Dan Riley's Blog, page 43

September 7, 2013

Early Nobby this week because I’ve got all these great pictures that are burning a hole in my computer. The pictures, as they say, tell the story. But there’s always the morning after. And on this particular morning after I found myself thinking about the “no-shows.” Why did some people say they were going to come and then not come? It was the kind of mindset that reminds me of why I love the Garden of Eden myth so much. Here I had just spent a glorious evening with family and friends in a virtual paradise, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from thinking of more and better. And just like a god, I started planning my vengeance on those who did not obey—those who had dared to eat the apple, or in this case dared not to show up and eat the lasagna and Cesar salad. As I was making up my list of who had been naughty and who had been nice, this message appeared from a friend--one of the no-shows--on my Facebook page:

I'm going through a difficult time in my life right now. I appreciate all my friends and their support. If I don't write you back right away, please don't worry - I love and value you and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.

Suddenly I was jerked from an Old Testament frame of mind to a New Testament frame of mind—from focus on my will, my labors, my needs and desires to someone else’s plight. I was reminded of how we often lose sight of the fact that others have their own lives to live, and they accommodate themselves to our lives only as theirs allow them. We all have only so much precious time to spend. So heartfelt thanks to those who were able to spend some of theirs with us, and wholehearted wishes for another time with those who could not.
Take it away, Van the Man.   
"Precious Time"
Precious time is slipping awayBut you're only king for a dayIt doesn't matter to which God you prayPrecious time is slipping away
It doesn't matter what route you takeSooner or later the heart's going to breakNo rhyme or reason, no master planNo Nirvana, no promised land
Because, precious time is slipping awayYou know you're only king for a dayIt doesn't matter to which God you prayPrecious time is slipping away
Say que sera, whatever will beBut then I keep on searching for ImmortalityShe's so beautiful but she's going to die some dayEverything in life just passes away
But precious time is slipping awayYou know she's only queen for a dayIt doesn't matter to which God you prayPrecious time is slipping away
Well, this world is cruel with its twists and its turnsBut the fire's still in me and the passion it burnsI love her madly 'til the day I die'Til hell freezes over and the rivers run dry
Precious time is slipping awayYou know she's only queen for a dayIt doesn't matter to which God you pray becausePrecious time is slipping away
Precious time is slipping awayYou know you're only king for a dayIt doesn't matter to which God you prayPrecious time is slipping away
Precious time is slipping awayYou know you're only king for a dayIt doesn't matter to which God you pray becausePrecious time is slipping away

The Fall Will Probably Kill You*

On September 7, 1968, a gathering of unsuspecting folks filed into a Unitarian church in Westport, Connecticut, and found the lyrics to the Richard Farina song posted above sitting on their chairs. The wedding they had come to attend would begin with a group reading of the lyrics. Grandmas, golfers, executives, little cousins, old aunts, moms and dads would all--for the love of the young couple making their vows that day--utter the words, however reluctantly, "And where was the will of my father when he raised his sword on high. And where was my mother's wailing when our flags were justified? And where will we take our pleasures when our bodies have been denied." 
Not exactly "We've Only Just Begun." But then it was 1968, the year of multiple assassinations, riots, and another war America's extravagant and evangelistic self-regard couldn't resist fighting. Would anyone in their right minds want to sing we've only just begun to all that? Still, "Children of Darkness" was a heavy load to drop on people who had just stepped out for the day to toss some rice, drink some bubbly, and wish you well. It was a lot for a couple of 20-year olds to impose on all the adults in their lives who were important enough to invite to their wedding. Twenty-somethings in the swirl of marriage plans often make very bad choices--including the choice of who to marry. Sometimes it takes years for the soundness of such choices to play out. As I sit here on the threshold of the 45th anniversary of my long-ago choices, two things are clear.
The first is that making "Children of Darkness" part of our wedding ceremony was a good thing for grounding everybody in the reality of the world Lorna and I were marrying ourselves into. I'm proud we made that choice and stood by it despite skepticism from concerned others. My only regret is that if we were getting married this weekend, we could still choose to feature that song and it would still be appropriate. 
The other choice--the more important choice of course--was in marrying Lorna. Marriage partners for as long as we've been makes us rare specimens and subject to immense curiosity and much speculation. How do you do it? We've been answering that question regularly--since the beginning actually when our choices of one another raised eyebrows among friends who only saw us through the prism of their lives. The answers we consistently give are not unlike what you'd find in a typical Huffpost feature on, say, "The Five Signs of a Healthy Marriage"--communication; humor; luck; allowing each other space; and when the inevitable disagreement crops up, making sure to stick to the subject of the disagreement and not let it become a proxy for litigating the entire relationship.
There's a story from one of our earliest "dates" that reveals that much of that was in play before we were married. Lorna was from the south end of Connecticut where they sailed and skied. I was from the north end of the state where we played baseball and football. "Ski" to me was the last syllable in most of the names at St. Adalbert's church which served our town's Polish Catholics. When Lorna suggested we go skiing, she may as well have been suggesting we go boar hunting. But I wanted her badly enough to say, "Yeah! Let's go skiing." 
1968 was not only the year of hideous political doings, but hideous ski technology. When I went in to be fitted for my rentals, I was told to raise my arm over my head. The ideal ski, I learned at that moment, would reach to the tip of my fingers. So I headed out into the wintry wonderland with two SIX-AND-A-HALF foot long, narrow wooden wedges strapped to my feet by metal contraptions that resembled nothing so much as small animal traps. Lorna led me to the "bunny slope" where I would learn to ski while she took the lift to the expert slope. The skis, which could've carried Vikings to Greenland, and the bindings which bound nothing, least of all my ski boots, would've been bad enough. But the fact that the humiliation was unfolding on something called the bunny slope made the whole exercise intolerable, so I retired early to the lodge. After an hour, Lorna found me, and she was bursting with the enthusiasm that I would come to know over years as her default position. She was perfectly sympathetic for my plight, but she had just the remedy. I would come up to the expert slope with her. "Really, you'll love it!" she exclaimed, with the gusto which would eventually lead her into a lucrative career in sales. "No one can ski on those bunny slopes. They're all dug up by novices falling all over themselves. The expert slope is smooth, and the scenery is beautiful. Come with me. Come with me."
As I said, I wanted her, so I went with her. The ride up was exhilarating, but when the lift reached the top and I caught my first glimpse over the horizon, my butt cheeks autonomously tried to suction my body to the lift chair. But the chair rudely dumped me out, and I tumbled to the snow. Lorna skied up alongside me smiling joyously, "Isn't it breathtaking?"  
Breathtaking. Yes, that would be a word. Heart stopping, too. And gut wrenching.  "I can't do this," I told her. 
"How will you get down?" she asked.
"I'll walk," I answered. And I did. With those Bunyanesque skis over my shoulders and with my cold ears ringing with insults from wisenheimers in the lift overhead--"Pussy!" "Wimp!" "Cherry!"--I made my way back down to the lodge. 
When Lorna joined me later for a hot chocolate, she was as effervescent as ever. Her run had been exceptional, she proclaimed. The next time, she promised, we'd get better skis and bindings for me. She knew it had been a rough day for me, she said, but she was so glad I'd come with her and given it a try. Better days were ahead, she predicted. 
And on that, she was right. With her in my life, how could the days be otherwise? 

* Loyal and attentive readers of this blog will know that the title of this one refers to this. 

Workers of the world...etc.

With the nonstop promotion of Employee X.’s book for the past few weeks, The Nobby has come to resemble a virtual workers’ collective, which is timely since Labor Day weekend is now upon us. Establishment of the holiday was an olive branch the US extended in 1894 to honor American workers after the government’s brutal crackdown on the Pullman strikers. The strike, which shut down much of the nation’s railroads, was sparked when railroad mogul George Pullman reduced his workers’ wages but not the rents they had to pay to live in his company-owned housing. Pro-business President Grover Cleveland and his Attorney General, a former lawyer for the railway, unleashed 12,000 troops on the strikers resulting in the death, maiming, and arrests of people more interested in making ends meet than meeting their ends.
Like many of our holidays—Easter, the occasion for a secular government to hunt colored eggs on the White House lawn; St. Patrick’s Day, the occasion for the non-Irish to get drunk in public; the Fourth of July, the occasion for taxpayers who begrudge poor children a free breakfast to lustily applaud ball park fly-overs—Labor Day has lost its moorings. Rather than honor the American worker, it is now more in honor of American ingenuity in creating barbecue sauces. Labor gets our attention these days only when the unemployment figures go up. No one much cares about the working conditions of those with jobs, because--as they are told in so many ways ad nauseam--they are lucky to have jobs. 
The ongoing effort to marginalize and demonize workers’ unions is in full flower with elected governments in Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, and Florida now doing the union busting bidding of corporate America. Most sadly, much of it is being done with the consent of the governed, who have come to think of unions primarily as the means by which 20-million dollar-a-year ballplayers get to have their urine samples kept secret from their employers. Even Hollywood, once the home of strong unionism and the source of films advancing workers’ rights from The Little Tramp to Norma Rae, has taken a decidedly Koch Brothers turn in its view of the working man. He is either like the DeNiro character in Silver Linings Playbook, unemployed and recklessly wasting his time and money trying to shortcut his way into a livelihood. Or she is like the Maggie Gyllenhaal character in Won’t Back Down, a ideal worker blocked from achieving her highest aspirations by her reactionary union. Fox News, if it were so inclined, might find evidence of a “War on Labor Day” in all this and announce a campaign to put Labor back into Labor Day.
How’d it happen? Well, Norma Rae was 1979, and then came 1980 and Ronald Reagan, the union turncoat, kicking his new Gilded Age off with a frontal attack on the air traffic controllers. Presto, just like that, “the greed is good” decade was born…now heading into its fourth decade. Except for a brief, weak show of a pulse in Wisconsin last year, the union movement in the US has been moribund ever since.
My friend, Employee X, who wrote that must-read, new book, Look Before You Lean, once asked a small group of corporate managers to list all the ways they could think of that employees register their unhappiness with their jobs. Their feedback consisted of: “They whine.” “They go to HR.” “They cop an attitude.” “They quit.” “They go postal.” 

That was it. “They form a union” didn’t even get honorable mention. That’s how irrelevant the American labor movement has become…even middle managers aren’t afraid of it.
It was left to Employee X. to mention union organizing to that particular audience of managers, but their eyes glazed over as if he had just brought up the Peloponnesian War. He did, however, manage to get their attention when he presented his own list of what actions unhappy workers might also take: SabotageGossiping about the company outsideVoicing complaints at company meetingsSending letters to the Board of DirectorsPassive resistance (hoping things will just go away)Passive/aggressive behavior—smiling to the boss's face/rolling eyes behind the boss's backLeaking harmful information to government agencies, media, or competitorsTheftGold brickingCalling in sickSlowing downWhistleblowingTaking the company suggestion box seriouslyI’m afraid that what passes for worker movement in this country for the time being will be just that kind of sporadic, go-it alone activity (and gods almighty, how we hate to commit and love our independence…). But I believe this state of affairs is only for the time being. Increasing waves of immigrant workers into the domestic work force with far less to lose than their American counterparts, combined with increasing awareness of workers’ right in Third World countries where Marx and Woody Guthrie will eventually show up on the village computer will plunge the global economy into a management-labor struggle that will make the 1930s look like a Koch Brother’s wet dream. I believe this is what is called an historical inevitability. 

Here's to Continuous Improvement

I post the You Tube clip above for three reasons. One is that it's darkly funny if you've witnessed a bad lean implementation up close.  Two, if you have no idea what lean is, this should serve as a good, albeit bad, first impression. Three, and most importantly, is that the clip was created and posted on You Tube by Mark Graban, who is an award-winning author, blogger, and noted practitioner in the lean universe. Graban is also an unwitting contributor to Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale in that the book's author, Employee X., prominently cites Graban's work in his own. In posting this You Tube, Graban shows himself to possess two rare but highly-prized qualities--a critical self-awareness and a sense of humor. While enduring the bad lean implementation that led to the writing of his book, Employee X. found considerable moral support in the willingness of Graban and others at The Lean Enterprise Institute to critically and continuously examine the process they had dedicated their professional lives to advancing. Unfortunately, the courage to subject lean itself to continuous improvement is not universal among lean advocates. There are some, like those featured in Employee X.'s book, who think continuous improvement is a one way street--you have to improve and we'll tell you exactly how. As lean continues to gain traction in non-factory work environments, the non-standardization of lean applications--what Graban calls LAME lean will begin to take a serious toll across a broad spectrum. It will make corporate heads who buy into bad lean look bad. It will make workers who have to suffer through a bad lean transformation feel bad. And it will allow lean advocates of bad faith to be bad at will. 

Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale is now available in print here. It is available as a Kindle instant download here. Within the week, it will be available at Barnes & Noble (print and Nook), Google Play, Kobo, and Amazon (WORLDWIDE!). As the proud publisher of Employee X.'s book, The Nobby Works joins him in hoping that his book saves other companies from going through what his company went through and that it contributes to helping lean advocates of good faith in putting their house in order. 

Four Dilberts

As The Nob counts down in Dilberts to the publication date of Employee X's pulsating new book, Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale, a tantalizing excerpt may be in order:

Yet, with all that and under the regime of standard work, within the purview of visual management (and with my own executive-approved project suggestions for the companyidling somewhere in somebody’s queue), I commenced serious work on this book. At my workstation. In plain-sight. All during the newly imposed standard work hours. With WTF placing mind-numbing emphasis on tracking every working hour, with charts galore tracking every employee with a dizzying array of arrows and stars and bars, with a pervasive and oppressive company push to get everyone on the Lean transformation bus, I sat undisturbed documenting much of what was going wrong with the process. 


According to the standard of work elements detailed for each of our leaders up the chain of command, in the time I spent writing this book I should have been visited dozens of times to be asked what I was working on…how I was progressing…was I having any problems. Just one gembawalk should have easily raised five “why” questions. Like, why was I busily working on my personal iPad while my company iMac with its 16-inch monitor sat on my desk mostly idle for three months? Why did the vaunted Lean process allow me to not only fall through the cracks but virtually disappear from sight? Why did someone decide that Lean standards would be further advanced by leaving me with nothing to do rather than putting me to work on approved projects with long-term benefits to the company? Why did someone decide that it would be a good idea to have one of WE’s most vocal critics of the Lean transformation sit without assigned work for more than 500 hours? Why, after intensive visual management and standard of work training, did our department management return to our “factory floor” so utterly blind or oblivious to the problem it was creating?

Three Dilberts

As The Nobby Works counts down in Dilberts to the publication date of Employee X's searing new book, Look before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale , it may be worth contemplating the future of America. The expression "the American experiment" gets thrown around a lot in academic circles. They see the "experiment" essentially as a test as to whether people can govern themselves. The real experiment, however, is can democracy and capitalism peacefully co-exist. It is an experiment along the lines of can oil and water mix or can lambs lie down with lions without getting eaten by morning. Currently the experiment is not going well. Capitalism is in the process of gnawing democracy to the bone because it sees democracy as weak and annoying. Employee X reports that an executive once brushed aside a suggestion of his that they conduct a survey of the workforce to gauge the progress of a grand and daring company initiative by saying, "We already know how the employees feel and we can't do anything about that." 

The future health of our democracy can be diagnosed by how much corporate America abuses the vital signs of democracy.  

Two Dilberts

This week The Nobby Works is counting down in Dilberts to the publication date of Employee's X's breathtaking new book Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale. It should be noted that Employee X did not choose these particular Dilbert strips at random out of the thousands available. According to Employee X, each of these strips actually covers the same ground he covers in certain chapters of his book. Yesterday's strip corresponds to the book chapter called "The Wizard of Oz," today's to the chapter called "Rumplestiltskin," and tomorrow's "The Midas Touch." The difference being that what takes Employee X 4,000 words to say in his book, Scott Adams says in three drawings and about three dozen words. Very Lean. 

One Dilbert

The countdown to the release date of The Nobby Works' second publishing venture, Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale has now begun. The Nob will count down the days in Dilbert strips, since Employee X, author of the book, discovered Scott Adams's creation during the writing of his book and derived enormous comfort from seeing that the little dweeb was suffering under much the same foolishness on his job. As Employee X writes in his book's acknowledgements, "...perhaps you have to find unhappiness in your job before you find Dilbert." Or, to put it another, more familiar way, misery loves company. 

Coming Soon!

The publishing division of The Nobby Works is about to release its second book, Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad—A Cautionary Tale by Employee X. If you have any workers of the world on your Labor Day gift-buying list, this chronicle of office work in the modern age will be available in time to unite them and you for this upcoming holiday season. Keep checking in on The Nobby Works for how, when and where you can buy the book--or better yet, sign up as a regular follower and get automatic Nobby Works updates via Google +.

Back Cover Copy
About the book: There’s a lot of pain going down in American business these days, and much of it is coming down on the heads of American workers. Surprisingly much of it is caused by corporate witlessness rather than wickedness. Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale chronicles two years of lean-driven turbulence at the author’s employer of 15 years. Lean, the management methodology which started in the 1950s in the manufacturing environment of Toyota, has slowly but surely been making its way into the office environments of the Western world. But not without controversy. The book pivots off the question of why lean thrives when it appears to turn people off almost as quickly as it turns them on. Beyond that, it is a statement from what lean practitioners call “the factory floor,” where the view is not as simple, sunny, or salutary as it may appear from the boardrooms, executive suites, or various lean think tanks. It is that most critical assembly line statement that lean advocates themselves give loud, long lip service to. It is this: Stop the line! There’s something wrong here.

About the author: Employee X has been a writer and editor in corporate America for most of his professional life. He once worked for a Fortune 500 company where the long-whispered rumor in the corridors was that they had once hired an arsonist to torch the hotel where their chief competitors were holding a conference, sending all its upper management up in smoke. He worked for another company when the founder and president was shot and paralyzed for life outside the courthouse where he was on trial for pornography. And then there was the company where one of the in-house mad scientists took an experimental laser ray up to a hillside overlooking a major metropolitan area to conduct an unauthorized, unsupervised, unhinged field test. Yet for all that, Employee X doesn’t think he’s ever quite seen anything like a company at the top of its industry with a 22 kt gold reputation turning the keys of its kingdom over to a cadre from an outside consultancy firm to conduct a “lean transformation.” You had to see it to believe it. Employee X saw it, and here he chronicles much of what happened before his disbelieving eyes. 

Judy 'n Dis Guy

I met Judy Clay on the sports pages of the Boston Globe about 3-4 years ago (it could be 5-6…I’ve suddenly reached a stage in my life where it’s become difficult to tell the days apart, let alone the years…but that’s a good thing). To borrow an expression from the CB community (breaker, breaker, Rubber Duck…), her handle was something like judy54 and mine was basildan (at least I think it was…I’ve also reached that stage where all my log-in names have blended together like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious).  We were frequent commentators on the blog of the redoubtable Charles Pierce. Easy for me since it was a sports blog primarily focused on Boston teams. Judy, on the other hand, was a Philly girl, and um, how do I put this…a girl…so it wasn’t as easy for her. Or, I should say, it shouldn’t have been. These male sports online communities do a grave disservice to the word community. They really are more like Lord of the Flies, and woe be to the naïf who wanders in without a conch to wave about. But Judy was fearless…and as important, she knew her sports.  She never backed down from (ahem) a debate, and as they say in locker rooms from coast to coast, she gave back as good as she got. 
Somewhere along the line, she dared to post an open invitation in one of Charlie’s threads for anyone interested to be her Facebook friend. This would be akin to walking into a bar and asking if anyone would like to use the new doilies you just made for their drinks. Well, yes, you can take the girl out of the sewing circle, but you can’t take the mom out of the girl. Call me sexist, but the nurturing, nesting, nuzzling gene is a powerful force in the weaker sex. And call me a puss, but I couldn’t resist her Facebook invitation. Over the months (or was it years?) of our back-and -forth in Charlie’s threads, I had come—in the words of Richard Benjamin to Ali McGraw in Goodbye, Columbus—to love her mind. She was sharp, funny, and prodigious in her writing, reading, and viewing habits.
A year later she and husband Rich traveled from their East Coast home to visit wife Lorna and me in our Southern California abode. In real life, Judy showed herself to also be prodigious in her consumption of Coors Lite and to have exquisite taste in Upstate New York wine (the gift bottle she brought still rests comfortably in my wine cellar waiting for just the right auspicious moment to uncork…or rather unscrew). We filled their two-day visit with talk of politics, and the memorable characters who inhabited Charlie’s blog (the passive-aggressive "massdolfan," the enigmatic professor who rambled away literally and figuratively, and the truly psychotic "T-butt"). We also held the first and only Donna Summer Memorial Pool Tournament in tribute to the Disco Diva who had just died (like Judy, she worked hard for her money….)
Most recently, Judy eventually coaxed some of the more manly men from Charlie’s old sports blog days to join Facebook, and then she recruited a hardcore group of lefties, atheists, cynics, and groupies (and The Man himself) from Charlie’s new digs at Esquire to create a very exclusive, high-toned salon at Facebook where everybody not only knows your name, but your game, and nobody much gets away with anything.
Judy sends me priceless gifts that she picks up at yard sales, provides me with moral support in my weekly attacks on the windmills of my mind, and has proven to be--in just two brief face-to-face visits, but in countless internet exchanges--one of the best friends in my life. I take time here to mention all this because there is a great deal of paranoia about making connections on the Internet (and surely I would be in that group if I had accepted, say, a T-butt invitation to be Facebook friends...or fiends as it were), and I just want to put it out there that it can work in very rewarding ways. I also mention it because today’s Judy’s birthday…and this is my long-winded way of telling her Happy Birthday.    Judy's gifts to Dan. How could I ever repay her?