election time

Well, the stage is set and the game of politics is on. Make no bones about it, I am voting for Obama and Biden. There are several major reasons for this:

1. The power of incumbency is too great for the republicans to create real change. There will be too many residues from Bush that they cannot get rid of and these rats must be flushed out of Washington.
2. McCain is 72. My Dad died at 72. I do not believe that there is any person at 72 that has enough vigor for this job. Especially not a man that has had melanoma. He is a good man, just not the man for the job.
3. It is the youth of this country that must bear the brunt of dealing with the major issues of our time, clean energy, the allocation of the commons, social justice, etc., globally. We need someone that can represent both generations.
4. Pallen is an abomination. This is a family that thinks it is OK to bring 5 children into the world. If every family on the planet had 5 children, we would all be over run. She says that this choice is a family choice and yet she want to legislate such choice for others. Nutcase. George Bush has shown us what an anti-intellectual, god fearing, fundimentalist can do. Do we want more?
5. Obama is smart. He is well educated. He is vigorous. He represents his generation. He has Joe Biden.
6. I do not think most people want less government. I think they want a government that works. We have seen what happens when the private sectors is given the power to make socially correct decisions. Fanny Mae and Mac are great examples. We will not hear the republicans fight this govt. takeover because its the only way to stop this private sector, poorly run trillion dollar business from crashing our economy. The airlines are next and maybe GM. People will expect the govt to step in and fix it because the market has no soul and no social outlook...by definition.

This can go on and on. Obama will make mistakes. He will not make severe ones because in his own way he is conservative and he will have great advisors. What he does have going for him is can link more that 5 words together, he reads, he understands the issues of health care and environment, and he understands the importance of local economies. He understands that we are in a rapidly expanding global circumstance, and that we must dialogue with everyone, friends and enemies.

I have had enough republicans, its time to give the other party a chance. How much worse could they screw it up?

Generic America

After 22 years of growing up and education, my wife and I deposited our daughter at graduate school last week to become a doctor of audio logy. It was a big experience and one that most parents hope for. I am very proud of her and the challenge she is undertaking.

This also gave me the opportunity to drive from Elon, North Carolina, to Mobile, Alabama. It is a drive of almost 700 miles and for the most part, the roads are in great shape. Here are some observations from the trip:

America is now almost exactly the same. Whether you in NJ or in Al, all the cities along a major highway have the same stores, the same restaurants, and the same banks and hotels. We are now generic America.

One thing we always do on trips, is to look for, (and it is becoming harder), to find the “local” spots, i.e., the places that are regional and local to a place.

Many local folks eat at the chains. They are full of people. Why is this when the local places are so good?

The Gulf Coast looks like a tough place to be. Dauphine Island off Mobile has about every other house for sale. The locals say it is due to high insurance costs. Insurance premiums are now almost $10k per year. $10k can buy a lot of exclusive vacation time in a very exotic locale. I suspect that the Gulf coast is what the entire coastal area of the US will look like after global warming has impacted fully.

Did you know that asphalt is made from oil? It is the bottoms of the crude oil fraction that is polymerized and laid down with gravel. So, not only are we dependant on oil as fuel but also oil as roads. This story just keeps getting deeper all the time.

I had some really good friends that watered my orchard while I was away and the temperatures rose above 100F for a week. Bless them for doing that.

People from the South are just gracious and nice. They go out of their way to be hospitable.

The Boiling Pot in Mobile has the best friend shrimp I have ever eaten. It is not a chain.

100 degrees for days on end will sap your strength and energy.

The average speed on I-85 is 74 miles per hour from Elon to Montgomery. If it was not for a couple of spots of construction, I suspect it would be close to 80 mph.

It was less stressful, riding in the car for 12 hours and driving, that it would have been flying to Mobile. We would have had to change planes twice and the difference would have only been 4 hours less, net-net.

That's all for now.

Sam

Las Vegas is not a good place

I recently went to Las Vegas with some very good friends. It was my second trip there, the first time I did more than spend one night. I was shocked at the number of children there. Why would anyone bring a child to such a place? The food was mostly bad and very expensive (there were exceptions). We went to visit the new Indian sponsored glass bridge on the west rim of the Grand Canyon, only to find it was almost $200 bucks a person to see it, and this was after a 4 hour drive, the last 22 miles over the worst dirt road I have ever been on in a normal car. Everywhere you go, the focus of the place and the people is to part you from your money. I am ashamed of a country that sees this as the future of entertainment.

It is a shitty place.

Ending and beginning

After over 30 years of getting up every morning and going to work in the family business, one day this week I will go into Burlington Chemical, and the place will be owned by someone else. We signed all the papers Friday to sell the company because we were unable to overcome the challenges of managing a community based company in a globalized market. It has been a sad 10 years, riding the bike backwards, leveraging the assets of the firm, trying to find the key that unlocked the value that we knew, just knew had to be there. Unfortuately, we failed. Not due to lack of effort, imagination, or even in the beginning cash flow, it was a lack of understanding of one of the fundimentals of market economics and indeed of life itself. Sometimes, somthing must die for others to live. Our company lived within a community that had been the lifeblood of a region, that being the textile community. It was a community that was not without problems, poor labor relations, a history of environmental and social exploitations, cotton dust, toxic chemicals, but it was a community that had survived and improved itself over hundreds of years, and now it, along with our company, it has moved on to someone or somewhere else.

I suspect that somewhere over in China, there is a person that sees the opportunties in the growing textile industry there, and I hope that the chinese textile community can support this person and perhaps his family through several generations, granting the boon of success and teaching from the failures and nurturng these families through the business of life. My Dad went to church each day he set his foot in Burlington Chemical. The place he built and the spirit and the opportunity that grew there was felt by most that labored for our customers.

He died a couple of years ago, knowing that unless something radical happened, the two generations of our family that worked to build that firm, would be the last to find success there. The world had changed. We could not change fast enough to find our new community. Oh, we are in good company, Interstate 85 is littered with the ghost of plants and the textile museums telling the stories of the good old days, in fact, one of the most successful textile mills in Concord has been torn down and a biotech research center has been developed. From the splicing of cotton yarn to the splicing of genes, same old process, one just being done at 10 to the minus 9th and one being done of the back of macro industial technology.

Just as I know that I and every person I know will die, the old ways are also dying. I do not have a good value judgement for that. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it matter? Damned if I know, but I do know that lots of good folks and some part of my heart and reality are gone. They teach us now that change is good and that change and the ablity to change is the only true competitive atvantage. I suspect that with technology cycles in acceleration and trade cycles mimicing technology, that the race will keep getting faster and faster and success will be based on being able to change. This leaves all of us with one simple reality, and that is the relationships we have with other people and with the planet are our only constants.

I do not know how to feel about the business going to someone else. I can only hope that the company will florish and that under a new leadership and with new financing, the firm will find a new value proposition that works. It will not be ours. We will not create the heroic turnaround story we were all working so hard for. This will be someone else's story and someone else's success or failure. For me, there must be a new reality, a new reason to get up and get going in the morning. There will never be another time and another slice of life that is what was. All that is left is memories, ghosts, and good stories.

Knee replacement surgery- The straight scoop on the first 6 weeks

I am a 51 year old guy who had a bad knee due to an auto accident when I was 18 years old. The knee finally was so deficient that replacement was the only option. This is the story of my surgery and recovery through the first 6 weeks.


Prior to the surgery, one must arrange for a couple units of blood to be given, just in case you need it. I did not need it. Most everyone also attends a series of training classes to tell you what to expect from the surgery and the various things that will go on after the surgery. I found these educational classes very good and really dropped the pre-surgery anxiety levels.

The day of the surgery, we arrived at the hospital on time and waited around to be called. The anesthesiologist showed up in the pre-op area about 10 minutes before the surgery and inquired if there was anything he needed to know. I did not find this comforting. He then proceeded to prep my IV’s, gave me a shot of something to relax me and then insert a spinal block to be activated after the surgery for pain control.

We were transported to the operating room and I went to sleep.

When I woke up in recovery, I was in a great deal of pain because the spinal block did not work. They tried to insert another, and it did not work. Then they gave me some big shot of pain killers and my heart rate dropped very low and off I went to ICU.

In ICU they put in the morphine “drug buddy” and the pain was controlled very well. This ends day one.

From day two until day four when they send you home, you are in pain or you are out of it from the drugs. There is a lot of pain and the pain control is not very good. Sometime during day three, they take out your catheter and the morphine drug buddy, and change you over to oral Oxy-cotton and Percoset. This takes the edge off the pain, but you still have sizeable discomfort. You get PT in the hospital and this hurts a lot and you must keep your leg as straight as you can to gain extension.

Then, after day four, you take your discomfort and go home. It is good to be home and you have about 10 days to two weeks worth of Percoset and oxy-cotton prescribed. When this runs out, you get a milder pain reducing drug. During that time you have physical therapy at home daily and sometime after 14 days post op, you change over to outpatient PT.




During week three and week 4 things begin to improve, but the pain is not really reduced significantly until after 4 weeks. During this time, it is important to do your PT with as much vigor as possible to gain strength in the quads and the knee. It is only after you get this strength that the pain of walking and moving about decreases. It is really quite remarkable the progress that you make in PT as the bone pain from the surgery diminishes and the stretching and tearing of scar tissues begins. This scar tissue pain is not nearly as bad as the bone pain and is easily controlled with Hydrocodone and/or Tylenol.

Week 5 and 6 are much better as you get off the narcotics and your head, bowels and physical abilities begin to return.

Final comments-

This surgery is brutal. The recovery period is 6 weeks. You will be out of commission for 4-6 weeks and may not be able to work. PT is the most gratifying part of this process. Your body is greatly traumatized by this surgery. You are weak, depressed and homebound for a long time. This was new to me and I did not suffer it gladly. Day-time TV sucks pretty badly and unfortunately for 4 of the 6 weeks the drugs made me unable to write or read very productively. I was tired most of the time and did not begin to feel better, really, until week 5.

This is surgery that changes people’s lives. I can tell that my new knee will be better than my old worn out one. However, this is major surgery and should not be taken or entered into lightly.

Doctor’s and hospitals are making millions of dollars from this surgery and performing many of these procedures every week. The attention to post-op pain control was not what it should have been for me. My patient care was not as good as I had experienced in the past, and this may be mostly due to the inability to adequately control the post-op pain. The latter stages of pain from PT, are not so bad because you can see progress every day. The first two weeks post-op are pretty bad and you will need some good care during this period.

If I were to do this again, hindsight being 20/20, I would demand a premeeting with the anesthesiologist, not on the day of the surgery, and I would make clear my demands for as much pain control as is necessary. There is still too much triage by experienced nurses on the floor not allowing for adequate pain control. If my post-op pain had been in better control and I had not had the additional trauma caused by inadequate care, my experience with this would have been better. All’s well that ends well is OK, but find a hospital and a surgeon that understands the care needed and get some feedback from someone that has been through the procedure at that facility. I had a great surgeon and a mediocre hospital, which provided for a less than satisfactory surgical experience.

Linking production and consumption

I attended the Sustainable North Carolina conference yesterday, where workshops and awards were presented. There was a much larger attendance than I expected and it was a very diverse group of folks. From lobbyist and lawyers, that were getting to know their adversaries, to the Birkenstock crowd that were pushing green products and services, it was evident that sustainable is of interest to a wide cross section.

What was not discussed yesterday, and what I find is hardly ever discussed in US conferences, are the links between consumption and production. I my opinion, this is the topic that must become the core topic of these conferences, because it is at the root of the matter of sustainable. .. And also a key issue for enterprise.

I keep coming back to the ethics of globalization of markets in the light of a complete lack of global social and environmental policy. Why are we so tolerant of inefficiency in government and policy and so intolerant of it inside of enterprise? We become excited at lower prices at the gas pump and at Wal Mart, but are apathetic when our government performs terribly after Katrina. The whole Katrina incident is indicative of how poorly the the government performs. I will also say that our military is also a key indicator. Give me an almost unlimited budget and the latest technology and I too can succeed militarily against an enemy 25 years behind me in battle tech. So could any other country in the world. One thing for sure the Bush government can do, is to through money at a problem...But this does not mean it is money well spent, it is just spent

I think the real issues are boundary issues. Can we agree on the objectives for our planetary ecosphere and then develop a life style to live within the boundaries? Does this have to be a life style of an austere monk? I don't think so.

I would hope that the next government will address two issues: The first is to achieve energy independence for the US. This will create millions of jobs and drive clean tech investment. The second is to socialize the medical system. If any incoming government will address and then achieve these two objectives, the country will be more stable, her people more productive, and we can spend some of this obscene military budget on domestic issues and make the US the most desired place to live in the world...And do it by creating opportunity within the boundaries of what is sustainable and important.

Change got to come soon.

Personal Mastery and Mental Models in Action-


At 51, I know that I am an accumulation of my education, genetic make up, experiences and environment. These attributes are what creates my personality or the skills I use to get by in life. Peter Senge calls this “personal mastery” and I like this metaphor. Senge also stresses the need for a person to always push, through continuous learning, the boundaries of one’s “personal mastery” so that it is ever expanding. As a life long learner and a person of much curiosity, I enjoy learning and experiencing new things. I have always thought that one of my strengths has been the application of my “personal mastery” to Society-Business challenges and developing inventive ways to approach these problems and make money.

For a person to see these challenges and find solutions, one must feel and understand how an individual’s “personal mastery” provides value into the world at large, i.e., where one sits and fits in the world. We all create what Senge calls “mental models”, which I can further define as the reality framework we all use to rationalize our place and value in society. Without mental models, we could all be really smart learners, but for what. Without personal mastery, we could all understand our place in the world, but be unable to change it or improve on it.

I think both of these attributes are important for individuals and organizations. These attributes are two of the 5 disciplines described in Senge’s famous book, The 5th Discipline. In this book, Senge discusses teams and organizational learning, etc., but I want to focus today these first two attributes, personal mastery and mental models, and how the interrelation of these two seem to be the yin and yang of personal happiness… at least for me. I have been much troubled lately about how technologically advanced we are in the US, but how we lag much of the rest of the world in relating our skills to the broader world. The song writer, John Prine, talks about people being forced to “live in their heads” and I think this means that as we internalized our personal mastery and lose mental models of how to build great things and provide value to society with our skills, we stand to lose balance.

When one of these disciplines weakens or is disrupted, this balance of learning for a purpose, or learning to maintain your mental model, is disrupted. If one is unable to continue to learn, one is certainly stuck in one place, for the world is always changing and requiring you to survive. What happens however when you do have the ability to learn and have a positive mental model for your place and value in the world, and then your external world of your mental model is disrupted?

I have seen several examples of this in my life. The first was when I was struck by a car in my 18th year and my physical world changed forever. One minute you are a fine specimen of a young man, and the next you have a damaged, gimpy leg for the rest of your life. This requires change in “personal mastery” to regain your mental model of where you are going to fit and find joy in life. Obviously, you cannot continue on to your college wrestling career and you must find a different route, through creation of a new mental model to create success and joy. At 18 years of age I was able to do this, thanks to my parents, Elon College, and due to the fact that at 18, we are all fairly pliable and the friction preventing change from your past is not so great. (With only 18 years, one is not so set in their ways)

The second example that I saw was my grandfather Rose, who only had a 3rd grade education and was a craftsman dyer. When there was a technological shift in the dyeing industry that made his craft obsolete, he did not have the education, (personal mastery), to change. He could not adapt. He lost his mental model for value creation because there was no further demand for his skills, and he did not have the self confidence nor the desire to learn a new way of doing. He died of alcohol in his early 50s, a person with little confidence, and too much money to buy alcohol.

The third example was my Pop, who had the education to change but grew so accustomed and set in his ways that as he aged and his health declined, and as the pace of change in business increased, he was unable to find a mental model that fit his aging abilities. He died quite an unhappy person at 72, with feelings of uselessness, feeling that he had a total lack of control over anything, and a very poor self image, and this occurred for a person who could have written a book about the American dream.

At 51, I find myself in a similar situation. My poor old leg requires a knee replacement, I am 30-40 pounds overweight, we have been unable to turn our business around, and I am staring straight into the abyss of my mortality through the death of my father and now the cancer in my Mother. I am seeking to find a mental model for the final quarter of my life. I grapple daily with thinking about how things have changed and how little control all of us have over anything. What is the point of life in America after your have lost your youth? I had hoped to use my personal focus on sustainability and my farm, as a post to which to anchor my mental model. However, the older you get, the less physical work you can really do, and I have become disillusioned with lack of anyone or any organization to seek sustainability. I am afraid that much of what we see advertised as sustainable change is really just another face of marketing and does not represent a rebirth or evolution of capital markets or social behavior.

The wisdom that comes from age is of little use in a technological age where businesses want flexibility, technological savvy within a 5 year business life-cycle. I find that all of these trends are opposed to what I feel is the direction that I need to go, which is to slow down, think, and act: to produce positive change in local environmental and social issues, to be a model of how to live a simple happy life.

I am unable to bring about change with my leg without entering the rat race of the medical system. I will have the surgery and pursue the PT and this is the best I can do. This replacement makes me even more dependent on medicine and doctors for the rest of my life.

There are no longer any changes that I can make in the business that are significant to it. I have shot my wad. My creative juices can no longer flow. We will hold on and continue to attempt to find a niche in which we can prosper, but I no longer have the zeal or believe in the operation of a business as a noble pursuit. I used to think that there was no nobler calling, than to be an ethical businessman. I used to believe that business was the best amplifier for ethical change because it influenced the breadth and depth of society. I think this has been removed from domestic enterprise by globalization.

Global business is a fickle mistress. Hard work, astute ethical management of a business is no longer the key to success in this global economy. Success will be measured on how fast you can get into a business with new ideas or services, build its cash production, and how fast you can liquidate it. There are no longer the profit margins in mature businesses to fund evolution and revolution at the same time. So either you clip your coupons until the coupons cannot be paid and the business dies, or you sell it to free up capital to start the next great thing. You cannot do both in the same business, unless there is great separation between business units. It certainly cannot happen in an SME with limited organizational and economic resources.

So the conundrum is how rapidly can expertise be grown, and how astute can management be in realizing when to liquidate. This also means that much of what they are teaching in MBA schools for excellence in operational management and contribution for an individual should be viewed in 5 year blocks.

The question for me is where to find a place where I can make a contribution for a new business?