My hometown, the City of Charlottesville itself, inspired my love and appreciation for Dr. W. Edwards Deming.
Yes: The “fine folks” in City Hall inspired my Deming journey.
Please note: It was not out of love, concern, nor any of their core values that they did so…
If you want the honest, amusing, unadulterated, immature yet mature-audience-only version:
Just ask.
Curious to know why the City threatened me with VIOLENCE for asking for help while completing their employee appreciation survey?
FOIA request my last email while working for the City. I sent it to three (3) top managers. My name is Parker. It was sent 3:31 p.m. 12/05/2023.
What I do want to openly share; I pulled from the book Dark Horse by Todd Rose and Ogi Agas:
This is an amazing read. Highly recommended. It supports a common theme used throughout this website:
Most our systems are exactly backwards.
While the Western world is making strides, I got a hunch it will be the year 2075 before we embrace the dreams of our most astute leaders:
Without further ado:
If I thought the City gave a damn, I would ask them about TJ:
Thomas Jefferson:
Remember him?
We commemorate him with his statue on City Hall…
His estate is visible from our building…
His house is on the back of our nickel…
He is the reason our city exists…
In many ways, he is literally like our father… Our god…
He wrote a paper a long time ago…
It is called the Declaration of Independence…
We ALL have a problem when those in government deny it…
Apologies for the vague notions here. These four monsters (as they call me) have already demonstrated the extent they will go to silence me. And, they have a lot more power, resources and authority than me. Hell, they figuratively print money. By literally taking it from you! You call it taxes. They call it perks. They will fight me with your money. Provided you have ever been to our now infamous town that mentioned by the highest authorities in connection to pure evil (POTUS’s commencement speech about the Unite the Right rally that should have never happened here…
After exercising my first amendment right, I was quickly escorted out the building by an armed detective. No shit! At first, I thought it was because I said something about the asbestos contained in City Hall. While I fear the truth is more sinister, I suspect this all has to do with something Robert Greene writes about. Something that Deming detests… Something that resonates the core of my being… See hashtags at bottom.
To my four favorite hypocrites in top management at City Hall:
The most influential sentence in Western political history must surely be the first sentence of the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The most celebrated phrase in this hallowed sentence is its trio of unalienable rights. Yet, curiously, one of them does not sound like the others it is easy to forget, when the extraordinary minds he fashioned the world’s oldest enduring democracy set down the most important rights do every human being, they afforded the rather eccentric “pursuit of happiness” the same supreme status as life and liberty.
Two and a half centuries later, life and liberty remained steadfast fixtures in the public arena. We still furiously debate the right to life and the right to die. However the pursuit of happiness rarely appears in public discourse. In fact in its first appearance upon the world stage the “pursuit of Happiness” which promptly mocked thoroughly throughout king George’s Britain.
The enigmatic phrase held profound currents of meaning for the founders. It reflected a moment in history when the greatest thinkers in the American colonies were pondering the ideal form of social organization for a free people, united by shared conviction that reason, philosophy, and civil debate could offer more effective solutions for government than tradition, religion, or bloodshed. And no American was more deeply engaged in the reasoning, philosophizing, and debating of the age than the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.
The inclusion of this phrase was neither an accident nor a compromise. It was the deliberate annunciation of one of history’s most gifted political thinkers as he was crafting what he believed was a transcended document for all humankind.
Protecting the bright to pursue happiness, therefore, demands recognition of the individuality of the pursuer.
What makes the United states exceptional among the nations of earth is that, astonishingly, its creators believed that the ideal society was one where individuality matters. A society where, above all, fulfillment matters.
In its original form, the adjective “happy” referred to something that fit a particular event. A “Happy thought” was one that was perfectly suited for conversation; a “happy garment” was one that was appropriate for a social event. Scottish English philosopher David Hume spoke of a “happy theory” because it kept fitting new data; Hume also penned a line that could serve as a our motto: he is happy whose circumstances suit his temper.”
Though the meaning of “happiness” was originally neutral, meaning “the state of fitting one’s circumstances,” by Jefferson’s time it had become a synonym for “goodhap,” meaning “the favorable state of fitting one’s circumstances,” just as the word “lucky” evolved from meaning “random” to “favorable luck,” and “fortunate” evolved from “random” to “favorable fortune.”
The first reference to happiness in American political document was in the Virginia Declaration of Rights published by Jefferson’s friend George Mason just a few months before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence makes him wrote, “All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights… [that include] pursuing an intent and obtaining happiness.” Analyzing Mason’s use of the word, historian Jack D. Warren observes that happiness “was not a vague goal as it now seems. Happiness did not mean pleasure, though 18th century thinkers held that happiness ought to be pleasant. For thinkers like Mason, a person that achieved happiness when his condition fit his character, talents and abilities.
For Jefferson and other founders, the pursuit of happiness was viewed as a scientific law of human nature, akin to Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
According to enlightenment thought, if something was a law of human nature, it was therefore necessarily a moral law. It was a right. In other words, since everyone was designed by nature to pursue happiness, to seek those circumstances that fit them best, this quest was a fundamental individual freedom that must be protected. “When they found what they must pursue, they knew they had a right to pursue it.”
In the final step of the Enlightenment chain of reasoning, if something was of moral law, an individual right, then that right must be protected by the government. It must become a political principle. Eight years before he signed the Declaration of Independence, founder James Wilson wrote, “the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.” In one of the most influential treaties of the early Enlightenment, A System of Moral Philosophy Hutchinson asserts that general happiness is a supreme end of all political union.
Thus, Jefferson believed that by proceeding through the logical steps of scientific law, moral law, and political principle, the pursuit of fulfillment was an individual right that must be guaranteed by any just social contract.
Most of the founders were in complete agreement that an independent American system of government must have as one of its paramount aims the protection and nurturing of its citizens fulfillment. This is what they likely believed they were affirming when they signed the Declaration.
Jefferson privately intended something more.
Jefferson is famous for his blue-sky thinking, for visionary ideas about how to improve the world that were often far ahead of his time period the pursuit of happiness was one of them. There was evidence that Jefferson intended “the pursuit of Happiness” not merely as general avowal of the individual right to pursue fulfillment, but as a solution to the problem of how to provide fulfillment to everyone.
That they never would have used such modern language, many of Jefferson’s Enlightenment idols believed in the existence of a positive feedback loop between the individual pursuit of fulfillment and the collective fulfillment of all members of society. According to this thinking an individual’s pursuit of fulfillment inevitably benefits her neighbors while the act of increasing her fulfillment her neighbor’s fulfillment elevates that individual’s own experience of fulfillment.
Henry Home, Lord Kames, a Scottish philosopher who mentored David Hume and Adam Smith, may have been the 1st to express a rudimentary form of this notion when he wrote, “there is a principle of benevolence in man which prompts him to an equal pursuit of the happiness of all.” Hutcheson then close the loop between the individual pursuit of happiness on the collective happiness, writing: “that each agent may discover it to be the surest way to promote his private Happiness, to do publicly useful actions… In the like manner, a publicly useful action may diffuse some small advantage to every observer, once he may approve it, and love the agent.
Adam Ferguson thought similarly; “It is likewise true that the happiness of individuals is the great end of civil society: for in what sense can a public enjoy any good, if its members, considered apart, be unhappy? The interests of society, however, and of its members, are easily reconciled. If the individual owes every degree of consideration to the public, he receives, in pain that very consideration, the greatest happiness of which his nature is capable.”
Jefferson imbibed these Enlightenment ideas about the social dynamics of fulfillment concluded that the individual pursuit of fulfillment was not only a right, but a duty. A duty that served as the essential mechanism for increasing the collective fulfillment of society. In his 2006 book Wealth in Families, Charles Collier, a thought leader in charitable strategy, encourages would be philanthropist to heed Jefferson’s conclusion: “According to Thomas Jefferson, the ‘pursuit of happiness’ has to do within the internal journey of learning to know ourselves and an external journey of service to others.“
Jefferson’s conception of fulfillment as both a bright and a duty!
In case you are wondering what it is like working at Charlottesville’s City Hall:
#badbosses
#badboss
#toxicworkplace
#badworkplace
#toxicbosses
#toxicworkplaces
#badmanager
#bosses
#badmanagement
#badguy
#corporateslave
#notoxicbosses
King Trump and President Musk (As Charlottesville veteran put it): These “fine people” in City Hall are the pinnacle of efficiency. Lowly staff can beg and plead for help and reform, but no one else seems to give a damn…