Daniel O’Neil

thoughts and reflections

  • Death of a Dominican Hero: Sonia Pierre

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    Sonia Pierre was both lauded and harassed by the Dominican government for her work to protect the rights of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. While the Dominican Government was threatening to revoke her citizenship, her photo was being displayed downtown Santo Domingo as a Dominican Hero.

    I worked with her in 2008 as we were preparing a proposal to improve conditions in the the bateyes. I was impressed with her drive and vision as well as with the quality of the work that MUDHA was implementing.

    Human rights work is thankless work. The Dominican government knows that it needs to have a clear, coherent policy towards dealing with Haitian migrants, but it is split. There are those who want the cheap labor and those who want to protect Dominican jobs–just as we have in the United States. Haiti has the same split–because Haiti cannot provide jobs or liveable conditions for so many of its citizens, it needs the escape valve provided by the Dominican Republic while at the same time deploring the way its citizens are treated. I saw this as an unsolveable problem and did not focus on it. Sonia Pierre saw this important work and devoted her life to it. 

  • Signs of Progress in Haiti

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    One of the greatest challenges in rebuiding Haiti is fighting the expectations. To some, the picture above is a picture of poverty. Women squatting in the street selling their meager wares surrounded by poor buildings. I fear that a lot of journalists would look at this image and see it as proof that Haiti is not being rebuilt.

    But I know that this is a great victory. I wrote of my visits to this neigborhood last March. At that point, we had just started the rubble removal. I was thrilled to see how our work had transformed the neighborhood. And that is the challenge. If your starting reference is the scene below, the picture above is a beautiful success.

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    I am guilty of having written against the idea of just rebuilding the chaos.  Now I recognize that reconstruction has to go through steps. Just removing the rubble was a huge victory. Getting the unstable houses demolished and the damaged ones repaired was another huge victory. We have to help people rebuild their lives before we can help them to build a new neighborhood.

    We are continuing to move forward. We are working with the local leaders and the mayor to build a better Delmas 32. Little by little, the bird will build its nest.

  • Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance

     

    In anticipation of his book launch, Jonathon has challenged us to write of "a time where you danced with uncertainty…and won." As I wrote in January of last year, my life changed in an instant when the earthquake devestated Port-au-Prince. Within 24 hours, I had crossed the border from the Dominican Republic into Haiti. I had no idea what I would find nor what would happen next. I knew that I needed to jump. I took over management of our Haiti office and went from running a small program to a large, chaotic one in the middle of the worst crisis in the Western hemisphere.

    I knew that I was in way over my head and trusted that I could make my mistakes as quickly as possible and move our operations in the right direction. I leaned in, worked closely with my team, made lots of mistakes, and kept moving forward. The first few months are still a blur. Even a year later, the wild ride continues.

    Before the earthquake, we were doing $10 million worth of work a year. The year of the earthquake, we raised only $2 million–a paultry sum compared to most NGOs, yet we rebuilt our systems, developed new programs, and did $16 million worth of quality work. Next year, we will top $30 million! Not only are we doing twice as much work, but the work is better. My Project Directors are linchpins. We are recognized as leaders in our work. Life is good.

    Except I still battle the butterflies every day. With growth come new challenges–can we hire new people as good as our existing team? How do we keep moving forward? How do I sell our programs to new donors? Am I really leading in the right direction.

    I thank God for the chance to have helped Haiti in the early days after the earthquake and for the trial by fire that has made me a stronger leader. I also miss those days pre-earthquake when my life was quieter and the fights easier. I preordered Jonathon's book, not because I want to go back, but so that I can do a better job of taming the butterflies.

     

  • The 7 Steps to Great Projects E-Book

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    I received a series of great comments on the Linkedin group Chief of Party Exchange to my earlier post Notes to a Newly Appointed Project Director. I reworked the earlier blog post into a free ebook: 7 Steps to Starting a Great Project. It is a six-page essay that focuses on the first seven things that a newly appointed project director should do to ensure that his or her project starts off right and hopefully ends well. It also includes short reviews of six books that every Project Director should read. What do you think? What would include in an expanded version?

  • Are you a Leader or a Manager?

    Exclusive interview with Seth Godin from GiANT Impact on Vimeo for the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast.

    There is practical, everyday management. I am not interested in that. Leadership is not practical and it is not everyday. Management and Leadership are totally different things. You think that you are being a leader, but you are probably being a manager. Seth's opening words in the video.

    I love how blunt Seth is. We all aspire to be leaders, but leadership is scary. Management is following the rules–good accounting, completing the activities in the log framework, writing complete reports. A good manager can squeeze a bit more impact from a project. Management is safe–we know what we need to do and how to measure our success.

    Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. Peter Drucker, and Warren Bennis, as quoted in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) by Stephen R. Covey, p. 101

    The challenge with leadership is that you have to be in front. If the path was known, then a leader would not be needed. I know that I am leading when I can feel the pressure. When a coworker says, "You can't do that.", but I know that I can and think that I will succeed. When I am 100% sure of myself, I am managing. When I am pushing in a new direction and pretty sure that it will work (even if though I will act 100% sure), then I know that I am pushing the envelope.

     

    Steve Farber tells this beautifully in his free audio series (available through this website) and less well in this video (skip the first seven minutes of selling–the core content start after this introduction). His point is that if you are not scared, if you are not experiencing an OS!M, you are not pushing yourself–you are not really leading.

    And this is the challenge. Leading is hard work. It is scary. It is the only way to make a difference. To paraphrase the subtitle of Seth's book Tribes, Lead, because we need you to lead us. So what do you want to do, Manage or Lead?

  • What would it have felt like to live through the Haitian Revolution?

     

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    The story of the Haitian revolution is a bizarrely twisted tail. The revolution began as an uprising by the slaves, became a civil war between the French and the mulatos (mixed race, free people) to a slave revolution. General Toussaint Louverture fought first for the French, then for Spanish, then for Haiti. Then when Haiti finally won its independence, its new rulers put the former slaves right back to work on the plantations. I tried to make sense of the convoluted story through a series of posts on the Our Border website. Isabel Allende has done a beautiful job of painting a picture of life during these turbulent times in her book, Islands beneath the Sea.

    Island Beneath the Sea is the story of life in Haiti before and during the revolution and later in New Orleans as seen by a handful of different characters. The beauty of the story is how each of the different narrators shows how they view the world and what happens: the slave girl who stays with her master even though he repeatedly raped her because it is best for her daughter; the plantation owner who finds ways to justify owning and even beating slaves even though he knows it is wrong; a doctor who is outspoken against slaves but unwilling to admit that his mistress is colored. I was fascinated watching how each character saw and related to the outbreak and spread of the revolution.

    My interest was in what happened in Haiti. I was disappointed when the characters all moved to New Orleans. The book kept me interested, but I was sorry that they never returned to Haiti.

    Island Beneath the Sea is a great addition to the fictional narrative of Haiti’s history along with Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones. 

     

  • A Little Guide to making Big Changes

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    Seth Godin's new book, Poke the Box, is a passionate manifesto to begin something and carry it through. It builds on his earlier work Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?–his guide to committing to making a difference–and the The ShipIt Journal–a workbook for getting a team to committing to completing a project.

    As with all of Seth's recent writings, it is really a collection of short essays on why we need to continually try, embracing failure when it comes, and fighting to completion as often as possible.

    Seth has given me the courage to continually fight for change–to be willing to openly question what others accepted and embrace the role of being a change agent or linchpin. My favorite quote from his earlier book was one from Steve Jobs, "Real Artists Ship." My favorite quote from this book is actually from his twitter feed, "If you don’t finish, it doesn’t really count as starting, and if you don’t start, you’re not poking."

    Seth is a fascinating person to follow because he practices what he preaches. Although he has a string of bestselling books, he turned his back on the publishing business and developed his own publishing company through Amazon. He boldly writes his own rules, tries different strategies ("pokes") to see what works and embraces the risk of failure. He even openly gives away the core story of the book through a free workbook. 

    This is a great book for anyone looking to be the change that they want to see in the world.

  • Video on House Repairs in Haiti

     

    We just put together this video that explains what a green, yellow, and red tagged building is and what we mean by house repairs. Let me know what you think of it.

  • Playing in Water

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    One of my projects as a Peace Corps volunteer was to build a 12m long bridge in the mountains around Kara, Togo. We worked a couple of days a week with just volunteer labor. Some days the work went fast, others it dragged on.  On one particular day, we had the abutments and central column nearly complete. While others were working on the masonry, I became distracted by the light flow of water through the stream. It wasn’t rainy season, so the stream wasn’t wider than half a meter. I became distracted by the stream and decided to rearrange the rocks to allow the water to flow faster. As I worked on the stream, I convinced myself that this work was important because it would allow the water to flow faster and limit the flooding.

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  • Notes to a newly appointed Project Director

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    Dear Newly Named Project Director,

    Congratulations on your new assignment. Whether this is your first stint as a project director or if you have done it many times, this is an exciting moment. We are glad to have hired you. You have a chance to make a significant difference in this new endeavor. If it is a brand new project, then you are facing the challenge of coloring in a blank slate. If it is an ongoing project, then you have the opportunity to push it in new directions.

    We expect you to do more than to keep the project on track, write reports, and balance the project's checkbook (although you must do these three perfectly!). We selected you because we need someone exceptional to make our work remarkable. To get you off on the right foot, I suggest that you start by focusing on the following challenges:

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