Uncle Karl, we hardly knew ye.

I got a chance recently to get through Collins’ Built to Last, and have some ambivalence about it. On the one hand, the technique of analyzing “visionary” companies in the context of a control comparison company is a fantastic idea. The role that passion plays in accomplishment really stood out, as well as the all-important role of setting up circumstances for people to do their best work rather than simply demanding it warms my heart as a follower of Deming. It saddens me to see what has happened to several of his stars since 1994 when it was written: Hewlett-Packard the innovator ate a low-cost volume manufacturer in a move guaranteed to destroy the ideology that made them successful (I now understand why the board was fit to be tied,) IBM sold off its most iconic division to the Chinese and is wondering what it wants to be when it grows up, and then there’s Merck. Poor Merck. What happened? Is the whole Vioxx thing a witch hunt, or did they sell out the glorious “patient first at all costs” philosophy that made them what they are? I’d believe either at this point. Not to be outdone, BOTH Ford and their comparison GM hitched their . . . make that welded their . . . wagons to the high-margin SUV (how IS that pronounced?) market, and will reap the wages of sin with $3 gasoline.

My ambivalence comes from the tone, which is just so – twentieth century. There’s an assumption of scale and size and insularity that just seems uncomfortable in the lean, decentralized, (no, I refuse to say “flat”,) telecommuting current age. I would just love to see how things would be rewritten if Microsoft got thrown into the equation, not to even mention Google, or Enron for that matter.

The one Demingesque thing I continue to take away is that it’s all about the people. Are people happy? Motivated? Incorporated into the profit structure of the company? [see competition below] One must take care of one’s people. Even the prophet of capitalism understood that humans are not necessarily “resources” that can be strip-mined:

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater
part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people,
comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or
two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily
formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in
performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps,
always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his
understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for
removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore,
the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it
is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders
him, not only incapable of relishing of bearing a part in any rational
conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and
consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary
duties of private life. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776 (p734)

Well, that’s the philosophy. Now to hire the staff . . . . . . . .

Why I am single:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 52

Dating is tricky business. In my experience it takes about three years to really get to know someone, and with most dates you have something like a few hours. Here’s the problem: in those two hours (or seven, or fourteen, or thirty) you have to figure out what this chick is about, whether not she’s at all intellectually curious, what here motives are, and whether she is capable of taking an interest in what you’re all about. That’s the easy part.

The hard part is doing all of this why also trying to figure out whatever weird arbitrary rules and expectations she brings to the table. It’s consistency that I have a problem with. The advice always given is “be yourself,” which is, I suppose, the best way to be. My problem always seems to be what part of yourself to be. I’m really a pretty simple guy, but apparently broadly interested and experienced enough to be perceived as complex. Combine that with a natural proclivity to take a position opposed the prevailing one in the room at any given time (innate striving for balance?) and you can see the results.

When with the 45-year-old attorney, one should probably be fairly calm and sophisticated; when with the 19-year-old retail clerk, probably happy-go-lucky and energetic. I, of course, am legitimately all of these in season. It’s just aligning the season with the situation, especially with any kind of consistency, that never seems to work. Mentioning the destructive power of pseudo-science with the fundamentalist Baptist? (despite all of the other good she may have) – probably not a good idea. Appreciate the honest power of being a simple native? - not around the shapely Russian banker. I often wonder at how a multifaceted prism gets mistaken for a cardboard cut-out.

Even if you do have the moment in common, the next hurdle is: what does she want? I’m pretty open-minded, but should one be superficial and aggressive (thus scaring the woman looking for a long-term relationship) or patient and deep? (thus scaring off the one looking for something casual) I think most people are each of these from point to point, but woe be to him that picks the wrong one at the word go.

That’s the only thing I don’t like about being an adult: no longer having the long time-frames to really know what you’re dealing with, it all becomes a matter of guesswork and luck. Over and over.

Of course, I could be over-analyzing things.

Living on the Edge (of the world) - Why I moved to Dallas.

I was listening to KCRW in Los Angeles yesterday, and they had a story on the development of banlieue Paris. In their words, the housing is “large and widely separated, requiring total dependence on your car. In a word: America.” From big-box stores in Issy to the fashionable suburbs of Japan being (in the words of the architect explaining them to me) “just like f-----g Plano” it seems like the whole world is becoming America – or at least a version thereof. Rem Koolhaas writes about this phenomenon as the arrival of the “generic city.” [SMLXL, with Bruce Mau – look at the dictionary entries.] It’s the universal reshaping of the world around the ideal lifestyle of convenience and space (at the expense of local character) that the rest of the world thinks of as native to the New World. I saw this all over Europe. Everywhere I went, I saw two things: 1) the place was the distinct product of a formative point in time (Baroque Rome, Haussmanian Paris, Seventeenth Century Weimar,) and 2) its residents seemed to be trying very inexplicably hard to adapt them to the place I’d just left.

This got me thinking. As a (future) architect with no particular location in mind I probably ought to go to the place the most steeped in the zeitgeist in its purest form. This meant young, forming, American, and in the van of the horizontal car-oriented cities that we were all told in school that we were supposed to hate. What, then, was the most nouveau-riche, low-density, car-oriented, growth-focused place in the country? Where was, in other words, the most unambiguously American place one could think to move? Texas. Of course.

Add to all of this memorizing Garreau’s Edge City again, and a semester of regional economics where I arrived at the inevitability of Houston on Marxian grounds, and my mind was made up. Off to the frontier. Sure, there’s no history. Sure, it’s practically impossible to find a neighborhood where anti-commuters like me would want to live. Sure, it’s hot. Sure, they’re too damn full of their myth. Sure to all of that, but it was a chance to be in the grand experiment of the anti-city, and chance to see what the world was like among all of those in the great majority that stubbornly refuse to let New Urbanist professors tell them how they ought to live - and to do it in its most extreme form.

Was the experiment successful?

Stulapalooza Photo

Native Expectations

When I was going to school growing up, I always assumed that I’d be unprepared. I think we all did; Oklahoma has the kind of stereotype in the wider world such that we all assumed that everyone else was far ahead, and we were starting in a hole. As a consequence, there was enormous pressure to know as much as possible to make up for the deficit and be at least as prepared as average if one ever wanted to be able to leave. My personal assumption in school was that what we were expected to learn was the bare minimum baseline that would be required in the world beyond. So I always tried to master the material, memorize it, know it backward and forward in order to be able just to keep up at the next step. (This did not, of course, translate into making anyone in local authority happy, but what the hell did I care about them?) How could anyone that didn’t have the basic facts of algebra, grammar, literature, science, and finance hope to even keep their head above water in a larger pond? We all seem to have been woefully over-prepared.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my experience in college, and especially since, has been just the opposite of what I’d expected. Far from being behind, the major problem has been adjusting to a world where everyone else doesn’t know what I always thought of as the baseline. Not a day goes by where someone around me doesn’t make some mistake of language, or reasoning, or math (although: see Romancing below) that would get them summarily laughed out of my senior English class. This, keep in mind, is as a professional in a large and diverse city (and dealing with professionals from San Diego to Saint Louis.) I shudder to think what it must be like in other environments.

I think this comes from people only doing the bare minimum to get by for years, and the attitude being pervasive enough so that’s all that’s expected. There was always an element of hunger that we all had that doesn’t seem to have entered into these people’s lives. When you have no sense of entitlement, and no guarantees of the future, just the fear of being trapped makes you work harder, think more, and expect far more out of yourself and those around you. I worked night and day in college to be able to solve almost any design problem to a level of perfection overnight (literally.) Now I watch as those around me bounce from solution to solution over a period of months just to arrive at the initial solution hiding in the front of my notes. If the vocabulary I developed so diligently isn’t dumbed down before I write a memo, I get nothing but confused looks. It’s kind of a bizarre world.

This has ramifications beyond me as an individual. I just know that at this very moment there are thousands of kids in India so ecstatically happy to get out of their villages that they’ll do an infinite amount of work just to get to the level of affluence where the average anglo kid in the Metroplex starts. Think Sputnik: if you’re trying to compete against an army of people that said “organic chemistry? You mean that’s all I have to do?” with people who can’t be bothered to study anything more difficult than “marketing” (whatever that is,) you may have a problem. According to WNYC’s OTM, the Defense Department is beginning to worry that the country will run out of enough native-born engineers and scientists to staff its weapons labs.

I often lie awake at night wondering if all of the brilliant, hungry kids I grew up with encountered the same low expectations. Not that I haven’t met smart, conscientious people since – it’s just that they’ve been few and far between (more on that later.) Saint-Simon (the younger, not the courtier) probably had the right idea. Perhaps I’m just seeing the downside of the cognitive assortment discussed below. After all, in a kingdom of nothing but the blind . . . .

What to do with this knowledge? I’m not sure.