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Todays program is called: Furor scribendi ­ A Mania for Writing

With the end of each financial year, our organisation's Directors, like those in all other Australian companies, must report to our Members, for we are a company without shareholders.

Directors have every reason to believe in the information presented to them by key Members which states that our organisation is paying our bills. All indicators show we have the financial health to continue in our business into the following year.

This year, we continue to restructure ourselves so that we are not too old fashioned.

Operational activities at our Centre are coordinated by our four Task Units which report to the Vice-Presidents and Managers.

The four Task Units are:

1. Local Area Planning and Asset Maintenance
2. International Dhamma Activities
3. Corporate Governance and Reporting
4. Knowledge Management

Each Task Unit must account for their activities over the year and to do this they produce written annual reports.

You may think we have what amounts to mania when we insist that every written word in reports presented to our Members at their annual meeting in 1999 must indicate something that is meaningful.

At his lecture given in London on 19 May 1840, Thomas Carlyle said: "With the art of writing the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new continuity and perpetual closeness, the past and distant with the present in time and place; all times and all places with this are actual here and now. All things were altered for men".

We hold this to be true.

This quote is to be found in the book "Heroes and Hero-worship".

On 23 August 1819, John Keats wrote to J.H. Reynolds and offered the view that he was convinced more and more every day that fine writing is, next to doing, the top thing in the world.

Since inception, we have insisted that when undertaking report writing, our key administrators must thoroughly know what the write about, and not be affected.

As might be expected, those superb administrators of a vast empire encapsulated the essence of such matters with the Latin phrase: "Vox audita perit; litera scripta manet" which translates as; "The spoken word perishes; the written word remains".

Our strategic and tactical evolution blueprints demand that managers produce tracking reports that are courteous and trustworthy.

This year, it became obvious we were becoming short of socialised managers because, at times, we found ourselves having to use unsocialised persons as managers.

These persons appeared to get things done, but upon investigation, we found they would stifle the creativity of those they directed.

The spoke harsh words towards popular Members.

We solved the problem of not having enough time to produce more socialised managers who did not hate human beings, by winding up our nine development committees and replacing them with our four Task Units, each led by highly socialised managers.

This year, four older managers were rated as unsocialised persons by performance testing.

One common indicator of unsocialised behaviour is where a manager stalls putting in writing what they are doing over the last six months with analysis of how his or her actions bring a cost benefit and return on assets to the organisation.

It is not satisfactory for a manager to spend our member's time funds and talk about team building if the project cannot pay its way.

Poor managers generate much ill-will and many complaints and we found their perception of the situation was looking for scapegoats to blame and their refusal to write coherent reports, "because they are too busy".

We have two members with Masters of Arts qualifications, and one with a Bachelor of Arts who are highly qualified wordsmiths with superior writing skills that are utilised to help managers write reports.

Since 1996, we have given more professional attention to the image and style of our reports to ensure they contain better written minutia which highlights our Centre as a quality organisation.

Our new S5 best practice management requires socialised managers.

The know how to find more time to adopt a more caring, and more "resource pulling" policy.

The must be willing to find the time to study how to operate our new computer systems as they become available.

This year, to make certain who could run modern S5 systems, we were forced to recognise that we had inherited four unsocialised managers from our long past culture.

When persons become too old fashioned they become dead wood who refuse to change with the times.

Old fashioned persons thwart the creativity and enthusiasm of newer Members who are more prepared to capitalise on refurbishments to our heritage systems.

It is essential we maintain the will to write down in report form how we intend to refurbish our systems from time to time.

Persons who refuse to commit themselves in writing to disclose to Members what clear, well costed development plans they intend to track, cannot be managers.

We expect our managers to write down skills and instruct others with the assistance of these documents. Our managers must remain up to date with current expert opinion, legislation, and internal guidelines. They must conduct themselves professionally, and act in a way that will avoid libelling others or reducing our image in the community at large.

Managers must show, in detail, how their work group will raise the necessary funds to get the plans to happen.

Our policy is not to borrow money.

This year, we examined our complex management systems in more detail and found persons who we thought were using excessive amounts of our organisation's funds for their pet projects.

We sought out persons who chaired meetings in such a way they removed these unsolicited persons from all operational tasks involving others.

The results was that this year, the tone of the organisation became fresh and energised.

Two of the unsolicited managers we found left our organisation this year.

1.0 Introducing a Major Paradigm Shift for International Operations.

This year, in the field of international operations, we have decided to make a shift from our strategic orientation for best practice from "growth now, profitability later" to "profitable growth now".

This policy transformation arose by analysis of the weighted average return on assets used for international events initiated over the last few years.

If you asked members what they thought were our peak activities in international operations, it is likely most would say it was such things as eight Members attending the World Fellowship of Buddhists (W.F.B.) Conference in Bangkok, Thailand in 1994 and ten Members attending the W.F.B. Conference in New South Wales in, Australia in 1998.

Under old practice, thousands of dollars of our Members' money was spent to attend the conferences. In addition we gave a considerable amount of DANA to others from our assets, but came away with little to show in the way of material benefit.

This gave key Members of the time an excellent introduction to international W.F.B. issues.

It is clear from the Vinaya rules that Buddha praises DANA up to a point, but does not praise excessive waste of resources.

He taught the rules for prosperity of persons and institutions.

It is interesting to note in terms of cause and effect that Members who consumed and wasted excessive quantities of their own or our Members' assets at Bangkok have since left our organisation.

We do not wish to repeat the loss of valuable Members who are heedless of the need that our Organisation must generate sustainable profit.

Mature reflection on teachings has made it clear that our Members must see our Regional Centre attending more to the "profitable growth now" paradigm when operating in the international arena and find favour at conferences.

Under our new paradigm, we would still attend, but would have a plan to come away with increased assets, donated from the richer regional Centres.

This plan was put into practice successfully during John D. Hughes' recent visit to Thailand for an Executive Committee Meeting of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, where he was offered the full paper-based version of the Chinese Tripitaka in Chinese language (108 Volumes).

Members require more vigour in our appeals for fundraising help.

This year, we intend to give all Members strong training to remove the older viewpoint of: "growth now, profitability later."

Several projects must be modified over the next financial year.

2.0 The IDA strategy is to be Operational in IDA by September 1999

Our Senior Vice President has given suitable training to Members in our International Dhamma Activity Task Unit, so they will have made this change within the next three months.

By October 2000, key Members of all other Task Units ought to have rewritten their policies to actualise the new system.

International ventures need not be by direct contact, country to country; they may be though an intermediary.

Before we drafted the new clear policy guidelines, we had little incentive to subject intermediary ventures to analysis.

3.0 Defining Unsatisfactory Transactions Under IDA Strategy

Our new IDA strategy generates some interesting guidelines which allow us to recognise the extent to which the financial transactions by hawkers, who sit almost invisible in our midst, are unsatisfactory.

The hawker, knowingly or unknowingly, does not operate in the interests of our profit or international goodwill.

Using the new policy guidelines, we discovered that one of our Members had been siphoning off thousands of dollars of Members' savings out of the organisation this year, by selling Tibetan rugs to our Members.

The transactions done by this hawker Member in the past year which did not solicit comment at the time are now considered to be inappropriate behaviour for a Member of our organisation.

This type of international venture has a negative effect on our funds because it drains the local resources of our Members to India. We did not receive one cent of profit from this Hawker's activity.

Such money was not available from our Members to buy our Centre's products which make us profit.

Our new policy would prevent this Member hawker touting for business on our premises.

We dissociate our organisation from this Member's trading activities for two reasons.

Firstly, the persons making the rugs do not appear to receive any form of payment or get any benefit from the profit from sales.

Secondly, we are not clear that the carpet money trail makes provision for Australian sales tax (GST) or that the money ends up in India.

We have advised this Member of our new policy and cautioned her that under our new strategy her actions are unacceptable.

We are awaiting her written reply.

It seems we must train more Task Unit Members to become aware of trading activities that drain resources from our Centre, and prevent outside international hawkers covertly exploiting our asset base.

We are closing off open publication of the asset base of our Membership list except on a need to know basis.

4.0 A Satisfactory International Venture Set Up This Year

This year, our paradigm could be altered because we obtained the "missing links" in the next two levels of the globalisation of our international operations.

This was done by increasing speed of retrieval of good information available to many Members from the new data warehouse in our LAN computer systems.

In addition, we provided a next generation internal E-mail facility and our web-site.

We are ready to lift our systems by yet one more generation to pentium technology next month.

These achievements make 30 per cent of our managers redundant.

Our modern paradigm uses analysis to show how we pinpoint persons who cannot produce positive returns on the weighted average of our assets, and who have not shown socialised managerial behaviour with fellow Members on past projects.

These persons will not be given any opportunity to hold themselves as representing our organisation in its international operations.

One profitable international venture of direct value to us was set up by Julie O'Donnell this year involves the direct purchase of Nepalese images from an agent in Australia.

We add value to the images and provide them to Members at a reasonable price.

More socialised managers are being sought to advise us of how we can set up and service our new international ventures.

To make it clear how each party can profit, global written policies are required for those we come into direct contact with.

The first element of our international paradigm is that to break up our former practices towards one or more overseas groups at the wrong time may create more problems than it solves.

When running with the former Committees, some Members tended to dominate discussions on the grounds that one country was more worthy of attention than another.

Politics and propaganda based on hate clouded the minds of some Members who had not been trained in logic or lacked historical facts or skills in research of the area under discussion.

For example, if we consider the history of our international operations in Bangladesh for decades, we started by helping fund and give moral support to one orphanage in Bangladesh.

This was due to past karmic connections of our Teacher who, in former life at that place, decided to help the Followers in that place.

By the causes of using our resources to collect and send funds; three working and teaching visits in this life; and printing appeals for many worthy causes in that country in our international publication Buddha Dhyana Dana Review, our Teacher has received requests from many persons to come to our Centre from many different monasteries and organisations in Bangladesh.

We have had two bad experiences because our compassion outstripped our wisdom and we did not have Members who had the time and were willing to be a champion for those who sought to learn here.

We are talking about Members who are not willing to put their own resources to the test and investigate the character and likelihood of improving the Dhamma performance of those who seek to visit here.

We are cautious about what would happen if our visitors fell ill, with the high costs for medical treatment in Australia and our need to find return air fares if our visitors could not pay them.

Some visitors seem to expect we will pay interstate travel expenses and expensive overseas telephone calls.

We are not willing to go along that track until we have sufficient cash reserves to cover such expenses.

Yet, how can we expect to achieve the benefits of international flowering without providing a cordial welcome to visitors?

So, in Bangladesh activities, we look good in print, but to some extent we are living on the merit from our Teacher's vigorous activities in the past two decades.

Since then, he has been granted almost legendary status by the 100,000 Students he taught in that country.

It would be a great strain on his health to revisit that country this life.

To be active in a full blown Dhamma performance in Bangladesh, our Teacher is required to interact with main players in Bangla Dhamma life.

We are looking to develop newer stronger Members who can make it their life work to fund activities and be a mentor for one or two countries.

The paradigm does not show how we choose and support Members for this task - that is up to them!

5.0 Does Any of our Goodwill Built by Past Systems Remain?

When we have scanned all past international correspondence onto our database, we will be in the position to rate our past performance on each country.

We can then make policy to build on our strengths.

All options are about to be evaluated from our new position.

Those Members who choose to ignore and follow through international alliances they made for themselves in past Committees, or affiliations with international visitors, will be exposed.

We are not looking for scapegoats.

6.0 The Task Units' Financial Mission for the Next Three Years

We are looking for leads that gain alliances among the new Task Unit Members whose task it is to turn measurable goodwill into one million dollars profit within the next three years to come.

This money is needed for the purchase of three new Centres in the Shire of Yarra Ranges.
Therefore, each Member of a group must create value for all Members so that the net result is a build up of local assets.

The absence of strong financial accountability and corporate governance structures encouraged some past Members to focus on the appearance of activity as propaganda, rather than profitability as their primary activity.

Such Group Leaders defend growth without profitability with rationale such as: "It is good public relations", and believe that other sub-committees in the organisation should fund the activity.

The complex cultural questions that must be faced in such cases is to question if the "group leader" is developing others on his or her committee to appreciate that, under S5 management, they are equally responsible, along with the group leader for running the group in question at a profit.

If there is a power play promoting his or her hidden needs or agendas when running the activity, this may allow a severe mismatch to develop between the organisation's asset structure and its financial structure.

We must not allow this to happen, and in such circumstances, the group leader must be dismissed.

For example, in past years, the Ch'an Academy hit a low point as an example of the destruction of wealth to no purpose by producing a negative weighted average return on assets over two years.

After calling for monthly performance reports from the Member responsible for this lack of growth with operating losses, evidence mounted that the Member was in a world of such intensity that she was incapable of believing the declining performance figures, and sought to blame other Members who had nothing to do with the project.

After eight months of weak reports, she collected her mind and could accept the fact that she was weak in prospecting for students.

At bottom line, she could then face up to the fact that the reason why she was running a "lemon" with a negative return on our assets, was that she was unwilling to train herself in prospecting.

At this stage, she was replaced by another Member who had been involved with the Ch'an Academy under her supposed "guidance".

She had not encouraged him to display creativity in selling "derivative" products, such as painting materials.

He had to be trained in prospecting for students, since he had not been trained to think about profit by his predecessor.

The change in his thinking occurred when he paid a booked tutor a $200 fee, even though the tutor was not required to attend, because there were no fee paying students.

When the neglected training was given by our Teacher, he was able to arrange for many fee paying students to attend Ch'an classes and sell about 500% more painting materials per year.

Over the last year, by putting into action what was needed, he has produced a positive weighted average return on assets.

Last year, two Members decided to develop a convincing picture of the prospects of the Ch'an Academy through strong public relations they initiated with three local Newspapers promoting the Ch'an Academy.

In addition, these two Members were energised enough to think about a weighted average positive return on assets by arranging a successful local painting exhibition, which is another example of selling "valued added" materials to Students.

Material from the exhibition is useful for international publicity on Dhamma.

7.0 Introduction to Catalytic Management Changes

A catalyst is a substance which when present in small amounts increases the rate of a chemical reaction or process, but which is chemically unchanged by the reaction.
The purpose of this year's reform was to introduce a catalytic mechanism to bring about more competitive management.

The nature of the catalytic management change within the last year has been dealt with in the Knowledge Management Task Unit Annual Report 1999.

That report describes the reformation of our systems from the old structure of nine development committees into four S5 style Task Units, each of which has a sharp set of teeth to allow up to one thousand times more "bite" in delivery of our information than the nine former committees.

This catalytic restructuring facilitated a view of competition as an encirclement rather than confrontation, and involves the use of stretch and leverage.

For example, over the last year, we have had more coverage on the WFB Newsletter (printed at WFB Headquarters in Bangkok and distributed internationally) than any other Regional Centre.

This is due to our News Editor (John D. Hughes) supplying a stream of well written bulletins of our Centre's activities.

Many of our articles are hand delivered by our Senior Liaison Officer, Vanessa Macleod.

8.0 Stretching Members' Exposure to International Dhamma Information

Dhamma knowledge is the foundation of our local and international activities.

Viewed from another angle, the more we give out accessible written Dhamma knowledge with steps for its implementation, the more we make causes to attract the right persons to join us or help us with our practices.

Good persons using good information can eject viruses from any unsound management practices we may have inherited.

Obviously we are forming strong international networks across many organisations.

Last year, ten Members took advantage of the opportunity to stretch themselves in international understanding by acting as rapporteurs at the 1998 W.F.B. Conference.

The persons so engaged produced a catalytic effect throughout our organisation.

Our library archive contents produce an ongoing catalytic effect. Last year, we received 886 new Dhamma reference books, an increase of 46% on the previous year.

We take these figures as one clear performance indicator measure of our international Dhamma knowledge.

We are looking to impel better performance in the consumer need for sound information about Dhamma.

One performance measure of our gathering of international Dhamma information is the extent to which Members immerse themselves into intelligence culled from other Dhamma Centres around the world. We implement the lessons they have learned.

This year, communication about Company international Dhamma tactics improved with the growth of our retrievable knowledge bases, including our e-mail, LAN, databases, archive storage facility and also through use of the ISYS search engine.

This catalytic system distributes power for the benefit of the overall system and allows lower-level managers to strike out the time wasting bottlenecks that occurred while waiting for some other manager "to think about it" before granting permission to change a slow work routine and replace it with a more socialised, less energy consumptive form of management.

For example, the heavy drawers holding the library record cards were held on a high shelf which made them difficult for library users to access.

The drawers were taken down in a "gut busting" exercise and placed on a library work table, effectively cluttering it, whenever books were indexed. That is the way it had always been done.

The new work procedure was to place the drawers on a small table having the same height as PC4A.

Now, the reference cards can be searched with ease by library users and have the advantage of leaving the main library table.

Persons are now more willing to help in the library because the traditional (but unnecessary) "gut busting" lifting chore has been removed.

9.0 Ethical Trends Likely to Enter Into International Corporate Life

A Harvard Business Review Case Study (July-August 1999) directed its attention to what should be done if there was a tendency for re-emergence of mainstream religious faiths to enter into corporate America.

It would be difficult to enforce a policy that network groups could not engage on proselytising or any other activity that is disrespectful to other employees.

If this trend became significant in corporate America, then due to the cultural affinities generated by many multi-national organisations having bases in Australia, it could be certain this trend would arrive within the Australia Felix.

Christian groups might make it possible for employees of all religions to turn down business trips during their religious holidays.

In ordinary company thinking, religion cannot be allowed to become a distraction or a problem on the job. It is well accepted in Australia in medical circles that meditation is beneficial to health. The introduction of morality into business schools can be traced to religious convictions of some of the professors or course developers.

Are more Buddhist family-run businesses likely to appear in Australia?

In networking, we must find common ground and not form sectarian Buddhistic organisations within the workplace.

Our first strategic challenge is to encourage Members to examine their mindsets to see if they have any entrenched religious or social model that may hinder the ability of our organisation to adapt and change in our international roles.

International sentiment at the moment is the new business paradigm.

As business conditions change, the most successful companies are often the slowest to adapt.

Is it legitimate to raise the cognisance of Members to note that since our organisation's inception two decades ago, we have had three male Presidents?

Is it defensible that our organisation has never had a female President?

For example, although it is a fact that we have elected female Senior Vice Presidents, from time to time, our organisation must explore and feel certain that we have no conscious glass ceiling or that we are in any way sexist.

We have one female in training who aspires to be a future President.

We have two areas related to international business ethics. One is not negotiable, such as no lying.

The other is negotiable, such as working in joint enterprises with persons who do not have Buddha Dhamma as their primary religion but have it as their secondary religion.

The second strategic challenge is that we cannot take a narrow view about anything to do with religion.

If we do, we will be farang. In Asia and Melbourne, it is quite common for persons to comply with the tenets of three or four different religions according to the occasion.

For example, Japanese people see no incongruence between the accepted practice of Shinto wedding rituals and chanting Buddhist sutras at funerals.

In Thailand and Melbourne, devout Buddha Dhamma practitioners have tree shrines for gnats.

In Singapore and Melbourne, they have altars to the Kitchen Gods, and so on.

In business, these shrines enter the workplace and if they were omitted, workers would not join the organisation.

10.0 Breach of Copyright

The international standards for copyright advocated by UNESCO state that breach of copyright is tantamount to theft. They go on to state, however, that if one duplicates articles, books, cassette tapes or video tapes for private use, for study or for non-profit distribution, one may copy as much as one likes. In some countries, however, one is allowed to copy only small portions of copyrighted material for such purposes, although exactly how small is small is only vaguely defined. Thus, as local copyright laws do not always adopt the UNESCO standard, a bhikkhu should check with the law before copying anything. In particular, the agreements covering the copying of commercial computer software usually do not permit the owner to give copies of the software to anyone for any reason, and limit the number of copies one may make for one's own use. One should follow such agreements to the letter.

11.0 International Business Skills Development

John D. Hughes as World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB) Vice President needs to develop his international business skills to propagate the issues raised in his WFB "Buddha Dhamma Challenges in the 21st Century" paper.

The international business skills needed are:

* prompt response to changes in customer demands
* concern over product quality
* awareness of trends in the global market
* ability to establish international business relationships
* willingness to take initiatives in making friends with business people from another country.

May you be well and happy.

This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Julian Bamford and Leanne Eames.

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