Month: October 2008

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Organic Farming (Hunting & Fishing Too)

My cousin Ray Jr and his wife Carol live simply amid the eskers and moraines of Wisconsin in a place they call simply paradise.   They are farming around twenty acres and using about twenty acres of woodland to provide forest products and fuel for their stoves.   Ray told me that the detritus of the forest provides all the fuel he needs to keep his home warm all winter long.  He has yet to cut a live tree for fuel.  

Below are raspberries

They are organic farmers growing thing like garlic, peppers, tomatoes, raspberries, corn and pumpkins for sale at local markets.  The garden crops such as garlic and raspberries are the most profitable, but also (perhaps because) most labor intensive.   Tomatoes are very much in demand early in the season, but as the bounty comes in it becomes almost difficult to give them away.   Anybody who has grown tomatoes in a home garden is aware of this phenomenon. 

Below – Ray & his bushhog

Ray follows a kind of three field system, like those used in the Middle Ages.  Crops are rotated and one field is always resting, fallow or with cover crops that will be plowed under to restore the soil.   Ray says that the chief activity of an organic farmer is keeping the weeds down all summer long. 

Below is a game animal exhibit at Cabella’s

In winter he works in the woods.  There are two reasons for this.  The most obvious is that other work on the farm is diminished during the non-growing season.  But another reason is lack of mosquitoes and biting flies that make the woods miserable when they are around.   (A silly, but true story about my running comes from the same motivation.  I liked to walk in the woods, but the mosquitoes made life unpleasant for me walking so I started to run.  The mosquitoes find you by zeroing in on the CO2 you exhale.  Running leaves it well behind you and the little nasties are chasing smoke.)

I enjoyed driving to his house up HWY 41.  I used to go this way to get to Stevens Point and I have a history with the Kettle Moraine area.  I had a camp nearby when I was ten years old.  We learned all about the local glacier landforms, such as kettles, moraines, eskers and drumlins.  I also used to ride my bike here a lot.  It is hard on the legs. The moraines make it a roller coaster ride. 

The moraines are the places where glaciers stopped.  They come in series, like ripples, as the ice advanced or retreated.  They call the most recent ice age the Wisconsin and you can see the most interesting landforms from that period right here north and west of Milwaukee.  Most of Wisconsin was under glaciers until around 10,000 – 15,000 years ago, when global warming (it happened then too) melted them, but not all.  Chrissy’s parents’ farm near Lacrosse is in what they call the driftless or the coolie region. That region was not glaciated in the last ice age, so it is rougher, but it was not spared the ice age experience.  Coolies are long narrow valleys formed by the flow of glacial melt water.   Fall is a beautiful time in all parts of Wisconsin.

On the way home I stopped at Cabela’s at the junction of 41 and 43.  Cabela’s is a more authentic store than LL Bean or Eddie Bauer, which have repositioned themselves as yuppie heavens these days.  Cabela’s still celebrates the actual hunting, shooting, eating and stuffing of game animals.  They sell everything from the cloths you need to be outside, to the rifles and bows to the meat processing equipment.  Beyond that, the prices are very reasonable. I have shopped the catalogue but this is the first time I have been in one of the stores.  It is almost like a vacation destination.

Above is Leon’s Custard.  Milwaukee makes the best custard.  It is better than ice cream and is made with cream and eggs.  Leon’s was used in the movie “American Graffiti” and some outside views of Arnold’s in “Happy Days”.   It is on 27th St (old Hwy 41) in Milwaukee.

On the side is a sugar maple tree. I just cannot get enough of that beautiful color.  

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Beer and Sauerkraut

I went with my sister to the Miller brewery and then around the old neighborhood.  Below are the boiler vats.   They are eighteen feet deep.

Miller Genuine Draft is good beer.  Miller Highlife & Miller Lite are not.  Miller also has a partnership with Leinenkugel, which is very good and it distributes Pilsner Urquell and Fosters, both of which are among my favorite beers.    It was fun to see where they were made. 

This is King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer.  This statue is in the “cave”, caverns dug into the hill where they used to keep beer cold before refrigeration.  They used to gather ice from the local lakes during the winter and pack it around in the caverns.  This cooled the temperature during the summers.  Evidently the ice would last until the next winter.  People lived closer to their environment in those days.   You have to be more innovative if you have to do more than flick a switch to get air conditioning.

The plant in Milwaukee makes a half million cases of beer a day and all this beer moves out EACH day.  This plant serves the upper Midwest and around 40% of the beer goes to Chicago.  Five other plants around the country serve other regions.  

BTW – According to the Bier Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law) issued by Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1516 all beer sold can be made of only malted barley, hops, water, and yeast.   This rule still applies on Germany.   Beer can be made from any grain.  Miller mixes in some corn with the other ingredients and Budweiser uses rice.  That means by German rules these are not really beers.

Only 1600 people work at the plant and half of them are corporate staff.  That means that around 800 workers make all that beer.  The plant is mostly automated.  I was thinking again re the loss of jobs.  Those jobs have not gone to China; they have just gone away.  below is the Miller warehouse, clean, tidy and almost w/o workers.  A half million cases will move through it today.  You can easily see the jobs that automation takes.

On the other hand, other jobs are created but hard to see.   My cousin Tony works for a company that runs webpages called www.officefurniture2go.com and www.homefurniture2go.com.   The firm was founded in 2006, has about a dozen employees and distributes furniture around the country – w/o a significant bricks and mortar operation.  We still think in the old industrial model where lots of people come together in one place.  The new model has people distributed thinly and in small groups.   It is hard to get used to it.

Anyway, we had another beautiful fall day.  Milwaukee has nice parks as you can see from the pictures. Above and below is Humboldt Park.  Pictures cannot capture such a glorious day.  Even if the visuals could be perfect, you would not have the smell, sound and feel of the day.

I also drove down to Franksville.  It is not a major tourist spot.  It used to be where they made Franks Kraut.  I don’t know if they still do, but I did see lots of cabbage fields.  The brand is actually owned by the Ohio based Fremont Company, makers of all sorts of Kraut and catsup.  Franksville is interesting for me because it was for a long time the edge of my biking world, as far south as I could reasonably ride and return in one day.   It is still familiar.  below is a cabbage patch.

Below a pumpkin patch near Franksville in Racine County.

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Indian Summer in Milwaukee

Below is Lake Michigan looking south from Warnimont Park.

Indian summer is always a bittersweet time.  The warm sun shining through colorful leaves is delightful, especially mixed with the smell of the new fallen leaves and the sound of their rustling underfoot.  But this is also an ending.  The last flowers of summer are on hanging lonely on their stalks.   The falling leaves will soon leave branches bare.  Pleasant October will yield to rainy and bleak November and we will have to wait several months for exuberant life to return to the forests and field.

Below is Boerner Botanical Gardens in Whitnal Park

Indian Summer is often a metaphor for life with its last vigorous but perhaps futile & melancholy gesture.   It essentially one of the characters in John Wayne’s last movie, “The Shootist”.   The poem “the Last Rose of Summer” sums it up.   (I put the full text at the bottom of this post.)

Below is Austin Street where I grew up looking north.  Those beautiful yellow trees are ash trees planted after the death of our elms.  They were planted in the middle of the 1970s.  The one on the right I repaired after a wind storm broke its branches.  It was smaller then.

Metaphor aside, October is my favorite month and Milwaukee’s October did not disappoint.  I visited some of my old haunts.  Many things have changed; most things have remained the same or similar.  

Below is a statue of Patrick Cudahy in Sheraton Park.  Cudahy founded the city that bears his name when the opened a meat packing operation south of Milwaukee.  

Below is Tadesuz Kosciuszko the Polish American hero in the park that bears his name.   The Polish epic Pan Tadeusz is based on him.  Interestingly, it starts “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie.”  Lithuania my country, you are like good health.  Of course nationality is always complicated.  The most famous Polish epic, written in Polish about a Pole can talk about Lithuania because they were part of the same commonwealth, which was lost, swallowed by its more agressive neighbors in 1795.  It was gone for 123 years.  That means that most Poles who came to the U.S. were not technically coming from Poland; they came from Russia, Austria or Germany, the countries that had annexed Poland and controlled its parts.  Pan Tadeusz goes on with some poingancy, ” I never knew till now how precious, till I lost thee. Now I see thy beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.”  Poles didn’t get their country back until 1918.  The Lithuanians lost theirs again in 1940 and didn’t get it back until the fall of the Soviet Union.  When I see the statue, I am reminded of the struggle.  This was a Polish neighborhood and people knew the story back then.   Today most people probably just see a man on a horse and think it is George Washington.

Speaking of a Polish neighborhood, this is Saint Josaphat’s Basilica, built by Polish immigrants.  Milwaukee has lots of churches near each other.  Each immigrant group built its own. We used to see it in the distance from our house.  It was lit up at nights and my sister and I thought it looked kind of like some kind of giant monster. It was scary.  You can see how this might be the case. Look at the “eyes”.

Below are geese flying into the pond in Kosciuszko Park.   The geese chase away the ducks. In this goose-duck war, the ducks are completely outclassed.  Geese used to be rare, but now they are all over the place.   They are bigger and more aggressive than the ducks and they crap all over the place.  Eventually, I suppose they will come to replace the ducks in the local ecology.  They also used to migrate, but now many stick around all year living off the fat of the land (and the local gardens)

Don’t forget the poem

Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
To give sigh for sigh.

I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one!
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go, sleep thou with them.
Thus kindly I scatter,
Thy leaves o’er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.So soon may I follow,
When friendships decay,
From Love’s shining circle
The gems drop away.

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Colorful World

Right outside the Window

The sun is lower in the sky in October and it enhances colors in the evening.   You don’t have to be at some beautiful outlook to see it.  I was just sitting on my couch at home when I was struck by the beauty of the light playing on the leaves outside.   I watched it for a little while and then I thought I would take a picture to share it.  Beauty really is everywhere. It is enhanced by the soundtrack of the birds singing and the crickets chirping as night falls.

 My New Truck

I just got a new truck.  Speaking of colors, it is a very bright red.  I wanted to get an off-white one that would reflect the heat in July and would not show scratches and dents so much, but everybody else wanted the red one.  I need a truck for the tree farm.   The new farm is off the paved road and the small, low-clearance Civic Hybrid just can’t make it over the dirt road.

This is a Ford Ranger.  It is the smallest truck you can get and the mileage is not so bad.  This one is supposed to get 19 MPG in the city and 24 on the highway. 

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Unpopular Thoughts on Energy

I was reading the new book by Tom Freidman called “Hot, Flat and Crowded” re new green industries.  Freidman says that President Bush should have imposed a stiff tax on imported oil right after 9/11.  There would have been support for the sacrifice and the tax would have taken money out of the pockets of many people who don’t like us and probably avoided the crisis we face today.  I agree on this point.  Now we see oil prices falling from their highs and I am afraid we are about to fall into a trap of cheap oil – again.  Below are some things I wrote a while back with some updates.   

Most conspiracy theories are as nutty as the people who believe in them and I hate to be associated with those guys in any way, but I think that there is a glaring example that we all see but don’t notice. There is the periodic lowering of oil prices.The oil market is not free. Governments control most crude oil and often oligarchs and despots control these governments. They make decisions based more on political than economic factors. Market forces constrain the their choices and they cannot completely ignore the forces of supply in demand, but they have stumbled on a kind of a whipsaw strategy to earn higher profits than the market would pay them in the long run by LOWERING prices in series of short terms.

We have seen this happen twice already and I am afraid we will get a third dose of it within a couple of years.   Already oil prices are dropping.  We foolishly welcome the cheap fuel and end up paying more in the long run. How does this work?Somewhere around $60-70 a barrel (adjusted for inflation) alternatives become competitive with oil and the higher the price goes, the more investment flows into alternatives. We saw that happen in the late 1970 until the early 1980s and we are see it happening now to an even greater extent. The problem with most alternatives is that there is a significant up-front investment. This includes research and development costs as well as capital investment in things like solar panels that might take several years to pay off.

When energy prices are high, investments in solar, wind or hybrid vehicles pays off quickly. When energy prices are low, such investments pay off slowly or maybe not at all.High energy prices provide a de-facto subsidy to alternative energy. Unstable energy prices make all energy investment uncertain.

Last year I attended a forestry convention where the theme was alternative energy from forestry residue (wood chips etc). The speakers were visionaries, talking about the great potential for alternative energies. Some of the guys around me looked skeptical. When I talked to them, it turned out that several had tried such things in the 1980s but lost their investments in the 1990s when the price of oil dropped through the floor. They recalled a similar, although smaller, such fluctuation in the middle of the 1970s. They were not going to jump on this bandwagon this time.It is true that market forces cause the price of oil to fluctuate. As prices rise, there is more exploration and development which naturally brings the prices down. But manipulation by governments greatly exacerbates market cycles and makes them pernicious. People like Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Vladimir Putin are not friends of free market democracy and are not enthusiastic about alternative energy sources that will cut into their profits and political power. They exercise their power to destabilize the energy market and make it a hostile environment for alternatives.

We are not helpless but our choices are limited. We cannot decree cheaper energy in the short run, but we can use market power against those who would keep us dependent on oil. The ironic way to lower energy prices and develop alternatives to oil in the long run is to make sure energy prices stay high in every short run.We cannot allow brief episodes of low prices to periodically destroy progress in alternatives and conservation. This happened in the 1990s. We foolishly welcomed these low prices and thought that the good times would roll forever.

Let’s scr*w the despots and declare independence from oil addiction. (Those who want to include American oil companies in this crowd, feel free to do so.) What we need to do is tax carbon and keep the price of oil up when it is coming down. It could be enacted in a simple fashion. Today the price of oil is high and we don’t think it will ever come down very far. Experience indicates this is mistaken. As oil prices come down, we should impose countervailing taxes to keep the drop from destroying our efforts to develop alternatives and invest in conservation strategies.Nothing works better or faster than price.  People talk a lot about raising fuel standards.  High prices do that naturally.   Otherwise raising standards doesn’t work, since people just drive more.   There just is no easy way to do this. 

I know what I am saying is deeply unpopular, especially this week when thoughts of the Great Depression are on so many minds.  We all like lower gas prices; we just cannot have them in the long run, but consistent and sustained higher prices in the short term will lead to lower price in the long run and it will help us break the hold foreign despots.  Wouldn’t it be great if Chavez, Ahmadinejad and Putin had less money?   A higher tax on oil will also help do that.  I generally don’t like taxes, but this is one we need.The oil pushers have fooled us at least twice. I am sure there are more examples, but there are two big ones I can recall. Let’s not give them a third shot.

Today’s Problems are Yesterday’s Solutions

Since we cannot always be right, we must be flexible and robust. As new information becomes available or conditions change, even the best decisions must be revisited and sometimes overturned. The ethanol debacle is a good example of both this idea and the pernicious effects government intervention in fouling up and calcifying the change and innovation mechanism.
Don’t burn fuel; grow it! What a great bumper sticker and the idea that a renewable, home-grown energy could replace dirty imported fossil fuels undeniably attractive. The devil is in the details, the execution & the fine tuning. Cf. a good article from last year.

First, let’s be clear. We do NOT have an energy crisis or even an energy problem in the real sense. We have a mix of energy choices. As we make different choices, options and consequences change. It is not a problem in the usual sense. Problems can be solved. This one is unsolvable. No breakthrough will save us. If it did, we would just expand our “needs” to encompass the new possibilities, as we did in the past. We can, however, manage the situation and change our energy mix. Nobody knows, because it is currently unknowable, what the optimal energy mix will be ten years from now. Some of the information we need to understand the upcoming situation and make sound decisions must be developed through trial and experimentation. Some sources and technologies that seem very promising today will prove unsuitable. They will need to be altered or abandoned w/o too much heartache or recrimination.

Wisdom lies not in knowing the best future, which is unknowable at current levels of technology & information. The appropriate solutions literally have not yet been developed. The best choices of 2025 are perhaps still not invented. Wisdom lies in having a system that can develop alternatives, smoothly transition from one option to another and easily course correct when appropriate. We need a system that allows people to imagine and innovate and then develop innovations into useful solutions. Fortunately, we have such a system.

This is something only the market can do. Government’s role is to point in the general direction of options that are politically acceptable. Within that broad constraint, however, government has no business picking winners of losers and it has no capacity to manage or micro manage the process. The more detailed instructions that politicians and bureaucrats give to those developing solutions, the less likely they are to succeed. The ethanol debacle is a good example. Government rule and subsidies are locking us into a technology and feed source that is proving a mistake. It is a QWERTY solution. (If you don’t know what a QWERTY solution is, take a look at your keyboard. This keyboard was designed to SLOW typists in the time of mechanical typewriters so they would not jam. Does your computer jam?)

The fundamental strength of the market is NOT its ability to choose the right choice. Rather it is the ability to try many solutions simultaneously, experiment and change course rapidly and smoothly. This is almost exactly the opposite of the skill set government bureaucrats and planners bring to the table and it is usually anathema to politicians trying to win votes. (Why didn’t they dump the ethanol subsidies last year?)

Ethanol from abundant American corn seemed a great idea. It was well worth the experiment and certainly some ethanol will be made profitably from corn in the future. It was NOT a bad decision, but unfolding events, new information and developing technologies over took it. The market can and to some extent is turning away, but the power of politics will prop up this sick horse for years to come. People in developing countries will go to bed hungry because of the good policies of the U.S. and Europe. Sometimes things go wrong BECAUSE of not in spite of our best efforts and every solution has the potential to become a problem. When condition change, we should change our minds too.

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Pixelated

I recently was asked about how I adjusted to life in Iraq.  State Department even has a course we have to take when we get back re adjustment.  They worry about our mental health in a high stress environment and they want to figure out how our experience can help the next group.  I don’t know how much my experience can help others.  Each experience is unique and I was lucky in my timing and my place.  I arrived in Anbar just as the violence was ebbing.  Given the extreme pessimism and scary stories in the media, I was ready for a horrible experience.  Instead there was steady improvement and strengthening peace.  It is much easier to adjust to better than expected conditions than the opposite.

Luck was also on my side in my decisions and the couple of hard decisions that turned out well.  For example, after a few successful attacks against Coalition Forces in Anbar and another PRT that resulted in deaths, some members of my team were feeling a bit skittish about all the travel we did outside the wire.  I determined that the successful attacks were just a statistical cluster and did not represent an actionable trend, so I put on the mask of certainty and told my staff that we would trust the ability of the Marines to keep us secure and continue our activities w/o pause.  We kept up our busy schedule and nobody got hurt.  Now we all feel brave and it was the right decision, but if it had turned out differently it would have been hard to take.  I respect my military colleagues, who often must make decisions that WILL result in people dying.    

There were not many heroic decisions I had to make.  Mostly I had to deal with the more prosaic problems of dirt, uncertainty and discomfort.   A lot of the same problems we have everywhere else, we have in Iraq.   I think being away from family and familiar surroundings is the hardest for most people.  It was hard for me.  There is a special sort of isolation in a place like Iraq.  I felt doubly away from home because there were few trees.  Everywhere else I have ever been I have always found ways to walk in the woods.  It is how I relax.  Not in Iraq.

You are reading one of the best things I did to adjust to isolation.  Keeping this blog and sharing my experience kept me feeling in touch and helped me in concrete ways. I could give my blog URL to people asking questions about Iraq.  Writing also helped me keep my own experience in perspective.   You take a different role when you try to explain something in writing to others. 

When reading the biographies of great individuals, I am always impressed by how much information there is about them in the form of letters, diaries and journals.  I am beginning to think that the relationship is casual in both directions, i.e. people who do important things keep journals and because they make the writer think through his ideas, journals help make people important. I have always kept journals, but never regularly.  I started to keep the blog because I thought that my experience in Iraq might be important enough for others to want to see.   I found that it helped me a great deal in the way I mentioned above and it made my thinking clearer and my actions more effective.   I recommend it to all.

I did other things experts recommend, such as keeping regular habits.  I would advise anyone living in a climate like Iraq’s to wake up at or a little before dawn during the summer months.  That is the time of the day when the weather is pleasant.  I like to run.  At 0530 running is good.  By 0800 it is already too hot and somebody who woke up at 0700 and did not get moving until around 0800 would only see experience the blistering heat and have that impression of Iraq.   You are smarter to change habits in winter.  In December it is cold in the morning, but nicely warm in the afternoon.  In that season it makes sense to wake up a little later and do your outdoor activities later in the day.  Actually nature gives you the directions.  The sun comes up later in winter, so if you just get up around dawn all the time, you have a good general schedule.   Iraq does not have daylight savings time, BTW. 

You don’t have to be in Iraq to be TOO busy.  Many people are too busy.  They brag about it, but it is no virtue.  I hate it when people claim to be too busy to read books or exercise regularly.  Nobody is that busy on a consistent basis.  They are just bad managers of their time.  I am not saying that there are not periods when you have to just work constantly, but if you do that too often it is like trying to sprint through a marathon race.  It is a losing strategy.  In Iraq, as everyplace else, I have carved out time to read and run.  People who don’t read don’t learn.  They end up wasting their time because of their bad judgment.  And people who don’t exercises slow down and/or die young.  Reading and exercise are investments, not expenses.  “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” calls such activities sharpening the saw.  It is harder and more effort to cut wood with a dull saw.  Taking a little time to sharpen saves time and energy. 

Finally, I think it is important to find the good and the fun in all situations and to learn from them.  There were so many interesting people & things in Iraq, so many things to experience, that it almost had to be an enriching experience.  Much depends on your attitude.  I always pity people who are too anxious to get away from or get to something.  They think that if they can just get somewhere or something different everything will be great.  This is rarely true.  No matter where you go, you have to take yourself along and if you are not happy with that who you are it won’t help to change your scenery.  In other words, if you are unhappy you probably should work on yourself before you work on other people or things. 

Anyway, what I said from my first days in Iraq remains true.   I am glad that I volunteered to go to Iraq and I am glad to be finished.  Both things were and are true.   I will add that right now I am glad to have the free time (State gave me fourteen working days of home leave) but I will also be glad to get back to regular work.  Nothing too much. 

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Iraq: After the Dust Washes Off

It is always like this when I come back from an overseas post. One day you are in the midst of a place, its events, culture and environment. It seems like the whole world. Then you are not. Iraq is like that, only more so, because being in Iraq is so unusual and so intense. You work long hours every day of the week, and you are immersed in it always. It gives you a special feeling of uniqueness, insulation and security. When I think back on the experience, it almost seems like I am remembering the events and details of somebody else’s life. But I know it was me, because I still have Iraqi dust on my boots.

For a year I was surrounded by Marines and team members who knew me or at least knew about me.   We were all members of one team, working together to accomplish a worthy goal.  We thought about HOW to overcome obstacles and achieve our purposes.  It never occurred to anybody to ask if we COULD do it. I miss the sense of purpose and the honor of being part of something big.   Back home people all have their own different problems.  Iraq has dropped off most of their radar screens. 

I never expected people to pay attention to all my stories.  I understand that I can talk longer than most people can listen.   But I am surprised at the general lack of interest in Iraq, which used to be and still is a big deal.   At first most people approach me sympathetically.  They thank me for my service and commiserate about the hardship of my ordeal.  They are a little disappointed when I explain that it was less exciting and not as bad as they heard.  And some seem almost offended when I tell them about the transformation that has taken place and the success we have achieved.   They really don’t want to hear about it.  I don’t think they believe me. 

Many Americans formed their impressions of Iraq based on the dicey and hard conditions on the ground in late 2006.  Rethinking their opinions in light of the vastly improved situation in Iraq hurts their brains.  They just want Iraq to go away and the possibility of success smacks of continued effort.  I am an intrusion into a comfortably settled belief pattern, as unwelcome as the skunk at a barbeque.

It will take a while before the significance of our success in Iraq sinks in and even longer for us to identify and explore all the options it opens and the challenges it creates.  Iraq will difficult and dangerous for a long time to come.  Changing long established conditions is hard and it takes time, but the trends are definitely positive.  Real change creeps up on little cats’ feet and we are often surprised to look around and see that things are not what we thought. 

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Leadership 2

On the side is  Taddeusz Kosciuszko in Layfayette Park across from the White House.  

I am still thinking about leadership for my upcoming seminar and working through the discussion questions.   The seminar is for guys like me recently promoted into the senior FS.  Part of it is held at the Foreign Service Institute.   We have a really nice campus in Arlington.  The other part is a week-long offsite in West Virginia.   I have great expectations for the seminar.  I figure that the best part will be the cross discussion with all the others with such broad international experience.  It is not the ordinary academic seminar.

My experience in Iraq sharpened my view on leadership.  I learned a lot from the Marines.   They do leadership very well.   The thing l liked about their style was the way that everybody took a responsible role.  It was a truly participatory management with a strong leadership component.  It seems paradoxical to have both, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. 

Competent subordinates demand good leaders and good leaders value (and do not fear) competent subordinates.   The leader who trusts his subordinates is showing his strength and understanding that sharing responsibility does not mean diminishing it.  Bad leaders often actually prefer bad subordinates that they can complain about and blame for failures.

In Iraq I observed and had to practice a assertive leadership style that you don’t always see in bureaucracies.  My toughest realization was that others were looking to me to take the lead and that I deserved to do it.  I have been in charge of organizations before, but in the bureaucracy you can lean on rules and spread decision making.   We work with committees.  It is rarely any individual’s responsibility.   That is why thing don’t happen very fast.

One of the hurdles I had to jump in my leadership learning in Iraq was very prosaic.   It may sound comical in its simplicity, but I had to learn to lead physically.   When the helicopter or convoy arrived, I had to get in first or walk over to the landing zone first.  As a passenger, I had always been accustomed to milling around and then following the crowd.   

This is a small example, but illustrative of how people look to the leader and the leader has the responsibly to decide.  I also realized how the leader’s options are very much limited by the responsibilities of the position and the expectations of the subordinates.  The leader has to fill the position.  He cannot just do what he wants; he has to do what he should.  You have the responsibility to make decisions AND the responsibility to be able to make decisions.   That means you have to think problems through in advance, do your homework and keep up with events.   It is a lot harder to be the leader than the follower.  Followers can complain and remain passive.  Leaders have to do something.  No excuses.

Consistently good leadership is rare.  Most bosses are not leaders.   They duck or postpone the hard decisions.    They literally boss people around, which is not leadership.   A good leader motivates and sets up structures that make subordinate do their jobs “on their own.”  When you have to boss somebody around – use your power directly and overtly – you have already failed in that respect.  Bad leaders also tolerate underperforming people too long.  (I think, BTW, that this is one of my weaknesses as a leader. I also hide behind the “you cannot get rid of anybody in government” excuse too much.)  When the boss fails to control bad performers, he is failing in his responsibility to his team. 

Good leadership is also episodic.  I can think of times when I have been a good leader and many times where I have failed.   When I look back on successes, I find that they were often the result of circumstances that played to my personal strengths.  Which points me to another trait of good leaders.  They know their strengths and weaknesses and work to ensure that they are shaping circumstances to their strengths to the maximum extent possible.   This often involves sharing leadership with someone who has complementary skills.  That is why when you look closely you are often seeing good leadership teams in action, and not so much just a good leader.

My friend Jeff Thomas told me a story about a great building contractor he knew in N. Carolina.  Seems this guy was an absolute artist.   Then suddenly his work went bad.  Everybody blamed his divorce and they were evidently right, but not for the reasons they thought.   This guy’s wife was his detail manager.   He was wonderful at managing his workers and his projects, but he couldn’t manage himself.   She made sure he was where he was supposed to be and crafted the situations to emphasize his strengths.   Nobody understood this until the relationship ended.  Then it was clear to everybody.  

I think this silent partnership happens a lot more than we realize.  In the non-personal example it is often possible to good leaders to replace their complementary team members, but not always.   Many declines in leadership are attributable to the loss of a key subordinate or partner.

Anyway, I am going to post this and go run.  It is a beautiful October day.  I am supposed to think about the characteristics of good leadership.   I will do that while I am running.   The thing that I am considering is whether I should consider good leaders who did bad things.   Leadership is like fire.  It is a dangerous thing that can be used for good or bad purposes.   

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Risky Business

NPR featured a story this morning about a couple of people who were bitten by a non-poisonous snake at the Renaissance Festival in Maryland.  Stop the presses!  Unfortunately, this kind of “news” is becoming more common.  I suppose it is a kind of human interest story, but it feeds the general impression of the world as a dangerous place. 

I went down to the farm a couple of days ago.  I picked up lots of chiggers and got stung by a hornet that managed to get under my work glove.  I killed the hornet  and scrapped off the chiggers.   In the spring, I often pick up ticks.  I read in the paper that you are supposed to save the tick and show it to your health care professional.  Who goes to the doctor for a tick?  I would have to go every week and he would have a complete collection of ticks.  Are hornets, chiggers, ticks and snakes dangerous and annoying?  Yes, they are.  But you elevate them to the level of a major risk, you cannot do very much. 

When I was a kid we used to play in a swamp in back of Nordberg and Pelton Steel mills.  This was not a natural swamp.  When we followed the stream to its source, we discovered it issued from the factories.   I suppose by today’s standards, we were playing in the toxic waste dump.  That explains why the water would burn your skin a little.  We were too casual about those things back then.  But we have overcompensated and overreacted now.   Today if somebody finds a little battery acid they cordon off the area and men in moon suits go in to decontaminate it.  They evacuated a local high school a while back because somebody broke a thermometer and some mercury spilled on the floor. 

Poison is defined by the dosage.   Most life enhancing medicines and vitamins can harm or kill you if you take too much, which means that most – in the wrong dosages – are poisons.  Many things have threshold levels.  Below a certain level, they are harmless or even helpful; beyond it they are dangerous or deadly.  We too often make the error of extrapolating that if something is dangerous in quantity even a little must be harmful.   This is wrong. For example, arsenic can occur naturally in spring water.   Arsenic is a deadly poison, but you can drink this water your entire life w/o suffering any consequences.  If you really analyzed it, almost everything we eat and drink is full of poisons.  Plants evolved with them as a means of defense.  We tolerate or even benefit from all those chemicals found in apples or pears. 

As our ability to detect risk has improved, we have become a little hysterical about it and have begun to avoid low probability risks to the extent that it impacts our fulfillment in life.  Ironically, our risk aversion creates a whole new set of risks.

I took this picture in Germany.  They still have the old stuff sometimes.

Take the example of playground equipment.   I don’t see how kids can have much fun at the playground anymore.  Everything is low down, easy to climb, slow paced or stationary.  I remember the high metal slides that burned your ass on a hot day or those merry go rounds that you could spin so fast.   Teeter totters?  They are gone.  So what happens?   Some kids push into even riskier things.  Most just learn to sit around and get fat playing video games.   In the long run, you are a lot better off breaking a leg when you are eleven than staying fat your whole life.  Which risk would you prefer?  There is not risk-free option.  Some problems just take a longer time to develop.

I assume snake-bit couple will make a full recovery.  Now I am sure our society will take added precautions to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.

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ArborTech – Sawmills Have Changed

Above – wood from nearby tree farms arrives at the mill.   

Saw mills have changed.   Machines, computers and robots have replaced the army of unskilled workers and the dirty and dangerous jobs are mostly gone.  The ArborTech saw mill near Blackstone, Virginia runs three shifts with only eighty workers.   I was interested in looking at the plant, since it processes loblolly pine (which I grow) and gets its timber within a sixty mile radius of the plant.  Both my timber tracks are within that zone.

Below – The giant hook loads the logs.  The initial processing can handle a log every 2-3 seconds.

The plant is run by a couple of partners who established it in Nottoway County in 2001.  They chose the location on the northern edge of the great loblolly pine forests.  There is lots of renewable wood resource available to the south and good markets to the north. 

Below – They switched from oil to sawdust, produced as a by-product of the mill.  You can see from the smokestack that it makes almost no pollution and it is carbon neutral.

Loblolly pine grows fast and is strong enough for structural timber.   Southern pine (which includes loblolly, slash and longleaf pine), also called yellow pine, satisfies around 58% of America’s timber needs.   We can grow this resource, sustainably, essentially forever.  I am glad to have an efficient mill near my property.  Below are some pictures and explanatory texts.

Below the computer decides where to saw to get the most straight wood.

Below is the guy running the computer to do that sawing.

Below – the boards move out just after they are cut.  The warehouse is very tidy and clean.

Below – the boards are cut with this bandsaw.  The computer keeps it sharp.

Modern industry is so different from what I remember.   It is much cleaner and automated. Despite all the talk about the decline of American industry, American industrial production is actually higher than it was twenty years ago.  But industrial employment has plumeted.  When you go to a modern plant, you can see why.   A lot of product is coming out of the plant, but there are not many people working there.  Industry will be like agriculture.  In the past almost everybody had to work on the farms.  Today less than 2% of the workforce does.  Yet they produce enough to feed us and much of the rest of the world.  Productivity means fewer jobs to produce more stuff.  That is good, but it sometimes hurts.