Most employees are below average...

Interesting point to ponder:
http://www.bchrma.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/rb-the-best-and-the-rest.pdf

Industrial v. Agrarian, Part I

Still working these thoughts out in my mind, but particularly liked this one I whipped off extemporaneousnessly here http://ironfiremen.com/2012/10/01/how-to-kill-a-fire-department/

Well, the good news is I've seen organizations rise.  I've seen some fall.  I've seen a few that still haven't gotten up.  I'm not sure I've seen any go full circle from being fallen to risen to fallen...but give me another couple decades.

The bad news is I suspect hat you're describing, in part, is the conflict between an "industrial" and an "agrarian" approach to the world -- and that's a much bigger issue in our world today then just the fire service.

To an industrialist, units are units.  You want to drive everything down to the simplest unit, to create systems that allow you to approach problems like algebra -- given the same operations the sum of x, y, and z will always equal the same thing.  ISO 9001, Six Sigma.  People aren't here to deeply understand what is going on but to follow set procedures.  One of the logical conclusions are corporations too big to fail, because after all what is needed is just tweaking the rules a bit, to understand what still needs to be documented and systemized so someone else can step in, read the manual, and continue running the organization.

Wendell Berry will argue that an agrarian approach is oriented to observing nature, to using technology but using it with deep wisdom to building better farms, better communities -- things that last for a long time.  Another farm writer, Gene Logsdon, will call it pastoral and point out that the the bible draws a difference between farmers (who are starting down the path of industrial temptation) and shepherds tending their flock.  This is built on working to deeply understand your local situation, to figure out how to benefit from it economically and socially, and leave it better in the end.  Joel Salatin won't get as philosophical but entertainingly shakes his head, in the book, "Folks, this ain't normal" at the conflicts between a regulatory system stuck in an industrial mindset and a farmer firmly planted in an agrarian world of his own.  They will all draw a sharp contrast between their vision of a farmer, and the unfortunate many who are called farmers today but seem to be more industrial serfs trapped in a financial and industrial fiefdom.

An industrial mindset is that of "our instructors are just as good as yours" -- it's a unit and one is good as any other (after all, you both have rockers above your shoulder patches indicating you've been trained to NFPA 1041).  Industrial is we know all we can know (until we find out we don't -- is there really a big difference the Charleston Sofa fire and the BP well blow out in the Gulf?) about something to make good decisions.  To an industrial mindset, it's just a matter of applying or perhaps adjusting procedures -- eventually everything must have most consistently reproducable and lowest cost solution; for their regulators it becomes just keep on layering more rules until you force folks into that one - and only one - possible "best" solution.

Agrarian people are also replaceable -- one day you will retire, one day you will die.  Did you leave your farm more productive then when the day you first went searching for chicken eggs?  Did you leave your community, your organization a better one?  Pastoral, if that's the better word, doesn't know all that there is -- they live a life full of doubt (a shepherd always wonders if a wolf is watching), full of always wondering how could things be done just a little bit better.  In the community, are they building up friendships and lifting up neighbors?  The decline of fraternal organizations like Grange, Elks, Masons is not unrelated to the decline of volunteer fire departments or the increasing difficulties in recruiting and retaining career firefighters.  After all, you need not seek friendship to fill your spare time --  a unit is a unit, one television program is as good as a website is as good as going to a meeting to fill that time.  Is the job of firefighting a calling (pastoral) or paycheck (industrial)?

A farmer -- in the agrarian mindset -- starts off collecting eggs as soon as he is old enough to walk and not drop too many, and moves on up to bucking haybales,  turning a wrench, and penciling out the plans of what to plant and how much profit can be expected, all the while observing the world around him...and counseling his kids as they move up the chain and take over the management of the farm to help them avoid the worst mistakes; all the while wondering if only he had time to try that, or had done this different could he improve on the results?  Contrast that to the fire chief who smuggly thinks he can manage scientifically simply because he's been given a prescriptive set of ideas from classes and standards and his limited personal knowledge hasn't yet been tested to it's limits -- and seeing he's achieved an artificial reality in the form of checking goals off a list, decides it's time to move on to a new town and a new set of goals to apply the same formula to.

I still haven't fleshed out this idea entirely, but the more I type over the last couple weeks on the subject the more convinced I'm becoming that this fundamental conflict between industrial and pastoral approaches is at the heart of much of the troubles we have today, and that's not limited to the fire service.

   

Rediscovery of Character

Great piece by David Brooks: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/opinion/brooks-the-rediscovery-of-character.html

“At root,” Wilson wrote in 1985 in The Public Interest, “in almost every area of important concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers or voters and public officials.” When Wilson wrote about character and virtue, he didn’t mean anything high flown or theocratic. It was just the basics, befitting a man who grew up in the middle-class suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1940s: Behave in a balanced way. Think about the long-term consequences of your actions. Cooperate. Be decent. He did not believe that virtue was inculcated by prayer in schools. It was habituated by practicing good manners, by being dependable, punctual and responsible day by day. Wilson lived in an individualistic age, but he emphasized that character was formed in groups. As he wrote in “The Moral Sense,” his 1993 masterpiece, “Order exists because a system of beliefs and sentiments held by members of a society sets limits to what those members can do.” Wilson set out to learn how groups created a good order, why that order sometimes frayed. He worked patiently and meticulously. The phrase “we don’t know” rings throughout his writing. He was quick to admit ignorance in the face of knotty social problems.

California, Culture, and Immigration

Nice article:
http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_california-demographics.html

Civil War was about slavery

(Posting here so I can reference it easily)
And even better than my writing below:





I'm not going to engage in a debate here.  But I will not let widely held but ignorant beliefs be stated without correction.

Anyone who reads contemporaneous documents on the subject will see it was entirely about slavery.  To believe otherwise after reading them takes an act of deliberate ignorance.

No matter what political hyperbole or revisionist history is applied, it came down to a battle to "Preserve the Union (in order to end slavery)" or "State's Rights (to continue to enslave humans)."

Perhaps the four best documents on this matter are the Ordinances or Declarations of four of the southern states themselves in which they lay out the reason why the wanted to secede from the Union.

These aren't the anonymous postings of pamphleter, nor are they an editorial of a single newspaper, a personal letter, or writings of a single author.

These are either Public Acts or explanatory notes that accompanied the Acts, adopted either by a referendum or by a convention lawfully called and assembled.  I can't think of anything that speaks to the sentiment of the people better then the documents they themselves voted to approve, or the Representatives they chose voted to approve.

Mississippi Declaration of Secession: http://www.civil-war.net/pages/mississippi_declaration.asp

In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. 

South Caroline Declaration of Causes of Secession:  http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/secession_causes.htm

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

Georgia Declaration of Secession: http://www.scribd.com/doc/47469194/Georgia%E2%80%99s-Declaration-of-Secession

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with theGovernment of the United States of America, present to their confederates and theworld the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have hadnumerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederateStates with reference to the subject of African slavery. 

Texas Ordinance of Secession:  http://www.lsjunction.com/docs/secesson.htm

...was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits...
The controlling majority of the Federal Government...avowed purpose [is] acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.

Apart from the Ordinances, CSA Vice President Alexander Stephen's "Cornerstone Speech" of March 1861 laid it out as:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.

As I said, I'm not here to debate.  There is nothing for reasonable men to debate -- the words of the people of the time are clear and unambiguous.  To claim the Civil War was about anything other the slavery is as ludicrous as to state the Sun sometimes rises in the west and sets in the east.

Utilizing Genius

Nifty article on managing geniuses:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/what-to-do-with-the-underutilized-genius-on-your-staff/7239?tag=nl.e101

We're a Network

More and more I realize we're a Network -- and it's the skills at administering that system (and the natural resiliency built into that system) that matters most.

Here's one great article from The New Republic:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/99521/america-world-power-declinism

And another good one on how the changes happening to how we train and recruit new workers:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576596630897409182.html

Many of the changes in the 2nd article date back to something mentioned in the 1st -- when faced with a stagnant economy circa 1987 American business began a ruthless restructuring that has maintained our share of the world GDP at around 25%.  But we haven't completed the "rewiring" of our Network to from one dominated by long-lived Corporations to one in which jobs and companies have much shorter "half-lives" before they decay.