President's message
If board meetings are your calling, SCNA is calling on you

Perhaps I am an ingrate, but I was not completely satisfied by our November SCNA election results. All of our incumbent directors who ran for seats on the SCNA Board were reelected. However, unlike prior years, we did not succeed in attracting any new candidates. I am hoping some of our members may have noticed this lapse and have made a new year's resolution to apply for appointment to one of our several vacant posts.

I confess this is a flip flop for me. When I first joined the board I was a captive of the logic that shrinking the size of the board would improve it. Why, that would cut the length of meetings by reducing the number of speakers and induce healthy competition for seats if they were not so plentiful! Well, experience trumps untutored logic in this area as in most.

Having sat on our board for a few years now, I have seen that the length of meetings is not a function of the number of members. A larger group can be expeditious if there is a shared value about disciplined use of debate. When people abide by the core of parliamentary procedure and focus and limit debate to clear motions for action, a lot of time is saved.

To paraphrase a recent New Yorker article on corporate governance, we have a good decision-making group because we engage in "task conflict"-fighting over the best solutions to particular problems-rather than "relationship conflict"-interpreting differences of opinion as differences of character. You might be surprised how interesting it is to serve on the SCNA Board. New issues are always arising to make you think. Perhaps you don't like McMansions, but you do like to see folks growing vegetables in their front yard, so why is it okay to legally restrict one thing but not another?

This year we will likely deal with the Curtis Park Village project application. We will need all the help we can get to adequately and accurately represent the neighborhood on this. Meanwhile, back at Sierra 2, we have a wonderful but challenging facility, housing a thriving institution, which we need to keep running and to improve.

Our board members supply the energy and much of the volunteer power essential to meet these challenges. I ask you to please consider helping out. If you are interested in making a few new friends and racking up some good neighbor karma, please call the Sierra 2 office at 452-3005 and let us know of your interest.

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