<-

I do not pretend to know everything about leadership. It is a tricky subject and it becomes even trickier in a volunteer organization like the Dark Brotherhood. What I do know or what I do believe is that organizational leadership requires three things to be successful:

• Leaders who nurture, develop, and have confidence in the chain of command.

• Cohesion, confidence, and trust between the members of the organization.

• Willingness of the organizations members to act without waiting to be told what to do.

Every decision I make, I have to decide:

• Does it develop and nurture the chain of command?

• Does it build cohesion and trust?

• Does it encourage our members to take initiative?

If a situation or proposal cannot pass the above criteria, I am not going to support it. This is why I do not believe a police state is conducive to a successful Dark Brotherhood. This is also why I am having the cursing script removed from #db. Success of our club rests with our members. It does not rest on spying on bad conversations or creating a bot to count the number of curse words said in channel. Members of the Dark Brotherhood need to be empowered without the fear of being hammered.

My job is to make the DB better. I can only do this by having personal accountability and instilling personal accountability into our leaders and members. This includes involving everyone on solving problems and asking how we can make the DB better, or how we can adapt the DB to suit the members needs.

Part of personal accountability is doing your best to make the DB better and not acting like a jackass. We all make mistakes and we all use profanity, but I am asking all of you to keep excessive cursing or offensive discussions out of #db. I trust everyone to have enough common sense to realize what excessive cursing is and what offensive discussions are.

A certain key element is missing in the Dark Brotherhood: The degree to establish the want to factor, to instill motivation to improve our organization. That is why we have people acting like a fool, seeking to embarrass others, or wrapped up in whether or not they can say fuck on mIRC. I am not sure how we instill this "want to" factor into these people, but I am willing to bust my ass to do it.

We have extraordinary members in the Dark Brotherhood and our organization can continue to grow and prosper, but the infighting has to stop. I am asking all of you to ask yourself why you are in this club. Hopefully you are here to have a good time and enjoy each others company. If that is the case, I'd like you to focus your energy on helping this club rather than tying it down in your personal vendettas.

<p>News</p>

<p>

GJW: The DGM and P:GM have submitted the final story and proposed competition mechanics and I am very happy with their work. We will continue to update all of you on when the GJW will kick off.

T:W: Congratulations to the new T:W, Vladek Solander.

Happy Father's Day: In the past several reports I have mentioned Darth Babytus, but I failed to mention another recent addition to the Dark Brotherhood family. Everyone should take the time to congratulate Orv on the new addition to his family. Orv's daughter was born right around the same time as my daughter and reports indicate she is quite the little Dark Jedi. Congrats Orv!</p>