What you are learning from, and how

"Am I a leader?" is a question you will never answer honestly. "What did I do last month?" you can answer in a minute — and that is the kind of question the gslk conversations ask you.

You have the number. What is left is what to do with it, and the answer is almost never "work faster" — it is "group them".

The board talks only about sponsors and numbers. Then somebody asks who the club is useful to besides its own members, and the table goes quiet.

You asked, it did not happen. Before drawing conclusions about the person, four things are worth checking, and only one of them is about willingness.

You are excellent at what you can do and you avoid what you cannot — until the post requires it. The gap between what the post demands and what you do can be learned shut; it has nothing to do with character.

One badly welcomed first-year costs more than a semester of publicity. A club has no product it can fix separately from itself — its brand is how it behaves.

Sooner or later somebody asks what all this is for. Most boards skip that question as awkward; this work treats it as the main one.

Nobody opened the invitation, and it was not because the topic was bad. Usually it contains none of the three things that make a person respond at all.

The announcement went out and half the people still ask the same question. Their attention is not the problem. The text is.

A negotiation over a room, a date or a figure turns into a contest of stubbornness. What someone asks for has one solution; why they need it has several.

A new board spends its first term arguing and concludes the team is wrong. Usually the team is fine — it simply has not got past a stage that has a name.

You promised a certificate for attending, and people started coming for the certificate. Sometimes an incentive buys what you already had for free, and spoils it on the way.

Bad news arrives late not because people hide things but because your first sentence on hearing it is usually "why didn't you say so earlier".