Pure Schmaltz

For centuries, tribes who’s territories bordered this region of endless rolling, silty loess hills, considered The Palouse to be neutral territory, common grazing land, a place where horses would not be stolen and war would not be waged. War had not been waged until US Army Colonel Edward Steptoe blundered into armed conflict near the present day Steptoe Butte, a jutting rock the natives called “power mountain.” Steptoe got his butt kicked and retreated back to Fort Walla Walla.

But that’s history. Today, the drive pulls you through capricious speed zones and expansive wheat and lentil fields. The place feels remote enough to allow for unregulated speeding, a false sense Whitman County depends upon to write a steady stream of speeding tickets. Best to pay attention and use the speed control to help you go slow enough to avoid the contribution to the county.

The drive up through The Palouse is a great place to talk, and Amy and I chatted last week as we chugged through. The topic? Consulting. The context? Why is it that so many of our colleagues are starving consultants? Why are we starving, too? Is it market or marketing?

The insight that came to me in that conversation was that the very term consultant serves as a context marker, one that poorly frames what consultants actually do.

Look at the questions clients ask: How much will it cost? What, specifically, do you recommend? What are the steps to achieve the goal? How long will it take?

These are questions best aimed at change. Aim them at transformation and invite endless confusion.

I used to define as contractor anyone who is hired to do defined work. They do the client’s bidding. Consultants I defined as those who do what needs doing, whether or not the client asked for that to be done. It’s common in consulting that the initiating purpose, target, goal, path, and cost shift. This is failure for a contractor, but success for a consultant.

Taking these rather limited definitions of contractor and consultant, I claim that contractors produce first-order change while consultants produce second-order transformation, but I might be the only one in the world making this distinction. What I didn’t fully appreciate until that drive through The Palouse, was that the label consultant introduces a change context rather than a transformation one. So of course the prospective client comes loaded with the usual change questions: How much? When? How long? How many? What process?

They come expecting to receive directions or methods, recipes or formulas. They expect the consultant to be an expert in the sort of problem they face and able to slay that dragon with experienced precision. That is contractor work.

The current Financial Panic is a decent example of a situation needing transformation. Listening to the floor speeches of our Representatives this morning. I was not surprised to hear many of them claim that the proposed bill would not solve the problem. These comments told me that some were approaching this difficulty as if it were a problem. The problem with that presumption is two-fold. If it is a problem, it must have a solution. If it has a solution, we really should find it. This encourages a lot of posturing and posing, since, clearly, the proposed bill wouldn’t solve anything. It wasn’t intended to.

The only way to solve the Financial Panic is to travel back in time and co-opt it before it gets to the present state. Since that’s not possible, we have to settle for something different than a solution. It’s helpful if, somewhere along the way, those seeking resolution realize that they are not going to solve anything. They might transform the situation, but never solve it.

No one ever seeks transformation at first. As I noted in my last post , we chase the old status quo first, trying to restore cows that have already escaped from the barn.

The Palouse Insight claims that the words we use to describe what we do confuse us all- client as well as consultant. Those in the transformation business struggle to find clients not because we are poor at producing results, but because our language is inadequate to describe what we do. We throw chaff in our client’s face and confuse the both of us. Transformation comes later, not at first.

We work by personal referral, not by clever marketing. No one, not even the most satisfied client, can ever describe what it is that we did. They can only say that they are satisfied, delighted usually. That their difficulty was resolved in some surprising way, never to be repeated, perfect for the conditions at hand then.

The contractor serves an installed base of problems, systems, situations. For the consultant, no two situations are similar enough to serve as template, though there are principles, meta-perspectives, which won’t make any sense to anyone except, perhaps, the practitioner.

So, consultant is a lousy label. It implies what it doesn’t intend. Like this explanation of the insight, perhaps meaningless except in the moment. I think, like transformation, you had to be there to really understand.

A lot like the debate over granting war powers prior to the Iraqi intrusion, and we know how THAT turned out.

Taking this to an area I know something about, on projects there are four or five critical failure modes when it's discovered that a project's in trouble. First, whatever the point of discovery, it was busted a long time before the problem was recognized. The old status quo was geriatric before it was acknowledged as aging. So the first shock is great, but not terribly significant. We've already lived for a long time with it busted.

Second, there's always a hair-on-fire urgency to do something - literally anything, probably to recover our sense of mastery and control more than to actually fix anything. Of course, the toup's flaming  creates the worst possible context for deciding anything mindfully.

Third, the initial strategies for resolving always involve recovery, rather than transformation, even though recovery will only produce more of what's already proven to not work. We don't know how to produce transformation in a systematic way. The paradox is that by letting go, we're more likely to encourage transformation. By holding on, we encourage continuing dysfunction.

Fourth, why seems like the right question, though it almost never is. What next? or what now? are each better questions, but each initiates an investigation rather than a solution. The belief that there is a root cause, and that finding that root cause will necessarily allow undoing the past, is the real root cause. But this is just the way it is, a stupid human trick. 

Finally, the quality of the response is usually misunderstood to necessarily mean clear, precise, predictable next steps. In this way, we recreate old status quo rather than pursue transformation. 

If we can side-step these pitfalls, we might make a real difference. If not, probably not.

The conversation around 'resolving the credit crisis' is stepping into every one of these.

Often, in my experience, embracing an "Anything But That!" strategy better encourages transformation, though it usually feels like the worst possible approach.

You Suck@Projects
(A cautionary ballad for the executive palate)

Okay, okay, I get it!
Your non-existent experience successfully managing projects  
didn’t get you promoted into your executive position. 
(I understand! Project managers aren’t on any executive track! 
It might  be  superstition, but they’ll never get your  commission.) Will  they?
And now you’ve inherited these ungainly systems,  
which are mostly pursuing projects as missions,
what will you do now?

You’ll do what you did in B-school: you’ll cram. 
You’ll grab a few books, and stuff  like exams. 
I mean, how hard could managing projects be? 
It ain’t rocket science, obviously.

What will you read? Maybe PMI's theories, Mythical Man Month, and   
Wylie’s acclaimed Executive Series. 
What will you take away? 
Well-distilled nostrums; real heady stuff. 
A tiny ration of common sense. 
And enough on-time,  on-budget,  on-spec horse shit to compost a small country. 
You’ll spout acronyms, my friend, 
until no one ever questions your credentials again. 

Then you’ll sound the horn, you’ll lead the way, 
and you’ll start making commitments for others that very first day. 
You’ll cite strategies, and competition, using buzzwords to convey
 A  deepening dedication to whatever it is you say.
And you’ll command, “Deliver by June,” and, “Play some  musical  chairs!
Just tell me the kinda resources you need, and I’ll plead for you upstairs. 
Just justify your methods and rationalize your goals 
and there’s no limit to how far all of us will go.” 

(I know, I know, you won’t mention the fact 
that project management ain’t on the executive track ---
while you motivate them through Hell and back.)

Then what? Yeah, then what? 
They deliver over-runs and under-shots, 
FUBARs, SNAFUs, and you-don’t-even-wanna-know-whats. 
Their best laid plans usually exceed fixed cost;
they embarrass you with your boss’s boss’s boss.
You miss a strategic deadline twice 
and discover your old friends aren’t quite as nice as they usta be at the club. 
For you, bub, are boob of the month, moron of the quarter, and idiot of the first half-year 
‘till you wonder what in the devil ever enticed you over here 
when you could have positioned yourself to rise through Sales or Marketing 
and left this project crap to stumble, curse, and fail, 
but nooooo, you just had to hop the fastest plane on your way to the top of the top of your game. 

Then you wear your career like a toilet seat crown
and nobody appreciates you hanging around.
Your project teams seem to notice your summit‘s 
a  pimple, a dimple, and your stock simply plummets.
‘Cause you suck at projects, you suck like Merlot, 
you suck at the stuff you were supposed to control: 
the smooth operation of these things you don’t know. 
You’ve mistaken these efforts for something you’ve seen, 
for processes, metrics, and rational schemes. 
But none of these projects perform to your skills! 
Worse, each one insists upon threatening to kill 
the one who, with his sincerity pure,
proposed what then seemed  just  a  reasonable  cure.

And once you start sucking, you suck  at  your  life,
You  suck  to  your  company, colleagues,  and  wife.
(Who  by  the  way  wonders  why  you  come  home  so  late,  
stumbling  between mumbling and nearly irate.)
No one ever hinted in MBA school
That an  executive’s lot  could  be  half  this  cruel, ... did they?
You  wonder  how  the  magic  wand  you  once  claimed
Could  betray  you  so  quickly,  just  whom  should  you  blame?

But the  breadth  of  your  genius  at  playing  this  game
Simply  leads  you  to  mandate  even  more  of  the  same,
’Cause  you  have  mistaken  what  might  well  be  soccer
For  baseball or football,  and you bet like a sucker.
You coach with the best of intentions and find
Your teams unresponsive to you and your bind.
You’re  stuck  with impossibles, a trussed suckling pig,
But you won’t satisfy  their  concerns  and  renege!
No, you’ll  just   put  your  head  down and fearlessly  charge
Another objective  both  fuzzy and large.

And  if  you’re  at  all  like  your  fellow ’IOs
You’ll continue this dance until they let you go.
To merge  with  the  mumbling executives emeritus
Who  once  sucked  at  projects  but  refuse  to  discuss
How  they  sucked  at  projects,  though  their  teams  seemed  to  fail,
And how you personally tried to guide them through Hell
And  how  if  only  they  would  have  noticed  how  wise  ...
The  guidance  you  offered  coulda  won  them  the  prize.
Instead,  you have  retired early to  write
the  book  that your colleagues  will  stuff  down  at  night
Attempting  to  do  what  not  one  of  them  can,
To  not  suck  at  projects again and again.

And Wylie seems interested in a three volume deal,
to be published with the fanfare certain to seal
The professional fate of whomever might read ’em,
To just suck at projects forever and  ever, and  ever! Amen.

©2008   by   David  A.  Schmaltz  - all  rights  reserved

It was Easter when we'd moved the poles and bracing down the wall
and all through May I watched each day usher in the fall.
For I was working some other walls while this one stood half-scraped
Though I hoped I could get back to here before this summer escaped

Into June each afternoon found me blocks away
engaged in chores meant to adore my Father's final days.
I'd decided to try to say goodbye by hovering close to him
Reviving that weed-choked lawn of his and catering to his whims:

Watermelon was the only meal that sorta seemed like food
So I delivered more than he would ever eat, uncued.
For I was chipping away at paint, laid down long before
When he was still all-powerful and I could still ignore
The walls that came between us and the paint we'd slathered on
When time was still so young and fresh it never would be gone.

But this summer our old hourglass began to spit,
hinting that remaining sand would surely, shortly stick.
Inexorably inflexible, our time together came
with me the much more powerful player in the game.
And all this time I worked behind the scaffolding standing there
More than aware I'd not prepared for primer or despair.

July saundered in with almost nothing changed
and slipped right through the lines we drew, leaving none the same.
And then we tried to satisfy his ever expanding needs
while layers of sticky surface scab resisted every plead
The well went dry on August first and and the yard went back to weed
while we began to count the days, unwilling to concede.

Through August I never spent a thought on my untouched wall,
I spent my time climbing his and mine, hoping to ease his fall.
And in the end that dear old friend was pretty thoroughly scraped
and ready for whatever paint might tempt the taste of fate.

And I, exhausted from the time, emotionally drained
decided it was well-past time for me to finally paint.
And so, a few days following his final, labored gasp
It being Indian Summer, and my obligations past,
I placed the soggy planking on the rusting steel shell
And set about to scraping down to bare wood on MY wall.

Ten days later, with September slowing down
the first marine intrusion turned the temperature around.
Though Thursday felt like ninety, Friday felt much less,
Saturday rained all morning, but the afternoon digressed.
And here I stand on the morning of the last day before fall
Still in preparation to prepare my weathered wall.

Thanks. david

Festina Lente- Hasten Slowly

The numbing numbers don't add up! The Industrial Revolution was a great way to revolutionize production. It has become a lousy way to live. ...

Fast Work undermines our effectiveness, forcing us into living Fast Lives. ... A firm respect for our most human capabilities can co-opt the folly of Fast Work.

The group slowly turned into a no-op, where a few people ever more slowly replied to some rather long postings.

A recent study might explain why Slow Work slowly dematerialized. in Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind in the current issue of the online The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, Mark Bauerlein reports on Jakob Neilson's and Donald Norman's latest studies about how online content is read.

Here's the link!

Their conclusion? It mostly isn't read.

... 'people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content."'

Yes, there's apparently a serious disconnect between the easy distribution of weighty concepts and the assimilation of them. The web, blessed as it is, presents a cognitive hurricane within which we fail to absorb the driest material.

So, we Facebook, which provides a virtual wall to use for posting literary Graffiti. We Twitter. I continue to post rather long blog entries, which, if Nielson and Norman are correct, few of us can actually read.

Of course, there is value (for me, anyway) in creating this stuff. It's how I work out what I think. I don't write to expose what I know, but to stumble upon it. Should I expect my readers to engage in pursuit of insight rather than distilled information, I might be deluding myself. But probably not you, since your reading patterns here might well employ that 'F' and so yield an 'F' in comprehension, appreciation, and retention.

This says nothing about any of us. Sure, my writing is brilliant! And your reading and comprehension even more so. The challenge is that we are coming together in a context that strongly mitigates against achieving what any of us might desire.

I'm finding ever more agency from listening to recorded books while engaging in s-l-o-w w-o-r-k. Scrape that wall, prepping for paint, and I'm in what might be the perfect context to really hear and really learn.

Log into my blog and I'm distracted by the very context within which the content resides.

I've gotta go get busy. Slowly.

(Thanks,Wikipeadia!)

..............................................................

Schmaltz’ Principles of Practical Performance
1. Leverage rule-of-thumb wisdom by appreciating differences in perspective.
2. Work together in community to more fully acknowledge the context governing purpose, and design situated approaches for creating sustainable value.
3. Match work with the preferences of individuals.
4. Acknowledge and appreciate the necessity of self-management to the discovery, definition, and realization of purpose and the creation of lasting value.

..............................................................

1. Acknowledging the Way It Is

A couple of years ago, Rob Austin, Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School, invited me to his annual innovation symposium, the centerpiece of which was a presentation prepared by Austin describing his research into the sources of business innovation. His research involved filming innovators at work, then, through a process of rigorous observation, cataloging the behaviors common to innovators.

Rob had developed a shorthand notation to describe observations and trained a few graduate students in its use. He claimed objectivity because different observers similarly classified actions when viewing the same film.

I sat teetering between boredom and fascination throughout this presentation. Rob’s method was doubtless scientific, but to what end? He might prove that he can condition graduate students, the lab rats of higher education, to observe and interpret in the same way, but then what? Would knowing, for instance, that the observed innovators opened up conversation rather than dominating it translate into anything useful to the aspiring innovator? I couldn’t stretch my meager imagination to believe it could.

No innovator was observed carefully cataloging the actions of other innovators. This omission was not scientifically observable, yet it seemed a material contribution to—and the very soul of—the practice of innovating. Vaguely acknowledged rules of thumb seemed adequate to guide the innovators, while Rob’s study of innovation demanded statistical rigor, proven objectivity, and repeatable methods. Curiously, innovation involves none of these. It thrives on gut feel over statistical rigor, sensitivity to subjective qualities over objective observation, and blazing trails rather than replicating them.

But what method could describe—let alone prescribe and induce—gut feel, subjective sensitivity, and unique response? Kind of a paradox, isn’t it?

I can’t argue that scientific analysis is impossible for some kinds of work. Mechanical work has long been well-represented by flow charts and innumerable similar process diagramming methods, because machines are programmatic. They are designed to do what they are told to do, and they can be engineered to behave. The recipe for insanity starts when this innocent technique starts charting unchartable territory. Like Rob’s scientific investigation of innovation, charts can be produced describing even the most subjective experiences, but how could anyone know whether the resulting charts represent the successful training of graduate students or an accurate—let alone useful—portrait of subjectivity? Distilled into predictive process descriptions, even love couldn’t help but seem understandable.

Poor Rob. He had managed to attract National Science Foundation funding, but had chosen a paradoxical field of study. The best his techniques might produce is a homogenization of something only useful raw, an absurd average, a silly statistic. But why would anyone chase such chimera? For science? For fortune? For fame?

What If Mechanical Engineers Ruled The World?

Sounds very much like Austin’s tactic, doesn’t it? The mechanical engineer’s world is mechanical, prescriptive, predictive. Unlike the pattern-producing chaos other world views describe, the mechanical engineer inhabits a tidy, knowable universe, or one capable of being tidied up. So they tidy. They hammer and nail and paint, oblivious to deeper philosophical questions, focused upon completing the assignment.

Hooray for them! If only the rest of us could perform so carefreely. But we are tangled in one or another conundrum. We fuss. We fear. We experience a more organic, subjective, surprising world; a messy universe glimpsed in shifting patterns of meaning and feeling and not so easily mastered. We, too, might hammer and nail and paint, but while struggling with deeper philosophical conundrums, leaving, if not a physical mess, at least some deeper meaning unresolved. Because we are not mechanical engineers. We are not any more or less human than mechanical engineers, but our humanity seems to play a more dominant role in our lives.

I’m merely describing temperaments. The decisive and the phlegmatic. The journalist and the poet. The realist and the dreamer. If mechanical engineers ruled the world, the dreamer might well be classified as unproductive rather than inventive. Placed on an assembly line, dreamers are dangerous, but wouldn’t immersing a realist in ambiguity produce similarly disjointed results?

One client described as an outright assault on intuitive thinkers by sensing doers the Bush administration’s attempt to reform via process improvements Los Alamos scientists’ proven generations-old practices. Physicists do not approach their work as a mechanical engineer might, and their methods seem inefficient and meandering in comparison to the straight-forward mechanics any engineer would employ. But the problems physicists pursue are different in class than those engineers resolve. They demand meandering, intuitive thoughtfulness, rather than active, predictive solution. They are not merely employing hammers, but inventing them.

The result? At Los Alamos, the assault yielded dramatic improvement in the productivity of the scientific investigation, not because the speed of scientific discovery was increased, but because a significant number of scientists choose to leave the Labs, reducing the overhead cost. What will this savings cost long term? No engineer could calculate this cost.

In Mark Frost’s novel The Second Objective, Nazi spies hold counterfeit passes to gain entry to Allied headquarters, but discover that “headquarters” is misspelled as “haedquarters” on their counterfeits. The Nazi spies produce replacement counterfeits to correct this error, only to learn later, after their intrusion is thwarted, that the genuine passes contained the misspelling. A French detective who helped crack the case comments about the Nazis, “They didn’t really make the trains run on time, either.” Their attention to the way it was supposed to be blinded them to the way it was.

And this kind of blindness is the very foundation of the mechanical engineer’s world view. Their certainty about how things should be, supported by rigorous scientific investigation, blinds them to the way things actually are. We can observe only the observable, and much of what dictates success in human endeavors remains tenaciously unobservable. We might decide that behavior can serve as a stand-in for all we cannot see, and conclude much based upon easily observable actions, and miss seeing the presumption this construction teeters atop. A house of cards.

If Mechanical Engineers ruled the world, we might find a world obsessed with measurement, one focused upon mechanical efficiency, and one improving meaningless as well as meaningful processes. This mysterious world would be characterized as ultimately predictable, and our economies would become roulette wheels rigged by a cruel fate. Our governments would be endlessly bailing out institutions grown so huge and essential that we cannot afford for them to fail, but ones which ultimately fail from focusing upon engineering clockworks to master organics. When they crumble, we find few guilty of any crime save those crimes classified as collusion, conspiracies created to contain natural messiness into predictable portfolios. We wonder how different these outcomes might have been had their energies been focused upon more fully acknowledging the way it is rather than enforcing the way it otta be.

Our survival might well depend upon us fighting this global movement toward Taylorism. In education as well as business, in government as well as industry, the mechanical mindset has gained significant credibility. And no wonder. It can, does, and has produced dramatic short-term improvements in the standard of living, as measured by income, capital, and wealth. But as the roller-coaster performance of our industries as well as our governments show, these improvements are short-lived. They boom then bust. They provide before producing privation. They are ultimately unsustainable.

Let this be a gentle engagement, inexorable. Fought not with the machines of war, but with the hearts and minds of thoughtful and caring people. One fueled by insight rather than hard rules of engagement. One informed by ethical responsibilities rather than by marching orders. Our goal cannot be to vanquish an enemy, but to encourage and nurture our own humanity. To appreciate differing gifts and build robust communities of otherwise individually inadequate individuals. To sustain rather than contain. To imagine rather than enforce. To build rather then destroy. To see science as something more than a metaphor for predictability, but as a method of genuine inquiry, one intended to generate more questions than answers, more insights than injunctions, and more sustainable humanity than mechanical precision.

v

I delivered this eulogy for my father today:

My father was a gentleman,
A gentle man.
A Republican.
He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.
He was a soft touch;
He loaned much but borrowed little.

My father was a noble man,
A nobleman,
An able man.
He wasn’t handy, but he was persistent!
He persevered much
And gave so freely, he seemed rich.

He leaves behind a family,
Familiarity,
Hilarity.
He came from what today is called a ‘blended family,’
But during the Great Depression was just a busted home.
He swore that his kids wouldn’t grow up like that
And we did not.

He insisted upon eating the chicken backs
At Sunday chicken dinner
I was grown before I understood that
No one prefers to eat back meat,
Not even him!
He preferred for others to be satisfied
And could absorb more personal misery in pursuit of other’s happiness
Than anyone I’ve known.

My father hated infirmity
and growing older
was hard for him
A bungled surgery left his foot drooping,
and he walked with a cane after that.
He’d walk almost down to Sturm and back
at a turtle’s pace. But he walked.

My father was a working man,
A hard-working man,
Never a hard man.
He held his own convictions,
forgiving others their’s.
He seemed to know someone everywhere he went.

He was a gentle spirit
Who just couldn’t get
Why we couldn’t get along.
He loved songs. Country songs and crooner’s songs
Charlie Pride and Nat King Cole,
And old familiar melodies we’d never heard before
back-lit him like sheet lightening.

He stood up for his kin.
He believed in them,
Even when others’ faith was thin.
He’d shake his head and remember when
They were younger, I guess, and clueless,
And he seemed to understand.

He leaves behind a closet filled with free umbrellas
Blind Native Americans sent
Pleading for his pennies for their programs.
They got their annual check. An obligation he fulfilled
Even though he had no use for those umbrellas.

He read voraciously
Deliciously
Endlessly.
When he’d read every book in the house,
and started in reading them twice,
it pained him to give those friends away
He filled those shelves again before he left.

He loved baseball
tolerated football

hated basketball.
He coached but hated competition.
Sportsmanship was more important—
That everyone could play.
Winning or losing meant less to him than how he played the game.

And he played well.
He also played when he wasn’t well.
He had some down days in his life:
Sick sometimes, but never unshaven.
No time off without grooming.
His mornings smelled of Aqua Velva,
after he’d shaved until his face shone with satisfaction.

He had a lead palate
preferring veal cutlet
to any fancier cut.
He despised mayonnaise,
revered anything with gravy,
He let his beans melt his cheese,
and he counted his cholesterol.

This is the part I cannot say
It’s above my pay grade
He and my mother were bound by something
Few have found
I’m not qualified to expound on it other than to say
His dedication drove me crazy
Inspiring me. A rock. A bickering mountain.

He protected her.
More than a care-giver,
It was as if her fate was on his soul,
and he couldn’t let go.
We couldn’t know the depth of this devotion
“This is just a part of the deal,” he disclosed
Heaven might know what he meant by that.
I know I don’t.

I’ve been trying on
different songs,
unseen ways of seeing
But have not yet found the sort of tune
that might replace this being.
“I can’t complain,” he would explain
It’s all part of the deal.
He’d take his cane and his good name
and make it almost down to Sturm and back
at the speed of a screaming turtle.

note: Sturm is the name of a street about two blocksfrommy father’s home.

The evening before my dad died, a praying Mantis landed on the front screen door. Mother recalled that a mantis takes up temporary residence on that porch this time every year.

All that evening and into that long, long night, while family came and went, and we stepped out for soothing night air, that screen door opened and closed again and again and again. Through it all, that solitary Mantis held vigil, much as we inside held loving vigil over his final night.

Morning light found our mantis devotional still. As Nancy the hospice nurse came and went, and his loving CNA Kathy came to bathe and massage him, that mantis remained. Silent. Still.

He drew his last labored breath mid-morning, and as we stepped outside to find consoling air, we noticed our mantis still in prayer. As family flocked together to share numb prayers, opening and closing his door another few dozen times, our monkish mantis never moved.

And later, as the mortician arrived, minister mantis stood steadfast. Only after his sons helped guide him one last time through that door—into eternity—did our freakish friar fly away.

The Ancients believed the mantis had divine and magical powers. May a divine and magical mantis sing kaddish for each of us in our time. Amen

Bob was born January 15, 1923 in Mt. Angel, Oregon, to Nicholas D. Schmaltz and Caroline P. Bounds. He was raised in Mt. Angel, Scotts Mills, Yachats and Waldport, Oregon, attending Waldport High School. He married Bonnie M. Wallace on October 28, 1945 in Condon, Oregon, where he served with the volunteer fire department, played on the town baseball team, worked with the county road crew, and began his long career with the US Postal Service. Bob moved his family to Walla Walla in 1952, continuing his Postal Service career, retiring in 1978 after 30 years service. Bob and Bonnie raised five children in their Pleasant Street home. After retirement, Bob and Bonnie traveled the country in their motor home, visiting family and friends until ill health intervened.

Bob was an avid reader, enthusiastic baseball fan, resonant singer, and quiet-spoken storyteller. Bob was a member of the Central Christian Church and the local Parkinson's Support Group. He was the primary caregiver for Bonnie for the last fifteen years.

He is survived by his wife, Bonnie, his half-brother Darwin Stewart of Downey, Idaho, half sisters Leta Dibble of Corvalis, OR, and Victoria Nelson of Walla Walla, step-sister Vanessa Clemons of LaGrande, OR, children R. Carol Smith of Walla Walla, Robert A. Schmaltz and wife Lana of College Place, David A. Schmaltz and wife Amy Schwab of Walla Walla, and Kathy (Schmaltz) Carey and husband Greg of Tulsa, OK, 12 grandchildren, and 25 great grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, his brother, his step-brothers and sister, one daughter, Susan McCormack, one son-in-law, and one great grand-daughter.

The family requests memorial donations be made in Bob's name to Walla Walla Community Hospice.

Jerry Weinberg used to tell a story about one of his daughters who managed to get five Fs and a D one quarter in junior high school. Jerry's ex-wife asked him to speak with his daughter, so he did, asking her how come she didn't get straight Fs. Well, she explained, the D was in Arts and Crafts, and in that class, she gets a D no matter what she does. Well, apply yourself next quarter, he counseled, go for straight Fs.

The next quarter she received five As and a D, again in Arts and Crafts. Shortly thereafter, she wrangled herself into a junior college program that took her out of regular school. A year later, she ran away and joined a circus.

Later, she owned a successful arts and crafts company before opening a successful antiques business in Greenwich Village.

Jerry's point in telling the story was to highlight the fact that what gets taught in public school is not so much knowledge or life skills, but acculturation. How to fit into a culture. Not the universal American culture, but how to get along in a large company. Again and again, government statistics show that most of the jobs created in this country are created by small, tiny companies, not the huge industrial powerhouses. Yet our schooling, from No Child Left Behind to Almost Every Child Left Behind trains us for roles most of us will never actually fulfill.

The number of trade schools, you know, that low-rent alternative to "real schooling", has fallen as the number of students who never satisfy high school graduation requirements continues to climb. What's that about?

Again and again in companies, I see people trained in perspectives orthogonal to their job's demands struggling to fix their stupid jobs. From managers who try to lead by the book to executives inspired by something they imprinted on in grad school, the one skill that seems to be missing is the skill to learn from the present context. We judge ourselves and our companies against those people and organizations who manage to get press coverage. We rarely hear what real people are doing.

Ever seen a case study for an organization that refuses to participate in case studies? (Hint: That would be the vast majority of organizations.)

I read the organizational self-help books and learn that I'm supposed to have a marketing strategy, branding, customer satisfaction surveys, a whole raft of stuff that I've never had and probably never will have. Just because Nike or Intel or some big 'N' consulting operation has those doesn't mean anyone working off the grid should. The economy, business, works mostly off the grid, but you'd never know it by reading the popular press. Because the popular press reports on the grig doings.

Truth told, I've always felt a bit inadequate when interacting with the gridders. As if my little operation was somehow less professional, less real than theirs. But I do real work. No, I do not have a quarterly marketing budget or a five year sales projection. I live hand to mouth, sometimes hand to forehead. Ours is not an industrial organization, but more hunter-gatherer. The industrialists have always complained about those lazy hunter-gatherers, even the hunter-gatherers manage to sustain themselves with a fraction of the effort any industrial firm requires.

I was counting on my fingers the number of organizations I've personally visited that seemed to be trying to reform themselves away from their hunter-gatherer roots toward more industrial modes. I ran out of fingers. The number truly benefiting from such reformation probably tracks closely to the ratio of the population working for large industrial firms.

God love the industrialists. Somebody has to. Those of us not operating on an industrial scale are worthy of more than a little admiration, too. The industrial, management-ist mindset sometimes seems dead set to discount our presence, like when a Wal-Mart moves in to undercut the old, oil-stain floored hardware store. We can choose to continue to frequent the good old hardware store where they remember your name and have human-scale answers to your questions. Where you can buy a penny's-worth of ten penny nails if you want, instead of a handy (for someone) pre-packaged five pound box.

Today, I celebrate the corner grocery, the backyard bike shop, the two person consulting firm, and the people over at the ranch supply. We will never see any of them on the cover of Fortune, but they keep the world spinning. Do not judge them (us) by the industrial yardstick, we work closer to home. We trade not in tons of product but ounces of relationship. We do not serve with a painted-on smile. You can see us sweat. We don't show so well in the board room. Few do. We show where some small something really matters. We have not gone on retreat to plot our sales strategy, we open the door, sweep the floor, and let the word of mouth remind folks that we're here, open for a human-scaled kind of business. (One they forgot to mention in B-school.)

The management-ist might be suffering from a severe case of industrial pollution, mimicking a dance that looked really good at the conference and could never shake anyone's booty back home. Hoorah and hooray. There and then encounters here, today.