One Year + Three Days: Squirrels, Nuts & Honesty

Time Passes

The one-year recap and look forward is in-process.  It's clear that I'm working more now that I'm working less.  Working for yourself is far more complex than being employed.  In an organization you set strategies and goals and work within budget constraints and the often limited human resources available.  As an executive I spent most of my time mentoring my staff, keeping them aware of what they needed to know and isolated from the distraction of useless information or no information and I spent much repetitive, unproductive time in planning meetings with bosses and peers.  Working for yourself everything is in flux and there is no end of the day wrap-up or weekend.

Squirrels & Nuts

Spring arrived very late in MN this year.  The snow seemed to never end.  Hot weather never arrived either and now with an early frost the honey and crop production has ended, also disappointing.  The northern suburb where we spend our weekday time is heavily forested with oak trees, white, red, burr, etc.  The red oaks are afflicted with oak wilt and we've lost many from our yard at great cost, financial and esthetic.  The lawns are covered in acorns allowing for non-stop browsing by the deer and perpetual carrying and burying by the squirrels.  Mice also seem to fill every niche with the half chewed shells.  It's not clear to me how a mouse carries something so large.  Apparently mice can enter our hose through a 1/4" hole.  That almost  a David Copperfield act with a 5/8" nut in your mouth.

There are a few black walnut trees around and the squirrels seem to carry these for blocks from the source.  It seems a non-stop effort this time of the year.  Pick up a huge walnut, carry it a couple of blocks and bury it and then repeat.  In my yard squirrels die frequently.  In the wild, without any marksmen about they can live seven or eight years.  They have three litters per year and seem to spend a fair amount of time making litters but what about the nuts.  Of all the acorns and walnuts and whatever nuts are about that they bury, what becomes of them?  Is some squirrel keeping track of the the 2009 nut stash, know that was a particularly good one or making sure it's secure?  It seems that on any given day squirrels go out and look for something to eat.  Never have I seen one dig up a nut that was buried.

Red squirrels are another opportunity to attempt and organizational metaphor.  The red guys chew on everything.  This past year they chewed up $3,000 of my cars.  While they did manage to take parts (insulation) from one car and build cozy nests in two others, much of their chewing was of little purpose.  It's unclear to me why you would eat plastic or oil-covered wire.  They also ate the handles off my garbage cans.  That might be a presumption that the handles were eaten.  They might have chewed off hunks and buried them in anticipation of some future time when the parts could be re-purposed or re-assembled (sort of a Ted Williams deal).  Much organizational work is red squirrel work.  I'm not going to bother to attempt metaphor completion.

This is what concerns me when I consider going back to working for someone else.  My experience in organizations was that we spend a lot of time burying nuts.  Whenever there was a crisis no one said "go dig up the nuts we put aside."  We looked for new nuts.  The really good nut-gatherers moved on to nut-gathering organizations where they were appreciated; we struggled.  The reserve organizational nuts must have all been consumed by the stockholders.  Many plans were written, proposals put together and meetings and seminars conducted where we talked about what we'd done in the past rather than looking to the future.  The word of the the half-decade is innovation.  Everyone is attempting to put together innovation programs...with documents, plans, goals, budgets, constraints, management, innovation czars, etc.  It seems that organizations only focus should be evolving production driven by innovation.

Moving forward I want to manage my own nuts.

Honesty

Watching the clock caused me to stop short of the honesty theme.  Given the opportunity and constraints of the market good workers will do what needs to be down.  Flatter organizations do that better than those more hierarchial. Heirarchy creates the needs for plans, budgets, management, and all that.  It's easier to be honest in the flatter organization.  Often c-level executives consider their vision to be more clear.  More time needs to be spent listening to those doing the work.  Not listening to your employees is a compromise of honesty and that undermines the most valuable resource...the employees.

I'm going to have to work on this honesty section.  The clock is driving me crazy.  The chainsaw needs to come out and a large limb come down before the squirrels move into the attic.