St Patrick’s Day

Posted on 15 March 2017 by Erik Hare | 4 Comments

I like to re-use this post every St Patrick’s Day as one of my personal favorites. It has a new meaning this year, sadly.

Good people go to Heaven, but the Celts went everywhere. There isn’t a corner of the globe where you can’t find us if you look hard enough. Nations as far flung as Canada and Australia are largely Celtic in origin, and the majority of those Celts came from Ireland.

Our people have wandered the earth like almost no other, and for one day we all return home with the help of a hyphen. Many of us become Irish-Americans or Irish-Canadians on Saint Patrick’s day when any other day American or Canadian would be enough. We drink up well in pubs, cheer on the bagpipers, and think back to what our ancestors must have gone through to get us where we are.

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4 Leaves

Posted on 13 March 2017 by Erik Hare | 2 Comments

In celebration of a decade of Barataria, Mondays are being given over to re-runs from the earliest daze of this blog. It may surprise you that I was ever this brief, but here is a piece that leads into St Patrick’s Day very well – even if it isn’t quite Spring in Minnesota.

Luck is sometimes where you find it. Or how you look for it.

With the damp arrival of spring over, our park has the first clover of the year peeking out of the ground. They are small and round and tender, not much to work with yet. But it’s good to get a head start on clover season.

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Yes, Anything is Possible

Posted on 8 March 2017 by Erik Hare | 4 Comments

As we revisit Barataria’s history approaching the Tenth Anniversary next month, this piece from nine years ago stands out. You can see that nothing happening now really surprises me, but it certainly does disappoint.

When I was young, I lived in a time and place where just about anything was possible. It’s amazing just how terrifying that prospect was.

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Walk & Talk

Posted on 24 February 2017 by Erik Hare | 1 Comment

As the Tenth Anniversary of Barataria approaches, we will be featuring posts from long ago which contain themes which carry through to today. Organizing in a changing world is probably the most critical concept all around. The standard position of this blog is that everything good comes at a “strong half-step back” – far enough away to have some perspective but close enough to keep your hands dirty. This is an example of that in practice from 2010.

Organizations that thrive in a changing world all have one thing in common – a strong strategic focus. They know their objectives and strategy very well and communicate them effectively. What is less obvious is that a good strategic plan comes from individual people. It takes a lot of skill and a little planning to work it up into a real plan, but there is never any substitute for the old “walk and talk” – getting to know the clients, customers, employees, citizens, or any other way you want to define the people of an operation.

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Why We Write

Posted on 20 February 2017 by Erik Hare | 10 Comments

Leading into the 10th Anniversary of Barataria in less than two months, I am re-running pieces from the first year. Some of these pieces, like this one, are more personal and introspective. I hope you enjoy it.

Why do we write? It’s a tough question. People put a lot of effort into blogs, but not too many of them are worth reading. Most of these will eventually cease to be amusing, stop being updated, and gradually dissolve as if there were never more than some kind of atmospheric turbulence. So why are they started in the first place?

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