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Leadership in a
Zoom Economy with
Microsoft Teams
Applying Leadership to a Remote
Workforce
—
Peter Ward
Foreword by Matt Wade
Leadership in a Zoom
Economy with
Microsoft Teams
Applying Leadership
to a Remote Workforce
Peter Ward
Leadership in a Zoom Economy with Microsoft Teams: Applying
Leadership to a Remote Workforce
Peter Ward
New York City, NY, USA
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-7992-2 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-7993-9

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7993-9
Copyright © 2022 by Peter Ward

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or
part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way,
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Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark
symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, logo, or image we use the names, logos,
and images only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no
intention of infringement of the trademark.
The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if
they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not
they are subject to proprietary rights.
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of
publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal
responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty,
express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.
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Printed on acid-free paper
This book is dedicated to my wife, Geeta,
without whose love, encouragement, and advice,
none of the chapters would have ever been written.
Thank you to Allison Kennedy, Microsoft Certified
Trainer & MVP, Consultant Data Platform & BI Reporting,
for her wonderful technical review and feedback.
https://www.excelwithallison.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonkennedycv/
Audrey Merwin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/audreymerwin/
Table of Contents
About the Author��xiii
About the Technical Reviewer��xv

Introduction��xvii
Foreword by Matt Wade�� xxv
Chapter 1: Personal Governance: The Art of Tidying Up��1

Why Do We Need To Focus?��2
Tidying Up Principles��3
Where To Start: Dispose��4
Deciding What To Dispose Of��5
Recategorization��6
Chapter Workbook��7
Disposing��7
Recategorization��10
Pitfalls of This Art��13
References��15
Chapter 2: Creating a Growth Culture with a Truly Remote Team��17

The Only Way Is Up, Ideally��17
SoHo’s Growth Mantras��18
Chapter and Book Disclaimer��18
How Does SoHo Dragon Go Remote?��20
The SoHo Dragon Story��20
v
Table of Contents
SoHo Dragon’s Non-Microsoft Tools��23

The Expansion��27
Unorthodox Advice for a Culture of Growth��28
Create a Culture of Shipping��28
Create a Culture of Accountability��29
Automate Anything That Can Be Automated��29
Do Not Do Tasks Below Your Pay Grade��29
Turn Emails into Tasks��30
Stay Out of Meetings��30
Delay Your Responses. Be Patient (Yeah, Right).��31
How MS Teams Meetings Should Be Run��32
Measure What Needs To Be Measured��33
Build to Spec��33
Shipping��34
Accountability��35
On the Go��35
Automate��35
Delegate��36
Meetings��36
Measure��37
Overruns��37
Chapter Summary��37
References��38
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Using M365 To Be an Effective Executive with Remote

Workers��39
Responsibility and Accountability��40
Understanding Results and How To Get Them��42
Tiny Improvements Add Up To Massive Differences��42
Good Decision Making��43
The Three Elements of Decision Making��44
Underperformance��45
Time Killers��46
Hiring Talent��47
Delegate��50
How To Delegate More Effectively��50
Accountabilities��51
Hires��51
KPIs��51
Time Killers��52
Delegate��52
Reference��53
Chapter 4: Entrepreneurship��55
What Is EOS?��57
Using MS Teams To Implement the EOS Methodology��58
Vision��58
People��61
Data��63
Issues��64
vii
Table of Contents
Process��64
Traction��65
Roles��65
Your Time��66
Free Time��66
What Gets Seen Will Get Measured��66
References��67
Chapter 5: Being Productive with Your Productivity��69

What You Will Learn��69
Eisenhower Matrix: Where To Start��70
Start with a Good Plan��71
Pareto Principle��73
Establish Priorities and Focus on Them��74
The Path to Progress Is All About Self-Exploration��75
Sleep Hygiene��76
Time Management��77
Final Point��77
Create an AM and PM Task List in One��78
Prioritize These Tasks with Letters��78
At The End of the Day, How Did It Go?��78
How Many Emails During the Day Did You Resist Responding to
Immediately?��79
After One Week, Did You Notice Any Improvements?��79
References��80
viii
Table of Contents
Chapter 6: Decisive Communication Over MS Teams��81

Figure Out Who You Are and How You Must Speak and Lead��82
For Projects To Thrive, the Doers Must Also Be Deciders��85
Numbers Give Me Good Comfort��85
Be Vulnerable��85
Identify the Muscling��86
The Type of Project��86
A Meeting Is an Alternative to Work��87
List the Projects/Initiatives That Report to You��88
With the List Above, Ask Yourself Which Level You Operate From��88
With the List, What Actions Do You Need To Implement To Operate
at the Define Level?��88
With Each Status Team Meeting, Reflectively Look at Your
Communication Style and List How Many Binary Questions You Ask��89
After One Month, Are You Operating at the Define Level?��89
References��90
Chapter 7: Selling Over MS Teams��91

Become Fast Friends��92
Project Technical Requirement Questions Template��93
The Sales Pitch/Demo��95
Focus on the Why��95
Respect People and Their Time��96
Give Them a Takeaway��97
Use Digital Ink��98
ix
Table of Contents
Do the Same Demo Over and Over Again��99

Give Them Insight into Scenarios��100
Watch Your Language��103
Add the Questions to Your Pre-Demo Questionnaire��104
Record a Sales Demo and Ask Yourself the Following Questions��104
Are You Noticing a Pattern with the Pain Points of Customers?��105
Has the Win Rate with Demos Increased?��105
References��106
Chapter 8: Get Organized with Your Organization��107

SoHo’s Org Chart��108
Why So Late for Me To Be in the Know?��110
Creating a Good Org Chart��111
Org Chart Rules��113
Understanding an Org Chart��114
The Discovery of Empty Suits��117
SoHo Had Several Fragilistas��118
Job Descriptions��118
SoHo’s Job Descriptions��119
The Butterfly Effect of the Org Chart��121
What the Butterfly Effect Is Not��121
When Was the Last Time You or Anyone Looked At or Studied Your
Company Org Chart?��122
List All Departments in Your Company��122
x
Table of Contents
Add Your Current Employees to the Org Chart in the Roles They
Perform��122
Is Anyone in More Positions Than They Should Be?��123
Are People in the Wrong Positions?��123
For Each Role, Define the Position Agreement��123
References��124
Chapter 9: The Wrap-Up Chapter��125

How to Start the Actual Implementation��125
What Will Move the Needle?��126
Gridlock��126
Create Your Next Day��127
Chapter Summaries��127
Introduction��127
Chapter 1��128
Chapter 2��128
Chapter 3��128
Chapter 4��129
Chapter 5��129
Chapter 6��129
Chapter 7��130
Chapter 8��130
Final Words��130
Index��133
xi
About the Author
Peter Ward is a Solution Architect on
Microsoft Cloud software. He is the
founder and CTO/CEO of SoHo Dragon,
a New York-based Microsoft Gold partner
focused on helping CXOs and technical
teams obtain as much value as possible
from Microsoft Cloud. He prefers taking the
technical lead on Microsoft Azure / M365
projects from an architect and deployment
standpoint. He is an M365 trainer and
motivator.
• A Microsoft MVP, co-author of four Microsoft SharePoint

books, and a frequent contributor to GitHub
• Is keen on UX simplicity and stays on the leading edge of

technology
• Thinks on his feet in meetings and complex situations

and gets to the heart of an issue while not ruffling too
many feathers
• Loves yoga, vegetarian food, and reading books by

Malcolm Gladwell
xiii
About the Technical Reviewer
Vikas Sukhija has over a decade of IT
infrastructure experience with expertise in
messaging, collaboration, and IT automations.
He is a blogger, architect, and Microsoft MVP
and is known by the alias TechWizard. As an
experienced professional, he has assisted
small to large enterprises in architecting and
implementing Office 365 and Azure.
Community contributions from him can be
found at
@Blog http://TechWizard.cloud
@Page www.facebook.com/TechWizard.cloud
@Twitter https://twitter.com/techwizardcloud
@Coderepo https://github.com/VikasSukhija
xv
Introduction
Guy Finley: Nothing in the universe can stop you from letting go and
starting over.
The Fundamentals
People will look back at what COVID changed and they’ll see it changed
the way we worked, as it has forced people to experience a different type
of working that they wouldn’t have normally done. For our industry, in the
medium to longer term, it will be transformational. Of course, it has also
created problems for both employees and organizations.
Employers and workers have been forced to shift to remote working
and have crammed years of transformation into just weeks and months.
Keeping workers cooped up in spare bedrooms and entrenched social
distancing rules has had a dramatic impact on other parts of the way we
work. The Zoom economy has as many losers as winners, but it’ll have a
profound, lasting effect on our daily work routine.
Technology is part of the solution, but it’s the way we use the
technology that provides the win.
The Zoom Economy

“Zoom” is a cool word. It means getting somewhere super-fast. The Zoom
product name was a great marketing coup with COVID impacting
the economy, and soon journalists started to bounce the term “Zoom
economy” around.
xvii
Introduction
Definition of the Zoom economy: People can telework and still do their
normal job functions by communicating not via the watercooler or in the
conference room, but over video conferencing technology, such as Zoom
or Microsoft Teams (MS Teams).
Another popular phrase that journalists bounced around was “Zoom
town,” where a community experienced a significant population increase
due to telecommuting. This name is a play on “boomtown.”
About Me and This Book

For those who do not know, like a lot of readers of this book, I am Peter
Ward, the founder and CTO/CEO of SoHo Dragon (SoHo), a New York
City-based Microsoft Gold Partner. There is nothing eye-opening about
SoHo. We ain’t putting rockets on Mars or defining the metaverse. We are a
Microsoft partner that was started in 2010 and has had impressive growth
for the past ten years, with a semi-remote workforce leveraging MS Teams
to aid the leadership activities of the employees.
You always read about expansion and growth in bigger companies, but
it’s the smaller companies where this is a struggle. According to Forbes,
only half of small businesses survive past the five-year mark, ranging from
45.4% to 51% depending on the year the business was started. Beyond
that, only about one in three small businesses get to the 10-year mark and
can party.
Statistics from The Small Business of Entrepreneurial Council state that
almost 90% of companies have fewer than 20 employees and firms with
fewer than 10 employees account for 78.4%.
Looking at the statistics, the odds don’t look good to build a company
with over 10 employees, and although SoHo’s activities probably won’t
make the pages of The New York Times, for the owner of a small company
that has ambitions of growing to 50+ employees, I hope this book
provides value.
xviii
Introduction
Often owners will write a book where they are the hero of their own
story, which I’ve tried not to do. Rather, I explain how SoHo operates with a
growth mindset in a new world of a remote workforce.
The book charts a very personal account of what I’ve experienced
in growing a company to over 100 employees, with 3 offices on different
continents, and how organizational principles are key to building and
scaling a company, but also how MS Teams is a fantastic aid to supporting
leadership processes and teamwork altogether.
I’ve been working with collaboration software since 1993 and the
now-obsolete Lotus Notes, and I started writing about my SharePoint
collaboration experiences on my blog in 2006, www.wardpeter.com. I’ve
co-authored four SharePoint books with Microsoft, Microsoft MVPs (Most
Valuable Professionals), and other talented SharePoint peeps, so I like
to think I know how remote teamwork works and doesn’t work in the
workplace. This book shares everything I have learned about running a
distributed team and how I grew as a team member, manager, and leader,
and how SoHo Dragon grew—the highs, the lows, and everything in
between.
Prior to 2020, the company had always been working semi-remotely,
with staff in multiple time zones: Philippines, California, New York,
Lithuania, Beirut, Ahmedabad, Singapore, consultants on client sites, or
sitting in coffee shops while electronically staying in touch with employees
and clients, which for some companies at the time may have seemed
like black magic. Since SoHo had been working remotely for some time,
we had figured out issues like Zoom fatigue and collaboration. Lack of
physical meetings appeared very natural, but new hires and customers
kept on asking questions like: “How does the company function?” “How
do you have these growth rates year after year?” or “How do you maintain
your corporate culture?”
This book answers these questions.
xix
Introduction
History of SoHo Dragon

SoHo was started in 2010 in the spare room of my apartment in Long
Island City, New York. In 2021, the headcount was 100+ and 3 offices. Of
course, because of COVID a lot of people were working from home, all
earning money in what we now call the Zoom economy.
SoHo started with just SharePoint services, but as the team grew,
the services expanded to data, quality assurance, Dynamics CRM,
infrastructure, managed services, and financial applications such
as Murex.
Murex is a company that provides financial software for trading,
treasury, risk, and post-trade operations for financial markets. It’s big-ticket
software and not for the fainthearted.
Most of our clients are in the New York City area, which is why our
slogan is SoHo Dragon is a Wall Street-based consulting and staffing
firm that focuses on complex technology deployments when time is
short, the budget is tight, and the cost of failure is high.
What Is Leadership?
I really cannot put my finger on what leadership is and neither can
most people. I do not have an MBA, nor do I play buzzword bingo with
management terms. Everyone knows leadership when they see it. I’m
also not going to claim that the leadership at SoHo should be written up
in Harvard Business Review, but each chapter does focus on a leadership
principle, discipline, or technique that has aided the growth of my
company.
I view many bad implementations of SharePoint, M365 cloud
initiatives, and problems in companies today resulting from lousy
leadership from both the implementing vendor and the customer. Thus
this book!
xx
Introduction
Leadership includes managing remote teams, and a lack of technical

skills in using M365 can interfere with that process. Capable use of M365
alone doesn’t give someone the ability to see the big picture, connect
with members of the organization, foster a meaningful and productive
work environment, or steer the corporate mothership through various
challenges to attain clarity. It takes a combination of technical and
business skills to do that—skills that contribute to leadership.
I sometimes think there is an assumption that leadership is a unique
set of skills and experience, matured to give personal perspectives and it is,
of course, these elements that set the natural leader apart from those who
just “run” organizations from 9 to 5. The latter is a manager mindset, rather
than a leader or owner mindset.
I’m now 50 so perhaps I think maturity is essential in a leader’s efforts
to develop and harvest a sound corporate vision, but really I think real
leaders see things more rapidly than the typical executive. At least in
part their insights are a reflection of “inner” clarity that allows for fuller
concentration on the challenges at hand.
I hope this book helps you understand what a leader really is in a
Zoom economy with Microsoft Teams.
How to Use This Book

I hope this book gives you a new way of looking at leadership and
communication in the workplace, and provides you with solutions to the
challenges of the Zoom economy.
To get value from this book, my advice is very simple. Read the book
from cover to cover and write up the workbooks. Bookmark the suggestions
you want to implement. The key mantra is how to apply leadership:
direction, culture, trust, and motivation with your distributed workforce.
I really want you to read this book in the time it takes to fly from coast
to coast so you can turn on your laptop or tablet and immediately start
solving problems in your next MS Teams meeting.
xxi
Introduction
In fact, mark up the book with a pen and think about how to apply
each chapter to your role or department. I recommend discussing
chapters, my observations, and theories with other co-workers and team
members to share and exchange ideas.
This book is not a prescriptive “how to” book with every
chapter stating something that should be implemented next
week.
What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 outlines the importance of tidying up not just at home, but also
on your desktop. It isn’t just a guide to decluttering. It’s about having a
clutter-free working environment so focus can be achieved.
Chapter 2 throws out the traditional notions of what it takes to run a
business with expensive technology and offers a collection of unorthodox
advice, ranging from productivity to communication and automation.
Chapter 3 offers a step-by-step guide to becoming a more productive
and effective executive with your employees.
Chapter 4 explains how a valuable tool called the Entrepreneurial
Operating System (EOS) works and how you can use it to build your
business leveraging the M365 technology. This chapter really is a guide to
running a robust, thriving business.
Chapter 5 is all about overcoming procrastination and learning
to manage your time with MS Teams functions such as the tasks list,
OneNote, and Outlook integration.
Chapter 6 gives you a playbook for successful team management.
It teaches you how to change your language and mindset to improve
decision-making, empower workers, and achieve better results.
Chapter 7 addresses the problem of selling to customers over MS
Teams. The goal of this chapter is to use “insight scenarios” so salespeople
can not only solidify sales relationships, but also significantly increase
sales volumes.
xxii
Introduction
Chapter 8 explains how to put people in the right position in the

company and to identify the roles people play in the company.
Chapter 9 is the final chapter. Like all good leadership and technical
books, it summarizes of the chapters of the book, the objectives of the
book, and the next steps for you, the reader.
What You Need for This Book

For this book to be of value, you will need an open mind to absorb and
interpret the leadership insights and experiences stated in each chapter.
This is key because the book’s emphasis is on leadership of remote teams
with Microsoft Teams.
This book is not a step-by-step survival guide to MS Teams, and
not every leadership insight and discipline should be applied if
you don’t think it is a fit. Not everything should be taken literally.
You will also need the ability to reapply the information stated in the
chapter topics to M365 functionality.
What you need to get value from this book is patience, interest in
making behavioral changes, and the ability to let go. One reason why we
are bad at learning is that we bring a lot of old ways of communicating
to our job and our lives. We may be accustomed to communicating with
our workforce face-to-face, by phone, and by email, but less familiar
with a comprehensive communication solution that includes video
conferencing, calls, chat, and more. If you can let go of assumptions from
“the old days,” you can learn much more effectively from this book. One
major piece of baggage we accrue is the belief that if we’re not visibly
active, we’re not learning. Luckily this is incorrect when we work in the
spare room five days a week.
Learning requires time to reflect and discuss what you have
learned and let your mind wander. It will help if you let go of
trying to look smart and focus instead on trying to be smart.
xxiii
Introduction
Who This Book Is For

This book is ideal for IT managers, business owners, project managers, and
any line-of-business (LOB) executives who face challenges with a remote
workforce and need to raise their leadership game.
This book is not designed for the developer and administrator,
yet the content may be of interest in helping provide a com-
mon vocabulary and vision between them and their lines of
management.
Final Word
This book idea isn’t new to me. I thought about in 2019. (Of course,
thinking and doing are completely different activities.) To quote a famous
musician from Liverpool, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy
making other plans.” In January 2020, I got married and then COVID hit.
COVID caused an adjustment for SoHo in how we do business internally
and externally with our customers. Still, this was an extension of what
I was already doing: applying leadership in a Zoom economy with
Microsoft Teams.
xxiv
This book you hold in your hand or read on your screen is a welcome dive
into the popular—if still not well-known—hub for collaboration from the
makers of Windows, Office, and SharePoint: Microsoft Teams. You’ll find
the book approaches the adoption and business value of MS Teams from
a leadership lens, not the typical Microsoft 365 or SharePoint developer
or administrator point of view. And it’s good to finally see books applying
leadership and project models using real tools, not abstract theory.
With the consistent growth of SharePoint over the past 20 years and
the crazy explosion of MS Teams both pre- and post-pandemic, MS Teams
is here to stay. One hundred forty-five million people use MS Teams daily
and 500,000 organizations use it as their default messaging platform
(source, Business of Apps). If your organization isn’t yet using it, it likely
will, which is why this book is going to be valuable to you.
(Source: Curry, David, Microsoft Teams Revenue and Usage Statistics
(2022), BusinessofApps, January 11, 2022, https://www.businessofapps.
com/data/microsoft-teams-statistics/)
Its pages provide a broader and deeper approach to leveraging MS
Teams functionality from a leadership standpoint compared to typical
books on the subject. You’ll find fundamental principles of high-stakes
communications, company structure, and day-to-day operations of a
remote workforce from an author who manages such a workforce in his
fast-growing company.
The story is very much a personal account of how the author has
implemented MS Teams and Microsoft 365 functionality into as many
of his company’s business processes as possible. Peter Ward and SoHo
Dragon provide a useful case study for improving and modernizing
xxv
repeatable business processes that you can put to work in your

organization today. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just apply
what’s been successful elsewhere?
You’ll find no sugarcoating of the process: this book doesn’t pretend
that an MS Teams implementation will scale a remote company, make
double-digit profits, or open offices around the world on its own. Rather,
it journals communication styles over MS Teams, how to truly understand
an organizational structure with Visio, and techniques to avoid meeting
Zoom fatigue. It chronicles how to get stuff done with a remote workforce
using the Microsoft 365 technologies you likely already have within your
subscription.
The path that Peter and his team have walked is a useful guide to follow
given their success in expanding their workforce from one to more than 100
in this new remote world that is certainly here to stay. And this book gives
management the “a-ha!” moments to help adapt, apply, and benefit from
MS Teams, OneNote, Power BI, and other tools in the Microsoft quiver.
I am delighted to endorse Leadership in a Zoom Economy with
Microsoft Teams as a challenging and inspirational invitation to go deeper
with the MS Teams platform in a practical, repeatable way.
—Matt Wade
Microsoft MVP and author of Teach Yourself Visually Microsoft Teams &
Office 365 All-in-One for Dummies
https://linktr.ee/thatmattwade
xxvi
CHAPTER 1
Personal Governance:
The Art of Tidying Up
Marie Kondo: Discard anything that doesn't spark joy.
There is something about tidying up not just at home but on your
computer’s desktop as well.
Tidying and organizing your desktop content and M365 tools can make
a massive difference to your leadership and productivity. I suspect you think
this is bonkers—and this is the first chapter of the book—but trust me, you’ll
get tasks done quicker and have your act together, and people will see this.
My team has seen this in my work and organizational skills, and after a bit of
coaching on tidying up their desktops, they have seen it in theirs as well.
Marie Kondo, the Japanese organization consultant, has made a career
of decluttering people’s lives from a philosophical side while apparently
making it happier in the process. This chapter applies Marie’s principles
not to make you happier (though it probably will) but as a guide to
decluttering your work so you have a clutter-free working environment
from a user experience (UX) of your desktop, browser, Outlook, and MS
Teams. The goal of the chapter is not just to help you keep your workspace
organized; it is to guide you to create a space that improves productivity
and uses M365 tools less confusingly.
You’re probably thinking that to unlock potential and productivity you
need more technology with more features to make work bigger, better, and
faster, which is the mantra of any technology product manager.
© Peter Ward 2022 1

P. Ward, Leadership in a Zoom Economy with Microsoft Teams,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7993-9_1
Chapter 1 PERSONAL GOVERNANCE: THE ART OF TIDYING UP
Microsoft is often criticized when it releases products that are bloated

with features. Maybe this is how humans have evolved: we always want
more. You should use this chapter as a trigger to pause and think about
what you currently have and use, and question if it is of value.
Given that most employees daily receive hundreds of emails,
instant messages, and notifications, I think this “tidying up” discipline
is more relevant than ever.
Why Do We Need To Focus?

There is something to be said about deep uninterrupted focus, which is
challenging in today’s Zoom economy. That’s why I get more done in an
hour at 7 am than the entire rest of the day at work.
We are surrounded by things that consistently zap our attention and
get in the way of how we perform our job, and we have no idea what task
is at hand or what we need to do. Worse, most of these attention-grabbing
notifications are not notifications that require our immediate attention.
Deleting applications, muting MS Teams channels, and simplifying our
workday looks more straightforward than it is because when we get down
to our tasks and applications, most people do not know where to start and
what to delete and hide.
This chapter’s title, “The Art of Tidying Up,” may sound like a simple
task, but it is not. That’s because most people do not know where to start,
how to complete the tidying up, or the value of being in control of their
day, which is why they fail to stay tidy and organized.
This is why this chapter has the word Art, rather than Science, as Art
means something intuitive, imprecise, and subjective, a skill cultivated
through practice and imagination. In contrast, Science means something
researched, measured, and objective, a hard statistic backed by people
wearing white coats. Sorry, this is not that discipline.
2
In this chapter, I prescribe the art of tidying as a series of simple actions

in which functionality and content that are not used or do not provide any
value are deleted or hidden, yet accessible when needed. This involves
having daily activities immediately accessible. In some ways, this goes
against conventional thinking by removing functions and features rather
than endlessly adding functions and features.
This clean-up process may seem simple. Yet I often look at a co-worker’s
PC and (to put it mildly) I do not know where to begin on starting the task of
tidying up their desktop to make their workday more productive.
Even new employees have an amazing ability to create a disorganized
mess in a very short period of time. For some reason, salespeople are the
worst. Oddly enough, this is not due to a lack of technical skills, but rather
a lack of awareness and a total inability to make tidying a regular habit.
After all, there are certifications in Excel and MS Teams, but I am not aware
of a course in tidying things up to make yourself more productive. To state
it simply, the root of the problem lies in discipline. Success is 90 percent
dependent on our discipline skills. This is true in many areas of our lives.
The goal of this chapter is to create a system to get your work done as
fast as possible.
Tidying Up Principles
I have defined two main tidying-up principles that you can apply: dispose
and recategorization.
• Dispose: This is deleting everything that provides no

value to your day job.
• Recategorization: This is the act of moving functions

and features that are used daily to be more accessible,
and making sure functions and features that aren’t
used daily or weekly are stored in the background.
3
The two principles stated above may seem obvious to the reader, and
you may think about how these principles create productivity and make
your workday more productive. Simply put, just like when your desk
becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical objects. In other
words, clutter distracts us from the source of the disorganization.
Now I know some of you might be thinking there are geniuses like
Albert Einstein who had a desk that looked like a bomb had hit it. His desk
was famous for being cluttered with notebooks, journals, and tobacco tins,
and behind the desk, a blackboard covered with equations and formulas
that were, to the untrained eye, a complete mess. But these creative
geniuses are not your typical worker in the office, and they are more
exceptions than the rule.
Also, creativity and productivity are not the same activity or
outcome and should not be confused.
The final point in this section is this: more functionality is not the
answer. So three monitors rather than two and a larger hard drive will
not cut it to get tasks done in the day. These are the quick fixes that may
organize junk better but do not get to the source of the problem and do
nothing to eliminate clutter. This is the classic behavior of going for comfort
rather than for change itself. It’s another version of what you already have.
Where To Start: Dispose

The disposing of items has to come first because if you do this first, there
are fewer things to recategorize or think about where to put, so it means
less work. I suppose there’s a productive win here!
The secret is to dispose of as much as you can in one shot as quickly
and thoroughly as possible. This can be done in a lunch hour, but this
needs to be a session where you think you have not just tinkered with
something but made a difference.
And guess what? This is an ongoing activity.
4
This chapter’s workbook is an excellent guide to disposing and

recategorizing functionality and content.
Do not even think about the other step until you have finished
the disposal process. Failure to follow this sequence is why many
people never make permanent progress in an organized mindset.
If this sequence is not followed, people start thinking about where to

save and hide applications and content, with these thoughts: “ I may use
this stuff one day, even though I haven’t touched these bookmarks in two
years.” Yes, I have seen it all with employees. You do not need to put things
away when you have finished getting rid of everything you do not need.
Deciding What To Dispose Of

“Taking a knife” to everything might seem obvious, but this is where
people struggle, and I think it is because people focus on what to throw
away rather than what to keep.
There are several common techniques when it comes to disposing
of files.
1. Discard things when they cease being functional,

such as saved bookmarks that do not work.
2. Dispose of outdated things, such as old versions of

application icons like OneNote (recently upgraded).
It is easy to get rid of things when there is an
apparent reason for doing so, such as when a project
is finished. It is much more difficult when there is no
compelling reason.
The rule of thumb I use is to dispose of anything I haven’t used
for a year. If you can’t decide, save that bookmark or file in a folder called
5
OLD and look at the items again six months later. I think we both know
what the outcome will be 😊.
I suppose indecisiveness is the key to flexibility, but when you start
focusing for long periods on choosing what to dispose of, you have
veered significantly off course.
A more thoughtful approach is to choose what you keep, not what
you dispose of.
Scarcity is one more thing to make this process more challenging.
When scarcity is factored in, the difficulty in choosing what to dispose of
causes experimental resistance, as people think that they could still use it
since it provides functional or information value or it has sentimental or
emotional value. When these things are hard to decide on, such as unused
course material that costs money or an installed application that took three
approvals, it becomes even harder to say goodbye and dispose of them.
My suggestion is to only keep things that you use frequently and then
take a knife to dispose of the rest. By doing this, the clutter clearing begins.
Recategorization
Again, people struggle with recategorization because they are attached to files
from a project that they have not used in years, perhaps because they bring
back memories. So it is often hard to decide whether to keep or move them.
My advice is to focus on these features:
• Function: Do I still use this application/file/bookmark?
• Information: Is this still relevant or accurate?
• Emotional attachment: That project from three years

ago got me promoted; these files are a badge of honor.
Even though it’s just boring enterprise-business stuff, the three factors
stated above add value to this tidying-up decision process.
6
C
hapter Workbook
D
isposing
T eams
1. Identify all teams that you are a member of and ask
yourself, “Do I need to be a member of this team?”
If the answer is no, leave the team. This should be applied to MS Teams
chats as well as MS Teams teams.
2. Identify all MS Teams chat groups (Figure 1-1) you

are a member of and ask yourself, “Do I need to be
in this chat?”
Figure 1-1. MS Teams chat group
7
If the answer is no, leave the chat group.
✓✓ Write down how many teams and chat groups you

have left.
Bookmarks
1. Review the bookmarks in your browser. Do you need
these links? When were they last used? If you keep
them, check to see if they all work.
✓✓ Write down how many bookmarks you deleted.
Desktop Files
1. Review all the files saved on your desktop. Do you
need these files? Are they saved elsewhere?
✓✓ Write down how many files you deleted.
Review your inbox and move emails to the Action Required folder
with the newly created Quick Step (see below).
OneDrive
1. Review all the OneDrive libraries synced with
SharePoint and MS Teams. Do these files need to be
saved on your OneDrive?
8
FYI: Unsyncing a OneDrive library does not delete

the file.
✓✓ Write down how many OneDrive libraries you

unsynced.
Application Icons on Start Menu and Taskbar

1. Review all applications on the Start Menu and
Taskbar. Do these applications need to be pinned or
even saved at all?
✓✓ Write down how many applications you unpinned or

deleted.
Email: Inbox and Folders

1. This will take time but delete all unwanted, old
emails in your Inbox. If you have not replied to them
after three months, you probably never will.
2. Delete emails in folders.
✓✓ Approximately how many emails do you think you

deleted?
Set up an automated rule.
9
O
neNote Pages
1. It will take time to delete all unwanted, unused, or
incorrect OneNote pages.
2. Delete unused pages.
✓✓ Approximately how many pages do you think you deleted?
Recategorization
With the technology areas stated in this chapter’s workbook, start to focus
on the areas in the following sections.
R
ecategorize Folders
Create folders for files and bookmarks that relate to business functions or
projects and move the items to these folders. They can be labeled as Sales,
Marketing, Project Name 1, Project Name2, or HR.
✓✓ How many folders did you create, and how many items
did you put in them?
Create a Quick Step in Outlook

✓✓ Create a folder called Action Required.
✓✓ Create a Quick Step to move emails that do not require

immediate attention. See Figures 1-2 through 1-4 for
the steps.
10
Figure 1-2. Creating a Quick Step
Figure 1-3. Choosing an action
11
Figure 1-4. Choosing a shortcut
Move
• Move files off your desktop to SharePoint or OneDrive.
• Move emails from the Inbox to folders in Outlook.
✓✓ How many files did you move?
ďŽǀĞϱϬ͍
Mute
• Mute all notifications, sounds, and pop-ups on your PC
and phone.
• MS Teams: Channels, instant messages
• New emails
✓✓ Tally up. How many notifications did you mute?
12
NOW repeat the exercises in the workbook two more times and
dispose and recategorize 5% more each time. Yes, 5%.
Pitfalls of This Art

Stop overthinking. Remember that a lot of the stuff you delete will be in
the recycle bin for some time. You may start thinking, “I might need it
for an unforeseen project” or “It’s a waste to get rid of it.” Do not let these
thoughts stop you. Let go.
When you do get stuck, ask yourself, “Why is this file is on my desktop?
Why is this application on my Taskbar? When was it last used?”
Not all content or applications add value to your day. Maybe they once
did. It is the same with friends or co-workers: you move on, and not every
co-worker you meet helps your career or helps you do your job. But this
does teach you the precious lesson of who you like so that you appreciate
those special people even more.
Remember the trick mentioned earlier in the chapter: If you can’t
decide, save that bookmark or file in a folder called OLD.
Did you find this chapter meditative? If not, this art of tidying up will
not be mastered.
Through this tidying up process, you will truly cherish the essential
things for your day-to-day tasks.
The key takeaways of this chapter are
• Identify the features and files that you need first.
• Be aware that this is an ongoing process. You should

review the chapter’s exercises every six months. (When
you are on a boring conference call, time is well spent.)
It gets easier after the initial tidying up.
13
• Be decisive in your actions. Staying in the middle

ground will not produce the desired results of this
chapter.
• Review and delete the items moved into the OLD

folder. This will confirm that you do or do not need
these items or files.
• Always keep improving. Take advantage of a clutter-free

workspace and look for other areas where this skill can
be applied, such as your work desk or home office.
One thing that does occur in this tidying up process is that you are so
focused on what to dispose of that you can overdo it. Yes, you may delete
files or links that you need. There is always a recycle bin. When you overdo
the disposition and recategorization, you may not be genuinely thinking
about what to keep to be productive.
This is a bit like the train company boasting that the trains now run
on time and reach the destination faster when all that has happened is
that the train is not stopping at all stations.
Through this observation, I concluded that the best way to choose
what to keep and what to dispose of is to take each item and ask, “Is this
something that I will use this week or this month?” If the answer is yes,
keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is the simplest and the most accurate
yardstick by which to judge.
I could argue that by keeping so much functionality and content, you
are not valuing what you have or use, but adding more functionality and
content to functionality and content that is not being used. This approach
has limited success. It is more productive to remove something you already
have and just let go.
14
References
Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, Netflix.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of
Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo (Ten Speed Press, 2014).
15
CHAPTER 2
Creating a Growth
Culture with a Truly
Remote Team
James Cash Penney, founder, JCPenney: Growth is never by mere
chance; it is the result of forces working together.
The Only Way Is Up, Ideally

As the founder and CTO/CEO of a company, there is an expectation from
employees and potential new hires that their employer is expanding—and
with this expansion, their careers will progress.
This employee expectation puts additional pressure on a founder
because you want to attract new talent but also keep talented individuals
around as much as possible, with challenging projects and technologies,
so they don’t outgrow the company.
BS job titles and fake job promotions will not cut it. Any talented
individual will see through these.
This chapter throws out the traditional notions of what it takes to run
and grow a small business with a remote team and offers some unorthodox
© Peter Ward 2022 17

P. Ward, Leadership in a Zoom Economy with Microsoft Teams,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7993-9_2
Chapter 2 Creating a Growth Culture with a Truly Remote Team
time-saving advice that will free any founder’s time, which will allow you to
focus on one thing: growth.
Time is the currency that any founder, including myself, just doesn't
have enough of.
These approaches, from productivity to communication and culture
building, have been applied to the SoHo organization to create growth of a
remote team with an internal focus. Yes, internal focus to create growth!!!
SoHo’s Growth Mantras

The following are SoHo’s growth mantras:
• Email is the graveyard of messaging. Most information

stored in employee inboxes is often lost or
unsearchable. If it’s a task, generate it as a task, not as
an email.
• Forms should be electronic, like in a PowerApp, not a

Word or PDF file to be downloaded.
• Do not assume that people read emails.
• Tasks ideally should be able to be performed on the go,

on a phone.
Chapter and Book Disclaimer

Let me state here, early in the book, that SoHo is not a 100% remote
company—not in the United States, India, or Lithuania offices. Yes, yes,
I know this book is about the Zoom economy.
You hear this all the time. A wildly successful tech company with 100+
staff working remotely, with no staff morale, productivity, communication,
or team-building problems. Like Basecamp and Automattic (the folks
behind WordPress), these successful companies are 100% remote, so how
do they do it and do it successfully?
18
Let’s not confuse things. First, most of these companies are somewhat
newish and have not been around for 30+ years and they are technology
product companies rather than service companies. At product companies,
there is a tendency to leave developers alone to do their jobs in isolation
and come up for air on sprint calls.
SoHo is a services company, not a product company. This is a crucial
point of difference when reading articles on remote workers, as traditional
companies that service the customer are located close to their customers.
This isn’t a new concept. If you look at the history of economic growth,
service industries are typically located where wealth is located. SoHo’s
office is off Wall Street, and our client base is finance.
I’m aware this goes against the advice offered in best-selling books like
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas
L. Friedman. A book that describes geographical distance from the market
is not important anymore.
Informal, face-to-face conversations are priceless.
A person working for a service company always needs to be
servicing the customer, while a person working for a product company
can be alone, in a different time zone, coding away.
The statements above are not hard and fast rules. They are based on
observing SoHo’s clients and community. Despite extensive use of MS
Teams with our clients, 95% of our client base is located within three miles
of our New York City-based Wall Street office.
Older companies may have a legacy of an office workplace culture. For
example, if a company is over 100 years old, has always been located in the
same building, has a workforce over 40 years old, then the “Let’s go 100%
remote next month” routine will probably not work because of culture
(the way we work), equipment, and people’s resistance to change. Going
remote can be done, but it will be a cultural shift that will be resisted.
For a traditional company, I suggest starting with one or two days a
week of remote work and evaluating the benefits after three months.
19
Another important point is that startups tend to have all the latest
gadgets, are more tech-savvy, and have a younger workforce than older
companies. I think they prefer to be on the leading/bleeding edge of
technology with webcams and Apple watch pings with every notification.
In contrast, older companies do not always have all the gadgets or the
tech-savvy workforce so new home equipment may need to be purchased.
So going remote is not for everyone.
How Does SoHo Dragon Go Remote?

As of the end of 2020, we are not a fully remote company. Yes, even during
COVID. And we probably never will be entirely remote because we have
found it too difficult to properly manage people that way and get people
into the groove of the company. I’m aware that other successful companies
have managed this feat, but we haven’t, so I have to be careful with some
of my statements in this book because in business, there are no hard-and-
fast, solid rules. The approaches and principles mentioned are from my
experience over the past 10 years.
This is my disclaimer.
The SoHo Dragon Story

When I started SoHo Dragon in May 2010, I was a single contractor,
working from my apartment in Long Island City, the most western part of
Queens in New York City. This setup was fine when it was just me visiting
client sites and cranking out code for clients. Not much teamwork at all,
as it was just me. In 2013, I brought on a partner, Jim Blottman, to the
company. The SoHo Dragon brand was firmly established, and we started
operating as a “loose” company with both of us working from our homes.
He was in New Jersey and I was in New York City. This worked fine with
Skype, Office 365 Mail, Dropbox, and a now-defunct task tracker called
20
Wedoist. Everyone in the company hated this tool, but I loved it because it
was so simple and it was $5 per month with unlimited users. I considered
it a total bargain.
There is something about simplicity that product managers often
do not understand.
SoHo is an IT consulting firm that is a service company. I joke that “our
business is just like lawyers; we provide a service in billable hours, but
we are friendly people to do business with and we always tell the truth.”
So employee utilization is vital, along with solid communication, both
internally and externally within the company.
Then in 2014, the big project hit. Yes, every small company gets a big project
that takes them to the next level. You could even say this big project was an act
of God 😊, as in 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast of the United
States, particularly New York City and the surrounding areas. Thousands of
homes and vehicles were destroyed during the storm. The economic losses in
New York City were estimated to be roughly 19 billion dollars.
The State of New Jersey received billions of dollars of federal recovery
money to rebuild damaged homes and awarded construction companies
the job of managing the rebuilding program.
In February 2014, a former co-worker who worked for the construction
firm MBP called me up and said, “We need a technology platform
that handles a lot of construction forms and documents and is very
customizable, and we don’t know what we want. Does that SharePoint
platform sound like it can do the job?”
SoHo went from two to six full-time team members within a week, and
real team activity was required. Microsoft Teams had not been invented,
yet Office 365 was great for email, instant messaging, and document
management. Meetings, tasks, and document management was not as
integrated into a single platform as I would have liked, but that is why MS
Teams was invented. Even if MS Teams had been developed, the client and
team communication challenges would still exist.
Technology only goes so far.
21
The best communication tool then and still today is face-to-face

meetings, so we set aside two days per week to work on the project site
in Wall Township, NJ. This required us to be on-site two days a week to
capture formal and informal requirements of the project, both internally
within SoHo and externally with the client.
In 2015, SoHo moved into MBP’s New York office at 30 Broad Street.
This was because it proved to be just too tricky Skyping, emailing, and
holding daily standing calls without speaking face-to-face.
There is something about the power of an informal conversation, a
chat over a coffee, and a side conversation. Technology hasn’t achieved
this yet. Also, if you ever want to get close to a client, move into
their office.
I also discovered that there is always going to be a factor where people
want to be in the room where it happens, rather than being in an MS
Teams meeting. I know this is a phrase from Hamilton, “Everyone wants to
be in the room.” I think it gives people bragging rights.
In 2021, even during COVID, SoHo still has an office that is a 30-minute
bicycle ride from my house. I work at least two days a week remotely.
These days are usually Monday and Friday as I deliberately line up my
status and team calls on these days, so there’s not much point in coming
into the office to be on conference calls (more about this later in the book).
Although most of our employees live in the New York metro area, we
do have some that are just outside daily commuting distances, and we
insist they come into the office at least once every other month and have
coffee with at least one person not on their team.
On a high level, this is how the SoHo team members work remotely. It
is not ideal, but like life, it is never perfect, but it works. Like everything, it
can be improved.
22
SoHo Dragon’s Non-Microsoft Tools

Even though the book’s title is Leadership in a Zoom Economy with
Microsoft Teams and I am a Microsoft MVP and SoHo is a Microsoft Gold
partner, the company relies heavily on non-Microsoft products for its
business success and growth. I thought I would outline them now for
transparency purposes.
Scaling SoHo with a remote workforce requires tools that provide
structure and process to day-to-day functions. At SoHo, we have several
non-Microsoft tools that surprise new employees when they see all the
branding on the website that we are a Microsoft partner. I often hear
comments like, “We are a Microsoft reseller; we must do everything
Microsoft.” These responses typically get my witty response of “You use an
iPhone. Where’s your Windows phone?”
But in all seriousness, we use what we feel is the right tool for the right
task. So the primary purchasing criteria are as follows:
• Ease of use: At home, employees install and use

complicated enterprise applications like Google,
Amazon, Gmail, and Facebook, which do not require
training hours. These same employees have the same
attitude with applications in the workplace. A two-day
training session does not work in today’s workplace.
• Cost of ownership: As the owner of a consulting firm,

I am obsessed with employee utilization, so I want
people to work as many billable hours as possible,
rather than building out homegrown systems that need
maintenance and take up time that could be billed to
clients. This is a challenge when there is a technology
23
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
CHAPTER XXIV
I
it was during his inquiry about clerical allies and rivals—they
were the same thing—that Elmer learned that two of his classmates
at Mizpah Seminary were stationed in Zenith.
Wallace Umstead, the Mizpah student-instructor in gymnastics,
was now general secretary of the Zenith Y. M. C. A.
“He’s a boob. We can pass him up,” Elmer decided. “Husky but
no finesse and culture. No. That’s wrong. Preacher can get a lot of
publicity speaking at the Y., and get the fellows to join his church.”
So he called on Mr. Umstead, and that was a hearty and touching
meeting between classmates, two strong men come face to face,
two fellow manly Christians.
But Elmer was not pleased to learn of the presence of the second
classmate, Frank Shallard. He angrily recalled: “Sure—the fellow
that high-hatted me and sneaked around and tried to spy on me
when I was helping him learn the game at Schoenheim.”
He was glad to hear that Frank was in disgrace with the sounder
and saner clergy of Zenith. He had left the Baptist Church; it was
said that he had acted in a low manner as a common soldier in the
Great War; and he had gone as pastor to a Congregational Church
in Zenith—not a God-fearing, wealthy Congregational Church, like
that of Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, but one that was suspected of being
as shaky and cowardly and misleading as any Unitarian fold.
Elmer remembered that he still owed Frank the hundred dollars
which he had borrowed to reach Zenith for the last of his Prosperity
lectures. He was furious to remember it. He couldn’t pay it, not now,
with a motor-car just bought and only half paid for! But was it safe to
make an enemy of this crank Shallard, who might go around
shooting his mouth off and telling a lot of stories—not more’n half of
’em true?
He groaned with martyrdom, made out a check for a hundred—it
was one-half of his present bank-balance—and sent it to Frank with
a note explaining that for years he had yearned to return this money,
but he had lost Frank’s address. Also, he would certainly call on his
dear classmate just as soon as he got time.
“And that’ll be about sixteen years after the Day of Judgment,” he
snorted.
II
Not all the tenderness, all the serene uprightness, all the mystic
visions of Andrew Pengilly, that village saint, had been able to keep
Frank Shallard satisfied with the Baptist ministry after his association
with the questioning rabbi and the Unitarian minister at Eureka.
These liberals proved admirably the assertion of the Baptist
fundamentalists that to tamper with biology and ethnology was to
lose one’s Baptist faith, wherefore State University education should
be confined to algebra, agriculture, and Bible study.
Early in 1917, when it was a question as to whether he would
leave his Baptist church or be kicked out, Frank was caught by the
drama of war—caught, in his wavering, by what seemed strength—
and he resigned, for all of Bess’ bewildered protests; he sent her and
the children back to her father, and enlisted as a private soldier.
Chaplain? No! He wanted, for the first time, to be normal and
uninsulated.
Through the war he was kept as a clerk in camp in America. He
was industrious, quick, accurate, obedient; he rose to a sergeancy
and learned to smoke; he loyally brought his captain home whenever
he was drunk; and he read half a hundred volumes of science.
And all the time he hated it.
He hated the indignity of being herded with other men, no longer
a person of leisure and dignity and command, whose idiosyncrasies
were important to himself and to other people, but a cog, to be
hammered brusquely the moment it made any rattle of individuality.
He hated the seeming planlessness of the whole establishment. If
this was a war to end war, he heard nothing of it from any of his
fellow soldiers or his officers.
But he learned to be easy and common with common men. He
learned not even to hear cursing. He learned to like large males
more given to tobacco-chewing than to bathing, and innocent of all
words longer than “hell.” He found himself so devoted to the virtues
of these common people that he wanted “to do something for
them”—and in bewildered reflection he could think of no other way of
“doing something for them” than to go on preaching.
But not among the Baptists, with their cast-iron minds.
Nor yet could he quite go over to the Unitarians. He still revered
Jesus of Nazareth as the one path to justice and kindness, and he
still—finding even as in childhood a magic in the stories of
shepherds keeping watch by night, of the glorified mother beside the
babe in the manger—he still had an unreasoned feeling that Jesus
was of more than human birth, and veritably the Christ.
It seemed to him that the Congregationalists were the freest
among the more or less trinitarian denominations. Each
Congregational church made its own law. The Baptists were
supposed to, but they were ruled by a grim general opinion.
After the war he talked to the state superintendent of
Congregational churches of Winnemac. Frank wanted a free church,
and a poor church, but not poor because it was timid and lifeless.
They would, said the superintendent, be glad to welcome him
among the Congregationalists, and there was available just the flock
Frank wanted: the Dorchester Church, on the edge of Zenith. The
parishioners were small shopkeepers and factory foremen and
skilled workmen and railwaymen, with a few stray music-teachers
and insurance agents. They were mostly poor; and they had the
reputation of really wanting the truth from the pulpit.
When Elmer arrived, Frank had been at the Dorchester Church
for two years, and he had been nearly happy.
He found that the grander among his fellow Congregational
pastors—such as G. Prosper Edwards, with his down-town plush-
lined cathedral—could be shocked almost as readily as the Baptists
by a suggestion that we didn’t really quite know about the virgin birth.
He found that the worthy butchers and haberdashers of his
congregation did not radiate joy at a defense of Bolshevik Russia.
He found that he was still not at all certain that he was doing any
good, aside from providing the drug of religious hope to timorous folk
frightened of hell-fire and afraid to walk alone.
But to be reasonably free, to have, after army life, the fleecy
comfort of a home with jolly Bess and the children, this was oasis,
and for three years Frank halted in his fumbling for honesty.
Even more than Bess, the friendship of Dr. Philip McGarry, of the
Arbor Methodist Church, kept Frank in the ministry.
McGarry was three or four years younger than Frank, but in his
sturdy cheerfulness he seemed more mature. Frank had met him at
the Ministerial Alliance’s monthly meeting, and they had liked in each
other a certain disdainful honesty. McGarry was not to be shocked
by what biology did to Genesis, by the suggestion that certain
Christian rites had been stolen from Mithraic cults, by Freudianism,
by any social heresies, yet McGarry loved the church, as a
comradely gathering of people alike hungry for something richer than
daily selfishness, and this love he passed on to Frank.
But Frank still resented it that, as a parson, he was considered
not quite virile; that even clever people felt they must treat him with a
special manner; that he was barred from knowing the real thoughts
and sharing the real desires of normal humanity.
And when he received Elmer’s note of greeting he groaned, “Oh,
Lord, I wonder if people ever class me with a fellow like Gantry?”
He suggested to Bess, after a spirited account of Elmer’s eminent
qualities for spiritual and amorous leadership, “I feel like sending his
check back to him.”
“Let’s see it,” said Bess and, placing the check in her stocking,
she observed derisively, “There’s a new suit for Michael, and a lovely
dinner for you and me, and a new lip-stick, and money in the bank.
Cheers! I adore you, Reverend Shallard, I worship you, I adhere to
you in all Christian fidelity, but let me tell you, my lad, it wouldn’t hurt
you one bit if you had some of Elmer’s fast technique in love-
making!”
CHAPTER XXV
I
elmer had, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn and
whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing
agreeable things was keeping others from doing them. But the
general bleakness of his sect was changing, and he found in
Wellspring Church a Young Married Set who were nearly as cheerful
as though they did not belong to a church.
This Young Married Set, though it was in good odor, though the
wives taught Sunday School and the husbands elegantly passed
collection plates, swallowed the Discipline with such friendly ease as
a Catholic priest uses toward the latest bleeding Madonna. They
lived, largely, in the new apartment-houses which were creeping into
Old Town. They were not rich, but they had Fords and phonographs
and gin. They danced, and they were willing to dance even in the
presence of the Pastor.
They smelled in Elmer one of them, and though Cleo’s presence
stiffened them into uncomfortable propriety, when he dropped in on
them alone they shouted, “Come on, Reverend, I bet you can shake
a hoof as good as anybody! The wife says she’s gotta dance with
you! Gotta get acquainted with these Sins of the World if you’re
going to make snappy sermons!”
He agreed, and he did dance, with a pretty appearance of being
shocked. He was light-footed still, for all his weight, and there was
electricity in his grasp as his hands curled about his partner’s waist.
“Oh, my, Reverend, if you hadn’t been a preacher you’d have
been some dancing-man!” the women fluttered, and for all his
caution he could not keep from looking into their fascinated eyes,
noting the flutter of their bosoms, and murmuring, “Better remember
I’m human, honey! If I did cut loose—Zowie!”
And they admired him for it.
Once, when rather hungrily he sniffed at the odors of alcohol and
tobacco, the host giggled, “Say, I hope you don’t smell anything on
my breath, Reverend—be fierce if you thought a good Methodist like
me could ever throw in a shot of liquor!”
“It’s not my business to smell anything except on Sundays,” said
Elmer amiably, and, “Come on now, Sister Gilson, let’s try and fox-
trot again. My gracious, you talk about me smelling for liquor! Think
of what would happen if Brother Apfelmus knew his dear Pastor was
slipping in a little dance! Mustn’t tell on me, folks!”
“You bet we won’t!” they said, and not even the elderly pietists on
whom he called most often became louder adherents of the
Reverend Elmer Gantry, better advertisers of his sermons, than
these blades of the Young Married Set.
He acquired a habit of going to their parties. He was hungry for
brisk companionship, and it was altogether depressing now to be
with Cleo. She could never learn, not after ten efforts a day, that she
could not keep him from saying “Damn!” by looking hurt and
murmuring, “Oh, Elmer, how can you?”
He told her, regarding the parties, that he was going out to call on
parishioners. And he was not altogether lying. His ambition was
more to him now than any exalted dissipation, and however often he
yearned for the mechanical pianos and the girls in pink kimonos of
whom he so lickerishly preached, he violently kept away from them.
But the jolly wives of the Young Married Set—— Particularly this
Mrs. Gilson, Beryl Gilson, a girl of twenty-five, born for cuddling. She
had a bleached and whining husband, who was always quarreling
with her in a weakly violent sputtering; and she was obviously taken
by Elmer’s confident strength. He sat by her in “cozy-corners,” and
his arm was tense. But he won glory by keeping from embracing her.
Also, he wasn’t so sure that he could win her. She was flighty, fond
of triumphs, but cautious, a city girl used to many suitors. And if she
did prove kind—— She was a member of his church, and she was
talkative. She might go around hinting.
After these meditations he would flee to the hospitality of T. J.
Rigg, in whose cheerfully sloven house he could relax safely, from
whom he could get the facts about the private business careers of
his more philanthropic contributors. But all the time the attraction of
Beryl Gilson, the vision of her dove-smooth shoulders, was churning
him to insanity.
II
He had not noticed them during that Sunday morning sermon in
late autumn, not noticed them among the admirers who came up
afterward to shake hands. Then he startled and croaked, so that the
current hand-shaker thought he was ill.
Elmer had seen, loitering behind the others, his one-time forced
fiancée, Lulu Bains of Schoenheim, and her lanky, rugged, vengeful
cousin, Floyd Naylor.
They strayed up only when all the others were gone, when the
affable ushers had stopped pouncing on victims and pump-handling
them and patting their arms, as all ushers always do after all church
services. Elmer wished the ushers were staying, to protect him, but
he was more afraid of scandal than of violence.
He braced himself, feeling the great muscles surge along his
back, then took quick decision and dashed toward Lulu and Floyd,
yammering, “Well, well, well, well, well, well—”
Floyd shambled up, not at all unfriendly, and shook hands
powerfully. “Lulu and I just heard you were in town—don’t go to
church much, I guess, so we didn’t know. We’re married!”
While he shook hands with Lulu, much more tenderly, Elmer gave
his benign blessing with “Well, well! Mighty glad to hear it.”
“Yep, been married—gosh, must be fourteen years now—got
married just after we last seen you at Schoenheim.”
By divine inspiration Elmer was led to look as though he were
wounded clear to the heart at the revived memory of that unfortunate
last seeing. He folded his hands in front of his beautiful morning
coat, and looked noble, slightly milky and melancholy of eye. . . . But
he was not milky. He was staring hard enough. He saw that though
Floyd was still as clumsily uncouth as ever, Lulu—she must be thirty-
three or -four now—had taken on the city. She wore a simple, almost
smart hat, a good tweed top-coat, and she was really pretty. Her
eyes were ingratiatingly soft, very inviting; she still smiled with a
desire to be friendly to every one. Inevitably, she had grown plump,
but she had not yet overdone it, and her white little paw was veritably
that of a kitten.
All this Elmer noted, while he looked injured but forgiving and
while Floyd stammered:
“You see, Reverend, I guess you thought we played you a pretty
dirty trick that night on the picnic at Dad Bains’, when you came back
and I was kind of hugging Lulu.”
“Yes, Floyd, I was pretty hurt, but—— Let’s forget and forgive!”
“No, but listen, Reverend! Golly, ’twas hard for me to come and
explain to you, but now I’ve got going—— Lulu and me, we weren’t
making love. No, sir! She was just feeling blue, and I was trying to
cheer her up. Honest! Then when you got sore and skipped off, Pa
Bains, he was so doggone mad—got out his shotgun and cussed
and raised the old Ned, yes, sir, he simply raised Cain, and he
wouldn’t give me no chance to explain. Said I had to marry Lu. ‘Well,’
I says, ‘if you think that’s any hardship—’ ”
Floyd stopped to chuckle. Elmer was conscious that Lulu was
studying him, in awe, in admiration, in a palpitating resurgence of
affection.
“ ‘If you think that’s any hardship,’ I says, ‘let me tell you right
now, Uncle,’ I says, ‘I been crazy to marry Lu ever since she was so
high. Well, there was a lot of argument. Dad Bains says first we had
to go in town and explain everything to you. But you was gone away,
next morning, and what with one thing and another—well, here we
are! And doing pretty good. I own a garage out here on the edge of
town, and we got a nice flat, and everything going fine. But Lule and
I kind of felt maybe we ought to come around and explain, when we
heard you were here. And got two fine kids, both boys!”
“Honestly, we never meant—we didn’t!” begged Lulu.
Elmer condescended, “Of course, I understand perfectly, Sister
Lulu!” He shook hands with Floyd, warmly, and with Lulu more
warmly. “And I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you were both so
gallant and polite as to take the trouble and come and explain it to
me. That was real courtesy, when I’d been such a silly idiot! That
night—I suffered so over what I thought was your disloyalty that I
didn’t think I’d live through the night. But come! Shall we not talk of it
again? All’s understood now, and all’s right!” He shook hands all over
again. “And now that I’ve found you, two old friends like you—of
course I’m still practically a stranger in Zenith—I’m not going to let
you go! I’m going to come out and call on you. Do you belong to any
church body here in Zenith?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” said Floyd.
“Can’t I persuade you to come here, sometimes, and perhaps
think of joining later?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Reverend, in the auto business—kind of against
my religion, at that, but you know how it is, in the auto business
we’re awful’ busy on Sunday.”
“Well, perhaps Lulu would like to come now and then.”
“Sure. Women ought to stick by the church, that’s what I always
say. Dunno just how we got out of the habit, here in the city, and
we’ve always talked about starting going again, but— Oh, we just
kinda never got around to it, I guess.”
“I hope, uh, I hope, Brother Floyd, that our miscomprehension,
yours and mine that evening, had nothing to do with your alienation
from the church! Oh, that would be a pity! Yes. Such a pity! But I
could, perhaps, have a—a comprehension of it.” (He saw that Lulu
wasn’t missing one of his dulcet and sinuous phrases; so different
from Floyd’s rustic blurting. She was pretty. Just plump enough. Cleo
would be a fat old woman, he was afraid, instead of handsome. He
couldn’t of married Lulu. No. He’d been right. Small-town stuff. But
awful nice to pat!) “Yes, I think I could understand it if you’d been
offended, Floyd. What a young chump I was, even if I was a
preacher, to not—not to see the real situation. Really, it’s you who
must forgive me for my wooden-headedness, Floyd!”
Sheepishly, Floyd grunted, “Well, I did think you flew off the
handle kind of easy, and I guess it did make me kind of sore. But it
don’t matter none now.”
Very interestedly, Elmer inquired of Floyd, “And I’ll bet Lulu was
even angrier at me for my silliness!”
“No, by gosh, she never would let me say a word against you,
Reverend! Ha, ha, ha! Look at her! By golly, if she ain’t blushing!
Well, sir, that’s a good one on her all right!”
Elmer looked, intently.
“Well, I’m glad everything’s explained,” he said unctuously. “Now,
Sister Lulu, you must let me come out and explain about our fine
friendly neighborhood church here, and the splendid work we’re
doing. I know that with two dear kiddies—two, was it?—splendid!—
with them and a fine husband to look after, you must be kept pretty
busy, but perhaps you might find time to teach a Sunday School
class or, anyway, you might like to come to our jolly church suppers
on Wednesday now and then. I’ll tell you about our work, and you
can talk it over with Floyd and see what he thinks. What would be a
good time to call on you, and what’s the address, Lulu? How, uh,
how would tomorrow afternoon, about three, do? I wish I could come
when Floyd’s there, but all my evenings are so dreadfully taken up.”
Next afternoon, at five minutes to three, the Reverend Elmer
Gantry entered the cheap and flimsy apartment-house in which lived
Floyd and Mrs. Naylor, impatiently kicked a baby-carriage out of the
way, panted a little as he skipped up-stairs, and stood glowing,
looking at Lulu as she opened the door.
“All alone?” he said—he almost whispered.
Her eyes dropped before his. “Yes. The boys are in school.”
“Oh, that’s too bad! I’d hoped to see them.” As the door closed,
as they stood in the inner hall, he broke out, “Oh, Lulu, my darling, I
thought I’d lost you forever, and now I’ve found you again! Oh,
forgive me for speaking like that! I shouldn’t have! Forgive me! But if
you knew how I’ve thought of you, dreamed of you, waited for you,
all these years—— No. I’m not allowed to talk like that. It’s wicked.
But we’re going to be friends, aren’t we, such dear, trusting, tender
friends . . . Floyd and you and I?”
“Oh, yes!” she breathed, as she led him into the shabby sitting-
room with its thrice-painted cane rockers, its couch covered with a
knitted shawl, its department-store chromos of fruit and Versailles.
They stood recalling each other in the living-room. He muttered
huskily, “Dear, it wouldn’t be wrong for you to kiss me? Just once?
Would it? To let me know you really do forgive me? You see, now
we’re like brother and sister.”
She kissed him, shyly, fearfully, and she cried, “Oh, my darling,
it’s been so long!” Her arms clung about his neck, invincible,
unrestrained.
When the boys came in from school and rang the clicker bell
down-stairs, the romantics were unduly cordial to them. When the
boys had gone out to play, she cried, wildly, “Oh, I know it’s wrong,
but I’ve always loved you so!”
He inquired interestedly, “Do you feel wickeder because I’m a
minister?”
“No! I’m proud of it! Like as if you were different from other men—
like you were somehow closer to God. I’m proud you’re a preacher!
Any woman would be! It’s—you know. Different!”
He kissed her. “Oh, you darling!” he said.
III
They had to be careful. Elmer had singularly little relish for having
the horny-handed Floyd Naylor come in some afternoon and find him
with Lulu.
Like many famous lovers in many ages, they found refuge in the
church. Lulu was an admirable cook, and while in her new life in
Zenith she had never reached out for such urban opportunities as
lectures or concerts or literary clubs, she had by some obscure
ambitiousness, some notion of a shop of her own, been stirred to
attend a cooking-school and learn salads and pastry and canapés.
Elmer was able to give her a weekly Tuesday evening cooking-class
to teach at Wellspring, and even to get out of the trustees for her a
salary of five dollars a week.
The cooking-class was over at ten. By that time the rest of the
church was cleared, and Elmer had decided that Tuesday evening
would be a desirable time for reading in his church office.
Cleo had many small activities in the church—clubs, Epworth
League, fancy-work—but none on Tuesday evening.
Before Lulu came stumbling through the quiet church basement,
the dark and musty corridor, before she tapped timidly at his door, he
would be walking up and down, and when he held out his arms she
flew into them unreasoning.
He had a new contentment.
“I’m really not a bad fellow. I don’t go chasing after women—oh,
that fool woman at the hotel didn’t count—not now that I’ve got Lulu.
Cleo never was married to me; she doesn’t matter. I like to be good.
If I’d just been married to somebody like Sharon! O God! Sharon! Am
I untrue to her? No! Dear Lulu, sweet kid, I owe something to her,
too. I wonder if I could get to see her Saturday—”
A new contentment he had, and explosive success.
CHAPTER XXVI
I
in the autumn of his first year in Zenith Elmer started his famous
Lively Sunday Evenings. Mornings, he announced, he would give
them solid religious meat to sustain them through the week, but
Sunday evenings he would provide the best cream puffs. Christianity
was a Glad Religion, and he was going to make it a lot gladder.
There was a safe, conservative, sanguinary hymn or two at his
Lively Sunday Evenings, and a short sermon about sunsets, authors,
or gambling, but most of the time they were just happy boys and girls
together. He had them sing “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Swanee River,”
with all the balladry which might have been considered
unecclesiastical if it had not been hallowed by the war: “Tipperary”
and “There’s a Long, Long, Trail,” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in
Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile.”
He made the women sing in contest against the men; the young
people against the old; and the sinners against the Christians. That
was lots of fun, because some of the most firmly saved brethren, like
Elmer himself, pretended for a moment to be sinners. He made them
whistle the chorus and hum it and speak it; he made them sing it
while they waved handkerchiefs, waved one hand, waved both
hands.
Other attractive features he provided. There was a ukulele solo
by the champion uke-player from the University of Winnemac. There
was a song rendered by a sweet little girl of three, perched up on the
pulpit. There was a mouth-organ contest, between the celebrated
Harmonica Quartette from the Higginbotham Casket Factory and the
best four harmonicists from the B. & K. C. railroad shops;
surprisingly won (according to the vote of the congregation) by the
enterprising and pleasing young men from the railroad.
When this was over, Elmer stepped forward and said—you would
never in the world have guessed he was joking unless you were near
enough to catch the twinkle in his eyes—he said, “Now perhaps
some of you folks think the pieces the boys have played tonight, like
‘Marching Through Georgia’ and ‘Mammy,’ aren’t quite proper for a
Methodist Church, but just let me show you how well our friend and
brother, Billy Hicks here, can make the old mouth-organ behave in a
real highbrow religious hymn.”
And Billy played “Ach Du Lieber Augustin.”
How they all laughed, even the serious old stewards! And when
he had them in this humor, the Reverend Mr. Gantry was able to
slam home, good and hard, some pretty straight truths about the
horrors of starting children straight for hell by letting them read the
colored comics on Sunday morning.
Once, to illustrate the evils of betting, he had them bet as to
which of two frogs would jump first. Once he had the representative
of an illustrious grape-juice company hand around sample glasses of
his beverage, to illustrate the superiority of soft drinks to the horrors
of alcohol. And once he had up on the platform a sickening twisted
motor-car in which three people had been killed at a railroad-
crossing. With this as an example, he showed his flock that motor
speeding was but one symptom of the growing madness and
worldliness and materialism of the age, and that this madness could
be cured only by returning to the simple old-time religion as
preached at the Wellspring Methodist Church.
The motor-car got him seven columns of publicity, with pictures of
himself, the car, and the killed motorists.
In fact there were few of his new paths to righteousness which
did not get adequate and respectful attention from the press.
There was, perhaps, no preacher in Zenith, not even the liberal
Unitarian minister or the powerful Catholic bishop, who was not fond
of the young gentlemen of the press. The newspapers of Zenith were
as likely to attack religion as they were to attack the department-
stores. But of all the clerics, none was so hearty, so friendly, so
brotherly, to the reporters as the Reverend Elmer Gantry. His rival
parsons were merely cordial to the sources of publicity when they
called. Elmer did his own calling.
Six months after his coming to Zenith he began preparing a
sermon on “The Making and Mission of a Great Newspaper.” He
informed the editors of his plan, and had himself taken through the
plants and introduced to the staffs of the Advocate-Times, its sister,
the Evening Advocate, the Press, the Gazette, and the Crier.
Out of his visits he managed to seize and hold the
acquaintanceship of at least a dozen reporters. And he met the
magnificent Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the Advocate, a
white-haired, blasphemous, religious, scoundrelly old gentleman,
whose social position in Zenith was as high as that of a bank-
president or a corporation-counsel. Elmer and the Colonel
recognized in each other an enterprising boldness, and the Colonel
was so devoted to the church and its work in preserving the free and
democratic American institutions that he regularly gave to the Pilgrim
Congregational Church more than a tenth of what he made out of
patent medicine advertisements—cancer cures, rupture cures,
tuberculosis cures, and the notices of Old Dr. Bly. The Colonel was
cordial to Elmer, and gave orders that his sermons should be
reported at least once a month, no matter how the rest of the clergy
shouted for attention.
But somehow Elmer could not keep the friendship of Bill
Kingdom, that peculiarly hard-boiled veteran reporter of the
Advocate-Times. He did everything he could; he called Bill by his
first name, he gave him a quarter cigar, and he said “damn,” but Bill
looked uninterested when Elmer came around with the juiciest of
stories about dance-halls. In grieved and righteous wrath, Elmer
turned his charm on younger members of the Advocate staff, who
were still new enough to be pleased by the good-fellowship of a
preacher who could say “damn.”
Elmer was particularly benevolent with one Miss Coey, sob-sister
reporter for the Evening Gazette and an enthusiastic member of his
church. She was worth a column a week. He always breathed at her
after church.
Lulu raged, “It’s hard enough to sit right there in the same pew
with your wife, and never be introduced to her, because you say it
isn’t safe! But when I see you holding hands with that Coey woman,
it’s a little too much!”
But he explained that he considered Miss Coey a fool, that it
made him sick to touch her, that he was nice to her only because he
had to get publicity; and Lulu saw that it was all proper and truly
noble of him . . . even when in the church bulletins, which he wrote
each week for general distribution, he cheered, “Let’s all
congratulate Sister Coey, who so brilliantly represents the Arts
among us, on her splendid piece in the recent Gazette about the
drunken woman who was saved by the Salvation Army. Your pastor
felt the quick tears springing to his eyes as he read it, which is a
tribute to Sister Coey’s powers of expression. And he is always glad
to fellowship with the Salvation Army, as well as with all other
branches of the true Protestant Evangelical Universal Church.
Wellspring is the home of liberality, so long as it does not weaken
morality or the proven principles of Bible Christianity.”
II
As important as publicity to Elmer was the harassing drive of
finance.
He had made one discovery superb in its simple genius—the
best way to get money was to ask for it, hard enough and often
enough. To call on rich men, to set Sunday School classes in
competition against one another, to see that every one received
pledge-envelopes, these were all useful and he pursued them
earnestly. But none of them was so useful as to tell the congregation
every Sunday what epochal good Wellspring and its pastor were
doing, how much greater good they could do if they had more funds,
and to demand their support now, this minute.
His Official Board was charmed to see the collections increasing
even faster than the audiences. They insisted that the bishop send
Elmer back to them for another year—indeed for many years—and
they raised Elmer’s salary to forty-five hundred dollars.
And in the autumn they let him have two subordinates—the
Reverend Sidney Webster, B.A., B.D., as Assistant Pastor, and Mr.
Henry Wink, B.A., as Director of Religious Education.
Mr. Webster had been secretary to Bishop Toomis, and it was
likely that he would some day be secretary of one of the powerful
church boards—the board of publications, the board of missions, the
board of temperance and morals. He was a man of twenty-eight; he
had been an excellent basket-ball player in Boston University; he
was tight-mouthed as a New England president, efficient as an
adding machine, and cold as the heart of a bureaucrat. If he loved
God and humanity-in-general with rigid devotion, he loved no human
individual; if he hated sin, he was too contemptuous of any actual
sinner to hate him—he merely turned his frigid face away and told
him to go to hell. He had no vices. He was also competent. He could
preach, get rid of beggars, be quietly devout in death-bed prayers,
keep down church expenses, and explain about the Trinity.
Henry Wink had a lisp and he told little simpering stories, but he
was admirable in the direction of the Sunday School, vacation Bible
schools, and the Epworth Leagues.
With Mr. Webster and Mr. Wink removing most of the church
detail from him, Elmer became not less but more occupied. He no
longer merely invited the public, but galloped out and dragged it in.
He no longer merely scolded sin. He gratifyingly ended it.
III
When he had been in Zenith for a year and three-quarters, Elmer
formed the Committee on Public Morals, and conducted his raids on
the red-light district.
It seemed to him that he was getting less publicity. Even his
friend, Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the Advocate-Times,
explained that just saying things couldn’t go on being news; news
was essentially a report of things done.
“All right, I’ll do things, by golly, now that I’ve got Webster and
Wink to take care of the glad hand for the brethren!” Elmer vowed.
He received an inspiration to the effect that all of a sudden, for
reasons not defined, “things have gotten so bad in Zenith, immorality
is so rampant in high places and low, threatening the morals of youth
and the sanctity of domesticity, that it is not enough for the ministry
to stand back warning the malefactors, but a time now to come out of
our dignified seclusion and personally wage open war on the forces
of evil.”
He said these startling things in the pulpit, he said them in an
interview, and he said them in a letter to the most important
clergymen in town, inviting them to meet with him to form a
Committee on Public Morals and make plans for open war.
The devil must have been shaken. Anyway, the newspapers said
that the mere threat of the formation of the Committee had caused “a
number of well-known crooks and women of bad reputation to leave
town.” Who these scoundrels were, the papers did not say.
The Committee was to be composed of the Reverends Elmer
Gantry and Otto Hickenlooper, Methodists; G. Prosper Edwards,
Congregationalist; John Jennison Drew, Presbyterian; Edmund St.
Vincent Zahn, Lutheran; James F. Gomer, Disciples; Father Matthew
Smeesby, Catholic; Bernard Amos, Jewish; Hosea Jessup, Baptist;
Willis Fortune Tate, Episcopalian; and Irving Tillish, Christian Science
reader; with Wallace Umstead, the Y. M. C. A. secretary, four moral
laymen, and a lawyer, Mr. T. J. Rigg.
They assembled at lunch in a private dining-room at the palatial
Zenith Athletic Club. Being clergymen, and having to prove that they
were also red-blooded, as they gathered before lunch in the lobby of
the club they were particularly boisterous in shouting to passing
acquaintances, florists and doctors and wholesale plumbers. To one
George Babbitt, a real estate man, Dr. Drew, the Presbyterian,
clamored, “Hey, Georgie! Got a flask along? Lunching with a bunch
of preachers, and I reckon they’ll want a drink!”
There was great admiration on the part of Mr. Babbitt, and
laughter among all the clergymen, except the Episcopal Mr. Tate and
the Christian Scientific Mr. Tillish.
The private dining-room at the club was a thin red apartment with
two pictures of young Indian maidens of Lithuanian origin sitting in
native costumes, which gave free play to their legs, under a rugged
pine-tree against a background of extremely high mountains. In
Private Dining-room A, beside them, was a lunch of the Men’s
Furnishers Association, addressed by S. Garrison Siegel of New
York on “The Rented Dress Suit Business and How to Run It in a
High-class Way.”
The incipient Committee on Public Morals sat about a long
narrow table in bent-wood chairs, in which they were always vainly
trying to tilt back. Their table did not suggest debauchery and the
demon rum. There were only chilly and naked-looking goblets of ice
water.
They lunched, gravely, on consommé, celery, roast lamb, which
was rather cold, mashed potatoes, which were arctic, Brussels
sprouts, which were overstewed, ice cream, which was warm; with
very large cups of coffee, and no smoking afterward.
Elmer began, “I don’t know who is the oldest among us, but
certainly no one in this room has had a more distinguished or more
valuable term of Christian service than Dr. Edwards, of Pilgrim
Congregational, and I know you’ll join me in asking him to say grace
before meat.”
The table conversation was less cheerful than the blessing.
They all detested one another. Every one knew of some case in
which each of the others had stolen, or was said to have tried to
steal, some parishioner, to have corrupted his faith and appropriated
his contributions. Dr. Hickenlooper and Dr. Drew had each
advertised that he had the largest Sunday School in the city. All of
the Protestants wanted to throw ruinous questions about the
Immaculate Conception at Father Smeesby, and Father Smeesby, a
smiling dark man of forty, had ready, in case they should attack the
Catholic Church, the story of the ant who said to the elephant, “Move
over, who do you think you’re pushing?” All of them, except Mr.
Tillish, wanted to ask Mr. Tillish how he’d ever been fooled by this
charlatan, Mary Baker Eddy, and all of them, except the rabbi,
wanted to ask Rabbi Amos why the Jews were such numbskulls as
not to join the Christian faith.
They were dreadfully cordial. They kept their voices bland, and
smiled too often, and never listened to one another. Elmer, aghast,
saw that they would flee before making an organization if he did not
draw them together. And what was the one thing in which they were

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Ebook Leadership in A Zoom Economy With Microsoft Teams Applying Leadership To A Remote Workforce 1St Edition Peter Ward Online PDF All Chapter

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Leadership in a Zoom Economy with

Microsoft Teams: Applying Leadership

Virtual Leadership: Practical Strategies for Success

Collective Leader Efficacy Strengthening Instructional

Leadership Team Coaching in Practice Case Studies on

MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams Exam Guide - Second

Agile Leadership in Practice Applying Management 3 0

Leadership Questions for Health Care Professionals

Leadership Resilience in a Digital Age 1st Edition

MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams Exam Guide - Second

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-7992-2 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-7993-9

Copyright © 2022 by Peter Ward

About the Technical Reviewer������������������������������������������������������������xv

Chapter 1: Personal Governance: The Art of Tidying Up�����������������������1

Chapter 2: Creating a Growth Culture with a Truly Remote Team������17

SoHo Dragon’s Non-Microsoft Tools��������������������������������������������������������������23

Chapter 3: Using M365 To Be an Effective Executive with Remote

Chapter 5: Being Productive with Your Productivity��������������������������69

Chapter 6: Decisive Communication Over MS Teams�������������������������81

Chapter 7: Selling Over MS Teams������������������������������������������������������91

Do the Same Demo Over and Over Again������������������������������������������������������99

Chapter 8: Get Organized with Your Organization����������������������������107

Chapter 9: The Wrap-Up Chapter������������������������������������������������������125

• A Microsoft MVP, co-author of four Microsoft SharePoint

• Is keen on UX simplicity and stays on the leading edge of

• Thinks on his feet in meetings and complex situations

• Loves yoga, vegetarian food, and reading books by

The Zoom Economy

About Me and This Book

History of SoHo Dragon

Leadership includes managing remote teams, and a lack of technical

How to Use This Book

What This Book Covers

Chapter 8 explains how to put people in the right position in the

What You Need for This Book

Who This Book Is For

repeatable business processes that you can put to work in your

© Peter Ward 2022 1

Microsoft is often criticized when it releases products that are bloated

Why Do We Need To Focus?

In this chapter, I prescribe the art of tidying as a series of simple actions

• Dispose: This is deleting everything that provides no

• Recategorization: This is the act of moving functions

Where To Start: Dispose

This chapter’s workbook is an excellent guide to disposing and

If this sequence is not followed, people start thinking about where to

Deciding What To Dispose Of

1. Discard things when they cease being functional,

2. Dispose of outdated things, such as old versions of

• Function: Do I still use this application/file/bookmark?

• Information: Is this still relevant or accurate?

• Emotional attachment: That project from three years

2. Identify all MS Teams chat groups (Figure 1-1) you

Figure 1-1. MS Teams chat group

If the answer is no, leave the chat group.

✓✓ Write down how many teams and chat groups you

✓✓ Write down how many bookmarks you deleted.

✓✓ Write down how many files you deleted.

FYI: Unsyncing a OneDrive library does not delete

✓✓ Write down how many OneDrive libraries you

Application Icons on Start Menu and Taskbar

✓✓ Write down how many applications you unpinned or

Email: Inbox and Folders

About the Technical Reviewer��xv

Chapter 1: Personal Governance: The Art of Tidying Up��1

Chapter 2: Creating a Growth Culture with a Truly Remote Team��17

SoHo Dragon’s Non-Microsoft Tools��23

Chapter 5: Being Productive with Your Productivity��69

Chapter 6: Decisive Communication Over MS Teams��81

Chapter 7: Selling Over MS Teams��91

Do the Same Demo Over and Over Again��99

Chapter 8: Get Organized with Your Organization��107

Chapter 9: The Wrap-Up Chapter��125

The Zoom Economy

About Me and This Book

History of SoHo Dragon

How to Use This Book

What This Book Covers

What You Need for This Book

Who This Book Is For

Why Do We Need To Focus?

Where To Start: Dispose

Deciding What To Dispose Of

Application Icons on Start Menu and Taskbar

Email: Inbox and Folders

Create a Quick Step in Outlook

Pitfalls of This Art

The Only Way Is Up, Ideally

SoHo’s Growth Mantras

Chapter and Book Disclaimer

How Does SoHo Dragon Go Remote?

The SoHo Dragon Story

SoHo Dragon’s Non-Microsoft Tools