Well, it looks like all of the A to Z doesn’t stop at the ED or the DSA. Apparently, since a different ED has been chosen, the plan just needs the VP, the P and the IPP* – and maybe we’ll throw in some spineless Ds who wouldn’t even be on the board if it wasn’t for the DSA.

The bruit is that the cockamamie strategic plan is to have NCRA pay to send students vetted through the allegedly plagiarized A to Z Program to school and have MEMBERSHIP pay for those students’ trainings. Just wondering who stands to reap from all of that “free” education? Could it be the current DSA and the VP and the P and the IPP? Perhaps they’re looking to form their own school?

Hmmm … maybe that’s the reason why the building was sold for $5 million.**

In our opinions, it’s just a free lunch of alphabet soup … paid for on the backs of the membership of NCRA!

WAKE UP, NCRA!
Frank N. Sense

* Those three women alone, who form a majority on the Executive Committee of YOUR association, can spend the money to implement this crazy plan without the rest of the board even knowing about it until the $$$ are already gone

** Membership is still ENTITLED to a complete accounting on the sale of NCRA’s building … before all of that money disappears

All of us here at Wake Up, NCRA want to welcome OUR new Executive Director and CEO! The short blurb that was written about her vision to seize the vast opportunities with laser-focused intention makes us hopeful that NCRA can grow and flourish again.The new ED/CEO has been granted the sacred trust of membership. We’re hoping that her definition of “laser focus” is that NCRA will keep its focus centered on stenographic reporters, and not just on “the court reporting industry,” in general.

Here are some ideas that all of us here at WUNCRA have come up with to help make this new relationship with membership a very successful one:

1. Transparency, transparency, transparency.  *As members, we believe that we are entitled to know how every single board member votes on every single issue.  How else can membership determine the board members that we wish to lead us?  We’re a membership of high-tech stenographic reporters, so please consider using stenographic reporters to write the board meetings verbatim while also streaming the board meetings live, then posting those transcripts on the site very soon after board meetings.   That will go a long way to gaining the trust of membership, and may even be great PR for getting members back to NCRA.  It will also be a good marketing tool for members who are trying to sell those services to clients in their local markets.  Please publish the agendas and board books online before every meeting.   Please also publish complete minutes after board meetings, not the “skeleton” minutes that have been the norm since at least the golden years.  Please do not allow the Executive Committee to usurp the entire board by making major decisions in the dark of night between full board meetings.  We do understand that there are certain board situations that need to be guarded, but Robert’s Rules covers those rare situations.
2. In our opinions here at WUNCRA, many of the board members over the last many years have not been servant leaders.  Many have had their own personal reasons and agendas for getting on the NCRA board and then moving on to executive board positions, culminating in the presidency.   In our opinions, it’s best not to pay any mind to the Vs, the Ys, the Ns, the Ps, the Ws, the Ds.  Just follow the years of the decline in membership, and use caution and your gut.  We think that there are even a few on the current board to be wary of.

We’re sorry that you’ve inherited a tough situation. But we here at WUNCRA, and we’re sure steno reporters in general, are pulling for you, Madam ED/CEO.

Godspeed,
Frank N. Sense

* We also believe that a full accounting and background on the sale of NCRA’s building for $5 million will also go a long way to gaining trust.  The NCRA board has a history of sweeping things under the rug and hoping that they don’t rear their ugly heads, but they usually do.  An example, in our opinions, is not completely 86’ing SLM from NCRA’s history, but instead allowing her to simply resign.

… because this week’s NCRA blast had a big ol’ article about the A to Z Program trying to give a boost to the reputation and status of the rumored member vying for the position who is also the recipient of the coveted — but now cheapened — DSA award.  Good PR is very good before a big announcement.

We haven’t had time to do the research, but we’ve heard from a few members that they seem to recall a similar program that was implemented around the country as long as a decade or two ago, so it may appear that the A to Z Program is just a recycled idea packaged with a new pretty bow.

This DSA recipient has been on the board of NCRA through many of its terrible events:  Boosting the credibility and career of a past president who now effectively replaces stenographic reporters with recording systems*; the sale of the building**; a lot of the umbrella brouhaha; the mass exodus of members, etc.

We find it interesting how a program that was recently re-introduced with no performance measures is worthy of the DSA award.  Why did the board pass up giving the DSA award to the masterminds of the “Writing Our Future” survey or the “Take Note” campaign?  Those programs have been around long enough to be statistically measured for their impacts on the stenographic profession.

In our opinions, this is the grand strategic plan that the DSA recipient and others implemented a number of years ago.  (We understand that the DSA recipient and a past ED/CEO have been selling “strategic plans” to reporters at many conventions this past year or so — but that’s a digression.)  We’re figuring that the grand strategic plan really got rolling in the late 2000s, and it will reach its fruition when the board announces the position of ED/CEO of NCRA.  And then the mean girls club will continue.

It seems like it takes loads of patience to see a strategic plan through, and maybe it went like this:  Nominate a good number of members to the board and then use your influence to get them on that board so that those board members owe you the favor of their votes to make you the ED/CEO of NCRA with a nice six-figure salary and great benefits package (wouldn’t we all like that?).  It appears that the DSA is just a marketing blitz to boost the resume.  Why wasn’t the A to Z Program implemented during all of those years on the board and through the presidency?  Perhaps because the DSA wouldn’t have been bestowed right before a new ED/CEO was due to be announced.

Wake Up, NCRA,
Frank N. Sense

*Did the new president run into the hawker of recording devices at the Court Technology Conference on September 12-14 that was attended by a “broad expanse of crucial decision-makers” from court systems around the country?  Just wondering.

**Membership is still entitled to a full accounting of the building that we now understand from a reliable source was not fully paid for at the time of sale (like Prince — may he rest in peace — we’ll now refer to it as “the formerly-paid-off-building-once-owned-by-NCRA”).  Soooo … was a loan taken against that formerly-paid-off-building to pay off a golden parachute?  So many questions that need to be answered.

But we know that we’re not.  The membership numbers aren’t horribly misinformed.

What has our leadership done to control the mass exodus that NCRA has experienced over the past ten or 15 years?  NOTHING!  They WANT a dwindling membership so that they can say that NCRA will die without credentialing recorders and voicewriters.  The single idea that has been most advanced and pursued by leadership has been the umbrella, and the things that they’ve done in pursuit of the umbrella has been against stenographic reporters.   This relentless pursuit has not served the interest of stenographic reporters, but it has served the business models, resumes, etc. of “leadership. “

Aren’t you just sick of hearing about the umbrella association model?  We don’t think that we’re horribly misinformed that our “leaders” are counting on the few members left having “umbrella association fatigue” so they are able to slip it in as NCRA’s model.  These are the things that happen when an association is run by a secret illuminati.

This Board of Directors has the power and ability to have NCRA run with complete transparency.  But they CHOOSE to run it with secrecy, and then we are accused of being “horribly misinformed” when we dig up nuggets of truth and share them with membership.  Imagine the nuggets that we’ve missed!  We’re sure that there are many that we’ll never know about.

This Board of Directors gave this year’s Distinguished Service Award to a woman whose business model, in our opinions, is more about making money off of an umbrella/”continuum of services” than it is about the best interests of stenographic reporters.  Does that make us here at WakeUpNCRA horribly misinformed, or is it the Board of Directors that’s horribly misinformed?  The DSA should only be given to a recipient that benefits membership as opposed to one who exploits membership.

Membership is still entitled to a full accounting on the sale of that paid-for $5 million building!  Maybe it was worth a few million more than $5 million, and we were TOTALLY fleeced.  Some of our limited research shows that a Massachusetts-based real estate firm was used as the agent for the building AND the acquisition of the spendy new office space.  We find that to be VERY curious.  The more digging we do, the more convinced we are that we are not horribly misinformed about what went down around the sale of the building.

 Wake Up, NCRA!
Frank N. Sense

P.S.  Please send this post to NCRA members on your contacts list so that they’re not horribly misinformed, either.

We were putting our heads together here at WakeUpNCRA and we figured out that the NCRA leadership has never deviated from their grand strategic plan of making NCRA an umbrella organization for recorders, voicewriters and stenographers (“stenos” as we’re referred to in the secret clique), even though membership has time and again stated that we want NCRA to be an organization “serving” stenographers only!

These are some of the things that we came up with:

1. During the golden era, the executive director/CEO held important meetings with a third-party facilitator so that he could put forward his goals and plans into action, but it looked like all the “great ideas” of making NCRA an umbrella association came from the board members themselves.
2. The board has a pattern over the years of refusing to go to membership for solutions, but instead implementing their own plans through the cliques that formed on the board.  If you made it onto the board and agreed to “go along to get along” (membership be damned!), you became a member of their secret society.  Just like a secret illuminati.
3. Ah, reduce membership from 35,000 down to under 12,000 so that they have the ability to say that NCRA will completely die if we don’t credential recorders and voicewriters.
4. They sold the paid-for building for $5 million without letting membership know until the board had to disclose it at a business meeting attended by around 80 members, not giving access to the meeting by streaming for all members to see.  AND, we’re sure that the new NCRA headquarters is in Class-A office space in one of the highest rent districts in the USA.  They’re blowing through the money as fast as wind in a Category-5 hurricane.  They’re making NCRA broke.  We will soon hear that they need to credential recorders and voicewriters just to stay in business – while putting the rest of us out of business. *
5. The board discourages participation in leadership.  They keep mostly sheep on the board.  The sheep don’t buck the system because if they do they won’t be able to go “up” to the cool girls’ table.  The one or two shepherds keep the grand strategic plan of the umbrella association alive.  Do a little research and figure out who nominated the most sheep (and maybe one shepherd) onto the board, including the current vice president (who is getting a ton of press through NCRA, after being nominated for and receiving the FAPR, news releases for becoming VP, etc.) over the past few years.  It’s the grand poo-bah of shepherds nominating all of those sheep. Baaaaaaaa …
6. Ah, yes, don’t forget the “board rules” that allow your fellow board members the ability to throw you off the board if you talk to membership about what happened during a meeting.  The “secret handshake” makes everybody feel so special.
7. Credentialing electronic recorders and voicewriters with NCRA’s coveted credentials fits the personal business model of the rumored member of NCRA vying for the Executive Director position.**
8. In our opinions, bestowing the Distinguished Service Award by the clique to the clique cheapens the significance that it gives to those who truly deserve it.

Wake Up, NCRA!!!
 Frank N. Sense

P.S. Please forward this post to other members of NCRA in your contacts list so that they can see how they are being screwed, too.

* We’re all still waiting for a full accounting from the sale of the building.  Maybe next year’s president will have the guts to give membership a full disclosure. We are ENTITLED! to a who, what, where, when and how.

** If the board is not very careful about who is given the job of the Executive Director of NCRA, they will see membership dwindle even more than after the famous umbrella speech of 2007.  But please read No. 3, again.

There are 14 officers and directors that sit on the board of NCRA.  With all of that “hard work, service and perseverance” sitting right there before our very eyes, we wondered why in the world our now immediate past president felt it necessary to place two nonboard members on the search committee for the new CEO/executive director of NCRA.  Why isn’t the Secretary-Treasurer, who is beloved and trusted by the membership of NCRA, on the search committee, but a gentleman who lost resoundingly in last year’s election is on it?  Do you think that maybe he’ll cancel out the vote of the woman he lost to last year?

There was whispering chatter at the Vegas convention that a member of NCRA whose business services voicewriters, electronic recorders and steno reporters is vying for the job.  We’re wondering, are the two nonboard members friends with that member? Actually, with the immediate past president or the new president breaking a tie, only one of those nonboard members needs to be in the clique to vote in favor of that hire.

Is the grand “strategic plan” to dwindle the membership down to right under 12,000 voting members (from a high in the mid 30,000s) so that NCRA can become about certifying electronic recorders and voicewriters?  The dwindling part of the plan is working.

And about dwindling membership, when you have a dissatisfied customer, don’t you normally try to find out why your customer is dissatisfied so that you can rectify the problem?  How could NCRA lose 25,000 members in less than ten years and not know why so many members have jumped ship?  Could it be that they just … don’t … care?  Because, gosh darn it, they’ve lost the battles of the cries of membership to remain a steno-only organization, but it’s so satisfying to win the war!

Wake Up, NCRA!
Frank N. Sense

If you have not received an e-mail from NCRA to vote, the URL is:

https://NCRA.simplyvoting.com

Enter your NCRA ID and your password.

Please be sure to vote AGAINST the bylaws amendments, and please do not abstain.

Wake Up, NCRA!!!
Frank N. Sense

P.S. Please send this e-mail to every NCRA member on your list, so they know that the balloting is NOW OPEN, and they, too, should vote AGAINST the bylaws amendments.

We were reading through the “rationale” behind the proposed bylaws and why the board thinks that these changes are in membership’s best interests!

First of all, all of us here at WakeUpNCRA – and we’re sure the rest of the membership, too – want to know exactly which board members voted to put these terrible proposed bylaws changes to membership vote.

But that would require transparency.  And the board doesn’t define “transparency” the same way that the rest of us do.  We’re not ALLOWED to know which board members voted against ANY proposal.  The majority rules!  They subscribe to the Three Musketeers’ principle – “all for one; one for all.”  And by the way, remember that it only takes Three Musketeers on the Executive Committee to pass anything they want to pass.  Aha!  So we can just rationalize that it was Steve, Tiva and Chris that voted to place these bylaws changes on the ballot.

One thing that their rationalization states is that members do want to be able to have an active voice in their organization.  That is something that we agree on.  But these proposals take away that active voice, and they give the Nominating Committee 100% authority over OUR representatives.

The Nominating Committee perpetuates the cliques.  The president appoints the Nominating Committee, and the immediate past president presides over it.  The president and immediate past president are chums, otherwise they wouldn’t be on the Executive Committee! The president appoints at least another two of her chums to the Nominating Committee.  They always throw in an outlier or two as decoys.  But, still, they only need Three Musketeers to agree on who will be nominated.  The immediate past president (a chum) always breaks a tie vote.

Now they want to allow the Nominating Committee to put up “as many highly qualified ‘friends’” as it likes with the top three candidates for Director seats garnering the most votes to be seated. AND they don’t mention anything about the coveted Executive Committee positions in their rationalization. Why?  Because it only takes Three Musketeers on the Executive Committee to make all of the major decisions for NCRA*, and they don’t want to change that li’l ol’ skulduggery.

These bylaws changes are BAD for membership.

These bylaws changes are BAD for steno reporters.

Theses bylaws changes are  BAD for NCRA.

Please join us on Thursday, August 10^th, in voting AGAINST any changes to the existing bylaws!!!

Wake Up, NCRA!
Frank N. Sense

P.S.  Please send this to all of your fellow NCRA members so that they’re informed about Voting  AGAINST this year’s bylaws changes, too.

*  like selling the paid-for NCRA building

There are so many reasons to Vote NO!!! on the current proposed amendments, but all of us here at Wake Up NCRA! only have a few days left to sort it out before the big vote this upcoming THURSDAY!!!

One of the proposed changes to the election procedures is to expand the balloting process from 12 hours to two weeks!

Let’s explain how bad this is for membership by giving a hypothetical scenario:

You have a hypothetical Nominating Committee Vice President nominee named Maureen who has lots of friends on the board and is part of the clique. A super-qualified member named Kendra, who gets totally snubbed by the Nominating Committee because she’s just not cool enough, gets 100 nominations from Voting Members to run in a contested election against Maureen.

Esperanza, who initially nominated Maureen for the position of Vice President, has a huge list of NCRA members. In this age of leaks, Esperanza finds out that Maureen is behind in the votes on day eight of the two weeks and goes on a marathon of calling and e-mailing to get more members to vote for Maureen. Of course, none of the leaked information gets out to Kendra. VOILA! Maureen wins the VP seat by ten votes.

Hey, Board of Directors, if you want more NCRA members to vote in the election, how about spending that two weeks before the election marketing that the balloting is going to be open for 12 hours on August 10^th!!! Voting 12 hours works for choosing the President of the United States. It’s PLENTY of time to choose board members for NCRA while hopefully avoiding improprieties.

Wake Up NCRA!
Frank N. Sense

P.S. Please send this to at least ten NCRA members so that they know to vote NO! on all of the bylaws amendments on August 10^th, too.

Since our “Golden” Era, NCRA’s membership has decreased tens of thousands, and this current board’s great idea is to do away with the Retired Lifetime Membership category to build up the bank account?

The current bylaws say that if you’ve been a member for 30 consecutive years and you are no longer engaged in verbatim reporting, that you’re eligible to become a Retired Lifetime Member.  The proposed amendment is now getting hyper-technical about what it takes to qualify for retired status, and, oh, by the way, if you manage to thread the needle and qualify, you get to pay half-price until you die. 

So let’s translate this for a second.  What leadership appears to be saying is that they’ve thrown in the towel on growing membership or winning back the tens of thousands who’ve quit because leadership hasn’t met their needs.  And so now the BIG IDEA is to make more money by punishing the members who have been loyal for at least 30 years!!!