Steps to a Simple Temple is online here at namahatta.org.

Tonight we’ll go on harinam at 4pm and then we’ve cancelled tonight’s Loft program to go to His Holiness Indradyumna Swami’s program at Sakhi Raya’s house.

We have been discussing eliminating Friday night at the Loft from our offerings in order to concentrate our energy on the other programs, but haven’t reached consensus on that point. Normally we would never modify our program whimsically - if you want people to come regularly (which you do, because that’s the only way they’ll get real benefit) you have to model that commitment. However, since it’s a couple of days before Christmas we’re projecting that attendence will be low enough to make it a fair exchange. We’ve contacted our regulars and have invited them to come with us. Anyone who comes unannounced or for the first time is out of luck. I don’t like that, but we’ve made a once-off trade-off.

This is the first time we have done something like this since this Loft opened in October of 2004. If it happens another time within the next 12 months that will be more than enough.

According to this article, credit card applications are up 90,000 or 11% over this period last year in Australia. Uncontrolled credit is increasingly becoming a problem for people, especially those of the so-called Generation Y, born from 1980s onwards.

According to one article I read (I can’t remember where), pre-Generation X’ers, born up to the late 60s, are fiscally conservative, and save before they buy. They get the money, then buy something. Generation X’ers, born during the 70’s, are more open to getting things on credit, but still reasonably fiscally responsible. Generation Y, however, those born from the 80’s to the mid 90’s, are credit animals.

I remember when I was a university student, 14 or so years ago. The bank gave me a credit card as a first year university student with no questions asked. The idea is of course to establish a credit relationship with a potential high-incoming earning person. It was an initial $500 risk for the bank, so pretty cheap, and the potential reward is to get someone using a credit card whose limit was eventually extended up to $5000 before I cancelled it.

A few months ago, passing through Sydney airport, I was offered an American Express card with a $5000 limit - with no need to provide any financial records or proof of income. Obviously air travellers generally have some income, so it’s the best place to do this.

This is going to become increasingly a problem. Up to this point we have been dealing routinely with people whose bodies, minds, and emotions are traumatized due to illicit sexual relations (including abuse), exposure to pornography, video games from an early age, drug use from an early age, junk food diets, and a myriad of other inputs which conspire to destroy determination and stability in responsible material and spiritual life. Add to this now the complication of a financial trainwreck and the challenge becomes even greater to help people “make a safe landing” and integrate themselves into a sane community.

Add budgeting, credit consolidation, and debt reduction to the palette of skills required by an urban missionary…

Interestingly, His Holiness Indradyumna Swami spoke at the temple the other morning on the subject of management, leadership, and governance. He related his own personal experience of being made a temple president after taking sannyasa at 29 years of age, and being forced to find out the hard way how these things work. He also recommended reading books about management as a way to becoming capable of discharging this service.

I’ve got the excerpt of the class that contains these comments, available in both .ogg (preferable) and .mp3 format.

I think Vraj had the mic volume up too loud on his iRiver H-140 when he recorded this one.

This communicates the concept behind the new survey approach:

(graphic courtesy of HBS Working Knowledge)

The idea is that we can work out how to better tune our programs by finding out more about the people we serve than we can by knowing more about what they think about us, at this point in time. So the focus goes off questions that have us in the center (”how did you find out about us?”), to questions that have them in the center (”how many books do you read a month?”).

Now it’s just a question of working out what questions to ask…

Apart from the national averages, which we can get from other sources, we want specific information about our demographic. We will be asking people what type and speed their Internet connection is, for example, because we want to know who will use Internet resources, and therefore what resources we should offer via Internet.

If we track this over time, then we will have a feel for the delta, or the rate of change. This will allow us to position ourselves proactively, making sure that we put the right amount of energy into development of Internet resources to be in the right place at the right time to serve the public.

In 1998 I purchased a Sony MZ-R50 minidisc rather than buying an MP3 player, as the minidisc allowed me to record 74 minutes in stereo or a whopping 148 minutes in mono on a single disc, which cost around $10, which was a capacity way beyond any MP3 player of comparable pricing at the time. At the end of 2005, however, MP3 player technology has reached a stage of maturity where it has become commonplace and has largely supplanted previous forms such as the ubiquitous tape walkman, the CD discman, and less common minidisc. Devotees no longer swap tapes, they swap files and folders.

Here’s a redux of various MP3 player brands and technologies that I am familiar with, along with my experiences and analysis.

Let me mention a few factors that you can use in comparing players:

• Features - here is a feature list that I consider necessary: built-in microphone, line-encoding (for ripping to mp3 from a mixing desk or walkman), support for ogg (free format).
• Hard Disk or Flash-based. Hard Disk has more storage space, but is bigger and bulkier. Flash is smaller and more energy efficient, but has less storage space.
• Battery life. The longer the better, obviously. Built-in Lithium-ion or Lithium polymer batteries are cheaper and more convenient as you don’t have to keep buying batteries or carrying around a recharger. The disadvantage is that when they go flat right before a class you can’t put in a spare one.
• Connector - a built-in USB connector is great. A USB cable that you have to lug around is not so good. An adaptor to plug into the unit to connect a separate cable to is a nightmare.
• Size and weight. If you are going to be carrying this thing around with you to listen to music and lectures on, the smaller and lighter the better. The trade-off can sometimes be durability, or features (including storage space).
• Obviously price - and you should do a calculation of the features per price, but remember - whatever you spend is completely wasted if the thing ends up as a paperweight because it doesn’t do what you need, and don’t be fooled by a “cheap” price that actually includes your time spent dealing with its foibles.

Let’s start with the most popular and highest profile mp3 player: the Apple iPod.

Apple iPod / iPod Nano / Photo iPod / Video iPod

Link

This unit sets the standard for design and cool. According to my Universal Principles of Design book, aesthetic design contributes to a sense of ease of use, and that’s definitely a factor with the Apple iPod. However, it has one area of weakness, and that is that it is a unit designed for consumers. The idea is that you buy songs from the iTunes online music store and download them to your iPod. The unit has no built-in production, that is to say recording, capability. For devotees, who are interested in recording classes, conversations, and kirtans for later review and distribution, it’s a critical area of weakness.

You can get a third party add-on from Belkin to enable the iPod to record. However, the strengths of the iPod and its focus do not lie in this area, which is a pretty crucial area for devotees, who are not catered to by the existing system of content creation and distribution that the iPod is designed as an integral part of.

Personally I would view the iPod as incompatible with the standard devotee lifestyle for this reason. It’s strengths lie in areas that are irrelevant or even detrimental to devotee lifestyle, and in areas where the need is greatest - in recording new content to supplant the current cultural output - it is sadly deficient.

That’s not to say that don’t think it’s a cool device with a great design - for what it is.

iRiver H-series

Link

This machine seems to be the devotee workhorse. The H-120 and H-140, with 20GB and 40GB hard drives respectively, were the first generation of player / recorders. The H-340, with a color LCD, is the current model. This machine is solid engineering - of sturdy construction, well built, with a well designed interface, good feature set, and good post-release support.

The H-120/140 has optical in and out (not that you ever use it, but it’s practically unique in the market space for this feature). Optical in/out allows pure digital transfer to and from machines such as hard disk multi track recording systems, minidisc decks, DAT units, and other high-end audio equipment. Not much use for anyone except those who are doing specific high end stuff using old gear that doesn’t support USB transfer of digital data. I’m not sure if the H320/340 still has this - but you can live without it. However, it demonstrates the engineering of this unit.

I skipped over this unit, even though others around me bought it, for a couple of reasons. One is the size of the unit. It’s feature packed and solid, but also chunky. It will definitely last a long time. Looking back, if I had to make the decision again, I might make it differently, but maybe not. Carrying that thing around in my pocket for the last year would have been a trip.

This thing has what you need - built-in microphone for “voice recording” (read classes, kirtans, etc…), line-in encoding, which you use to hook the unit up to a mixing desk or stereo output to capture classes or convert old tapes / records to mp3. It also handles a variety of formats - mp3, wma (yuck!), and the awesome, free format ogg.

The H-140 has a battery life of around 12 hours. For a general hard disk based solution this is a good one, when you think about it from a recording perspective. From a playback perspective, the unit is quite big and heavy, relatively speaking.

All in all, however, for most people this is a good choice. The engineering is excellent and the unit will stand up to some serious bashing. The post-release support is excellent as well, something that I did not factor in when making my original mp3 player purchase.

After the player is released, iRiver continue to develop the firmware for it, and release new functionality. After the H-120/140 was released, for example, support was added for ogg and also for deleting files on the player itself. Other mp3 player manufacturers do not continue to develop new functionality, restricting themselves to fixing bugs - for a while. After all, they don’t make more money by putting resources into a unit that you already paid for. iRiver’s commitment to developing the unit even after it has been sold is a major plus.

Recently I got my hands on a new H10 - a 5GB hard disk unit with a color LCD. It is smaller and more portable, and promises a 16 hour battery life. It looks good - the start up time is much faster than the H-140, which is important when you have to start it up and start recording as fast as possible in order to not miss the first few sentences of a class, or the opening of a kirtan.

JNC SSF-M3

Link

This is the unit that I got instead of the iRiver H-120/140. It was at the time the world’s slimmest 20GB mp3 player. I have also seen the 40GB version, which is larger. Between 20GB and 40GB I don’t think you can really tell the difference. Unless you are using it to store DVDs or movie data, you can’t listen to everything on either a 20GB or 40GB player, so the extra weight and size of the 40GB one is not such a good tradeoff.

The main consideration for me in getting this one was the size (along with the necessity of supporting the free format ogg). You carry it around with you all the time, whether you are recording or not. And most of the time you are listening. So the smaller and lighter it is, the better.

It doesn’t have a screen on the unit, or even a full set of controls. It also doesn’t have a USB connector or line in on the unit. The screen is in the remote, as are the full set of controls, and the USB connection and line in are on a small adaptor or a base station that comes with the unit.

This is a strength and a weakness. If you lose or break the remote then the unit becomes essentially worthless. You have to carry around the adaptor to get access to all the functionality of the unit.

The main strength of this unit is the size. You can slip this thing in your pocket and forget about it. You can’t do that with an iRiver. The headache is in carrying around the adaptor as well as the cable.

The JNC doesn’t have the ability to delete files from the unit itself, needing to be connected to a computer to do this. JNC also don’t do much in the way of post-release engineering of the firmware.

iRiver T20

The iRiver T20 is an example of a flash-based mp3 player / recorder. Flash players have lower capacities than hard disk ones. If you have a laptop computer with a large hard drive you can often store your library there, and transfer files to and from your flash based player, rather than lugging around your entire library on a hard drive. After all, you can’t listen to 20 GB of mp3s at once.

The T20 has 1GB of storage and what I would consider a good mix of features, with iRiver’s solid engineering. It has a slide out USB connector, line-encoding, plays ogg, built-in microphone, good eq (including user definable), can delete files and folders from the player itself (doesn’t need to be connected to a computer) with the latest firmware. It’s very small and lightweight (about as big as a Bic lighter) and has up to 14 hour battery life.

iRiver do great engineering. They build things that are robust and very usable. Their units are solidly engineered, not at all flimsy or whimsical, and the feature set of their hardware and firmware is great.

Weaknesses: it needs Windows in order to upgrade the firmware (you have to use their software to do it - which doesn’t run on Mac or Linux), and also to order the tracks - they don’t play in alphabetical order on the device.

Compared with JNC’s 1GB SSF-5100 the T20 has a Lithium Polymer battery built-in (which recharges via USB) to the JNC’s AAA removable battery, 14 hours battery life ot the JNC’s 9, support for mp3, wma, and ogg to the JNC’s mp3 and wma, and iRiver’s proven post-release firmware support.

Sony

Link

Sony make some of the best engineered gear, with the smartest features. My MZ-R50 minidisc is still going strong almost 8 years later (the MZ-R50 is considered to be the best model they made). The Li-Ion battery is still going strong, and I use the built-in compressor and microphone preamp to go into the line-in on an mp3 recorder.

The Sony NW-HD5, for example, has a whopping 40 hour battery life on its Li-Ion powerpack.

However, I would not recommend buying Sony because of their corporate stance on consumer freedom - they don’t believe it. For example, later versions of the MZ series of minidiscs had USB transfer capability - but you could not transfer digitally from one MD recorder to your computer, and then to another MD recorder. The idea there is to stop people from “pirating” Sony’s proprietary copyrighted content, for example by putting Sony Artist X on your MD, then your computer, then a mate’s MD. What it does in effect is effect is stop you from recording a kirtan or class on your MD, and then digitally transferring to anyone else.

Forget it.

The NW-HD5 does not support the free format ogg. Sony uses a compression technology called ATRAC3, which is technologically brilliant - smaller filesizes than mp3, but completely controlled by Sony, and even more restrictive than mp3. They only allow it to be interacted with using their proprietary software interfaces. The recent scandal involving Sony copy-protected music discs installing root kits on Windows machines shows the ridiculously extreme restrictions on consumer freedoms that they like to impose. I don’t recommend buying Sony at all, in spite of their technical and engineering brilliance, for those reasons.

Less is More

Whether you opt for a small lightweight player / recorder with a few hundred megs of RAM, or a full-on multi-gigabyte hard disk player / recorder will depend on your usage, and also the other gear you have. One thing that I’ve noticed is that you can’t listen to everything on even a 20GB unit. I used to joke when comparing my 20GB with other devotees who had 40GB units - “40GB? Anything above 20GB is atyahara (overcollecting)!” While I was in Peru, Raivata lent me his 64MB Diva mp3 player. I could put only one kirtan from Harer Nama and one class at a time from the Contemporary Urban Preaching Seminars. I can play that kirtan verbatim on harmonium, accordion, and mrdanga, and I can give that seminar verbatim. That’s the power of concentration. With a 40GB unit you can have every recorded Prabhupada class in one place - but will you be able to listen to them?

Gone are the days of having one tape and playing it until it weared out. Now you can grab gigabytes of lectures and kirtans from other devotees, all in one hit.

Less is more. I’ve now gone backwards to a lower spec’d mp3 player - trading off storage space for size and speed (it’s flash based). It forces me to constantly make decisions about what will be on there, as there is simply not enough room to just keep putting all kinds of things on it. That’s a good thing.

In an article entitled: “Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve” Jim Collins summarizes some of the findings of his study published in Good to Great, specifically relating to the kind of leadership character found in the most highly successful organizations in the US. You can read a summary of that article here, courtesy of the US Coast Guard.

The greatest leaders combine the paradoxical personal qualities of extreme personal humility and an iron professional will. This is in stark contrast to the currently popular notion of the strong leader as the boastful, outwardly aggressive personality. Famous captains of industry such as Lee Iacocca (Chrysler) and Jack Welch (GE) fall into the category of Level 4 leaders - good, but not great. The difference is in the legacy that they leave. A great leader is not defined by what happens when they are around, but what by what happens after they leave. A good leader creates excellence. A great leader creates a culture of excellence.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, from another angle. Recently Alison gave a class as part of the “Live to SERVE” series at the Sunday Feast here, entitled: “Engage with Detachment”, speaking about the paradox of engaging with detachment. We are used to engaging with attachment, or disengaging when we are not attached.

This idea of detached engagement is at the crux of Level 5 leadership. The Level 5 leader has a paradoxical relationship with their service. They are at once completely detached from it, and prepared to walk away at a moment’s notice, and totally committed to it, prepared to give everything else up for it.

We’re used to people who are so attached that they will never give it up (some wags joked that Iacocca stood for “I Am Chairman Of Chrysler Corporation Always), or else so detached that they don’t put in anything approaching 100% effort.

Understand one thing: a Level 5 leader is a necessary ingredient for a great organization. In every good to great organization Collins’ team discovered a Level 5 leader quietly at the helm. They didn’t start out looking for leadership as the common denominator, in fact Collins initially told them to discount leadership as an explanation as it was too neat, and “don’t all organizations have leadership?”

In fact, good to great organizations have a special type of leadership that distinguishes itself from the leadership found in other organizations that do not reach to greatness.

You can see that Srila Prabhupada embodied this paradox. In fact I read an exact description of this in the latest Transcendental Diary the other day. Hari Sauri prabhu was relating Prabhupada’s pastimes staying with a family in India (I forget where - Agra? family called Agra?). He tells how a group of people came and heard Prabhupada speaking in his room, and that they were impressed by his simultaneous unbreakable conviction in what he was preaching and his own personal humility. Personally humble, professionally fierce - as Prabhupada himself described the ideal preacher: a lion in the chase, a lamb at home.

In Good to Great and the article mentioned above, Jim Collins admits that while they were able to detect and describe the Level 5 leaders and the qualities of Level 5 leadership, they were unable to explain satisfactorily the process of developing Level 5 leadership. The best they could do was to postulate that some people have the potential for it, while others do not, and that the seed of that potential could sprout due to life’s circumstances, resulting in a fully fledged Level 5 leader.

One of the impetuses that Collins postulates as a trigger for Level 5 leadership is a spiritual experience.

I have one story to illustrate this. I saw it on a video about Christian preaching. One preacher was sent to a small town to become the pastor there. He arrived in the afternoon with his wife and children and they checked into a motel. His wife turned to him and said: “Don’t bother unpacking - we’re not staying”. The town was riddled with gangs and methamphetamine production. The streets were in disrepair and the buildings were covered with gang tags.

That night that preacher prayed and prayed, and he felt the Lord telling him that his life’s work was to be there in that town. The next day he went to the local cemetery and purchased a space for his body to be buried in.

I’ve always found that to be an inspiring example. There is one ISKCON preacher in South America who embodies for me this example - His Grace Omkara Krishna Prabhu.

Anyway, at the heart of the Chowpatty temple you find His Holiness Radhanatha Swami, who is well known for his extreme personal humility. And something that is repeated again and again in the booklet that accompanies “The Simple Temple” - you just have to keep trying. They relate how they started and restarted programs various times before they finally got off the ground. That fierce organizational resolve is the influence of a Level 5 leader.

Knowing precisely which programs to commit to with that intensity is something else, and another organizational characteristic described by Collins and modelled in Chowpatty temple…

It’s a hefty download, but it’s worth it - it’s the 50 page pdf book “Steps to a Simple Temple“, that accompanies the Simple Temple DVD. Buy this DVD now! This DVD shows a wonderful model of a Krishna conscious community based around the temple in Chowpatty, India.

I’m re-reading this book again at the moment, and it is very good. The beginning discussion of the brahmacari ashram demonstrates one of the principles discussed in Good to Great that distinguishes all great organizations from good or not-so-good ones - they have an emphasis on getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats before they leave the station.

The section on counsellors discusses starting a counsellors program. It makes the point that they had no model to follow, and had to feel out each step. It may be that others trying to emulate their system by following the exact footsteps that they did will not have the same success, due to having a different set of environmental conditions, which must be dealt with in a different way.

We shall see more clearly as more successful models of this type are created which are the essential principles, and which are the details of implementation. Especially the way in which they developed their program from scratch (they discuss the evolution) may be different in different places due to differing resources.

Definitely the rigid adherence to the fundamentals - what powers their resource engine (the Holy Name), what they can be best in the world at (caring for people) - and the elimination of everything extraneous to this (concentration means elimination), also a factor discussed in Good to Great, is a major contributor in their success.

The clarity of the vision is also a major contributing factor in their success. There may be a number of different ways to eat a mango, but you have to have one, and you have to be clear about what it is. I am sure that everyone there knows what the program is.

As Jack Welch puts it, “the leader defines the situation”. Without a clear vision things will just muddle along. This book gives a crystal clear vision.

The presence of a “Level 5 leader”, a personality completely sold out to the mission above their own ego gratification, has also been identified in Good to Great as a precondition for sustained organizational excellence. I believe that His Holiness Radhanatha Swami is such a personality, and the success there in Chowpatty demonstrates this.

What they are successful at: creating a Krishna Conscious community, is a result of their spiritual focus. The same principles they model here can be used for material or spiritual success. If you get up early and do the same thing every day you’ll advance in it, for example. Whether that thing is spiritual or material depends on you. The principle is universal.

Simply “being spiritual” is not enough. We have to be intentional, and if we want it to be successful on a large scale, we have to be strategic. That’s not material, and it’s not thinking oneself the doer. It’s simply “putting in our one inch of the rope”. Our effort plus God’s grace is the winning formula.

The difference between the two, of course, is that God’s grace alone can be sufficient, whereas our effort alone never can be. However, sitting at home waiting for an honorary degree (krpa-siddhi) is not the recommended strategy.

If you don’t have this DVD, get it now. Buy another copy to give to someone for Christmas.

Have you ever been in this situation?

You’re put in charge of a restaurant that is underperforming. There is a team of people working in that restaurant already. Morale is low. Everyone on the team is either unsatisfied with the way things are going, or else taking advantage of the situation to their own benefit.

Everyone you talk to has their own idea of what should be done to fix the situation. You’re dealing with several problems. One is the economic issue - the restaurant is the economic engine of a temple, and the temple is pulling out all the available cash, so you have no capital to work with. At the same time, the temple is putting pressure on you to put out more, as the production of the restaurant is too low.

Another problem is the problem of the personnel. Because things have been left for some time a culture has developed, and there is resistance to changing it on the part of some people. They don’t mind change as long as everything stays the same for them. You don’t have a lot of good will to experiment with, so your changes have to be spot on or you will generate a massive backlash. You can’t easily replace them either, because you have to hire practitioners of Krishna Consciousness. Finding devotees who want to work in this particular job is not easy. The existing employees are aware of this and leverage it to maintain the status quo.

Sound familiar?

What’s your recourse? Do you pull out the book “ISKCON Leadership and Management Series: What to do with a struggling restaurant”, which is filled with case histories and lessons learned, discussions of underlying principles and how they should be applied in different circumstances?

I couldn’t find that book either, but don’t worry - you are not alone. I experienced this a few years ago, and I have a feeling that this is quite a common scenario. (If it sounds familiar it’s not because I’m describing your situation, that’s a direct description of the circumstances I found myself in four years ago. I suspect that this is not a unique occurrence).

Or how about on the other side of things (I haven’t been there, but I’ve seen it): you’re an upper level manager, and you put someone in charge of the economic engine of your temple, the restaurant, which is not doing as well as it could, and they start making changes, seemingly at random, knocking customers and staff around. I mean, you wanted things to be improved, but you weren’t imagining that the restaurant was going to become a laboratory for experimentation. Where’s an “ISKCON School of Leadership and Management” graduate when you need one?

I went out and tried to find some books that dealt with these issues and that could give me some guidance. One of the books that I stumbled across was “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. It is a review of an academic study of high performing organisations. It took me a few years to absorb the information, which was not quick enough to be of use in my restaurant situation, but I’m no longer completely in the dark about the principles involved in organizational excellence.

Anyway, I bring this up because of a post over at Tony Morgan’s blog, introducing a recently released supplement: “Good to Great and the Social Sectors“, which deals with volunteer and religious organizations.

Actually, I’ve been thinking about it, and the majority of people will get little or no benefit from reading this book. There are a small number of people who can actually process the contents. If those people can do so, and put these principles to work in the service of the sankirtan mission, then they can write further books which explain these principles and their application in the context of Krishna Consciousness. I’ve found one of those books, and I’ve reviewed it above.

I’m still waiting for that book to be written, the “ISKCON Leadership and Management Series: What to do with a struggling restaurant” one. Collecting case histories and interviewing managers needs to be done. While I was there in Peru I was crying out for a book on management set out like Nectar of Book Distribution, where different devotees come out and recount their experiences: “I did this for five years, then I discovered this, now ten years later I realize this…”

I have been for some time with the idea of generating some questions and interviewing experienced leaders in the Krishna Consciousness movement, and collating their responses into something along those lines. Perhaps that’s a task that could be undertaken by the Bhaktivedanta Leadership Institute. I’ve never been able to do such a thing due to lack of qualification. Whenever I have the opportunity to spend some time with experienced leaders I always ask questions about their experience and realizations in their service for my own edification. If that could be codified more for wider benefit, that would be from good to great.

Anyway, in the meantime, Good to Great represents a study of successful organizational principles that can be understood and then applied in a Krishna Conscious setting. We have to utilize anything and everything, and ultimately depend completely on Krishna.

The ISKCON Management and Leadership course taught in Mayapura is a good collation of principles presented in a Krishna Conscious framework. If I were in a position to do so, I would send my potential leaders to this course (or at least some). Failing that (time and laxmi are not unlimited resources), and while we wait for a more distributed educational program and books written from a specifically Krishna Conscious perspective, Good to Great is a cutting edge book on the principles that underlie organizational excellence. I highly recommend it for persons who have the additional bandwidth to absorb it.

Whatever may be there is alright, simply add Krishna and it becomes perfect.

This is a more measured version of last night’s post, which I rushed off after arriving home from the Sunday Feast.

Last night was the final Sunday Feast of the year in Brisbane. We are closed for the next two weeks (like a lot of other mega-churches ) as the next two Sundays fall on Christmas day and NewYear’s Day. We’ll be using the time off to recuperate and refocus on our mission for 2006.

On the last night of the year I spoke summarizing the recent series Live to SERVE, which ended with the presentation on “Embody the Values” by my spiritual master, His Holiness Devamrita Swami, last week. I cast some vision for the Sunday Feast program, we had a yoga demonstration by Elliott and Param Satya, and then a kirtan lead by Maha-mantra prabhu.

During the class I asked how many people read news.com.au, how many read the newspaper, how many watched the news on television, and how many listened to the news on the radio.

I realized when I did this that we do not have much demographic information on our attendees, nor have we ever sought that in surveys. I was in Auckland, New Zealand a few weeks ago, and they administered a survey similar to the one done last year in Wellington and the surveys that we would do at the Alternativa Positiva festivals in Peru. Basically you are trying to find out how people find out about your program (where you are going to focus your marketing resources), what attracted them to come (what angle you use), what they liked while they were there (what will get them to come back), and what they didn’t like (anything we can improve?).

That’s all old news now. We know how people hear about us: we do some advertising, and meet people in the street, and people who come due to that bring friends along because they really like it. They like the music, the food, the dancing, and above all the company and the vibe (the community). Things they don’t like? Try the opening kirtan at the Sunday feast if you’re still following that old school system where a couple of hardcore devotees lead a half-hearted opening kirtan for the new guests (everyone else comes half way through the class).

That’s all known now. We know generally how things work. Word of mouth - customer referral - is everything. People like the sense of community that comes from having a mission and aligning your energy with that, from the sacrifice of the staff in devotional service.

What we need to know now is what kind of people are coming, and how that changes over time. In other words, now that we know what our strong suits are, we need to measure the effect as we play them, by finding out about the people who are coming along.

One of the first things that came to mind last night, is the literacy level of the people who come. To encourage a person who doesn’t read at all to read Bhagavad-gita is a two step process. You have to encourage them to read, and to read Bhagavad-gita. If you have people who already read as a matter of course, then getting them to read the Bhagavad-gita is a one step process.

Of course there are a large majority of non-reading people in every country - don’t think that your country is unique and that “no-one here reads”. Although the percentage varies, the literate / intellectual class in every country is a numerical minority (and I do think that it is shrinking over the years).

However, my feeling is that these people are a good place to start. We have to be intentional about what we are doing. We have to preach on purpose.

So we are planning a publicity campaign for the universities, to attract the students to the Sunday Feast, and we’re looking at ways to measure the effectiveness of that. Of course there’s always the “checking out the crowd”, and getting the feel by talking with the guests and debriefing with the other staff members. Once we start getting up to thousands of people, however, we’ll need other systems. Best to start thinking of them now. We don’t want to slow down the growth because we were unprepared for it….

Now that we know how people hear about us (80 /20 - word of mouth / flyer), what they are attracted by (yoga) and what they like about us (dancing / food / community), the next thing to do is to find out about them.

What we’ve been asking up to this point is how they perceive us. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Here is what I want to know about you:

• What speed is your Internet connection?
• How often do you read the newspaper?
• How many books do you read every month?

I want to see what the answer to this survey is, and I want to see that this changes over time, as we more accurately target our intended public.

We want to encourage people to read Bhagavad-gita. If we have to encourage them to read on top of that, we’re really pushing a heavy rock up a steep hill.

We need to have Bhagavad-gita study groups, not remedial reading classes. Once we have a whole lot of people we can run remedial reading classes, just like the Jehovah’s Witnesses do English as a Second Language.

There is nothing wrong with people who do not read, and we will accept everyone. However, if there are no people who do read, that’s a problem. And yes, I do realize that there are a lot, increasingly so, of people who don’t read - they just watch DVDs and play computer games. But there are still a class of people who do read, and we need them to be coming along. Those people are needed.

We need to see if we are getting those people. If you can’t measure it, good luck trying to improve it. (How will you know whether your changes are working or not if you can’t measure the effectiveness?)

Prahlad is sick at the moment. Fever and vomiting.

NZ Emergency managers are making noises about staying in your house for six months during a bird flu epidemic. You can get rid of a sickness, but not sickness per se - it is a fact of material existence.

Gurudeva left today from his week-long visit to Brisbane and went to Auckland.

Here is an interesting resource: Changethis.com. It is a collection of manifestos - well written, well laid out, good, interesting contents.

Examples:

• Speak Softly - one that Candidasa and Ekendra would like, asks where America’s humility has gone.
• How to speak a teen’s language - good advice on presenting to modern teenagers.

Oh, there’s so much good stuff there. Just check it out when you have some time.

Good to see that the sadhus from Melbourne are back online. Gopal Guru had a month long hiatus from posting, and Aniruddha Prabhu has been in India.

Yesterday we had a meeting with a television producer here in Brisbane. An initiative of Gaura Seva prabhu, we’re working on a series of television programs to show on Bris 31, the local community access television station. My taste in television (not that we have one - check this recent article on namahatta.org) runs to Ali G’s HBO series, the Jamie Kennedy Experience, and Safran vs God, which people have shown to me on DVD - irreverent, boundary pushing (critics would call it tasteless). There was a great program put together by Innertain.tv called “The Happiest Place on Earth” that also rocks.

I’ll probably ask around for a copy of some recent television programs to see how they are structured. Anyway, obviously we’ve not going to get away with a Hare Krishna Safran (maybe we could get him on the show - he didn’t do Hare Krishna on Safran vs God - he owes us one!) or a Devotional Borat, but something at least a little edgy would suit my tastes. Nice if it can be done, non-essential if it can’t.

I like the stuff that Granger Community Church do as intros to their Sunday sermons, for example this one introducing a presentation on why forgiveness is so hard and why we’re willing to sacrifice our future, money, time and energy for revenge.

At the moment we’ve planning to cover one topic per show. Topics at the moment include: World of Warcraft Addiction, A World Running Out of Fuel, and Racial Intolerance.

The most important decisions you make as a leader are about people (refer to this previous article on the subject).

Every time you make a decision about a person, it’s not just about that person - it’s about the kind of people you want in your organization.

The kind of people that you want are not motivated by money. They are not simply looking for a paycheck, looking to get by. Those people will destroy your organization.

The kind of people you need are looking for an opportunity. They are looking for an opportunity to realize their potential, to utilize their talents and abilities in the service of a cause, and to further develop themselves. These people want the opportunity to work with persons who are better than themselves, because they want to become better themselves.

If you have individuals who are committed to creating excellence and improving themselves, then your organization will create excellence, and it will go up. It will also be attractive to the kind of people that you want.

If the individuals you work with have no interest in bettering themselves, organizationally you won’t go anywhere, and the people you need will not see any benefit in joining you.

The most important decisions you make are about people, and it’s never about a person, it’s about the kind of people you want.

Yesterday my spiritual master, His Holiness Devamrita Swami dropped over for lunch. We invited a few people around, and Maharaja talked for about half an hour, casting vision about urban missionary preaching. I recorded it using the WCE6T microphone, both to get a good recording, and also to allow Gurudeva to get used to it before the Sunday Feast program today.

Here’s the recording:

Lunch time talk at Red Hill by H.H. Devamrita Swami

As we heard at the end of October, the venerable VCal program that has served ISKCON so well is being retired. The Next Generation Vaisnava Calendar is now under development, and devotees with skills in IT, especially in programming, are invited to participate in the development.

On the one hand: Worldwide, Information Technology is increasingly prevalent and, like the rest of the population, many devotees today work with computers, and have skills and talents in this area.

On the other hand: Information Technology is the latest development of the Western drive for efficiency that Srila Prabhupada so admired (the lame man and the blind man). A recent study revealed that 2 year olds in the US spend as much time looking at a screen than they do playing outside, and more time than reading. People in the developed countries are increasingly eschewing print media for online media. The US Congress is getting set to pass legislation to get broadband Internet into the 66% of US households that still don’t have it. A project to provide an initial 15 million $100 laptops with networking capability to under-developed nations will start rolling out in Q4 of 2006.

Regardless of our understanding of the superiority and desirability of a simple, subsistence lifestyle, we can’t have our heads buried in the sand. The printing press will never disappear, but the Internet is increasingly becoming the brhad-mrdanga of the 21st century.

Putting these two things together, we need to offer engagement to devotees where they can use the skills they are having to learn in order to get jobs to support themselves and their families, or are increasingly arriving already in possession of. Programmers, graphic designers, infrastructure and project managers, can all utilize their skills and abilities in the service of the sankirtan mission. We need to adopt modern technologies and place them in the service of Sri Krishna Sankirtan - let us leave nothing un-utilized.

A worldwide organization such as ISKCON needs a significant IT capability in order to leverage the efficiency-increasing power of IT in communications, data storage and retrieval, calendar calculation, content delivery, and other areas. At the same time, something like a centralized corporate IT department is an impractical model.

The open source development model utilized by the GNU/Linux community more closely maps to the principles and values that ISKCON operates under, and looks like a more realistic guide for a practical implementation.

Whether you are familiar with this model or not, if you are a devotee who has abilities in information technology and would like to get involved in leveraging these to add value to the sankirtan mission, then get in touch. If you know someone who has these talents, drop them a line and point them here. Washing pots, sweeping floors and cutting vegetables are all great services and clean the heart. At the same time, in addition to this type of service at your local temple or preaching center, you can also engage your professional abilities in service, making a significant contribution to the mission, and purifying that aspect of your life. The Next Generation Vaisnava Calendar is being developed using the open source development model. The GBC Calendar Committee has sponsored the creation of a coordination mailing list for this project. Send a blank email to vcal-devel-subscribe@worldsankirtan.net to join it.

Manasa deho geho yo kichu mor - apilu tuya pade nanda kishore

With whatever you have - mind, body, wealth, family, worship the lotus feet of the son of Nanda Maharaja (Bhaktivinode Thakura)

yat karosi yad asnasi yaj juhosi dadasi yat yat tapasyasi kaunteya tat kurusva mad arpanam

Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer or give away, whatever austerity you perform - do that, O son of Kunti, as an offering to Me. (Bhagavad-gita 9.26)

Here is an interesting article on the use of technology by American “Megachurches”. Props to Candidasa for the heads-up. Here’s another related article from the Sitapati.info archives.

If you read the section “Towards Network Centric Preaching: Vision 2011″ from the “Operations Manual for World Domination” that I published in December last year, you’d have read my analysis of how information technology enables massive increases in scalability and speed - exactly what Srila Prabhupada had in mind when he talked of the “lame man and the blind man”.

(btw - I submitted that article as part of my CV for my current job)

One example that is given in the Megachurch article is that of using management software to deal with a huge number of people.

While I was in South America I was involved in the Bhakti-vrksa program there, and I noticed something. Part of the Bhakti-vrksa program is reporting. Every week each group leader needs to make a report about his group and its members. These reports then go up the network to the area commanders, whatever they’re called in the Bhakti-vrksa model (sorry, I’m a little out of touch with the terminology - and yes, I know he’s an area servant, but this is Lord Caitanya’s Sankirtan Army on a mission of digvijay - world conquering, so please let me indulge in some bombastic rhetoric), who can then make informed decisions about what’s going on.

Theoretically, and this was my point the other day, these reports could go higher and higher, until the heads at namahatta.org could produce classified reports detailing the exact situation worldwide, which could then be summarized, sanitized (to protect preaching in countries where it’s banned), and published periodically.

Now in practice what happens is that coordinating the movement of paper is practically impossible, even at the local level. For the group leaders to fill out a report is sometimes too much to ask. Getting it from them takes more time. By the time you get everyone’s reports, it’s already the next week, and you spent so much time and energy just getting them that you don’t have time to do anything with the data.

Unless you have a secretary you now have to sit down and enter all that data into a spreadsheet to get it in a useable form. God help you if your Bhakti-vrksa is actually successful, because you’ll be swamped under the paperwork.

What happens in practice, in my experience, is that reporting is simply discarded as too much trouble. The lack of reports coming out of the ministry tend to support my supposition that this is a widespread phenomenon.

I don’t have to keep harping on the point, but I am. A lot of the systems involved in Bhakti-vrksa currently just can’t scale to support the kind of growth that it is potentially capable of. It’s a system that is currently destined to fail because success will kill it. It is self-limiting.

Here’s an idea for a solution:

First the caveat: this will only work initially in developed countries, but if you build it, they will come…

There is an online system where the group leader, after the meeting, the next day, whatever, logs in and fills out the report online.

Bada bing.

Now the area commander does not have to deal with massive amounts of paperwork, and neither does the group leader. The area commander doesn’t have to chase all the group leaders, and they don’t have to add finding the area commander to hand in their paper work to their duties of maintaining contact with their group members.

The area commander doesn’t have to convert the data from paper to electronic form, and as you get more groups and group leaders, the work automatically redistributes. Ladies and Gentlemen, can you say “Scalability”.

Now here’s the kicker. You use one central database, and the namahatta.org heads can run global reports on it.

That’s what I thought when I saw what happens when the theory of the BV Manual (on reporting) meets the real world.

Now we just need to build an IT capability to build and maintain such a solution, and we’ll be there. More on that in the next post.

OK, here’s another thought.

The law of exponential growth:

To grow linearly, lead followers. To grow exponentially, lead leaders.

Bhakti-vrksa, or network or cellular preaching, is not about making devotees, it’s about making leaders (who are devotees). It’s about leadership reproduction. Wherever there are leaders, there are followers. Try reproducing cell groups without reproducing leaders, and the whole thing will shut down real fast.

Now, what leadership training programs and resources do we have within ISKCON, or the Bhakti-vrksa program?

The only one that I am aware of is a 5 day leadership and management course. (Update: It’s a 36 hour course that is designed to be delivered in a single block across a number of days, up to six. You can read about it here.) There are several problems with this which can be summarized in a single statement: “It’s not scalable”. In order to sustain exponential growth of the kind predicted in the BV Manual you have to have scalable systems.

That program will not scale because people cannot give 5 days to a course like that. You are not planning that one or two or ten people will need to take the leadership training, but tens of thousands. It’s not practical. It has to be training delivered in such a way that everyone can do it.

Secondly, it requires a two pass process. First you do one course to learn the material, then another course to learn to teach it. That’s not scalable. It will not scale fast enough to match your growth.

Contrast this with system used by EQUIP. If you are interested, read through this site. First of all they cast the vision: “A billion Christians in the first decade of the 21st century will require two million new churches. More than 4,000 new pastors (leaders) are needed every month to match this growth.”

I can’t find it on the site right now, but the way that it works is that trainers come to your country and deliver the training to your seed people there. They each then go out and deliver that one day training to 25 people. Those 25 then go and do the same thing. In three months time the trainers come back and deliver the next installment. They do this six times = 18 months to complete the training, which is a total of six days of training.

It’s scalable because it reproduces itself - as you add more people you get more resources. It’s a network training system. The current five day leadership and management program in ISKCON requires you to train more trainers, apart from teaching the material, and it requires too much of a commitment of time in a big chunk for most people to actually do it.

There are some good lessons to be learned from the EQUIP model. They have met their million leader mandate and have trained 1 million leaders well before the target date of 2008. Now their goal is one million leaders per year.

Those figures in the 1996 BV Manual are not unrealistic. We just need to make a few adjustments to hit them.

I’m back in Brisbane, Australia from NZ. I have some photos that I took while I was there, including a few of Ratha-yatra, and also a few articles that I wrote in the early mornings there. I’ll post them up soon.

A thought for this morning - which is actually something that I’ve been thinking about for a few years. I’m not saying that it’s a fact, just something that I’ve been considering: “the Bhakti-vrksa program works well in India and amongst people from an Indian cultural background because Krishna Consciousness is part of their cultural heritage. In the same way cellular preaching of Christianity works well amongst people of Christian cultural background because they are predisposed to it.”

Following this line of thinking, Bhakti-vrksa will not work so well with people of a Christian cultural background as it will with people of Indian cultural heritage.

Is this the case? It’s hard to say. I haven’t been able to find published statistics from Bhakti-vrksa preaching. Part of the Bhakti-vrksa program is statistical reporting, so theoretically it should be possible to collate world wide stats to monitor the health and progress of the program. I hear that it works well in Russia.

One thing is for sure, the Bhakti-vrksa program has not hit the projected targets published in the BV Manual in 1996.

Now, another factor: from my observation, Christian cellular preaching works well in third and second world nations - in places like Central America, Africa, and also in South Korea, which is a developed nation. These people do not have Christian cultural heritage.

Reading through the literature available on Christian cellular preaching (we need to hear some more stories beyond Free to Preach, and especially from the West - including what doesn’t work, and discussion of why), it has shown itself to remarkably adaptable to the cultural context in which it is expressed. Christianity is no longer a Middle-Eastern specific religion, and the cultural trappings of both the Middle East, and the Medieval Church, with the castle-like churches and the stained glass windows with Kings on them, are being shed in favor of contemporary memes, and contemporary language.

I’m not sure how it all links together yet, but it seems to me that the Bhakti-vrksa program may need some more development before it will hit the sweet spot and yield the results projected in the 1996 BV Manual. A lot of people have lost faith in it and its potential because of the overpromise / underdelivery, but I’m a believer. There may be small adjustments that need to be made. I’ve had some ideas about some, and we’re trying them out. It will be a few years before they can be fully deployed, but I’ll keep you posted.

Bhakticandrika and Alison worked together to produce the new Loft flyer. This one is color. You can download it as a pdf.

As promised, before I jet off to NZ, here is the third principle in the series. It’s entitled “Narrow the Focus”. Being successful is as much about what you don’t do, as it is about what you do do. After all, you can’t do everything - but when you have to make intelligent decisions about how to apply your limited resources, what guidelines do you use to do it?

In 2001 I found myself in charge of a facility and some people in a situation where we were on the back foot. It was obvious to me that it wasn’t simply a case of doing “more of the same”, because that was taking us down. Changes had to be made, our depleting energy had to be channelled into something that would resuscitate the situation. However, I didn’t have any clear guidelines on how to do this. The only “manuals” that I could find relating to temple management were operations manuals written in the 70s for the situation of the 70s. There was nothing that could help guide me through a change process in an unfamiliar country in the 21st century.

While circumstances and details of implementation may change, fundamental principles remain the same.

This principle provides a lens to examine the situation through, and get clarity on what kinds of things should be focused on and what things should be neglected in order to regain and sustain momentum. As the resourcing situation and the external circumstances change, this lens can be used to refocus things and keep them on track.

Principle #3 Narrow the Focus