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Call for Submissions for the October Carnival of Trust

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The fifth Carnival of Trust is on its way and will go live on Monday October 1st. The deadline for entries is this coming Thursday September 27th. This edition will be hosted by Steve Cranford of Whisper . Ultimately branding is about trust, and Steve should deliver an exellent carnival.

As I wrote when announcing the first Carnival of Trust my hope and ambition for the carnival is to begin establishing a home base, a center of gravity, for people who are interested in fostering greater trusted relationships in various realms of the world.

While my own material is primarily business-oriented, the Carnival of Trust will be explicitly more broad than business alone. Trust is heavily personal in nature, and I hope the submissions will reflect that—postings that deal with personal trust, business trust, and political trust are welcome, as well as pieces on the nature of trust.

There is a hard limit of 10 postings per Carnival. The host will personally make the decisions about inclusion, in an inevitably subjective manner intended to push the thinking ahead in those broad areas of trust.

I invite, encourage and urge you to submit pieces for the Carnival. You can submit them here.

The first, second, third and fourth carnivals of trust had some great articles I urge you to read if you haven’t already.

And I look forward to reading your articles in the October Carnival.

Customer Strategy? Or Strategy vs. Customers? Part 1 of 2.

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The October 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review is out; in snailmailboxes, anyway (at HBR, no early advantage is given to electronic subscribers, unlike most other publications.)

The issue provides such a juicy entrée to business thinking that I can’t cover it with one blog posting. Look for the Part 2, next posting, which will pit Amazon against credit card companies.

But first—let’s talk business and global warming. The entire Forethought section this issue is devoted to “the climate business and the business climate.”

No fewer than 7 articles address the issue, led by the reigning king of corporate strategy, Michael Porter, co-authoring with Forest Reinhardt. Porter’s life’s work has been to cement the link between strategy and competition. It’s hard to overstate the effect his work has had, even on those who don’t know him by name. The term “sustainable competitive advantage” is, in large part, his handiwork.

After cementing that worldview in business, Porter applied it to countries, then to non-profits; and now to global warming. What, you might ask, does corporate strategy have to do with global warming?

Porter gives a quintessentially Porterian answer. First, you might be able to make money on it (what with higher energy prices, green policies, et al).

But that can be just operational. The bigger reasons for companies to think climate, says Porter, are strategic. You might be able to stake out a position in an emerging market; or prevent a competitor from doing so. Walmart’s emission reduction programs don’t just save money; they “will be strategic if [Walmart can]…reduce emissions in a way that is difficult for its smaller rivals to replicate.”

As Porter and Reinhardt put it:

While many companies may still think of global warming as a corporate social responsibility issue, business leaders need to approach it in the same hardheaded manner as any other strategic threat or opportunity.

I submit there is something profoundly wrong with this logic.

There is something wrong with business thinking when the core guiding strategic concept is the pursuit of continued competitive domination by corporate entities. When the best thinking business can bring to bear on global warming boils down to the dictum to view it like "any other strategic threat or opportunity."

In a world that is networked, globalized, outsourced and inter-dependent, the last thing we need is an old ideology centered on companies “built to last” who are all about “playing hardball” to achieve “sustainable competitive advantage.” That mode of thinking has proven itself incapable of dealing with the economic issues of "the commons" time and time again, on a less-than-global scale. Why should it prove any better when the stakes really are global?

Is that really the best we can do for a guiding set of beliefs? I think not.

I am not suggesting that companies ought to be do-gooders. Nor am I suggesting that companies ought to calculate political pressure and react according tof the relative power of broader constituencies and their enlightened self-interest (an approach responsible for “business ethics” being perceived as an oxymoron). I am not suggesting “co-opetition” as a solution.

I am suggesting we need an entirely different business ethos—a logic as powerfully and concisely stated and as deeply embedded at the heart of business as competition was when Porter wrote in the late 70s—but an ethos based on relationships, networks, synergy, inter-dependency, collaboration, customer-supplier relations, and mutuality.

Do the other 6 articles in HBR’s forethought section offer that ethos? Not really. One talks about the stakeholder pressures that will be brought to bear on companies; another about the value of transparency. All are stuck in the same root assumption: business is about the sustained competitive advantage of companies.

Elsewhere in the same HBR issue, however, there lurks a clue about a viable alternative approach.

Stay tuned to this blog for Part 2.

 

Quarterly Earnings and the Addiction to Lying: Can Mattel Show the Way Out?

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If you lie, the best time to ‘fess up is immediately. “Immediately” is the only time that “oops” can constitute a full apology.

The longer you wait, the more “oops” looks like a dot in the rear-view mirror. Soon, to make amends, you have to confess. And probably explain. And the longer you wait, the more you have to express remorse, do penance (or pretend that you are) and other forms of disaster recovery.

No wonder CEOs have a hard time with quarterly earnings: the more quarterly earnings increases they show, the harder it is for them to show a quarterly loss; the more they’ll lie to keep the string going.

That’s the conclusion of a very clever study in the spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance. Its authors are James N. Myers and Linda A. Myers, and reported by Mark Hulbert, in the September 22 NY Timess, How Many Quarters In A Row Can Quarterly Earnings Grow? (Hulbert is a rarity—an analytical finance type who speaks completely in common English).

The profs analyzed the heck out of tons of data to answer the question: “absent manipulation, how many companies over a 42-year period would have been expected to put together a 20-consecutive quarter string of increased earnings?”

The professors calculated that no more than 46 companies during that 42-year period should have had earnings-per-share growth for 20 consecutive quarters. But 587 companies actually reported such strings of growth, so the professors conclude that their findings constitute “prima facie evidence of earnings management.”

Additionally: companies that had increased the same percentage over five years but in less linear fashion showed six percentage points less in stock appreciation.

Finally, the longer the string of positive earnings reports, the sharper the plunge in stock price on announcement of a losing quarter. As the professor says:

Together, these various findings paint a picture of extraordinary pressure on corporate management to sustain strings of consecutive earnings increases for as long as possible.

When I was in b-school, we talked about volatility of earnings—basically, a straight line is better than jagged. But we also talked about “quality of earnings,” which suggested that cooking the books (I don’t mean illegal, just, you know, cooking) was worse than not.

I don’t recall realizing there was a tension between those two goals, but it’s clear to me in retrospect that the more powerful of the two in the market was the appearance of low volatility.

In other words, cooking the books is rewarded by Wall Street; and the more you cook them, the more you’d better keep on cookin’.

Is that yet more proof for the cynics? It certainly sounds that way.

Then again, just because everyone’s lying doesn’t mean truth-telling doesn’t work; it could just mean no one’s willing to really try it.

Which brings us to Mattel, whose CEO apologized to China on Friday, September 21, saying China had gotten a bum rap for manufacturing flaws, when design was at fault.

Mattel’s stock price gapped up Friday about 4%, and stayed up on the day. A vote for quality of earnings? One day proves nothing, but as Rick Newman at US News and World Report says,

Mattel messed up, but now the company is bringing a welcome degree of transparency to an issue that seems complex and murky to most of us. So hurry up and pay attention, before the politicians and fearmongers muddle it up.

Was Mattel’s apology genuine, or forced by the Chinese?  I suspect the markets couldn’t care less.

 Could transparency actually be worth financial returns? Now there’s a thought.

The Cancer of Short-term Thinking

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Western capitalism is fighting a form of business cancer. And the most virulent form of it is short-termism.

In physical cancer, some cells go haywire and turn viciously against the body. This is also what happens when certain core beliefs are perverted or taken to extremes. Some examples—the beliefs that:

• greed is good (Hollywood simplification)
• individual pursuit of selfish aims yields public good (mis-translated Adam Smith)
• pursuit of short-term corporate goals ends in long-term social success (what’s good for General Motors hasn’t been good for America for some time now).

Those and other beliefs have resulted in rampant short-termism. A few examples, “ripped from the headlines:”

1. The trend in private equity toward front-end deal fees. Gretchen Morgensen’s NYTimes article quotes Michael Jensen, emeritus of Harvard Business School and the “father of private equity:”
“…these fees are going to end up reducing the productivity of the model… People are doing this out of some short-run focus on increasing revenues."
In other words, private equity is good when it subjects bureaucratic managers to the pressure of markets, with say a 3-5 year timeframe. But when the privateers themselves succumb to the lure of instant front-end fees, the greed snake is eating its own tail.

2. The trend in the mortgage industry to convert relationships to transactions—from integrated loan-making and loan-holding, to separating the entire process into various stakeholders—most of whom get their money up front, now. Short term.

3. The IBGYBG mentality in investment banking during several market crashes detailed by Richard Bookstaber in his book A Demon of Our Own Design, that resulted in people making fast deals that would explode on investors down the road, but that paid off nicely up front for the dealmakers, who said not to worry, because—"I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone," it’ll be someone else’s problem then.

4. Young financiers opting out of an MBA because the opportunity exists to make so much more money in the short term:
“With the growth of hedge funds, you’re getting a lot of really smart people who are getting paid a lot very young,” says Arjuna Rajasingham, 29, an analyst and a trader at a hedge fund in London. “I know it’s a bit of a short-term view, but it’s hard to walk away from something that’s going really well.” Yup on both counts.

5. The current residential real estate recession, driven heavily by speculative buyers betting well beyond their means on continued high prices—“I’ll pay off the loan when I flip it.”

6. The longer term trend in business toward “alignment” of processes—which often assumes the only way to long-term profit is to ensure that every short-term measure is itself profitable.

7. Quarterly earnings pressure, which was one of the original drivers of private equity, back when PE was doing some good.

8. Private equity firms selling equity to the public: “a non sequitur in both language and economics,” according to Gretchen Morgensen’s paraphrase of Michael Jensen .
The private equity movement initially shook up stodgy companies that were permanently-funded by stock, where inefficient managers could hang out draining away value for decades. Private equity would buy them and insist on returns in 3-5 years; it left managers no place to hide, and produced real value returns. But when the 3-5 year people themselves start selling permanent stock to investors, they have become what they started out to fight. Which means they’re either stupid or venal. And while I usually opt for stupidity in explaining conspiracy cases, in this one I’d put money on venal.

Is there any relief? Or is this just another case of cheap hustlers exploiting weak human nature that goes with every business cycle?

Three antidotes can work against short-termism. One is pain. Suffering may not be a sufficient condition for social change, but it’s usually a necessary one.

Second is education. Awareness creation can help.

The third is leading thinkers, and there are some hopeful signs. Martha Rogers has begun talking about a lifetime financial perspective on customers:

"Creating maximum value from your customers involves optimization — balancing current-period profits against decreases or increases in customer lifetime values, to maximize your “Return on Customer.”

This isn’t new in finance, accustomed to present-value thinking in pricing financial assets. But it’s new to management thinking, accustomed to quarterly EPS. Robbing future customers robs enterprise value, says Martha. And she’s right.

The aforementioned Michael Jensen announced last month a paper he wrote with Werner Erhard (the controversial founding father of EST training, and more recently of Landmark Forum) on the subject of—get this—integrity.

Here’s a tasty quote from the abstract:

We demonstrate that the application of cost-benefit analysis to one’s integrity guarantees you will not be a trustworthy person (thereby reducing the workability of relationships), and with the exception of some minor qualifications ensures also that you will not be a person of integrity (thereby reducing the workability of your life). Therefore your performance will suffer. The virtually automatic application of cost-benefit analysis to honoring one’s word (an inherent tendency in most of us) lies at the heart of much out-of-integrity and untrustworthy behavior in modern life.

They are right too. You can’t fake trust; trust is a paradox; motives matter. The act of justifying trust by its economic value destroys not only trust, but its economic value. The best economic results come as byproducts, not goals.

Can clearer business thinking beat short-termism? It can’t hurt.

High-Tech Divorce

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The nastiness level of divorces has been going up, thanks to technology, according to the The New York Times Business Section’s Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce on Sept 15, 2007.  Bits and bytes are subpoenaed or surreptitiously obtained from cellphones, blackberries and PCs, and used to deadly advantage by plaintiffs and defendants alike in divorce cases.

This can’t be good for the causes of marital therapy or divorce mediation.

On the other hand, private investigators and lawyers make out well.  And all this technology is causing privacy laws to be rewritten.

This story is being written as being about privacy: how technology is increasingly invading privacy, and how our laws are evolving to protect—or not protect— our privacy.

But is it just about privacy?  What about trust?

What’s striking about the article is it’s an equal opportunity horror story.  It’s horrible to find out the awful things your spouse was doing all those years, the article suggests.  Yet it’s equally horrible to find out that your spouse is planting GPS devices on your car or hiring PIs to track down your every little cyber-indiscretion.

So, which is it? Is it worse to be the spy? Or the spied upon?

The subtext of both is victimhood, and an unwillingness to take responsibility. In short, a shortage of trust.

If I conduct a long-term affair, with elaborate attempts to hide it, then basically I’m a schmoe without much moral ground to stand on. If my spouse discovers me, I have little ethical room for indignation.  I have violated her trust.

If I suspect my spouse of conducting an affair, and choose to buy covert screen-copying software or filch her Blackberry rather than directly and calmly confronting her about my suspicion—then I am a sneak and a thief, and have already convicted her in absentia by my decision to go covert.

Some may quibble about the relative nastiness of each side, but basically it’s all ugly. It’s all about mistrust, lying, and the inability to constructively confront.

What it’s not about is privacy laws. Yet that’s the buzz.  Is email admissible in court? If it was a family computer, maybe so; if not, maybe not. Were passwords shared?  Then emails may be admissible.  And so on.

That’s how we get statements like this, from the article:

“If I were to tell you I have a pure ethical conscience over what I did, I’d be lying,” he said. But he also pointed to companies that have Internet policies giving them the right to read employee e-mail messages. “When you’re in a relationship like a marriage, which is emotional as well as, candidly, a business, I think you can look at it in the same way,” he said.

When did a marital  “ethical issue of conscience” become directly comparable to corporate policies on reading employees’ email?

When we started defining issues of ethics and trust solely in terms of issues of the law and privacy, that’s when.

Technology certainly raises interesting issues about privacy, as it does about private property and copyright law, for example.  But when you have a hammer, the world can look like nails.

We have a hammer—technology. The world is starting to look like the nail of the law—the answer to privacy, property rights, and patent issues.  We need to remember there are also screws and glues, not just nails.  There are relationships, trust, respect, virtues, transparency—even marriages. 

If you have to define marriage solely in terms of legal privacy rights, you might as well be describing flood insurance policies.  Same for any relationship.

Privacy matters can sometimes be trivial next to trust matters.
 

Business Ethics and Self-Orientation

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The Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series has a track record of picking fascinating topics, even if I’ve occasionally accused them of over-analyzing the obvious.  Not so in a current article.

Why We Aren’t as Ethical as We Think We Are, by Tenbrunsel et al, is not only a terrific topic, but—in my humble opinion—it’s treated very provocatively. It raises big issues well.

Here’s HBSWK’s abstract:

People commonly predict that they will behave more ethically in the future than they actually do. When evaluating past (un)ethical behavior, they also believe they behaved more ethically than they actually did. These misperceptions, both of prediction and of recollection, have important ramifications for the distinction between how ethical we think we are and how ethical we really are, as well as understanding how such misperceptions are perpetuated over time…Key concepts include:
• All individuals have an innate tendency to engage in self-deception around their own ethical behavior.
• Organizations worried about ethics violations should pay attention to understanding these psychological processes at the individual level rather than focus solely on the creation of formal training programs and education around ethics codes.

That second conclusion contrasts with the usual business approach to "ethics."  Many corporate “ethics” initiatives amount either to probabilistic analyses or to brainwashing about political correctness.

Harvard Business School’s own ethics program is, if I recall, built around analyzing three constituencies: business, the law, and society (the latter including prevailing norms and mores).  The manager’s job is to intelligently balance the response.

This approach doesn’t distinguish between “ethics” and corporate strategy.  If the overriding goal is the long-term survival and success of the company—which it nearly always is (think "sustainable competitive advantage")—then "balancing" is just another exercise in corporate optimization.  The concept of a “conscience” in such models is a curiosity that seems to exist solely in others—just another data point or constraint to be optimized.

Yet how can “ethics” be discussed absent a treatment of the formation of conscience?

It can’t.  To their credit, the authors suggest conscience is individually meaningful, and affected by emotional processes. They say the psychological angle may be heretical to some ethicists—but I think the personal angle is even more heretical to most business thinkers, stuck in modes of alignment and processes, where "conscience" is an alien concept.

The article has meaning beyond ethics.  Look at this pattern.  People think they are more ethical than others; and they rewrite their past (and future) ethicality relative to current actions.

This is also a pattern not just of ethics, but of self-orientation.

A study asked faculty and students to rate how often they thought about the other group, and how often they thought the other group thought about them.  Yup—students and faculty alike thought mostly about themselves—but students assumed that faculty were also absorbed by their thoughts of students.  And faculty assumed that students were consumed by thoughts of faculty.  Everyone projects their own levels of self-absorption on to others, no one noticing the true similarity—self-absorption itself.

In its low-grade form, this is human nature.  In extremis, it is narcissism.  Another extreme form is encountered in alcoholics.  In both cases, the individual projects an over-inflated sense of one’s own importance on to others. (For narcissists, the projection is always positive—for alcoholics, it’s an oscillating  sine wave of positivity and self-revulsion).

Narcissists and alcoholics—I suspect—aren’t high on ethical behavior charts either.

Which suggests the ability to get out of oneself and to see things as they are are prerequisites both for accurate observation of the outside world, and for ethical behavior.  

Which suggests that strategy and ethics actually share something—an innate focus on the Other.  Self-centered strategies, those built around optimizing selfishness, are ultimately self-destroying; good strategies are intimately bound up with markets, customers, employees, suppliers.   Ditto for ethics; an ethics built solely on corporate success is an oxymoron.  Ethics require us to be intimately bound up with others.  

Hmmm…strategic and ethical analyses share an external view…both have a psychological component…business is about people as people, not just as objects of behavioral vectors …

This is not your normal business writing.  Kudos to HBSWK, and to the authors.

 

Two Pros on Powerful Presentations

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“If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

This truism is true in many venues. One is in the field of communications.

There are people who are expert in crafting presentations. Others, in body language. Still others in the use of voice, and others in what we say.

But the really good communicators know how to use the full toolkit, even if they might lead from one tool or another. They manage to find themes that cut across the functional skills of the trade, and convey holistic ideas to those of us who must speak.

Two pros in the business of standing-and-delivering in the business arena are Steven Pearce (in the UK) and Sims Wyeth (in the US).

Treat yourself to Pearce’s Straight Talker’s Manifesto. It covers a range of suggestions, and manages to convey a look while doing so that is itself an education about communication.

Sims wrote The Three Commandments of Presenting in an excellent publication from the past, Consulting To Management, or C2M. It lives on his article, which reminds us Thou Shalt Not Be Arrogant, Confusing, or Boring. He does so without committing any of these sins.

Good stuff for all of us who would communicate better, and think the world is looking a bit nailish lately.

When On-message Marketing Makes for Off-trust Sales

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Being “on-message” is a sort of  First Principle for marketers.  (You may be more aware of the term through politicians, who in recent years have become astute consumers of marketing technologies).

The “on-message” concept is closely allied to the broader strategic term “alignment.” The core idea is—if you get all the parts humming in sync, you will certainly avoid contradictions, and probably create synergies.

Who could argue with that?

Well, like any good concept taken to excess, it can turn nasty.  That’s what happens when marketing pushes the “on message” concept too hard onto sales.

What caught my eye was the cover story of the September 2007 issue of PharmaVoice (though it’s not an issue unique to Pharma—it can be found in professional services or technology as well):

The pharmaceutical industry can no longer afford to be off-message—not even once—in this exceedingly competitive marketplace…
Innovative pharmaceutical companies are redefining the communications process by tearing down the walls between the different factions: agencies, sales, marketing, and public relations.

By including “sales” with agencies, PR and marketing in a broader process called “communication,” sales is potentially being set up for lowered trust.

Sales should be about dialogue between seller and customer. That means two-way conversation—synchronous—at the individual level. PR and marketing by contrast are largely one-way—asynchronous—a monologue, and almost always one-to-many, rather than individual (one-to-one marketing is largely aspirational).

Customers have no problem with marketing, as long as it doesn’t claim to be personal and synchronous. Customers have no problem with sales, as long as it is a true personal dialogue.

Trouble happens when one mode pretends to be the other. And that is what happens when sales is forced to operate mainly in the “on-message” mode. For a salesperson to be “on-message” means they are “off-dialogue” and asynchronous—while still pretending not to be. Result: customer disconnect.

Basically, we don’t trust people who insist on mouthing ad slogans at us.

That doesn’t mean salespeople should be random content-generators, or that they should shy away from marketing dialogues. It simply means that, past some point, treating sales as an extension of marketing will erode sales effectiveness.

What that point is, is hard to define. Just where do the plains end, and the mountains begin? The fact that the transition point may be hard to define doesn’t mean mountains don’t exist.

Think of it this way. If marketing is in charge of all your sales collateral materials—you may be an “on-message” abuser. If marketing is scripting selected sentences at the individual word level—you may be an “on-message” abuser. If marketing gives sales a list of “don’t-talk-about” topics—you may be an “on-message” abuser.

If you believe sales could and should be replaced by significant improvements in targeting and delivery via alternate media—then you probably are an on-message abuser, because you don’t believe in the unique value of human one-to-one contact.

Humans have their own message wave-length. And if you want your message to be heard, you’d better start with hearing theirs.  Being on message isn’t much good if it means no one’s listening.
 

Trusted Politicians

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Sound like an oxymoron?

There’s good reason for that.  Not just in fact, but in principle, it is hard to square politics with trust. Trusting a politician may be an exercise in pre-meditated resentment.

Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara once said,  referring to interacting with the press, “never answer the question you are asked; always answer the question you wanted to be asked.”

That may or may not be a good recipe for politicians; it is certainly bad advice for anyone who would be trusted. It speaks volumes to the desire to control others’ opinions, refuse to engage, and to willingness to appear evasive.

Mark Twain’s comment, “Congress is the only distinctly criminal class” is typical of our desire to believe otherwise—and our continued disappointment when the next politician reveals his colors. “Meet the new boss—same as the old boss,” sang Roger Daltrey years ago.

There’s a reason. Politics requires a continual calculation of how to align with the majority. A minority politician is, pretty soon, a losing politician. Passing legislation requires convincing others; getting elected requires convincing others. The art (or science, increasingly) of politics is combining effective majorities across various issues, while minimizing the perception of the minorities as being on the other side.

That means there is virtually no single principle that a successful politician can afford to consistently endorse.

Yet all the while, we engage with politicians in a mutual conspiracy to deny that this is the case. We insist on believing that politicians believe in principle; and they in turn use the language of principle, in order to gain our votes.

Then we become outraged in the cases when politicians are caught violating their principles—whether it’s Republican homophobes caught with their pants down, or Democratic social liberals invested in subprime mortgages.

Logically, we should not be enraged. Humanly, we are. Because we want to trust, and trust requires some measure of consistency around principles.

The answer may lie partly in losing our innocence. Trust in politics arguably requires term limits. Only lame ducks can afford to vote from principle.

On the other hand, to surrender to cynicism and accept politics as merely an exercise in coalition-building is to move in the direction of single-issue politics—abandoning the middle, and any hope for unity.

Or, to continue to hope for the best—a politician with just enough principles and persuasive capability to actually sway opinion. To create a majority where none existed.  A real leader, in short.

Well, hope springs eternal.
 

An Honest Wedding

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I went to an unusual wedding last week in Western Michigan.  It doesn’t matter whose (except to note it wasn’t mine)—call them John and Jane.

Bride and groom are both in their early 50s. She has two daughters, each in their early 20s. He has a son 16 and a daughter 11. It’s a second marriage for both.

The minister defined eclectic; she had spiritual credentials from several traditions. The ceremony featured candles and white rose petals, and was held upstairs from the minister’s husband’s bike shop.  Of the nine attendees (which includes bride, groom, minister and children), five of us chose the optional bare feet mode.

The minister said:

Like all weddings, this is a joyous celebration, a union of two soul-mates who have found each other.  A time for joy.

Yet joy isn’t the only thing that happens at a wedding like this.  There are three others who are not here, but whose presence is very real, and felt by all who are here.

We would not be honest if we did not speak of them.  And honesty is vital if this marriage, and all in this room, are to  thrive and prosper.  And so we will be honest here today.

One presence is a deceased mother, who left behind a husband—John—their 13-year old boy, and their 8-year old girl. Her children here today miss her; John senses her presence too; and Jane feels it as well.

Second is a divorced husband—the father, with Jane, to these two daughters in their twenties. The daughters see their mother with a new husband, and seek new definitions of “home” and “parent” and “marriage.”

The third is cancer.  It was cancer that claimed John’s former wife, the teens’ mother.  But Jane understands too—because Jane herself is a two-time cancer survivor.  The children know what cancer means; and John and Jane have their eyes wide open about it.
 
These three presences raise powerful issues for everyone in this room—which is why we speak of them.

As the minister spoke, I’m sure I saw the four children become more at ease.  I felt it, and think the other adults did as well.

Afterwards we ate fruit and cake.  Then we drove to Lake Michigan, changed into shorts and got wet and red from the end-of-summer sun.

We talked about truth-telling, of living in the moment.  But mostly we talked about being free of labels and roles, of learning to see and accept things just as they are.

It was a fine wedding.  An honest wedding.