrast, when Franklin D. Roosevelt began his second term, Democrats held 79 seats in the Senate, the Republicans only 16. When Lyndon Johnson pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress, Democrats held 68 seats in the Senate and a 295–140 majority in the House. Moreover, in the 1930s and 1960s both parties were far less ideologically homogeneous than they are now: more than half the Republicans in the House and more than 40 percent in the Senate voted for Medicare.
People who used to complain about the lack of coherent ideology in American party politics have gotten their wish. More than three-quarters of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans now accept the label conservative. Democrats are less unified: 40 percent identify themselves as liberals, another 40 percent as moderates, and 20 percent as conservatives. Comparing the current political situation with those of the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s makes clear, as does the difficulty Democratic congressional leaders faced in rounding up the votes to pass the final version of the bill, that Democrats were hardly in a position to dictate the terms of debate. As has happened repeatedly in American history, even a measure that incorporated many concessions to its opponents barely squeaked into law. It seems unlikely that Republicans will be able to fulfill their promise of repealing a package almost certain to win adherents as quickly as Social Security and Medicare did. Even so, as Obama noted in The Audacity of Hope, in a democracy "no law is ever final, no battle truly finished," which is why philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy go hand in hand. Principled partisans of pragmatism and democracy are committed to debate, experimentation, and the critical reassessment of results.
For that reason no straight lines run from philosophical pragmatism or deliberative democracy to Obama's positions, strategies, or policies--or any others. One of the characteristic features of pragmatism, in fact, has been the incessant disagreements among its adherents. Every major debate in American politics in the last century has seen self-proclaimed heirs of James or Dewey lining up on opposite sides, usually on multiple sides. Getting pragmatism right does not dictate a certain political position, although the connection between philosophical pragmatism and an experimental, democratic approach to politics is hard to deny. But the forms experimentation and democracy should take are not only appropriate subjects for debate. Wrangling over such questions is what a commitment to pragmatism and democracy means. Obama has demonstrated such a commitment himself, and spirited debates about all aspects of his presidency, from its overall thrust to its tactical maneuvers, are not only bound to continue whatever he does, they are fully consistent with the conception of democracy he has outlined and embraced.


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Chan Ho Park, sidelined in mid-September with a strained right hamstring, just bumped Brett Myers off the Phillies' NLCS roster:
Chan Ho Park will take [Myers'] place, a team source said. Park has not pitched since Sept. 16 because of a strained right hamstring, but Park said he feels healthy. Myers said he had a feeling he would not be on the NLCS roster once the Phillies did not pitch him in Games 3 or 4 of the NLDS against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field.
Park's addition to the NLCS roster was getting buzz since afternoon our time today, after news broke that he flew from Florida to travel with the team to Los Angeles.
Chan Ho Park, back in Dodger Stadium again. Wow.


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Elfregi, a Dutch youth association founded 27 December 1929, at Zaandam, Dutch province of North Holland, composed of the Mennonite catechumens of the whole Zaan district. A clubhouse at Zaandam was obtained in 1931; besides this, church services for the youth were organized in September 1932 and meetings were held in the Broederschapshuizen (brotherhood homes) of Elspeet and Schoorl. In 1945 the association was reorganized, becoming a Mennonite scout organization, which had sections at Zaandam-Wormerveer, Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Groningen. The name Elfregi symbolizes the contacts of the three Mennonite brotherhood homes and camping centers which existed when the Association was founded, Elfregi being formed of the first syllables of Elspeet, Fredeshiem, and Giethoorn. The total membership in 1954 numbered about 400.
D. J. C. "Elfregi" Zaanstreek 10 Jaar. Zaandam, 1939.
Author(s) | Nanne van der Zijpp |
Date Published | 1956 |
Cite This Article
MLA style
Zijpp, Nanne van der. "Elfregi." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1956. Web. 27 Feb 2024. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Elfregi&oldid=107591.
APA style
Zijpp, Nanne van der. (1956). Elfregi. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 27 February 2024, from https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Elfregi&oldid=107591.
Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 2, p. 184. All rights reserved.
©1996-2024 by the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. All rights reserved.


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Related links:
Robert Scott
Robert Falcon Scott was an Antarctic explorer, who came in second in a famous "South Pole Race" with Roald Amundsen and died while returning from the pole. Scott became a tragic hero of the age of Antarctic exploration.
Robert Scott was born in 1868 near Devonport in England. He left home at the age of 13 to join the Royal Navy and begin his training. From 1901-1904, Scott commanded the National Antarctic Expedition in which Ernest Shackleton also took part.
In 1910, Scott embarked on his second polar expedition. Soon he found out that Roald Amundsen was also heading for the South Pole. Scott's expedition spent a year preparing to reach the pole and making scientific observations. Finally, Scott with four other men reached the South Pole in January 1912, where they discovered that Amundsen has been there a month earlier. On their way back, they suffered from unusually cold weather, frostbite and lack of supplies. Finally, on March 29, Scott made the last entry in his diary: "We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker of course and the end cannot be far.It seems a pity, but I do not think that I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people". The tent with bodies of Robert Scott and two of his companions was found eight month later by a search party.
When the news of their tragic death reached Britain, Scott and his companions became national heroes. The race between Scott and Amundsen became a subject of many books and films, and the discussion about reasons for Scott's failure still continues.


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Every day our staff at EAGnews wrestles with the following questions: "What are our children being taught in school?" and "How is the information they're learning going to change America?"
Those are important questions to ask, particularly since government schools in more than 40 states will soon be teaching students a curriculum that's aligned to the new Common Core national standards.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about Common Core. One of the biggest is, "What kind of ideas are leftists going to try and slip into your child's classroom through the Common Core experiment?"
There's no doubt it will happen. There is far too much documented evidence of liberal educators actively designing lesson plans and strategies to indoctrinate students into their school of thought.
And they don't just target college students and high school kids. Many of their strategies call for the indoctrination process to begin in the early elementary grades.
One might argue that there's a firewall against such political mischief, since it's up to local school districts to decide how they're going to teach the new math and English standards to students.
But most school districts in Common Core-aligned states won't be designing their own unique curriculum. That would require a lot of time, money and brainpower.
Instead most districts have purchased – or will purchase – a pre-written, Common Core-ready curriculum from a major textbook company, like the Zaner-Bloser company.
EAGnews recently purchased a stack of Common Core-aligned teacher guides produced by Zaner-Bloser because we wanted to know what students are being taught about America's history, economic system and predominant culture.
The guides we purchased are for grades 1-6 and feature different texts promoted by the Common Core learning standards. Each text comes with a week's worth of related lessons.
Handling 'problems,' SEIU-style
One of the books recommended in the third-grade teaching guide is "Si Se Puede/Yes We Can!"
Zaner-Bloser includes this book – with its very familiar title – in its "Rights and Responsibilities" unit.
Most Americans would probably expect a unit about citizen "rights and responsibilities" to be firmly rooted in the Constitutional principle of individual rights – as described by the Bill of Rights – and checks on the power of government.
But that's not the goal of the "Si Se Puede" book and lesson plans.
According to the Zaner-Bloser guide, the "central question" for students to grapple with is, "How can we work together as a community to stand up for our rights?"
You can already see where this is going.
"Si Se Puede" tells the story of a 1985 SEIU-led janitors strike in Los Angeles.
The acronym SEIU refers to the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest and most radical far-left labor unions in the country.
So that's the kind of "community" Zaner-Bloser authors are referring to.
In the teachers' guide, the authors say the janitors went on strike "for more money because their wages [were] too low to be fair."
Keep in mind, this unit is geared for 8- and 9-year-olds who have no understanding of how the labor market works, let alone any knowledge of the economic principle of supply and demand.
And yet they're being told that the janitors weren't making a "fair" wage.
That's not all they're being taught. In the guide, teachers are told to introduce students to the vocabulary word of the week – "protest."
The book instructs the teacher to "remind students that a protest is an event in which people publicly show their strong disapproval of something. Discuss protest throughout the week. Challenge students to use the word while speaking and writing."
After students read the book and learn about underpaid janitors and protests, the guide tells teachers to help students apply these concepts to their lives.
They do that by brainstorming about problems they believe exist in their school.
In case the kids can't identify any problems worth protesting, the Zaner-Bloser authors helpfully offer an example: "No talking allowed in the lunchroom."
The authors even suggest a solution: "Protest by making signs and marching."
So here you have a Common Core-aligned lesson instructing third-graders how to stage a public protest against their adult school leaders. They're essentially being groomed to be future members of labor unions, or at least to sympathize with the organized labor point of view.
We have teachers – teachers! – who are showing 8- and 9-year-olds how to be defiant and unruly.
We certainly hope they don't teach them the standard SEIU procedure for dealing with classmates who become "scabs" and cross their protest line.
In case you're wondering, nowhere in the "Rights and Responsibilities" teachers' guide is there any mention of the founding of America, our God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution or the protection of individual rights through limited government.
But we shouldn't be too surprised. Traditional American values quickly lose their value when left-wing activists control the classroom.
That's why it's so important that parents pay attention to what's going on in their children's school. I implore you to find out what your children are being taught.
There is an organized effort to push these radical ideas on very young kids. Only parents and other citizens have the power to put an end to it.


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• larrup •
Pronunciation: læ-rêp • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, transitive
Meaning: 1. To whip, whop, beat; to apply the cane or rod. 2, (Participle only) Great, huge, decisive.
Notes: Growing up in the 50s, today's contributor often heard her fourth-generation Irish-American grandparents use larruping as an intensifier, as in "This is larruping good pie." This use of the participle of today's Good Word parallels the use of whopping in other dialects, where whop is a variant of whip from a time when whipping was considered the ultimate principle of child psychology and discipline. So, a whopping good time in those dialects means "a very good time".
In Play: Should you wish to use this still Good Word, remember that its basic sense refers to a physical thrashing: "Winthrop won his bid for Congress easily as a result of his repeated suggestion that all current members be given a good larruping." If you are not in politics, you might stick to the figurative sense of the participle: "Winthrop now looks forward to a larruping good term in Congress."
Word History: Today's Good Word is apparently an English makeover of Dutch larp "switch, stick, whip". It first emerged in published form in Suffolk, England, though we have no evidence of how it might have gotten there. This word was widely used in the first half of the 20th century. It appears in the works of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and the Irish novelist James Joyce, to mention two of its most famous users. How it got into any of these dialects from Dutch is anybody's guess. (Today we thank Patricia Giffen for suggesting today's larruping Good Word.)
P.S. - Register for the Daily Good Word E-Mail! - You can get our daily Good Word sent directly to you via e-mail in either HTML or Text format. Go to our Registration Page to sign up today!


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Big news from the Bend, Ore brewery today. See the following press release, as well as a Q&A with Larry following.
09 June 2011 – Bend, Oregon – Deschutes Brewery announced today that Larry Sidor, Brewmaster, is leaving the company at the end of the year to pursue a lifelong dream of starting and running his own brewery. Sidor has been at the brewery for eight years, following 23 years at Olympia Brewing Company, in development and production at a Yakima hop dealer and creating a small winery.
"My years at Deschutes Brewery have been incredible. I've thoroughly enjoyed leading and collaborating with the brewing team to hone and create its phenomenal portfolio of beers, but also originating new beer styles and brewing techniques," said Sidor. "I will always be proud of the work we've accomplished together, and be grateful for the support of Gary and the leadership team for taking creative risks. While I transition to the next phase of my career, over the next several months, my heart and head will be with the Deschutes Brewery team and will remain focused on their continued success."
With Sidor at the head of the brewing department at Deschutes, the company has added many new brands to the portfolio including Hop in the Dark, Red Chair Northwest Pale Ale, Inversion IPA, The Abyss, The Dissident, and several barrel-aged specialty beers. Sidor will continue on at Deschutes Brewery through the end of 2011 while the company integrates a new brewmaster over the next several months.
Gary Fish, Founder and CEO of Deschutes Brewery, said, "While we are sad to see Larry go, we are excited for him being able to realize his life-long goal. His contributions to the brewery are innumerable, and he will be missed by us all. Now, we're announcing that one of the best jobs in the industry has just become available! We are looking ahead with excitement toward the future."
Deschutes is the original brewery in Central Oregon, a place which has now become a hot spot for craft brewing. A search is underway for a replacement for Sidor.
Here is an additional Q&A sent out by Deschutes:
Q. How many years have you spent in the brewing industry?
A. 37 years.
Q. What roles have you held? What role did you enjoy the most?
A. The greatest amount of my time has been in brewing operations with significant contributions to process and product innovation. My personality is such that everything can be better. My belief is that all products can be improved to meet customer expectations.
Q. What's your favorite part about brewing beer? What has been the greatest challenge for you?
A. Wow, this is a hard question to answer. It would be easier to answer what I don't like about brewing. And that answer would be nothing. The greatest challenge for me has been understanding what customers wants. This has always been a moving target and currently the target is changing at an incredible rate. The rewarding part for me is that customer expectations are lining up with my personal beer preferences. A saying in the craft beer industry is that "if you brew beer for yourself, the customers will follow."
Q. You've also spent some time making wine – in your opinion how different is it from making beer?
A. I have spent time both growing wine grapes and making wine. I found that great wine is more about what is done in the vineyard than in the winery, hence the term used in the wine industry of "winegrowing". I grew up in a very agrarian home and agriculture is very dear to my heart. But brewing is my passion. With brewing, the brewer has a worldwide supply of raw ingredients that can be brought together in limitless combinations. As I've said in the past, I believe craft brewers have only begun to scratch the surface of taste profiles that will be achieved in the future.
Q. From your perspective, what have you seen happen in the craft brewing space over the last several years? What changes have been significant?
A. There are really too many to mention, but I will attempt a few.
First and foremost is the customers. They are the engine that drives what I do. They are rejecting commoditized bland beers that are sold by slick advertising "lifestyle" campaigns in favor of more flavorful beers which enhance their life experiences.
Second is also the customers. One of my favorite beers developed at Deschutes is The Dissident, a sour beer. This is a beer which we began developing in 2004. At that time, it was a direction I really wanted to go, but it was met with skepticism. Now, The Dissident is one of the beers I field the most questions about. The shift in customer awareness and acceptance has been simply mindboggling.
Third would be the suppliers. From malt, to hops, to equipment, the improvements have been pivotal in allowing the craft brewers to make higher quality and innovative beers. I get goose bumps when I see Cascade hops being grown again in the Willamette Valley. The exciting new hop varieties which are being released have rocked the craft world. Deschutes was pivotal in the release of the Citra hop and are currently supporting two other new varieties; Bravo and Delta. The new and innovative specialty malts that are being roasted by our maltsters are allowing us to explore new and exciting flavors.
Q. You've been with Deschutes for 8 years. Tell us about your tenure at the company and what you see as your biggest accomplishment while there?
A. Without hesitation, development of the Brewing Team. I believe Deschutes Brewery has the best and the brightest brewers in the world, bar none.
Q. You have recently decided to start your own company. What was the driving factor behind this decision? Is it a natural next step in your brewing career?
A. I have always wanted to have my own business. I accidently got into the brewing business when I was trying to raise money to start a winery. One fateful night I stopped by the Olympia Brewing Company in Tumwater Washington to see a friend. I had no intention of working there because I wanted to make money fast so I could get on with my dream of a winery. But a late night tour of the Olympia brewery and I was hooked for a lifetime. Olympia was my first dream job. Over the years, plans to start my own brewery came and went and other things in life got more attention. I fell in love with sailboat racing and a gal from Seattle, ended up getting married, building a house and soon a son and a daughter. Later we moved to Yakima where we bought a vineyard and I worked for a hop company. We really enjoyed owning our own business but it confirmed that brewing is my passion, not winegrowing. We sold the vineyard and took another dream job with Deschutes Brewery.
Q. What kind of business venture (or craft brewing venture) are you exploring?
A. I can't wait to share the details with you — the Central Oregon community — and the Brewing Community — but I'm not ready to talk about it just yet. As soon as I have more information, I'll make sure you get the details. If all goes as planned, it's going to be a very exciting project. For the next six months, my heart and head will be focused on my work at the Deschutes Brewery. I'm invested in the ongoing success of Deschutes Brewery, both personally and professionally, and I want to keep my energies here until I'm ready to move forward with my personal venture.Q. What will you miss the most about being at Deschutes?
A. The loyal Deschutes customers, fellow employees, and the vast resources Deschutes has.
Q. What type of brewer do you see filling your shoes at Deschutes?
A. An experienced innovative brewer who will support and grow the current brewing team.