I have a few minutes before I head back home after doing two days of training and based on some of the emails I have received about yesterday’s blog “On Commitment, I think an addendum is appropriate.

I do believe that “a deal is a deal.  However, I also remember one thing that my father added.  Sometimes things come up.  Sometimes things change and the nature of the deal changes. Sometimes something gets in the way of following through on a commitment. In that case, as my father would say, you need to communicate that fact to the others involved.  If circumstances change, maybe the nature of the commitment (or the deal) needs to change as well.  To those who have emailed me, I hope this addition helps.

Whenever I work with a group around the topic of commitment, someone usually offers the following quote: “In a breakfast of ham and eggs, the chicken is involved and the pig is committed. And in the spirit of true confessions, I’ve also shared the same quote with organizations. And it has always bothered me because taken to its logical end, one could conclude, commitment involves death. That is a rather grim image of an otherwise honorable term.

So what is a good way to talk about commitment? One of the terms that my friends Will Stockton and Marjorie Herdes use is committed action. And I might add that Marjorie is quick to add as a corollary to the above quote that the pig was really coerced!

A few weeks ago I happened to catch the HBO documentary titled, “Brooklyn Dodgers – The Ghost of Flatbush. It is mostly about the love affair that the people of Brooklyn had with the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. Now for those of you who have a passing familiarity with the history of baseball, the residents of Brooklyn adored their Dodgers , even though they would repeatedly disappoint their fans , until, of course, 1955, when they finally won the World Series by defeating their hated rivals, the New York Yankees. In the documentary, when asked why after so many years of disappointment the fans would continue to support the Dodgers, one of the interviewees simply said, “You stick by your guys. In other words you hang in there through thick and thin because your guys are there for you and you are there for them , to accomplish something greater than any individual could. Brooklyn fans would refer to their team as “Dem Bums (there is a certain way of casting the English language that only people from Brooklyn know how to do) , and woe be tied to anyone not from Brooklyn who called the Dodgers bums. As loyal fans would say, “they may be bums but they are OUR bums¦

My father also had a way of talking about commitment. He would say, “a deal’s a deal. In other words, if you are member of a leadership team that agrees to a certain approach to move forward, you have made a deal with that team. And you stick by your guys (or girls!). If you renege on the deal , in my father’s frame of reference , that is one of the worst things a person could do because a deal is a deal. It does not entail death , but it is serious business. It does mean that you don’t let others down. It means you can count on each other!