Graceful Degradation

I have long been a fan of wooden boats. There is something alive about them that a fiberglass or steel boat lacks. Modern materials are an improvement in terms of strength to weight and ease of maintenance, but there is a grace to wood.

Part of that grace is that wood speaks to us about its condition. It shows its wear, its cracks, or its incipient rot. A spruce mast will creak and bend before giving up and breaking, allowing a sailor time to loosen a line or change course prior to a disaster. Although it is many times stronger, pound for pound, a carbon fiber mast offers no warnings. If there is a hidden flaw in it, or if you exceed its strength, the first you will hear of it is a sound like a gunshot. Your mast will go over the side and you will be in a very sudden predicament.

What the wooden mast has that the carbon fiber mast lacks is the property of graceful degradation. This is one of my favorite engineering terms. It calls up the image of genteel debauchery, but it refers to a system that has a gradual mode of failure with perceptible warnings inherent to the process.

This concept came to mind as I visited eastern Massachusetts this last Sunday. A ten-foot diameter water main, no, THE ten foot diameter water main from the primary reservoir had broken, putting two million people instantly on a boil water order.

The water main was just a trigger, though. The concept has been percolating in the back of my mind for some time, possibly since the recent tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The present financial crisis swirls into the mix along with the ash cloud from that volcano in Iceland, as do the 5,000 barrels of oil that spew into the Gulf of Mexico every day.

I’ll jump to the conclusion and then backtrack: Efficiency isn’t resilient. Concentrated, streamlined, just-in-time, lean systems aren’t resilient.

We rely on many complex systems that have virtually no room for error, yet threaten us with disaster in the event of an error. We have the single big water main and the few large power plants transmitting over the few large transmission lines. The power plant in question runs on an inherently dangerous fuel in an inherently dangerous reaction that has to be carefully balanced and isolated from the environment by layers of so-called failsafe protection. A dozen huge banks handle 60% of our economy. Our air transportation system is structurally overbooked, with planes taking off and landing every 30 seconds at major airports. A delay at one airport cascades to dozens of others, clogging the entire system .There is no room for error, breakdown, bad weather, or, let’s say, a volcanic eruption. There are hundreds of offshore platforms managing holes drilled into the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico, each required to contain a high pressure stream of toxic material. It’s surprising that more spills haven’t happened. As the various pipes, actual and metaphorical, crack and spew, we witness the inevitable force of chance multiplied by decades of cost savings through deregulation and deferred maintenance.

We could take a lesson from nature. The natural world has evolved to be spectacularly inefficient. It is inefficient because only the inefficient survive. Most organisms over-reproduce so that some small number of offspring will survive. Living systems exhibit massive redundancy.

I am reminded of the State of Vermont installing a “living system” wastewater treatment facility for one of its welcome centers along Interstate 91. A living system wastewater treatment plant uses tanks with hydroponically grown plants to absorb waste products and purify the water. The problem with wastewater treatment at a tourist welcome center is that business spikes on the weekends and then goes to nearly zero during weekdays. A conventional septic system has a hard time handling the surge or starve pattern, but a plant ecosystem is well adapted to it. The huge surface area of the root systems captures the surge and the plants store the nutrients till the next time of plenty.

I am also reminded of a presentation I attended at the Northern Grain Growers conference back in March. The presenter was talking about side by side tests of organic and chemically grown grains. In good years the chemical crops outperformed the organic crops. However, in mediocre or bad years, when the weather didn’t cooperate, the organic crops outperformed the chemical ones. The reason is that organic farming concentrates on nourishing the soil, not the plant. (See my essay on obliquity) It takes more effort and care to build up the soil, but then the soil holds moisture and nutrients better than the dead sponge of a chemically treated field. The organic farmer is trading short term gain for long term reliability.

The British Petroleum (BP) offshore well that is now leaking 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico is a classic example of the failure of short term bean counting. It would have cost BP roughly $500,000 per well to install a remotely operated emergency shutoff valve, a backup requirement that BP had lobbied against. BP has about 200 subsea wells worldwide, so that would have cost BP $100 million. The company is now facing civil liabilities approaching $10 billion, and its stock has lost $25 billion in market value. That’s just the financial cost of lean operation. The cost to society in general will be many times that.

I’ll lay our present crises at the figurative feet of corporate power and corporate mythology. Our culture has been sold a story about the efficiency of business and the wisdom of market forces. Corporate interference in our government has made that mythology law. What we find is that efficiency works (at least for the shareholders) only as long as everything is going well, and that markets are no wiser than the yeast in a beer vat.

We need to have a conversation as a society about the ongoing price of building in resilience. In some cases it won’t be a cost, but a savings. My local credit union gives me better service and interest rates than the commercial bank I used to use. Widely distributed renewable energy systems will pay for themselves during their service life and dampen price volatility. We have to start adding into our calculations the periodic, yet inevitable price of lacking a Plan B. If we are smart, we will enforce some rational amount of redundancy. When things go wrong, as they so often do, we will have the ability to degrade gracefully.



The Language of Suits

Your Minor Heretic has never been a clothes horse. Jeans and work shirts are the norm for me, with the occasional display of a tweed jacket and khakis when I want a little professorial cred. Every man has a turning point, though.

In my role as a renewable energy consultant I have to make a presentation at a prestigious country club to the board of a well funded organization. When I thought about the venue and the audience I realized that tweed and khakis wouldn’t cut it. Time to buy a suit. Being ignorant, but realizing both my ignorance and that there are subtleties to the selection of suits, I turned to my friend The Broker.

He is a successful manager at a brokerage firm with a name you would recognize. He knows the game, plays the game well, and enjoys the game, but realizes that it is a game and stays somewhat aloof and amused by it all. I owe him much of my understanding of the financial markets (such as it is) and appreciate his window into that world. I have lunch with him regularly and on a recent outing I pumped him for information on the language of suits. He gave me a raft of information, which he then helpfully summarized in the email below. Oh brave new world.

Here's what I'd look for in a suit:

2 button jacket, not three, which was a bit of a trendy fad that is fortunately (in my view) going out.

Plain front pants, versus pleated. Pleated are a perfectly acceptable classic look but your build wants plain front and it is a slightly cleaner, more contemporary look without being trendy or affected. Affected being the sartorial offense only slightly eclipsed by tacky. And, yeah, you want cuffs on the pants.

Materials: a light to mid-weight wool worsted will work in all but the hottest days. You may want a spring-summer suit and a fall-winter suit. I love the three-piece suit, despite my nasty comment.* I think it is a perfect expression of Minor H. Just know that it is a more academic look and statement which, I suspect, may be spot on for much of your work. But if you find yourself doing a Power Lunch with some mogul you may want to think about whether or not the vest communicates what you want.

For Wall Street or a more formal look I go for black, navy, charcoal, pinstripe, neither of which sound appropriate to me for your Sunday afternoon at the Country Club. For that I suggest a mid-tone gray, a nice glen plaid or even a nice tan with an interesting texture or pattern ( a la the Land's End example I attached). The suit says "serious, professional, committed." The friendly color and material say "Sunday afternoon at the Country Club" and "I'm not some schmuck trying too hard to sell you something." If you get the cut and fit right, then it winks and nods to the assembled Prepoisie that you know the game.

The other cues in that game are Brooks Brothers shirts which are immediately recognizable to the initiated by their rounded barrel cuff edges and the rounded pockets. Again, a shirt with some stripes or color or a nice pattern will also be more Sunday afternoon and less Monday boardroom. That will play well in Brookline.

(* Nasty comment: Three piece suits are only seen in a five mile radius around Cambridge Massachusetts.)

There’s a lot of information packed in there, but no more than is packed into a well-made glen plaid two-button suit with a Brooks Brothers cuff peeking out. The exercise of choosing a suit has brought to the forefront of my attention how much we signal each other with our clothes. There are some people who deliberately work with their clothing style to communicate, but most of us just have some basic idea of what’s appropriate for various situations and choose clothing by some mixture of work requirements, brand loyalty, and color preference. Our broadcast of our identities is unconscious. My friend The Broker knows the language and employs it consciously. The only other person I know who employs the language of clothing so consciously is a costume designer. And now I do.

This plunge into business clothing has made me think about that most impractical piece of men’s clothing, the tie. A man’s tie is a decoration, but mostly it is a sign. I’ve been trying out a number of messages to attach to the tie, and I have distilled it down to “I care.” A man wears a tie for professional situations to signify a serious attitude. He wears a tie to social functions to express his opinion that said function is special in some way, elevated above the norm. The color and pattern of the tie can signal an allegiance to a university, a club, or an arm of the military. It can also signal an ironic counter-message to the formality of the form.

I ended up going to a Brooks Brothers outlet with The Librarian. She was my unbiased set of fashion conscious eyeballs. The woman at the outlet was competent and not too pushy. I tried on some suits. The Librarian approved of a grayish-tan glen plaid and a dark gray pinstripe. I went out in the parking lot and got on my cellphone for some last minute coaching from The Broker. Then I dropped a few benjamins on the suits, plus one blue and one white narrow cut shirt. I passed over the shirts in light purple, teal, and I-ate-too-many-jalapeno-poppers-and-drank-too-many-strawberry-daquiris-and-puked. I also passed over the many ties that the saleswoman proffered. The patterns and colors were suitable for signaling high-altitude rescue aircraft, or perhaps luring amorous poison dart frogs. My explanation for the eyeball-spanking coloration is that while the form and mere presence of the tie signals formality, its color and pattern are the last outlet for personal expression in business attire. As with plumbing, the smaller the outlet, the harder the spray.

I’m ready for my presentation and some years of presentations after that. I’m also set up with a refreshed perception of clothing. Earlier today I found myself waiting at the bottom of a set of stairs for a group of men to pass by. Four out of five had dark suits, white shirts, and unexceptional ties. The fifth man was in jeans and a sweater. Given the building they came out of, I figured them for a mix a lawyers and lobbyists. The point is that I actually noticed that they had virtually duplicate dark suits and plain ties, and wondered about the contrast with the guy in jeans. New eyes for me.

I can’t end this without relating a story from my college days. I dressed raggedly and colorfully back then, a post-hippie, I guess. I was invited to a Halloween party and wanted a counterintuitive costume. I scrounged among my friends and assembled a full-on business suit, a good trench coat, and a briefcase. I parted my hair on one side and tucked my (now departed) ponytail down the back of my shirt collar. Wearing no mask or makeup, I presented myself at the front door of my friend’s house. The very woman who had invited me answered the door, looked me full in my uncovered face, and asked, “Um, can I help you?” She stared at me without recognition until I said my name. She was startled, laughed, and invited me in. The clothes make the man.



Spreading the Love

I’d like to direct your attention to two worthy blogs. One is about a blatant lie and another is about a long string of subtle lies.

The first is Government is Good , subtitled “An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution” and “A web project of Douglas J. Amy, Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College.” Professor Amy, in clear, simple prose, explains why “governments are instituted among men” (See: Declaration of Independence) and why the knee-jerk critics of government qua government are wrong. It warms my heretical heart to read cogent, well supported articles with titles such as “The case FOR Bureaucracy” and “How Govt. is Good for Business.”

Bashing government is the national pastime, not baseball. And yet, as I have written before, what people really dislike about government is based on either the effect of corporate interference in government or our own misunderstanding of the rule of law.

Most of the regulatory absurdity, wasteful spending, and foreign policy blundering is the result of legislators being dependent upon corporate charity to run their reelection campaigns. On a personal level, we’d all like the law to let us do what we want to do, while preventing our neighbors from doing those annoying things that they want to do. There is a necessary symmetry to the law. You are supposed to be treated equally to the person you most despise. As Professor Amy points out, we are peeved when we deal with a bureaucrat who rigidly follows the rules, but we would be even more disturbed if that same bureaucrat had arbitrary power over us.

We are like fish in the sea, not noticing the water that sustains us. Professor Amy points out the water and its life-giving properties. It is refreshing.

The second site is BAGnews Notes, subtitled “How Politicians and the Media Spin Political Pictures.” This site chronicles and comments upon the use of images in the media, particularly political images. I find this fascinating and important because the most effective bias is the bias of background. Making a direct statement imperils the propagandist, because a direct statement can be fact-checked. The insinuation of a cleverly selected photograph is harder to confront.

The BAGnews home page presently has photos from recent Tea Party rallies, President Obama’s nuclear materials control summit, and the riots in Kyrgyzstan. All have something to say, more powerful for the absence of text. BAGnews provides the text, often an invitation to analysis as much as analysis itself.

I’m going to be frequenting these sites, and I hope you do as well.

Obliquity

I was at the used book sale at the local library last week, and I looked at one of those management advice books. I can't remember the name now, but a quick skim revealed the usual obvious truths. (Be self-observant in order to be emotionally genuine in order to interact with other people honestly.) It did explore one concept that interested me, one that I have thought about before but never had a concise name for: obliquity.

The concept is straightforward: Don’t focus only on your goal, and don’t head straight for your goal.

In business it means that keeping both eyes on the quarterly earnings reports is shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating. Witness our numbers-driven economy with its inflated parasitic financial sector, outsourced everything, tapped out consumers, and multi-billion dollar annual trade deficit. Contrast us with Germany, until recently the largest exporter in the world. Germans have worker friendly jobsite conditions due to powerful labor unions, universal health care, six-week vacations, mandated worker representation on corporate boards, and much more. Germany decided to have an economy that works for a majority of the people, with a broad spectrum of utilitarian goals. Wonder of wonders, Germany is also an economic powerhouse. Even with well paid, well treated workers they have a trade surplus. But it isn’t so surprising.

Back in the early part of the 20th century Henry Ford understood that he should pay his workers well enough so that they could buy Ford automobiles. Over the past 30 years or so the philosophy in corporate America has been to fire half the employees, keep wages flat for the other half and work them harder, and then hope that some other company’s employees have enough money to buy your product. Meanwhile, investors found that, at least in the short term, it was more profitable to plow money into a credit bubble than to actually go to the trouble of manufacturing useful things. We are experiencing how well that worked out.

Here’s an old column by Robert Cringely about high tech companies being managed to death. It includes the real life parable of the R&D department of Celanese being gutted in the name of earnings. Once again, the straight numbers guys miss the point.

One of my favorite examples of obliquity is daylighting, that is, the architectural practice of letting natural daylight into a building and intelligently managing it. The building in question is a school. Now, if you accept the premise of No Child Left Behind, the way to increase school performance is to have rigorous standardized testing with penalties for underperforming schools. (As I have written elsewhere, the educational equivalent of bayoneting the wounded.) The school in question was retrofitted with daylighting and test scores instantly jumped 15%. Apparently, just that much improvement in their work environment allowed the kids to concentrate on their studies. I wonder how much better our schools would perform if they weren’t designed like prisons or blast-proof bunkers.

A study by the Heschong Mahone Group found that the performance of workers at an incoming call center improved 6-12% with better views out windows, including more vegetation. Office workers performed 10-20% better on cognitive skills tests when they had windows with attractive views. Think about all the money corporate management wastes trying to wring out a few percentage points of financial performance when they could do so much more for the price of some windows and landscaping. Someone once pointed out to me that heating and lighting a commercial building costs less than $20 a square foot annually, but the cost of paying the people who work in the building costs hundreds of dollars per square foot annually. Increase productivity by 10% and you’ve blown away your utility costs. And yet, people still work in drab, shoddy, poorly lit cubicles.

Here’s the “Duh” quote from Adam Smith:

- "Where wages are high ... we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low." (from "The Wealth of Nations", 1776)

B-B-B-But, that would cost more money, just like providing a decent workplace and treating employees as if they mattered. Yup. Money that would pay a dividend.

Managers of all types get caught up in the raw financial numbers because raw financial numbers are what they were taught in their MBA programs. They weren’t taught to stick their heads up and look around at the general scenery. The truth being that the general scenery is where the action is.

Contrast the statements of the CEO of General Motors and the CEO of Honda. The CEO of GM once stated that GM was company that made money and that it just happens to make cars. The CEO of Honda stated that Honda is a company that makes cars and that it just happens to make money. Who is making money now?

This gets me back to the management book. It is just the business version of a thousand self help books, health books, and diet books that clog the publishing industry. All of them have a special magic formula for success, whether that success is measured by self-esteem, absence of disease, or pounds shed. It doesn’t seem to work that way. Happy people don’t deliberately follow a formula. They live full human lives. That is, they take part in their community, they spend time with family, with friends, and alone. They work, they play…this is sounding really hokey, and you know the shtick, but it is true. It is my observation that happy people don’t obsess about why they are happy or how they are going to remain happy. They just go do good stuff. Likewise with health and weight loss.  Most healthy people don’t diet. They don’t gorge on the “little known key nutrient that will extend your life and give you abundant health.” They cook often and eat good food. They live an active life. They have an overall lifestyle that works.

The cute parable on the subject is the one about the old cat and the kitten. The old cat sees the kitten chasing its tail and asks why. The kitten says “ I know that happiness is in my tail, so I chase it.” The old cat says, “It’s true that happiness is in your tail. But I just walk where I want to and it follows me.”




Vore

I’m looking for a word. I’d like you, my readers, to offer up some suggestions.

Localvore isn’t working for me. I know there are some variations on the practice of eating only locally produced food, but the term itself is absolute. I like the concept, but I also like chocolate and bananas. (See the Minor Heretic’s killer banana bread recipe) Other people’s diets are tiresome, so I’ll try to keep the explanation brief.

Your Minor Heretic is a vegetarian. I eat a lot of local products, including a type of bread called Cyrus Pringle from our local Red Hen Bakery. It is made with all Vermont grown wheat. I’ll search out local food products and often spend a little extra on them. I have been buying fresh spinach all winter from a local farmer with a greenhouse, so California is getting along without me on that front.

I do eat things from afar, but under three conditions:

1) Only if there is no true local substitute. There are no banana trees in Vermont, but there are plenty of apple trees. Ergo, I don’t eat apples from New Zealand or Chile. Sadly, nobody in Vermont makes Gruyere, so the Swiss get my money on that little luxury.
2) Fair Trade if at all available. No slave-grown chocolate for me.
3) The closest non-local supplier gets priority. 

Of course, your Minor Heretic being human, these rules get bent in order not to offend people or be a complete pain in the ass. So what does one call someone who buys local food when available and ethically as possible otherwise? I think there are a lot of people in this category, but it lacks the definitive name of the absolutist localvore. Kindalocalovore? Somewhatethicalvore? Tryingmybestinanimperfectworldovore?

Suggestions? If someone comes up with something really good I’ll make a Minor Heresies T-shirt and reward that coiner-of-buzzword.