Sean Horgan @seanhorgan - Tumblr Blog

List of resources for Ukraine

Note: I haven't vetted all of these resources -- use caution when sharing any personal information.

List of Fundraising / Donations

https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/ https://1kproject.org https://ua-aid-centers.com/

NGOs

https://www.facebook.com/norwayforukraine

List of Refugee Coordination Sites

https://www.uasos.org/en https://www.ukrainetakeshelter.com/ - not recommended / insecure https://stipruskartu.lt/ https://www.host4ukraine.com/?view=map https://handbookgermany.de/de/ukraine-info/ua.html https://www.unterkunft-ukraine.de/ https://www.refugee-action.org.uk/ https://uk.ukrainskidom.pl/

Map of apartments and other services for refugees

Polski/український/English /PL Aby pomóc lub znaleźć miejsce możecie skorzystać z portalu: https://ukrainesupport.net/pl/ Przypominamy a

Map of military activity & news

The Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map is a crowdsourced effort by Centre for Information Resilience (https://twitter.com/Cen4infoRes), Bellingcat,

Live Universal Awareness Map Liveuamap is a leading independent global news and information site dedicated to factual reporting of a variety

Jomini of the West

https://twitter.com/JominiW

Rochan Consulting

https://rochan-consulting.com/about-us/

Online Communities

Discord is the easiest way to communicate over voice, video, and text. Chat, hang out, and stay close with your friends and communities.

https://t.me/insiderUKR

https://www.reddit.com/r/volunteersForUkraine/

Sending Body Armor & Helmets

Articles & news of others doing this

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/russia-is-worried-americans-are-sending-body-armor-and-ammo-to-ukraine/

https://www.wboy.com/news/harrison/harrison-co-sheriffs-dept-sending-body-armor-to-ukraine/

https://bulletproofzone.com/blogs/bullet-proof-blog/can-body-armor-be-shipped-internationally

Organizations

https://www.facebook.com/UACCusa/

https://uaccusa.org/supportukraine.html#donate

#ukraine

Supporting Afghan Physicians

Nice way to start 2022! Just wanted to follow-up on a request I made on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago to help some Afghan doctors study for their US medical board license exams. Below is a photo of the group at the computer lab in Fort Pickett Virginia. Many thanks to those like Shiv Gaglani at Osmosis.org from Elsevier who reached out so quickly to help support them.

Original request

Is there anyone in my network that can help with USMLE study materials? I'm a few years removed from the field but I know there are some great people out there with the right connections. Volunteers are trying to help a group of Afghan medical doctors who are staying on a military base here in the US prepare for their medical licensing board exams. #Afghan #AfghanEvac #USMLE #MedEd Benjamin C. Williams Shiv Gaglani David Guertin Wolters Kluwer Elsevier Osmosis - Knowledge Diffusion Kaplan Medical BoardVitals Sketchy

📷

#usmle #afghan #refugees

Marine Staff Sergeant Sean Horgan's father Michael Horgan served 27 years in the IRA - the Irish Republican Army - before he and his family

#ireland #northern ireland

Organizations with boots on the ground

Our team at Veterans for American Ideals just returned from Matamoros Mexico and we fly back home early tomorrow morning. I’ll find more time to collect my thoughts but I wanted to quickly share a few photos, observations and ways to help (as many of you have asked for).

The whole situation in Matamoros is a study in contrasts. It’s both heartbreaking and beautiful, hopeless and hopeful, constrained and full of possibilities. The grit, dignity and faith of every single person we met will stick with me forever. We 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝘁 do more for them because we 𝗰𝗮𝗻 do more for them.

Felicia Samponaro is running The Sidewalk School in the middle of the tent city. Out of her own pocket, Felicia pays teachers who happen to be asylum seekers in the camp to teach the kids. You can donate to the school here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-sidewalk-school-for-children…

Helen Perry, an army veteran, is the Executive Director of Global Response Management. They deliver emergency medical care and humanitarian relief in high-risk areas, like Mosul. And now Matamoros. She compared her experience dealing with ISIS in Iraq to the cartels in Mexico. You can help them here: https://www.global-response.org/take-action.

Human Rights First runs Vets for American Ideals and is a non-partisan advocacy and action organization that challenges America to live up to its ideals. They are the amazing people that organized and funded our trip and you can support them here: https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/donationform…

Thanks for all your encouragement and support.

#veterans #refugees

First thoughts from Matamoros

As part of a team with Veterans for American Ideals, I spent most of the day listening to and learning from asylum seekers in a sprawling tent city just a few hundred feet from the US border in Mexico.

Before I share more I want to be clear about a few things. I sincerely respect those who serve on the border. Just like our military they have a tough mission that is often driven by the politics of the day. That doesn’t mean any of us get a free pass as we ultimately have a moral responsibility to do what is right but the problems at the border are largely geopolitical, span multiple administrations, and are tangled in economic, criminal, medical and cultural disparities going back hundreds of years. This isn’t a problem created by the rank & file.

Having said that, there is so much more each of us can do to alleviate the human suffering happening in our backyard and on our watch. We’ve taken a horrible situation in Central America and made it worse by forcing some very vulnerable people to stay in a region that is effectively under the operational control of the cartels.

The tent city starts right next to the border with some tents tied off directly to the bridge on the Mexican side and run right down to the Rio Grande in full view of the border fence. Up until January of last year asylum seekers could remain safely in the US while their applications were reviewed but now 2500 of them are forced to stay nearby in this makeshift camp. They fear leaving the border due to the high rates of kidnapping by criminal gangs and the extreme difficulty in getting back in time for their next hearing. The UN and Red Cross apparently want nothing to do with the situation due to political sensitivities on both sides of the border so many of the camp services are organized organically by the various national groups within the camp and some dedicated (and inspiring) NGOs.

More to come tomorrow.

#veterans #refugees

Heading to Matamoros

What do an F-16 pilot, a naval intelligence officer, a marine, and an air force operations intel analyst have in common? We are all on a team of veterans heading to a refugee camp at the US/Mexico border this #MLK weekend to listen, learn and lend a hand. Veterans for American Ideals Human Rights First #ServiceDoesntStop

Annual planning ≠ strategy

From a McKinsey interview in 2007, Richard Rumelt talks about the importance of separating the process and resourcing planning elements of an organization from strategy work:

Now, lots of people think the solution to the strategic-planning problem is to inject more strategy into the annual process. But I disagree. I think the annual rolling resource budget should be separate from strategy work. So my basic recommendation is to do two things: avoid the label “strategic plan”—call those budgets “long-term resource plans”—and start a separate, nonannual, opportunity-driven process for strategy work.

That doesn’t mean that resource planning and strategy are in independent; they are two sides of the same coin. The point here is to not confuse one with the other.

While it’s important be to opportunity-driven, that doesn’t mean you wait for opportunities to knock on your front door. You need a systematic process for surveying the landscape, talking to your customers, analyzing competitors and changes in capitalization, reviewing new research, and objectively assessing your own capabilities.

Another good section is his take on positions:

Strategic thinking helps us take positions in a world that is confusing and uncertain. You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity. If you want certainty and clarity, wait for others to take a position and see how they do. Then you’ll know what works, but it will be too late to profit from the knowledge.

and the importance of the entrepreneur:

There is no substitute for entrepreneurial insight, but almost all innovation flows from the unexpected combination of two or more things, so companies need access to and, in some cases, control over the right knowledge and skill pools.

Rumelt’s take on the dynamic nature of strategy plans very well into Simon Wardley’s topographic intelligence. Rumelt:

If the terrain never changed, that would be the end of the story. High ground is always high, and low ground is always low. But in business, unlike geology, change happens in years rather than millennia.

From Wardley’s “On Playing Chess”

Strategy is all about observing the landscape, understanding how it is changing and using what resources you have to maximise your chances of success.

Execution is everything

Lots of great content in this post from @TrenGriffin:

https://25iq.com/2018/10/28/execution-is-everything/

A startup is not just a smaller version of a large company. It has unique challenges like establishing product market fit for the first time. Medium-size companies have their own challenges. It can be hard to break free from challenges related to scale and sometimes a business hits an invisible asymptote which limits growth. Large organizations have a tendency over time to focus too much time on process and not enough time and energy on renewal of the franchise of the business.

A major benefit that startups should have over medium to large organizations is that they can focus their efforts almost completely on establishing product-market fit. Larger organizations have a bias toward an “institutional no” or taxing their teams with process and unrealistic product evaluation criteria.

I like section 9 on OKRs, which is a deceptively easy framework to understand but difficult to implement unless everyone is onboard.

“Focus, alignment, commitment, tracking and stretching, I love that [acronym] because it spells FACTS.

Tracking OKRs is critical:

“OKRs are driven by data. They are animated by periodic check-ins, objective grading, and continuous reassessment—all in a spirit of no-judgment accountability. An endangered key result triggers action to get it back on track, or to revise or replace it if warranted.”

High functioning teams can get by with mid-quarter checkins but newer teams should start with weekly updates and work their way toward less frequent formal reviews as they demonstrate they are working well together.

Commitment is also critical:

The creation of transparent goals crates a social contract that takes the form of commitment. “In implementing OKRs, leaders must publicly commit to their objectives and stay steadfast”

OKRs are for everyone and if they aren’t taking seriously at the top, they won’t be taken seriously anywhere else.

Below is a nice visualization for building a quarterly OKR cycle:

Where do we find these people?

I’m reproducing a copy of Capt Brian M. Worley’s essay “Constraints” which won the 2017 Marine Corps Association’s Gen Robert E. Hogaboom Leadership Writing Contest. It was published in the Marine Corps Gazette’s June 2018 issue. Sometimes these links stop working and I want to make sure this story doesn’t get lost so I archived a full copy of the text in a public google doc.

#usmc

Machine learning that helps refugees resettle

Great article in a recent issue of Science:

Bansak et al. used a machine learning approach to develop an algorithm for geographically placing refugees to optimize their overall employment rate. The authors developed and tested the algorithm on segments of registry data from the United States and Switzerland. The algorithm improved the employment prospects of refugees in the United States by ∼40% and in Switzerland by ∼75%.

Below is a chart showing refugee employment at 90 days and their personal characteristics (pooled across all locations):

I’d like to better understand why refugees from Iraq faired worse than others and if it’s possible to identify recipients of the Special Immigrant Visa Program.

#refugees

Goodbye sweet crib. thanks for the being there for me for the first 3 years of my life. http://ift.tt/2lgllWP

#IFTTT #Instagram

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Marie Curie

Strangling innovation and non-profits

Steve Blank gets a lot right in this post about innovation:

https://medium.com/@sgblank/how-companies-strangle-innovation-and-how-you-can-get-it-right-854e6d13c7f0.

Concepts like Jobs to be done, McKinsey Three Horizons Model, Lean Canvas, and (not covered) Topographic Intelligence in Business and Good Strategy Bad Strategy, form the basis for how I approach problems.

I’ve used many of these principles and processes in leading product and teams in the for-profit and non-profit world. I’ve been thinking about product in the context of non-profit mission-driven organizations, e.g. Greater Boston Veterans Collaborative (veteran service), Team Rubicon (disaster response), and Veterans For American Ideals (human rights). Steve posted a variation of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) that is focused on a government or mission model:

Steve made five changes to the BMC:

Revenue => Mission Achievement

Customer Segments => Beneficiaries

Cost Structure => Mission Cost/Budget

Channel => Deployment

Customer Relationships => Buy-in/Support

Below are some raw thoughts on some of these changes. I’d rather have some concrete recommendations to make this better and as those come together I’ll update this post.

The change from revenue to mission makes sense for organizations where funding isn’t a major concern but for smaller-stage non-profits, you quickly need to attract and retain funders. I also think that if you don’t focus on the flow of money, regardless of for-profit or non-profit motives, you’re going to miss something important.

Transitioning from customer segments to beneficiaries doesn’t address one of the core problems I have with BMC: multi-sided marketplaces that often dominate enterprise value chains. He tries to tackle this with a separate Value Proposition Canvas for each beneficiary but in my experience I’ve found separate BMCs/Lean Canvases to be better. I have the same issue with Buy-in/Support and I prefer the customer frame.

I’m going to dig into other non-profit business visualization tools like this and try to find a better way to respect both the social value creation and the realistic financial needs of any non-profit.

https://medium.com/@swardley/uber-the-not-so-disrupting-disruptor-f03ecbb1330a

@swardley

beingblog

“Beauty is about substantial becoming, a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.” — John O’Donohue

No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. This Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher insisted on beauty as a human calling, as that in the presence of which we feel more alive. This was one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008. But his voice and writings continue to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings.

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.

Nelson Madela

Ten years ago, just 2,600 female students took the AP Computer Science Exam.

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Sean Horgan