Pretty much everybody is familiar with the Scout Motto up there in my title: “Be prepared.”

It’s a pretty simple notion on its face, but a bit more complicated when you really think about it. Be prepared for what? Obviously, you should prepare fully for the specific activity you have planned. But beyond that, what else should you be prepared for?

You can answer that for various scenarios in two ways: research and thought. Whether in the Scouting world or the business world, pretty much anything you’re going to take on, somebody else (and usually lots and lots of somebody elses) have done it before. So do some reading about it and see how other people prepared and what they took along. Similarly, go through the though exercise of thinking the activity through and figuring out for yourself what you might need for the basics, and what otherwise unforeseen challenges might arise that you can similarly prepare for.
Having done all that homework, now you’re 100% prepared, right? Unfortunately, no. Lengthy experience and lots of thought and research can cover you for everything you encounter in a routine activity. But with every activity comes the very real possibility of something non-routine happening, and you’re far less likely to be ready for that.

The good news is that getting ready for all the other stuff will make you more mentally prepared for any unforeseen circumstances that arise. That’s one of the underlying beauties of the Scout Motto. You’ll react to all occurrences better than you would have if you’d gone in with little preparation.

Still, you may well find yourself in a situation where you just don’t have what you need. In the moment, you’ll just have to get by and figure out how to survive anyway. (The notion that preparation can remove all risk, by the way, is arrogant, foolish, and wrongheaded. Just ask my long-ago friend and former Scoutmaster who was canoeing with his Troop when a lightning bolt came from an almost perfectly clear blue sky and instantly killed two of his Scouts. We all like to believe we’re masters of this world of ours, but we really aren’t.)

Once you get through it, though, give some time to think about how you might have been better prepared. I’ve taken to keeping a “Be prepared list” of things to do or to bring with me that I’ve learned about from past problems or failures. For example, I was on a lengthy hike on the shore of Lake Michigan on a sunny June day once when a freak weather system rolled through and made things pretty chilly for a while, with thick fog and a 20 degree temperature drop in just a few minutes’ time. My group had no warm clothes with us, so it was a bit uncomfortable for a while. Fortunately the sun came back out after about an hour and it warmed back up. But now I always carry a few emergency “space” blankets in my backpack just in case.

Similarly, we had a couple younger Scouts go missing on a campout earlier this year, taking a freelance hike when we were all supposed to be in camp preparing dinner. Worried about their ability to find their way back, a few other adult leaders and I went out to search for them. One of my fellow leaders had binoculars that helped us to find them pretty quickly. So now there’s a compact pair always in my backpack.

You can do the same thing in your work world. When things don’t go as planned, take some time to consider what you might have done beforehand that would have made the difference. Then plan to have or do whatever would have helped the next time around. For example, say you have a crisis at work and find that you don’t have the phone numbers you need to get the help you’re looking for in the moment. After the dust on that particular crisis settles, find those numbers, and add them to your contacts on your computer and in your phone – plus print out a hard copy for your planner or briefcase.

“Be prepared.”

It was a bitter irony, the contrast in weather for our send-offs for my Mom and my Dad. Mom hated winter, but the week of her funeral almost three years ago was a nearly non-stop blizzard in our Upper Peninsula hometown of Ironwood, Michigan. This week, as we said goodbye to Dad, was one of those gorgeous but all-too-rare crystalline late-summer weeks of warm sunny days and clear chilly nights. Mom would’ve loved it – except to note that the chill meant another hated winter was coming.

They’re together again, as it should be. I’m glad my Mom has him back with her. But the world lost a very good man this month.

I knew of his many accomplishments, but was proud (and a bit humbled) to read them all gathered together for his obituary: Air Force photographer. Bachelor’s degree in Forestry. Career with the US Forest Service, including a term as Forest Ranger in my birth state of West Virginia. Two-time District Governor with the Lions Club, and recipient of its Melvin Jones Fellowship Award. School Board President. Volunteer in endless ways with the Catholic church.

But most important, husband to my Mom for sixty years, and father to my six siblings and me.

Husband and father weren’t most important on their own. Most men are husbands, and most men are fathers. Big deal.

But they were a big deal to Dad. He lived during the time when career took over for men as the be-all and end-all of supposed success. Dad wasn’t immune to that societal pressure; he wanted more from his career, but he didn’t get it from the Forest Service.

And he didn’t put it first. He put us first.

Right now I just happen to be reading The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s legendary recounting of the exploits of the test pilots and astronauts who took America into space. Just this morning I came across this passage, about Gus Grissom’s wife Betty:

By now Betty knew what to expect from Gus personally; which is to say, she seldom saw him. In one 365-day period he had been with her a total of sixty days. About six months before, Betty had had to go into the hospital near Langley for exploratory surgery. There was a good chance that she would require a hysterectomy.

Betty had a real siege in the hospital. She was there for twenty-one days. She was there for so long she had to get some of her relatives to fly in from Indiana to look after the boys. Gus managed to make it to see her in the hospital exactly once and he didn’t quite make it through the entire visiting hour. He got a call right there in the hospital asking him to return to the base, and he left.

I have nothing but admiration for what our astronauts accomplished back then, and the “right stuff” of the book is largely about the courage it took for them to willingly be strapped in atop a giant bullet-shaped bomb. Kudos to them for that.

But they were also perfect caricatures of today’s definition of success: climbing atop a career ladder with self-regard being the #1 driving force, and with family being the first thing to be sacrificed along the way.

Now, my Dad certainly had the courage of the kind celebrated in the book. Because the one regularly-occurring stretch of time he would spend away from us, his family, was just about every summer while I grew up, when he headed out west to fight forest fires for weeks at a time. One of his office colleagues and fire-fighting compatriots shared with me in the receiving line at his funeral that Dad was “the best fire-crew chief I’ve ever known.” He was in charge of groups of guys who went in knowing all too well that if things went wrong, or if they screwed up, they would die. Montana’s 1949 Mann Gulch disaster was a constant in their training, and had to be ever-present in their minds when they went in.

So yes, Dad had that kind of courage, without a doubt.

He would disappear for those long stretches during our summers, then come home and all would be normal. And it was during those normal times that, to me, Dad showed even greater courage by rejecting the career definition of success.

Because, unlike America’s astronaut heroes (and all too many common Joes too), Dad was there. For most of those years when we were growing up, when he was at home, Dad left for work at the same time every morning and got home at the same time every afternoon – and was always there for our oddly early family dinners, every single evening. Church every Sunday morning? He was there. My siblings or I had a basketball game? He was there. Mom was in the hospital after discovering nearly too late that she had become diabetic? He was there. First Communion? Confirmation? Graduation? There, there, there.

Dad’s government job gave him oodles and oodles of vacation time, and he would take us (once he finally decided to get in the car on the day of departure) on weeks-long vacations to see Mom’s family in the high desert of southern Oregon, or his family in his riverfront hometown south of Pittsburgh – plus all the many sights along the way on the trips out and back. Those trips were long and hot and crowded (all of us in a single station wagon!), and could therefore be terribly frustrating – and they’re memories I treasure today.

Dad was stern and taciturn. I loved my oldest brother John’s comment in his eulogy that he was still waiting to hear from Dad if he could have the car for his senior prom. He was gruff but something of a softie, as our friend Pete discovered, leading him to give Dad a tongue-in-cheek nickname that we still use today: Bruiser. But he was also funny and fun-loving, to the surprise of many who didn’t know him well. I’ll always remember the time he found me on the couch and asked me to help him reach a spot he couldn’t while he was cleaning our bathroom ceiling. He handed me a wet rag and told me to grab onto the shower spigot while I washed around the light fixture. When the rag touched the base of the light, I got an instant electric shock that almost knocked me to the floor. And he laughed his ass off – he’d done the same thing himself, discovering that there was an electrical short of the light’s wiring to the metal base, and had decided to share the fun with me.

Mom and Dad were hoarders, who found it nearly impossible – as did many others who survived the Great Depression – to throw anything away. We’ve grumbled about that for years. Now my brothers and sister and I will have to go back to Ironwood and go through a whole lifetime of pictures and documents and toys and cards and furniture and knickknacks and memories. That will be an unbelievable amount of work. And other than decades of their love and support, and that most precious gift of all, their time, I wonder if it won’t be the best present Mom and Dad ever gave us.

Dad was proud of his Polish descent, and when I was still very young he introduced us to the Polish “good night.” From that time on, it’s how I always said “good night” to him.

Goodbye, Dad. I love you. Dobranoc.

Rossi… you magnificent bastard, I READ YOUR BOOK!

Jim Rossi loves him some movie quotes and paraphrases, so please bear with me as I start my review of his new book with one. (Go to the link, and better yet, watch the whole movie. It’s a great one.) Because his repeated use of movie references – even if some were lost on me, since I’ve very rarely been to a theater or seen what’s popular these last couple decades – is one of the many things I like about his Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper, the first of what I hope will be many offerings from him.

It’s a ponderous tome. Yes, okay, that’s properly a classic novel reference, but it allowed me to direct you to another fine George C. Scott effort. So sue me. Anyway, Rossi’s book is not a short read. But if you’re like me, it’ll suck you in and the time – and pages – will fly. Parts of it read like a Mickey Spillane novel, and other parts will have you saying to yourself, “Really? That really happened? That’s crazy!” I think my wife and two boys probably thought I was quickly going insane while I read it, because I don’t think I succeeded in keeping those thought entirely in my own head.

That’s because Rossi finds himself entwined in an unfolding big-ass con. You might have gathered as much from the title, but what I found astonishing was how right-in-front-of-his-face it all was. The con artist Rossi ends up exposing was tied to several local initiatives that Rossi was also involved in as part of his work (at least initially) with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I gotta say, there were numerous times through the book I started seriously wondering about various people I’m involved with that seem sort of sketchy.

Jim Rossi

But it’s Rossi’s investigative work that really unmasks the scoundrel – or actually, scoundrels, because while the book is focused on a central sleazebag, he’s surrounded by others who come off as, variously, just as wicked, somewhat wicked, and willing to go along with the wickedness for their own purposes. Be warned: this is not a book that’s going to give you a warm fuzzy about the notion of all people being good at heart. The villains, as it turns out, have long histories of scams, and they’ve hurt a great many people along the way.

(If the book serves no other purpose, it should give you fair warning to watch out for yourselves. Dudes, change your freakin’ passwords!)

On the other side of the moralistic coin, it’s very heartening to read of the staunch support and help Rossi got from his Wolfpack. These are some really good, smart, savvy, and loyal folk. If you don’t have your own Wolfpack, by golly, read about Rossi’s and go start building one. Your life will become infinitely better.

On the third side of that coin (don’t judge; this is my review), Rossi certainly didn’t help turn around my already raving prejudice that a good many of our university administrators should be immediately relieved of duty and put into positions of no authority whatsoever. If you’re a fan of Douglas Adams’s five-book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (don’t judge – it’s Adams’s trilogy, and that’s how he rolled; RIP), you’ll remember that we learn that earth’s population descended from all the useless people from another world. Telephone sanitizers and the like from planet Golgafrinch, they were fooled into boarding emergency life vessels that were crash-landed here. Our version of those people would, in my estimation, absolutely include some of our university administrators. (The rest of the Golgafrinchans died of a disease from an “unexpectedly dirty” telephone. I doubt we’d find the lack of those particular university administrators anything remotely as negative here.)

But I digress. I already had an affinity with Rossi from our many interactions via LinkedIn, so perhaps that’s why it often felt like this book was aimed at me personally. Rossi is an Eagle Scout (nice work, Jim!); I’m not, but I am a Scoutmaster. Rossi is an avid bicyclist, and so am I. His stories of epic rides on the roads surrounding Las Vegas as well as the mountain bike trails all over the western US have me awfully jealous. He’s an admittedly extremely self-confident and oftentimes contrarian journalist. I’m some of those things some of the time. (Oh, this disclaimer perhaps should have come earlier: Rossi thanks me on his Acknowledgements page as one of his readers on LinkedIn. I am that, for sure. I’ll tell you straight up this has no effect on my judgment of the book, as I was unaware of it until I was nearly finished and already loving it. If you don’t believe me, ask my wife, who was sitting across the room from me when, nearing the end my reading and wondering how quickly (too quickly!) I’d be done, I looked ahead and my own name popped out at me, and I exclaimed, “Hey! My name is in this book!”)

A final interesting element is how the law operates around all this. As he turns up obvious serial law-breaking by his target, Xavier Cross (oh, and Jim, I got the Scrooged reference the very first time that pseudonym popped up – but my wife and I watch that movie every Christmas), Rossi contacts local police and eventually has a visit with the FBI. They do nothing – but in this case, I won’t be critical. Now, I’m a law-and-order kind of guy (here’s one area where Rossi and I differ – I adhere to the Manichean worldview, at least sometimes), but it’s one of the attributes of scum like Rossi’s adversary that they know how to keep the law at bay. Rossi’s dogged pursuit and various personal methods of thwarting the crooks… well, I’ll let you find out for yourself how it all pans out.. But Rossi took care of his own, and that’s as much as anyone can ask of anyone.

Read the book. It’s a whale of a story, which I found intriguing the whole way through. Along the way, I got some excellent movie recommendations (my wife and I greatly enjoyed watching the original Ocean’s 11 right after I finished the book) and some great additions to my reading list. (I’m in the midst of re-reading The Prince right now!) The book begins with a quote from Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game (so I knew I was in for a great tale from the get-go), and has repeated references to that classic battle of wills throughout. Rossi details his use of lessons from other battles of will as well. Jim, I think I’m going to start some family poker games. Thanks.

A few weeks ago my older son John and I spent the better part of a week aboard the 52 foot sailing ketch Retriever, as part of the Scouts BSA Great Lakes Sailing Adventure.

John and I sail under the Mackinac Bridge

We had two experienced crew leading the way, Captain Steph and First Mate Jonathan. The actual crewing of the boat was done by the six Scouts on board, with help from three adult Scout Leaders. The boys did it all: raising and lowering the sails, handling the sails, manning the helm, navigating and plotting our courses, guiding by ATONs (aids to navigation – buoys and the like), and everything else that needed to be done.

It was fabulous. We kept stressing with the boys that almost nobody in the world gets an opportunity like that. And of course, that was true for me and the other adult leaders as well.

We never went far from the boat’s home base of Mackinaw City, Michigan – but we visited islands and lighthouses and remote marinas with charming little boatworks-ice cream emporium-coffee shop combos (see my separate post after this one with more about that). We toured a wooden boat refurbishing shop, and helped build up a trail on a remote island to help another Troop with their rehab work on historic old buildings.

Our Captain and First Mate were fabulous. They were wonderful with the boys, keeping the dryer classroom-style education interesting while playing up the adventurous and fun parts of running the boat.

I miss them. I miss the boat. I’m starting to understand why that dude couldn’t stay put, even with Brandy and her eyes that could steal a sailor from the sea. But don’t tell Miss ViVi.

PS – it sure was cool to make actual use of all those knots we’ve learned over the years…

Retriever

Well, I’ve been awfully spotty posting here. That’s because I’m writing seven full-length articles a month about manufacturing over at Forbes.com. I published my 50th a few weeks ago, and the ideas just keep pouring in.

It has been loads of fun (and lots of hard work, yes). Almost my whole career, three decades now, has been in food manufacturing. I’ve gotten to see lots of cool stuff and places, but it’s a pretty limited world when you compare it to the broad swath of industrial production. Now I’m getting to learn (from afar, mostly) about pretty much every aspect of manufacturing, from heavy equipment to 3D printing to apparel to aircraft assembly.

My favorite parts are all the spellbinding stories behind the products, and all the great people I get to talk to and learn from.

Do swing by over there and check my stuff out.

In the preface of The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty, by Clayton Christensen, Efosa Ejomo and Karen Dillon, Professor Christensen writes of Ojomo’s failed efforts to provide fresh water for impoverished African communities:

“His failure raised some difficult questions for him. If these vexing problems couldn’t be solved by an injection of resources and goodwill, then what would help instead? Why do some efforts succeed and not others? Why do some countries fare better than others?”

The book then answers those questions in a clear-headed and evidence-based way, overturning some very popular and deeply held (for me, anyway) preconceptions about the “whys” of less-than-fortunate nations. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say this is one of the most important books to come along in decades.

I’ll be brief, because instead of reading reviews, you should read the book. As with many of Professor Christensen’s writing, innovation is a key element of the solution he offers. He always details the particular kind of innovation required for the dilemmas he addresses, and the particular ways to apply them. It’s no different here.

The Prosperity Paradox is focused on alleviating poverty in poor nations. The particular kind of innovation that the authors show to be effective is that focused on nonconsumption – that is, market opportunities in those nations that solve a problem for the masses in a way that allows them to participate in market activity they weren’t previously part of. As examples, the book cites stories from the rise of America, such as Ford Motor Company or Singer sewing machines, and from modern-day struggling countries, such as Toleram’s Indomie instant noodles in Nigeria, or the pan-African telecoms company Celtel.

Those companies, though, all applied their innovations in a particular way: by overcoming the lack of resources and supports that companies in developed economies rely on. A big part of that involves vertical integration, and going into business in seemingly unrelated products and services that are required for the main part of the business to survive and thrive.

What these innovative companies don’t rely on, and can’t wait to rely on, is institutions. I’ve long been a believer that impoverished countries should focus on developing those societal fundamentals that seem to underlie the success of wealthy countries: laws and regulations, as well as mores and a culture of honest business. But the book demonstrates how wrong that notion is – how it’s impossible to push institutions into a country, and how institutions that arise before market innovation takes root will fail to nurture such innovation. Turns out I had it exactly backwards: a culture of innovation will spawn the very institutions it requires over time.

As I mentioned earlier, The Prosperity Paradox is aimed at helping poor nations. But I believe its impact can go far beyond that. I see real value in its prescriptions for aiding the many areas of our own nation that have been left behind by wealth-creating innovations over the past few decades, or for serving disadvantaged groups. (In fact, just a few days ago I read a profile of Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET. He made his fortune by targeting nonconsumption right here in the US.) And at a micro level, its holds lessons even for established businesses. I’ll have a separate blog post soon about its passages that help explain why so many companies’ Continuous Improvement efforts fail.

The real strength of the book lies in its exhaustive research. This is no mere theory; the authors cite endless examples to show what works in the real world, and what doesn’t.

As with all of Christensen’s books, this one is extremely well-written and a pleasure to read. His previous work with Dillon produced the excellent How Will You Measure Your Life? And Ojomo clearly brings much to the table, with his experiences growing up in Nigeria and with his own aforementioned failed efforts to provide aid in Africa. The three make a fine team here.

The tragic story of the death of Tulane University student Margaret “Meg” Maurer is heartbreaking all by itself.

Maurer was killed in an astonishing freak accident on March 5 at a rest stop on I-10 in southern Mississippi. A dual wheel assembly from a passing tractor-trailer broke free, rolled 850 feet, and struck her as she was getting back into the car she was traveling in for a hiking vacation to the mountains of North Carolina.

Adding to the tragedy is a what an amazing talent the world lost as a result. Maurer was a gifted scientific illustrator, as seen in these examples:

I was reminded of the similarly tragic compound loss from long ago that I learned about at the Indiana Military Museum in Indianapolis last fall. They have a whole room dedicated to the history of the cruiser the USS Indianapolis, lost to Japanese torpedoes on July 30, 1945, after she’d dropped off the materials for the atomic bombs at Tinian.

One soul who perished in that sinking was Lieutenant Commander Earl O. Henry of Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a dentist, a birder, a self-taught taxidermist, and an exceptionally gifted painter. My somewhat rough picture below shows some of his work in capturing his favorite animals with his craft. You can see (and purchase) much better examples here.

Each of us brings something unique to this world. As Clarence the angel said in It’s a Wonderful Life, “One man’s life touches so many others, when he’s not there it leaves an awfully big hole.” Losing the amazing gifts of Meg Maurer and Earl Henry so painfully early leaves us two gaping caverns.

I’m terribly delinquent for a book review I promised months ago, that of Sharyl Attkisson’s recent The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote. So here’s my take on the book: everybody ought to read it.

Attkisson details the staggering machinery of how unbelievable numbers of people work together to shape the news in the mass media, and particularly how they focus their energies on specific targets of political opportunity. If you didn’t believe in conspiracy theories before reading this book, you certainly will afterwards. (It’s a laughable aside that our country has been chasing conjured-up “collusion” for two years now, while the real – and really damaging – collusion has been ever-present for decades now.)

Most egregious is the revelation of how many media people who present themselves as objective are anything but. Also, the role of public relations firms is a revelation. (This is not to be critical of PR folks in general; I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with a good number of very fine people in that industry lately. It’s a tiny percentage in their world who are part of the smear machinery.) For anyone generally paying attention, though, none of this will be big news – but the sheer scope and audacity of it is astonishing.

Attkisson makes it clear that smears have been used on both sides of the political aisle. (I was awfully surprised, though, not to see the name of Lee Atwater as an example from the conservative wing.) But that being said, today they are almost the sole province of the political left, and they seem to be coming with increasing and alarming frequency.

And it’s in that vein that I hesitated to write this review, because each time I began thinking about it in earnest, there was a new and more egregious example in the current events of the day. Then a week would go by, and another, yet more outrageous version would rear its stupendously ugly head. I’d wait some more. Lather, rinse, repeat…

So whether it was the hateful attacks on Judge Kavanaugh, or the Covington High School students, or most recently, Trump supporters in general in an invented-from-whole-cloth association with the concocted Jussie Smollett attack, the smear machine detailed by Attkisson was launched in full force.

But what finally got me off my duff to promote the book is that it’s not just the old actors as detailed by Attkisson pushing smears anymore. Lately we’ve had the advent of corporations joining forces with the smear machine, and operating in much the same way – pulling in politicians, pundits, and PR people to push an attack. So when Delta, Levi’s, and Dick’s Sporting Goods teamed up to go after the National Rifle Association in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting, it was the smear machine in action. Same with Nike’s attack on our entire nation when they sided with the ludicrous Colin Kaepernick – their ad ran, then a whole concerted effort was launched to make it stick. (It failed with almost everyone, with the exception of those true believers who never needed the prompt in the first place.) Ditto the attacks on men in general, whether by Unilever in their Axe advertising, or by P&G in their disgusting Gillette spot. Again, the ads ran, and then the true smear was launched in the mass media.

Now we’re even seeing it enacted in the private sphere as well. You probably didn’t get wind of the appalling attacks on a needlecraft merchant and blogger just recently, but suffice it to say that a whole industry (albeit a small and insular one) wound up being pulled into what were completely fabricated allegations of racism against an innocent woman, who wound up groveling and joining her vile attackers. That opens a new front in this war: the under-the-radar smear, starting with individual players and pulling in fellow-traveling companies to add fuel to the fire.

This has to stop. It will take a lot more people being educated about how these things work, and pushing back on them when they’re launched. You can start to help by reading The Smear. Arm yourself with the facts.

One of my most respected LinkedIn contacts is Phil Rink, a fellow engineer who writes the Jimi & Isaac series of children’s books, and is generally well-informed about anything he chooses to comment on.

I just recently finished the second book of his series, Jimi & Isaac 1b: Curve Ball. (I love reading good kids’ books – they’re similar to reading a great short story, but with a bit more meat on the bones.) In it was this remarkable passage:

“Isaac’s mom is teaching him how to pitch,” I told Dad. “She played softball, so she’s teaching him how to throw a baseball.”

“She’s helping me learn,” Isaac said. “My dad says nobody teaches anybody anything, but some people help other people learn.”

This was like the proverbial light bulb flashing on, a true Eureka! moment.

I’ve long known how difficult training is. A couple decades ago I was in charge of helping a very talented group of manufacturing technicians become proficient at cereal packaging, a job to which everyone, including me, was brand new. One method we used was to bring in service technicians for each piece of equipment on the packaging line, and have them train our technicians.

At least that was the intent. For most of them, what instead happened is that they ran the equipment while our folks stood around and watched, then eventually went away, leaving us no better off. Or actually worse off, since they cost us an arm and a leg for their labor, travel, and per diem expenses.

There were one or two, though, who very quickly had our technicians becoming expert themselves. We loved those guys, because they made such a vast difference in our ability to operate and maintain the equipment.

But what was different about them? I knew at the time it was an ability to “reach” our operators in a way your average extremely knowledgeable machine service tech couldn’t, but I never got much beyond that.

Much later, as we developed our company’s continuous improvement methodologies, the concept of “Learn-Do-Teach” came around, and that helped a bit. Certainly, including the bit about the learner not just grasping but being able to teach the material by the end was a great notion. But it still wasn’t the answer.

Later still, as I became active as an adult Scout leader, the BSA training methodology – the EDGE method – helped even more. It’s an acronym for “Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, and Enable.” This truly got at the root of each person learning to do something in his own way.

But Phil’s passage brought it all home. You don’t actually teach anybody anything! You help them learn. What a huge, deep concept made completely simple, in a children’s book of all places. Yes. It’s all clear now.

Nice job, Phil. Thanks.

One of my favorite Christmas movies – part of the pantheon of shows my wife and I have watched every Christmas almost our whole time together (decades), is The Bishop’s Wife. David Niven plays Bishop Henry Brougham, who’s so consumed by his desire to lead the construction of a huge new cathedral that he neglects his wife and daughter, his flock, and himself.

It hit me as we watched it last month that it’s a timely warning of the lives we lead today. So very many people now live for their careers only, men and women alike. Hustle, hustle, hustle! (And side-hustle, too!) Be the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night! Climb the ladder! (Or be the CEO of a startup!) Wake at 4:30 and retire at 11:00! Go go go!

But we’re being sold a bill of goods. I felt that keenly right before Christmas, when I read a LinkedIn post by a young woman who was cheering herself for letting business travel keep her away from home for her daughter’s seventh birthday. Think of the example I’m setting for her about how women can get ahead and be corporate power-brokers! she consoled herself.

I thought of it again when a young woman posted an article this month detailing her struggle over the reality that she’d been forced to become a stay-at-home Mom. “No one wants to hear a TedTalk from a woman who gave up her career to follow her husband to another country for his career. Where are the lessons learned and inspirational stories in that?” wrote Dorin Greenwood.

I considered it deeply as I wrote this blog post some months ago, pointing out that my corporate executive friends are out of shape and look awful. That’s not how it should be if you’re fulfilled, am I right?

But I thought the most about it when I lived the corporate leader life, traveling constantly and missing things at home, and pissing my wife off tremendously in the process. I resented her quiet (but not subtle) temper tantrums each time I headed out of town – she was failing to support my climb up the ladder! And then I got royally shafted by people I’d supported for over fifteen years, people I considered friends, but who clearly considered me just a tool to get what they wanted. But I still had one cheerleader: my wife. I finally took a step back and thought deeply about what’s really important to me. And I realized that through all that time, I’d been every bit as miserable as I’d made her. I wasn’t chasing my life, our life – I was chasing a life all those people who wound up dumping on me decided I should have.

Since then I’ve tried very hard to have the right priorities. I still screw them up, but I guarantee you I’m a lot closer to living the life I want to live now than I was back then. My wife and my boys and my health come first now. It was very nice to reflect during the movie last month that I long ago jettisoned that cathedral I was letting other people run me into the ground to build. Oh, I’m still building – but it’s increasingly a design of my own making.

In the movie, Cary Grant plays the magnetic angel Dudley who shows up to answer the bishop’s prayer for help. Dudley’s increasingly close (and therefore threatening) relationship with Bishop Brougham’s daughter, servants, friends, and most of all, wife Julia (played by the radiantly lovely Loretta Young), brings the bishop back to his senses and has him abandon the planned cathedral to save his marriage, his family, and himself.

That’s probably not going to happen for you, an angel showing up to make everything right. What will it take for you to put first things first, to throw out those cathedral plans that others – your bosses, your colleagues, society – are trying to shove down your throat?