Pure Schmaltz

What starts as inspiration, gets explained as technique. Then technique gets taught as if that would induce inspiration.

The history of every management scheme, every movement since Scientific Management, has followed exactly the same pattern. It starts with some visionary, a real oddball, experiencing an insight. [Hey, that works!] Usually for no reason directly related to anything the oddball actually did (but sometimes due entirely to passionate public relations), the odd insight gets noticed. Perhaps it gets a little prominent press.

Then the danger point: popularization. Everyone who can misspell the name hangs a shingle and proclaims mastery. To defend brand integrity, certifications are offered. The market floods with practitioners, societies, devotees, as well as charlatans. By the time prominent companies notice and join in the throng, the originating spirit, the inspiration (which is and always was quite personal, context-dependent, and, well, nothing like a process in the first place) has been thoroughly branded, man-handled, and shop-worn until it resembles even more of the same of whatever was already happening.

Once the major corporations show real interest, the movement is certainly in decline. The major corporations have no interest in doing anything any different, and little ability to change their spots, anyway. So, like they did with Scientific Management a hundred years ago, recognizing the commercial necessity of associating with the latest, greatest movement, they adopt the label while continuing to do pretty much what they were always doing, while proclaiming themselves transformed.

"In 1922, Persons (then President of The Taylor Society) announced that one need not "be a 'Taylor man' or represent a 'Taylor plant'" to join the [Taylor] Society. Membership now meant only that one was interested in that field, and was "open-minded and appreciative of the great contributions to the development of better management." Now the staff members of the large corporations flocked to the Taylor Society. These officials usually had no intention of revamping their firms in accordance with the stringent requirements of the Taylor System; rather, they would shape the mechanisms of Taylorism to fit into the existing structure of their companies. Members of the "Human Engineering Department" of General Electric and AT&T began to take part in Taylor Society activities. Student branches of the Taylor Society at the best business schools introduced Scientific Management to the future officialdom of the large corporations." (excerpted from Efficiency and Uplift-Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890-1920 by Samuel Haber, 1964, University of Chicago Press T58.H23)

Most practitioners complain about this distastefully political meat grinder without fully acknowledging that their movement is no less political than the orthodoxy it opposes. This is no tragedy, except the normal kind associated with anyone who engages in politics without fully acknowledging that it's politics they are engaging in.

Henry Laurence Gantt is not remembered as the Father of Scientific Management, but he was present at the birth. He knew the mother well. He worked 'under' Frederick Winslow Taylor at Midvale and Bethlehem, and was one of the four people closest to Taylor professionally. He knew how Taylor operated, and may have operated in the same autocratic way. It's a curious fact of history that most of the attempts to implement Scientific Management failed, and every implementation was achieved only by autocratic command.

Yea, I know, much of the literature of the time speaks glowingly of Scientific Management as the key to cooperation between worker and owner, but in practice, Taylor's methods tended to further disconnect worker and owner, replacing their separate judgments with an internal planning department. Taylor was famously bull-headed, insisting that everyone just get with his program or out of his way. He routinely screamed at workmen, and fired any who crossed him. I'm sure he would have fired owners, too, if he could have. At Bethlehem, he befriended a member of the board and ignored executive management, who complained endlessly about his unapproved expenses. His board benefactor defended him. And Gantt was there through those times, too.

Gantt worked with this despot for nearly twenty years, so he was at least complicit. But after he and Taylor were fired by Bethlehem Steel, Gantt sought work on his own. His stories about implementing Scientific Management read like they were written by an engineer. (They were.) They are filled with the enthusiasms of someone convinced that they are on a holy mission.

But Taylor and Gantt had a falling out in 1913. Gantt had started espousing the necessity of listening to the 'workmen,' of working with them rather than simply ordering them around as if they were dumb cattle. This, alone, was probably enough to earn him excommunication from Taylor's sanctuary, but this was just the start.

Shortly before he died, Gantt wrote an essay entitled A Parting of the Ways. In this essay, he proclaimed that the pursuit of profits above service to the community was responsible for a whole raft of industrial ills. He spoke like a Utopian Socialist, even encouraging thirty-some engineers to create a splinter group of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers entitled The New Machine.

Gantt, like many efficiency engineers volunteered to work with the war production boards set up by the Wilson administration. These boards were governed by citizens, had no statutory authority, yet managed industrial production during the war years. They could not command anything done, though they could and did control allocation of critical resources. In flagrant violation of the Sherman Antitrust Statues, they called competitors together and encouraged them to cooperate to produce war material. But understanding the need to continue producing baby clothes, for instance, these boards ended up managing much of the economy for the duration of the war.

This was sweet work for Gantt, who maintained his deep belief that facts rather than opinion should determine critical decisions. He had no faith in the debating society politics that prevailed on Capitol Hill, and Congress was largely silent on the question of board control, save for a few impassioned floor speeches. The engineers went about telling industries how to produce and what to produce without getting too sideways to any free-marketeer.

Gantt looked at this experience and had a difficult time rationalizing the free market after than. And if anything, Gantt was rational. One historian claims that Gantt died just before history judged his beliefs absurd. Yet today, it's easy to swoon a bit over his logic. There's no greater curse for a logical, rational engineer than to be labeled Utopian. Yet, a decade after his death, the American Management Association began awarding an annual H. L. Gantt award for service to the community. Some of his message survived.

Taylor never spoke to Gantt again after their split, though Gantt spoke warmly of Taylor's genius. All of these people were missionaries, prophets, occasional heretics. How their radical ideas finally infected and influenced mainstream industry takes some explaining. It was as accidental a convergence as any. There's much more to tell. (to be continued ...)

Father is the painting of a blue house green. Father lives on the other side of the sky. Father is a cloudy day with sun. Father is an email, a phone call. Father is paperwork and publishers. Father is books and drives in the country. Father is fireplaces and snow. Father is the ocean I swim in. Father is a cascades volcano, a skyscraper. Father is large and powerful. Father is a bold line across a blank page. Father is a bowl of pasta, an arugula salad, a Christmas goose. Father is a day in June. A long day, where the sun shines almost till midnight.

Love,

Heidi

©2009 by Heidi Astrid Schmaltz, all rights reserved

The word 'manager' has existed for about one hundred and seventy-five years; 'scientist' for perhaps just a few years longer. The melding of these two new concepts didn't take hold until two generations later. By then, corporations had grown beyond proprietorships manageable by the owner into geographically-dispersed, culture-straddling entities which were, by traditional means, unmanageable.

American Telegraph was one of the first corporations to outgrow their founders' britches. Organized as a network of remote shop floors, daily operations in each location was ceded to a supervisor, rather like a shop foreman, who's primary job was to direct laborers. The board of directors made decisions as seemingly insignificant as the purchase of fifty telegraph poles for the Tucson office. Their board meeting minutes, written in the fine secretary hand of the day, preserved in the archives at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, make some of the most mind-numbing reading available anywhere.

While that board nattered over trivial matters, a few seemingly insignificant discussions were recorded, like the questioning of the value received from a hundred dollar payment to one Thomas Alva Edison, who believed he could transmit voices over telegraph wires. Meh!

By 1900, a new generation of college educated engineers entered industry. They served as a medium between the aristocratic owners, who had by long tradition maintained a studied indifference to shop floor practices, and the shop floor employees, who were responsible for actually producing stuff. By that time, owners had grown skilled in producing prices: monopolizing markets, stifling supply, and smothering wages, but were unaware of the negative influences these practices had on long-term viability. These college-educated engineers discovered a lot of gold these aristocrats were leaving on the table.

Among them, Frederick Winslow Taylor is acknowledged as the Father of Scientific Management. It was his idea to formalize inventory, having been inspired by the then new Dewey Decimal System for classifying library books. He carried this penchant for organizing on into the flow of work across a factory, routinizing what he could, creating standard practices he labeled 'The One Best Way."

The question, of course, was what the aristocrats, who knew little and cared less about the means of production, would do with this new science. One needn't be a student of anyone's history to reasonably predict the answer.

The first twenty years of the twentieth century saw the greatest labor unrest in the history of our republic, and God bless us, it should have. Faced with improved throughput, which flooded monopolized markets with increasing quantities of goods, prices naturally fell. To maintain profits, the geniuses in charge cut worker wages and even idled factories in response to what the owners labeled 'over-production.' The laborers, who in many cases worked six twelve hour days for slave wages, rebelled.

Between 1900 and 1920, industrial profits expanded as much as 400% under the growing influence of scientific management. Labor rates increased no more than 40%. A revolution in more than shop-floor practices seemed unavoidable.

Taylor was elected Executive Director of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers around 1900. His first act mandated that the Society be managed according to the principles of scientific management. This induced a struggle that lasted as long as Taylor's tenure, and encouraged the Society to choose its old governing process once Taylor retired. What was good enough for the laborers was apparently unworkable for their executives.

In the background, Taylor's former lieutenant, Henry Laurence Gantt, started one of the first private management consulting firms. After nearly twenty years working as an employee of various manufacturing companies, the company he worked for went under in the Panic of 1897, so Gantt put out his shingle and prospered. But while there's no evidence that Taylor's years organizing shop floor operations ever influenced his self confidence that he (or some other duly qualified scientific manager) could scientifically determine any worker's One Best Way to work, Gantt's experience differed.

... to be continued ...

Perfect until it came time to store our wonderful finds. This little apartment doesn't have a root cellar or an auxiliary beer fridge in the garage, not even a garage. It was time to clean out the also-rans. Time to make stock.

Stock, properly made, makes the stuff sold as stock in grocery store seem like cat piss. Real stock is rich in color and flavor, but also in texture, the way no other liquid I know of can carry texture. The little fat in it shimmers enticingly. The color, ranging from a tawny tan to a rich amber, depends upon what was taken stock of in making it. What do I mean, taking stock of?

Stock is free if you make it yourself, or as nearly free as anything consumable might aspire to be. It sells for four buck a quart or more in the store, and isn't even real at that price. Made at home, it's leverage with no downside; trash utterly transformed.

Daily, I throw every veg peeling and odd stalk, every ugly leftover bit into a plastic bag and into the freezer. On stock day, which invariably arrives when too much great new stuff displaces the increasingly marginal stuff I have just not gotten around to trashing yet, the fridge gets a through cleaning. The crisper drawers get sorted through and anything not yet skanky gets set aside for the stock pot. The freezer, which by this time is filled with odd little plastic bags of asparagus butts, Brussel sprout trimmings, parsnip and carrot peelings, and rejected artichoke leaves, also gets a thorough going over, with ingredients selected as if in their prime to create a once-in-a-lifetime combination.

Today was a lucky day. I had a couple of pounds of veal bones, which I'd spotted a couple of weeks ago while cruising the Eastern Market. In other words, a couple of bucks worth of collagen-rich leftovers, bought for pocket change. The bones, which are worth more than anyone ever charges for them, are the only thing worth paying top-dollar for when making stock. The rest of the brew involves stuff you would have thrown to the worms in the composter or the garbage disposal if you weren't so damned wise.

The process starts with roasting the bones for an hour in a 500 degree F (260 C) oven. For young bones like veal, this will just start to crispen the exterior. After an hour, roughly chop that odd end of parsnip you found in the bottom of the veg crisper, the larger of the two wilting turnips, a carrot or two, and an onion, and take the garlic that's starting to sprout and wilt, no need to even take the paper off those. Throw the whole chopped mess into another pan, like a deep frying pan, that's been preheating in that hot oven for a while. Drizzle a little olive oil over the mess, then return it to the seemingly way-too hot oven. Turn dem bones while you're at it. Go read a novel for a half hour or so while this mess crazes.

At the end of the half hour, plop dem bones in right in on top of the glistening veg, then deglaze the pan they were roasting in. This is simple, just pour a bit of that leftover white wine you bought for someone who never showed at your last soiree, drizzle that into the hot pan the bones left behind, and swirl with a whisk until the stuck bits come loose. Pour the result into your deepest stock pot. Throw in all the odds and ends you selected from your frozen inventory---asparagus butts, etc---, put that pot on moderately high heat and add enough water to cover the mess. Then go back to reading that cliff-hanger, cat on lap optional, but appreciated.

About a half hour later, after two hours of roasting, the bones are ready for a bath. Transfer them into the now serenely bubbling nascent broth on the stove top and revel in the satisfying sizzle each yelps when dropped in. Nothing like a hot bath after a long sauna! Throw the roasted veg in, too. Add more water if you're greedy and want as much stock as possible from this mess, then go back to see what the villains are plotting in that novel.

Ninety minutes might be enough time. Certainly no less time, and the liquid will have reduced a little bit, but not too much, because you left the mess on moderately high heat before you disappeared back into fantasy land. When the time is right, and your nose will tell you that the veg is exhausted and won't give another drizzle to the performance, drain the mess and pour into your wide-mouth jars (perhaps with a little finely chopped leek to dress it up a bit.) Make this transfer when the liquid is HOT! seal the jars immediately, and they'll seal tight as they cool and last forever in the back of the fridge. I ran short of jars (as I knew I would in this little place), and stored the last liter and a half in empty olive oil bottles, sealing the tops with aluminum foil and rubber bands. (Yes, Amy threw out my left-over olive oil bottle lids as apparent garbage.)

There, you're almost done. Separate the bones from the veg, discard the veg, it's exhausted. It's given its all. Transfer the bones back into the stock pot, cover with fresh water, and boil them for another hour or more on high, high, high heat. You're extracting the final collagen to make something that will utterly transform anything it's added to. After an hour or so, when the liquid is almost gone, remove the bones and give them to Amy, who's always trolling for soft cartilage to chew, then boil down the remaining liquid until it's almost nothing. Sticky. Gooey. Chilled to room temperature it will look like shoe leather. A mere sliver added to anything will ennoble that thing. A pinch on an egg, a dollop into a sauce, you'll find yourself carving bits off to just pop into your mouth as you cruise the kitchen. It's knighthood on a knife. I don't have much variety for storage, so I poured this into an unused ashtray. I'll dress the garlic scapes and asparagus with it at dinner.

If you don't stop and take stock, and make stock every few weeks, we have to wonder about you. Do you usually eat out? You know, real stock is the only reason their sauce tastes so much better than yours (or better than the Lean Cuisine you innocently thought would be faster to make). If you make your own stock, though, you might never be satisfied with another restaurant meal again. Your stock will be so much better than even the celebrity chefs', you'll wish you'd just stayed at home.

Cheap but good is great. The best there is in this life. If you don't make your own stock (yet), take stock of your life. It's short and brutish, save for the small differences something like stock makes.

(Store the jars, leftover olive oil bottle, whatever ... of broth in the corner of the fridge that usually freezes stuff. Only fill the jars 7/8ths full, or the expanding frozen contents might (will definitely) break the container, and you'll lose the contents. ... how and when should you use the stock you've taken? Cripes, if you don't know the answer to that question, you're worthless. Move to freaking Virginia and eat ham!)

ps: notice how I didn't instruct you to salt or 'fresh ground pepper' this mess? Good. Don't even think of salting it. The goo will be perfectly seasoned. You can add salt to taste when you actually use this stuff. No one could know how much to add to satisfy taste before actually using...

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters hypothetical
I leave it to my quants to understand the mere quadratical
About the buzz on Wall Street, well, I'm teeming with a lot o' news
But don’t expect me to explain the square of an hypotenuse.

Don’t expect me to explain the square of an hypotenuse
Don’t expect me to explain the square of an hypotenuse
Don’t expect me to explain the square of an hypotenuse

I flunked right out of integral and differential calculus
I spurn the scientific names of feelings animalculous
In short, in matters speculative, unctuous, or derivative,
I am the very model of a modern chief executive!

In short, in matters speculative, unctuous, or derivative,
He is the very model of a modern chief executive!

I know our mythic history, from our founders to our LBO
I bluffed my way through every move, and so became the CEO
I quote in banal homilies the words of others just like me
Iconic and elusive, I’m a model chief executive.

I smell financial fraud before the SEC gets wind of it
and join the croaking chorus when the loser’s frog-marched to the kip
Then quietly cash in just like I’ve done a thousand times before
And pout with all the innocence of a child dressed in pinafore

And pout with all the innocence of a child dressed in pinafore
And pout with all the innocence of a child dressed in pinafore
And pout with all the innocence of a child dressed in pina-pinafore

Then I can write a binding bill in bureaucratic cuneiform
And lobby ‘till it’s voted to become our justice uniform
In short, in matters legislative, unctuous, or derivative
I am the very model of a modern chief executive!

In short, in matters speculative, unctuous, or derivative
He is the very model of a modern chief executive!

In fact, I know what happens to the ones who cannot win this game
They’re forced to public service and to lose that seaside shack in Maine
They’ll drive a General Motors car and be a minor News Hour star
And blame the best and brightest for the latest economic scar.

When I first heard what progress had been made in modern sophistry
I quickly learned the tactics like a novice in a nunnery
And now I am a master of a bait and switch economy
You'll say no chief executive has ever lived, the likes of me!

You'll say no chief executive has ever lived, the likes of me
You'll say no chief executive has ever lived, the likes of me
You'll say no chief executive has ever lived, the l-likes of me!

With bureaucratic skill I am both plucky and adventury
This should prevent indictment till the start of the next century
But still, in matters speculative, unctuous, or derivative
I am the very model of a modern chief executive!

But still, in matters speculative, unctuous, or derivative
He the very model of a modern chief executive!