Intelligent Disobedience (Oct 20, 2020)

ANNOUNCEMENTS

♦ NEW PRESIDENT-ELECT: CONGRATULATIONS TO P.P. DICK BAUER who has agreed to become our new President-Elect for next year 2021-2. He did a great job last time as President, so we know he will make a better president this time! Thank you Dick !

♦ "IN PERSON" MEETINGS: President David, had the idea that we could have an "in person" meeting at Mark Beil's backyard. The date is set for October 27th (out doors and with proper Corona Virus restrictions.) All members are now invited (but no spouses or guests) Thank you Mark for your generosity. President David has written to each of you that you will be responsible for dinner. He has arranged to have Panera's restaurant to deliver your order. Wine and Beer, soft drinks will be provided. We start at 6:00 p.m.

♦ DONATIONS TO POLIO+ - During the month of October, ALL donations to Polio+ will be matched by the District- so it's double the money for Polio+, AND will be doubled again by the Melinda Gates Foundation. Wow!

♦ EFFIE YEAW PROJECT - Habit Restoration will occur on Saturday, November 14 at 9:00 am and about 14 people have signed up to help- so says Dick Bauer. He will contact each person about the event.

♦ World Food Day: Friday, October 16th: Some of our Carmichael Rotarians showed up and worked to put together food packages for Rise Against Hunger: The Roe family Stan and Nan, daughter and grandson and Jay and Vicky Boatwright. Photos below:

FUTURE PROGRAMS

►OCTOBER 27: Friendship Meeting at Mark Beil's place- no program

►NOVEMBER 3: Brian Gladden "Making Your Competition Irrelevant"

Intelligent Disobedience

Gopal Kapur, consults, writes, and educates on management excellence. He has authored three college level textbooks and lectured at Harvard University, The Brookings Institution, University of California Berkeley and Davis, The Commonwealth Club, and many Rotary clubs. He was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award by the President of India.

Gopal was featured in the Rotarian magazine May 2009 and September 2019.

He is the founder of FamilyGreenSurvival, a not-for-profit, with the mission to EndLocalHunger.

From his interest in creative cooking, he has developed SMART Cuisine, that produces wholesome, beautiful looking, tasty dishes in 15 minutes. GUARANTEED.

We were very honored to welcome Gopal (virtually) to our Rotary Club, to give us a talk on the unusual subject of Intelligent Disobedience. Gopal talked about the leader in a company who gets an idea for a half baked project and pushes it on to the project manager and staff. The question is, how do those involved mitigate or limit the damage of the project. Gopal provided for us a quite extensive and detailed slide show about what to do about the situation. One basis of his theory about avoiding disaster in a project lies in the training of dogs for blind people. That dogs are trained to disobey their masters when they know that obeying his/her command will bring harm. (To illustrate from our Club's experience, We had a guest lecturer this January, Dan Mckay , who gave the example where he was about to step out into the street with his dog and cane, but there was a truck with a ladder extending out (chest high) and his dog refused to obey his command, saving him from harm).

Gopal went through many examples where using intelligent disobedience might have saved the day. One example he gave was of the Red Lobster restaurant which promoted having 3 and 4 helpings of Crab at 679 eateries. The results caused crab prices to escalate and triggered a shares sell-off, wiping out $405.9 million dollars of value in a single session! Might they have been more careful and researched their sales program better? Might they have tried the program on a smaller scale?

Gopal has given us a link to his full detailed presentation that I have below. Be sure to look it over:

IntDisob or https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GRn5_3tpwiefnFcP78SehUxC74qhflU7/view?usp=sharing

After a lively Q and A session, President Thorman thanked Gopal for his interesting and informative presentation and, I think, pleased him by letting him know that a book will be donated, in his name to the Carmichael Library ( subsidiary of the Sacramento Public Library )

President David Thorman opened the 14th "virtual meeting" of the 2020-2021 Rotary Year on the 20th of October He brought his "Big Bell" with him and rang it to officially start the meeting.

The "pledge" was performed by our esteemed member Mark Beil,

and he gave a short "Thought for the Day" as follows:

EXPLANATION: A BELL RINGER IS SOMEONE WHO DONATES $100 TO THE CLUB IN A GIVEN YEAR; A GONG BONGER IS ONE WHO DONATES AN ADDITIONAL $100 TO EITHER THE CLUB OR R.I. FOUNDATION (FOR GENERAL OR SPECIFIC PURPOSE)