Tag: Sports

One Person Can Make a Difference – ENCORE

Posted on February 11, 2021 in Ethos, Social, Strategy

SuperBowl LV … on February 7, 2021 … Wow!!!

It was a fun watch. Check out these encyclopedic details:

  • The Game – The championship for the 2020 NFL season. The National Football Conference (NFC) champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Kansas City Chiefs, 31–9. The game took place at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, the home stadium of the Buccaneers, marking the first time that a team played a Super Bowl in its home stadium.[7][8] Due to COVID-19 protocols limiting the stadium’s seating capacity to 25,000 fans, it was the least-attended Super Bowl.[9]
  • The Halftime Show – This was headlined by The Weeknd.[5][116][117] The show featured a number of the Weeknd’s hit songs, including “Can’t Feel My Face“, “Earned It“, and “Blinding Lights“, among others.[120]It was reported that the Weeknd spent US$7 million of his own money on the show, which featured men dressed in all black with red jackets and bandages on their face as backup dancers.[120]
  • The Commercials – The estimated cost of a 30-second commercial at Super Bowl LV remained steady with 2020, with [American TV Network] CBS reportedly charging around $5.5 million. The economic impact of COVID-19 prompted some brands to skip the game, including Avocados from Mexico, Budweiser (who donated the airtime it purchased to the Ad Council for public service announcements regarding COVID-19 vaccination; Budweiser parent company Anheuser-Busch would still air ads for its other brands during the game, with a total purchase in line with that of Super Bowl LIV),[92] Coca-Cola, Hyundai, and Pepsi (focusing more on its halftime show sponsorship).[93][94]
    This is a familiar topic for the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean in that we have exhausted the consideration of lessons-learned for the Caribbean ecosystem from SuperBowl commercials.

There is one more take-away:

The lesson-learned of the impact of One Person.

The SuperBowl winning team, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had a losing record of 7 – 9 last year. But now, they were able to go from Zero to Hero. How?

One person made a difference: Quarterback Tom Brady.

[This is] his first season away from the New England Patriots; [bringing the winning culture with him]; he was the oldest player in this Super Bowl at 43. He extended his player records for Super Bowl appearances at 10 and wins at seven. He was named Super Bowl MVP for a record fifth time and was the first to receive the award with multiple franchises.[15][16][17] He became the oldest player to receive the honor and win a Super Bowl as the starting quarterback, breaking additional personal records.

It was all because of Tom Brady that this team went from Zero to Hero. This one player made a difference to this game, his team-franchise and the home-town-region. What he brought to the team was more than just a good strategy, more importantly, a good culture (discipline, attitude, respect, commitment to hard-work and a refusal to lose). We truly believe that culture eats strategy for breakfast.

This is familiar. We had published a previous blog-commentary on the same topic on February 6, 2017. It is only apropos that we Encore that commentary again now, as it was a profile in courage for the same player Tom Brady and his previous team. We need more of this culture in the Caribbean; we need to recognize that One Person Can Make a Difference and be prepared to allow that person or those persons to “ply their trade” in the region. We need to invite them here, retain the ones – differences makers – we have and petition to return those ones that have emigrated. We need their impact here in the homeland.

See that previous Encore here/now:

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Go Lean Commentary – ‘Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast’

Congratulations to the New England Patriots of the National Football League. They won SuperBowl LI on Sunday February 5, 2017 – beating the Atlanta Falcons 34 to 28 in a dramatic comeback – in which they overcame a 28 to 3 deficit.

[Congratulations to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League. They won SuperBowl LV on Sunday February 7, 2021 – beating the Kansas City Chiefs 31 to 9 in a dramatic fashion.]

Their victory proved the validity of the business axiom:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

CU Blog - 'Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast' - Photo 2This phrase was articulated by distinguished management consultant Peter Drucker and made famous by Mark Fields, a former President of Ford Motor Corporation. This corporate best-practice – good for nation-building as well – is that this axiom is more than just theory, it is an absolute reality! Any company, or community for that matter, disconnecting the two (culture and strategy) are putting their success at risk.

This expression made a leapfrog to NFL football in 2014 when the Head Coach of another team, Philadelphia Eagles, referred to the concept in a passing comment. See the full origin story in this link:

How ‘Culture Beats Scheme’ Became Eagles’ Motto

The New England Patriots SuperBowl win is proof-positive of the culture-first ethos. Talent abounds in the league; all 32 teams have the same opportunities and yet, none can boast the Patriots’ history of success. Why? This team has focused heavy on its culture … and has the success to show for it:

The Patriots have appeared in the Super Bowl nine times in franchise history, the most of any team, seven of them since the arrival of head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady in 2000. The Patriots have since become one of the most successful teams in NFL history, winning 14 AFC East titles in 16 seasons since 2001, without a losing season in that period. The franchise has since set numerous notable records, including most wins in a ten-year period (126, in 2003–2012), an undefeated 16-game regular season in 2007, the longest winning streak consisting of regular season and playoff games in NFL history (a 21-game streak from October 2003 to October 2004), and the most consecutive division titles won by a team in NFL history (won eight straight division titles from 2009 to 2016). The team owns the record for most Super Bowls reached (seven) and won (five) by a head coach-quarterback tandem, as well as being the first tandem to win the Super Bowl 13 years after the first. – Source: Wikipedia.
CU Blog - Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast - Photo 1

The purpose of this commentary is the focus on culture. This definition of culture refers to community ethos; this is defined in the book Go Lean … Caribbean as …

… the fundamental character or spirit of a culture [group or community], the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; the dominant assumptions of a people or period.

Culture allows “you” to overcome obstacles; endure the heavy-lifting of a turn-around; invest in future success based on promising talents; stay the course of a roadmap, rather than “giving up” and fleeing for the appearance of greener pastures elsewhere. Culture dictates devoting “blood, sweat and tears” to a community cause, to give a full measure of devotion. We can learn so much by examining organizations and communities of great accomplishments. The New England Patriots is one such model. See VIDEO here describing the culture of the New England Patriots:

VIDEO – Chris Long of New England Patriots on Team, Winning, Unselfish Culture – https://youtu.be/ne-YkmXMN4M

Published on Jan 3, 2017 – Chris Long discusses the New England Patriot’s TEAM Culture, Winning Attitude, & Unselfishness on the NFL Network’s Game Day Prime with former NFL Head Coach Steve Mariucci on 1/1/17.

The Go Lean book relates that there are good ethos and bad ethos – the good ethos can be considered “culture” while the bad ethos may be deemed “defects”. The Caribbean member-states are not known as great societies, despite having the greatest “address on the planet” in terms of terrain, fauna/flora, hospitality, festivities, food, rum and cigars; this is due to our deficient community ethos, our organizational culture. There are role models for us to consider:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” is a famous quotation attributed to the late business management guru Peter Drucker, and I can’t think of a better example that proves this than Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s acquisition of National Car Rental and Alamo.
…
They have been recognized numerous times for their customer service by J.D. Power. Business Week recognized them as one of the top 25 customer service brands in the world. In addition to running a wildly successful business, they obviously know how to take care of their customers, which means their customers want to come back.

All that is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as how they proved these top customer service awards weren’t a fluke. All of the awards and accolades they continue to receive don’t happen by accident. They aren’t just lucky. Everything Enterprise does is very purposeful. It is their culture. – Forbes Magazine Columnist Shep Hyken’s Profile Story.

One mission of the Go Lean book is to foster good community ethos – good culture – for the Caribbean region. We have great talent in our region and yet still we do not win; our people “take their talents to South Beach / South New York / South Toronto / South London, etc.”. What is missing here? Culture.

The Caribbean has a lot of people who have excelled on the world stage in their chosen professions, only because they fled their Caribbean homes seeking better opportunities abroad. Consider:

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to elevate Caribbean society and culture. The CU has 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

From the outset of the book, in the opening Declaration of Interdependence, the Go Lean roadmap posits that a target for the CU’s empowerments should be the Caribbean youth. This is the best way to foster a new culture, focus on the next generation. Then the remainder of society will assimilate … the new values within a short time. See the focus on youth in the opening pages of the book (Page 3), with this sample quotation:

Our youth, the next generation, may not be inspired to participate in the future workings of their country; they may measure success only by their exodus from their Caribbean homeland.

Thusly, the Go Lean/CU roadmap dictates how to reach, engage, and solicit the youth market to foster the new required attitudes. These other pronouncements in the opening Declaration of Interdependence, bear a direct reference to this quest for changing culture; consider these on Pages 11 & 13:

xix. Whereas our legacy in recent times is one of societal abandonment, it is imperative that incentives and encouragement be put in place to first dissuade the human flight, and then entice and welcome the return of our Diaspora back to our shores…

xxi.  Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

The book provides some turn-by-turn instructions for soliciting the different generation groups (Baby Boomers, Generation X and the current Millennials) who are at the frontline of the current Caribbean battles, that of societal abandonment, of which the region is sorely losing; (see this portrayed in a previous blog-commentary). The Go Lean book asserts new community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementation and advocacies. The following list from the book applies:

Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future Page 21
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Around Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good Page 37
Community Ethos – Lean Operations Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future Page 26
Community Ethos – Impact the Greater Good Page 37
Strategy – Strategy – Keep Young People At Home in the Region Page 51
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization Page 57
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Postal Union Page 78
Anecdote – Turning Around the CARICOM governance Page 92
Anecdote – “Lean” in Government Page 93
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Deliver Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media Page 111
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate Page 118
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Events Page 191
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce Page 198
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth Page 227
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Sports Page 229
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Sports Leagues Page 234

The Go Lean book is a great guidebook for developing agile institutions – a recipe for the CU technocracy.

The Caribbean can succeed in our efforts to improve our community ethos. Consider this sample of previous blog-commentaries that delve into aspects of forging a better “culture” in Caribbean communities:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10220 Waging a Successful War on the BAD ethos of Rent-seeking
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10218 Waging a Successful War on the BAD ethos of Stupidity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10216 Waging a Successful War on the BAD ethos of Orthodoxy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9595 Vision and Values for a ‘New’ Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9428 Forging Change: Herd Mentality
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8186 Respect for Minorities: ‘All for One’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7646 Going from ‘Good to Great’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7628 ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695 Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3915 ‘Change the way you see the world; you change the world you see’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3780 Forging an Ethos of ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623 ‘Only at the precipice, do they change’

The vision for a new Caribbean is one that has a culture that could “eat strategy – scheme or talent – for breakfast”.

While the focus of this commentary is on culture, a lot can be said for the Sports eco-system as well. The Go Lean/CU roadmap is NOT a sports promotion plan but it does present the important role for sports in the vision to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. As an expression of this vision, the Go Lean book states (Page 81):

“… a mission of the CU is to forge industries and economic drivers around the individual and group activities of sports and culture”.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. The benefits are too alluring: dawn of a new economy and new opportunities to preserve Caribbean culture for future generations. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Toxic Environment – It Infects Everything

Posted on September 22, 2020 in Ethos, Industries, Social

Go Lean Commentary

24 “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. 25 Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. 26 But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. 27 When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.” – The Bible re: Building on a Solid Foundation – Matthew 7:24-27 – New Living Translation

Having a solid foundation versus a sandy foundation, for a house, may not matter too much during a normal sunny day, but when “push comes to shove” – during a storm – is when the surety of the house becomes important. Will it stand, stabilize and survive?

A weak foundation for a house can be likened to the toxic environment of a community, think a workplace filled with harassment and discrimination or a neighborhood with blatant racism where minorities endure burning crosses on their lawn.

Such communities may have some functionality, but will it stand, stabilize and survive when “push comes to shove”?

Here’s the answer: No!

As Jesus Christ cautioned above: “it will collapse with a mighty crash”.

It is fair to conclude that we all want a “house that does not collapse during a storm”. It is also fair to assume that we all want to live in a community that is NOT a toxic environment. But just as Jesus described the heavy-lifting effort of building a house on a more solid foundation, we must conclude that it is also heavy-lifting to foster a community (workplace or neighborhood) that is not a toxic environment. For the record, we got toxic environments here in the Caribbean; we got it bad. But we must reform …

Ready for the effort?!

The path of least resistance is just to “fall into hate, bigotry, xenophobia and intolerance”. But to weed these defects out of society – or to not allow them to foster – we cannot default to that path of least resistance; we must do the heavy-lifting work; the homework, the shop work and the community work.

This is an acute issue for our Caribbean communities; we have near Failed-States as a result. These blatant societal defects can no longer be tolerated. We have lost good people; many have fled our society in search of refuge; we have Pushed many away, while others have been Pulled by more hopeful invitations – the “grass on the other side has been greener”.

This was the assertion in the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean, where it pronounced this in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12):

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

Every month, the movement behind the Go Lean book presents a Teaching Series to address issues germane to Caribbean life and culture. For this month of September 2020, we are looking at Toxic Environments. This is entry 1-of-6; the first one; it introduces the thesis that “doing the right thing, while not always easy, always pays off in the long run”. Despite our past, we can always start anew. There have been many bad experiences of hate, bigotry, xenophobia and intolerance in our Caribbean actuality. To cure these societal defects, we must reflect, recognize, repent and reconcile.

Yes, we can …

Let’s start now! Consider here, the full catalog of the series this month:

  1. Toxic Environment: Ready for Football – Washington “Redskins”
  2. Toxic Environment: Homophobia – The problem is the Hate, not the Fear
  3. Toxic Environment: Opposite of Diversity & Inclusion
  4. Toxic Environment: Lessons from Yugoslavia
  5. Toxic Environment: Ease of Doing Business
  6. Toxic Environment: Make the Caribbean Great (Anew)

The Go Lean book, serving as a roadmap for the introduction of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), asserts that Caribbean stakeholders must do the heavy-lifting to mitigate the societal defects. The purpose of the roadmap does include optimizing the economic, security and governing engines for greater opportunities, but we must have a good foundation first. The purpose of this month’s Teaching Series is to focus on that foundation. There is a glaring need for reform, as we have a long track record of bad behavior like hate, bigotry, xenophobia and intolerance in our Caribbean communities.

We have been fostering a toxic environment in our culture in which these bad behaviors have been permitted to flourish. This is not good! A toxic environment pits villains against victims; in the long run, the victims seeks refuge elsewhere. This is true with a toxic workplace and a toxic neighborhood. This is also true for the Push dynamics of Caribbean abandonment:

  • “Push” refers to people who feel compelled to leave, to seek refuge in a foreign land. “Refuge” is an appropriate word; because of societal defects, many from the Caribbean must leave as refugees – think LGBT, Disability, Domestic-abuse, Medically-challenged – for their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
  • “Pull”, on the other hand refers to the lure of a more liberal life abroad; many times our people are emigrating for societies that have better expressions of the rights for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The Caribbean is not the first nor the last toxic environment. There are many of them out there. We must look, listen and learn from toxic workplaces and toxic neighborhoods. Just because we are not alone does not mean we can be complacent; we are still bleeding populations – we must stop the bleeding.

Let’s consider one example from the United States …

… that of the team in the National Football League (NFL), the Washington Football Team, formerly known as the Washington Redskins. Just that name “Redskins” – a derogatory reference similar the the N-Word – shows their disregard for the toxic environment they were fostering. See the details in the Appendix below.

What we have learned from the historicity of the Washington “Redskins” over those many years is that they had no regards nor remorse for offending others …

… this normally means that they would have no regards nor remorse for offending their own people. This is exactly what has happened. We learned of other victimizations of this toxic workplace. See these two stories here:

Title 1: Washington Redskins Cheerleaders Describe Topless Photo Shoot and Uneasy Night Out
By: Juliet Macur
When the Washington Redskins took their cheerleading squad to Costa Rica in 2013 for a calendar photo shoot, the first cause for concern among the cheerleaders came when Redskins officials collected their passports upon arrival at the resort, depriving them of their official identification.

For the photo shoot, at the adults-only Occidental Grand Papagayo resort on Culebra Bay, some of the cheerleaders said they were required to be topless, though the photographs used for the calendar would not show nudity. Others wore nothing but body paint. Given the resort’s secluded setting, such revealing poses would not have been a concern for the women — except that the Redskins had invited spectators.

A contingent of sponsors and FedEx Field suite holders — all men — were granted up-close access to the photo shoots.

One evening, at the end of a 14-hour day that included posing and dance practices, the squad’s director told nine of the 36 cheerleaders that their work was not done. They had a special assignment for the night. Some of the male sponsors had picked them to be personal escorts at a nightclub.

“So get back to your room and get ready,” the director told them. Several of them began to cry.

“They weren’t putting a gun to our heads, but it was mandatory for us to go,” one of the cheerleaders said. “We weren’t asked, we were told. Other girls were devastated because we knew exactly what she was doing.”

…

Source: New York Times Investigation – posted May 2, 2018; retrieved September 20, 2020. See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/sports/redskins-cheerleaders-nfl.html

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VIDEO 1 – Redskins Cheerleaders Reveal Disturbing Details Of 2013 Costa Rica Trip | NBC Nightly News – https://youtu.be/i7ZCHjYW2NE

NBC News
Posted May 3, 2018 – The cheerleaders tell NBC News that in addition to their passports being taken, they were forced to be topless for a calendar shoot, and later asked to escort team financial backers to a party.

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Title 2: At least 15 women are accusing Washington Redskins staffers of sexual harassment, report says
By: Ellie Kaufman, Pete Muntean and Laura Robinson, CNN
The Washington Redskins have launched an internal investigation after 15 former female employees and two journalists who covered the team accused team staffers of sexual harassment and verbal abuse, the team told CNN.

The allegations were first reported by The Washington Post on Thursday. The newspaper obtained screenshots of text messages in which Richard Mann II — the team’s assistant director of pro personnel — made inappropriate, sexual comments to a female employee. Mann was fired in the past week.

Former employees also accused Larry Michael, the team’s former senior vice president of content and play-by-play announcer, of talking about the attractiveness of a college intern in 2018 when he was being recorded for a team video, the newspaper reported. Michael retired Wednesday.

CNN was not able to reach Mann and Michael for comment Thursday.

Owner Dan Snyder and former team president Bruce Allen were not directly implicated in the sexual harassment allegations brought by the female employees and reported by the Post. But Snyder was criticized for fostering a culture in which the behavior was permitted.
…

Source: Cable News Network – posted July 18, 2020; retrieved September 20, 2020. See the full story here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/us/washington-redskins-sexual-harassment-allegations/index.html

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VIDEO 2 – Washington Redskins accuser says she hopes for new policies – https://youtu.be/YAAX5qGnA0w

KEYT – KCOY – KKFX News
Posted July 23, 2020 – At least 15 women are accusing Washington Redskins staffers of sexual harassment, report says

We must change (reform and transform) the Caribbean to rid ourselves of our own toxic environments. How do we do that?

A previous Go Lean commentary from March 5, 2019 identified the chain of events: thoughts-feeling-speech-action. See an excerpt here:

[Thoughts-feeling-speech-action] is usually the order and process for change. Change doesn’t just start with Action; a lot more goes into it. It can be likened to a factory process; there is input and there is output. While Action is the output, “Thoughts, Feelings and Speech” qualify as input.

Got Change? Want Change?

The movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean asserts that we have to be prepared to contribute the appropriate Inputs. In fact we must start changing the current Inputs to better reflect the values we want to see in our society. That means changing our thoughts, feeling and speech.

The Go Lean roadmap has always focused on the actions for changing the Caribbean eco-system. We have always had focus on the thoughts-feeling-speech-action continuum. The target change here is what the Go Lean book refers to as a change in community ethos (Page 20).

  1. the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period: In the Greek ethos the individual was highly valued.
  2. the character or disposition of a community, group, person, etc.

This focus, fostering change in the community ethos, has been a mission for this Go Lean movement from the beginning of this movement. This theme has been elaborated in many previous blog-commentaries; consider this sample here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20281 Cleaning up the Toxic Use of the N-Word to improve Black Image
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20105 When Rising from the Ashes – Watch Out for changes to Bad Ethos
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19833 Stamping Out Hypocrisy from Community Ethos & Leadership
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17464 The need to change Bad Ethos to launch ‘New Commerce’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16408 Mitigating Bad Ethos on Home Violence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2480 Learning a Lesson from History – Changed Community Ethos for WW II
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=214 Changing from Least Common Denominator to an Entrepreneurial Ethos

Cleaning up our toxic environment is conceivable, believable and achievable. We have seen it done many times before.

But, it is not just a matter of changing a brand name – like for the Washington Redskins – we have to change the community attitude. We have to message against:

hate, bigotry, xenophobia and intolerance

The presence of these bad attributes are not in dispute. The strategy for abating them is not in dispute. It starts and ends with messaging. This is 1-of-6 in that messaging. The rest of this Teaching Series portrays the messaging for the above-cited attributes. You are urged to lean-in to every entry of this series to glean the insights, strategies, tactics and implementations.

We cannot change the world, but we can change “us”. It is heavy-lifting to abate bad attributes, to reform and transform our society. But this is what must be done. It is the only way to make our regional homeland a better place to live, work and play.

Yes, we can!  🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12):

x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xiv.  Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. 

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Appendix – Reference: Washington Redskins

The Washington Football Team are a professional American football team based in the Washington metropolitan area. Formerly known as the Washington Redskins, the team competes in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the NFC East division. The team plays its home games at FedExField in Landover, Maryland, with its headquarters and training facility located in Ashburn, Virginia. The team has played more than 1,000 games and is one of only five in the NFL to record over 600 total wins. It was the first NFL franchise with an official marching band and a fight song, “Hail to the Redskins“.

The team was founded in 1932 as the Boston Braves before changing its name to the Redskins the following year. The franchise then relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1937, where they have been based since. …

Washington’s former Redskins name and logo drew controversy over its history, with many criticizing it as offensive to Native Americans. Pressure from major sponsors of the league and team eventually led them to retire the branding in 2020 as part of a wave of racial name changes in the wake of the George Floyd protests. The team will play as the Washington Football Team until a permanent replacement is chosen later. The team is valued at approximately US$3.4 billion according to Forbes, making them the seventh-most valuable team in the NFL and the 14th-most valuable sports franchise globally.[2]
…

Redskins name and logo controversy
The team’s former Redskins branding, used from 1933 until 2020, was one of the leading examples of Native American mascot controversy as the term redskin has been defined as offensive,[81] disparaging,[82][83] and taboo.[84] Various people and groups, such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), considered the name a racial slur and attempted to get the team to change it for decades.[85][86] Supporters of the name countered both the dictionary definition of the term and the testimony of Native Americans by asserting that their use of the name was intended respectfully, and referred only to the football team and its history.

In a 2013 letter “To the Washington Redskins Nation”, team owner Daniel Snyder stated that while respecting those that say they are offended, a poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2004 found that 90% of Native Americans were not offended by the name and logo.[87][88] This poll was essentially replicated in 2016 by The Washington Post with near identical results. However, public opinion polling, which places the question about the Redskins within a longer telephone survey on other topics, was deemed scientifically questionable by academic researchers. As an alternative, social scientists from the University of Michigan and University of California at Berkeley performed a study in 2020 that measured Native American opinion in detail, finding that 49% had responded that the name was offensive, with the level of offense increasing to 67% for those with a stronger involvement in Native American culture.[89]

Following renewed attention to questions of racial justice in wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, a letter signed by 87 shareholders and investors was sent to team and league sponsors Nike, FedEx, and Pepsi urging them to cut their ties unless the name was changed.[90][91][92] Around the same time, several retail companies began removing Redskins merchandise from their stores.[93][94] In response, the team underwent a review in July 2020 and announced that it would retire its name,[95][96] with a new name and logo to be chosen at a later date.[97][98] As a team rebranding process usually takes over a year, the team will be playing as the Washington Football Team until a more permanent name is chosen.[99][100][101]

Source: Retrieved September 20, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Football_Team

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Naomi Osaka – Shining Bright in the Darkness of 2020 – Encore

Posted on September 13, 2020 in Ethos, Social, Strategy

2020 has been a Bad Year; it has been filled with darkness and death, due to the raging Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic plus the resultant global recession. In addition, in the United States and other countries, there has been reflection and a demand for reconciliation over racial injustice and police brutality.

For the Caribbean, there has been little for us to smile about. Unless, we look at the Wide World of Sports. Here is this example in this summary of a big Sports News story:

Japan’s Naomi Osaka came from a set down to beat Victoria Azarenka of Belarus to win the US Open on Saturday and clinch her third Grand Slam title. Osaka, the fourth seed, overcame her unseeded opponent 1-6, 6-3, 6-3 in 1hr 53min inside a near-empty Arthur Ashe Stadium at Flushing Meadows. It brought 22-year-old Osaka’s haul of tennis major trophies to three after her victories at the 2018 US Open and 2019 Australian Open. – Source.

2020 has been a devastating year due to events “above and beyond” sports. But this is what has been comforting and inspiring about Naomi Osaka; she has been comforting and inspiring above and beyond sports. See the continuation-conclusion of the foregoing news story:

… Osaka had walked onto the court wearing a mask bearing the name of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African-American boy who was shot dead by a white police officer in Cleveland, Ohio in 2014.

Osaka, of Japanese and Haitian heritage, wore different masks honoring victims of racial injustice and police brutality in each round of the tournament.

The 2019 Australian Open champion also donned face coverings bearing the names of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and Philando Castile.

Naomi Osaka is a role model for all of the Caribbean to emulate. She represents the greatness that Caribbean people and culture can produce … and export to the world.

This was the assertion on September 12, 2018 in a previous blog-commentary from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. It is only appropriate to encore that previous submission now. See it here-now:

——————

Go Lean Commentary – Naomi Osaka’s recipe for success: Caribbean Meld

There is actually a recipe for success on the world stage, one that has just been applied by tennis superstar Naomi Osaka in winning the 2018 US Open over fan-favorite Serena Williams. The recipe:

Meld Caribbean distinctiveness with that of other cultures.

Wait what?!

This sounds so familiar, even fictionalized! Those who are fans of the science fiction franchise Star Trek will remember the mantra of the cybernetic life form “The Borg”. Their announcement when attacking potential victims were as follows:

”We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” – Source

This is “Art imitating Life”! We see this recipe at work with this new sports champion and beneficiary of this international melding: Naomi Osaka.

She is a professional tennis player who represents Japan internationally. She is the first Japanese citizen to win a Grand Slam singles tournament, defeating Serena Williams in the final of the 2018 US Open.[6] Osaka has reached a career-high world ranking of No. 7.[4] She was born to a Haitian father, Leonard “San” François, and a Japanese mother, Tamaki Osaka .[7]

This story, beyond its relevance to sports, has a Caribbean relevance because of Osaka’s parentage. The meld – noun/verb: blend – had produced an end-product that has accomplished more than any one component has accomplished on its own. Osaka is the first Japanese citizen to win a Grand Slam event, and needless-to-say, the first Haitian.  It has not been easy:

In racially homogeneous Japan, Osaka is considered hāfu, which is Japanese for biracial.[10] Her Japanese grandfather was furious when he found out that her mother was romantically involved with a black man. As a result of the interracial relationship, her mother did not have contact with her family for over ten years.[8] In a 2016 interview, Osaka said: “When I go to Japan, people are confused. From my name, they don’t expect to see a black girl.”[11] – Wikipedia

This biography provides a lesson-learned for the rest of the Caribbean, and the world for that matter:

  • To our Caribbean brothers and sisters, we entreat you to embrace pluralism; good things come from the embrace of our differences.
  • To the rest of world, we declare that the Caribbean identity is not “Less Than”. We bring a strength of character and ethos that adds value and elevates any community where we meld.

If we can successfully meld and conquer a challenge on the world stage, how much more so can we meld our distinctiveness here at home or in our regional neighborhood to accomplish greater feats. This is the message of the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean, which asserts that great Caribbean progress is in store when we meld – integrate, collaborate and confederate. The book – available to download for free – serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states.

This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs. There are many industrial expressions that we will have to make in order to reach these goals, including the facilitation of the Art & Science of Sports.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The book stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 14):

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism …

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines for all member-states in the Caribbean region.

The story of Naomi Osaka is about more than just her heritage. She is an excellent athlete of her own making. It takes blood, sweat and tears to excel at the highest level of her sport. For Osaka to beat Serena Williams – earning $3.8 million – that was no fluke; that was the full measure of her athletic prowess; that was heavy-lifting. Even now, all the attention is on Serena losing, rather than Osaka winning; see the VIDEO here and the related story in the Appendix below:

VIDEO – US Open Highlights – https://nyp.st/2CM60t5

Published September 8, 2018 – Serena has mother of all meltdowns in US Open final loss.

Heavy-lifting in sports is a familiar theme for this Go Lean movement; we recognize that there could be more economic rewards if the regional stewards do a better job of facilitating a viable sports eco-system – we have few expressions of professional sports and no intercollegiate system in the region. We have previously elaborated on how the Art & Science of sports can be used to help elevate our societal engines. Re-consider these previous blog-commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11287 Creating a legacy in pro-Surfing
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8495 Basketball Great and Caribbean Role Model: Tim Duncan
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7866 Caribbean Track & Field Athletes monetize their talents “elsewhere”
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1446 Caribbean Players in the World Cup
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1020 Advocates and Revolutionaries for Caribbean Sports

So how can we foster more people in our Caribbean region to be like Naomi Osaka, people who can help to elevate our society and the global image of Caribbean contributions to the world? The Go Lean book addressed this question; within its 370-pages of instructions for impacting society, in the specific details for fostering more world-class athletes. Consider the summaries, excerpts and headlines from this one advocacy in the book on Page 229 entitled:

10 Ways to Improve Sports

1 Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market
This will allow for the unification of the region of 30 member-states into a single market of 42 million people and a GDP exceeding $800 Billion (per 2010). This market size and multi-lingual realities allows for broadcasting rights with SAP-style language options for English, Spanish, French and Dutch. This makes the region attractive for media contracts for broadcast rights, spectrum auctions and sports marketing. The Olympics have demonstrated that sports can be profitable “big business”, and a great source of jobs and economic activity. The CU will copy the Olympic model, and harness the potential in many other sporting endeavors, so as to make the region a better place to live, work and play.
2 CU Games
Promote the CU Games, every 2 years, as the ascension of the CARIFTA Games for Amateur and now Professional Athletes. The CU Games Administration will also partner with all National Olympic Committees. This administration applies to feeder games, trials and qualification events. The ultimate goal is to field a world-class competitive Olympic Team representing the entire Caribbean. While the CARIFTA Games are for track-and-field events only, the CU Games will resemble a mini-Olympics with multi-sports (boxing, football/soccer, tennis, volleyball, sailing, baseball/softball, etc.)
3 Fairgrounds as Sport Venues
The CU Fairgrounds (managed by the Interior Department) will have the infrastructure to fund, build and maintain sports arenas and “stadiums” (stadia) in local markets. The mantra is “build it and they will come”, so the CU building and managing world-class sport facilities will result in a more organized industry and the emergence of vertical markets.
4 Regulate Amateur, Professional & Academically-Aligned Leagues
5 Establish Sports Academies
6 “Super” Amateur Sport Association
7 Regulator/Registrar of Scholar-Athletes – Assuage Abandonment
8 Sports Tourism
9 Professional Agents and Player Management Oversight (a la Bar/Lawyer Associations).
10 Impanel the CU Anti-Doping Agency

Congratulation Naomi Osaka!

… and thank you … for making it easier for us to impress on the world that Caribbean-anything is not “Less Than”. That argument is now easier to make.

It is now also easier to convey the message that “Yes, we can” forge a “pluralistic” democracy and make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

—————–

Appendix – It’s shameful what US Open did to Naomi Osaka
Opinion by: Maureen Callahan

Naomi Osaka, 20 years old, just became the first player from Japan to win a Grand Slam.

Yet rather than cheer Osaka, the crowd, the commentators and US Open officials all expressed shock and grief that Serena Williams lost.

Osaka spent what should have been her victory lap in tears. It had been her childhood dream to make it to the US Open and possibly play against Williams, her idol, in the final.

It’s hard to recall a more unsportsmanlike event.

Here was a young girl who pulled off one of the greatest upsets ever, who fought for every point she earned, ashamed.

At the awards ceremony, Osaka covered her face with her black visor and cried. The crowd booed her. Katrina Adams, chairman and president of the USTA, opened the awards ceremony by denigrating the winner and lionizing Williams — whose ego, if anything, needs piercing.

“Perhaps it’s not the finish we were looking for today,” Adams said, “but Serena, you are a champion of all champions.” Addressing the crowd, Adams added, “This mama is a role model and respected by all.”

That’s not likely the case now, not after the world watched as Serena Williams had a series of epic meltdowns on the court, all sparked when the umpire warned her: No coaching from the side. Her coach was making visible hand signals.

“I don’t cheat to win,” Williams told him. “I’d rather lose.”

She couldn’t let it go, going back multiple times to berate the umpire. At one point she called him a thief.

“You stole a point from me!” she yelled.

After her loss, Williams’s coach admitted to ESPN that he had, in fact, been coaching from the stands, a code violation. The warning was fair.

Everything that followed is on Williams, who is no stranger to tantrums. Most famously, she was tossed from the US Open in 2009 after telling the line judge, “I swear to God I’ll take the f—king ball and shove it down your f—king throat.” John McEnroe was taken aback. Even Williams’s mother, Oracene Price, couldn’t defend her daughter’s outburst.

“She could have kept her cool,” Price said.

On Saturday, she also could have tried to be gracious in defeat. No matter how her fans try to spin this, Williams was anything but. Upon accepting her finalist award, she gave parsimonious praise to her competitor while telling the crowd she felt their pain.

“Let’s try to make this the best moment we can,” she said in part, “and we’ll get through it . . . let’s not boo anymore. We’re gonna get through this and let’s be positive, so congratulations, Naomi.”

Osaka accepted her trophy while choking back tears. She never smiled. When asked if her childhood dream of playing against Williams matched the reality, she politely sidestepped the question.

“I’m sorry,” Osaka said. “I know that everyone was cheering for her and I’m sorry it had to end like this.”

She turned to Williams. “I’m really grateful I was able to play with you,” Osaka said. “Thank you.” She bowed her head to Williams, and Williams just took it — no reciprocation, no emotion.

Osaka, a young player at the beginning of her career, showed grit, determination and maturity on that court and off.

She earned that trophy. Let’s recall that this wasn’t Osaka’s first victory over Williams — she beat Williams back in March, causing a hiccup in that great comeback narrative.

Osaka earned her moment as victor at the US Open, one that should have been pure joy. If anything was stolen during this match, it was that.

Source: New York Post Newspaper – Posted September 8, 2018; retrieved September 12, 2018 from: https://nypost.com/2018/09/08/its-shameful-what-us-open-did-to-naomi-osaka/

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Pandemic Playbook – Caribbean Inadequacies: Missing the Bubble Opportunities

Posted on August 26, 2020 in Government, Industries, Social, Tactical

Go Lean Commentary

Welcome to the … Bubble.

This is the only business model – in the leisure industry – that can find success right now.

For the record, we are addressing the concept of a travel bubble (think isolation bubble):

What is a “travel bubble?”
Travel bubbles, also called travel bridges or corona corridors, do away with that waiting period for a select group of travelers from certain countries where the coronavirus has been contained. “In a ‘travel bubble’ a set of countries agree to open their borders to each other, but keep borders to all other countries closed. So people can move freely within the bubble, but cannot enter from the outside,” says Per Block, an Oxford University researcher in social mobility and methodology. “The idea is to allow people additional freedom without causing additional harm.” Travel bubbles are an extension of one of Block’s research specialties —social bubbles, where people expand their quarantine zones to include more people they consider safe. Block is one of the authors of an Oxford study that suggests social bubbles could be an effective strategy to alleviating coronavirus isolation, although the findings have not yet been peer-reviewed. – Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/five-things-know-about-travel-bubbles-180974983/

The foregoing says “the findings have not yet been peer-reviewed”. Well, the review is in; according to the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the US, the “Bubble” works. See the experiences here:

2020 NBA Bubble
The 2020 NBA Bubble, also referred to as the Disney Bubble[1][2] or Orlando Bubble,[3][4] is the isolation zone at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida, near Orlando, that was created by the National Basketball Association (NBA) to protect its players from the COVID-19 pandemic during the final eight games of the 2019–20 regular season and throughout the 2020 NBA playoffs. Twenty-two out of the 30 NBA teams were invited to participate, with games being held behind closed doors at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex and the teams staying at Disney World hotels.[5]

The bubble is a $170 million investment by the NBA to protect its 2019–20 season, which was initially suspended by the pandemic on March 11, 2020.[6] On June 4, the NBA approved the plan to resume the season at Disney World, inviting the 22 teams that were within six games of a playoff spot when the season was suspended. Although initially receiving a mixed reaction from players and coaches,[7] the teams worked together to use the bubble as a platform for the Black Lives Matter movement.[8]

After playing three exhibition scrimmages inside the bubble from July 22 to 28, the invited teams each began playing the eight additional regular season games to determine playoff seeding on July 30.[9][10] The 2020 NBA playoffs then began on August 17, and the 2020 NBA Finals is scheduled to begin on September 30. – Source: Retrieved August 26, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_NBA_Bubble

—————

VIDEO – The NBA and Tyler Perry provide Bubble Models – https://youtu.be/WGnP4SfHpZo

Posted August 16, 2020 – Story – With pro basketball teams and staff living in isolation, actors and crew quarantining at Tyler Perry’s Atlanta studios, and families forming self-isolating “pods” for the sake of their children during the coronavirus pandemic, many are working hard to keep protective social bubbles from bursting. Lee Cowan reports.

Despite the threats of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, the Bubble is working! The economic engine of the NBA is restored-protected; that means the preservation of a $8.76 Billion business enterprise; see the related chart here:

The COVID-19 pandemic is also wreaking havoc on the economy for the Caribbean – where our primary economic driver is leisure travel; no people are consuming vacations nor cruises. We have no Bubble to mitigate this pandemic.

There is an over-arching need for mitigation. See the outstanding COVID-19 cases in the Caribbean (CariCom member-states) as of today:

Source: https://moodle.caribdata.org/lms/pluginfile.php/4951/mod_resource/content/0/26Aug2020%20Regional%20Briefing%20.pdf

We need to look-listen-and-learn from this Bubble strategy; we are missing out!

This commentary is the continuation of the Teaching Series for the month of August 2020 on the subject of Pandemic Playbooks. This is entry 2-of-6 from the movement behind the 2013 book  Go Lean…Caribbean. There is the need for Travel Bubbles in our Playbook. According to the foregoing VIDEO, it works for the NBA, for Tyler Perry Studios and it can work for the 30 member-states of the Caribbean.

“It is possible to beat COVID at it’s own game”.

Yes, we can! The other commentaries in the series are cataloged as follows:

  1. Pandemic Playbook: Worldwide Leadership – Plan ==> Actual
  2. Pandemic Playbook: Caribbean Inadequacies – Missing the Bubble Opportunities
  3. Pandemic Playbook: Bahamas Example – ‘Too Little Too Late’
  4. Pandemic Playbook: Only at the Precipice – ENCORE
  5. Pandemic Playbook: To Be or Not To Be – COVID Vaccine
  6. Pandemic Playbook: Success – Looks like New Zealand

This is our objective. Yes, we can!!! With a Pandemic Playbook, it is conceivable, believable and achievable to restore our society and economic engines.

In order to accomplish our objectives, there is the need for this Pandemic Playbook for the Caribbean as a whole and for the individual member-states. The playbook must include Bubbles. Imagine this vision:

An all-inclusive hotel resort with controlled entry-exit. Imagine too, all staff on the property being tested regularly and limited to the property for a few weeks contiguously; lastly, the visitors (tourists) only enter the Bubble after qualified testing.

Wait?! Controlled Access and guaranteed testing?! This is exactly what the CruiseLlines intend to do to restart their economic engine. Remember, these cruise ships cost $Billion; this investment is wasted if they are not transporting passengers and providing leisure. They are crying out for a Bubble strategy.

See their Cruise Bubble plans as portrayed in the Appendix below.

How about land-based resorts?

We strongly urge Caribbean hotels and resorts to copy the NBA model. In fact, while Orlando has privilege of facilitating the NBA end-of-season and playoffs, other communities can (and should) propose solutions for other leagues.

Imagine NCAA Basketball (National Collegiate Athletic Association) …

… there is the annual Battle for Atlantis (Nassau/Paradise Island) tournament; see more here:

The Battle 4 Atlantis is an early-season college basketball tournament that takes place in late November of each year, at Atlantis Paradise Island on Paradise Island in Nassau, Bahamas, on the week of the US holiday of Thanksgiving. The games are played in the Imperial Arena, a grand ballroom which is turned into a basketball venue.[1] The tournament is known for being the richest Division I men’s early-season college basketball tournament. Schools are awarded $2 million in exchange for their participation in the men’s event.[2]

In 2020, a women’s tournament will be added, also featuring eight teams. It will immediately precede the men’s tournament.[3]

The tournament is promoted by Bad Boy Mowers, and is televised by ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU.[4]
Source: Retrieved August 26, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_4_Atlantis

Can “we” continue this for 2020, but this time in a Bubble, with these modification:

  • Every player, coach and support staffer must be continuously tested negative to participate.
  • Increase field from 4 teams to 32; modelling the World Cup by FIFA.
  • 8 Groups of 4 teams each; during Group Play, each team plays each other in the group; guaranteeing 3 games.
  • Elimination Rounds continue with the 16 top Teams, then 8, then 4, then 2, then Champion.
  • Facilitate e-Learning for all College Students in the Bubble – they are student athletes.
  • Allow fans, family and media to participate if they comply with the protocols.
  • Perfect the model and repeat through the Caribbean with more 32 Team combinations.

There you have “it”: Caribbean deficiencies averted; economic opportunities exploited.

The Go Lean book and roadmap provides a glimpse of a new Caribbean that is ready to explore all the opportunities in the Sports eco-system. This plan was published as a Playbook … 7 years ago, far before there was a COVID-19 virus.

Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.

The CU/Go Lean roadmap presented a new Caribbean preparedness that is ready, willing and able to deliver economic optimization and Good Governance.

The CU structure allows for a Sports Management functionality – Sports & Culture Administration – within the Cabinet-level agency, the Department of State  (Page 81). The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt the needed community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society. We need these types of efficiencies in our Pandemic Playbook. Consider the specific plans, excerpts and headlines from the book on Page 229 entitled:

10 Ways to Improve Sports

1 Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market
Embrace the advent of the Caribbean Single Market & Economy initiative of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. This will allow for the unification of the region of 30 member-states into a single market of 42 million people and a GDP exceeding $800 Billion (per 2010). This market size and multi-lingual realities allows for broadcasting rights with SAP-style language options for English, Spanish, French and Dutch. This makes the region attractive for media contracts for broadcast rights, spectrum auctions and sports marketing. The Olympics have demonstrated that sports can be profitable “big business”, and a great source of jobs and economic activity. The CU will copy the Olympic model, and harness the potential in many other sporting endeavors, so as to make the region a better place to live, work and play.
2 CU Games
3 Fairgrounds as Sport Venues
4 Regulate Amateur, Professional & Academically-Aligned Leagues
5 Establish Sports Academies
6 “Super” Amateur Sport Association
Promote All-Star tournaments (pre-season and post-season) for Amateur (School and Junior) Athletics Associations winners. This includes team sports (soccer, basketball), school sports (track/field) and individual sports (tennis, golf, etc.).
7 Regulator/Registrar of Scholar-Athletes – Assuage Abandonment
8 Sports Tourism
The CU will promote tournaments and clinics to encourage advancement in certain sports. These tournaments are aimed at the foreign markets (US, Canada, Europe, Central and South America) so as to generate sports-tourism traffic.
9 Professional Agents and Player Management Oversight (a la Bar/Lawyer Associations)
10 Impanel the CU Anti-Doping Agency

This Go Lean book presents that the organizational structure to deliver a Pandemic Playbook must be in place first – embedded at the onset of the CU Trade Federation – Day One / Step One. Then we will be ready to get “lucky” and avail ourselves of all the profits that Sports eco-system can deliver. We have detailed that profit-potential before; consider this sample of previous blog-commentaries that focused on this industry-opportunity:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18392 Refuse to Lose – A Lesson from Sports
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14527 March Madness 2018 – The Business Model of NCAA Basketball
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14160 The Business Model of Watching the SuperBowl … and Commercials
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12259 The Business Model of the College World Series
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11939 Bad Models: Rio Olympics & Athens Olympics; Same Failure
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11287 Creating a Sports Business Legacy in the Pro-Surfing Eco-system
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10820 Miami Sports Eco-System: Dominican’s ‘Home Away from Home’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8272 Lebronomy Fulfilled – Economic Impact of the Return of the NBA Great
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6464 Sports Business Role Model – ‘WWE Network’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3244 Sports Business Role Model – espnW
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2171 Sports Business Role Model – Turn On the SEC Network
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1943 The Future of Golf; Vital for Tourism
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1446 Caribbean Players and Impact in the 2014 FIFA World Cup
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1214 Smart Business Model: The Art & Science of Temporary Stadiums
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1148 Franchise values in NBA Basketball? A “Bubble” or Real? Appears Real!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=318 Collegiate Sports in the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273 Among the 10 Things We Want from the US: Sports Professionalism
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=60 Caribbean’s Olympics: A Dream or A Nightmare?

We want sports! We want profit; We want Good Governance. Most assuredly, we want a Pandemic Playbook so that we can cope with all changes: good, bad and ugly.

Welcome to the ugly of COVID-19.

It’s not too late, we can still reform and transform our Caribbean societal engines (economic, security and governance) to better respond-rebuild-recover from emergencies like this pandemic. This is how we can make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 14):

x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. …

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accidence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism – modeling the Olympics.

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

——————-

Appendix – COVID-19 testing ‘very likely’ when Royal Caribbean returns to cruising, executive says
By: Curtis Tate

Royal Caribbean is considering coronavirus testing as part of its plan to resume sailing, a company executive said during a quarterly earnings presentation Monday.

The company has paused its cruise operations since March and hopes to resume them in November, if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifts its no-sail order, which is set to expire at the end of September. The U.S. cruise industry has voluntarily extended its sailing suspension through Oct. 31. Though company executives gave no firm date for the resumption of cruises, one said testing would be key.

“It’s very likely that testing will occur,” said Michael Bayley, CEO of Royal Caribbean International.He offered no additional details, including whether testing would be for crew members and passengers or to which cruise lines testing would apply.

Royal Caribbean Group owns four cruise brands: Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, Silversea and Azamara.

Royal Caribbean canceled 1,545 sailings since March 13, including all of its sailings in the second quarter. The company posted a $1.3 billion loss for the quarter and expects to post a loss for the third quarter and for the year.

One tangible impact: Royal Caribbean Group was supposed to receive five new ships by the end of 2021 but now will take delivery of only three: Silver Moon in October, Odyssey of the Seas, in early 2021 and Silver Dawn late in 2021.

COVID-19 impacts: Cruise lines are shedding ships from their fleets. Here’s what it means for cruisers

Royal Caribbean’s Wonder of the Seas was supposed to make its debut next year as the world’s largest cruise ship, but its arrival is on hold indefinitely because of the pandemic.

The ship will be able to carry 6,000 passengers and 2,200 crew members.

Royal Caribbean Group’s fleet includes 62 ships, with another 16 on order.

Jason Liberty, the company’s chief financial officer, said it was looking at selling older ships in the fleet.

“We are evaluating opportunities to sell ships,” he said, while not specifying which ones.

The company reported bookings for 2021 comparable with years past, in a sign that demand for cruising could return. Bayley noted that younger people and loyalty customers were driving sales.

“I’m hopeful we’re going to see a lot of pent-up demand,” he said. “People certainly want to have a vacation next year.”

In the near term, Liberty said, the joint Healthy Sail Panel of Royal Caribbean Group and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings is looking at every facet of safety, from whether ultraviolet lights can effectively kill the virus to how to improve meal service.

Some of the proposed changes might prove costly, such as whether to modify ships to promote social distancing. And such recommendations could smack into the evolving nature of how to best fight the coronavirus, including how soon a vaccine might be on the way.

The company could resume sailings in China and Australia before November, but executives made no commitments in the quarterly earnings presentation Monday.

Ultimately, the prevalence of the virus would determine when sailings can resume, Liberty said.

“It’s a real puzzle,” he said. “There are so many variables to consider.”

Contributing: Morgan Hines, USA TODAY

Source: USA Today – Posted August 10, 2020; retrieved August 26, 2020 from: https://www.fayobserver.com/story/travel/cruises/2020/08/10/royal-caribbean-cruises-likely-have-covid-19-testing-upon-return/3302471001/

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A Gathering of ‘Old Men’ – 1972 Dolphins ENCORE

Posted on December 23, 2019 in Ethos, Industries, Social

For the first time, this is an ENCORE of a previous ENCORE of a blog-commentary by the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean.

We must have really been moved!
Indeed we were …

The remnant of the 1972 Miami Dolphins was on the field at the local Hardrock Stadium on Sunday December 22, 2019 – this was the home finale of the 2019 Miami Dolphins Football Season. The halftime show was a reunion of that perfect team from 1972.

What a moving feeling for a life-long Miami Dolphins fan (and current season-ticket holder): Me!

Title: Dolphins To Honor 1972 Team As Greatest Team In NFL History Against Bengals
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. – The Miami Dolphins will honor their 1972 Perfect Season team as part of ‘NFL 100 Greatest’ in a special halftime ceremony against the Cincinnati Bengals, Sunday, Dec. 22 at Hard Rock Stadium. The team was named the greatest team in the 100-year history of the NFL on Nov. 15.

“It’s always special to be around the guys who came together to accomplish what no other team in the 100-year history of the NFL has ever done – the perfect season,” said Hall of Fame Head Coach Don Shula. “It’s only fitting as the League closes out this milestone season that the 1972 Dolphins are officially recognized with an honor that we always knew was true – that they are the greatest team in NFL history.”
Source: Posted December 19, 2019; retrieved December 23, 2019 from: https://www.miamidolphins.com/news/dolphins-to-honor-1972-team-as-greatest-team-in-nfl-history-against-bengals

This is my photo from the event – this Gathering of ‘Old Men’!

It is only apropos to Encore the previous blog-commentary (May 16, 2017) on this subject; which itself was an Encore of a previous blog-commentary (from August 31, 2015). See here-now:

————-

Miami, Florida – If you’re a fan of American football (NFL or the National Football League) then you know how impactful it is to go undefeated from the beginning to the end of the season, playoffs included. Only one team has done it … ever: the 1972 Miami Dolphins. The 50 players on that team became heroes to every football-loving kid anywhere near the broadcast waves of Miami.

There was a time when these guys were my heroes.

But “time and unforeseen occurrences befall us all” – The Bible (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

There is a connection between Miami and the Caribbean; the city has become much more than a shopping destination; it has redefined itself as the financial, political and sports capital of the Caribbean and Latin America.

So this news is shocking to receive, as the Miami Herald newspaper reports that many of the players on the 1972 Dolphins team now suffer from CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy).

Say it ain’t so …

CU Blog - UPDATE - Concussions Come Home - Photo 1

CU Blog - UPDATE - Concussions Come Home - Photo 1b

CU Blog - UPDATE - Concussions Come Home - Photo 3

It seemed like this CTE disease was so far-off; an affliction on people “over there” … somewhere. But to hit the 1972 Dolphins players means that this disease has come home…to our local heroes.

🙁

See the story here in this recent Miami Herald article:

Title: Football’s toll: At least eight members of 1972 Dolphins affected by cognitive impairment

CU Blog - UPDATE - Concussions Come Home - Photo 2They called him Captain Crunch, and the name was fitting. Mike Kolen packed a punch.

Now, 45 years after the Dolphins’ No-Name Defense ran through the 1972 season undefeated, Kolen and his perfect teammates are tied together again. But instead of celebration, there’s heartache.

South Florida’s most legendary team has become a cautionary tale, a poignant symbol of the concussion saga that threatens the future of America’s favorite sport.

“Within the last month or so, I’ve been diagnosed with the initial stages of Alzheimer’s,” Kolen, a starting linebacker on Miami’s two Super Bowl-winning teams, told the Miami Herald.

And was football the cause?

“I think that’s about the only way I’d have cognitive issues,” replied Kolen, 69, who has no family history of dementia.

Kolen’s story is not unique for Miami’s most historic team.

Earlier this week, Sports Illustrated detailed how Kolen’s better-known 1972 teammates Nick Buoniconti and Jim Kiick have both deteriorated mentally in the past few years.

After quarterback Earl Morrall’s death in 2014, an autopsy revealed he had Stage 4 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease more commonly known as CTE that researchers have linked to football.

Bill Stanfill, the Dolphins’ first sack king, suffered from dementia and Parkinson’s disease when he died last fall at age 69.

Three others from that famed roster — cornerback Lloyd Mumphord, defensive back Tim Foley and running back Hubert Ginn — have quietly dealt with cognitive impairment in recent years, teammates tell the Herald.

That makes at least eight members of a roster of roughly 50 men who have experienced loss of acuity. And that figure includes only those who keep in regular contact with the organization; several do not.

Roughly a quarter of the ’72 team has passed away, including five from cancer. Manny Fernandez, a defensive lineman who was the star of Super Bowl VII, has had eight surgeries on his back alone. Center Jim Langer, 68, said his “legs are bad and my knees are shot” after six operations.

…

Even the NFL acknowledges – see VIDEO below – that there is a link between football-related head trauma and neurological diseases like CTE after denying any such connection for years. …

Continue reading the full article here; (it is lengthy):

http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/nfl/miami-dolphins/article150311157.html retrieved 05-11-2017.

———

VIDEO – NFL acknowledges link between football and brain disease CTE – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4503362/Seven-members-72-Dolphins-suffered-brain-injuries.html#v-6189767714419658422

Relating Miami to the Caribbean makes this story relatable to the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean. One purpose of this movement is to engage business models so that Caribbean communities can better take advantage of the economic benefits of sports. There are few expressions of professional sports in the Caribbean now – there is no eco-system for collegiate athletics at all. Due to the territorial status and the border proximity, there are 3 member-states with organized American Football league play in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands and the Bahamas.

With the advantages of professional sports (money from ticket sales & broadcast rights, pride, athletic fitness, etc.), come disadvantages as well. CTE, as one, is only now begrudgingly been accepted as a direct consequence of the often times brutal game of American Football.

This was the warning from this previous blog-commentary that marked the release of the movie “Concussion”, chronicling the David-versus-Goliath-like advocacy of the Pathology Doctor who “blew the whistle” on the systemic “willful” ignorance and Crony-Capitalistic abuse in the NFL. This excerpt highlights some main points from that blog:

Yes, movies help us to glean a better view of ourselves … and our failings; and many times, show us a way-forward.

These descriptors actually describe the latest production from Hollywood icon Will Smith (the former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). This movie, the film “Concussion”, in the following news article, relates the real life drama of one man, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born medical doctor – a pathologist – who prepared autopsies of former players that suffered from football-related concussions. He did not buckle under the acute pressure to maintain the status quo, and now, he is celebrated for forging change in his adopted homeland. This one man made a difference. (The NFL is now credited for a Concussion awareness and prevention protocol so advanced that other levels of the sport – college, high schools and Youth – are being urged to emulate).

Beyond the excerpt, see the entire blog-commentary from August 31, 2015 on the movie ‘Concussion‘ and the dreaded CTE disease being encored here:

—————-

ENCORE – Go Lean Commentary – ‘Concussions’ – The Movie; The Cause

“Are you ready for some football?” – Promotional song by Hank Williams, Jr. for Monday Night Football on ABC & ESPN networks for 22 years (1989 – 2011). See Appendix Below.

This iconic song (see Appendix) and catch-phrase is reflective of exactly how popular the National Football League (NFL) is in the US:

“They own an entire day of the week”.

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 2So says the new movie ‘Concussions’, starring Will Smith, referring to the media domination of NFL Football on Sundays during the Autumn season. The movie’s script is along a line that resonates well in Hollywood’s Academy Award balloting: “David versus Goliath”; “a small man speaking truth to power”.

In the case of the NFL, it is not just about power, it is about money, prestige and protecting the status quo; the NFL is responsible for the livelihood of so many people. The book Go Lean … Caribbean recognized the importance of the NFL in the American lexicon of “live, work and play”; it featured a case study (Page 32) of the NFL and it’s collective bargaining successes (and failures) in 2011. An excerpt from the book is quoted as follows:

Football is big business in the US, $9 billion in revenue, and more than a business; emotions – civic pride, rivalries, and fanaticism – run high on both sides.

Previous Go Lean commentaries presents the socio-economic realities of much of the American football eco-system. Consider a sample here:

Socio-Economic Impact Analysis of [Football] Sports Stadiums
Watch the Super Bowl … Commercials
Levi’s® NFL Stadium: A Team Effort
Sports Role Model – College Football – Playing For Pride … And More
Sports Role Model – Turn On the SEC Network
Collegiate Sports in the Caribbean – Model of NCAA
10 Things We Want from the US: #10 – Sports Professionalism
10 Things We Don’t Want from the US: #10 – ‘Win At All Costs’ Ethos

While football plays a big role in American life, so do movies. Their role is more unique; they are able to change society. In a previous blog / commentary regarding Caribbean Diaspora member and Hollywood great, Sidney Poitier, it was declared that …

“Movies are an amazing business model. People give money to spend a couple of hours watching someone else’s creation and then leave the theater with nothing to show for the investment; except perhaps a different perspective”.

Yes, movies help us to glean a better view of ourselves … and our failings; and many times, show us a way-forward.

These descriptors actually describe the latest production from Hollywood icon Will Smith (the former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). This movie, the film “Concussion”, in the following news article, relates the real life drama of one man, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born medical doctor – a pathologist – who prepared autopsies of former players that suffered from football-related concussions. He did not buckle under the acute pressure to maintain the status quo, and now, he is celebrated for forging change in his adopted homeland. This one man made a difference. (The NFL is now credited for a Concussion awareness and prevention protocol so advanced that other levels of the sport – college, high schools and Youth – are being urged to emulate).

See news article here on the release of the movie:

Title: ‘Concussion’: 5 Take-a-ways From Will Smith’s New Film

Will Smith, 46, is definitely going to get a ton of Oscar buzz portraying Dr. Bennet Omalu in the new film “Concussion.” NFL columnist Peter King of Sports Illustrated got an exclusive first peek at the trailer and it has been widely shared on social media since. And it’s very chilling.

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 1

Here are five take-aways and background you need to know before checking out the clip:

1 – It’s Based on a True Story

Omalu is the forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players who got hit in the head over and over again, according to the Washington Post.

In the clip, he says repetitive “head trauma chokes the brain.”

Omalu was one of the founding members of the Brain Injury Research Institute in 2002. He conducted the autopsy of Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, played by David Morse in the film, which led to this discovery.

2 – Smith’s Version of Omalu’s Accent Is Spot On

Omalu is from Nigeria and Smith has been known to transform completely for a role. He was nominated for an Oscar for 2011’s “Ali,” playing the legendary Muhammad Ali.

For comparison, here’s Omalu’s PBS interview from 2013.

3 – Smith Is a Reluctant Hero

“If you don’t speak for them, who will,” Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Prema Mutiso in the film, tells Smith’s character.

He admits he idolized America growing up and “was the wrong person to have discovered this.”

4 – Alec Baldwin and Luke Wilson

“Concussion” brought in some heavyweights for this movie. Baldwin plays Dr. Julian Bailes, who advises Omalu, and Wilson, who will reportedly play NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, according to IMDB. There’s no official word on this. He’s seen at a podium in the trailer, but doesn’t speak.

5 – “Tell the Truth”

Smith captures Omalu’s passion to have the truth told about this injury and disease.

“I was afraid of letting Mike [Webster] down. I was afraid. I don’t know. I was afraid I was going to fail,” Omalu told PBS a couple years back.

———-

VIDEO Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3322364/?ref_=nv_sr_1


Will Smith stars in the incredible true David vs. Goliath story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the brilliant forensic neuropathologist who made the first discovery of CTE, a football-related brain trauma, in a pro player.

The subject of concussions is serious – life and death. Just a few weeks ago (August 8), an NFL Hall-of-Fame inductee was honored for his play on the field during his 20-year professional career, but his family, his daughter in particular, is the one that made his acceptance / induction speech. He had died, in 2012; he committed suicide after apparently suffering from a brain disorder – chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a type of chronic brain damage that has also been found in other deceased former NFL players[4] – sustained from his years of brutal head contacts in organized football in high school, college and in his NFL career. This player was Junior Seau.

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 3a

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 3b

Why would there be a need for “David versus Goliath”; “a small man speaking truth to power”? Is not the actuality of an acclaimed football player committing suicide in this manner – he shot himself in the chest so as to preserve his brain for research – telling enough to drive home the message for reform?

No. Hardly. As previously discussed, there is too much money at stake.

These stakes bring out the Crony-capitalism in American society.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean (and subsequent blog/commentaries) relates many examples of cronyism in the American eco-system. There is a lot of money at stake. Those who want to preserve the status quo or not invest in the required mitigations to remediate concussions will fight back against any Advocate promoting the Greater Good. The profit motive is powerful. There are doubters and those who want to spurn doubt. “Concussions in Football” is not the first issue these “actors” have promoted doubt on. The efforts to downplay concussion alarmists are from a familiar playbook, used previously by Climate Change deniers, Big Tobacco, Toxic Waste, Acid Rain, and other dangerous chemicals.

This Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). Sports are integral to the Go Lean/CU roadmap. While sports can be good and promote positives in society, even economically, the safety issues must be addressed upfront. This is a matter of community security. Thusly, the prime directives of the CU are described as:

  • Optimize the economic engines of the Caribbean to elevate the regional economy to grow to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs, including sports-related industries with a projection of 21,000 direct jobs at Fairgrounds and sports enterprises.
  • Establish a security apparatus to protect the people and economic engines.
  • Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these economic and security engines.

The CU/Go Lean sports mission is to harness the individual abilities of athletes to not just elevate their performance, but also to harness the economic impact for their communities. So modern sports endeavors cannot be analyzed without considering the impact on “dollars and cents” for stakeholders. This is a fact and should never be ignored. There is therefore the need to carefully assess and be on guard for crony-capitalistic influences entering the decision-making of sports stakeholders. The Go Lean book posits that with the emergence of new economic engines, “bad actors” will also emerge thereafter to exploit the opportunities, with good, bad and evil intent”. These points were pronounced early in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12 &14):

x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices of criminology and penology to assuage continuous threats against public safety. …

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interests of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism …

The Go Lean book envisions the CU – a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean chartered to do the heavy-lifting of empowering and elevating the Caribbean economy – as the landlord of many sports facilities (within the Self-Governing Entities design), and the regulator for inter-state sport federations. The book details the economic principles and community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize sports enterprises in the Caribbean:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification Page 21
Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways Page 21
Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices / Incentives Page 21
Economic Principles – The Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future Page 21
Economic Principles – Job Multiplier Page 22
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Whistleblower Protection Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Light-Up the Dark Places Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – “Crap” Happens Page 23
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness – Mitigate Suicide Threats Page 36
Community Ethos – Impact the Greater Good Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederating 30 Member-States into a Single Market Page 45
Strategy – Vision – Foster Local Economic Engines for Basic Needs Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Prepare for Natural Disasters Page 45
Strategic – Staffing – Sporting Events at Fairgrounds Page 55
Strategy – Agents of Change – Climate Change Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization Page 57
Tactical – Confederating a Permanent Union Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Sports & Culture Administration Page 81
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Fairgrounds Administration Page 83
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Health Department – Disease Management Page 86
Implementation – Assemble Regional Organs into a Single Market Economy Page 96
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities – Sports Stadia Page 105
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up – Unified Command & Control Page 103
Implementation – Industrial Policy for CU Self Governing Entities Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Deliver – Project Management/Accountabilities Page 109
Anatomy of Advocacies – Examples of Individuals Who Made Impact Page 122
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better Page 131
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Emergency Management – Trauma Arts & Sciences Page 196
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Sports Page 229
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Sports Leagues Page 234

The Go Lean book and accompanying blogs declare that the Caribbean needs to learn lessons from other communities, especially when big money is involved in pursuits like sports. These activities should be beneficial to health, not detrimental. So the admonition is to be “on guard” against the “cronies”; they will always try to sacrifice public policy – the Greater Good – for private gain: profit.

Let’s do better. Yes, the Caribbean can be better than the American experiences.

The design of Self-Governing Entities allow for greater protections from Crony-Capitalistic abuses. While this roadmap is committed to availing the economic opportunities of sports and accompanying infrastructure, as demonstrated in the foregoing movie trailer, sport teams and owners can be plutocratic “animals” in their greed. We must learn to mitigate plutocratic abuses. While an optimized eco-system is good, there is always the need for an Advocate, one person to step up, blow the whistle and transform society. The Go Lean roadmap encourages these role models.

Bravo Dr. Bennet Omalu. Thank you for this example … and for being a role model for all of the Caribbean.

RIP Junior Seau.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. This roadmap will result in more positive socio-economic changes throughout the region; it will make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the free e-book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

——-

Appendix VIDEO: Hank Williams Jr. – Are You Ready for Some Football – https://youtu.be/dKPZEMu7Mno

Uploaded on May 28, 2011 – Official Music Video

 

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Refuse to Lose – Canada’s Model of Ascent

Posted on October 21, 2019 in Ethos, Locations, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

10 Lessons from Canada’s History – #6 – Neighbor: Frienemy
What is a frienemy?
“Frenemy” (also spelled “frienemy”) is an oxymoron and a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy” that refers to “a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry” or “a person who combines the characteristics of a friend and an enemy”. – Wikipedia.

In the last submission in this series, it was established that “Yes, we can” succeed in competition with the US despite the dominance of the American hegemony.

Canada does! 

They are the greatest example of a Frienemy, in their association with the US. They cooperate and they compete. The have beaten America in the past and continue to do so even today. Just look, at their recent victories here in the sporting world:

VIDEO – Canada beats USA in soccer for the first time in 34 years! – https://www.bttoronto.ca/videos/canada-beats-usa-in-soccer-for-the-first-time-in-34-years/

Canada wins 2-0 against USA in soccer and Kyle Lowry officially signs his contract extension with the Raptors.

In truth, all neighboring countries are in competition with the US, if only to retain their citizens from “taking their talents to South Beach“. So many of the Caribbean Diaspora have taken their talents to “South Beach, South Toronto or South London”. The economic impact of their absence has been duly noted in research and analysis and the conclusion is bad:

Caribbean loses over 70% of tertiary educated citizens to the brain drain

What more can we learn from Canada, from their turn-around of losing and ascent to a competitive super-power on their own?

Consider the history highlights here, (and the depictions in the Appendix VIDEO below):

While the United States of America got its start in 1776 – by declaring and fighting for freedom from Great Britain – Canada was not formed as a nation until 1867, almost 100 years later. During those “Bad Old Days”, they could only stand idly by and watch the US take … parts of Maine, Northwest Territory, Oregon Territory, etc.. The purpose of their 1867 Confederation was the uniform quest to: Stand its Ground against America.

They – Canada – got sick and tired of being “sick and tired” and finally developed the attitude to:

Refuse to lose – a commitment by a group or society to the values of quality, success and winning.

If we model Canada’s example and adopt this attitude then we too will believe that we can compete with the US and even be better. This is a theme in the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean; it serves as a roadmap for the Caribbean to be a better homeland to live, work and play. This commentary continues the series on the Refuse to Lose ethos; this is Part 5-of-6. The full series is cataloged as follows:

  1. Refuse to Lose: Lesson from Sports
  2. Refuse to Lose: Remediating ‘Columbus Day’
  3. Refuse to Lose: Introducing Formal Reconciliations
  4. Refuse to Lose: Despite American Expansionism
  5. Refuse to Lose: Canada’s Model of Ascent
  6. Refuse to Lose: Direct Foreign Investors Wind-Downs

It is the assertion of this series of commentaries that the Caribbean can win, despite American dominance. How can we win or “Refuse to Lose“? Among the many strategies, tactics and implementations embedded in the Go Lean roadmap is the goal to learn the lessons from Canada’s history.

Among the 370-pages of the Go Lean book are the turn-by-turn instructions on “how” … to adopt new community ethos. The book presents the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to lose less often and win more. The book presented one advocacy on Lessons from Canada – their 150-Plus-years of history – entitled: 10 Lessons from Canada’s History; (Page 146). Consider some specific plans, excerpts and headlines from that advocacy in the book, here:

1 Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market
This treaty calls for the confederation of the Caribbean region into a single market of 30 member-states and 42 million people, similar to the original 1867 confederation for Canada. The history of Canada synchronizes with the aspirations of the CU Trade Federation. In this Canadian context, confederation generally describes the political process that united the colonies in the 1860s and related events, and the subsequent incorporation of other colonies and territories. Today, Canada is a “G8” advanced economy, made up of 10 provinces and 3 territories, ranking among the largest in the world, due its abundant natural resources and well-developed trade networks, including one with the US, a long and complex relationship. Canada has been a Northern Star, as a guide and refuge to Caribbean hopes and dreams.
2 Confederation for Defense – Strength in Numbers
The American Civil War caused security threats for Canada. The Union (US North) encouraged Irish immigration and sourced their Army (a million-man strong) with many Irish fighters. Since many Irish immigrants maintained animosity towards the British, there were documented cases of terroristic attacks against Canadian targets, i.e. the Fenian (an Irish Brotherhood) raids. This corresponded with the Little Englander philosophy, whereby Britain no longer wanted to maintain troops in its colonies.Confederation was therefore necessary to promote security for the related colonies of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia – amounting to a population of slightly over 2 million people
3 Multiple Cultural Legacies and Languages
4 Better than a Republic – (Civil War Lesson for a Technocracy)
5 Assuage Human Flight – Provide Alternative
6 Neighbor: Frienemy
Despite the cooperation needed for the St. Lawrence Waterway – (see Appendix UA) – the stated US desire, doctrine of Manifest Destiny, was to govern the entire North American continent. The US had fought wars against English-Canada interests and many believed that the US would annex the other colonies governed directly by England, as the US acquired the Oregon Territory. These reasons provided the motivation for the initial Canadian Confederation to expand from coast-to-coast, and serve as a role-model for the CU to target the entire region of the Caribbean Sea geography.
7 Aboriginal Relations Need Local Governance
8 Mastering Natural Resources
9 Federal / Provincial Outsourcing
10 Population Concerns – Not enough Natural Growth
Canada could not contend with the aging population (more retirees with fewer workers); they adapted a liberal immigration policy in the past decades and now their 2011 census counted 33,476,688, up over 6% in 5 years, and 20% over 20 years. The CU has the same challenge and needs its confederation to assuage the negative actuary equations.

Canada has ascended – now a “G8” advanced economy country – despite being in the shadows of the US. We, in the Caribbean can ascend too.

The subject of the Canada’s role model have been addressed in many previous commentaries; consider this sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15662 Manifesting High-Tech Neighborhoods in Toronto, Canada
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14954 Overseas Workers – even to Canada – not an ideal solution
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14541 Viola Desmond – One Canadian Woman Made a Difference
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14174 Canada: “Follow Me” for Model on ‘Climate Change’ Action
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13321 ‘Pluralistic Democracy’ – Canada’s Model of a Multilingual Society
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12369 Canada @ 150 Years Old – Happy Canada Day 2017
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12322 Canadian Model for Ferries: Economics, Security and Governance
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9480 10 Things We Want from Canada and 10 Things We Do Not Want
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6937 Women in Politics – Canada’s Model of Political Equality
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3694 Jamaica-Canada employment program generate millions for economy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3582 For Canadian Banks that Invest Regionally: Caribbean is a ‘Bad Bet’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=510 Florida’s Chilly Welcome for Canadian Snowbirds – Bad Model

In many ways, Canada has presented the ethos of Refuse to Lose to their American neighbors and have benefited as a result. They may not always win, but they Refuse to Lose and this makes them a better homeland in their pursuits of “life, liberty and happiness” and their overall goal to be a more harmonious society – a more perfect union.

We need that same Refuse to Lose ethos for the Caribbean Way Forward so that we can start winning. We have lose too much already. We hereby urge every Caribbean stakeholder to Refuse to Lose; this is how we will make our homeland a better place to live, work and play.  🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 13):

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv.  Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.
————-

Appendix VIDEO – How the USA grew from 13 Colonies to 50 States – www.westgateschool.org/apps/video/watch.jsp?v=162718

Posted October 26, 2017 – Featuring archival footage and lively graphics, this informative, live-action program traces the expansion of the United States from 13 colonies to 50 states. Explores the stories behind the acquisitions of the different territories as well as the figures involved in each acquisition. The program covers the Louisiana Purchase, the Texas Annexation, the Gadsen Purchase and more, while helping to develop map-reading skills and an understanding of U.S. geography.

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Refuse to Lose – A Lesson from Sports

Posted on October 13, 2019 in Ethos, Industries, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

‘Winning and Losing’ is a reality in life …

… especially true for us in the Caribbean, where losing is a constant feature in our lives; consider:

It does not have to be this way; there is an attitude – about losing – that seems to be missing here in the Caribbean:

Refuse to lose

This is more that just “3 words strung together”; this is a commitment to quality, success and winning. This is referred to as “community ethos” in the 2013 book Go Lean … Caribbean; see the definition here from Page 20:

The fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period.

How do we go about fostering this ethos to “refuse to lose”?

One approach is through sports. The field of sports can help to foster the good community ethos to “refuse to lose“. Refuse to Lose is also the title of a book by one of the winningest coaches in College Basketball, John Calipari. See here:

Book Review: Refuse to Lose – Hardcover by John Calipari  (Author) – September 17, 1996

“Realistic people place roadblocks in front of themselves,” says John Calipari, “I’m unrealistic in a positive way.” And he gets results. As one of the hottest coaches in college basketball, John Calipari transformed the once-dispirited UMass Minutemen into a #1-ranked force to be reckoned with–taking them to the Final Four for the first time in history. Calipari did more than develop a phenomenal team. He built an outstanding program for success.

What is Calipari’s winning philosophy?

Develop a “Refuse to Lose” attitude.
Though you play to win whatever the score, how you play the game counts. True, you will lose some games, but the way you deal with those losses is part of the attitude of refusing to lose. Calipari’s rules: Stay within the rules. Don’t blame others, take responsibility yourself. Review the tape and learn from it. These are the life skills he taught his players–and they resulted in both professional and personal victory. If you love your kids, Calipari believes, they’ll go through walls for you. Now you can apply these winning strategies to your own life–with your family, your co-workers, and yourself–to any endeavor in which there’s a goal to achieve.

The formula works. A man driven by competition and the desire to excel, John Calipari plays to win, rather than playing not to lose. In Refuse to Lose, he insists you step out of your comfort zone. When you’re comfortable, you’re not doing your best. But when you raise the bar above your comfort level, you can accomplish things you never thought possible. He will show you how mistakes can be powerful learning tools and how adversity can become opportunity.

In the bestselling tradition Rick Pitino’s Full Court Pressure and Pat Riley’s The Winner Within, John Calipari tells an amazing story of triumph and grit that is both universal and unique. Powerful, optimistic, and spirited, Refuse to Lose offers a dynamic philosophy that is contagious. Catch it and win!

Source: Retrieved October 12, 2019 from: https://www.amazon.com/Refuse-Lose-John-Calipari/dp/0345408012

——————

Reference: Coach John Calipari
John Vincent Calipari (born February 10, 1959) is an American basketball coach. Since 2009, he has been the head coach of the University of Kentucky men’s team, with whom he won the NCAA Championship in 2012. He has been named Naismith College Coach of the Year three times (in 1996, 2008 and 2015), and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.

He was previously the head coach at the University of Massachusetts from 1988 to 1996, the NBA‘s New Jersey Nets from 1996 to 1999 and the University of Memphis from 2000 to 2009, and was the head coach of the Dominican Republic national team in 2011 and 2012.

Calipari has coached Kentucky to four Final Fours, in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015. He also led UMass and Memphis to the Final Four in 1996 and 2008 respectively …  As a college coach, Calipari has twenty-four 20-win seasons, nine 30-win seasons, and three 35-win seasons.

Source: Wikipedia Online encyclopedia; retrieved October 13, 2019 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calipari

We need more of this Refuse to Lose ethos in the Caribbean. We are already committed to sports as our Caribbean communities, participate and excel in many sporting endeavors. Plus, most of the Caribbean member-states boast Judeo-Christian principles; alas there is an apropos Bible scripture that adds insight to this discussion (Go Lean book Page 229):

For bodily exercise is profitable for a little … – 1 Timothy 4: 8 (American Standard Version)

We have published a number of previous commentaries reviewing the actuality and historicity of Sports in our region; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15664 Naomi Osaka’s recipe for success: Caribbean Meld
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14527 Learning from March Madness (2018)
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10351 Lessons from a Winning Team – ‘Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8272 The effect of ‘Winning in Sports’ on a Losing Homeland
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4019 Learning from the Super Bowl … and its Commercials
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1341 Learning from Omaha and the College World Series Time
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=498 Learning from the ‘Sports Gene’ – Book Review:
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=318 The urgent need for a Collegiate Sports Eco-system in the Caribbean

Refusing to Lose is a similar good ethos to the heroic “whatever it takes” attitude. This was detailed in a previous blog-commentary from April 24, 2019:

Way Forward – Whatever it Takes
So for the Caribbean, we need to adopt the required community ethos, drop the bad ethos, execute the strategies, tactics and implementations … to elevate our society. We need to do the heavy-lifting,  ‘whatever it takes’; we must succeed.

Lives, livelihoods, identities and cultures are at stake.

Refusing to Lose is the opposite of the bad ethos that had been the observed practice for the National Airlines in the Bahamas and other Caribbean member-states. This was detailed in a previous blog-commentary from December 29, 2014:

No Fear of Failure – Case Study: Bahamasair
The story being related in the following [embedded] article is a far cry from a pursuit of quality, in fact the overriding theme is “no fear of failure” on the part of the airline’s stakeholders; “if we succeed or fail, it doesn’t really matter”.
…
This negative community ethos is even enshrined in the regulatory filing for the airline as an international carrier. Appendix B [Industry Quality Standards: Warsaw Convention] highlights the accepted quality standard in aviation known as the Warsaw Convention. Appendix C [Warsaw Convention Exemptions for International Carriers in the US] on the other hand, demonstrates how Bahamasair, and other Caribbean carriers, have petitioned for waivers so as not to abide by these high standards.

This writer got a glimpse of the good “Refuse to Lose” community ethos, just recently, at the 2019 Homecoming Football Game for Florida A & M University (FAMU). Homecoming games, per its namesake, is where the alumni flock back to the Tallahassee campus to celebrate the FAMU experience, culture and societal contributions – addressed in a previous Go Lean commentary. (See the Appendix VIDEO below of a glimpse of the Homecoming Parade).

With the increased attendance and priority, there is no toleration for a lost in the featured football game. The players, coaches and staff … must refuse to lose every year. For 2019, the FAMU Rattlers won; see the news story here:

Title: Rattlers clip the Eagles 28-21 on Homecoming day
By: Rory Sharrock, Tallahassee Democrat

Xavier Smith is the hometown hero for the second consecutive contest at Bragg Memorial Stadium.

The wide receiver followed up his game-winning catch versus Southern on Sept. 21 with a scoring run with 32 seconds remaining to give FAMU a 28-21 triumph over North Carolina Central Saturday on homecoming day.

With the victory, the Rattlers improve to 4-1 and 2-0 in the MEAC. The Eagles fall to 2-4 and 1-1 in league play.

The team’s march to victory began on its 35-yard line with 4:16 on the clock. They picked through the Eagles’ defense with outlet passes and sideline routes.

FAMU quarterback Ryan Stanley tossed three touchdowns to three different receivers.

David Manigo, Marcus Williams and Smith were the recipients of Stanley’s scoring throws.
…
See the full article here: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/sports/college/famu/2019/10/05/quarterly-updates-famu-takes-7-0-lead-over-n-c-central/3879051002/ Posted October 6, 2019; retrieved October 13, 2019.

FAMU Homecoming 2019 was a manifestation of the ethos of Refuse to Lose.

This is why the fostering of sports is so vital for elevating Caribbean society. This is part-and-parcel of the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies introduced by the book Go Lean … Caribbean. In fact, “fostering sports” is just 1 of 144 different advocacies presented in the book as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU).

Why is this roadmap so important? It might be the best hope for our Caribbean homeland’s constant ‘losing’.

This roadmap describes the Way Forward, the heavy-lifting for elevating Caribbean society – to turn from losing to winning. Among the 370-pages of the Go Lean book are the turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt many new community ethos. Consider the headlines, summaries and excerpts here on how the region can better foster the Sports eco-system in the Caribbean (Page 229):

10 Ways to Improve Sports

1 Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market
Embrace the advent of the Caribbean Single Market & Economy initiative of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. This will allow for the unification of the region of 30 member-states into a single market of 42 million people and a GDP exceeding $800 Billion (per 2010). This market size and multi-lingual realities allows for broadcasting rights with SAP-style language options for English, Spanish, French and Dutch. This makes the region attractive for media contracts for broadcast rights, spectrum auctions and sports marketing. The Olympics have demonstrated that sports can be profitable “big business”, and a great source of jobs and economic activity. The CU will copy the Olympic model, and harness the potential in many other sporting endeavors, so as to make the region a better place to live, work and play.
2 CU Games

Promote the CU Games, every 2 years, as the ascension of the CARIFTA Games for Amateur and now Professional Athletes. The CU Games Administration will also partner with all National Olympic Committees. This administration applies to feeder games, trials and qualification events. The ultimate goal is to field a world-class competitive Olympic Team representing the entire Caribbean. While the CARIFTA Games are for track-and-field events only, the CU Games will resemble a mini-Olympics with multi-sports (boxing, football/soccer, tennis, volleyball, sailing, baseball/softball, etc.).
3 Fairgrounds as Sport Venues
4 Regulate Amateur, Professional & Academically-Aligned Leagues
5 Establish Sports Academies
6 “Super” Amateur Sport Association

Promote All-Star tournaments (pre-season and post-season) for Amateur (School and Junior) Athletics Associations winners. This includes team sports (soccer, basketball), school sports (track/field) and individual sports (tennis, golf, etc.).
7 Regulator/Registrar of Scholar-Athletes – Assuage Abandonment
8 Sports Tourism
The CU will promote tournaments and clinics to encourage advancement in certain sports. These tournaments are aimed at the foreign markets (US, Canada, Europe, Central and South America) so as to generate sports-tourism traffic.
9 Professional Agents and Player Management Oversight (a la Bar/Lawyer Associations)
10 Impanel the CU Anti-Doping Agency

So ‘Yes We Can’ …

… Refusing to Lose is a necessary ethos for the Caribbean Way Forward to start winning. We have experienced far too much losing. We can foster the attitudes and opportunities for winning at sports, in life and in society, as individuals and communities..

Let’s all engage, get off the bench and get into the game. We need to win! But first, we need to Refuse to Lose.

This commentary is the start of this series on the Refuse to Lose ethos; this is Part 1-of-6. The full series is cataloged as follows:

  1. Refuse to Lose: Lesson from Sports
  2. Refuse to Lose: Remediating ‘Columbus Day’
  3. Refuse to Lose: Introducing Formal Reconciliations
  4. Refuse to Lose: Despite American Expansionism
  5. Refuse to Lose: Canada’s Model of Ascent
  6. Refuse to Lose: Direct Foreign Investors Wind-Downs

We urged everyone in the Caribbean – leaders and residents, athletic participants and spectators alike – to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap; to win … at all costs, to make our homeland a better place to live, work and play.

This is not a game for us; this is life.  🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 14):

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv.  Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism ….

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

————–

Appendix VIDEO – Marching 100 perform in Homecoming Parade – https://www.tallahassee.com/videos/news/2019/10/05/watch-marching-100-perform-homecoming-parade/3879408002/

Posted October 5, 2019 – The Marching 100 perform in the 2019 FAMU homecoming parade. By photographer Alicia Devine, Tallahassee Democrat.

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Role Models in Pan-Africana: Dr. Bennet Omalu – ENCORE

Posted on February 4, 2019 in Ethos, Social

Go Lean Commentary

Welcome to Black History Month 2019.

The commemorations of this month are not just an American concept as this is not the only country in the New World with a large Black population. In fact, most of the homelands that comprise the political Caribbean – 29 of 30 – present a majority Black population. There is also the African continent, with majority of its 1.2 Billion population being Black (or some related ethnic blend).

Here, we present a full series of commentaries related to Black History Month; the series is cataloged as follows:

  1. Black History Month 2019: Dr. Bennet Omalu – Definer of Gladiator Sports
  2. Black History Month 2019: Marcus Garvey’s World View
  3. Black History Month 2019: Starting 75 years of Bob Marley’s legacy
  4. Black History Month 2019: Angela Davis – Hero or Villian?
  5. Black History Month 2019: WEB DuBois – Moved to Africa for Later Life

In this series, reference is made to the last 100 years of Black History in the New World. There are many Role Models in Pan-Africana and many lessons to learn from their history that can impact our daily lives now. Most important, there is a Caribbean consideration for all of these submissions. While the Caribbean region is in dire straits – we must reform and transform away from our bad history – the rest of Pan-Africana also remains in danger.

This commentary opens a 5-part series for Black History Month 2019. This entry is 1 of 5 in this series from the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean in consideration of the impact that Black people have had on the recent history of modern society. This first submission looks at the “Dark Side of the American Sports World”, and the open acknowledgement that there is a undisputed danger with concussions and the dreaded disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).

Due to the advocacy of one initial role model, Nigerian-born Dr. Bennet Omalu, the world can no longer deny the medical consequences of these Gladiator Sports – the Football World did try; again and again, in classic Crony-Capitalistic denial mode – think Big Tobacco. In the midst of SuperBowl season – SuperBowl LIII was played yesterday (Sunday February 3, 2019) in the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia – it is now the clear analysis that the US has entered in a new age of Gladiator Sports. See this related news article here:

Are Football Players Really Modern-Day Gladiators?
Sub-title: Comparisons between American football and Roman gladiator games are common. Do historians think they’re apt?

If you’ve read anything at all about football’s brain injury crisis in recent years, you know one thing for certain: players are “modern-day gladiators.” It’s a comparison soubiquitous that a series of hyperlinked words can hardly do it justice.

The analogy is nothing new. In 1881, a New York Times editorial lamented the brutality of this “modern gladiatorial contest.” Since then, every time football’s violence has caused concern, observers and critics have heard the clashing weapons of ancient Rome. The similarities seem obvious. Brutal conflict. Cheering fans. Competitors who end up broken or dead.

But is it that simple? While journalists, fans, and even many players are convinced that football is a rebirth of gladiatorial combat, what about people who actually know stuff about gladiators?
…
Read the full article here: https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/d7mz3y/are-football-players-really-modern-day-gladiators; posted December 4, 2015; retrieved February 4, 2019.

In fact, in the traditional Pre-Game Presidential Interview, Donald Trump intimated that while he loves football, he will not allow his teenage son to participate in the sport due to the concussion risk. See that reference here:

Donald Trump Calls Football “Dangerous Sport” But “Great Product” On Super Bowl Sunday

President Donald Trump says he would steer youngest son Barron away from playing football, calling it a “dangerous sport” but a “great product.”

“I just don’t like the reports I see coming out having to do with football. It’s a dangerous sport,” Trump said in the traditional POTUS Super Bowl Sunday sit-down with the broadcasting network.
…
See the full article here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/donald-trump-calls-football-dangerous-173332866.html; posted February 3, 2019; retrieved February 4, 2019

So who then will be the participants … and who will be the spectators?

This harkens back to the days of Gladiators.

So many of the participants in the American football space reflect the Black-and-Brown (Pan-Africana) populations in America. See this related VIDEO here, previewing the story on HBO’s Real Sports:

VIDEO – HBO Real Sports – Middle Class avoiding football due to CTE – https://youtu.be/jwyWIcvHRi4

Published on Jan 25, 2019 – A Real Sports investigation reveals that in towns across America, concussion concerns are leading wealthier families to flee the game, while the number of players on government assistance is significantly rising.
#RealSportsHBO
Subscribe to the HBO YouTube Channel: https://goo.gl/wtFYd7
Don’t have HBO? Order Now: https://play.hbonow.com/
Like on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/realsportshbo
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This Go Lean commentary has frequently focused on American Football. We have highlighted the “art and science” of the sport, the business and the pride. But the caution that was bravely warned by Dr. Bennet Omalu is even more apropos now for the American Black-and-Brown populations. His impact is thusly summarized:

Concussions? “They” do not care about you; as long as their families are spared.

Listen up people, the White Middle-class world is leaving the sport to you to entertain them. We must do better.

For the purpose of Black History Month, on the heals of SuperBowl LIII, it is only appropriate to Encore the 2015 landmark blog-commentary on Concussions.featuring Dr. Bennet Omalu. See that Encore here-now:

—————

Go Lean Commentary – ‘Concussions’ – The Movie; The Cause

“Are you ready for some football?” – Promotional song by Hank Williams, Jr. for Monday Night Football on ABC & ESPN networks for 22 years (1989 – 2011).

This iconic song (see Appendix) and catch-phrase is reflective of exactly how popular the National Football League (NFL) is in the US:

“They own an entire day of the week”.

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 2So says the new movie ‘Concussions’, starring Will Smith, referring to the media domination of NFL Football on Sundays during the Autumn season. The movie’s script is along a line that resonates well in Hollywood’s Academy Award balloting: “David versus Goliath”; “a small man speaking truth to power”.

In the case of the NFL, it is not just about power, it is about money, prestige and protecting the status quo; the NFL is responsible for the livelihood of so many people. The book Go Lean … Caribbean recognized the importance of the NFL in the American lexicon of “live, work and play”; it featured a case study (Page 32) of the NFL and it’s collective bargaining successes (and failures) in 2011. An excerpt from the book is quoted as follows:

Football is big business in the US, $9 billion in revenue, and more than a business; emotions – civic pride, rivalries, and fanaticism – run high on both sides.

Previous Go Lean commentaries presents the socio-economic realities of much of the American football eco-system. Consider a sample here:

Socio-Economic Impact Analysis of [Football] Sports Stadiums
Watch the Super Bowl … Commercials
Levi’s® NFL Stadium: A Team Effort
Sports Role Model – College Football – Playing For Pride … And More
Sports Role Model – Turn On the SEC Network
Collegiate Sports in the Caribbean – Model of NCAA
10 Things We Want from the US: #10 – Sports Professionalism
10 Things We Don’t Want from the US: #10 – ‘Win At All Costs’ Ethos

While football plays a big role in American life, so do movies. Their role is more unique; they are able to change society. In a previous blog / commentary regarding Caribbean Diaspora member and Hollywood great, Sidney Poitier, it was declared that …

“Movies are an amazing business model. People give money to spend a couple of hours watching someone else’s creation and then leave the theater with nothing to show for the investment; except perhaps a different perspective”.

Yes, movies help us to glean a better view of ourselves … and our failings; and many times, show us a way-forward.

These descriptors actually describe the latest production from Hollywood icon Will Smith (the former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). This movie, the film “Concussion”, in the following news article, relates the real life drama of one man, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born medical doctor – a pathologist – who prepared autopsies of former players that suffered from football-related concussions. He did not buckle under the acute pressure to maintain the status quo, and now, he is celebrated for forging change in his adopted homeland. This one man made a difference. (The NFL is now credited for a Concussion awareness and prevention protocol so advanced that other levels of the sport – college, high schools and Youth – are being urged to emulate).

See news article here on the release of the movie:

Title: ‘Concussion’: 5 Take-a-ways From Will Smith’s New Film
Will Smith, 46, is definitely going to get a ton of Oscar buzz portraying Dr. Bennet Omalu in the new film “Concussion.” NFL columnist Peter King of Sports Illustrated got an exclusive first peek at the trailer and it has been widely shared on social media since. And it’s very chilling.

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 1

Here are five take-aways and background you need to know before checking out the clip:

1 – It’s Based on a True Story

Omalu is the forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players who got hit in the head over and over again, according to the Washington Post.

In the clip, he says repetitive “head trauma chokes the brain.”

Omalu was one of the founding members of the Brain Injury Research Institute in 2002. He conducted the autopsy of Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, played by David Morse in the film, which led to this discovery.

2 – Smith’s Version of Omalu’s Accent Is Spot On

Omalu is from Nigeria and Smith has been known to transform completely for a role. He was nominated for an Oscar for 2011’s “Ali,” playing the legendary Muhammad Ali.

For comparison, here’s Omalu’s PBS interview from 2013.

3 – Smith Is a Reluctant Hero

“If you don’t speak for them, who will,” Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Prema Mutiso in the film, tells Smith’s character.

He admits he idolized America growing up and “was the wrong person to have discovered this.”

4 – Alec Baldwin and Luke Wilson

“Concussion” brought in some heavyweights for this movie. Baldwin plays Dr. Julian Bailes, who advises Omalu, and Wilson, who will reportedly play NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, according to IMDB. There’s no official word on this. He’s seen at a podium in the trailer, but doesn’t speak.

5 – “Tell the Truth”

Smith captures Omalu’s passion to have the truth told about this injury and disease.

“I was afraid of letting Mike [Webster] down. I was afraid. I don’t know. I was afraid I was going to fail,” Omalu told PBS a couple years back.

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VIDEO Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3322364/?ref_=nv_sr_1


Will Smith stars in the incredible true David vs. Goliath story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the brilliant forensic neuropathologist who made the first discovery of CTE, a football-related brain trauma, in a pro player.

The subject of concussions is serious – life and death. Just a few weeks ago (August 8), an NFL Hall-of-Fame inductee was honored for his play on the field during his 20-year professional career, but his family, his daughter in particular, is the one that made his acceptance / induction speech. He had died, in 2012; he committed suicide after apparently suffering from a brain disorder – chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a type of chronic brain damage that has also been found in other deceased former NFL players[4] – sustained from his years of brutal head contacts in organized football in high school, college and in his NFL career. This player was Junior Seau.

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 3a

- The Movie; The Cause - Photo 3b

Why would there be a need for “David versus Goliath”; “a small man speaking truth to power”? Is not the actuality of an acclaimed football player committing suicide in this manner – he shot himself in the chest so as to preserve his brain for research – telling enough to drive home the message for reform?

No. Hardly. As previously discussed, there is too much money at stake.

These stakes bring out the Crony-capitalism in American society.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean (and subsequent blog/commentaries) relates many examples of cronyism in the American eco-system. There is a lot of money at stake. Those who want to preserve the status quo or not invest in the required mitigations to remediate concussions will fight back against any Advocate promoting the Greater Good. The profit motive is powerful. There are doubters and those who want to spurn doubt. “Concussions in Football” is not the first issue these “actors” have promoted doubt on. The efforts to downplay concussion alarmists are from a familiar playbook, used previously by Climate Change deniers, Big Tobacco, Toxic Waste, Acid Rain, and other dangerous chemicals.

This Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). Sports are integral to the Go Lean/CU roadmap. While sports can be good and promote positives in society, even economically, the safety issues must be addressed upfront. This is a matter of community security. Thusly, the prime directives of the CU are described as:

  • Optimize the economic engines of the Caribbean to elevate the regional economy to grow to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs, including sports-related industries with a projection of 21,000 direct jobs at Fairgrounds and sports enterprises.
  • Establish a security apparatus to protect the people and economic engines.
  • Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these economic and security engines.

The CU/Go Lean sports mission is to harness the individual abilities of athletes to not just elevate their performance, but also to harness the economic impact for their communities. So modern sports endeavors cannot be analyzed without considering the impact on “dollars and cents” for stakeholders. This is a fact and should never be ignored. There is therefore the need to carefully assess and be on guard for crony-capitalistic influences entering the decision-making of sports stakeholders. The Go Lean book posits that with the emergence of new economic engines, “bad actors” will also emerge thereafter to exploit the opportunities, with good, bad and evil intent”. These points were pronounced early in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12 &14):

x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices of criminology and penology to assuage continuous threats against public safety. …

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interests of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism …

The Go Lean book envisions the CU – a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean chartered to do the heavy-lifting of empowering and elevating the Caribbean economy – as the landlord of many sports facilities (within the Self-Governing Entities design), and the regulator for inter-state sport federations. The book details the economic principles and community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize sports enterprises in the Caribbean:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification Page 21
Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways Page 21
Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices / Incentives Page 21
Economic Principles – The Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future Page 21
Economic Principles – Job Multiplier Page 22
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Whistleblower Protection Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Light-Up the Dark Places Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – “Crap” Happens Page 23
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness – Mitigate Suicide Threats Page 36
Community Ethos – Impact the Greater Good Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederating 30 Member-States into a Single Market Page 45
Strategy – Vision – Foster Local Economic Engines for Basic Needs Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Prepare for Natural Disasters Page 45
Strategic – Staffing – Sporting Events at Fairgrounds Page 55
Strategy – Agents of Change – Climate Change Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization Page 57
Tactical – Confederating a Permanent Union Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Sports & Culture Administration Page 81
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Fairgrounds Administration Page 83
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Health Department – Disease Management Page 86
Implementation – Assemble Regional Organs into a Single Market Economy Page 96
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities – Sports Stadia Page 105
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up – Unified Command & Control Page 103
Implementation – Industrial Policy for CU Self Governing Entities Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Deliver – Project Management/Accountabilities Page 109
Anatomy of Advocacies – Examples of Individuals Who Made Impact Page 122
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better Page 131
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Emergency Management – Trauma Arts & Sciences Page 196
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Sports Page 229
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Sports Leagues Page 234

The Go Lean book and accompanying blogs declare that the Caribbean needs to learn lessons from other communities, especially when big money is involved in pursuits like sports. These activities should be beneficial to health, not detrimental. So the admonition is to be “on guard” against the “cronies”; they will always try to sacrifice public policy – the Greater Good – for private gain: profit.

Let’s do better. Yes, the Caribbean can be better than the American experiences.

The design of Self-Governing Entities allow for greater protections from Crony-Capitalistic abuses. While this roadmap is committed to availing the economic opportunities of sports and accompanying infrastructure, as demonstrated in the foregoing movie trailer, sport teams and owners can be plutocratic “animals” in their greed. We must learn to mitigate plutocratic abuses. While an optimized eco-system is good, there is always the need for an Advocate, one person to step up, blow the whistle and transform society. The Go Lean roadmap encourages these role models.

Bravo Dr. Bennet Omalu. Thank you for this example … and for being a role model for all of the Caribbean.

RIP Junior Seau.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. This roadmap will result in more positive socio-economic changes throughout the region; it will make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play.   🙂

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Appendix VIDEO: Hank Williams Jr. – Are You Ready for Some Football – https://youtu.be/K8LLKO0-PAE

Uploaded on May 28, 2011 – Official Music Video

 

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Remembering the Moment – 1968’s Proudest Protest – ENCORE

Posted on October 16, 2018 in Ethos, Social

October 16, 2018 – Today marks the 50th Anniversary of a moment in history when two American athletes stood-up in protest at the 1968 Olympic Games, during the Medal-Award ceremony. Their “human rights salute” is regarded as one of the most overtly political statements ever in the history of the modern Olympic Games.

Protesting athletes? This sounds so familiar, considering the recent exploits of Colin Kaepernick et al.

This one episode – this moment – was actually a forerunner for conducting protests and forging change today. It was part-and-parcel of the tumultuous year that 1968 proved to be.

This was not just an American issue. This affected the whole world. After all, this was the Olympics. In addition, one of the protesting athletes, John Carlos, was of Caribbean (Cuban) Roots.

Today, we are presenting an Encore of the profile of John Carlos, depicting his role in this episode in history. See this previous blog-commentary from March 10, 2017 here-now:

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Go Lean Commentary – Caribbean Roots: John Carlos – The Man. The Moment. The Movement

The title: “The Man. The Moment. The Movement” is more than just a catch-phrase, its a recipe for successfully transforming society.

Do you remember this Sports Moment That Changed the World?

CU Blog - Caribbean Roots - John Carlos among 'Three Proud People' - Photo 1It was at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Despite all the attempts by the organizers to keep the Games apolitical and free-of-conflict, the Moment got political and conflicted … and impactful. This was when the Man, John Carlos, the bronze-medal winner in the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics gave his Black Power salute on the podium with gold-medalist Tommie Smith; this galvanized the Movement – the Civil Rights Movement in general and the Olympic Project for Human Rights in particular. The Movement caused a lot of controversy.

What is not known about this moment is that this Man, John Carlos, has Caribbean roots.

We are so proud!

Consider his biography reference here:

Title: John Carlos
John Wesley Carlos (born June 5, 1945) is an American former track and field athlete and professional football player. He was the bronze-medal winner in the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics and his Black Power salute on the podium with Tommie Smith caused much political controversy. He went on to tie the world record in the 100 yard dash and beat the 200 meters world record (although the latter achievement was never certified). After his track career, he enjoyed a brief stint in the Canadian Football League but retired due to injury.[1]

He became involved with the United States Olympic Committee and helped to organize the 1984 Summer Olympics. Following this he became a track coach at Palm SpringsHigh School. He was inducted into the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame in 2003.

He is the author, with sportswriter Dave Zirin, of The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, published in 2011 by Haymarket Books.

Early life and education
Born in Harlem, New York, to Cuban[2] parents, John Carlos was a gifted high school athlete and outstanding student who went on to study at East Texas State University on a full track-and-field scholarship. His victories in the 100- and 200-meter dash and as a member of the 4×400-meter relay helped lead ETSU to the 1967 Lone Star Conference Championship. After his first year, Carlos enrolled at San Jose State University where he was trained by future National Track & Field Hall of Fame coach, Lloyd (Bud) Winter.

Carlos was awarded an honorary doctorate from CaliforniaStateUniversity in 2008. In 2012, he was awarded honorary doctorates from his alma maters Texas A&M University-Commerce (formerly EastTexasStateUniversity) and San Jose State University.

Career
At the 1968 Olympic Trials, Carlos won the 200-meter dash in 19.92 seconds, beating world-record holder Tommie Smith and surpassing his record by 0.3 seconds. Though the record was never ratified because the spike formation on Carlos’ shoes (“brush spikes”) was not accepted at the time, the race reinforced his status as a world-class sprinter.

Carlos became a founding member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), and originally advocated a boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games unless four conditions were met: withdrawal of South Africa and Rhodesia from the games, restoration of Muhammad Ali’s world heavyweight boxing title, Avery Brundage to step down as president of the IOC, and the hiring of more African-American assistant coaches. As the boycott failed to achieve support after the IOC withdrew invitations for South Africa and Rhodesia, he decided, together with Smith, to participate but to stage a protest in case he received a medal.[3] Following his third-place finish behind fellow American Smith and Australian Peter Norman in the 200 at the Mexico Olympics, Carlos and Smith made headlines around the world by raising their black-gloved fists at the medal award ceremony. Both athletes wore black socks and no shoes on the podium to represent African-American poverty in the United States. In support, Peter Norman, the silver medalist who was a white athlete from Australia, participated in the protest by wearing an OPHR badge.

IOC president Avery Brundage deemed a political statement unfit for the apolitical, international forum the Olympic Games was supposed to be. In an immediate response to their actions, he ordered Smith and Carlos suspended from the U.S. team and banned from the Olympic Village. Many supporters, however, praised the men for their bravery. The men’s gesture had lingering effects for all three athletes, the most serious of which were death threats against Carlos, Smith, and their families. Although it has been reported that Carlos and Smith were stripped of their medals, Carlos has indicated this is not true and his medal is with his mother.[4]

Carlos had his greatest year in track and field in 1969, equaling the world 100-yard record of 9.1, winning the AAU 220-yard run, and leading San JoseState to its first NCAA championship with victories in the 100 and 220 and as a member of the 4×110-yard relay. He was featured on the cover of Track and Field News‘ May 1969 issue.[5]
…

CU Blog - Caribbean Roots - John Carlos among 'Three Proud People' - Photo 3

Source: Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia – Retrieved March 8, 2017 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carlos

This biography should go back further to include John Carlos’s Cuban-Caribbean heritage, that of his father:

John Carlos is of Cuban descent and can understand Spanish. His father, Earl Carlos Sr., was a businessman (a cobbler or shoe repair) and World War I Veteran [fighting for the US]. He was a man proud of his appearance in all circumstances and carried himself in a dignified way. He had to work hard from an early age (like most African-American children of his era, especially in the South of the country) and his parents were born as slaves; [(slavery ended in Cuba in 1886 and he was born in 1895)]. When he participated in World War I, he got wounded and received the Medal of Citation Award for his stoicism on the battlefield. When he returned back home, he had to face racial hatred, economic discrimination, the Roaring Twenties, the Stock Market Crash in 1929, the Dust Bowl in the mid-thirties and World War II. Despite the difficulties, he never became bitter. He met his future wife, Vioris Lawrence (an African-American woman), in 1941, who was later John Carlos’ mother. – MegaDiversities.

This was quite a legacy to absorb. John Carlos had the molding from his proud Cuban father, who left a segregated Cuba and emigrated for a better life in the metropolitan area of New York. Harlem – think Harlem Renaissance – was a better place to be a Black Man than the Jim Crow South or the minority-ruled Cuba. When he stood in defiance in that Moment in 1968, John Carlos was protesting the blatant racism that he experienced and his father before him – Earl Carlos died later, in May 1969. The Movement to uplift oppressed people had began on the global stage, but the Black Power salute was a local action in solidarity with all those oppressed before and after this Moment. He understood that ‘Sport and Politics’ are intrinsically linked, whether right or wrong.

The movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean recognizes the significance of that Moment and the stage for its execution, the celebrated Olympic Games. The Go Lean book applauds the struggle for Civil Rights and the dynamics of sports. It posits that sports can foster a great influence – and even wealth – in modern society. See this in Appendix B VIDEO.

The sportsman can “rule in people’s hearts”. People marvel at their athletic prowess – billions may be watching on live or tape-delayed TV broadcasts – the participants can forge a positive image and wield power and influence; think:

We can add John Carlos and Tommie Smith to that list.

This Moment was in 1968; that was a pivotal year, so many things happened, mostly bad; consider this sample:

  • Martin Luther King was assassinated, April 4
  • Robert Kennedy was assassinated, June 6
  • Vietnam War Protests – Summer
  • Chicano (Hispanic) Movement and Red Power (Native Americans) Movement Summer Protests
  • Mexico City Olympics – October 12 – 27
  • James Brown song: Say it loud: “I’m Black and I’m Proud”
    CU Blog - Caribbean Roots - John Carlos among 'Three Proud People' - Photo 2

According to John Carlos, in a recent interview describing the disposition on the ground there in Mexico City: “it was high tension, drama, a powder keg … prior to the Olympics there was a massacre that killed hundreds of young activists”.

That was 1968 … all around; consider the experience of one Californian “back in that day”:

1968 was an exciting time for me. I think it was when my activism was born. Before that time things were pretty rosy. Even though I knew about the [Black] Panthers and had seen Dr. [Martin Luther] King, living in LA you were kind of removed. I do remember expressing a desire to join the Freedom Rides, but my Pastor said ‘No’.

1968 was [when] my friends were coming home from Vietnam or refusing to go.

I remember loaning my boyfriend $$ to go to Philly to go before the Draft Board to argue as a Conscientious Objector. He won and we were so happy.

I remember the day Dr. King was killed and going that night to a service with friends. I remember being so sad and being glued to the TV.

I remember the horror of Bobby Kennedy being killed. I was at work and heard the news.

I remember being so proud of Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics.

My living room had two posters. One of them on the stand with the black gloved fists held high and the other was [Black Panther Party co-founder] Huey Newton sitting in that Peacock Chair.

Those were the days when I was very active in the Watts Summer Festival. Tommy Jacquette, the founder, was a friend, and we all gathered together to make the event a success. …

I would say that 1968 was the year that I became the person I am today. – Bunny Withers, Los Angeles.

The reality of human rights abuses in America in 1968 was bad, worse or dire – those were the only options. The Black community was far from being treated as equal citizens in that society. But truth be told, other minority groups in the country also experienced oppression, repression and suppression. America was the greatest country on the planet for those that qualified; those that were:

White, Anglo-Saxon, Rich, Male and Straight

Anyone else – everyone else – needed civil rights empowerments.

Fortunately, this is not the conditions of the America of today. It is now a better place to live, work and play. How did this society go from “there to here”?

It took the strenuous efforts of advocates: individuals – Men and Women – and organizations, exploiting Moments and Movements for maximum exposure. They appealed to the public, appealed to their better nature. John Carlos was one such individual.

The third person on the dais, silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia, can also be classified as an advocate fighting to assuage human rights abuses – he also wore a badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights – he was in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. See the profile VIDEO on his activities in Appendix A below.

The Caribbean has a problem today that we did not have back in 1968. The majority populations of the Caribbean region is/was Black-and-Brown. America was not inviting to this demographic, so our people rarely immigrated to the US. Now with the above-referenced civil rights empowerments, America is now a more fair society for all people. Our Caribbean people now “beat down their doors” to flee to America, and other places – Go Lean book Page 3.

The US is now a “frienemy” for us! We are trading partners; we are aligned; we are allies; many of our students studied there; many of our Diaspora live there. We now have to compete to dissuade our young people from setting their sights on American shores as a refuge and destination of their hopes and dreams. No society can survive with a high abandonment rate – the book Go Lean … Caribbean reports that 70% brain drain rate among our professional populations.

We are failing and need advocates of our own.

We need new role models, with the courage of John Carlos, to help us “battle” against the “push-and-pull” factors that draw many Caribbean citizens away from home to the US. We need Men to seize the Moment and advance this Movement.

The Go Lean movement pursues the quest to elevate the Caribbean region through empowerments in economics, security and governance. Since 29 of the 30 Caribbean member-states (“St. Barths” is the only exception) have majority Black populations, the book pushes further on this subject of racism, positing that it is easier for Caribbean citizens to stay home and effect change in their homelands than to go to America and try to remediate that society. The book therefore asserts that the region can turn-around from failing assessments by applying best-practices, and forging new societal institutions to impact the Greater Good for all the Caribbean.

The Go Lean book posits that sports – individual achievements and the business of sports – can greatly impact society; in addition to the entertainment value, there is also national pride, image and impression. People can override many false precepts with sporting excellence by great role models.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), a technocratic federal government designed to administer and optimize the economic-security-governing engines of the region’s 30 member-states. This is highlighted by these 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy; creating 2.2 million new jobs and expanding the regional GDP to $800 Billion.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

At the outset, the roadmap recognizes our crisis and the value of sports in the roadmap, with these statements in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13 & 14):

xix. Whereas our legacy in recent times is one of societal abandonment, it is imperative that incentives and encouragement be put in place to first dissuade the human flight, and then entice and welcome the return of our Diaspora back to our shores. This repatriation should be effected with the appropriate guards so as not to imperil the lives and securities of the repatriated citizens or the communities they inhabit. The right of repatriation is to be extended to any natural born citizens despite any previous naturalization to foreign sovereignties.

xxvi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism – modeling the Olympics.

The Go Lean roadmap calls for the market organizations to better garner the economic benefits of sports. One of the biggest contributions the CU will make is the facilitation of sports venues: arenas and stadia. As described in a previous blog-commentary, sports can be big business! And even when money is not involved, other benefits abound: educational scholarships, fitness/wellness, disciplined activities for the youth, image, and pride. No doubt an intangible yet important benefits is depicted in this Go Lean roadmap, that of less societal abandonment.

The movement behind the Go Lean book salute those ones from our past who left their Caribbean homelands for better opportunities abroad; we salute their legacies (foreign-born children) as well. We know that there are “new” athletes who are just waiting to be discovered and fostered throughout the Caribbean member-states. We salute these ones as our future, and pledge to do better to keep them here at home. The book details the community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to allow Caribbean people to prosper where they are planted.

In terms of salute, it is appropriate to salute Vioris Louise Lawrence Carlos – the mother of John Carlos. She just recently passed-away, on December 12, 2016, at age 97. This blessed woman’s contributions and life course help to mold the life and legacy of 5 children – including John Carlos – and a whole community.

Previous Go Lean blog-commentaries that identified other sports role models for our consideration:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8495 NBA Greatness and Caribbean Roots: Tim Duncan Retires
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2222 Sports Role Model – Playing For Pride … And More
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1020 Sports Revolutionary: Advocate Jeffrey Webb
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=498 Caribbean Sport Excellence due to ‘The Sports Gene’

In addition, these other Go Lean blog-commentaries have identified other role models with Caribbean roots:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10609 Caribbean Roots: Cast of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10114 Esther Rolle – Caribbean Roots
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9948 Sammy Davis, Jr. – Caribbean Roots
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8724 Remembering Marcus Garvey: A Role Model; Still Relevant Today
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8619 Clive Campbell – Jamaican Innovation for Hip Hop
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8328 YouTube Role Model with Caribbean Roots: ‘Tipsy Bartender’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2726 Caribbean Role Model – Oscar De La Renta – RIP
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=866 Caribbean Musical Icon and Role Model: Bob Marley

The world is a better place, sports-wise and arts-wise, because of Caribbean contributions. Thank you to all past, present and future athletes and contributors.

Not to be overlooked, but the same as the US had a Climate of Hate in 1968, we have our own societal defects in the Caribbean region today. We cannot claim enlightenment to the achievements of advocates like John Carlos and have a blind eye” to our own “ills”. So let’s stand-up as a Proud People and force our own communities to change. Let’s make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Sign the petition to lean-in for the roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

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APPENDIX A VIDEO – The Story Behind The White Guy In This Historic Photo – https://youtu.be/t4LvwXYmt3Q

Published on Oct 31, 2015 – In 1968 there was a powerful moment of protest at the Olympic games when two winners put on black gloves to protest what was happening in the country during the civil rights era. Most people don’t know the story of the silver medalist, Peter Norman. Cenk Uygur, host of the The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

“In an act as appropriate as it is overdue, the Australian House of Parliament is issuing an official state apology Monday to the country’s late, great sprinter Peter Norman. Norman won the 200-meter silver medal at the 1968 Olympics, but that’s not why he’s either remembered or owed apologies. After the race, gold and bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised their fists on the medal stand and started an international firestorm. Many see the iconic image and assume Norman was just a bystander to history, or as he would joke, “the white guy.” But he was standing in full solidarity with Smith and Carlos, wearing a patch on his chest that reads, “Olympic Project for Human Rights.”

Read more here: https://www.thenation.com/article/aus…

Disclaimer: The Young Turks is an online video talk show that provides commentary on news and opinion articles. Often times these articles come from sources outside of our organization. Where possible, we do our best to research and verify various sources before reporting. Content created by third parties is the sole responsibility of the third parties and its accuracy and completeness are not endorsed or guaranteed.

UPDATE to story: http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/j…

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APPENDIX B VIDEO – THREE PROUD PEOPLE (Mural project) Tommy Smith, Peter Norman, John Carlos – https://youtu.be/xHcasP4HOo0

Uploaded on May 17, 2009 – This mural was put up about 6 weeks prior to the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic games. It could be viewed from the McDonaldtown train station platform and from trains travelling past. Trains travel from central Sydney to the Homebush Olympic venue past this mural. As of a few years ago, the mural can no longer be seen from the tracks due to a city rail concrete sound barrier that has been installed.
Peter Norman was repremanded for his part in the action. Peter, in solidarity, wore the Olympic project for human rights badge, which defied the code of conduct. He also came up with the idea of Smith and Carlos each wearing one black glove from the same pair. All three of these guys were very couragous.

  • Category: Education
  • License: Standard YouTube License

 

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Naomi Osaka’s recipe for success: Caribbean Meld

Posted on September 12, 2018 in Ethos, Social, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

There is actually a recipe for success on the world stage, one that has just been applied by tennis superstar Naomi Osaka in winning the 2018 US Open over fan-favorite Serena Williams. The recipe:

Meld Caribbean distinctiveness with that of other cultures.

Wait what?!

This sounds so familiar, even fictionalized! Those who are fans of the science fiction franchise Star Trek will remember the mantra of the cybernetic life form “The Borg”. Their announcement when attacking potential victims were as follows:

”We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” – Source

This is “Art imitating Life”! We see this recipe at work with this new sports champion and beneficiary of this international melding: Naomi Osaka.

She is a professional tennis player who represents Japan internationally. She is the first Japanese citizen to win a Grand Slam singles tournament, defeating Serena Williams in the final of the 2018 US Open.[6] Osaka has reached a career-high world ranking of No. 7.[4] She was born to a Haitian father, Leonard “San” François, and a Japanese mother, Tamaki Osaka .[7]

This story, beyond its relevance to sports, has a Caribbean relevance because of Osaka’s parentage. The meld – noun/verb: blend – had produced an end-product that has accomplished more than any one component has accomplished on its own. Osaka is the first Japanese citizen to win a Grand Slam event, and needless-to-say, the first Haitian.  It has not been easy:

In racially homogeneous Japan, Osaka is considered hāfu, which is Japanese for biracial.[10] Her Japanese grandfather was furious when he found out that her mother was romantically involved with a black man. As a result of the interracial relationship, her mother did not have contact with her family for over ten years.[8] In a 2016 interview, Osaka said: “When I go to Japan, people are confused. From my name, they don’t expect to see a black girl.”[11] – Wikipedia

This biography provides a lesson-learned for the rest of the Caribbean, and the world for that matter:

  • To our Caribbean brothers and sisters, we entreat you to embrace pluralism; good things come from the embrace of our differences.
  • To the rest of world, we declare that the Caribbean identity is not “Less Than”. We bring a strength of character and ethos that adds value and elevates any community where we meld.

If we can successfully meld and conquer a challenge on the world stage, how much more so can we meld our distinctiveness here at home or in our regional neighborhood to accomplish greater feats. This is the message of the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean, which asserts that great Caribbean progress is in store when we meld – integrate, collaborate and confederate. The book – available to download for free – serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states.

This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs. There are many industrial expressions that we will have to make in order to reach these goals, including the facilitation of the Art & Science of Sports.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The book stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 14):

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

xxxi. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism …

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines for all member-states in the Caribbean region.

The story of Naomi Osaka is about more than just her heritage. She is an excellent athlete of her own making. It takes blood, sweat and tears to excel at the highest level of her sport. For Osaka to beat Serena Williams – earning $3.8 million – that was no fluke; that was the full measure of her athletic prowess; that was heavy-lifting. Even now, all the attention is on Serena losing, rather than Osaka winning; see the VIDEO here and the related story in the Appendix below:

VIDEO – US Open Highlights – https://nyp.st/2CM60t5

Published September 8, 2018 – Serena has mother of all meltdowns in US Open final loss.

Heavy-lifting in sports is a familiar theme for this Go Lean movement; we recognize that there could be more economic rewards if the regional stewards do a better job of facilitating a viable sports eco-system – we have few expressions of professional sports and no intercollegiate system in the region. We have previously elaborated on how the Art & Science of sports can be used to help elevate our societal engines. Re-consider these previous blog-commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11287 Creating a legacy in pro-Surfing
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8495 Basketball Great and Caribbean Role Model: Tim Duncan
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7866 Caribbean Track & Field Athletes monetize their talents “elsewhere”
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1446 Caribbean Players in the World Cup
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1020 Advocates and Revolutionaries for Caribbean Sports

So how can we foster more people in our Caribbean region to be like Naomi Osaka, people who can help to elevate our society and the global image of Caribbean contributions to the world? The Go Lean book addressed this question; within its 370-pages of instructions for impacting society, in the specific details for fostering more world-class athletes. Consider the summaries, excerpts and headlines from this one advocacy in the book on Page 229 entitled:

10 Ways to Improve Sports

1 Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market
This will allow for the unification of the region of 30 member-states into a single market of 42 million people and a GDP exceeding $800 Billion (per 2010). This market size and multi-lingual realities allows for broadcasting rights with SAP-style language options for English, Spanish, French and Dutch. This makes the region attractive for media contracts for broadcast rights, spectrum auctions and sports marketing. The Olympics have demonstrated that sports can be profitable “big business”, and a great source of jobs and economic activity. The CU will copy the Olympic model, and harness the potential in many other sporting endeavors, so as to make the region a better place to live, work and play.
2 CU Games
Promote the CU Games, every 2 years, as the ascension of the CARIFTA Games for Amateur and now Professional Athletes. The CU Games Administration will also partner with all National Olympic Committees. This administration applies to feeder games, trials and qualification events. The ultimate goal is to field a world-class competitive Olympic Team representing the entire Caribbean. While the CARIFTA Games are for track-and-field events only, the CU Games will resemble a mini-Olympics with multi-sports (boxing, football/soccer, tennis, volleyball, sailing, baseball/softball, etc.)
3 Fairgrounds as Sport Venues
The CU Fairgrounds (managed by the Interior Department) will have the infrastructure to fund, build and maintain sports arenas and “stadiums” (stadia) in local markets. The mantra is “build it and they will come”, so the CU building and managing world-class sport facilities will result in a more organized industry and the emergence of vertical markets.
4 Regulate Amateur, Professional & Academically-Aligned Leagues
5 Establish Sports Academies
6 “Super” Amateur Sport Association
7 Regulator/Registrar of Scholar-Athletes – Assuage Abandonment
8 Sports Tourism
9 Professional Agents and Player Management Oversight (a la Bar/Lawyer Associations).
10 Impanel the CU Anti-Doping Agency

Congratulation Naomi Osaka!

… and thank you … for making it easier for us to impress on the world that Caribbean-anything is not “Less Than”. That argument is now easier to make.

It is now also easier to convey the message that “Yes, we can” forge a “pluralistic” democracy and make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

—————–

Appendix – It’s shameful what US Open did to Naomi Osaka
Opinion by: Maureen Callahan

Naomi Osaka, 20 years old, just became the first player from Japan to win a Grand Slam.

Yet rather than cheer Osaka, the crowd, the commentators and US Open officials all expressed shock and grief that Serena Williams lost.

Osaka spent what should have been her victory lap in tears. It had been her childhood dream to make it to the US Open and possibly play against Williams, her idol, in the final.

It’s hard to recall a more unsportsmanlike event.

Here was a young girl who pulled off one of the greatest upsets ever, who fought for every point she earned, ashamed.

At the awards ceremony, Osaka covered her face with her black visor and cried. The crowd booed her. Katrina Adams, chairman and president of the USTA, opened the awards ceremony by denigrating the winner and lionizing Williams — whose ego, if anything, needs piercing.

“Perhaps it’s not the finish we were looking for today,” Adams said, “but Serena, you are a champion of all champions.” Addressing the crowd, Adams added, “This mama is a role model and respected by all.”

That’s not likely the case now, not after the world watched as Serena Williams had a series of epic meltdowns on the court, all sparked when the umpire warned her: No coaching from the side. Her coach was making visible hand signals.

“I don’t cheat to win,” Williams told him. “I’d rather lose.”

She couldn’t let it go, going back multiple times to berate the umpire. At one point she called him a thief.

“You stole a point from me!” she yelled.

After her loss, Williams’s coach admitted to ESPN that he had, in fact, been coaching from the stands, a code violation. The warning was fair.

Everything that followed is on Williams, who is no stranger to tantrums. Most famously, she was tossed from the US Open in 2009 after telling the line judge, “I swear to God I’ll take the f—king ball and shove it down your f—king throat.” John McEnroe was taken aback. Even Williams’s mother, Oracene Price, couldn’t defend her daughter’s outburst.

“She could have kept her cool,” Price said.

On Saturday, she also could have tried to be gracious in defeat. No matter how her fans try to spin this, Williams was anything but. Upon accepting her finalist award, she gave parsimonious praise to her competitor while telling the crowd she felt their pain.

“Let’s try to make this the best moment we can,” she said in part, “and we’ll get through it . . . let’s not boo anymore. We’re gonna get through this and let’s be positive, so congratulations, Naomi.”

Osaka accepted her trophy while choking back tears. She never smiled. When asked if her childhood dream of playing against Williams matched the reality, she politely sidestepped the question.

“I’m sorry,” Osaka said. “I know that everyone was cheering for her and I’m sorry it had to end like this.”

She turned to Williams. “I’m really grateful I was able to play with you,” Osaka said. “Thank you.” She bowed her head to Williams, and Williams just took it — no reciprocation, no emotion.

Osaka, a young player at the beginning of her career, showed grit, determination and maturity on that court and off.

She earned that trophy. Let’s recall that this wasn’t Osaka’s first victory over Williams — she beat Williams back in March, causing a hiccup in that great comeback narrative.

Osaka earned her moment as victor at the US Open, one that should have been pure joy. If anything was stolen during this match, it was that.

Source: New York Post Newspaper – Posted September 8, 2018; retrieved September 12, 2018 from: https://nypost.com/2018/09/08/its-shameful-what-us-open-did-to-naomi-osaka/

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