12 Hours to Save the World

Quatro --- Feed your troops. An army does not travel well on an empty stomach. Feed your staff, with food for thought, with opportunities for learning and training, with chances to strutt and show their stuff, and with real physical rewards and signs of appreciation.

Stanley Bing said it best in Sun Tzu was a Sissy, feed your staff food, splurge for a lunch, a dinner, pizza or cookies, but make sure that your staff is fed first. I worked for someone in the past who never fed staff, never took staff to lunch, individually, as a group or as the entire team. And all suffered, quietly and in confusion, that an individual who made three times the salary of 90% of the staff never expended personal funds to thank folks for their sacrifices.

So others fed staff.

Stanley Bing is very much a man, so this idea of pleasure or rational in feeding others isn't just a woman thing.

For some reason, full of chargrin, I have become attracted to the Food Channel. It may be the slowness of summer, the 100 degree weather outside, or a lull in work coming to OpenSky-wi, and the knowledge that the bank account is dwindling, or a combination of it all. Whatever, the mix has led me to an incredible desire to think about food. Not cupcake wars, but big cooking challenges between teams of chefs and their sous and prep chefs, going hard-on to build the best meals for picky, prickly and pointedly-persnickity judges. I find myself considering how I would approach the challenges, what I would do with the various food substances that appear in the mystery boxes, whether I could come up with an eggs benedict without a recipe or handle the pressure of things catching on fire that shouldn't, people saying your food was wrong or tasted awful and watching your hope bleed away as well as the juice of lambchop before you could get it to table.

Then it struck me --- these restaurant and cooking wars remind me of grant submittal season, the up to the last minute deadlines, the scramble to compose a proposal that meets the requirements handed to you in the RFP, is structured as required, and fits on the page limit with the budget limits and all those forms and supportive material. Points are awaiting and every element needs to be completed as precisely as possible.

And yet somehow taking all those precise elements in consideration, what drives us to complete each proposal and win our own version of the restaurant wars are the individual ingredients and grit and creativity in our presented solution to the challenge in question.

We lay out those individual pages in the RFP and get out our magnifiying lenses and go over line by line --- the only way we actually can see between the lines is with this magnifying glass, and we begin to see where there is flexibility, where we have space to wiggle, and a great heart comes to us the creators and a slight thrill goes through us.

The menu --- I love this part. Lay out the entire proposal on a tight spreadsheet, and get it all on just two pages so it makes sense and then you can build a meal that becomes a feast.

And then your proposal is funded and you are feeding many, many people.

That's the best result of restaurant wars.

Let me hear from you if you want to talk grant submittal via restuarant wars!!!

Now go eat and feed someone.