Now Blow Your Mind on Q-Analysis

Clean, Big and Obvious:   Six Billion People Aren't Going Away

"Uncle Will" Stephenson

I left the last blog hanging on a follow up (which is coming).  But it's a holiday and vacation coming up, when I traditionally "go academic" in the blog.

Dirty Little Secret : Clean Big Obvious

The weak link is between "Secret" and "Obvious".  The first question you have to ask is "Obvious to Whom?" "Secret to Whom?"   Or does a secret only matter to one billion "big and clean" people?

Whom is being Surveyed?   This is a question I grew up with, as the oldest kid whose dad was getting a Ph.D. in Journalism at Columbia Missouri - then considered the top J-School and still a giant.   I sat as a kid and absorbed dinner conversation between my dad, his Faculty Advisor Will Stephenson, and my great Grandfather, William Freeland.  And I was told to finish my peas, and not spread them about the plate, because children were starving in China...

Service Economy Blues? Try Enjoying People

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Dublin.   The two young men who served us this morning had to get what my wife and I wanted to us, very quickly, because there was a little bit of a line.  Not much, compared to an airport, but they don't get to sit down much today, I reckon.

They are typical of the people who have served us - bus drivers, waiters, shopkeeps, etc.  And my wife and kids are talking about how wonderfully kind people are here in Ireland.  It's true.

It was also true in Lima Peru earlier this year, though the language was a barrier for us.  And it made me think again of one of the three books I read this summer, at the beach.  Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, in which an alter-ego of the Gotama Buddha finds his zen as a small person ferryboat steer.

When I like myself, occasionally, it's when I'm enjoying and liking other people.  If one manages to achieve that, life goes by nicely.   On the other hand, the consumption path of the human species really is headed for a precipice, and being popular with other humans can't be the sole measure of my life.   When I want to actually accomplish things and make a difference, I'm forced to try changing human behavior which doesn't want to be changed.

The service sector requires us to recycle our soul with each client encounter.

Perspective at EScrap 2011

In the 1990s, I learned from a mentor, Sheldon Appel, of Perkit Folding Box Company (a small paper mill, incredibly still operating in inner city Boston in the 1990s) that in the recycling industry, we think we are recycling paper, plastic and metals.   Actually, he told me, we are recycling people, by creating jobs and patiently working with people desperate enough to work for us.  He said he had stopped making money running the paper mill years earlier, but still ran it in Mattapan, because the people who worked for him would have serious trouble finding blue collar work if they ever closed.


Shelly, Baynard Paul, Jim Harvey, Milty Shaeffer, the Golds... a generation of recyclers who had been around as the Massachusetts paper mill industry survived by recycling.  The larger and larger scale paper mills were moving closer and closer to the trees, up in Maine and Canada, and proximity to the urban areas which needed the paper was now easy to do with Eisenhower's system of interstate highways, undercutting the advantage of having paper mills close to cities.  While the recycling mills like Perkit and Newark Paperboard and American Tissue were indeed "saving trees", they didn't do it on purpose...   They were accidental environmental companies, turning to a feedstock that came from the city, in order to survive and compete with a maturing market.