Alcor: Discussing Problems and Solutions

By: David Pizer

I want the Alcor Board members to agree to discuss the concerns of some Alcor members (and my own) which I have compiled in my writing here, in order to see if things are so bad at Alcor that our (the suspension members and existing patients) chances of survival through Alcor are being diminished. Also, I would like to discuss if there are ways of making things better and safer for all members and patients.

When I first came to the conclusion that it was the system of directors re-electing themselves that was the root of the problems at Alcor and a risk to Alcor s survival, I tried to approach the board and a few leaders in a private discussion. In previous individual discussions I could not get the board members to discuss ways to make Alcor better because they claimed there were no problems or mistakes at Alcor. In order to get the group of directors to agree to discuss ways to make themselves better I would first have to show that there is something wrong. In my attempt to show that things are wrong at Alcor I unintentionally insulted some of the directors and after that they would only engage in trying to insult me back or criticize the way I was trying to debate with them. None of them would enter into a serious discussion whether things are wrong or how to make things better. When I started to take this debate to the public cryonics arena, they continue to avoid engaging in a meaningful discussion.

So now I am asking the board to put all that behind them, let's forgive each other for the early name-calling, let's start fresh, and debate two things: One, are things really pretty bad now at Alcor, and two, if they are pretty bad how, can we fix them?

I am also asking for input from those cryonicists who feel they have something to say on these matters and do not feel they are at personal risk to engage in this discussion. It is my intentions to hold these discussions in multiple forums.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALCOR AND HOW TO FIX IT.

I will try to show that:

1. MISTAKES ARE CONSTANTLY BEING MADE: That these mistakes may lead to Alcor going out of business. I will claim that we can make changes that will turn this around. If I am to claim changes need to be made to make Alcor better, I feel it is incumbent on me to first show that there are things wrong at Alcor. If I can't show that things are bad at Alcor there seems no need to change things.

2. WHY. I will attempt to explain why these mistakes are being made.

3. HOW TO FIX THINGS. I will argue that a different way of electing the directors will improve the situation by making the directors (any directors) feel more motivated to do a better job, and by empowering the membership and therefore making them feel that they are more a real part of shaping Alcor's future. Since the regular cryopreservation members' lives are just as much at risk as the board members' lives, the members should be just as entitled to have a meaningful say in how the leaders at Alcor are chosen.

1a. THE MISTAKES: MY OPINION OF SOME GENERAL MISTAKES THAT ALCOR HAS MADE . (I believe that many indicators of how a business is doing will show that Alcor has been going downhill.)

I doubt that the mistakes are intentional. I think the board members mean well. I think it is the system of how board members elect themselves, they have admitted it is a dictatorship, is at fault. Here are some indicators of why Alcor's business is bad.

1. MEMBERSHIP GROWTH IS POOR. Alcor directors have allowed membership growth rates to fall. In 2006 and 2007, for every net member gain at Alcor, one Alcor member left the organization. So in other words two people signed up and one person quit. Although more information is needed to know the exact cause, I believe that this shows that people come to Alcor because they like the idea of cryonics, they learn how Alcor is run, they come to feel they have no real say at Alcor, and then they leave.

2. LOSS OR REPUTATION FOR BEING THE RESEARCH CRYONICS LEADER The Directors have allowed Alcor to lose their reputation for being the undisputed leader of all cryonics organizations in research. Until very recently Alcor had lost the ability to do research and did not have any research program despite the fact that quality research has always been an important part of the identity of Alcor. Alcor's present research program is still very vulnerable and at risk of its best people leaving.

3. NO LONGER THE LARGEST ORGANIZATION BY PATIENT COUNT. Alcor is no longer the leader in the most amount of patients.

4. LOSS IN MARKET SHARE PERCENTAGES. Alcor has gone down in its advantage over CI in the number of funded suspension members by percentage comparison.

5. LOSS IN FINANCIAL STRENGTH. Alcor does not have the financial strength it once had. It has allowed its overhead to become too large as compared to its income from dues

6. A TREND TO SECRECY. Alcor no longer shares as much meaningful information with its members. Much of the most dangerous problems are kept hidden from members under claims of needed confidentiality. Many member feel that some Alcor directors are now more concerned with keeping their mistakes from the press and members then they are about doing things to prevent mistakes from happening in the first place.

7. ALIENATION OF MEMBERSHIP. Members no longer feel a part of Alcor. Donations (in relation to size of membership) are down. Volunteerism is down. Attendance at functions in down. Pride in Alcor is down. Many past presidents and other past leaders have left Alcor or are dissatisfied with Alcor.

There are many members of Alcor who are bitter about the lack of direction of the organization. These members will soon be lost if Alcor does not allow them to have some say in choosing their leaders, leaders who they feel can get us back on track.

8. FAILURE TO CHECK OUT BACKGROUNDS OF PEOPLE THEY ELECT TO BE THE PRESIDENT. After Steve Bridge and I left Alcor's management team Alcor directors elected three presidents in a row that they later had to fire or force to resign. Three in a row hired, and three in a row fired. Since we, the members, were never given the details it's hard to know the truth about what the reputations of each of these three candidates were. I believe that before Fred Chamberlain was elected president he did not have a reputation of great success in the real estate business in Payson where he was practicing. Some people have said that they thought Fred was a sucker for pyramid schemes. The board fired Fred after they felt he had mishandled and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of their and the members money and made many other mistakes that they have kept secret.

Then the board hired Jerry Lemler, MD. It is possible that Dr. Lemler may have been having trouble with his existing business in the south and was winding it down when Alcor hired him. For sure after the board hired Dr. Lemler they either fired him or forced him to resign. They said they felt that Lemler was not qualified to be president of Alcor, he didn't know what he was doing, and he made way too many mistakes, they claimed. Then they put Lemler on the board, a position of more power and control then the president. Why would you fire a manager for incompetence and then put him in a higher management position?

This is not the first time the board has put someone they felt was not even qualified to be president to a higher position on the board. The board forced Carlos Mondragon to resign as Alcor president and left him on on the board until he resigned from that later. Later they put him back on the board. Fired as president for incompetence and then elevated to a board position.

The third president in a row to be fired was Joe Waynick. I do not know whether Waynick was doing a good job or bad job as by the time the board forced him out of office as president. The board was keeping a lot of things secret from the membership by then and it has been hard to get a straight answer.

But some people believe that Joe was having problems with a printing business he was running when he was offered the presidency and based on that experience never should have been made president in the first place.

MORE MISTAKES: MY OPINION OF SOME OF THE SPECIFIC MISTAKES ALCOR HAS MADE.

1. CONSTANT TREND OF ALCOR'S (or Alcor member's money who Alcor is responsible for) MONEY BEING WASTED OR STOLEN.

1a. One Alcor President mismanaged hundreds of thousands of dollars of Alcor's and Alcor's members' money. President Fred Chamberlain asked Alcor members to invest in a company related to Alcor. They are made to believe they are contributing to one company, BioTransport, to buy equipment to do cryopreservations for Alcor, and then he uses the money to start up Cells for Life, which goes broke, and which Fred personally gave himself a lot of ownership stock in the company.

1b. An Alcor employee embezzles almost $200,000.

1c. An Alcor employee takes Alcor's credit card and makes cash withdrawals for her own use of up to $10,000. One person has told me that she had done this at her previous employer and had been dismissed for that. Why doesn't the board have a better way to screen people before they hire them?

1d. The system of not holding the directors accountable has a long history of allowing people to run off with Alcor's money. The recent staggering losses are not the first. There have been many other reports along the way of this result of the directors not having to be held accountable for their actions. The first time I ever heard of this happening to Alcor was about 20 years ago when the board secretly gave this non-Alcor person $100,000 cash to hold for them during the Dora Kent crisis and that guy, (I think his name was Gemini) ran off with all that money.

2. POSSIBLE PRESIDENT VIOLATION OF EMPLOYEE'S RIGHTS. Maybe employees were paid settlement money for their charges against Alcor presidents? These may just be rumors. I can not get a definite answer from any board member on this. I would like the board to either tell us what happened, they don't have to give the details but just admit that complaints were or were not filed, and money was or was not paid to these employees. If that isn't true, say in writing that neither of these people filed complaints against Alcor management and neither was paid any money. Failure of the board to deny these charges in writing can only make us believe there is some truth to the charges.

3. MISMANAGEMENT OF CELEBRITY SUSPENSION. Alcor gets chance to cryopreserve celebrity Ted Williams and has chance for great PR, and allows the matter to turn into bad PR for Alcor. Gruesome details are allowed to leak out to the public.

4a. WITHHOLDING REPORTS WHEN THE BOARD DOESN'T LIKE WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT THE DIRECTORS AND THE THINGS THEY HAVE DONE. Alcor used to make detailed reports after each case and publicize them in the magazine. Detailed reports are now way behind or not even done anymore. What there is is brief and vague. This can make people think that mistakes are being made in cases. The board needs to pony up the money to pay someone to make detailed reports and then let the membership know what went right and what went wrong, and how they plan to change what went wrong.

4b. Alcor produced a report about the quality of case work and patient care in 2002. What happened to that?

5c. Lately it seems that Alcor rarely provides detailed information on readiness and who makes up the standby teams. Also, it seems that training sessions have been dropped. Was there a reason for this? Charles Platt has repeatedly complained about Alcor's cases and case reports; imprecise statements, insufficient personal at the suspension, omissions relating to standby and other omissions, delayed onset of cooling, improper use of transport vehicle, delays in ventilation, actually there are rumors that quality of casework is down. People, perhaps staff, who know facts, are afraid to go public to the membership. I believe they fear the board will take revenge later on them.

WHY. DISCUSSION ON WHY MISTAKES ARE HAPPENING.

After many years on the Alcor board, and as Alcor's vice president and treasurer I have come to the conclusion that the reason some Alcor directors don't do a better job is because they don't have to come up for election each year by the membership. I have been on both sides of this issue as a director who thought that we directors were the best people to elect new directors or re-elect ourselves and as member who thinks that the membership is the best group to elect the directors.

I believe the directors who want to keep the present system in place and those who feel opposite ,as I do, all have the same motivations; we want to make Alcor as good as possible so we have a chance to survive death and may even have a prospect of immortality - we just disagree on *how* to do that.

First, the directors will do a better job if they have to answer to the members each year at election time then if they just re-elect themselves every year. Converse to this is that if the directors don't answer to anyone but themselves there is the loss of incentives to move all living things - pleasure and pain -- which leads to the carrot and the stick. We all remember that the carrot and the stick are two ways to motivate a rabbit to move forward. We put the carrot on a long stick and hold it in front of him to make him jump forward. When the rabbit becomes tired of jumping for it and quits to perform, we can give him a poke with the stick. I know that we would all rather that the stick was never needed. On the other hand, I have been in attendance at board meeting that went on a very long time, and directors on one side just got too tired out to continue to fight for what they thought was right. This, and the desire for more peaceful meetings, led to compromise. Compromise is ok on some matters but not when you have reason to believe that compromise is going to lead to things that are so bad that a terrible mistake might result.

If there was the threat of coming up for re-election that might just be the extra incentive a board member needed to stand firm on an issue and prevent a mistake. The threat of standing for re-election is needed to keep some board members from getting overconfident. To make them think twice, or for the third time. To make them listen to that person talking who may take his argument to the membership. If he has some points best to understand them the first time.

Without the power of the membership being able to vote out an incompetent director, when one director sees incompetence he does not have the option of taking the matter public. If he feels the actions of the board are going to cause Alcor problems and he feels there is nothing he can do to prevent it, he can either resign, or try to keep the matter quiet. There is a tendency on a board that does not have to account for their actions to try to keep mistakes secret rather then try harder to prevent the mistakes in the first place.

When directors of an organization know that they have to answer to the members every year at re-election time, there is a tendency on tough issues to ask for input from the members before they make the decision. We see this in city councils and school boards etc.

When Alcor directors were voting on a matter, if they feel they are going to have to approve something the members won't like, they merely call a secret meeting, stating that this is a sensitive issue, go behind closed doors and vote. They can vote on how the matter and then vote on the best way to keep the matter secret. They justify this by thinking that they know more then the members about what is good for Alcor. In fact that is the basic underpinning in the argument to have director-elected directors. I think it would be better if they told us in advance that they had to approve an unpopular decision and force them to justify their actions. They would have to engage the membership and the staff in debate on the issues. We have almost 900 members, many of them bright and successful people. Surely the 9 directors are not smarter in every possible category and have more knowledge and experience then the pool of 900 people who were smart enough to sign up for cryonics.

Let me inject here that I am not claiming that some directors are doing a poor job on purpose. I think they all have good intentions, and like other members, the board members realize when they apply for the job that their survival may depend on how well they do. But like all politicians they enter with good intentions and then get wore down by the system. They start to compromise to get along. They try to avoid conflict. This leads to mediocrity or worse.

The membership has come to feel like the native Africans in the recent South Africa matter. The white leaders told them that they were just as good as they and lots of other things, and gave them all kinds of reasons why they would not let them vote. To the credit of those people, they did not buy it. I think that Alcor members are not buying it either. That leads me to the second point I want to make on why director-elected dictatorships are not good for organizations like Alcor.

Second, the membership has slowly been made to feel alienated from Alcor as they have come to realize that they have no meaningful say whatsoever in how Alcor is run. When members of an organization are made to feel that they have no say in it, they quit. That happened when I was a director of Alcor and members felt that they had little say and that we were doing things wrong. The members, over time, banned together and formed a company called CryoCare. From the time of the first dissatisfactions to the very end this was about a four year period. They left because they felt they did not have enough say in how the leaders of Alcor were chosen. During that time about 100 Alcor members left Alcor. About 25 per year. That has been happening again in the last few years at Alcor. I think about 25 members per year are leaving now.

Besides the members who are leaving, the existing members no longer have the energy and enthusiasm for Alcor that they did years ago. What has changed?

When I first joined Alcor very few people wanted to be on the board. It was risky to be a cryonicist. Your employer might fire you. Your friends and neighbors might think badly of you. I used to go to the board meetings which were packed with most of the Alcor members. The board positions were token positions then. You served as a director because you were not afraid to come out of the cryonics closet. But many of the leaders, or great thinkers, were not on the board. Everyone, board members and regular suspension member sat together and discussed the issues together, and came to conclusions and decisions of how to respond, together. All the issues, even the most sensitive. The members made their will known and then the board rubber-stamped their vote. The members felt like they were running Alcor in those days. So they contributed their money extra above the amount of the dues. They volunteered their services and Alcor's payroll was low compared to the amount of dues they collected, compared to what that ratio is today. Today Alcor has to pay almost everyone to do work for them. The skilled people who used to volunteer their work now feel that since they are being shut out they don't want to do extra things for Alcor.

People used to bring their friends to Alcor to sign up. They used to promote Alcor, come to events in big numbers. Their collective enthusiasm helped everyone to feel good about being an Alcor member.

The board recently complained that no one comes to the board meetings anymore.

They blamed the members for this as if the members were being bad. But why would a member want to come to a board meeting. He can't vote on any issues. If he stands strong on a point, like I have done, and the board can't defeat his argument, they begin to vilify him instead. They attack his method of presentation. They build straw man arguments about his motives. But they don't have to answer the members' charges. They don't have to defend their decisions or actions. They don't have to engage any member's concerns. They don't have to answer to anyone but themselves. At election time they nominate each other, they vote for each other. What is there motivation to vote for other directors that they feel are not the best choices -- If you vote for me, I will vote for you. If you don't support me, I will support the opponent for your seat.

HOW TO MAKE ALCOR BETTER. WHY ALLOWING THE MEMBERS TO VOTE WILL CAUSE THE DIRECTORS TO DO A BETTER JOB.

Both director-elected directors, and member-elected directors can be equally competent, personally self informed, and well motivated. But member-elected directors have additional motivations to do a better job because they are held accountable to the large pool of members (and therefore many more relatives of the patients) at election time, where director-elected directors are not. That reason alone (with all other things being equal) will cause member-elected directors to be MORE competent.

We all feel the patients are Alcor's biggest priority. The close relatives of the patients are the ones most likely to take actions and risks for the benefit of the patients. There more friends and relatives of the patients in a pool of 900 then in a pool of 9. The general membership pool will always have a lot more people who are closer to the patients.

I believe the evidence shows that Alcor is in the early stages of floundering. To recap a little - Membership growth is at an all time low. Member support, pride and involvement are down. In the last two years, for every 2 people that signed up, 1 person left. This shows that people are coming to Alcor for the idea it stands for, learning how Alcor is run, finding out they have no say, and then half of them are leaving. Alcor once held the reputation of being the undisputed leader in doing research. Alcor once had the reputation of having the best technology in doing suspensions, now many people think that CI with its involvement with Suspended Animation may be as good or better. Alcor employees have run off with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and an Alcor president mismanaged even more. The members feel there is too much secrecy and Alcor president and director's main argument is that secrecy is needed to keep us from getting sued. These are major signs that something is wrong in the very underpinnings of how Alcor is run.

The main thought here is: All other things being equal, directors of a company who are held accountable to stockholders, customers or members, will have more motivation to do a better job then directors who are not held accountable to anyone but themselves.

WHY ALLOWING THE MEMBERS TO VOTE WILL CAUSE THEM TO BE MORE ACTIVE AND SUPPORTIVE OF ALCOR, AND WHY ALCOR NEEDS THAT SUPPORT.

As I mentioned: The first major incident of not allowing the members to have the vote came when I was a board member. At the time I did not realize it, but the dictator policy was making some members very angry with Alcor and alienating them. If during the time before the start of the Cryowars (when eventually about 100 Alcor members left Alcor), the members would have been able to vote for re-election of the directors I believe they would not have felt that they had to leave and try to start their own company.

In the past few years, I have had several people ask me to help them start their own cryonics companies or support research. So far it has been my opinion that it is better to try to save Alcor. But if we cannot convince the directors to give the vote to the membership I believe that new competitors for Alcor will more likely spring up. Already CI is doing a better in getting people to join their organization instead of Alcor. I think if we have to split up the small cryonics membership pie between three of four more companies, things will be much worse for Alcor. I think it is better for the cryonics movement to fix Alcor then to motivate Alcor members to keep leaving and eventually help lead to the formation of other new competitors.

Not allowing the members to vote is telling the whole pool of 900 that your group is not as smart and knowledgeable as our group of 9. Some directors believe this. I have heard them say it. OTHER ARGUMENTS

THE AGRUMENT FOR PROTECTING ALCOR FROM TAKE-OVER BY HOSTILE GROUPS.

Basically their (most board members) argument goes like this: We are the smartest people in Alcor. The proof for this is that we are the directors. Therefore it will be harder for a hostile group to take over from the smartest people then from the dumbest people. This is like say that the Bible is God s word. The Bible says so. Since, the Bible is the word of God so it must be right.

The simple fact is that the larger the number of people in the voting group, the more people it takes to mount a takeover. If you have 9 board members, it only takes 5 evil people to take over the board. They get 5 positions and they control Alcor. Some people have argued that Alcor board has already been taken over by people that are not competent to run a business the size of Alcor. With the exception of Saul Kent, those people have good intentions but do not have successful business experience. There are now even board members who do not have a long history of Alcor Activism.

To take over the Alcor membership of 900 people (if the members had the vote) you would need 901 new members to join, pay their sign up fees and then take over.

THE ARGUMENT THAT A DICTATORSHIP MANAGEMENT STYLE IS THE MAIN REASON WHY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS SURVIVED SO LONG.

The argument claims that the Catholic Church's longevity is mainly because of the dictator system they have and that it is similar to Alcor's. Since Alcor elects board leaders like the Church elects its leaders that main reason proves that Alcor's dictator system of electing its leaders will cause Alcor to have similar longevity.

The Catholic Church has survived ONLY because their members believe the Church represents GOD. The non-democratic way it is run has allowed the church leaders to take away property from the members, and kill, burn and rape them and their children, but the Church has survived in spite of the way it is run, not because of the way it is run, and only because of main idea of representing God that the Church stands for. It also creates the most amount of dissatisfaction and mistakes possible. I submit this is exactly the same case for Alcor. Alcor's similar government has angered its members and the monopoly they once owned is eroding. Catholics are becoming Protestants. Alcor members are becoming CI members. Unless Board members are soon planning to announce they represent God I think Alcor is in big trouble.

People come to the Catholic Church and Alcor because they like the ideas these organizations stand for, they see how they are run, and then many of them leave.

THE MEMBERS MIGHT ELECT THE DIRECTORS AND SOME POSSIBLE SUGGESTIONS ON HOW TO BUILD IN PROTECTIONS IN THE SYSTEM.

(here are some beginning ideas on how to build in protections. I am sure the membership can think of a lot more.)

There should be three classes of leaders at Alcor: directors (who run Alcor) and advisors (who advise and are training to be directors) and voting cryopreservation members of 2 years membership who will vote for advisors and directors each year.

DIRECTORS

1. Directors will be elected from the existing pool of advisors. Anyone who has been an elected advisor for two years before the date of the annual election for the director's office they are seeking can announce his desire to be a candidate.

2. The Members will elect the directors (see requirements for members to be able to vote below) from the pool of qualified advisors who have asked to be a candidate and from the pool of existing directors who want to stand for re-election.

ADVISERS

1. To be a candidate for advisor a person must be an Alcor cryopreservation member for 3 consecutive years.

2. The pool of advisers can be up to 5% of the total amount of Alcor members as figured 60 days before the election for advisers.

3. Any person who wants to be an advisor announces that intention 30 days before the election and the qualified members then vote.

4. At the monthly board meetings, or special meetings, when motions were to be voted on by the directors, first the advisors would vote on the motion. A roll call vote would be taken and each adviser's vote would be recorded. So a record of how each adviser had voted would be made. This record would be published in the Alcor monthly magazine that goes to the members and a two-year record would be available at election time when an Adviser ran for a director's position. So we would have at least a 2 year record of how advisers felt about various matters that had come before the Alcor board.

WHO CAN VOTE FOR ELECTORS AND/OR ADVISERS

1. Any person that has been an Alcor member for 2 or more years can vote for advisors and directors.

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