Monthly Archives: August 2025
Toastmasters: “Where Leaders Were Made”
The motto of Toastmasters used to be “Where Leaders are Made”
Or as I like to say:
“People join to learn public speaking
and stay to learn leadership.”
What seems to have been forgotten by Toastmasters International is that in the process of deliberately teaching Leadership driven by a dedicated Competent Leadership manual, Toastmasters had a baked-in process to perpetuate and build clubs. With the focus now exclusively on public speaking, once someone gets comfortable with that skill, they have no incentive to stick around and develop their leadership skills or pass those skills on to others. This is certainly a contributing factor to the decline in membership.
While Toastmasters International has dropped the focus of leadership, I am hearing more and more clubs are re-introducing the Competent Leadership Manual as a supplement to the Pathways program. There is practically no overlap and it is motivating members to take more meeting roles and club officer roles that they otherwise might not.
If your club is interested in doing this, here is the .pdf of the Competent Leadership manual.
The one thing that is missing is a convenient source for getting the CL .pdf printed as a manual (not just a stapled booklet). If you have a suggested source for printing, please share it in the comments.
Notes/Domino 12.0.2 Fix Pack 7 Released Now (Lotus Notes)
There is a new FixPack released for the 12.0.2 series of Notes and Domino. Unlike other releases which occur across all currently supported major releases, this is only a fix pack for 12.0.2. Nothing for 14 or 14.5. Rather than repeat all of the details, check out the technote by HCL:
There are 44 bug fixes published in the list of fixes. The most notable one for me is the one created as a direct result of a bug I reported while working with a database with 13 TB of data DAOS data. You read that right, 13 Terabytes (1.3×10^13 bytes or 13,000,000 MB). Quite possibly the largest Notes database in existence today. If you have a database of comparable or larger size, I would love to hear about it.
This also reveals a limitation in the database properties panel. It can’t properly display a database size that large. This one isn’t fixed yet.


