Quietly Re-Thinking Out Loud

From the Dharma-Haven.org website a good explanation of one of W. Edwards Deming’s lessons for us:

What I find particulary interesting is "The people work IN a system" and "The job of a manager is to work ON the system," in that that is at the core of the message that Michael Gerber talks about in his books The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It and The E-Myth Contractor : Why Most Contractors’ Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It and Susan M.Carter writes about in her book How To Make Your Business Run Without You.

by: Jerrald Hayes

Peter F. Drucker 1909-2005

Many years ago my girlfriend at the time once commented that I was never lonely in that when I wasn’t spending my time with her or someone else I would just go down to the shop and and paint while listening to music or get wrapped up in a book. She said that way I was always hanging around with virtual friends like Bruce Springsteen, Aaron Copland, or Tom Peters.

It struck me as a little bit ironic then when this morning I learned through Joe Ely’s Learning About Lean blog this morning that Peter F. Drucker had died. What was ironic was that Joe Elys post started by saying:

How do you describe a dear friend whom you have never met? Further, how do you explain the pit in the stomach when that dear friend dies? Which is what I feel this evening upon just learning of Peter Drucker’s death earlier today…..read more>

I wasn’t as well up on Peter Drucker as Joe Ely was but he was a friend and teacher of one of my dear friends that I have never met, Tom Peters. What I did read and listen to (audio tapes & CDs) of Peter Drucker came from Tom Peters mention of him. What I did know was that he was a remarkable thinker and that:

" …he preached that employees were a resource, not a cost." (from the NYTimes obit )

also from the New York Times:

As his career progressed and it became clearer that competitive pressures were keeping businesses from embracing many practices he advocated, like guaranteed wages and lifetime employment for industrial workers, he became increasingly interested in "the social sector," as he called the nonprofit groups.

Mr. Drucker counseled groups like the Girl Scouts to think like businesses even though their bottom line was "changed lives" rather than profits. He warned them that donors would increasingly judge them on results rather than intentions. In 1990, Frances Hesselbein, the former national director of the Girl Scouts, organized a group of admirers to honor him by setting up the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management in New York to expose nonprofits to Mr. Drucker’s thinking and to new concepts in management.

He certainly will be missed but his influence will be felt through those who learned from him for a long long time.

Godspeed.

by: Jerrald Hayes

I think it was in researching employee ownership or growth that I first came across and read about Marthas’s Vineyard based The South Mountain Company. From an article SMC owner Jon Abrams wrote in the Journal of Light Construction entitled Taking the Pain Out of Growth I must have googled his company to learn more. On their website I read THE SMC STORY and felt there was lot in SMC I could model the company I would want to build after.

I don’t recall now how I stumbled across it but last week I found out that John Abrams had written a book on his company called The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place and I ordered it right away. During my coffee break earlier this morning I started the book and read the Forward and the first chapter entitled Cornerstones. While I’m going to make every effrot to read this book as fast as I can I think it’s going to take me a while. For me at least I think there is going to be a lot in the book to highlight, notate, and think about.

Right there at the start of the book was a passage that spoke to me:

"Along the way, as we have become a part of this place, we have come to sense that we are not only at the beginning, that our endeavors— and our company—may have, or can aspire to have, some of the enduring qualities of qualities of the buildings we fashion."I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have built some very artistic and beautiful projects that I know will be there a hundred years from now but what has eluded me till know is being able to build "a company" that with that same kind of enduring quality.

A few passages later Jon Abrams goes on to write:

" ….We not only build houses, we build connections and bonds between people, between people and land, and between commerce and place. We are organized around the idea of maintaining and perpetuating an ongoing business community. We think we are crafting a company to keep.

I think that may be the key. It’s about building connections and bonds between people, land, their homes, and commerce.

Jon Abrams describing how he learned about and discovered the cornerstones of his business ideology:

"
The stone mason sorts through a pile of material to find just the right stones for the base, the corners, the fillers, the stretcher that lock the wall together, and the capstones to finish it off. he discovers the wall as he builds it, as I found the cornerstones of our business"

About Growth:

"
At South Mountain we favor certain kinds of growth, but not expansion for it’s own sake, which author Edward Abbey described as ‘the ideology or the cancer cell’…
….When we grow it is intention rather than in response to demand. We think about "enough" rather than "more" — enough profits to retain and share, enough compensation for all, enough health and well-being, enough time to give our work the attention it deserves, enough communication, enough to manage, enough to headaches"

All this from just the first chapter.

Ya know how every once in a while you crack open a book and in reading the first chapter you get real excited and start to think wow this is going to be great. Well I think this is one of them. I know there some people here who will really hate this book (maybe that’s why I like it so much) but I also can think of many more people here who I know who will really indentify and appreciate it.

There will be more on what I’m thinking and learning as I read on. Anyone else want to join in the discussion? If so drop in to Fine Homebuilding’s Breaktime Forum or The Journal of Light Construction’s Business Strategies Forum and speak your mind.

by: admin