Have you noticed that matches don't work anymore?

In my youth, a single Diamond™ kitchen match could set a porcelan toilet on fire. (I didn't mean to do it. I was just experiementing!) Today, I need four or five to catch tinder-dry kindling. The little matches, the ones that come in handy pocket-sized boxes, don't work at all, except as pocket filler. I can go through a box of these without ever catching anything on fire, especially the matches. They die before they flare, leaving me with a fine pile of tinder-dry kindling and an empty box which, if I'm lucky, I might set fire to if I have four or five kitchen matches handy.

Forget about paper matches, which are nothing more than advertising on false promise. Probably two false promises. Don't believe anything you read on a matchbook cover.

In Europe, it's still possible to buy decent matches. Full-headed with a decent striking strip. Lively with flame, On Swedish wood. And firery graphics with sexy names. Vestas! Calling the Greek god of fire into play every time you strike.

The American match seems godless, designed for efficiency of manufacture and lowest possible cost. I'm sure they succeed on both of these counts, but in achieving these noble ends, they have succeeded in reducing this once proud implement to an impotent twig, unable to perform its primary function.

Gotta light? Probably not.

I've tried (Lord knows I've tried!!!) to keep my obsession with things related to project management out of this blog, but vanity or pride prevents me from sustaining this intention. I make an exception in this one small instance. The e-zene Projects@Work today published my latest rant on the subject of Free Market Project Management, so I just have to bust my barrier. ...

See the piece (and following comments) here:

http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/Articles/229437.cfm

We have been undermining an important capability, one essential to our global competitiveness. The movement toward "process maturity" has been moving us away from an on-the-ground reality. We build castles when we really need tents. We maintain bureaucracies when we need entrepreneurial engagement. Much of the rest of the world has already discovered this wrinkle in our dominant economy. How long before we catch on? Your guess might be as good - or even better than mine. What's clear to me, and to many others, is that we will not much longer be able to define the terms of our trades. This is a great tragedy for those who have constructed castles. And a Godsend for those who live in tents.

As Kurt Vonnegut often said, "So it goes."

Interesting piece I came across this week. Compares the battles raging over the right for a community to provide high speed wifi with the monopolists' trying to prevent communities from creating municipal electrical cooperatives a century ago. While the battles rage, of course, Japan is building a universal wifi netword 500 times faster than our fastest. How much longer will we be content to float along behind the technological revolution?

Link follows:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.podesta.html

∆ London, England

We were supposed to have a quick lunch meeting with the CIO, but a man three seats in front of us on the plane from Vienna had what appeared to be a heart attack, so our flight made an emergency landing in Frankfurt. Then we had to reclaim our baggage and rebook onto a later flight out of Dusseldorf, so we made a frantic call.

Then we waited. ... ... ...

Later, the CIO’s admin returned our call and asked if we could meet late that afternoon. “Sure,” we replied, “We’ll call you as soon as we land to let you know we’re on the way.”

We didn’t make that lunch meeting until just after five o’clock that afternoon. And we chatted for over two hours, then sauntered to a pub to continue the conversation with one of the participants. Had we met our original schedule, we never would have connected as we did.

From one perspective, our schedules are under constant threat. From another, the universe seems to be conspiring to guide us where we might have intended, had we only been wise enough to understand. Whether we end up wise or simply inconvenienced might be completely in our control.

The next time my schedule gets threatened, I intend to listen through my initial frustration and see what the universe has planned for me. I expect to be delighted with the result.

Today's NYTimes speaks of the Struggle Against Majority Tyranny, of checks and balances and how they don't always work. Nice read.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/opinion/23mon3.html

∆ Frankfurt, Germany

I was sick. We’d carefully planned the workshop. I was the lead dog. Amy was playing backup.

So I had a responsibility to deliver on my commitment. But just before noon on the third day, feeling as though I had spent the morning trudging through chest-deep snow, I bailed out.


Amy was a little peeved at first, but she took the reins as I fled to our over-heated hotel room to shiver the afternoon away. I could do nothing else.

The workshop ended delightfully well. It was in good, honest, skillful hands. Though some of the attendees had come to work with me, they received an unintended bonus.

I’ve refused to listen to my body enough to understand that it rarely lies to me. I wish I could say as much about my side of our relationship. I’ve learned through frequent, painful repetition, that my attempts at self-sacrifice for the good of the effort at best get in the way of delightful, surprising outcomes.

The math never worked. How could we achieve our best if I chose to insist upon self-sacrifice?

My most powerful learning experiences have arrived just like this. The lead I was following threw me the reins and disappeared, leaving me unprepared and disoriented. Had I been ready, I might have learned nothing.

There really is no adequate replacement for a sincere lack of preparation. How ever well you prepare.

The Ice Cube or Vapour Box

The relationship between consumer and supplier features unending contradictions. While the consumer desires products that they control, ones that cost nothing to buy, take up no space, are infinately speedy, are of infinite high quality, are infinitely easy to use, and free to operate, suppliers require that one or more of these desires go unsatisfied in order to survive. The relationship is an unending battle to see how long any supplier will retain control over the relationship, and the customer will always ultimately, eventually win.

The supplier’s game is to delay as long as possible that transition from their control to another supplier’s or the consumer’s control. Suppliers can do this by appearing to side with the consumer, by changing some constraint that currently prevents the consumer from controlling their own relationship with the product while retaining others. By lowering price, for instance, a supplier can help to satisfy the consumer’s desire for free goods and undermine another supplier’s ability to satisfy this same need. If the supplier can reduce a presently high cost with one that conveniently fades into the background, he can make the cost seem to disappear. Or, by increasing the prestige of the product, a supplier can, for some consumers, evaporate the remaining negative externalities of the product.

For the purposes of this description, negative externalities are any which limit the customer’s ability to take total control over satisfying their own need. So, any cost, improper size, slow speed, low quality, difficulty to use, and cost to operate is, at root, a negative externality for a product. It’s important to note that the consumer might not outwardly complain about the present terms of exchange. They might treasure their relationship with their auto mechanic, but if they could have a car which didn’t require a mechanic or some means of transportation that eclipsed their desire for a car, they would walk away from that treasured relationship without once looking back, as if freed from an indentured servitude.

Suppliers are similarly heartless in their commercial relationships. They dangle increased ease of use for their new release of their operating system, failing to mention all of the backward compatibility lost with installation, dramatically increasing the cost to operate the innovation. They also might at any time target a new market segment, dropping loyal and satisfied customers without their permission or request. Suppliers have long histories of lobbying legislatures to require their product or service as a matter of law, or to artificially inflate their prices above market demands. They are not their customer’s unending friends.

Vapour Points are achieved whenever the consumer wins a round in this eternal game. The previous supplier is vapourized unless he can find some other advantage over the consumer or some other industry with adequate advantage over the consumer to regain his temporary superiority in the game. The superiority is always temporary for the supplier, since the consumer’s search never ends for infinitely smaller negative externalities. The wide availability of inexpensive home ice-making equipment didn’t liberate the consumer from suppliers, it transferred their indenture to another industry, one which provided a more satisfying mix of controllables. The widely-reported vapourization of the Buggy Whip industry came closer to satisfying the consumer’s ultimate objective, since it made moot the day-to-day need for such a thing as a buggy whip. Doing away with a need is the highest form of vapourization, since the absence of need costs nothing to provide, takes up no space, occurs instantly and constantly, renders quality moot, requires no skill, and incurs no operating cos

Legal Maneuvers

9:35am, October 14, 1913. The office of Wyndam, Colbert, and Weese, Attorneys At Law, Westfield Mass.Present: Godfrey Wyndam, senior partner, and Hiriam Hull III, President of the Westfield Whip Company.

“I tell you, Godfrey, the whole town’s threatened,” Hull continued. “These horseless carriages have become more popular than anyone thought they would fifteen years ago. And as people replace their carriages with these horseless models, the market for our buggy whips is drying up. Remember, Westfield produces 95% of the buggy whips in the country and buggy whip manufacturing produces most of the livelihood in Westfield. Mine. Yours, too.”


“I see your point, Hi,” his old friend replied. “If they don’t use horses, there’s no need for whips on these new buggies.”

“The early ones at least had buggy whip holders on them,” Hull complained. “These latest models don’t even have those. When they break down or get stuck in the mud, people have one hell of a time hitching up an old reliable horse and guiding them out.”

“Yes,” Wyndam agreed, “I had that problem just last week. I was calling on the Kemperer family, you know them, they live up by the big bend in the river, and the road was muddied from last week’s rain. I was fool enough to take my horseless carriage out on that jaunt. The darned thing ended up stuck in that hole at the bottom of that last hill. Took half of the afternoon to find a horse, hitch him up, and pull that blasted thing out. I could have used one of your whips then, I can tell you.”

“Damned right!,” mumbled Hull. “It’s a danger to public safety to sell a horseless carriage without a buggy whip. These machines get stuck and a buggy whip is essential for getting them out. Who do these upstarts think they are, selling their carriages without this necessary accessory?”

“Okay,” Wyndam replied, “But what do you think you can do about it?”

“That’s why I’m here this morning, Godfrey. I need your help. If these horseless carriages continue to sell like they have been selling, Whip City will be out of business in a decade. If everyone is driving these contraptions, no one will be buying whips. Our suppliers—the whalebone industry, the rattan industry, the leather tanners—will be out of business, too. Westfield could become a ghost town. You have as much of an interest in preventing that outcome as I do, Godfrey.”

Wyndam looked thoughtfully at his old friend. Hiriam Hull III was the grandson of the man responsible for turning Westfield into Whip City. Until Hull’s grandfather perfected his braiding machine, whip manufacture was a cottage industry. With that machine came mass production and with mass production came wealth and with wealth came explosive population growth. But the last decade had seen some signs that the prosperity of the nineties might not continue.

“Aren’t you blowing this threat all out of proportion? Sure, the horseless carriages are becoming more popular, but do you honestly think they’ll ever replace horse-drawn transportation? I mean, the roads are nearly impassable by horseless carriages from the late fall into the spring around here. Won’t people continue to use their buggies most of the time?”

“The state’s talking about paving the major roads, Godfrey! Horses don’t walk so well on paved road, my friend. If the state decides to pave roads, what will prevent the counties from following suit? And if the counties pave their roads, won’t the cities pave theirs, too? I’m telling you, the legislature is in cahoots with these horseless boys, and Whip City’s gonna end up whipped as a result.”

“Well,” Wyndam considered, “ You may be blowing this situation out of proportion, but if the legislature is planning on paving state roads, I think our people in the capitol might be able to influence that decision. After all, the state needs the jobs. Why should we destroy our own livelihood to satisfy some passing fancy? But work like this’ll cost you.”

“I’m not expecting a free ride, Godfrey. You know me better than that. Westfield Whip has started conversations with the other major manufacturers in the city, U.S. Whip and the rest, and we’ve agreed to spend some money to influence some decisions. After all, there’s a way of life at stake here. We’ll be advertising in the Saturday Evening Post, emphasizing that every horseless carriage should carry a buggy whip for safety’s sake. We think we need to carry this fight into the U. S. Congress and into every state in the country, for Christ’s sake. We know what we have at stake here, and we’re ready and willing to create whatever war chest might be needed to win this war.”

“Okay, Hi. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here. After all, this threat you’ve been describing has not come about yet, and might not ever come about. Remember, even you have horseless carriages, but even yours aren’t reliable enough for anything but a Sunday joy ride. I doubt that you’ll ever consider trying to drive to Boston or Albany in that thing, would you? After all, there’s reliable train service every where. Who in their right mind would want to risk the hardships of long distance automobile travel?”

“Godfrey, I’ve got a bad feeling about this situation. If those mechanics in Detroit can make those contraptions more reliable, and they have been making them more reliable, and if those financial wizards can use installment credit to make them affordable, and they have been making them more affordable, and if those oil jockeys down in Pittsburgh can set up a distribution network to make fuel more widely available, and they have been making it more widely available, I’m telling you that within a generation, the average American might not even own a horse. I know that sounds crazy, and half of the manufacturers in this city think I’m deranged, but we’ve just got to start defending our way of life before it disappears on us.”

“Fine, fine. Let me confer with my partners on this, Hi. You’ve outlined a potentially huge effort, and I want to make sure that my colleagues are up for the fight before committing WCW to such a campaign. All the states, you say? National congress? We’ve never been involved with something as vast as this,” Wyndam nattered. “Can we get back together early next week to start laying out strategy? Oh, and you’d better bring along a few representatives of the other whip companies. I think we’ll all need to be of one mind on this.”

Hiriam Hull III stood, shook Godfrey Wyndam’s hand, and, turning toward the glass paneled door, he paused for a moment. “This is life or death, Godfrey. Mark my words,” he said without making eye contact. Then, quickly opening the door, he left.

Over then next two years, the Whip manufacturers of Westfield did battle with their arch competitors. Congress passed the Horseless Carriage Safety Act of 1915, which mandated that each horseless carriage sold be equipped with a buggy whip for use in emergency towing situations. Several state legislatures, Massachusetts first among them, passed laws forbidding the paving of state roads, citing the threat to railroad traffic, the unavoidable public danger should large numbers of horseless carriages take to the road, and the damage to horses caused by hard, paved surfaces.

Westfield prospered from the introduction of the automobile and the whip industry performed a great public service, which helped preserve the American way of life. Or so the story might have gone.

In the real world, no one in Westfield was particularly alarmed with the introduction of the automobile. When they were first introduced, there were only a few hundred miles of paved road in the entire country, and these were located within large cities. Most people lived in rural areas, where fuel and mechanical support was impossible to find. No, the whip industry didn’t feel threatened by this novelty. Furthermore, at that time, government was not as experienced in protecting threatened industries as it is today. Lobbyists were fewer and legislatures were not so well-funded that they could consider protectionist legislation.

So Westfield’s primary livelihood literally went the way of the buggy whip and their product became, for most American’s, simply irrelevant. Had Hiriam Hull III invested five percent of his company’s 1895 profits in the automobile industry, his company would have prospered on the dividends from that investment over the years. Yet, such an investment would have seemed irrational at the time, and certainly would have failed to garner the support of any fiscally responsible board.

Such are the usual responses when a company’s product encounters the vapour point. Most do not see the vapourization coming, and few have the resources to mount a successful defense once the vapourization becomes obvious. In 1900, people imagined that selective breeding would produce enormous fruit, not that frozen food would make enormous fruit unnecessary. Our predictions are no less wrong today. Had the buggy whip industry successfully mounted a defense against the encroaching automobile industry, it is not unlikely that cars today might have a federally-mandated buggy whip as a part of their emergency equipment. And the buggy whip industry would be intact.

Locating The Vapor Point

That Spring of 2001, across the country in Portland, Oregon, True North project guidance strategies, the two-person training and strategic consultancy I’d founded eight years earlier, was barely keeping up with the burgeoning demand for our services. Following a humbling slowdown before Y2K, our client list had expanded to just beyond our ability to confortably service it. Where prior years had seen us make the occasional ten day trip, this year would see me in 53 different hotel rooms, some for as long as two contiguous weeks. One client had prepaid a year’s fees, and cash flow was more positive than ever in the company’s history.

TidePoint and Aplion’s vapourization were no more than distantly troubling rumbles. Our ability to deliver high quality results was growing at an expanding rate. Our customers were more than satisfied. Our future looked secure. That fall, the consultants retreat we attend was so oversubscribed that attendees had to share rooms in the small hotel. Some complained of recently lost contracts, but few felt near the edge of anything. A year later, the same retreat had a third of the attendees and half of them participated in hope of finding some new insight that would bring a paying client.

Not a week goes by today, eight months later, without another dismayed email from a colleague consultant. Lost the contract. No replacement. Seriously considering getting a real job. No real jobs available. Dismay melts into desperation. Some lose their homes. Others lose their identity.

No statistics show the massive dislocation in the professional consulting ranks in the last few years. Even the huge training firms struggle to reach minimum class sizes, and the independents, so long the source of innovation, have turned to writing books and articles for an ever shrinking publishing industry. Is the consulting business vapourizing? Who’s to say today? Who can say today what tomorrow will conclude?

No one can rationally predict the exact timing of a Vapour Point, except in retrospect. It remains a fable until it becomes a reality, but by then it’s too late to be ahead of its slippery, inexorable curve. The nagging uncertainty is crazy-making. The irresolution insane.


As I walk the streets of my own small, Western town, I notice only a few of the differences between the town I left thirty years ago and the one I returned to find just two years ago. Many of the landmarks of my youth have gone. While the town thrives today, much of the period between my departure and my return was gut-wrenching for those who remained. While my small town thrives, a thousand others like it do not. In the Midwest, the out migration has left churches boarded and empty, main streets desolate, and homesteads gobbled into ever enlargening corporate farms. Their steady, reliable past is falling out of focus and whatever will replace it seems shrouded in a vapourous fog. Some say that society itself is crumbling, but that assertion is by no means a certainty. That things will never be the same again goes without saying. What they are becoming and what they might become, a matter for only unenlightened speculation.

The TidePoint Debacle

In the fall of 2000, Ray L. Steele, Director of the Ball State University Center for Information and Communication Sciences (CICS) invited me to attend their annual alumni awards banquet. Ray had, over the prior decade, built CICS into the graduate degree program most valued by the booming telecommunications industry. The program’s graduates were accepting six figure starting salaries at companies such as MCI, AT&T, and Anderson Consulting. My company had entered into a joint marketing agreement to sell our workshops to CICS’ community, building on a colleague’s use of our material in her Art and Science of Project Management class, a popular part of CICS’ curriculum. Our new relationship was to be introduced to the alumni at the awards banquet.

Sitting next to me at the banquet table was Joel, President of TidePoint, a start-up telecommunications company and a recent graduate of CICS. Joel was present, I learned, to receive the Alumni Of The Year Award. When he heard that I was a project management expert, he offered his card. He asked me to call the following week to chat about a project management difficulty his company was experiencing.

TidePoint was like many start-ups in the nineties. Riding the crest of unprecedented telecommunications industry growth, a group of software engineers attracted several rounds of venture capital from an Atlanta-based bank. Before they had even brought a product to market, the company remodeled a derelict complex on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, participating in the renewal of the former rusting, brick and mortar infrastructure, and hired dozens of eager engineers.

Among them was Rob, who was responsible for managing the Service Planning Department at TidePoint. In my call to Joel, he asked me to speak with Rob and assess his strategy for ramping up their service organization. I called Rob, who had left a career at Ford Motor Company to join the high tech revolution at TidePoint. Rob explained how he was facilitating a long series of discussions with the other executives at TidePoint to define the methodology that would insure consistency when implementing their revolutionary network management software. He was struggling to gain consensus, as the chief architect didn’t agree with many of his suggestions and he couldn’t buy into the chief architect’s perspective, either. Rob complained about the architect having some key engineers reassigned to complete the software development effort, but Rob felt confident that if only they could agree on a method, once the product shipped, the consistent installation process would become a profit center for TidePoint.

I was impressed at how much energy TidePoint was expending on creating a mature support structure for an uncompleted product, for which no paying clients had been recruited. Both Joel and Rob assured me that once the product shipped, demand would explode, but I was skeptical. They wanted some advice on how to rein in the incorrigible architect. I was dissatisfied with Rob’s strategy, which seemed to build on his long experience within a very different context. I doubted that service infrastructure would very quickly become a critical factor at TidePoint, and suggested that some experience with real, paying customers would quickly resolve the speculation that their endless meetings to decide the proper methodology had failed to provide.

I left a message for Joel after speaking with Rob, but Joel didn’t return my call. He was a busy man, I explained to myself, and we were just starting the conversation that might become a paying assignment for me. I left several more messages over the following weeks and, as Thanksgiving and Christmas turned into New Year, I focused my attention elsewhere. In February of 2001, I called again, only to receive a message that the number I called was no longer in service. Thinking I had dialed incorrectly, I redialed more carefully, only to hear the same message again. An Internet search yielded a string of broken links. TidePoint’s flashy Internet site, which had explained their revolutionary product in excruciating detail, wasn’t there.

I found in an Internet copy of a Baltimore business journal a brief description of TidePoint’s demise. A round of venture financing failed, which prompted a significant layoff. Shortly thereafter, the remaining employees arrived to find the door padlocked and the phones disconnected. A bankruptcy hearing was scheduled for a few months into the future. Joel, I later learned, joined a Washington DC consulting firm. I don’t know where Rob or his antagonistic chief architect ended up.

TidePoint was a tiny tide pool in a massive, industry-wide vaporization. The industry TidePoint expected to service had over built. Their financing had become increasingly speculative until it emerged as a virtual Ponzi scheme, where no rational cash flow projection could illustrate a future means for servicing operations, let alone repaying accumulated liabilities. Demand evaporated before the company’s asset value, but both disappeared overnight without a trace.

Two hundred miles north, along New Jersey’s Route 10, Aplion Networks was busy building a remarkably similar system to TidePoint’s. Engineering was located in India, where the venture dollar stretched further, but progress was painfully slow. Complaints from the founder to speed development were met with the humbling acknowledgment that a competitor had three times the engineering staff working on the same problem and were only half as far along. Walt, the VP of Engineering and Operations, was a veteran of Hewlett Packard and a later Intel acquisition, Dialogic, and he was spending more and more time on airplanes to India without a completion in sight. He had assembled a remarkable team, more capable than any he’d ever led, but progress was elusive. In late summer 2001, he was called back to headquarters from a family vacation at the Shore to help decommission some of the operation. A few weeks later he was handed his own papers. Aplion stayed in business only to hold their patents, hoping some other company would find them valuable enough to finally make the millions the company was originally started to create.

No strategy could have forestalled either TidePoint’s or Aplion’s demise. Their process maturity could not have saved them, neither could the delivery of the most successful software imaginable. They were aiming at a disappearing target. By the time they reached it, it would no longer even be there.

A Different Shaped Guitar

In 1975, after seven years as a musician, I was performing more and earning more than ever. I’d opened shows for some top acts, and been invited to open for more. But the clubs I performed in were changing. Most had installed sound systems wired to a turn table and opened more of their space to dance floor. They hired me to perform on Tuesday or Wednesday nights, and weekends became reserved for a new craze. Disco.

As a single acoustic artist, performing thoughtful folk songs, I received more and more requests to play mindless, danceable tunes rather than the quiet, introspective ones I preferred. Never much of a performer, I felt compelled to change. But I didn’t want to change. I had worked hard to develop the expression I loved, and had no stomach to focus my talents on good-time dance music. My agent said he could sell anything I wrote if it was danceable. I took a heartsick stab, producing only a few silly parodies.

I wallowed in the certainty that the identity I had so painstakingly created was losing its relevance. I was at the peak of my capabilities, but I could see no future from those heights. I reluctantly decided to enroll in a university. I’d study marketing, perhaps get involved in the business end of the music business. I justified the move by explaining that I was just taking up a different shaped guitar, and this fantasy helped me engage with something approaching the passion I’d found in my music. In the three frantic years I spent at University, I discovered other identities for my talents and myself.

I remember my last concert, given at my university in the first quarter after enrolling. It was pure magic. The audience was suspended in the room, entranced and timeless. I was a master at work. The following Monday, I arrived as an apprentice for my eight o’clock class, my mastery stored away in the basement with my PA system and microphone stands. I knew that I would never again sit on a quiet stage and share my stories in that way. I opened that introductory accounting text as if it held some secret for my survival, and attended to the lecture as if I were part of an audience listening to a real master.

I had not been vapourized. I saw the handwriting on the wall and bailed out while the bailing was still pretty good. Many of my fellow folk singers lagged this change curve and found their audiences shrinking until they had no choice left but to choose anything else.

Part two of my 2003 work about discontinuous change...

No Language Describes It

We have no language to describe a vapourization, just like we have no satisfying description of death. We imagine, we might even find the faith to believe in an afterlife, yet we can search the archives and leave only certain that we’ve found no objective first hand account of what happens next. We describe from painful, shared experience the process of coping with the death of others, but find nothing but obscure scripture written in allegory, like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to guide the steps of those passing away. We have descriptions of reinvention and re engineering, but these are continuous changes, where someone can track the differences between the old and the new. We can only characterize the missing spaces, the voids left behind by those who leave us. We cannot track their journeys once they leave.

Reinvention and re engineering repair, like surgery. Vapourizations utterly destroy. Reincarnation might be possible, but like the Hindu fable of the man reincarnated as a flea, no one, usually including the reincarnated, have any connection to anything in their past. Those who remember past lives are haunted more than reassured by them.

The great challenge for anyone interested in learning to cope with vapourization, what happens to their industry, their company, and themselves, is that they can be certain only that they will never craft a plan that will make them or anyone else a master of the experience. Vapourization will render them victim before they ever discover another mastery, and their new mastery will be irrelevant to their old context, and their old skills irrelevant within their new context.

Our models for change hint at these catastrophes, but utterly fail to address them. Yet we have no language to describe it. Consequently, we have only crude methods for coping with it. We can sometimes forestall it, but never permanently and only at some cost. We can ignore it only so long before it has its way with us. We can submit to it, which, because we have no adequate language to describe the experience, feels more like self-destruction than self-preservation. And so it becomes self destruction, and we stiff-arm acceptance until destruction is certain and our reincarnation unaffected.

What Vapourization Isn’t

Not only do we lack a language to describe vapourization, we lack personal experience of it. We mistake being laid off or shifting careers for vapourization, but neither experience adequately represents personal effects of vapourization. Can you prepare for it? Will you survive it? These are troubling questions which have no simple, discrete response. Coping with vapourization will challenge more than your expectations and demand more than your present skill.

Laid Off

You’re running late this morning. The kids were fussy over breakfast. Your son couldn’t find the shirt he absolutely needed to wear today. Traffic didn’t help, either. About fifteen minutes behind your usual arrival time, you pull into the familiar parking garage, finding vacant only the unfamiliar places furthest from the building, adding another five minutes to your tardiness as you gather your briefcase and hustle toward the front door.

Something brings up the hair on the back of your neck, as if your collar had suddenly developed a static charge. Two security guards stand, one on either side of the entrance. As you approach, they make a dog catcher’s eye contact, hinting at something certain and terrifying that you cannot imagine. The taller guard asks to see your identification and you warily pull the string dangling plastic cards from beneath your coat. He checks your name against a list on a clip board and, in a voice that says you don’t have a choice, he asks you to please follow his partner.

His partner won’t look you in the eye. You follow him into the building to the Human Resources department, where he opens the door of a small conference room. Inside, your boss fidgets, standing awkwardly as you enter, offering you a chair with the same sickening solemnity as the tall guard‘s greeting. Your escort stays in the hall as your boss closes the door and turns to face you with his eyes cast downward and to one side.

His “good morning” doesn’t warm either of you as he takes his chair across the small table. He looks up tentatively, then begins.

“The board met yesterday and came to a painful decision.” You don’t hear most of the rest of the explanation. You’re not the only one and the company appreciates your many years of dedicated service. Yesterday was your last day, though your salary will continue for some time and you can choose to extend the benefits. The guard waiting outside the door will escort you to your desk, where you’ll have the time it takes to box up your personal belongings. He’ll accompany you to the garage.

A chill passes almost through you, sticking in your gut as you pass your ID cards across the table and, limply shaking your boss’ hand, accept his best wishes.

No one’s head pops above any cubicle wall as you move down the aisle, guard trailing at a watchful distance. You see several other suddenly empty cubicles, two with a guard hovering as the inhabitants shuffle through desk drawers. Your familiar cubicle feels cold and foreign. You silently fill two boxes with recognition certificates, books, and a decade’s detritus of personal effects. You are too numb to feel anything and your usually sharp perception sees nothing but light and shadow. Mostly shadow.

You won’t remember the balance of the morning. You must have loaded your boxes on a hand truck and followed the guard to the parking garage. Someone might have passed a shy smile or a dismayed nod as you moved out of the department that you helped build to become the best in the industry. You must have driven somewhere. You took temporary refuge in the back of a small coffee house, where you call your spouse on your cell phone and fail to explain anything.

You have not been vapourized. You’ve been fired. After a suitable period, you’ll find another job. Maybe you’ll have to accept a position beneath your former grade or move to a different location, and while these changes will certainly challenge you, they will never threaten to destroy you. You will survive.

Level Crossing

First, the rumble.
Then smoke and cinder.
No one slows
Until the signal man
Says they must.

Even level crossings
Mind this rule.
Blind turns,
With obstructed vision,
Are worse.

How many crossings
Do we hurry by
Never noticing the show?
The level ones,
Especially, should
Require no signal man.

These need us
To slow ourselves down
to see
Anything special
Rumbling into view.

Whip City

Westfield, Massachusetts still calls itself Whip City. The center of the booming buggy whip business in 1893, only two companies survive today from what was once the center of a burgeoning industry. Ninety five percent of the jobs in Westfield directly or indirectly supported buggy whip manufacture in the 1890s, only a small percentage are so engaged today. The demise of the buggy whip industry has become over the eleven decades since, a trite example of obsolescence, mentioned in thousands of key note addresses since Demming first used the example to describe futile efficiency.

Speakers exhort us to avoid becoming another buggy whip manufacturer, as if we could notice when a vapourous idea unrelated to our industry would explode to vaporize us. The owner of any of the many buggy whip manufacturing operations in 1895 Westfield could have sold their shares for top dollar and re-invested the returns in the infant automobile industry, but they would have been recognized as fools for doing it. What board could have survived such a decision? What investor would have stood idly by for such idiocy? Only history could explain the logic. And history had not been born yet.

Those buggy whip businesses which crumbled under evaporating demand were well managed, even forward-looking. They teach us nothing more about death than any corpse might. They cannot give up their secrets and they may well have no secrets to disclose. They are gone.

Yet Westfield remains; still known as Whip City, though few whips are made there. The two companies that remain from the hey days have stories to tell, and stories that better instruct us than the best of those that disappeared. The US Whip Company suffered through nearly three decades of shrinking demand before redefining themselves. By that time, they were no longer masters of whip making. They looked at their operations and concluded that they were really in the braiding business. “What might we braid?” their management asked. At the time, in the mid-twenties, three markets seemed attractive mediums for a company with braiding expertise: sports equipment, medical supply, and fishing. In the sports equipment business, golf was growing in popularity, and golf clubs in those days had braided shafts. But this business seemed unlikely to sustain US Whip. Likewise the medical supply business, where sutures were in constant but not expanding demand. The fishing business, where demand for fishing line seemed promising, looked like the a growth opportunity, so US Whip started braiding fishing line, finally renaming themselves US Line in the early thirties. They are now a leading supplier of commercial and recreational fishing lines.

The Westfield Whip Company remains the sole significant link to Westfield’s whip-making past. Nearly out of business by the late forties, a retiring newspaperman took the company as a hobby and found some markets for its products. The livestock industry supported it through the fifties and into the sixties, and today the company, which traditionally sold to distributors, has begun making custom whips for a wide variety of applications. It’s no longer a buggy whip manufacturer, but a whip maker. A look at where whips are offered for sale today shows the traditional livestock industry, but they are also offered by a trendy set of discrete sex supply shops advertising on the Internet.

Neither US Whip nor Westfield Whip survived these changes, though their corporate entities remain. Those thousands of workers displaced by the vapourization of the buggy whip industry didn’t just disappear, either. The supply chain that fed and distributed the products of Westfield’s efforts are gone without much of a trace. Where did the whalebone and the rattan suppliers disappear to? Where did the leather tanners and the braiders go? Gone somewhere, but like Westfield, they survived.

The State of the Union

I hear lots of rumbling about how we, the people, should impeach President Bush. Now that he’s admitted to initiating this wiretap scheme, claiming that Congress granted him a right which it explicitly denied him and that he’s simply fulfilling a duty of his office, the Internet is filled with virtual pitchforks and burning torches. Voices clamoring for his head.

But over the past year, Mr. Bush has accomplished what none of his detractors suspected him capable of achieving. If we believe the national polls, which carry more political clout than either truth or virtue, the country was polarized a year ago. Half believed he was at least the best of two evils, while the other half was much less generous. Today, only about 30% of the people stand on his side of most issues. I think this shows a remarkable performance. From a tottering, divided country to one standing much more united in a single year. He’s clearly a Uniter, just like he said!

How has he achieved this result? He got out of touch. Looking back over the past year, I see a string of presidential proposals, not one of which found traction with the American public. Heck, even the Congress, which was lock-step behind him through the prior three years, has moved out ahead of him on several issues. They now continually question his judgment.

Hooray! It’s too easy to blame the leader. True, our constitution provides for the removal of any misbehaving President, but it provides no such remedy for removing a population guilty of failing to fulfill its own responsibilities for challenging its leaders.

If we merely follow the leader, we won’t find any balance of power. We’ve given our President a lot of power, but not at the expense of our authority to question him. When our system gets out of balance, it has the capability of righting itself. Only with our help. We seem to be waking up to that responsibility.

Impeachment would just get us polarized again. I wouldn’t choose that over the progress we have achieved over the last year. Being President is a tough job. So is being a citizen. We have no obligation to make the president’s job any easier than ours is.

And his leadership has empowered us all.

David A. Schmaltz
Walla Walla

∆

Invited to present at the Changing Change Management Conference, our plane arrived an hour late.

I found my driver waiting for me just outside baggage claim. He held a sign, “Dr. (they call me doctor there) David Schmaltz”, so I approached him and identified myself. The man standing next to him held a similar sign, “Dr. (they call Amy doctor, too) Amy Schwab,” and Amy tried to explain that she didn’t need a separate ride. But her driver spoke little English, clarified that she was, indeed, Amy Schwab, took her rollaway, and headed for the garage. My driver and I followed.

We took separate cabs to the same hotel. Amy felt kidnapped.


Then, as I was registering for our room, I asked that Amy’s name be entered into the computer, in case someone called for her. “But you are in a single room, Herr Schmaltz,” the clerk replied. Amy had a separate reservation and a separate single room. They found adjoining rooms for us, but had no double room available that night.

I liked this. After two weeks on the road, my inner introvert craved some cave time. Amy’s steaming nearly went to boiling point when I closed my door to use “my” facilities. I fell asleep in “my” room shortly thereafter. Amy was up in “her” room until after two, feeling abandoned.

The next day, the hotel had promised to move us to a double room, but they had no doubles available. They did have a junior suite overlooking the most popular shopping street in Vienna, which was slightly less per night than two single rooms. We agreed to take that.

This story should be no surprise to anyone who travels much. Planes arrive late. Reservations get garbled or lost. At the point where difference first appears, everything just looks f***ed up. Maybe you feel kidnapped. Or abandoned. Only later, sometimes much later, does a delightful end result emerge.

If you want something to end up delightfully, wait until delight appears, then call that the end. If you choose to end on a sour note, you’ll accumulate few sweet memories.

David

The latest Projects@Work has a piece I wrote on New Orleans' Emergency Preparedness Plan. Take a look here: (Slightly annoying registration required...) david

http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/Articles/227527.cfm

Earlier this month, Amy and I took True North's Mastering Projects Workshop to Europe. One class, held at the London Chamber of Commerce facility, was booked into a training room next to a room where PRINCE2 certification training was happening. Amy, poking around before we started, came into our room to announce their presence, commenting that their sign said "SPOCE-Successful Projects Operating In Controlled Environments".

"Interesting," I noted, "We're doing a workshop focused upon creating successful projects in uncontrollable environments." We checked with the participants after they arrived to see if we had the right focus, and each said that they worked in an apparently uncontrollable environment. What possible utility, I wondered, would a workshop limiting creating successful projects to controlled environments have in the real world?

The two workshops couldn't have been more different. In theirs, people arrived in suits and ties. No strange noises slipped out into the hall. They started and stopped on time. The Mastering Projects Workshop didn't stay in the assigned room. Exercises slipped out into the lobby and beyond. Some arrived in suits the first day, but not after. Strange noises permeated. We never once finished on time.

The last day, a few bleary-eyed students emerged from the PRINCE2 workshop, smelling as if they'd just survived a certification test, to find half the MPW group standing in a circle in the elevator lobby, with their backs to a table covered with strangely-arranged little rubber animals and packets of tea. "We wanted to be in your workshop," one of them said as she waited for the 'lift', "It looks like more fun."

More than more fun. Several of the MPW participants had survived PRINCE2 certification. They said MPW was more useful.

But not more useful for creating controlled environments. Not more useful for ensuring consistency.

Near the end of our stay, we dined with a couple who have the priviledge of being the parents of an Autistic son. They described his development (he's now six), and their development as his parents. I was struck by the similarities between the process-driven obsession with controlling environments and the common Autistic behavior pattern of closely controlling environments. The Autistic establish strict routines. They act out should these rituals be disrupted. They also exhibit great difficulty in establishing and maintaining relationships with others. They often become experts on some subject, able to endlessly recite arcaine details about dinosaurs, celestial mechanics, or, somewhat commonly, mathematics.

As Temple Grandin, an autistic adult who is also a college professor and prolific author, points out in her books, the autistic seem to process serially, unable to perceive patterns and relationships. Memory for them is a replaying, as if working with a video tape. There is, she points out, no concept of "cow", just a specific cow.

We found in our MPW participants, a deep longing for relationships in environments which seemed to deny their presence and importance. There were no real barriers to creating deeper relationships, but the opportunities didn't seem to present themselves. After a few years of out-sourcing, many of the long-standing relationships had been disrupted. One participant reported privately that he was in charge of a project to exchange his department's people interfacing with client departments with a generic phone bank. He acknowledged that the phone bank would be more mathematically efficient, but fussed that this efficiency might be beside the point, since the client departments would have little relationship with the people answering the phones, and the relationships seemed to resolve more difficulties that the reps' technical skill did. Quite a dilemma.

As we've managed (pun intended) to make our organizations more mathematically efficient, and focus ever more upon quarterly bottom line results, our organizations have started to behave as if they were austistic. Unable to engage in relationship. Very expert, savant-like in their particular speciality, and nearly illerate in everything else. Diversity of thought and practice gets discouraged in favor of once meaningful, but increasingly meaningless rituals. Controlling the environment becomes a chief concern.

Of course the environment cannot be controlled. Though the strict engagement in ritual might appear to be control, it fools no one, really. I'm not naive enough (damn!) to believe that it's my job, or anyone's, really, to reform these organizations. I'm just noting the pattern, which the autistic organization, thanks to their obsessive focus upon process, cannot see.

And I'm again wondering how I cope with this humbling acknowledgement. What can it teach me? How can I, not terribly ritualistic, engage in a fully human manner in an environment which acknowledges little of my basic human capabilities. Perhaps my friends, who found themselves parents of an uncontrollable environment, have some clues.

They've looked at the present state of the art and found it wanting, and are learning from their interactions with their lovely son. I think our autistic organizations are lovely sons, and we can learn a lot in our unacknowledged relationship with them. Their rituals are sacrosanct, but not unchangeable. Their perspective is golden, even if it's frustrating. We needn't buy into their behavior and world view to understand and learn from it.