Open windows

In the spring we are buffeted by pollen so it's hard to leave our windows open very much, so fall is the true time for living with windows open. It was my dad who inveighed about the wickedness of a world in which office and hotel buildings didn't let one open windows and let in fresh air, and as with many things he was not altogether wrong, he just couldn't fucking shut up about it and stop insisting on being the center of attention all the time, the proverbial smartest guy in the room, which made him difficult to take in any thing except the most measured of doses.

Speaking of which, I looked at the biography of Musk yesterday and decided I needed a little break from that motherfucker and his ilk. Not that we are not reminded of their presence constantly in the media daily. So I decided to take up One Man's Meat, a volume of essays by EB White from the late 30s. My friend Hilary had been reminded of it by reading my blog and it has been in the stack on my bedside table. I've dipped into it but never really caught White's groove, but I stdarted to last night. I'm sure I'll be coming back to it because the article I was reading before I turned off the light was about a visit to the Methodist camp near White's farm in Brooklyn, Maine from one Francis Townsend, whose name rang a bell though I wasn't sure why. Turns out he was one of the driving forces behind the development of Social Security. 

But let me return for a second to Musk. One of his principles in his catechism for product design and manufacturing process design is that every product requirement ("must be able to withstand support 2,000 pounds of pressure" or whatever) should be associated with a name. So that each requirement can be ruthlessly and continually interrogated so that things can be done and made in as efficient a way as possible. He has had results, we must credit him with that. 

By contrast, I read this WaPo article about the guy who runs the nation's military cemetaries and has made them the organization with the highest customer satisfaction rating of any in America. I could say his name but that's not the point. He's not about that. Quite the contrary. He considers it an accomplishment when the origins of the best practices of his organization become so integrated into his organization's way of doing things are forgotten. This, my friends, is a leader.