Tag: Jerry Sandusky

Dilemma and Decision

Leaders are tasked and paid to make decisions.

Hard calls. Tie-breaking calls. Go for the Gold, or take the safe route.

Coach Joe Paterno had a lot of wins, but many were taken away from him because of one mis-step.

Pope Benedict XVI , however, did call it quit (right timing).

And Tesla–Solarcity–Space X? the jury is still out on that one risky “pal”.

No pain no gain.

One good thing about this brutal Recession: it separates the wheat from the chaff.

The wheat here might be Indie-Capitalism, sports diplomacy, soft-power influence…

We simply cannot afford full-scale hardware-driven conflicts as in years past.

First the Soviet bloc folded. And now, the US with Sequestration.

Our machine has gotten ahead of us, the cart before the horse.

If only we could disrupt ourselves, or press “reset”. One other way is to review the old play book and give it another try.

For instance, it’s quite couner-intuitive since the IT industry migrates to the Cloud away from the office, Yahoo wants its workers to head back to it.

They will probably work out of virtual stations, with wi-fi and white boards, to lunch in play room like in nearby Googleplex.

Dilemma and Decision.

Work and life balance.

Private cloud or complete virtuality.

Hybrid or plug-in EV.

Key Stone or kicking the can.

21st-century dilemma requires 21st-century leadership.

Who among us are ready and willing to step up to the plate!

He who lives in a glass house refuses to throw stones.

When looking at the game from that standpoint, executive’s high exit bonus  is not such a bad deal. It would cost more for them to stay on than to leave. Zappos learned this and paid its new employees a bonus for leaving than for sticking around. It’s the culture, stupid. Decision or dilemma.

Changing-transforming

The first comes natural. The second,  involves an act of the will and intervention. Penn State will need to be transformed.

Besides, it’s not the place. It’s the institutional mindset. We know this. We will do it, individually and collectively.

It’s Sunday morning. I will use this day to reflect on my experience at Happy Valley. Those 4 years have always been special to me. Now, they will need to be looked at in a different light. Perhaps with more maturity due to hindsight.

Today, when I jog pass a lush-green golf course, I still think of PSU’s.

The shorter loop is 4 miles, the 8-shape loop 8 miles.

Students could be seen jogging around the clock up and down those hills. The book Running was a run-away best seller at the time. So were jogging shorts.

And…..long socks with color-stripes up to our knees .

We would watch Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Express…anything with “midnight” in the title. Disco was in the air. And the shiny silk shirts.

Long-hair students sat along “the Wall”, while more traditional ones would stop by the Creamery. The best there is.

When it’s home-game weekend, you can hear the roaring echo from Beaver Stadium. Post-game evening, win or lose, it’s full house at local pubs. It’s fun to go out in Happy Valley. Everyone finds a date, winter or summer.

It’s 50’s innocence, now facing 21st-century ethical dilemma: big box, big bucks and bomb-shell publicity problems.

I can well imagine the press descending upon State College, the Corner Room, Old Main, the HUB. I am sure they interview students, staff and faculty for reaction.

I am sure they camp out at nearby hotels (lots of them to accommodate tourists). Then, they would pack up and go on to the next disaster.

Happy Valley will once again be quiet..until September.

Summer there is hot. Student housing are sparingly occupied, either by those who need to work summer job, or take a summer course to finish up their degrees.

If any good comes out of this, it’s the proper place of football in the scheme of things. Perhaps academic, and yes, ethics.

Institution for higher learning, for learners and decent folks, PE included, but not as THE thing at Penn State. The changing and transforming of place, people and priority.

Ignore it!

Willful ignorance, kicking the can further down the road. Hoping it lands on someone else’s front yard.

Problems got ignored,  because if solved, it’s gonna cost. Penn State pedophile problem is one.

One of us vs societal rule of law, subjectivity vs objectivity, warm feelings vs calm rationality.

I read JoePa’s son’s op-ed in USA Today. He asks for suspense of disbelief until the full investigation is out (email in context etc….).

In short, we need time. Kick the can a little further down the road once more.

Don’t ignore it, but also, don’t just immediately jump to conclusion.

Moral dilemma.

Beaver Stadium was adding seats. Can’t just tear them down.

Moral rehab vs mortar remodeling. If you look back, you will turn into salt.

Just ignore it?

Tragedy comes in three for me: 1975 Saigon evacuation landing at Penn State – devastated. Three-Mile-Island internship 79 – terrifying. Now FootballGate.

I want to ignore it. Then it creeps up. Like an unwanted member of the family.

Hoping there is no such thing called Thanksgiving, so you don’t have to face him/her. Meeting with Jesus. Court date. Press inquiry. Public debate.

Can’t ignore it now, ever.

the right screen

Smart phones got computer, TV and phone screens, all in once. The combined screen.

I was sitting in front of a lap top and an attached large screen. For a moment, I looked at one screen while the action took place at the other. To catch on, I  need to follow the cursor to know where the action was.

In life, we have looked in the wrong place for the right thing.

(to make friends while in prison, for instance).

Penn State commissioned JoePa statue in front of Beaver Stadium, just to now debate whether to take it down.

The Christian in Asia a few centuries ago, were told to remove ancestor’s altars, traditionally placed at the center of the home.

The FEDs keeps reducing rates. Should we look there for future directions? Unemployment indicators? Housing and foreclosure reports?

Never have we been tested as during the past 4 years.

Am I looking at the wrong screen?

Prophets have arisen, and more shades of truths have been made available.

Which way is the wind blowing?

Put your money in Macau.

or in Manhattan?

Google Glasses or JcPenney?

Pick your people right. Business model can always be modified as we go along. Often times, it’s on the wrong screen anyway. Keep the statue. Make it a teachable monument. After all, JoePa had always championed scholarship and athletic pursuit hand in hand. Institution for higher learning should at least have intellectual honesty and moral conviction to defend its mantel and mission. Especially when it is now looking at the right screen not smokescreen.

Taking chances

Peter’s Principle states that line managers are often promoted “beyond their level of competency”.

In other words, a technical guy, best at his job, ends up being the boss who has to crawl his way through business dilemma and personnel issues.

In life, however, some problems cannot be solved at the same level where they had first occurred. Bully problems at school, for instance, need intervention. Or as recently as this morning, Sandusky‘s sin exposed and dealt with in public.

It’s a call to take chances, to take risks if we were to make any progress.

This Recession has drawn out both the best and the worst in us.

Some of us rose to the occasion. Diversify ourselves. Or take the high road (going after our passion or non-profit work).

Others just checked out. Drifted.

I have met a bunch of expats who kept staying in-country indefinitely.

Extended vacation.

Or permanent student.

Profitable venues i.e. financial and housing sectors are hitting bottom.

We are left with the “sure things”: food, clothing and shelter (renting).

Even families once so close now seem so far. Recession pull them apart, that was.

My friend reminded me how long it took Japan to get through its V-shaped recovery. 18 years.

Ouch! I will be dead by then.

Still there are things that need risks: crossing the street, eating one more bite of that greasy foods or banking on the elusive thing called love.

Friends went into fields which are quite different from their academic and career backgrounds. That’s risk-taking.

I spotted excitement and adrenaline.

For VC‘s, they need to hit 20% of the time, to cover the other 80% failures.

Still it’s worth it.

Still taking that chance.

Still go for it. Or else it wouldn’t be solving the problem at a higher level.

Because after all, many of those problems cannot be solved if left where it started.

But beware of over-promotion (beyond one’s level of competency). Peter’s Principle.

My Happy Valley

A photo of  Penn Stater, eyes glued to the Collegian, brought back strong memories of the HUB (Student Union Building) and my time in Happy Valley.

State College was home to me for 4 years. Happy Days. The Wall. The Corner Room. Beaver Stadium. Best ice-cream at the Creamery.

In the Spring, at outdoor concert , we heard  “Here comes the Sun” as an opening act. I saw Bruce Springsteen at a concert in the HUB Ballroom, and remembered thinking, “that man got juice”  (Born to run).

I too was on the run. From the burning monk and burning napalm. From the war last day (7th Fleet spanned the horizon as far as the eyes could see) I too was born to run. The road took me to Native American geography (Susquehanna River and Indian Town Gap). Most memorable was when  I ran into and received kindness from a fellow refugee I met on a  Harrisburg snowy night.

Across from campus, at the Corner Room, we had many coffee refills without getting dirty looks.

Raymond Brown, the Penn State Choir Master, drilled it in us to “Breathe” and “Think”.

His football counterpart, Joe Paterno, had turned Head Coach a decade before I got there.

When I left for a TV internship, he was still there. Today, as of this writing, he is still there (sneakers and Tootsie glass).

(Latest news break announced this would be his last season).

I never came back to Beaver Stadium for commencement. I was an intern at an ABC-TV station in Wilkes Barre on my last quarter.

We got a call to cover nearby Three-Mile-Island incident.  As usual, we set out with our battery pack and a fresh roll of tape.

Then the story broke, and we ended up in a ghost town (people rushed to withdraw cash from ATM”s) again, with lots of coffee refills

and still with no dirty looks, only worry ones. It’s the second time within the span of 4 years that I was stuck in one set of clothes for days on end.

In the span of those four years, I was insulated from a changed world outside of Happy Valley. That world had turned more cynical, and more sexually aggressive (Last Tango in Paris).

But I managed to take courses in Science, Technology and Society whose premises stay with me until today.

We invented the Machine, but in the process, the Machine reinvented us (I am a BMW driver, an I Phone user etc…).

What I saw before Happy Valley (7th Fleet on the War last day, B-52 bombers overhead at night etc…) and after (nuclear power went wild) served as two bookends, with near fairy tales in between (We went singing at nursing homes on Sundays, or performed with Andre Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at Heinz Hall).

We were still using punch cards at the only two computers accessible to students. All of us used manual type writers to write term papers and produce newspaper, the Collegian. My dorm mate worked as an Editor  there.  Right after we saw Bruce Springteen, Jeff’s eyes lit up when he saw I could play the solo part of  “Born To Run”.

It must have been a trip for them to experience a foreign student first hand, as opposed to viewing characters like Sixteen Candles’  Luong Duk Long “what automobile?”, and to find out I shared  delayed curiosity and hidden aspiration (Deep Throat shown on campus? Is this Bob Woodward’s idea of a joke?)

Seeing today’s students holding up the Collegian warms my heart, despite the sad circumstance surrounded it (sexual abuse and institutional cover-up scandal).

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2011/11/07/column_sandusky.aspx

I know next to nothing about football besides coming into contact with a few players who dozed off in my Speech class and Jimmy Cefalo who served as an intern at the same time I was at WNEP-TV.

But for years since, I haven’t found a place, and a time, that shaped the lives of so many, mine included,  for the good.

When the Lion, our mascot,  did one-hand push ups, we and alumni counted out loud, you could feel the stadium rock. We all felt mighty proud. And rightly so, because WE ARE…and still are PENN STATE.

our team always wins

In three hours, Penn State is going up against Ohio State.

We are….

I have had a down morning, until I remember what’s like at tail gate parties: blue-and-white everywhere, strangers cheering you up  and Joe P our god eternal.

My spirit is always lifted when the marching band runs into the stadium to lead the way for the rest of the team.

We learn about team loyalty, competitive spirit and “reset” mindset (nice try, defense!).

The alumni kept coming back, many with season tickets.

Happy Valley was indeed a happy place especially on home-game weekends.

Despite the ups and downs of my post-college years, Nittany Lion has a special place in my heart.

All positive.

Practice, practice, practice.

Players are to show up in class as well (even though they napped in Speech classes).

Mind over body.

Team over individual.

Winning is not everything. It’s the only thing.

We are…. Penn State.

It’s a microcosm of a larger universe, called America.

Lose not the competitive spirit, team spirit and grace in defeat.

For me, our team always wins, because We are…..