We’ve had some fun and nice weather the past few weeks.  The boys posed for their cousin Nate outside the garage a couple weekends ago:

The same weekend, we went out for a hike in a park down by the river where they’re tearing down the old train trestle.  The boys were brave enough to walk out on it with me, and posed afterward:

Now fall is here for real.  Probably some snow pictures soon!

I heard this for the first time ever the other day and recognized the voice. A little searching on YouTube turned it up: “Breathe Your Name” by Sixpence None the Richer. I’ve liked (really, really liked) Leigh Nash since “Kiss Me” hit the charts. This one’s even better.

I’m amazed at how effortlessly Leigh can do a falsetto.  If that’s the right way to say it, that is.  Because I’m not only no singer, I’m not even in the same world as anyone who could be called that.

Jim Collins of Good To Great fame jumps into the dump-on-Scott bandwagon with a really poor reading of history.

In his new book, Collins comes up with a new thesis as to why some companies do better than others:  because they’re like Roald Amundsen and they deliver consistent positive results at a given level, year in, year out, regardless of the business environment or other challenges.  And they restrain themselves from overdelivering in good years.

Because, you see, that’s why Amundsen beat Scott.  Because Scott and his team dashed ahead some days and stayed in their tents others, while the Norwegian and his crew made consistent mileage throughout.

Great theory.  Unfortunately, Collins’s entire notion rests on his assertion that the two teams faced the same weather:

Amundsen and Scott achieved dramatically different outcomes not because they faced dramatically different circumstances. In the first 34 days of their respective expeditions, according to Roland Huntford in his superb book The Last Place on Earth, Amundsen and Scott had exactly the same ratio, 56%, of good days to bad days of weather. If they faced the same environment in the same year with the same goal, the causes of their respective success and failure simply cannot be the environment. They had divergent outcomes principally because they displayed very different behaviors.

And what he says is true.  But what he doesn’t say is that Scott and his team were out there for 150 days before they perished.  Why focus on 34 days?  Because after that, they faced enormously different weather conditions.  Yes, Scott’s team stayed in their tents some days — because the weather was so unspeakably awful that to do otherwise would have been to die that much sooner.  Yes, they dashed ahead on others — they knew they were facing the race of their lives, after all.

It’s simply unacceptable that this celebrated author is so sloppy with his facts.  But he’s just one of many overfed, over-comfortable modern-day critics who deign to second-guess men whose courage he can’t even fathom.

This passage from The Climb, mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev’s story of the disaster on Mt. Everest in 1996, made me think of such foolishness around Scott’s story:

Some pundits have looked for an explanation for Fischer’s death in his personal history, mining his character as if a cause could be extracted from some flawed vein of his personality.  These explorations have done little more than denigrate a man whose life was no more complex than any of those of us who have chosen to write about the events of May 10, 1996.  The “revelations” have contributed little to an understanding of what happened.

In the end, Scott and his team certainly made decisions that contributed to their demise — departing too late for their journey with an impossibly long timetable, carrying rock samples right until the day they died, and on and on.  None of those decisions would have been second-guessed if they’d won.  They didn’t; they failed and died.  But they died seeking glory modern men can scarcely imagine.  Jim Collins isn’t nearly man enough to second-guess them, even if he had his story straight.

He doesn’t, though.  Horrid.

In this article, innovation author Robert F. Brands uses the story of the race to the South Pole to draw lessons about best practices and innovation.

I’m in complete agreement with the ideas he’s trying to reinforce, that the best innovation combines the use of best practices and new ideas.  Good messages, though, are no excuse for misreading – or misrepresenting – history.

Brands accuses British explorer Robert Falcon Scott of poor planning and use of “mere ‘innovation'” (Brands’ words) and attributes to Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen a near-magical combination of best practices and real innovation.

But I personally find it unsettling and off-putting to read as someone sits in modern comfort and harshly judges the actions of far more courageous and ambitious men of a different time simply because their efforts ended poorly.  Brands glosses quickly over Scott’s earlier successful mission in the Antarctic, and gives no attention whatever to any reasoning that might have been behind the decisions Scott made in preparing for his quest for the pole.  Brands repeatedly accuses Scott of hurried preparation, yet makes no argument that that precludes successful innovation.  And Scott was hurrying, because he knew others had designs on his prize; Shackleton had gotten awfully close just before Scott’s attempt.  Amundsen may have been less hurried, but only because he was well-prepared for a race in which he’d already failed:  his objective became the South Pole after he was beaten to his original goal, the North Pole, by Peary.

It seems to me that Brands makes enormous, unsupported leaps as he looks at the Scott expedition’s failure and assigns malignity and ineptitude of various sorts to its leader.  For example, he is scathing in his indictment of Scott’s use of motorized sledges that failed in the harsh conditions Scott faced; yet Amundsen himself greatly feared that those sledges might lead to Scott’s victory.  Brands is equally dismissive of Scott’s use of horses, which indeed turned out to be a poor choice; yet none other than Shackleton, holder at that point of the record for reaching the furthest point to the south, thought they offered the best approach.

Brands mentions not once the very different weather and conditions that each expedition experienced (Amundsen’s team had surprisingly good weather through nearly its whole expedition, while Scott faced unspeakably harsh weather almost constantly).  He therefore ignores a very real factor that people who believe all failures are avoidable simply can’t face:  luck.  The human condition is such that, regardless of planning, our best and most noble efforts can be thwarted by bad luck or bolstered by good.  Prospective innovators, no matter how smart or well-prepared, aren’t immune to this reality.

I think a lesson completely different from Brands’ can fairly be drawn from the story of the race to the South Pole.  It is that, when men march into the unknown toward a goal they know could cost them their lives, it sometimes will; lives of pure success and safety aren’t ours even when we take no risks at all, so they assuredly aren’t part of pursuing great things and taking the related great risks.  But of course, none of that has anything whatever to do with innovation.

Ross D.E. MacPhee, author of Race to The End:  Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole, (an absolutely magnificent book, by the way) had this to say about Scott:

Yet for all his obvious, documented failings there is a full measure of countervailing evidence concerning Scott’s strength of character, his sense of justice, his willingness to do anything and everything he asked his men to do.  It is just not conceivable that this man, who conducted not one but two expeditions to Antarctica, who had veterans and novices alike clamoring for positions on his team, was the blubbering, unstable incompetent that some authors have made him out to be.  Scott may never receive the level of approbation that Shackleton has recently enjoyed, in part because Shackleton’s apotheosis came for him comfortably late, long after the chief participants in his expeditions had died.  Scott comes with much more baggage, and with a list of virtues that were considered exemplary in upper-class, prewar Britain, but which have little resonance today.

I for one think our society would be the better were we able to turn things around and have Scott’s virtues once more celebrated.  Indeed, today’s best innovations may involve returning to notions from the past that we’ve foolishly cast off.  But that kind of thinking probably won’t get me published as a leadership or innovation “expert.”

For the first time since I started running a few years back, I was able to replace my old pair of shoes with the exact same model and color.

I’d thought my old shoes had held up extremely well — in fact, I really thought they looked pretty new.  Until the new ones showed up:

Well, for the record, the old shoes carried me through a full marathon, a half marathon, and almost all the training miles for both races.  They deserve to look old.  Thanks a bunch, New Balance!

How funny is this?

It’s amazing to me that the “leaders” in the fastest-dying part of the West continue as though it’s not obvious that THE.  GAME.  IS.  OVER.

A long time ago, Peggy Noonan was brilliant.

We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

President Ronald Reagan said that on January 28, 1986, after the space shuttle Challenger had exploded shortly after launch.  Peggy Noonan was his speechwriter.

But as did so many very smart people, she fell for the smooth-talking Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, and became one of his most vocal supporters.  That was not brilliant, given the incredible weight of evidence that said this man, who has now proved to be the most disastrous president in a lifetime, was at once arrogant, lacking in both accomplishments and the ability to accomplish, and dangerously blinkered ideologically.

Today Peggy Noonan is brilliant again.

Would the next president like a story? Here’s one. America was anxious, and feared it was losing the air of opportunity that had allowed it to be what it was—expansive, generous, future-trusting. It was losing faith in its establishments and institutions. And someone came out of that need who led—who was wise and courageous and began to turn the ship around. And we saved our country, and that way saved the world.

There’s a narrative for you, the only one that matters. Go be a hero of that story. It will get around. It will bubble up.

There’s much more of that sort of thing — read it all.  Welcome back, Peggy — we missed you.

John Derbyshire’s “Steel and Fire and Stone” was one of the best things written that day.

The family is fresh back from a long weekend of camping up near Mellen, Wisconsin.

The boys threw rocks in the lake and burned a whole bunch of stuff.

We all did some mondo hiking at Copper Falls State Park and some paddleboating and swimming at our home away from home, Wildwood Haven Resort and Campground (highly recommended!).

Sweet Miss Vivi cooked up some rockin’ camp vittles.

So, Yes has their first studio album in 124 years or so, Fly From Here.

I like it.  I like it a lot.  I like it so much I’m listening to it repeatedly, just like I did with the original Wolfmother album.

My brother Steve said it best:  the new album has a great combination of the original Yes sound with the 90125/Big Generator sound.  Original Yes singer Jon Anderson called the sound “dated.”  I agree.  That’s why I like it.

I find it cool that the new singer, Benoit David, has his own distinct voice, but is also true to the style of Anderson.  And that the 25 minute, 6-part title track is based on a demo by the Buggles, the 80s band featuring the new album’s keyboardist Geoff Downes and producer Trevor Horn.  And that Trevor Horn had a cameo in the video for “We Can Fly.”  And that the cover design is another fantastic Roger Dean creation.

What I don’t find cool is a criticism I read from one guy online.  He slammed the album for having “vapid lyrics.”  Is it this dude’s first Yes album or what?  I mean, when your band’s greatest song of all time begins with the lines

A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace

And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace

And achieve it all with music that came quickly from afar

Then taste the fruit of man recorded losing all against the hour

and continues on like that for another 17 minutes, then I don’t think the quality of the story you’re telling is really a big driver for you, right?  Yes is well-known for treating lyrics as nothing more than vehicles for the right beat and sound.

Anyway, the album is good stuff.  Not bad at allfor a band that’s been around in one form or another for 43 years.