I Guess I'm No Politico

I am ready to FIRE some of the other board members of the High-spanic Health Coalition. We have our next meeting next week, it's an early breakfast meeting. There are a handful of board members, 4-5, who never contribute, never come to meetings, never bother to respond to emails. There's only 11 of us currently; we had 3 voluntary dropoffs in the last year. We met with a consultant recently who told us that all boards have worthless members, just like we do (my words, not his). We all had to SIGN a board member commitment at the start of the new year, so in my humble opinion these dead weights have not honored their signed agreement and based on this, they must be removed from the board and do not deserve to pad their resumes with us any longer.

I sent this suggestion to our current President to be put on the agenda for next week's meeting but after I sent the email I thought, "Am I being too rash? Am I risking alienating these people from the coalition? Should they just be allowed to keep padding their resume b/c apparently, this is a common occurrence on all boards the world over?" Dammit! I don't care! I hate slackers and do not want any resume-padders on my watch! I spend ~2-4 hours/week on coalition work, not counting the monthly and bimonthly meetings. I spent an evening at home earlier this week writing up a job description for us to hire an AA. I am committed and when others are not, it ticks me off that they have the nerve to call themselves a fellow board member of mine when they don't do SHIT.

I'm currently reading The Smartest Guys In The Room and I see where Ken Lay was a huge charmer and used relationships time and time again to his advantage over the course of his life. I just can't stomach doing that; I'm a real bridge-burner. I don't like playing games with people and manipulating them and using them and having the same done to me because--this sounds terrible, but this is how I really feel--I believe that people are truly replaceable! There is no evidence that shows otherwise. Fatherless children adopt father figures. People remarry. When you leave a job someone else takes your place. I guess I don't really mean that the people themselves are replaceable, but rather, what they do can be done by someone else, every time. This sounds really harsh... but I fear it is true. And there's almost nothing I need from anybody else in this world that if they prove themselves to be worthless enough, I can't get from someone else the next day.

Fortunately, I am blessed enough that all the closest people to me in my life have been hand-picked and wisely chosen and there's only about 3-4 acquaintances/coworkers who I am waiting for to get carried off by a twister or eaten by a bear. But those people I have no choice about being involved with; however once they are gone they will not be missed, nor replaced! Now if I can only get rid of these space-wasting board members...