Speaker A The go society. As a co sponsor, you may want to know a few values behind this. The first value all of us had in Toronto, where it started was the personal contact with Elliot Jackson and the value that he brought of extraordinary conceptual contribution. But for us, what was very important was his generosity and his patience to teach extraordinary value. Elliot Jacks came in 1992 to Toronto. We made an experiment of one day program. Some people walked out because they were very much into adult education, and he taught them by lecturing and a bit of domination. And they said, we're into androgyny adult education participation. And they walked out. But we had courage and went forward. Oh, what happened? Okay, blue is one day, red is three day and seven day. And this is a period of about eight or nine years. All of those programs taught by Elliot Jacks, some free and some it's sponsored by our professional association. And he worked far below fee half or a third of what he normally did. So it's his generosity. Now, the difference was that the people who studied were senior consultants, normally competitors, but we learned not to be competitors. We discussed competition, copyright, proprietary rights. But Elliot, Jack said use anything I have. Just give me credit. Keep my name on it. Use mine to give me credit. You can use it. Okay? Before that, we were competitors. After we staffed, we had volunteer staff members in those meetings, and we all volunteered our time in order to learn. And when he died, we said, we will volunteer our time to teach others. So behind this is a value of non competition, collaboration, and giving to others what Elliot gave to us. So that spirit is behind the Go Society. The second value, a meeting like this can be very satisfying, but it slips from the memory with video. We put it on the website. We're going to ask for your permission. This way, others benefit from what we share and what we do. We learned early on that a CEO will try something if another CEO recommends it, who they respect. So it's very difficult to get a CEO to go to another company or to really give their opinion because it's proprietary, because various reasons. But it was Sir Roderick Carnegie who would go to a company like Novus. And many of you will meet the people from Novus eight years later, because they have done much. They're another co sponsor of the conference. But he went to meet with their CEO and team and told them his experience, and they were then had the courage. They've been on an eight year project, and you will hear about it. So a CEO talking to another CEO, well, once a CEO says that, are they going to do it 100 times? No. If we can get what they say on video and put it on a website or put it in a short film. Now CEOs. See many CEOs. So the secret of the Go Society is, one, generosity. Two, capturing on video everything. So not only interviews with you, but meetings like this, the conference, the trainings, and we put everything on the website free. So now a consultant. Let's say you're trying to sell a project. You say, Let me show you what three different CEOs in your industry say about this. That's very different. It's much easier to sell. Okay. There is a third value. Elliot primarily was a psychoanalyst when he worked at Glacier. For those 14 or 15 years, half of every day he worked in the organization, half he worked as a psychoanalyst. Some of the early people who followed him were psychoanalysts. What is the primary characteristic of a psychoanalyst, other than intelligence and helpfulness? It's privacy, client confidentiality, and one on one relations. The psychoanalyst does not bring his clients together for a group meeting. That's not his paradigm. Right? So when Elliot practiced, he almost never wrote up a case. Glacier, yes, because he worked with the CEO. The CEO wrote it. But it wasn't until Commonwealth Aluminum, after many people pleaded, did he ever write up a case. So confidentiality was a strong value and one on one relations. So he would develop a relation with each of us. And many people said, oh, Elliot would write to me, he would talk to me, he would help me. But it was one on one. When he came to Toronto, a number of us senior there were from another field, another paradigm desarojo organizational OD, organization development. What do we think of first? Confidentiality and privacy? No group sharing. So several of you came to the Holiday Inn and you saw the shock of the one on one versus the network. Were you there? And was it Gabrielle? Or Gabrielle? Was several of you? And you saw the shock? And we confronted Elliot. There was a very big confrontation. And we said, it has been a star pattern. It must go to a network pattern or this work will die. And John Bryan, in a private we had a staff meeting before John Bryan looked at Elliot and he said, elliot, you are going to die, and if you don't learn to teach us better, your work will die. And Elliot just he sat there and he said, elliot, you must let us do and you must teach us to do this before you die. It was a very important moment. So the Ghost Society attracts intellectuals, introverts, academics, systems, thinkers, not necessarily people in organization development who share a lot. So some of us have a background of organization development, and our job is to provide the infrastructure, the system, so that intellectual, conceptual, high mode intellectuals are encouraged to share, to speak on video, and to network. That's a very important value. So when we design a conference or something like this, when people come in, we say, you sign a permission you must allow yourself to be videotaped. And we will ask you, but we'll ask you to sign today. You must allow yourself to be videotaped. Anything you show or say, you must allow to be shared on the web. This is a massive confront to people confrontation. We only had two people refuse out of 250. Secondly, the conferences are extremely long and there is very little entertainment. No golf, no swimming, no skiing. They're limited to people at high three, four and above. And these people have very little time. Normally, they go to a conference for half a day or a day, but not for four days, not for five days. At our conferences, they stay for four and five days, and they don't leave early. It's amazing. And why do they do that? They say it's because they feel lonely. They don't have other people of their level to speak about things that are important. So what brings people to our conferences is they are lonely and they want to talk to other high level people with experience. So the shock of the two paradigm, the psychoanalyst in one on one versus the group. So when you see the society, see that, see generosity, see this group and Sharon. And that's why we made a big point of bring something to share. So those are basic values. Okay, there is one other very important value that I forgot, but it's extremely important. Okay, I know what it is. Part of what we're doing is luck. If Ken Craddock had not worked with Deming at Columbia, and if Deming had not died and left Ken Craddock without something to do, ken Craddock would not have found Elliot. Ken Craddock gave all of us over ten years of his life, building an 1100 page bibliography annotated about this work. It's his passion. You will meet him. He was on the video. You will meet him. If he had not done that bibliography, the Ghost Society and the people would not have had the confidence that our ideas were big enough, strong enough, and prevalent enough to go forward. We would have looked around at a group like this and say, we are so few, we are so weak. What can we do? But because of Ken Craddock's gift, we looked at that and said, oh, my gosh. Many very good people over many years have done a lot. We are just the current people, and now we have a bigger responsibility. So Ken Craddock will come, and he has a new edition, more pages. You can get his bibliography free on our website, and you can keyword search it on your computer. It's amazing research. So that is the last value. Again, a gift of generosity and a foundation in academics. And I want to go back to this slide. This slide and one other. This is about teaching. You will notice almost ten years of repetitive group sessions. While Elliot was present, everyone was staffed with four or five senior consultants like yourself, working free, helping the participants learn. We had groups of 30, 40, 50 people, 60. We had small groups. We always had staff. They were always free. I mean, they were always non paid. So I wanted to show what it takes. Then in Toronto and in Canada, there are many, many organizations using the method. I want to show a couple more things and then be done. These are levels and these are names of Canadian professional associations. And you will see that many of the members are at two and three. They have a few at four, and one, which is strategic leadership, have more at five. So this is what we wanted to build on. How do we raise an appeal to this part of the audience group moving from three to four and four to five? And we are looking for co sponsorships here with ADCA, adra fundesse idea. And we have several meetings coming up this week, so if we succeed, we're fine. So in. I think that's it. Oh, this is just a dream, but I have to share it because it was a very exciting dream. At one session, you will meet Herb Koplowitz. At one session, Herb Koplowitz says, this is so powerful. If we in Toronto could get a number of the major companies and the newspapers interested, other firms would pick it up. He said, in ten or 15 years, this could change Toronto's competitive advantage. It would be so powerful. And there were a few of us who put together this diagram of what are our resources, how could we and I will share this with you, I'll give it to you how could we work together over a period of years and make Toronto much stronger, competitively, much better organized? And it is surprising how many companies in Toronto are now using it. So that's why we had the first conferences there. So let's say today co sponsoring this event. We know that consultants are the driving force of go because they get income from the work. Academics, however, are the reason we exist. If it weren't for Elliot and his research, if it weren't for Ken Cratdock and the consultants say when they sign these new engagement agreements, if you didn't have academics and the teachers as part of your organization, we would not want to belong. It must have the academic foundation. So how do we build that? So I wanted to emphasize the need for this and the need for teaching and how we do it. Now each of us are teaching alone, and we're going to see the survey, this meeting. We want to co sponsor this meeting with EDPA, because you have done so much over the years and taught so many. You're a great model for how it could be built into education that we want to learn. And we wanted this on video showing the world what can be done. We want these stories told so perhaps Buenos Aires is a better place than Toronto or anyplace else about the teachers of requisite telling their story and getting it on video to give confidence, to know what have we learned? What have we done? What can we do? What do we want to do? That's basically it. So with those words, that's the value statement and why we're doing what we're doing.
