Out of Africa and Into the Wilds of America’s Corporate Jungles
Drums at the Doubletree Inn.
Is your corporate team dispirited? Are your communicators not communicating? Has your can-do attitude being undone by inter-office factionalism?
Enter Arthur Hull and his African drums, percussion instruments, repertoire of tribal songs, and a list of clients that stretches from Apple Computer to Levi Strauss to the Canadian National Defense Department.
“I may not be a master drummer,” Hull said, “but I’m a master facilitator.”
This week Hull, a 40-ish pixie whose main gig is teaching African drumming at UC Santa Cruz, will bring his motivational wiles to San Diego.
At the Doubletree hotel near Horton Plaza, Hull will create an African village for the annual Management Symposium of Prudential California Realty.
Seventy PCR managers (including 15 from San Diego), battle-scarred veterans of the sluggish real estate market, will sing, play and dance under Hull’s gentle direction: all in the name of reinvigorating the spirit and steam-cleaning the lines of communication.
Ask about his techniques and you can expect a torrent of words and excitement:
“We sing, maybe a Haitian bolero, or a Suffi song, back and forth, call and answer. It can get highly intricate and beautiful. All of a sudden they understand that they’re all a part of the same song; they’re just as important as any other part; they relate to people as people, not as job descriptions; that’s the village metaphor.”
Hull has done seminars from Silicon Valley to Moscow. A standard price is $600 for four hours.
“I’m always amazed at how he manages to build up trust with a white-shirt, corporate audience,” said Trish Bergstrom, whose Northern California management consulting business has employed Hull for numerous clients. “He uses humor and exuberance and passion. He’s almost elfin and very childlike.”
Yes, but for real estate brokers? These are people whose bible is the Multiple Listing Service and who go around chanting, “Location, Location, Location.”
Not so, say the folk at Prudential California Realty.
“We’re cutting edge,” said Rolinda Smith, regional director of the Beverly Hills division of PCR. “We’re willing to try something different.”
A Different Kind of Rage
There’s been much talk about black rage as an element in the Los Angeles riots.
But did another kind of rage--the rage of L.A. cops toward their superiors--play a role in the Rodney King beating that started the city down the path to violence?
Norman Stamper, executive assistant police chief in San Diego, thinks it’s a possibility.
On Friday, Stamper was scheduled to deliver a keynote address on “Community-Based Policing” to a conference at the University of San Diego about American social problems.
Instead, he discarded his prepared text and talked of the Los Angeles tragedy.
He called the King beating “cowardly and brutal” but said he hoped it would not lead to a “backlash against a very, very fragile movement” to give beat cops more authority to decide how to handle their jobs.
Stamper, who has tried to “demilitarize” the San Diego PD, said the paramilitary structure of most police departments, where cops are told to take orders and keep their mouths shut, breeds anger in the ranks:
“My theory is that every third blow of the baton, every fourth kick to the ribs of Rodney King, was a shot at Daryl Gates or a sergeant or a captain or some other functionary of the Los Angeles Police Department who made the mistake of treating a grown-up professional police officer like a dependent, 3-year-old child.”
Stamper knows his views will not make him popular with brass from other departments:
“I’ll take a whole lot of gas for having said what I’ve said to you this morning.”
Can’t Beat This Seminar for Fun
The joy (and pain) of learning.
The Learning Annex today presents a seminar on “Fetishes and Fantasies” with “internationally known dominatrix” Ava Taurel, from Scandinavia.
Among other things, Ava will discourse on “toys and techniques.” Organizers say more than 100 people have paid $29 in advance.
If you’re interested and free, it’s 1 p.m. at the San Diego Princess Resort. If you’re tied up and can’t make it, Ava will understand.
