Wanting to focus on leadership, but . . .

I'm under the gun to get two presentations complete; one for the Systems Thinking Conference that starts Thursday at the ESD and the second for our leadership retreat that starts on Monday at the Junior High.  The leadership retreat for me marks the start of the new school year making me wonder where the summer went.  For the system conference I will be sharing our leadership journey focused on reflective conversations and aspirations.  We only have an hour so it won't be that difficult.  I start the leadership retreat with "Mike's Story" also focused on our leadership journey and my learning.  This is important to me and always proves difficult to say something of importance that results at the same time in generating energy and passion while also producing some creative tension for those in attendance.

At the same time I'm working on these and wondering what to share in this post about them, I can't get the chart I saw today in a post from Climate Progress out of my mind showing the first and second quarter earnings for the big 5 oil companies.

How much is enough?  Over $62 billion in profits in two quarters while producing less oil and natural gas liquids than in the first two quarters of 2011.  According to the article this is about $236,000 per minute.  If they donated about six minutes of these profits to us we could meet our current and future needs for renovation and increasing student housing capacity.  Something just doesn't seem right and I say that without sharing what they pay in taxes or lobbying.  When I pay a higher percent of my earnings in taxes than these companies something needs to be looked at.  I think I spewed forth in a post about the same or a similar chart last year - some things just don't change.  I guess they need the $72 billion in cash reserves for the day the world turns on something other than gas and oil.