Campaign Insurance
So, our challenge will be to live in relative peace while these tea pot skirmishers whistle all around us. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to avoid their de-civilizing influence, since their campaigns require us to become more than passive observers.
I won’t minimize the danger. These peddlers are experienced professionals. They know which heartstrings yield maximum emotional response, and they know how to pull every single one of them. Their curious science of consent engineering leverages normal human cognitive facilities to cruelly manipulate belief.
They could make me vote for a chicken if I let them in. You, too.
So, I’ve adopted a few tried-and-true defenses, I call them My Campaign Insurance, which I re-deploy every campaign season Slip over here for more ...
The Invisible Hum
This was humbling news. My copyright clearly designated ownership, but gave me no protection against unscrupulous operators. So, I called up my ex-partner and told him that I would make a point of telling prospective clients to watch out for him, as he was a pirate. “If you do that, I’ll sue!” he sputtered. “Great,” I thought, then my insurance will cover the cost of litigation, and I will most certainly win.”
Turns out that there’s a ton of law against unscrupulous operators, but exercising the rights granted under those laws gets problematic. Anything I create could be swiped at any time, and I’m unlikely to even know about it, let alone have actual recourse. Now, the monied segment of the content industry lobbies Congress to pass new stricter laws to ‘prevent intellectual property piracy.’ Might as well throw in a rider banning lustful thoughts while they’re at it. Slip over here for more ...
The Pleasing Paradox
I recently worked with a group that was trying hard to make their customers happy. Their customers were, likewise, also focused upon making their customers happy. The whole place felt self-sacrificial, as if the key to success could be found in doing whatever it takes to please others. No one seemed terribly happy with the results.
They were playing into The Pleasing Paradox. Studies have shown that the most satisfied customers have had one or more disappointing experience with their service provider. Recovery creates more satisfied customers than flawless delivery ever does.
The challenge is to be of service without becoming servile. We shouldn’t elevate any customer to the role of superior being, but treat each with human respect.
Human respect does not involve treating others as if they were superior or defining your self through their expectations just because they're paying the bill. Human respect means being responsible, not overly responsible— a curious form of irresponsibility. Don’t cut others' meat for them.
Human respect demands that I respect myself so that I can respect others. Whenever I take that humbling step down and backwards, I can lose my own self respect, and thereby forfeit my ability to really respect—or be of real service—to anyone else. When I can engage with my customer as a peer, we both seem more satisfied with the result.
Slip over here for more ...New Shoes
fresh out of the box today,
they’ll smell like something I’m proud to say
belongs to me, for a few days, anyway.
My old shoes
fit like they were a part of me.
Though they couldn’t hold the shine I’d used to see;
I could not believe when they’d started to leak.
So I bought new shoes,
Though the old style’s discontinued now,
I found something close to my familiar style,
I’m not yet sure these’ll really work in the long run, still,
Time’ll tell.
It’s a new year,
foisted from some midnight haze;
they tell me it’s the end of the good old days,
I knew so well. I say, “Oh Hell, I know
It’s like new shoes.
An alien presence for a time,
but soon even these will loose their shine
and that curious smell, and I will come to know them as well
as my old ones.
Training Wheels
Learning to ride a bicycle might be the perfect training for life. It teaches the same lesson we each encounter when learning to walk, but were too small to retain. Both teach the clear distinction between balance and balancing, which might be trying to impart some acknowledgement of the much more significant difference between being and becoming.
We ask our children just what we were asked as children: “What do you want to
be when you grow up?” Well-intended but none-the-less insidious, our question begs an unfortunate response. They’ll have to choose. They’ll aspire, then, to a notional state their earliest life lesson might have clearly demonstrated couldn’t exist.At sixty, I’ve almost discarded the notion that I might be something when I finally grow up. I’m still wondering when my growing might slow enough that I might reasonably declare myself grown. But then I consider what might follow this curious achievement.
Slip over here for more ...Synchronicity- The Movie Made Just For Me
This seems enough of a not-everyday experience that I feel especially blessed whenever I encounter it. I’m reasonably certain that I cannot, by mere volition or will, force it to occur. Perhaps I’m subtly letting go whenever this movie-like magic appears, unconsciously stepping aside from standing in my own path. How could I know?
I do know that a certain openness seems to surround me these days, as if my molecules had elbow room; space for the unexpected to nudge into play. I’m getting better at going with these surprising flows, acknowledging their presence, accepting their utility, and leveraging their possibilities.
Slip over here for more ...Gravity and Levity
I questioned that my grandfather, who I remember as a grizzled coot with nicotine-stained fingertips and emphysema-thickened chuckle, ever was a boy, though he had a mile-wide mischievous streak and an unrelenting glint in his eye. His sixth grade school photo shows a barefoot Tom Sawyer look-alike, and I’m certain that he never fully out-grew those patched overalls and that soup bowl haircut.
Slip over here for more ...Ganging Agley
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
Robert Burns, To A Mouse
Life seems curiously analogous to a thirteen year old, fully capable of intruding upon her self; setting off on one certain trajectory only to ricochet onto another, then another, then yet another. I don’t know who proposed that plans should ‘turn out,’ but their’s was one short-sighted, perhaps naive idea. Though most otherwise sentient adults insist that success involves manifesting aspirations into actualities, this occurs so rarely that lady luck gives better odds. Might as well ‘invest’ in the lottery. Slip over here for more ...
Her Why-ness
who tried to understand
Every mysterious wonderment
which fell into her hand.
She started with the obvious,
wondering who? and where?,
then annoyed both friends and family
with her insistent whats? and whens?
Even mere acquaintances wondered where her questions would end.
But this whoman didn’t stop her quest—she continued to carry on—
flinging about her question marks until most of her friends were gone.
And still she posed her questions, inquisitive through and through,
until she bumped into the questions nobody ever gets through.
Not even kings and princesses have ever gained much ground
following the promising breadcrumb trail our curious whoman found. Slip over here for more ...
Leaning Into It
Anticipatory Living
I remember debating with myself: to jog or not to jog. I’d had a roommate who jogged. He’d also played Pop Warner and high school football and even won a football scholarship, but blew out his knee, so he became a journalism major—covering sports. I tagged along with him once while he followed the UW golf team around a course. Aside from the mushrooms I found along the way, it was a most remarkably boring afternoon for me, though my roommate seemed endlessly interested in whatever might happen next.
It seemed that he was mostly living in the future, finding his energy in looking ahead. He seemed to do this when jogging, too.
My final answer to the Deal Or No Deal jogging question: No Deal! It was just too mind-numbingly boring. I took up stationary bike riding, which would have been equally mind-numbing had it not been for the book stand over the handlebars. I could read, which I never find boring, while engaging in unavoidably boring repetitive motion.
I called my bike-riding ‘leaning into it,’ because that was the sensation I felt when poised on that machine. I was certainly not making forward progress, but I was definitely leaning into it. I found the exercise refreshing and the leaning into it strangely rewarding. I began to understand why people jog. It’s an extreme leaning into it; they are chasing their future.
Slip over here for more ...Splatter Patterns
In my youth, I firmly believed that I would one day out-grow my frustrating tendency to hit my wall; that maturity or modernity might make me immune. I’m outgrowing that belief.
I now believe that my wall’s there for good purpose. Complete clarity might not be the purpose. I always seem to find myself in a hazy, twilight world when hitting my wall. It’s as close to pure experience as I get, no thoughtful choosing. I simply wham! After the impact, though dazed, my internal compass seems partially reset. I’m more mindful, too, if no more than mindfully confused. But even confusion seems, upon reflection, an improvement over my former mindless over-extension.
Hitting my wall never qualifies for as pleasant. It’s painful. Often humiliating. My usually reliable control surfaces seem hijacked. Even if I could see the impact coming, there’s nothing I could do to prevent the collision.
Slip over here for more ...Voice
Remember the first time you heard your recorded voice played back to you? I’ll never forget when I first heard mine. I’d always been a little more than a bit of a ham, mugging for some invisible microphone. Thinking in my mind’s ear that I must sound pretty gol-derned clever. That first playback in a fourth grade music class took my breath away, and not in any good way.My played-back voice sounded nothing like the beautifully-modulated murmur I’d imagined. I sounded like Jerry Lewis imitating Donald Duck.
Speaking of Ethics
The Silver Spring PMI meeting pre-show, Wednesday, 11/9, 5:30pm, Blair Mansion Restaurant at 7711 Eastern Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20912
Act always so as to increase the number of choices.
The Ethical Imperative, Heintz von Foerster
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that one cannot speak of ethics. They are too personal, too situational, too fuzzy. Yet we are exhorted to perform ethically. What does that mean in practice?
In practice, we might not feel very much like philosophers, yet ethics has for centuries been the meat and potatoes of philosophy.
Ethics might best be thought of as choices that matter. How should one choose? Slip over here for more ...
The Folly We Pursue
We’ll stand before the folly of power before falling to our knees and praying for the humility that power never brings.
We’ll wash our feet in the fountain of wealth to remind ourselves to see the necessity of charity and the futility of greed.
I’ll borrow the shoes those other guys wear and stumble along their trail while they try on my sneakers once to hike my humbled mile.
We’ll feast on food that’s “bad for you” and live to tell the tale to remind ourselves how little we know, what our studies never tell.
We’ll snub the neighbors we usually greet and greet the ones we snub to better see the community we’d inadvertently scrubbed.
We’ll unplug all the media and shut down every shop to remind ourselves what might be real before this hamster wheel stops.
We’ll park our cars on the freeways and hike all the way to work and approach every serious assignment with a healthy, skeptical smirk.
We’ll revel in revelation and embrace inconvenient truth to distinguish between our wisdom and the ignorance of youth.
All will pass and none will fail; each will be rewarded with the experience of a small salvation and see the folly of damnation.
And this damned nation might survive another millennium or two if we could, each year, acknowledge half the folly we pursue.
©2011 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved
Set Theory
While fans and audiences think in terms of songs, performers parse their experience differently—into sets. A set might be most readily understood as a collection of songs, but it’s much, much more than that. Properly devised, a set works like a story, linking individual songs into an indivisible whole. Like within a song, where verse builds to chorus, chorus to bridge, bridge to close, a set develops a plot line using individual melodies.
The maturation of a songwriter begins with the shatteringly intermittent ability to pull songs out of the ether. Whether one chooses (or is chosen) to pull the lyrics before or after the melody, the sequence of creation never really matters. Ultimately, it’s a push-me/pull-you affair. I’m still fine-tuning songs I clocked as finished decades ago.
But finishing a song doesn’t leave anyone even halfway done. What does one do with a finished song? I store ‘em as lyric sheets in the bottom of my guitar case until called to perform. “David, you will be playing a few songs for our dinner guests, won’t you?”
Well, sure I will. But there are deeper questions. What tunes fit this situation? In what order should I choose to play them? How might I relate these songs to the conversations we held over supper? To what purpose will I perform?
These are set questions. I will select from the thin catalogue of songs I’m currently practiced up on. From these half-dozen, I’ll sort for the right one to start and the proper one to end with. I will buck up my introversion into floating eye contact and hope for the best. However well-practiced the guitar playing and the singing, I’ll judge myself more on the quality of the encapsulation: the introducing story, the threads between songs, and the bigness of the finish. And in that after supper half hour, I will perform a cobbled-together set of songs.
I’ve been performing like this for most of my life and I still hold deep questions and even deeper misgivings about my skill. I know I’m no musician. Sure, I play my guitar and sing my own songs, but I accomplish this without virtuosity. I have no complete idea what the real chord names are, and communicate these to myself in my own curious language. I do not play the chords properly, either. I seem incapable of fluently reading notation, and have failed innumerable times to correctly transcribe. Music theory remains abstract theory and not my practice.
I might be more intuition than musician. Music seems an extension of my native intuition, of which I have an abundance. It’s a form of expression like speaking or writing. I’m no grammarian, either, but rely upon my nose, my developing sense of proper structure, rather than a remembered rule set.
Still, I have written songs which have remained more or less stabile over long years, and can recreate them pretty much at will. I have no similar intuition about sets. I remain blind to the possibilities, like choosing marbles out of an opaque bag, when I set about creating a set of songs.
The notion eventually emerges: what would my set sound like? Where would I begin? Where would I end? And what path would I choose to get there if I was really choosing? Now that the songs are written, how should I string them together and to what larger-than-individual-tune purpose?
When I was twenty five, I decided to get out of the music business, go to university, and get a real job. Of course, every piece of this chosen different path smugly mirrored the business I said I was leaving behind. I didn’t write as many melodies but drew from the same intuition to compose project plans. My life in the business world involved playing a different shaped guitar. Other than that inconsequential distinction, it was the same.
Later, as a consultant, I found myself writing songs again, this time in the guise of models. These, I’d string into reasonable sequences and perform as workshops. Even later, I started writing about my experiences and found that same progression. I’d write the vignette then string it together with other ones to make a coherent story.
Only in my background music world, it seems, have I somehow managed to stiff-arm stringing together my work into coherent sets. And it’s now past time. I feel moved now to attempt this meta creation. To take that pile of lyrics mouldering in the bottom of my guitar case and pull them together into an indivisible story. I should not wonder how I’ll do that with this different-shaped guitar, but I do. Perhaps that mystery is an inescapable element in the design of every nascent whole.
The end product will be a performance. One evening set aside to properly tell the story with a set of songs. I will invite my friends. I will record the result. Later, I’ll (at Amy’s insistence) step into a studio and let a real audio technician condition the performance set into real recording, which I will share.
The Steve
We call this uncompromising, visionary, genius. The Steve had the genius to surround himself with people far smarter than he would ever be. Most of them didn’t need the klieg lights like The Steve did. Apple employees loved him.
My moment came when the group I was consulting with decided to head over to the Apple employee cafeteria for lunch. Crossing DeAnza Blvd and hiking over to 1 Infinite Loop, we chatted about the challenges we were working through; difficult deliberations hidden behind the Just Do It! personna. As we approached the cafe, we were overtaken by an electric buzz. “The Steve’s here! The Steve’s here.” Seems Jobs was having a quiet lunch with his son, and everyone entering the cafeteria seemed to suddenly stand about half a foot taller and be mugging for some invisible camera.
The atmosphere was palpable. We each felt it, a life-force, perhaps of our own making, charged through us. We were instantly smarter, taller, tanned and ready. We were different, special, uniquely qualified. When The Steve looked up from his lunch, every eye in the place seemed to be seeking out a spark of contact, a quiet recognition, confirmation that they, too, were as real as he seemed to be.
His reality was myth made flesh. Not even he could stand in the shoes everyone imagined he’d invented. His life was a few sizes larger than he ever was. A physically unimposing man magnified by the stories surrounding him.
He turned out to be human after all. And he will, no doubt, continue even in death to inspire those of us not yet too jaded to believe in differences that make real differences. We willingly set aside the rough edges, forgiving the many trespasses in homage to that one ennobling moment when I’m certain our eyes met across that bustling cafeteria.
Going There
Before I'd been there and back again, I'm certain that no explanation, no matter how complicated or complete, could have taken me there. As if I didn't have language yet, only after I'd gone there was the concept of there a meaningful distinction.
But then I catch myself doing what simply does not work. I explain, in varying levels of passion and patience, what I experienced going there. My stories do not fall on deaf ears. They find ears perfectly capable of hearing and comprehending every single, well-chosen word. Even so, they do not seem to understand what I intend.
It might be the case, as I've heard others say, that the difference between understanding going there and not lies in some personally transforming experience. Only this, some claim, can create the proper context for understanding. And, as K.D. Laing said over a generation ago, "Those who don't know what they don't know, think they know." Those who have not been there and back again, probably think they've already been there and back again when they've only read about it or heard about it or seen someone else's there-and-back-again experience in some movie.
Slip over here for more ...Smells Like Fish To Me!
The word elicits righteous satisfaction. Proclaim something efficient and an angelic heart starts glowing. If cleanliness really is next to godliness, efficiency stands even closer to it. Or seems to.
I’m learning to question my own glowing feelings when someone starts batting around the term. I more often cringe, as if witness to some slow-motion catastrophe, but I didn’t always respond this way. There was a time when I was more readily entrained, a time when my heart of hearts really did beat a little faster, when I really would stand a little taller when instructed to improve efficiency. I’m a smart enough guy, I’d think. I can do this.
My track record stinks. Sure, I could often find ways to cut time, but simply cutting time doesn’t necessarily translate into efficiency. I could cut waste, too, but waste it tricky stuff; one’s waste is another’s sustenance. I could even produce more with less, but often at some unaccounted-for, often long-deferrable additional cost. But I’m not here to discuss my first marriage. I’m here, I think, to cut some smelly bait.
I like to blame it all on Aristotle. Might as well, since he’s no longer here to defend himself. I know it’s not fair, but he slung efficient around and I suppose was an early principle in the proliferation. What did Aristotle mean when he spoke of efficient?
Ari parsed our world into four causations: Material, Efficient, Formal, and Final. Material Causation explained something as being caused by its nature. This feels tautological, but some things really do seem to be caused by simple nature. Because I am a mammal and all mammals have hair, my being a mammal is the material cause of my hair. Ari used efficient to describe the necessary precursor to a present state. My hair looks the way it is because I had my hair expertly styled. My stylist caused my hair style.
Duh-fficiency
[Drawing from the May 14, 1911 New York World, reporting on best-selling author and The Father of Scientific Management, Frederick W. Taylor’s after dinner speech at the American Bookseller’s Association convention.)
A hundred years ago, the world was in the middle of going crazy again. It’s not profound to notice that the world goes crazy sometimes, but this crazy was special. Usually, these insanities disappear quickly. This one did not. It managed to worm its way into our DNA and replicate until today, this crazy has become the accepted benchmark for sane.
What was this insanity? Efficiency. Slip over here for more ...
On The Lam
Just about done
with this bleating winter sun.
I’ve wearied waiting for her engraved invitation to leave.
Barn-bound till today, I’m out here to see some green
peeking through the snowpack back at me.
I’m bound
to butt my head until it’s found,
The stinging Springtime snow has no idea
what she’s found herself up against this time.
I figure if she won’t cede my feed,
I’ll just up and take what I know is mine!
On The Lam,
Forgettin’ my high-handed fantasies!
I won’t ever understand,
So I’ll just accept what grace I already have at hand.
Without any firm permission,
I’m committing to the life of commission!
Tell the sheepdogs I’m off in some new direction,
I’m On The Lam.
And it’s already begun,
Her Icy fingers lose their hold,
Though the bleary old status quo told me otherwise.
Me, I’m believing my own two eyes!
I’m reneging on the compromise that held me here;
Now, I get to be own surprise!
I’m On The Lam!
On The Lam,
Forgettin’ my high-handed fantasies!
I won’t ever understand,
So I’ll just accept what grace I already have at hand.
Without any firm permission,
I’m committing to the life of commission!
I’m gamboling off in some new direction,
I’m On The Lam.
02/06/2011- Lamb Lookin’ Sunday
An Inconvenient Time
Find first installment here: Prior Post
This song holds a lot of history. I wrote it while staying at the old La Poseda Hotel in Albuquerque. My wife Amy says that she really met me the evening she heard me singing this song.
As I explain in the brief interview before performing, I have a personal rule which helps me cope with inconvenience: The most important things happen at the least convenient times. This rule helps me reframe inconvenience into the acknowledgement, usually begrudging acknowledgement, that if I’m feeling really, really, really inconvenienced, something important might be happening. Pay closer attention.
Neither Here Nor There
Fortunately for me, I was invited as a guest to one of the few pilots made. Even more fortunate, Jeffrey kept the recordings. Slip over here for more ...
Projects As Reflexive Systems
University Seminar on Reflexive Systems
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 from 10:00 am-12:00 pm
Funger Hall, Room 620
2201 G Street NW
PROJECTS AS REFLEXIVE SYSTEMS
David A. Schmaltz
What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
In our society and culture, we seem to start projects when we don’t know what else to do. Fewer than half of these ever finish. Of those that do finish, only a small percentage manage to satisfy anyone. Just last month, the OMB recommended that another raft of government-sponsored information technology projects be cancelled after expending tens of millions of dollars while producing nothing of discernible value. In private industry, no one reports just how sorry their project performance is. The truth would certainly panic the investing public.
The last fifty years has seen the greatest expansion in project management techniques in the history of the world, yet project performance is no better, and might well be worse. How could this be? This situation might reflect nothing but human nature; to pose a metaphor, then get trapped within it; to improve by insisting upon even more of the same perspectives that created the difficulty in the first place; to begin even more hopefully again, as if intention or will determined success. This seems to be what we’ve done when we didn’t know what to do. I believe we could we do better.
Demystifying DC - part one
But it’s a place worth investigating. It runs on more than money. Though money plays a stunningly important role here, abject poverty is commonplace. It also runs on truly remarkable dedication. I know, the media and the more ingenuous politicians have never stopped complaining about the cost, the waste, and the most obvious absurdities of our government, and DC, being the seat of that government, gets unavoidably painted whenever their terribly broad brushes take another swipe. And from the distance across a continent, it pretty much all looks the same.
Slip over here for more ...Small Fraud
Splice of Life
One author reported that most people are more productive when working behind closed doors. Others insist upon pairing, sharing workspaces. Some cube just fine. Others, not. Some counsel focus, fuzzy or clear. The distracted praise procrastination. Heads-down, hands-on people insist that you really should just get 'er done. All exhort the elusive 'flow.' I doubt that we will ever see the end of well-intended, largely useless advice.
I find myself flourishing under each, and sometimes none of these schemes. Fortunately, I rarely have the luxury of getting to choose. When I plan a day in splendid isolation, the danged phone rings. When I'm suffering through an endless day of mind-numbing isolation, not only does the phone refuse to ring, nobody's there when I try to call my usual lifelines.
We work, it seems, in fits and starts. Some days more fit than others.
Slip over here for more ...Spare-Time Successful
This year, though, I'm reflecting on just how much progress the pre-mature profession of project management has managed to make. Today, more projects are managed by non-professional 'project managers' than are managed by professional ones. And I am grateful for this humbling fact. Slip over here for more ...
Taylorism Transcended
His premise insisted that disciplined observation would yield improved understanding, an application of a basic scientific principle. He believed, as any progressive must, in the possibility for a vastly improved future. That he chose to 'drive' his method when he could not convince others (workers and executives) of its goodness, says more about his personal desperation than it does about the utility of his ideas. One could say that the manufacturing miracle Toyota claims arose from a deeper reading of Taylor rather than a shift further away.
Slip over here for more ...Coffee, Tea or We?
When the founding fathers penned our Constitution, they began simply but profoundly with “We the people.” This statement feels remarkably progressive. No one had seen anything like “we” associated with “the people.” Their aspiration seems clear. Slip over here for more ...
Telephoney-Part Two
Now we have cell phone stores. They combine the worst of Radio Shack with the very worst of automobile dealerships to produce perhaps the bleakest shopping experience anyone's ever devised. Shopping for a new kidney couldn't help but seem refreshing in comparison.
The modern cell phone 'provider' offers 'plans' comprised of various combinations of damned whatever you do choices, and an array of actual telephones which, by the way, sometimes even involve telephony, though they much more prominently feature MP3 player, camera, GPS, and web-accessing technologies. Even the lowliest offerings tout ring tones more than usability, and the highest-end feature a dizzying library of 'apps,' which seem to be little more than opportunities to turn the ...ahem... telephone into a terribly expensive video game unit. "Hello? I'd like to place a telephone call." Fergetaboutit! Slip over here for more ...
Telephoney-Part One
My current phone is a bit more than two years old, a pocketknife-sized Samsung Jazz, so old now that Google can't find any evidence that it ever existed. Just as well. If I was Samsung, I'd deny any association to the damned thing, too.
I acquired it at the same time Amy got her first Blackberry, which is a machine so damned complicated that I still can't pick up an incoming call on it for her. She swims the breadth of the web on the little thing. For me, it has all the technological sophistication of an under-sized paperweight with a particularly crude and unusable user interface. Great for some but they forgot to provide access for the rest of us. Slip over here for more ...
Simple Wisdom
Windsock Nation
It started with the budding Harris Organization incorrectly predicting that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman in the 1948 Presidential Election. Lord knows where it will end. Americans love pollsters. It’s unthinkable to imagine a representative who does not query the community to determine what s/he should do. We’ve become a windsock nation. Slip over here for more ...
The Tickle Point (continued)
This insight returned yesterday, when I attended a meeting with a bunch of Russell Ackoff Systems Thinking people. Since Systems Thinking has never hit the mainstream... most organizations still cling to reductionist dominion tactics when trying to resolve difficulties (or, as they say, 'solve problems'), ...the Systems Thinkers feel marginalized. Rather like feathers.
This was a meeting of the club of people who never join clubs, so many felt isolated, misunderstood, out of community.
Slip over here for more ...Statesmanship
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, let me first of all thank my great friend from Montana, Senator
Baucus. We arrived in the Congress of the United States together on the same day, back about 35 years ago. We have been friends for 35 years. We arrived in the Senate at different times. He got here a little before me. We have been in this institution for 30 years. I cannot describe in the limited time I have what a difference he has made--the fact we are here debating, finally, the last piece of this legislative effort to give the Americans what they have sought for more than a century, and that is the basic right to health care.I always found it somewhat ironic in a way that we in this country provide for those accused of criminal offenses the right to a lawyer, the right to an attorney. I believe in that. I think it is correct. But isn't it somewhat ironic that the same country that would provide you with a right to a lawyer if you are charged with a criminal defense cannot provide you with a doctor if your child is sick? There is something fundamentally wrong with that, in my view.
Slip over here for more ...Eat To Excess
I do not can asparagus. Or freeze it for later. After its short season leaves, I’m on to whatever’s in season next. This practice ensures variety, which I agree is the essential spice of the good life. Though I admit, by the end of any season, I’m fairly sick of whatever was in season. Until next year.
Slip over here for more ...Barely Legal Seafood
A Cook's Book
I am not a chef. I am a cook. And a pot wizard. And a cheap-assed shopper.
I do not wear a toque. I only occasionally wear an apron. My knives need sharpening. They were not imported from Germany.
My cookware does not match. I have way more Corningware than I will ever use, purchased for next to nothing at an old family friend’s estate sale. It holds more meaning than utility.
My favorite cast iron fry pan has a crack in the bottom of it, but I cannot bear to replace it. I found it in the oven of the old gas cookstove in that crummy apartment I moved into when my first wife and I separated. It, however, holds more utility than meaning, though it holds a lot of meaning, too.
I am a picky eater. Slip over here for more ...
Sweet Dreams
Free Advice
Yesterday afternoon, I heard the latest rehash of these classics on NPR's Marketplace program, where Rosabeth Moss Kantor, herself a NY Times Best selling author and Harvard B-School professor, warmly remembered Peter Drucker's legacy. What would Drucker have to say about the current business climate? Same old, same old. Slip over here for more ...
