Too Big (Not) to Fail
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| The head shot is from after I quit the corporate world, a disheveled writer in sweats, and the suit |
pic is the uniform I wore for years, charcoal suit, white shirt, and monochrome tie, usually silver.
The very thought of writing this post makes me nervous. For it to be truthful, it will have to be full of the pronoun “I,” because my career in the business world has been a series of unique experiences in which my work made a difference far beyond my expectations. Five times I have worked out of headquarters offices, here and abroad, sometimes as an employee in a cubicle and others as a management consultant with one large principal client. My participation was always deep involvement in big things underway, but also always some distance apart from the office politics of the people I was working with. That represented a rare opportunity to observe and study how things work in such centrally controlled environments. Why I believe I have some insights about the difficulties of effecting change in large organizations.
Back when the economy crashed at the end of the Bush 43 administration, the mantra of those crafting the many bailouts that somehow failed to resolve the crisis was that there are institutions which are “too big to fail.” This, of course, is clearly untrue. What they meant was that the powers-that-be couldn’t afford to let them fail, even though failure is the great self-correcting tool of capitalism. Why economists delight in telling us that “capitalism is war by other means” and operates through a continuous process of “creative destruction.” The average lifespan of a corporation, even the very big ones, is less than the lifespan of a human being, about 40 years, give or take. How do they fail? The same way old people fail as they age. They forget things, important things, and they lose their ability to adapt to inevitable changes in the circumstances of their lives.
The reason for this post is that the defense of what Donald Trump terms the “Deep State” consists at base of the same “Too Big to Fail” (un)truism. Massive change initiatives targeting institutions that collectively make up the U.S. Government are condemned as acts of seditious vandalism. The argument goes that the Government has worked pretty well as is for many generations, that it is inherently stable, and that it has done more good than bad over the decades, which would be imperiled by misguided reform efforts that can succeed only in causing chaos in vital government functions at tremendous cost to the Constitution and the citizenry.
My view is that the underlying argument is completely wrong. All organizations are subject to the same afflictions and their built-in momentum toward eventual failure is aggravated enormously by sheer size. The federal government of the United States is the largest, most powerful organization in human history. It holds the power of life and death over all the people on earth. Its direct actions can have unintended consequences that kill millions or billions of people, and its age-induced failure would kill far more than that. Worse, there are aspects of organizational behavior which have never been well understood because human myopia, even at the ‘expert’ level, has failed to perceive that longstanding organizations possess a consciousness of their own, a function of their literal DNA, which is anti-human by nature. It is the tendency of all organizations to substitute their internal reality for the larger — to them dangerous —reality of human morality, logic, judgment, curiosity, independence, and individual thought.
How dare I make such outrageous claims? Because I have been a witness and a player at high levels in efforts to change threatened organizations before their own momentum kills them. I have done in this in multiple industries and multiple disciplines and learned some hard lessons along the way. Change and revitalization are possible, though not for all organizations and not for organizations whose leadership is too much a captive of organizational consciousness. All of this I will explain. First, a look at the inputs to my fairly radical perspective, which comes principally from the corporate world.
THE CORPORATE WORLD
Coincidentally or not, I’ve had affiliations with companies that are unusually old in the scheme of things. I had a grandfather who spent his entire working life as a plant engineer for Anchor Hocking Glass, founded in 1911. I had a father, a grandfather, and an uncle who spent most of their careers in the employ of E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company, founded in 1802. In my own career I have been affiliated as employee or consultant with four long-lived corporations, one of them in the Fortune 500 and three of them in the Fortune 100. The youngest of these was founded in 1911. All of the venerable manufacturing institutions on the list, including DuPont and Anchor Hocking, have had to struggle mightily in my lifetime to survive. By this happenstance, I have learned a great deal about the ills of old age in the corporate world. My association with the United Auto Workers union (founded in 1935, during the first term of Deep State godfather FDR), also provided me with insight about the ailments of very old not-for-profit bureaucracies whose mission is serving the needs of their membership, i.e., voters, comprising very nearly a million active and retired persons.
The manufacturing companies were all in different businesses: glassware, chemicals, computers, automobiles, and appliances. What did they have in common? Extreme longevity achieved through a century or more of continuous success and innovation in their core businesses. Concomitant with success, however, is the inevitable accumulation of numerous operating units staffed by increasing layers of hierarchy.
What manufacturers didn’t recognize until later was that the graduate business schools were focusing their students on majors in finance and accounting, which spawned a cold-blooded perspective on business growth. Emotional commitment to the kind of product that had made the company prosper for generations began to give way to a view that what really mattered was the verities of profit and loss and stock price. Companies existed to make money, not synthetic fabrics, bottles, cash registers, cars, and durable appliances. Gradually, rhe most favored route to senior management was the CFO position. This seemed to make sense. Markets change, and what used to attract customers could be made obsolete in a heartbeat.
The unintended consequence of this profound shift in management priorities was that companies forgot what business they were in. They felt no need to dance with the girl they’d brought to the prom. DuPont acquired an oil company, because the commodity nature of petroleum looked like a good hedge against the rising costs of new product development in the high-tech world of plastics and innovative industrial and commercial chemicals. They became the python who swallowed the deer and choked on the carcass. Anchor Hocking lost the returnable bottles market and since they had never been in the new product development business changed their business model to the financially defensible strategy of managing revenue decline while retaining profitability through cost cutting, which resulted in plant closures and the loss of market opportunities they no longer had the capacity to pursue.
NCR, which stood for ‘National Cash Register’ don’t forget, finally built a mechanical product that was too heavy for most retail counters to support. However they described it to themselves, they were forced to become a computer company instead of a mechanical machine manufacturer. They made the transition by dedicating themselves to two markets in particular, retail point-of-sale processors and terminals, and financial management systems (dear to the hearts of their increasingly finance-oriented senior managers). Like most computer companies, their product offerings relied on proprietary software, which limited their connectivity with other brands and application types in the business environment. With a loyal customer base carried over from the cash register days, they were able to charge premium prices and make the money needed to cover the cost of their hardware manufacturing. In the process, they missed the monopoly on mainframe computing achieved by IBM, who were ruthless in competing for customers in every industry. This led to a catalogue of catastrophes at NCR (whose initials officially no longer stood for cash registers), and a financial strategy that inflated stock price via a Treasury-stock buyback scheme that fooled AT&T into believing they were a successful and desirable computer company. NCR was acquired and subsequently spat out a couple years later by AT&T, who have never themselves recovered from forgetting they were in the telephone business. Today, ironically, NCR is essentially a cash register company again, selling ATM cash machines to banks and retail outlets. Full circle. Almost.
General Motors is its own sad story of forgetting. They, and their American competitors, forgot how to design and manufacture automobiles their customers wanted. When I left NCR and became a freelance business writer, I received a monthly contract with one of GM’s oldest manufacturing divisions, Inland, the historic Dayton OH plant that still sat on the location of the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. All by itself, Inland was a $3 billion business, providing component products to various makes and models of GM cars and trucks. They were struggling. Corporate management had become ruthless about moving manufacturing plants to Mexico for cost reasons. Inland was at dire risk of being closed. My umbrella assignment was to provide written materials in support of Inland’s “synchronous engineering” program. I got a crash course in manufacturing, whose fundamental economics and quality assurance were sorely in need of improvement. The answer? Something called the Toyota Production System. Otherwise known as Just-in-Time manufacturing or — if you were GM who had to have its names for everything (in Detroit ‘employee’ was spelled ‘employe’ and don’t you forget it) — “synchronous manufacturing.” Got it. And thus began a great adventure at what was still the largest manufacturing company in the world.
Here I should explain a couple of things about my own career that bear on the question of how I learned what I claim to know about companies I’ve worked for. By the age of 25, I had been to graduate business school at Cornell, dropped out in my second year for fear of becoming a CPA, and became a conspicuous failure given my educational background and work experience, which included an intern job in the tax department at Scott Paper Company headquarters (ugh) and both summer jobs and a full year after college working for a small town Harvard lawyer-entrepreneur (educational, especially the time spent on research in a county courthouse, then as a collection agent and lumber yard flunkie and truck driver). I was editor for a time of a county-sponsored historical magazine, where I stole time to learn, finally, how to write. All of which left me nowhere after the end of the Bicentennial doings that inspired my defunct editorial job. When I decided it was time to grow up and start earning a living in the business world, where my educational credentials were no longer an asset but a liability. “You went where? Why are you looking for a job here?”
I took a job with a construction newspaper in Philadelphia (competing with McGraw-Hill’s Dodge Reports, who kicked our ass but good), got fired for insubordination after a year and five months, and found a job as a proofreader for a nuclear engineering firm in Cherry Hill, NJ. The company was making money but not so much by designing nuclear power plant components as by responding to interrogatories by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This, you see, was in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island disaster, and the nuclear industry was moribund. My busiest time was on a task force updating engineering résumés to satisfy the NRC’s post-TMI documentation requirements. Plenty of overtime. Thousands of résumés. Also many technical letters generated by a truly diverse engineering workforce, many of whom were transplants from Russia and prickly about having their sentences rewritten by American English majors. I got away with it for the most part, and was also assigned to develop a “Comma Seminar” for a proofreader workforce that filled a lot of time by pretending to proofread and changing each other’s comma decisions to show they’d made corrections. The Comma Seminar was a crowning touch in my process of learning to write. It made me understand sentence structure better than I ever had, despite all those years of Latin and French and English grammar in school. A year and five months in at Stone & Webster Engineering, I resigned to avoid getting fired for insubordination again and got a job with Datapro Research Corporwtion, a McGraw-Hill company headquartered in Delran, NJ.
Datapro was the most successful company I’ve ever worked for. They had a virtual monopoly on 3rd party technical computer documentation. They published system descriptions and user ratings of hundreds of computer products from mainframes to modems. Reports were published in 3-ring binders updated once a month with new and revised product reports in each monthly supplement. All the editors on staff were smart, including the managing editors. Can’t say that about any company I’ve worked for and with ever since. When I interviewed for a job with the editor of the Word Processing and Office Systems services, she explained the choice she always had to make about job candidates. Were they writers who had to be taught about computer technology or computer technology types who had to be taught how to write? She was a lady in her middle years who looked and sounded gruff, but she was as kind as she was shrewd. I could check off a couple minor boxes on the technology side (BASIC computer programming course at Cornell, end-user of IBM ATMS word processing system at Stone & Webster), but the last time I’d written a program was on punch cards fed into an IBM mainframe. She smiled and told me I’d be one of the ones who had to learn about the technology on the job.
Yes, I was back in school, pushing 30 years old and back, finally, at Square One of an actual career. Way to piss away your youth, I was thinking… on the first day I wasn’t even in the building with the others. I was in a compact satellite building where there was an Apple II computer and a couple of small unoccupied rooms with desks and no windows. My editor Shirley showed up promptly and dropped a 3-pound stack of paper on the desk in front of me. “These are IBM product announcements. We get them every week. Your first assignment is to read them, every word, all the way through. You have to learn how they think. The products will do exactly what they describe and nothing more. You cannot assume what is not specifically included.” What I did for days. Read IBM stuff, all about SNA (System Network Architecture), point-release descriptions of innumerable pieces and parts of IBM software applications. I was reminded of the guidance provided to takers of the LSAT, always use only the narrowest possible interpretation of the facts presented (the reason I walked out of the LSAT preparation course I signed up for after my LSAT score did not suit me). Big Picture perspectives are not tolerated. Think small. Got it. This is how IBM succeeded so spectacularly in capturing its major account customers and making them dependent on the vendor, an utter reversal of the traditional seller-customer relationship.
Within a couple weeks, I was allowed into the editorial building. It was a great experience that laid the groundwork for the rest of my career. I got to use dedicated (then mostly proprietary designs) word processors to see how they worked. I still had my Underwood Standard typewriter at home, but even the comparatively primitive computer technology of the time changed my writing life for good. The competitors were battling for market share over such design decisions as page-oriented vs document oriented and onscreen code displays vs WYSIWYG (‘What You See is What You Get). We got our pick of what we wanted to write our own reports on. I chose a DECmate II, a very successful product of the Digital Equipment Corporation, then the chief rival of IBM in major accounts, and I was smitten with the machine. We had immediate access to vendors of the products we were writing about, and in line with my IBM announcement apprenticeship, I got to verify exactly what this or that feature could or could not do. Enforced precision. I got to meet fascinating people. Betsy in the Data Communications service, who started the day I did, a music major who came in uncomputerized and learned data communications by listening to Mozart as she read, until she could visualize the stream of digital bits and bytes traveling through cables and ether and system products like modems and packet switch networks. Brilliant lady. John Murphy, an industry-famous guru of microprocessors, who worked with the Queen of Word Processing, Amy Wohl, who made or broke new products on the market with a few well chosen words.
Others. John Allen, the best practitioner of management-by-wandering-around I’ve ever encountered. You could think of him as kind of aTrump without the mean tweets. What John had instead of tweets was stars. He visited your cubicle, glanced at what you were doing to see how you were doing, chatted with you for a minute,or so, then added some stars like lightning on whatever paper was topmost on the desk, and wandered off. He never had an unkind word for anybody, knew what and how everybody was doing, and ventured mild but cogent advice where needed. He also made ice cream once a week on the stoop behind the building. He was John Allen. (He and Betsy both attended my first book reading years later at Borders in Cherry Hill.) I got to go to industry conventions, including my first visit to Las Vegas, where I helped man the Datapro booth and beheld the breakthrough prototype of the Xerox Star, which would be transformed into the game-changing Apple MacIntosh when the expensive Xerox effort failed because the appliance company who developed thought it was just another snazzy appliance, not a breakthrough game changer.
I wound up writing the first Datapro review of the Apple MacIntosh some months later. I loved it. Along with everybody else. I got to stand in the hallways with editors from other services, where we debated the future of the computer market. Who would win? Who would dominate? The IBM PC had just taken the market by storm, but its communications were primitive, and so there were editors who though AT&T would ultimately rule the computer world with its vast experience with packet switch networks. We knew everything, of course. We were sitting on all the best technical information anyone had. We had all been to multiple courses at 2- and 3-day technical training in subjects like data communications and chip architecture. We were the smartest guys in the room. Which is where and when I started hearing a name that would come to haunt me. Frank Bogage. He was the smartest guy NOT in the room with us. Bogage knew everything. Like Bill Gates, he built chips in his garage and knew how all the billions of hits fitted together. He had been at Datapro. Then NCR Corporation had swooped in and stolen him away. I kept hearing from my Datapro colleagues, “Sure you’re good, but Bogage is… well, Bogage.”
Which explains why the headhunter who connected Bogage with NCR arrived out of the blue, courtesy of John Murphy, and did the same for me. Why, a year and five months into the Datapro job, I moved to Dayton, Ohio, and went to work as a competitive analyst at the NCR Office Systems Division (OSD). I would be leaving NCR too, a year and five months later, after I finished proposing and reviewing vendor responses to a consulting project designed to capitalize what had been learned from the failed OSD venture in the vital office information systems market. In that final task I was reporting to a Special Executive Committee meeting on the top floor of NCR World Headquarters. The Committee consisted of NCR vice-presidents from across the company, who approved my design of the consulting project and evaluated the responses before choosing the winner of the contract. The bidders were the Stanford Research with whom I had worked before, the Coopers & Lybrand Big 8 consulting firm, and an independent I had identified through my own Dad, a computer pioneer in his own right at DuPont. The consultant was Edward Yourdon, the father of structured programming, Yourdon had observed the chaos that was complicating software development in commercial markets and had defined, then effectively championed, standards for the architecture of application development, beginning with real world output objectives and ascending through a structured hierarchy that ensured conformance between the final code and the original intended use of that code. My proposal had described a process of developing new office application software employing a structured a Yourdon-type approach, beginning with a study of real needs in office environments. Yourdon’s name got on the bidder list as a courtesy to me, but when I met with him in New York, it was clear he wouldn’t win. He was a one-man operation with one assistant, who wrote an indifferent proposal. The two remaining bidders were SRI and Coopers. SRI’s response was workmanlike and somewhat academic. Coopers showed up with three full partners in striped suits and a custom ring binder beautifully printed on high quality paper. They got the job. I resigned shortly afterwards, and got two job offers from NCR in the following week, which I declined without regret.
Yourdon has been vilified as a paranoid who promoted false fears about the
dangers of Y2K. He was not paranoid. He was not wrong. No one knows how
much last minute work was done to avert the crisis. We all just got lucky, and
no one wanted to admit, then or now, how close we came to disaster. Secrets.
My freelance writing contract with Inland Division rapidly became much more. GM work quickly crowded out what I was doing for Dayton clients like Reynolds & Reynolds, the Iams Company, Mead Data Central, and a few advertising and video houses. My principal Inland contact reminded me more of Datapro than anyone I had worked with at NCR (apart from Bogage, of course, who was Datapro and definitely a genius and mentor to me personally). Frank Cooney was friendly, demanding, and knew his job, just like the editors I had known in Delran. He liked my copy and made no superfluous changes to it. I had two kinds of jobs, which would be the case throughout my 4-year association with GM: make the tools of JIT understandable to factory floor employes and put the right words in the mouth of the Division Manager in video and speech scripts about JIT and Statistical Process Control (the Deming stuff). I had to work on very short notice. Sometimes a script had to be delivered in the middle of the night after being assigned in the early afternoon. I could do that. It led to more work, including for Frank’s boss, a top manager type who had no social graces but also approved all my copy with few changes. I never addressed him by name. His first name seemed too familiar and I didn’t want to call him Mister. (Here, I’ll call him Mr. B.) Between Frank and his boss it soon became clear that what was needed was a comprehensive training program for all the division employes. By this time, two of the Coopers partners had approached me about working with them, and so I described the Inland opportunity, which convinced them to resign from Coopers and form a consulting firm with me.
Bogage had taught me about computers, the organizational problems created by computers, and, just as importantly, about computer companies and their irrational pretense of rational decisionmaking. (All those conversations in the hallways of Datapro had been wrong; companies do not make rational, informed decisions…) Mark Long was an MIT grad who had survived the grueling Arthur Andersen basic training ordeal that was famous for breaking consulting careers before they even began; one placement error on a computer printout of financial calculations was enough to make the entire output “all wrong,” a fail. Mark passed. He taught me the consulting business, most specifically how to structure a winning consulting proposal and how to leverage it for more business down the road. We won a big contract to produce technical documentation manuals of the JIT techniques for managers, user manuals written for factory floor employes, and presentation materials (videos, etc) for the kickoff event. We had a very tight deadline, which we met with the help of new partners of my writing acquaintance. The end result was a very successful division-wide rollout and promises of more work to come.
Then a couple big things happened. GM suddenly shrugged and changed all the rules on us. With a stroke a top management pen, Inland Division was rolled into a brand new unit called Inland Fisher Guide Division, and Inland’s Division Manager was named to head the new entity. Mr. B. was also promoted to a strategic position and faced a requirement to roll out a video explaining this massive organizational change to both the Inland and Fisher Guide employes. He called me early the next morning and said the Fisher Guide communicators had already grabbed hold of the project and were planning a quick award to a local vendor. This was not acceptable. Mr. B wanted me to attend the project briefing in Detroit and seek permission to bid on the job. I knew his talent for diplomacy, so I wasn't surprised they weren’t happy to see me after my 3 1/2 hour drive from Dayton. A lot of ‘Who might you be?’ looks from the Fisher Guide insiders seated around the table. I sat through the instructions about content and schedules and such, asked permission to return with a proposal first thing in the morning (so as not to delay their hop-to-it timeline), received it, and drove back to Dayton. I had about 8 hours to write my proposal, which I completed by 4 am, in time to arrive back in Detroit by 8 am. The man-in-charge seemed stunned by the document I gave him and awarded me the contract at the end of the meeting. Then I drove back to Dayton put in a call to Mr. B, informing him of the project status.
Mr. B returned my call and informed me that the Divisional Announcement video had been indefinitely postponed for a more urgent project, a major presentation by the new division’s business unit managers to the top management of GM Europe in a few weeks time. In Germany. All the business unit presentations had to be fully scripted and backed by design-unified slides to reinforce the reality of an integrated Inland/Fisher Guide organization that could serve a skeptical customer named GM Europe. I was given contact numbers for the business unit managers, a desk location at Fisher Guide in Detroit, and a preliminary deadline for script development and slide content.
Unfortunately, my consulting partners were otherwise engaged. They had fallen prey to a disease that was sweeping the nation at the time, the lure of the leveraged buyout. One of our newer partners had been a retail executive with major department store chains. He knew of a store in Ohio that was available for purchase. The owner was old and anxious to retire. He wanted some money to retire on. Overnight, Mark and fellow victims of the LBO virus hatched a plan to by the business for no money and went to work in negotiating a deal. Which left me alone in Detroit with a big job to do. It took me three days to build one slide showing the number of Inland Fisher Guide employes, total revenues for the merged organization, and the number and location of manufacturing facilities by product line. Nobody had the information in hand. It had to be assembled and verified in real time. The business unit managers were predictably uncomfortable with being scripted. They were used to winging it and scripting would cramp their style. All I had was a phone and a couple of email addresses. One of those was to the IFG Division Manager for whom I had written scripts in the past and whom I had personally directed through video shoots. I sent him progress reports that included subtle hints about where SBU manager cooperation was lacking. The resistance soon disappeared. I used the email channel prudently but effectively throughout the hectic development effort. When I needed support or a decision, it came. Design and production of high-end glass-mount slides proceeded with one of the Fisher Guide vendors, who let me down only once. I’d been working on slides (with content streaming in from all over), and I had a meeting scheduled to review the final final of the SBU scripts in a joint meeting with Mr. B and all SBU directors, as they were now officially titled. All I had to do was print out the revised scripts on the slide vendor’s laser and wend my way across a few of Detroit’s “Mile” roads to the meeting. Only the laser printer chose that moment to go haywire, spitting out blank pages from un-emptiable corrupted print queues. I had to choose between being late or showing up empty-handed. It wasn’t the slide guy’s fault. It was mine. I should have been better prepared. I drove past Nine Mile and Eight Mile Roads, etc, preparing for the unpleasant moment when Mr. B learned I had screwed up.
Except for the first and only time in my dealings with him, Mr. B took my news casually. “I’m sure everyone has their last markup of the scripts,” he said, with a look around the room. They all nodded. “Have their changes been made? Any issues with them?” I told all the changes had been made and the scripts were safely stored in the computer for final printout when aI returned to the office.things fell into place remarkably well after that. By the time we headed our separate ways to Germany, several of us were carrying last minute glass slide corrections, and everyone was in a good mood when we reached our hotel the night before the presentation. All I really had to do in the event itself was click the slides on the projector while the directors delivered their coordinated spiels for their product lines. About halfway through, one of the directors leaned over and tapped me in the shoulder. He was one who had been most resistant to the scripting. But he was smiling. “We can see the head and part of the shoulder being born,” he said. “Good job.”
After that, my role at GM changed. I became more executive speechwriter and less presentation builder. I was invited, on the basis of my managerial connections and my experience with Inland UAW members to become the only outside consultant invited to be a member of the new UAW/GM Quality Network, which was replacing everything I’d been working on before. I was able to return to Dayton for the most part, where we had reached a total of a dozen partners all told, and I made a decision to finish writing my long delayed book project called The Boomer Bible. I left my fancy-looking office p, its walnut panels and rich green carpeting, to move into a small white room across the hall. Where I wrote every day for two years and the business went slowly to hell.
It was not to be the end of my business career, because I was going to be given one more opportunity, seemingly out of the blue, to make use of all that I had learned in my career to date. But what was that exactly? Why have I spent time relating details of my personal experience in corporate America. Nothing I had done changed the world or saved America from a patient and hungry disease called decline.
Mark Long used to say, “It takes 20 years to get good at something. Most of our experience is just education, not accomplishment.” He was right. He was a man of contradictions and surprising wisdom, a devout Roman Catholic, a union-born Democrat, a faithful husband and father, and in my time with him, an excellent teacher and loyal friend. He was rough-edged, which he used adroitly to smooth the irritations caused by my icy consultant demeanor. In meetings with prospects and clients he always took off his suit coat and loosened his tie because aI never did. He was the regular guy people could talk to. We were a good team. One of our other partners, a college professor, was married to a psychic who gave him a reading on me without having ever met me. He told me about it because he wanted to see how I’d react. I gave him a noncommittal response but the truth is, she got a lot right, way more than she could have gleaned from her husband’s then slight acquaintance of me. She said I rely a lot on partnering with someone key, someone advantageous to me, whether I know that’s what I’m doing or not. As I thought about it, she was probably right. Mark Long certainly, and Frank Bogage. At NCR, people referred to me and Bogage as the Blues Brothers, forever warning of dire circumstances. Before those two, there were others in my life who became unlikely friends because we complemented one another in ways advantageous to both. Most of these have served in different ways to make me more human, which is to say more physical, more engaged with other people, more present in the here and now, and less a solitary, which is probably my default state. Always an observer, the partners the psychic speaks of have made me a participant as well, expanding the observational opportunity in important ways.
Why does any of this matter? How does it relate to my professed topic? Because I participated in the phenomena I was observing to a degree that forced me to make sense of what I was doing, why I was doing it, and what the experience was educating me about (hearkening back to Mark Long’s words about 20 years and education).
END OF PART 1
Yes, as I feared, this is turning out to be a longer piece than I can complete in one jump. With all the DOGE activity and panicky lawfare resistance, the topic is more relevant than ever, however. So I’m posting this at a good breaking off point and will bring Part 2 as my writing schedule permits. (As if there’s a schedule… I really don’t know what I’ll be working on from day to day, I just wait for the urgent thing to pop into my head when I wake up. Sorry about that.) The fact that this is posted will gnaw at me, and make it more likely for me to get back to work sooner than I might have otherwise. Something funny planned for tomorrow though… we’ll see how that works out.
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