Pure Schmaltz

Campaign Insurance

david@projectcommunity.com — 2012-01-18T14:17:13-05:00

The candidates and their super pacs are spending millions trying to influence you and me.

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. ... 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.

1- I stop watching television. Since it’s the primary medium by which the noise machine reverberates, they can’t touch me if I’m not there.

2- I lie to all pollsters. ... I figure any candidate gauche enough to talk up his own righteousness should be discounted as the hypocrite the Bible says he is.

5- And I s..l...o...w down the conversation. ... I check my facts and preconceived notions if I expect to really hear anyone else’s perspective.

My campaign insurance has me feeling pretty secure in the face of this upcoming storm.

The Invisible Hum

david@projectcommunity.com — 2012-01-18T09:13:55-05:00

“That will cost you over a hundred thousand dollars, and even if the court finds in your favor, they’ll be no way to force them to pay up or prevent them from just changing their company name and continuing the practice.”

This was humbling news. ... 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. ... “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. ... Might as well throw in a rider banning lustful thoughts while they’re at it.

The question might be how those who create intellectual property might thrive in pirate-infested waters, since it seems the pirates will always be there, just as they have always been there.

Scott McCloud in his brilliant Understanding Comics, classifies art as anything done without the explicit intention of making money from it. ... That intellectual property my ex-partner swiped wasn’t art because I’d created it with the explicit intention of making money with it.

But much of what I create certainly satisfies McCloud’s definition. ... The people who gladly download a free pirated copy are not the same people who might gladly pay for that privilege.

The Internet is one bitch of an environment, worse if it’s mistaken, as so many of the later commercial operations have, as just another marketplace. ... It thrives on the free exchange of ideas, and I figure I can choose to be a part of that free exchange or set my expectations where satisfaction is unlikely.

Of course the commercial interests have long lusted after some form of monopoly control over the free exchange of ideas. Not fully understanding that should they succeed in cutting open that cat and isolating its purr, it would necessarily sacrifice the cantankerous cat by doing so.

An Invisible Hum rules the internet, kinda roughly analogous to Adam’s Smith’s notorious invisible thumb.

The Pleasing Paradox

david@projectcommunity.com — 2012-01-07T12:44:14-05:00

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. ... 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.

Requiem for Requirements

Basing any project's success upon merely satisfying customer "requirements" encourages servile engagement. ... The customer might not understand that, by engaging our services, they are agreeing to participate in a conversation that neither of us could possibly know how it will turn out. We've all been in conversations before, and we already know that if anyone knew at the beginning where a conversation would meander, there’d really be no reason to engage.

Make this implicit understanding more explicit. ... Set your certainties aside and encourage your customer to set theirs aside, too.

Two Little Letters, One Little Word

The key to becoming a stellar service provider lies in making only responsible commitments. ... Client and service provider will have to discover what constitutes best, and this always, always, always means stumbling through some uncomfortable territory together.

The noes learn what no nose could ever know. ... Not simply as compliant consultant to commanding client.

The feeling that we might not be able to make our customer happy is an important sense, one we should acknowledge early in the relationship.

New Shoes

david@projectcommunity.com — 2012-01-02T08:21:46-05:00

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 this well.”

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

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-12-15T08:47:43-05:00

Learning Balancing

Learning to ride a bicycle might be the perfect training for life. ... 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?” ... 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. ... We claim to be when never more than becoming.

Life’s choices take on a misleading gravitas. Many qualify as false choices, begging selection which, once chosen, leave us dead-ended, feeling as if we have no further choices. ... I don’t believe that young boys face any choice even approaching the impact of this one: “will you ‘be’ beautiful or smart?” ... But not as posed.

This false choice ignores an infinite number of possibilities between and around the one or the other. ... Choosing either/or won’t finish the game, but might well stall it.

Such choices serve as training wheels, perhaps, reassuring us that we can achieve balance until we learn that we will never be more than balancing here.

Synchronicity- The Movie Made Just For Me

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-12-14T10:57:47-05:00

I know when I’m in my groove because everything I encounter seems perfectly placed, as ready-to-hand and as ready-to-mind; as if in a movie produced expressly for me.

This seems enough of a not-everyday experience that I feel especially blessed whenever I encounter it. ...

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.

I speculate that these times might just be normal times, that I’m just distracted otherwise, and could, without much effort at all, simply plug into this way of living as the new normal; the same-old, same-old endlessly writ new. ... The DHS inspector found a typo on my boarding pass, and sent me back to the ticket counter for a corrected one. ... I hadn’t noticed that my new boarding pass reassigned me a window seat closer to the front of the cabin until we were boarding. Amy slinked to the back of the bus.

I was almost the last to board the flight, and found my new seat assignment in an empty row on an otherwise packed flight. ... So, thanks to a typo on my reservation, synchronicity found me that aisle seat I really wanted, Amy, that adjacent window seat, and left us an empty middle seat to huddle over through the flight.

Grace stalks us all. I can’t help but believe this in my deepest soul, given my now-vast experience with grace finding me, in unlikely places, and blessing me with a satisfying plot twist in the middle of a movie that I swear somebody must have made just for me.

Gravity and Levity

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-12-01T07:40:40-05:00

The rest of us have had to pretend that we would, could, and eventually did grow up, though our claims sometimes seem doubtful.

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.

Still, society seems to demand that each of us put aside our childish ways. ... Our bodies and our voices betray us, and we become willing accomplices in an insidious form of self destruction.

All this transformation without benefit of a cloaking cocoon; right out in the open where every prying eye can see. ... Inside, I still feel about eight years old.

The Grand Otter’s (the grand daughter) well on her way toward completing her first, rough approximation of her grown up self. ... (I retain my eight year old self as surely as I hide that sacred school patrol badge in the bottom of my sock drawer; I revere my childish ways.) But we do out-grow and we do grow into and nothing can stop gravity’s one, true counterweight: levity.

In the middle ages, a solemn scientific society declared levity—the supposed opposite of gravity—a joke, thereby rendering it unsuitable for recognition, let alone serious study. ... Yet we still grow up, we grow out; defying gravity with a destiny perhaps better recognized as levity.

If we can’t laugh about these changes, we’d be doomed to cry our eyes out over them. The innocence of youth becomes the ignorance of maturity, fondly remembering a time never fully lost.

Perhaps we are all somewhere in the middle between never growing up and endlessly out-growing, gravity and levity in imperfect balance.

Ganging Agley

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-11-28T13:21:08-05:00

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. ... Might as well ‘invest’ in the lottery.

We each know this simple truth, and know it over-well from personal experience. We’ve seen our intentions humbled, our hopes crash and burn, but there must be something working overtime inside most of us that keeps our aspiration fires burning in spite of frequent disappointing downpours. ... Maybe we get over life’s intrusions on life by creating a new plausible fiction with a distant-enough horizon to carry our hopefulness a while before life intrudes on our plan again.

The planned life isn’t much of a life at all. ... We can comfortably exist in the reassuring shadow of our self-cast future without ever noticing that it’s comprised of nothing but notions, a self-recharging siphon of expectations. ... We might never see so clearly as when we find ourselves on our knees, stunned at the audacity of life’s latest intrusion into our formerly secure life plan. The most important things might happen at the least convenient times.

Not even the 6:15 for Silver Spring can deflect life’s insistent intruding. ... They certainly qualify, not as the problems they seem to be, but, rather, as eternal features of every everyday life.

Life kicks in after the expected fails.

Her Why-ness

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-11-27T07:04:03-05:00

Wh-once there whas a whoman
who tried to understand
Every mysterious wonderment
which fell into her hand.
She started with the obvious,
wondering who? ...
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.

Dissatisfied knowing who? ... s no ditch to stumble into, no place to place your nose,
‘cause how you’ll get back out again, nobody—but nobody!—knows.
It’s the question with no answer, certain to cause you shame,
you’ll be fortunate enough if you ever escape, and you’ve only yourself to blame.

Because why? presumes a certain clockwork universe,
where wheels and cogs spin and jog at rank and file pace.
And the world isn’t particularly predictable looking forward down the track
and even less comprehensible over your shoulder looking back.
What’s past won’t share her secrets, no matter how many why? s
a whoman shrieks obliquely into the maw of time.

Why?’ s the question with no answer, certain to make a fool
of any whoman foolish enough to complain about this rule.
Go ahead and ask your who?... just seeds excuses, criticisms, blames,
and stories we live better without sullying our good names.

So keep in mind this silly little rhyme
the next time a why? ... ing never, ever, E-V-E-R ends.

Leaning Into It

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-11-26T06:08:21-05:00

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. ... 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. ... Leaning into the future seems to create a more sparkly future, which bleeds back into our present.

Okay, so I get that, but I don’t understand the apparently compulsive drive that insists upon always doing something; the so-called active lifestyle. ... Not to lean into their future, but frantically chase it.

I’m pretty certain that no amount of dedicated pursuit will forestall the onset of puberty. ... A bit of leaning into the future seems healthy, but on it’s far extreme, it’s possible to lean right through the future and chase the past. ... Consequently, she spends quite a few days bored to the gills, following me around on one or another domestic errand, leaning back into what certainly qualifies as an often unpleasant present. We’ve provided no kick-starting mechanism: no commitment to conduct dawn patrols, rush off to breakfast book clubs, or trundle into Tuesday afternoon teas.

She walks begrudgingly, prefers to be driven, and begs to drive herself, just as if she could. ... Sometimes, sitting still, your future finally catches up with you.

And look at this, I have an opening in my schedule just perfect for this happy accident to fit into.

Splatter Patterns

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-11-25T10:17:11-05:00

Hitting The Wall

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. ... But even confusion seems, upon reflection, an improvement over my former mindless over-extension.

Hitting my wall never qualifies as pleasant. ... Even if I could see the impact coming, there’s nothing I could do to prevent the collision.

Others might not even notice me crashing, but it seems to me that they must. ... That young mother screaming at her unruly two year old has been spooling up for this outburst for longer than this particular trip to the grocery. I just happened into the middle of a movie, produced especially for my education, but which I can do nothing to prevent. ... She’s grounding out to reset, then plug back in.

If I squint a bit, I can see my own experience playing out before me. ... We almost never dent the wall.

Though it’s darned inconvenient for a grand daughter to ‘lose it,’ it’s not gonna end up being the end of the world. ... After, you could pretend you didn’t notice and be there to help them hammer out a dent or two and get back onto their wheels again.

Voice

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-11-20T06:48:55-05:00

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. ... While I’d taken to recording myself on a ratty cassette deck, I was still, probably stemming from that first shocking fourth grade experience, ginky about hearing my recorded self played back.

But this recording studio experience was way different. ... I’m my own self-contained, full duplex feedback loop.

And my voice sounds really different in the moment than it ever does coming back at me through the playback machine. ... Your ears are pointed in the right direction to absorb the straight poop—from my mouth directly into your ears—while my ears are pretty much backwards to where they’d have to be to really hear myself speak.

Now, I’ve got Garageband on my laptop, and a schmancy condenser microphone routed through a complicated USB port. ... Just when the recording seems to sound exactly like the voice I’ve always known as my true voice, everyone else complains that it sounds nothing like me at all.

And I believe them. ...

I noticed this morning while listening to the early morning NPR broadcast, that the voice of modern media sounds like it was written by a twenty three year old journalism major. ... This seems to happen when I get tangled up in this weird feedback loop, when some tinny internal speaker renders me self-conscious, convincing me that I really do sound like Jerry Lewis imitating Donald Duck or when I notice, for one stunning moment, that my voice sounds almost entirely unlike anything that might ever come out of a twenty three year old journalism major.

This questionable gift of self-consciousness qualifies as a very low-level form of consciousness. ... Better, probably, to simply sing than to mug for the microphone or, worse yet, to affect that perky personna everyone’s now conditioned to expect but which insists upon being no different from any other voice.

I’m with the playwright Herb Gardner on this one: I’m convinced there must be a reason I was not born a chair, and probably an even better reason I have the voice I have.

Speaking of Ethics

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-11-04T08:49:22-04:00

In practice, we might not feel very much like philosophers, yet ethics has for centuries been the meat and potatoes of philosophy. ...And if you don’t notice a choice point appearing, you’re unlikely to choose. ...As a general rule, you might make a point to never lie, but you blunder into a little white lie of omission—you left out the unsettling details—then started down an inevitably degrading decline, offering annoying opportunities to choose, then choose again, then choose yet again. ...Every ethical professional is only too aware of their own missteps, though perhaps no one else ever caught their infractions. ...For instance, mandatory ethical standard 3.3.2, claims that “we do not exercise the power of our expertise or position to influence decisions or actions of others in order to benefit personally at their expense.” Except when we do, and in a competitive environment, we might be fools not to, sometimes. ...Before we know it, once we start thinking about ethics, we start thinking like the philosophers we’d never insist we are. ...We’re likely to discover that we have been making choices, even great choices, and understand that everyone else is wrestling with the very same dilemmas.

The Folly We Pursue

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-10-22T07:49:42-04:00

To celebrate the end of the war in Iraq, I propose a new national holiday. A Folly Holiday! One day set aside to mourn and remember, to cheer and forget; to more fully acknowledge our troubling national blind spots.

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.

Set Theory

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-10-12T07:32:38-04:00

This is the story of a late middle-aged storyteller teaching himself how to tell his story with his songs.

While fans and audiences think in terms of songs, performers parse their experience differently—into sets. ... 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. ... 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’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 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? ... 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. ... 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. ... 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

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-10-06T06:41:54-04:00

Some had worked for him, some of those had been fired by him, and a few had just up and quit. ...The Steve had the genius to surround himself with people far smarter than he would ever be. ...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! ... 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. ...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. ...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

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-10-01T06:49:33-04:00

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. ... 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.

And these second-hand experiences can be thoroughly convincing, just as if you'd personally been there; convincing but ultimately deluding. If you've been there, you already understand what going there entails, so the stories fall on ears properly conditioned, ones that translate the intention as the sender intended.

I call the attempt to explain this inexplicable 'screaming at sheep.' ... Each camp satisfies them self with their proposals without influencing the other.

If a community’s capability gets defined by the lowest common denominator, then this community seems destined to continuously rearrange deck chairs without ever influencing their future course. ... They seek resilience, not stability.

The closed system crowd honestly believes that if only their customers understood the needle eyes they have to drive camels through to deliver their services, then the customers would appreciate them as they’ve learned to appreciate themselves. ... No measurement could represent it, either.

So those who’ve been there budget a bit of time to creating and maintaining window dressing, making their going there seem the same as rearranging deck chairs. ... Some communities manage to distract those who have not been there by agreeing to them rearranging their deck chairs while the ‘been there’ folks go somewhere inexplicable.

Probably the single best way to stifle these efforts involves insisting that everyone go there together. ... We could acknowledge this fundamental, subtle difference without trying to change it.

Who says part of the crew shouldn’t satisfy themselves rearranging deck chairs and sending glowing reports back to home port while those who have been there and back again steer the necessary course?

Smells Like Fish To Me!

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-03-24T05:25:57-04:00

Ground up with careless usage, efficiency creates a rich and fragrant fertilizer apt to burn in application.

The word elicits righteous satisfaction. ... 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. ... Sure, I could often find ways to cut time, but simply cutting time doesn’t necessarily translate into efficiency. ... I’m here, I think, to cut some smelly bait.

I like to blame it all on Aristotle. ... I know it’s not fair, but he slung efficient around and I suppose was an early principle in the proliferation. ... Because I am a mammal and all mammals have hair, my being a mammal is the material cause of my hair.

Duh-fficiency

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-03-22T03:37:14-04:00

They cobbled together sciences that today appear positively medieval to create a grand delusion, the science of management, creating a technological elite equal, then surpassing even the status of the old money elite.

Very little of this work began as crazy. ... Now, I’m very afraid, it’s metastasized.

As David Halberstan reported in his 1986 Reckoning, speaking of one of the later-day efficiency experts, “McNamara sought rationality in an irrational world, and if he had had his way he would have manufactured and sold only rational cars.” But, he continued, “there was no easy way to replenish real car men,no graduate school readily turning out designers who were both creative and professional or manufacturing men who could run a happy, efficient factory. ... The great business schools of America could not produce genius or intuition, but they could and did turn out every year a large number of able, ambitious, young men and women who were good at management, who knew numbers and systems, and who knew first and foremost how to minimize costs and maximize profits.”

What would a decade later degrade into the principle component of The Fog of War had already chewed well into the center of American business.

The ancient Greeks understood the principle of Enantiodromy, the transition of things into their opposites. ... Merkle notes that while the professors wanted to teach this new science, they rejected the idea that they might be managed under its schemes. “thus it was not the engineers, but the academics purely in the business of organizational analysis, planning, and the teaching of management who became the advocates of the conscious message of peace through productivity ...: the strategy of creating and monopolizing bodies of knowledge as a means of perpetuating and expanding professional job opportunities.” A self-licking ice cream cone.

”[I]n the United States, as in Europe, the possessors of active minds who had their eyes fixed on middle-class gentility tended to pin their hopes for social mobility on their unceasing labors to create sciences out of services.” Proliferation was absurdly simple in a frantically upwardly mobile society, and many bright young men achieved gentility by setting down a body of arcane but marketable knowledge, gathering disciples, setting up a school, establishing ‘professional’ certification, and founding a professional society.

We all know where this story goes because we live in the future these bright-eyed geniuses aspired to. ... Our new computer’s on back-order because an earthquake in Japan shut down a node in a giant just-in-time manufacturing system that looked a whole lot better on paper than it turned out to be in practice.

On The Lam

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-02-06T18:49:51-05:00

In honor of my thirtieth Superbowl Sunday out looking for newborn lambs, I arrived back home with this latest addition to Dadbo’s Top Fifty Terrible Traveling Tunes. ... So we basked in the sunshine, zooming along back country roads running wet with the fast melting winter and glinting with the undeniable promise of Spring. 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!...
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 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

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-02-04T17:33:18-05:00

Here’s the second part of my appearance on Jeffrey Townsend’s Neither Here Nor There Radio show.

An_Inconvenient_Time-Podcast

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

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-01-25T10:30:29-05:00

A couple of years ago, my friend Jeffrey Townsend, former Hollywood production designer and media whiz, decided to pilot a radio program. The program, entitled Neither Here Nor There, was hosted by Steve Johnson, known to readers under his pen name Sam McLeod, and recorded in a lightly reconditioned WWII-era barracks building at the Walla Walla Airport in rural Washington State. ... Jeffrey, a natural-born smart aleck, wrote jingles for such local hot spots as the Worm Ranch Mexican Restaurant (yes, there really is such a place), and The Iceburg, a genuine fifties-style drive-in. Described as: " Walla Walla's only, and therefore longest running, radio variety show that's not on the radio," the program was a terrific idea but ultimately unsustainable.

Fortunately for me, I was invited as a guest to one of the few pilots made. Even more fortunate, Jeffrey kept the recordings.

Yesterday, Amy arrived at the Metro station after work with one of those grins on her face. ... She fiddled with her computer for a while, hooking it up to the Nakamichi, then called me into the living room. ... I can report that I am proud of this performance, and deeply, deeply appreciate Jeffrey for preserving this bit of my experience.

We recorded two segment during my appearance. ... Pictures of the performance space here.

My_Wives-Podcast

Projects As Reflexive Systems

david@projectcommunity.com — 2011-01-10T08:43:35-05:00

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. ... 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. ...In the early nineties, I worked for a boutique Silicon Valley consulting firm which had researched how successful, fast-time-to-market companies managed their projects. The findings revealed that none of these organizations managed their projects correctly—according to the civil engineering traditions that still underpin the dominant project management approaches—yet they consistently produced successful products in remarkably short time. ...The research found common threads among these operations: they had shifted their metaphor governing their projects away from ‘scripted performance’ toward ‘conversation,’ away from fine prediction toward adaptation, and away from team toward community. ...These shifts involved changing the perspective of those involved in the efforts, not finely determining how projects are supposed to work, but improving individual ability to see how they do work. This presentation will, in the spirit of these insights, consider projects as reflexive systems by engaging in a conversation about project work. ... Expect to be delighted by what we discover together.

Demystifying DC - part one

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-12-15T18:46:48-05:00

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. ... A blinking tax clock in front of the DC City Hall, just a short walk along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, displays the ever-growing amount of the tax burden borne by the District’s unrepresented citizens.

DC is a Southern city. ... The Northern Virginia ‘burbs feel like Northern California.

My wife Amy and I, and over a hundred and sixty five thousand other new-comers, moved here last year, further over-burdening an already inadequate infrastructure. ... DC is America’s idiot step child, living under constant suspicious scrutiny.

There are probably more smart people here than in any similarly-sized place on Earth, though they sometimes seem to out-smart themselves. ... A common complement overheard here: You’re really smart; delivered just as if smart was the height of human accomplishment.

DC must be the most multi-cultural city in the country. ... I think nothing of walking the mile to the Metro, then another mile to the Library of Congress, then repeating the treks in reverse.

When we first arrived, my job was to scout prospective neighborhoods, but I found that I could not do this very effectively in a car. ... In this way, I slowly, sometimes frustratingly, developed a better understanding of the city’s layout than any map could have provided.

We lucked out finding a place to live. After weeks of fruitless searching, ably assisted by a local real estate agent friend of a friend of my sister, and after rejecting many places, we stumbled upon a fine place in Takoma Park, Maryland, just over the extreme Northern DC line.

Small Fraud

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-11-13T11:27:30-05:00

"Our search for precision carries a hidden cost. Honesty might be the best policy, but practice can compromise even our best intentions. When I don’t even feel the twinge anymore, I guess I’m in real trouble, though I won’t feel the trouble—or anything at all then. So I notice the small frauds coming, side-step them when I can, and try my best to feel the pain when I just can’t stand aside. Maybe noticing qualifies as good enough."

My latest article posted on Best Thinkers.

Splice of Life

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-11-06T08:45:55-04:00

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. ... 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. ... Many hours wander that dark wood somewhere between, leaving not even footprints behind.

For me, I'm realizing that I rarely finish anything in one sitting, and almost never all by myself alone. I used to call this pattern time slicing, because it seemed to me that I was making progress by thin-slicing rather than by full loaves. ... While I am working with less than full lengths, I am also splicing these bits together into ever longer pieces until a full thread appears. I'm time splicing.

I am not so much cutting as weaving one nerve-frayed end into another in those sometimes long distracted periods between sharp focus. ... Shift the metaphor, and we are creating together even when we seem between doing anything.

When I speak with people about their work (or the work they feel frustrated at not ever being able to catch up with enough to complete) I hear time-slicing's subtle influence. ... If you experienced those long pauses caused by that 'emergency' unscheduled meeting or the in-the-moment distracting telephone call as splice points, rather than knife-sharp slices into aspired to—but rarely experienced—continuous flow?

Spare-Time Successful

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-11-04T09:07:19-04:00

Or Why-ning.

This year, though, I'm reflecting on just how much progress the pre-mature profession of project management has managed to make. ... And I am grateful for this humbling fact.

Week before last, I found myself before a room filled with very smart people, many of them tenured professors; certainly smarter than I will ever be. ... "Oh, you don't want to become a project manager, you just have to manage projects as a part of your real profession?" (Long collective sigh.)

When I first started working as a 'project management' consultant in Silicon Valley, I quickly learned that most of my clients were in this same boat. ... This, when their calendars were already filled with the demands of their real, full-time profession.

To become successful time-sharers, then, became the primary challenge. To somehow carve success out of absurdly thin little attentive moments, and to design projects fairly well capable of managing themselves.

This never was much of a science, differed for each 'practitioner,' and little could be reduced to mere technique. ... Their ability to manage themselves more critical to project success than any ethereal notion of how to manage others or how to manage those elusive critters known as projects.

So I take my hat off today to the under-appreciated majority of project managers, those who manage to become successful in their spare time. May this anniversary remind you of who and what you really are, and the huge difference you are making in your spare time.

Taylorism Transcended

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-09-23T15:59:18-04:00

Like many 'improvements' before and since, Taylor's implementation might have fallen prey to an ancient principle which claims that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

His premise insisted that disciplined observation would yield improved understanding, an application of a basic scientific principle. ... 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.

Taylor faced the same blockages any change agent faces, and he mostly worked around them, 'improving production' in spite of executive support more often than by the means of it. By the end (of his career), implementation of his insights were being 'driven' in many organizations, even though he originally proposed his methods as a more human alternative to 'driving' results.

Soros labels this eternal struggle The Will To Power vs The Will To Truth. ... Management Science arose as a response to blunt Will To Power, but then blunted itself by resorting to The Will To Power to implement itself, "for their own good."

I believe that you have to be at least 'so tall' to ride the Systems Thinking roller coaster. ... In my experience, it's the rare executive who will willingly forego demonstrating their power to drive (even if it’s merely illusory) for the mere possibility that their organization might more profitably direct itself. ... Taylor himself, in spite of his night-school engineering training, admitted that he lacked the background in mathematics to do more than the logical outlines of the system and to apply them by force (both figuratively and literally-he received death threats in the course of his reorganization work) to practical organizations. ... authority combined with ignorance could hardly be expected to raise productivity."

John Dos Passos' prose poem about Taylor, The American Plan, was most descriptive:
It ends...

"But Fred Taylor never saw the workings of the American plan;
in 1915 he went into the hospital in Philadelphia suffering from a breakdown
All his life he'd had the habit of winding his watch every afternoon as fourthirty;
on the afternoon of his fiftyninth birthday,
when the nurse went into his room to look at him at fourthirty,
he was dead with his watch in his hand."

I was in my earlier post apparently failing to point out the similarities between Taylor's technique for introducing his change, without supporting Taylor's techniques or his management philosophy, and what I see even today. ... His story is mostly myth.

His legacy now seems to inhabit that curious pedestal we Americans reserve for past innovators, featuring a cold stone likeness of a once living being and pigeons who mistake the presence for a roost and bathroom.

Coffee, Tea or We?

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-08-31T10:22:09-04:00

I could be living a hundred years ago without changing a single spot.

When the founding fathers penned our Constitution, they began simply but profoundly with “We the people.” ... But as soon as General Washington’s terms were completed, even the founding fathers back-slid a bit.

By 1910 we’d experienced a succession of presidents who might be described as representing either us or them. Any attempt to include anyone formerly disenfranchised always prompted a plea for a return to traditional values.

The Progressives were a poorly-focused lot. Up against the might and treasury of a tightly-collusive gentry, most of what the Progressives proposed, such as equal pay for equal work, was summarily struck down as illegal by our (or was it their?) Supreme Court.

Then, the ‘ruling class’ used their considerable wealth to swamp the media with dire predictions, sounding every bit like brimstone-familiar New England preachers, and scaring the stained and patched pants off workers who thought maybe fifteen hour days, if they really were an expression of God’s will, might not be so bad.

After the Panics of 1893 and 1901, regular working people were literally hungry for more than social justice and President Wilson promoted a progressive agenda, strongly supported by the emerging college-educated class. The Great War stifled most of these initiatives and they, the people, put their stomachs on hold for the duration.

During the war, the media blitz started equating progressivism with Communism, and the gentry won. ... They’re still clamoring for a return to ‘traditional values,’ the oldest scam in the book.

Mary Parker Follett, a writer at the time, suggested, “Whenever anyone offers you a choice between this and that, choose a third way.” ... Our opposition only serves the forces of opposition, either us or them, while We The People might seek the more enduring values found in we—just as if we actually are the US we claim to be.

Telephoney-Part Two

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-08-14T07:27:52-04:00

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. ... Two years before this mast seems most common because, as the folksy CEO of Sprint explained in a recent interview, the modern cell phone is a six or seven hundred dollar investment, and no one wants to pay for these machines up-front, so the cell 'provider' needs the indenture of a two year contract, with heavy penalties for early cancellation, to even hope to turn a profit. ... Who could help but imagine that the day after I sign, the company will declare moot the technology I've just committed to carry for fourteen dog years.

Anyway, my wife continues to be after me to 'upgrade' my phone. ... So I could have any phone I want as long as it works on Verison's network.

So I spent some time this week, attitude bucked up by a recent success, browsing through their 'offerings.' ... I suspect that with more diligent study, I might resolve this small mystery.

I might try to try out some newer model, use it for a week to see how it treats me before agreeing to any renewed indenture, but then I might not. Amy will undoubtedly encourage me to shift technologies the next time I fail to get her urgent call, and we're both certain that this will happen again and again and again. ... ("It was designed that way," the salesman told me after I'd dropped in to complain just after I'd indentured myself to the phone.)

Telephoney-Part One

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-08-02T18:27:01-04:00

Or maybe that's Telephoney's history with me.

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. ... 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. ... Great for some but they forgot to provide access for the rest of us.

My littler phone is just marginally better, but only because I have figured out how to pick up incoming calls, usually. ... The day that I was finally allowed (read: forced) by law to purchase my own phone and choose my own provider was a day that lives in infamy for me. Sure the Telephoney Industry complained about it with all the sincerity of any crocodile, but for me, this 'freedom' positioned me squarely in the crosshairs of an industrial machine bent on humiliating me. They've made good on the opportunity.

I made that first trip into a phone store to ... urp ... buy my own phone long after I could have. ... So I took my newly found freedom and bought a phone that weighed a whole lot less and did pretty much the the same stuff as my dial phone, though much less reliably. And that phone only lasted barely ten years before I was trotting out to another 'phone store' again to be mystified by the multiple lack of choices offered me.

No, I did not want a phone with a brain, as I was still adjusting to the unvalidated assertion that I might possess a brain.

Simple Wisdom

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-06-14T17:00:11-04:00

The inquiries were worth the effort anyway.

Perhaps the purpose of these inquires was never as I envisioned—to find that definitive answer—but to reassure myself that I had not overlooked another's scholarship and jumped to some hasty conclusion. ... At times, I would have gladly traded for a single magic bean—even the promise of that bean for future delivery, such was the frustration, the crazy-making frenzy of my search. And I admit to taking respite on the occasional flimsy lilly pad, my weight swamping the damned thing, my sleeplessness eventually driving me back into the deep chilling water to ask again and then again.

But I was praying to a false God, worshiping a moldy idol, asking for the wrong prayers to be answered. ... They no more than I understood why this tar baby refused to be released, though they, unlike I, had a lot more reasons why it should have been a simple matter of a tweak here, a temporary reassignment there, and everything would resolve just as it should have resolved in the first place. And no reasons why it should not.

And I entered—probably because it was in my self-esteem's best interest to believe it so—believing that I could certainly right this slightly capsized vessel. ... Cold, wet, thankful to be alive and wary of any opportunity to leave solid ground again.

But it was heady stuff, this blind navigation, this frenzied search for the presumed missing keys. I didn't know then and barely accept now that no one in the history of the world had ever managed to discover those presumed lost keys because they were not lost but had never been forged. ... Yet it was my steadfast belief that they had been cast and lost and that I could find them that motivated me through decades of delusional dedication.

Windsock Nation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-05-12T09:41:58-04:00

We’ve become a windsock nation.

This practice is not all bad, though it has significantly shifted the political climate. ... The electorate would choose based upon character, then, having chosen, let that character represent them.

Today’s elected representatives need not have character, but they must have a polling organization. They need not bring judgment, other than the judgment a windsock exhibits when it submits to the breeze.

So we see political directions shifting faster than a tango dancer’s. We see long-standing policies right-face or left-face or even pivot backwards, promoted by nothing more permanent than a slight shift in the wind.

When a Harvard University researcher interviewed some of the world’s most successful designers, the results were clear. ... Nobody could know, that’s why the framers put their trust in character and judgment, not popular opinion.

I consider it to be my civic duty to lie to pollsters. ... When they ask a twisted question, I ask them what the question means, how others have answered, what use my response will be put to. ... I’ve worked with statistical analysis long enough to understand just how unreliable it is.

Who do my representatives think they are, sniffing the wind instead of their judgment? ... If my nose is out of joint about half the time, I figure it’s working.

A government trying to satisfy all the electorate all the time is no government at all.

The Tickle Point (continued)

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-04-25T06:32:25-04:00

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. ... We'd been charged with creating a list of bullet points and a visual, but MY table blew off the facilitator's direction, in favor of something more memorable. Besides, no one at OUR table could draw, so I volunteered.

I went to the front and explained that our dialogue had not yielded handy bullet points. ... And there we were, mere feathers blown around by the wind, facing a fulcrum with the big hairy problems of the world on one side, a pin feather trying to counter-balance with critical mass to achieve some tipping point.

We decided that instead of trying to achieve critical mass to affect a tipping, it might be wiser to find that point along the fulcrum where the feather might achieve some tickle; the Tickle Point. BIG programs to combat BIG problems almost never succeed, because they are often BIG DUMB actions which raise no intelligent response from the offending system. But a tickle can wake up the system just enough so that it becomes just a little more aware of the stupid stuff it's doing, so more mindful adaptation, even evolution is possible.

(We also decided that if the tickle didn't work, we could always revert to the flipping point. That's always handy and easy to find.)

Here's the prior Tickle Point posting.

Statesmanship

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-03-24T16:57:09-04:00

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. ... Henceforth, in the years to come, they can mark the calendar date of March 23, 2010, when for the first time in American history an American President signed into law a bill that will provide Americans the opportunity to live free from the fear that they or their loved ones will be

faced with a health care crisis and they will not have the capacity, without bankrupting themselves or watching a loved one lose their life or become chronically or permanently ill or sick because they could not afford it, to see a doctor.

I rise today on this very historic day to thank my friend from Montana, to thank the terrific staff of the Finance Committee, to thank the members of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by my great pal and friend Ted Kennedy for so many years. ... My daughter was going to get the kind of treatment she needed.

But that room was filled with a lot of people that night, people with no health care, people showing up well beyond a point you would want to see a physician because they did not have the resources to do it. ... How many other children in this city or across America that night had parents sitting around, sleepless, wondering whether that child was going to get better, knowing they were getting more dehydrated and putting them at great risk of spiraling down, putting them at greater and greater risks, not knowing what to do, not having the resources to do it, not having that kind of health care, not having the money and insurance to pay for it, and wondering when they were going to show up in the emergency room to take care of that child. That goes on every single day in America, in the United States of America, in the 21th century.

This bill does not solve all of those problems, but the idea that we can lift the burden of fear from those families, those people who work hard--remember, a majority of all the bankruptcies last year occurred because of a health care crisis in that family, and a majority of those people who went bankrupt because of a health care crisis had health insurance. ... But for other families across this country who don't have that security, that sense of confidence that if their loved ones end up ill or need attention or care, that unless they have the kind of coverage and the ability to pay for it, their child might not have had the same outcome that mine did. ... It was Democrats and Republicans who tried to get this done.

What this effort represents is proof that while progress is not easy, neither

is it impossible, and that, maybe more than anything else, is important about what we saw today.

As President Obama said, we didn't come here to the Senate, to the Congress of the United States to fear the future; we came here to try to shape it. ... It revises revenue provisions in the law to take some of the burden off middle-class families and put it on the pharmaceutical industry, which can afford to bear those burdens.

On top of all these commonsense fixes, it includes a badly needed, fully-paid-for investment in Pell grants enabling more Americans to go to college and get the education they need to compete in the 21st-century world in which these children will face.

Eat To Excess

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-02-23T11:03:25-05:00

He’ll stuff an extra pound or so into the bag for good measure, and it was cut just that morning. ... For a week or two in late May, the short sockeye salmon season intersects with the asparagus, morel, and the Walla Walla salad onion harvest. ... Aside from eating to excess only whatever’s in season, I’m picky about what of whatever’s in season I’m going to gorge on.

I like my eat to excess rule because it’s a positive goal. ... So we eat to excess.

By buffering this natural tendency with a little caveat, I’ve managed to avoid the common afflictions of the glutton so far. I could interpret this rule as carte blanche to eat Little Debbie Cakes until I burst, except Little Debbie Cakes don’t have a season. ... Off season, it’s a side salad.

Meat, bread, dry beans, and butter are not seasonals, and therefore excluded from my list of foods to eat to excess. ... If we gather to celebrate, we might as well celebrate the harvest, and not the wonders of deep freezing technology.

Sure, I’m a pig. ... And eat an awfully lot of that.

Barely Legal Seafood

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-01-23T10:42:18-05:00

Lemon Butter Sauce is a euphemism for lousy quality in the industrial food service industry, and if you hanker to meet industrial food service with all of its euphemisms, you could not do better than to plan a visit to Legal Seafood. ... Full disclosure, probably to be mandated by some future judicial ruling, will doubtless require a slight name change to Barely Legal Seafood.

I ordered the Woodfired Seafood Combo, breaking a personal rule to avoid ordering anything advertised as a combo, but it was late and it seemed the simplest alternative. The wedge salad was fine.

The sword, tuna, and Atlantic salmon came guarded by shrimp and scallops "grilled" employing a remarkable method which apparently infuses in lemon butter sauce on a wood grill. ... These babies drooled all over the fish, which itself seemed to have been wood-fired in lemon butter sauce, and were not simply well-done, but well past retirement age.

Finish the presentation with steamed broccoli in poochichi sauce (an old Filipino favorite I didn't know anyone in this country even knew how to make) and a thrice-baked potato that looked as if it had survived a bar fight and was on the lam from a restraining order.

Okay, I ate it anyway. ... She had the lobster, which she reported as serviceable, served on a bed of cold, sandy clams and dehydrated mussels with a small hunk of 'not bad' corn on the cob and what looked like a wood fired weenie, also probably infused with Lemon Butter Sauce. ... The weenie went back with the sandy shellfish.

We will not go back.

I'd eaten at Legal Seafood in Boston before it was a chain, and liked it fine. ... It's pretty clear that some efficiency experts have had their way with this operation. I am confident only that the food is now cost-effective, the operation profitable, and the small crimes committed with each course, Legal, though barely.

A Cook's Book

david@projectcommunity.com — 2009-12-10T12:13:23-05:00

I also learned that I have a naturally decent palate and an eye for unusually yummy combinations.

She worked at fast forward speed, a skill she’d had drilled into her throughout her professional career. ... If you’ve ever worked in a professional kitchen, you’d recognize that it has about as much in common with your kitchen as a cruise ship has with a toy boat.

Most of what makes cooking work cannot be written about —- or, indeed, spoken. ... We don’t want tuna with good taste, but are satisfied with tuna that tastes good enough.

That said, I have a bookshelf filled with cookbooks, though I rarely even try to follow their instructions. ... I’m looking for a cue about how I “should”, which for a cook provides ample motivation to do it differently than that.

Our tastes are situational. ... EF was different every time, yet also very much the same.

I like to think that every family must have its own personal Electric Fred. ... Like I said, I’m not fast in the kitchen, and don’t aspire to be.

I believe that I should savor the cooking at least as much as the result. ... I think there’s a container of wheat germ in there, too.

One shelf in the refrigerator has mason jars of homemade stock, lemon juice (I am not picky about lemon juice), and various pickles. ... When I cannot do that, I’m buying blind.

My tastes are mine and you can’t have them, no matter how much you drool and beg.

Sweet Dreams

david@projectcommunity.com — 2009-11-19T12:53:33-05:00

I'm prototyping a new media and I need your feedback, pushback, and loving advice. Please take a peek and comment below. Thanks!

McMethodBedTimeStory

Free Advice

david@projectcommunity.com — 2009-11-17T08:11:08-05:00

It's been over a century now that otherwise bright consultants have been offering the same sage advice: Focus on the employees. ... You can't drive knowledge workers, and everyone who works for you is a knowledge worker.

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. ... I'm holding out for the idea that it might (I said MIGHT) be every generation's job to learn to better cope with the world as it is. Yet these sage bits of advice seem focused upon fundamentally changing the world

I don't mean to sound cynical here, because I'm not cynical, though I have concluded that simply telling another what they should be doing has little influence on that other person's actions. Yet the sages continue offering the same good advice, just as if, stated for the umpteenth time, it might finally change someone or something. ... It bounced off the advice deflectors every predator was born with, reassuring only scholars and theorists and all those of us who engage in business without the predator gene. ... How might we better engage, those of us who would otherwise be little beyond beach balls bouncing off the indifferent smirks of our shadowing bureaucracies? ...

You and I should have paid closer attention in Junior High.

Amen