I write short stories. Check out my book, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, for samples. I’m toying with a story inspired by the saga of a failed-businessman who, I am waiting to hear, has been caught snitching bon bons while taking out the cat litter.
Three military men appear in this strange and dysfunctional spectacle.
The oldest soldier was a pilot shot down over hostile territory, tortured, held as a prisoner of war for five years, was released, and became a U.S. Senator.
The second soldier flew combat missions in Iraq, became an astronaut, and commanded space shuttle missions. He retired from the military when his senator wife was shot in an attempted assassination and was elected to replace her in the U.S. Senate.
The third military man was a part-time member of the National Guard, led small infantry squads and sat in an office during three tours in the Middle East. He became a cable television anchor where he projected a tough persona on camera while presenting his own off-camera spectacle of drunkenness and erratic bullying. But, by golly, he looked the part.
The TV drunk was appointed to a casting couch cabinet as Secretary of Defense. He disclosed classified information on unofficial and insecure media and, in the interest of transparency, I suppose, invited a journalist to listen in. The leak jeopardized the lives of troops on the ground, no doubt more seriously than when he led rifle squads.
The failed businessman derided the prisoner of war senator for allowing himself to be captured.
The casting couch secretary accused the astronaut senator of sedition and tried to strip his military rank and deny his pension when the astronaut quoted the Department of Defense Law of War Manual on social media.
I won’t be writing this story. It’s beyond belief and I’m too busy avoiding cat bon bons from Venezuela in the news.
Last week, I self-published a book on Amazon. Thorough readers of the Vine Maple Farm blog will find it familiar because its content was all published as posts here. I bundled together a selection of posts and called them Vine Maple Farm: A Whatcom County Idyl, then sorted and grouped the posts for coherence, and edited them to knock off a few rough corners and solecisms. You can purchase it here.
I admit that I am not pleased with life in 2025: too many pointless attempts to sway each other’s politics, too many crass ads invading our lives, over-valuing wealth and power and forgetting kindness and justice.
I’d like to go back to a better time, not the bitter mono-cultural nationalism and tribalism favored by MAGA, but the time and life where I grew up on a rural road in the far northwest corner of the country, an area that likes to call itself The Fourth Corner, the last corner of the country to enter the culture of the rest of the United States.
Alaska and Hawaii have a right to disagree, but The Fourth Corner is often behind on the news.
The product of my yearnings is a Whatcom Idyl. Don’t be fooled: all idyls are the product of fantasy and selective memory and my idyl is no different, but I hope that a few people might pick it up during the coming Advent and Christmas season and enjoy a moment drifting off into a world much different than today.
I’m not feeling optimistic about the U.S. If there was ever a time for a U.S. turnaround, it’s 2025.
The bed rock of Deming’s method is respect for all the participants; the hot-shot CEO and the assistant janitor both contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. If everyone today took Deming to heart, the decade would turnaround in an instant.
Boeing, a company I respected, even idolized, forty years ago is in shambles. 3M, another company I once admired, is accused of foisting forever-chemicals on us, and now we’re supposed to get rid of our black plastic kitchen utensils because they are poisoning us.
We’re about to inaugurate a president who claims to be a business genius but went bankrupt running New Jersey casinos. He’s such a blunderer at moral corruption, the usual play ground of political types, he’s a convicted felon. Not my idea of success.
This week, I decided it was time to go to the all-time turnaround king, W. Edwards Deming, for advice.
About fifteen years ago, I wrote a book on computing standards called Cloud Standards. I covered ISO/IEC 270001, which is a basis for most IT security plans. Cloud computing services, such as Amazon Web Services, request public audits of their compliance to ISO 270001 aiming to increase their customers’ confidence in their IT security practices. 270001, as do many IT governance schemes, relies heavily on W. Edwards Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle.
Consequently, I became interested in W. Edwards Deming; I read a number of his books and studied his work. In the 1950s, Deming went to Japan to advise industrialists on running their companies while they struggled to recover from WWII. Within fifteen years, Japan went from a bombed out and defeated ruin to the thriving second largest economy on the planet. They attributed their success largely to Deming’s tutelage.
In the 1980s, Ford Motor Corporation had trailed behind General Motors in automobile sales and profitability since the halcyon days of Henry Ford and the Model T. Seeing the success of Honda, Toyota, and Nissan, they brought in Deming. Following his advice, FMC soon took the lead among U.S. automakers in competing against the onslaught of well-designed and precision-built Japanese automobiles.
Maybe it’s time to listen to Deming’s advice. He died in 1996, so we can’t talk to him, but he left behind several books and many papers.
Deming applied statistical analysis to manufacturing and management. You might expect his method would be to measure productivity precisely and design processes around time and motion studies of worker efficiency.
Deming rejected all of that. Instead, he recommended abolishing performance reviews. The originator of Total Quality Management looked on product inspections with disfavor.
His most popular work, Out Of theCrisis, was published in 1982. He wrote to address the crisis of American industry in the 1980s when Japan produced better cars at lower prices than Detroit and companies like Sony and Hitachi were innovating circles around the nascent Silicon Valley.
Out Of Crisis contains the kernels of his ideas. He demands that both workers and management have a through understanding of all aspects of their business and customers and focus on long term success while ignoring quarterly profits. He uses statistical analysis to distinguish errant processes from accidents. The job of both management and workers is to improve the process by iterating on the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle for continuous improvement.
The bed rock of Deming’s method is respect for all the participants; the hot-shot CEO and the assistant janitor both contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. If everyone today took Deming to heart, the decade would turnaround in an instant.
I wish I could recommend Out Of the Crisis as a book, and I do, but with cautions. Deming’s style is his own. He’s preachy. He works from examples more often than explicit statement of principles and reasoned exposition. Keep in mind that Deming was not a crackpot. He sounds like one, but when businesses followed his advice, they consistently thrived. He was the most effective business consultant of the twentieth century.
He could turn around the twenty-first century. Read him and follow his advice.
