DIRTY TRICKS AND SNEAK ATTACKS

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You lost the election in your building because your opponents collected a majority of proxies. Why didn't you collect proxies?

I would always get proxies from the people who weren't living in the building. But in all these years, we've hardly ever had a contested election, and enough people would show up at the meetings, so we never got proxies from everybody else. However, collecting them, regardless of apparent need, is a very good idea.

Another point: It's important to promote the activities of the hardworking board while they're happening, or soon after, because people generally don't realize how much work it is, and if things improve and are running smoothly for a couple of years, they can start taking you for granted.

Are you talking about spin?

No, no, that's a separate point. Spin to me is a matter of presenting bad news or controversial proposals in a way that people are more likely to accept. The thing that's been very hard for me personally is that I very much operate on a sort of rational, logical, analytical basis, and I always think that if reasonably intelligent people are presented with the facts and the right analysis, they'll understand why you're doing something.

Unfortunately, very often that's not the case. People react emotionally, and they react out of a sort of narrowly focused self-interest. Self-interest is fine — it's understandable — but sometimes to me it's shortsighted. I listened carefully to how our opponents were presenting things, and they were saying some of the same things we had said, but they packaged it in a way so that people didn't object. That's what I mean by spin. Which is totally different from self-promotion, which is saying to the unit-owners every so often, "Hey! You know, these are the good things we've been doing for you lately."

If you're going to be on the board, and especially if you're the president, you may not want to be unpopular. But you have to expect to be unpopular sometimes. You have to expect that you cannot please everybody. That's not your role. What's in the best interest of the condo as a whole may not be in the best interest of individuals, and they may complain and you have to manage that. But in order to manage it properly, you have to understand this.

What else did you learn?

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