A FEW ITEMS NOT COVERED IN YOUR BODY’S OWNER’S MANUAL

One Foot in the Gravy

OWNER’S MANUAL

I have had two great loves in my life: my wife of fifty years, and management consulting. My wife and I are still married and in love, but I’m shutting down my management consultancy. My only regret is I didn’t do it two years ago.

I started my consulting career before I knew what it was called. While still on active duty in the military I was the operations officer in a Division-level Prisoner of War Interrogation organization at Fort Hood, Texas. I made two observations: first, wars are not going to be fought in offices, so we needed to get into the field as often as possible. The stumbling block was the presence of two Divisions and an Army Corps on the same base, tens of thousands of soldiers competing for land on which to train simultaneously. The second observation was that Battalion Intelligence Primary Staff Officers were woefully unprepared. Most were Second Lieutenants straight out of basic intelligence training, eager and friendly puppies in a world of hungry adult canines.

These staff officers, called S-2s, were unable to do their jobs without the trust of their battalion commanders, seasoned Lieutenant Colonels, and battalion S-3s, Operations Primary Staff. They were pretty uniformly failing, not their fault. The position was supposed to be filled by a Captain, an experienced officer, not by a cute friendly puppy, but almost never was. The duties of a Battalion S-2 are several-fold, but the primary ones are to give the Commander and the S-3 reliable and accurate information with which to conduct warfare, and to look after the security of the battalion, ranging from classified documents to arms rooms, explosives and spies. Few had anywhere to turn to learn how. I filled the void.

At the end of my duty day, I started making rounds, usually visiting one or two S-2s per afternoon. I followed him around, chatted about what he was doing, what his problems were, and, when I had his confidence, began offering observations. Soon they began better prioritizing their tasks, and stopped giving formal multi-slide briefings to commanders, replaced with markers and butcher block paper. Before long, most gained the trust of their commanders and S-3s; the commanders were uniformly bright people, and discerned the catalyst for the changes. I became friendly with all of them. After that, when I needed a small slice of land, I would go to the post’s “Rosetta Stone,” as the land division and assignment daily document was known, find a friendly commander, and get what I needed.

That had another benefit. Every one of my soldiers spoke English plus at least one other language. German, Russian or Korean wasn’t the first language they needed, though, it was Infantry, Armor and Artillery. I rotated soldiers through two-to-three weeks of shadowing a non-commissioned officer in each of the disciplines, to become familiar with the realities of their lives. That gave them fluency in the lives of those they interrogated.

Later, when working for the National Security Advisor, I tackled a ticklish subject, release of classified information to foreign governments. Sure, we automatically gave anything requested to Canadians, Brits, Dutch, Germans, Spaniards, but what about Nicaraguans? Or Colombians, or Moroccans, or Thais, or Egyptians – the list is very long. So was the process for getting approval, which was often necessary to maintain positive relations and always took six to twelve months. I shortened it to a week or two.

First, every piece of classified information has an owner, who is often easy to identify. Rather than a four-month journey through every layer between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the owner, followed by a couple days of work by the owner, then a four-month journey back up, I proposed starting with the owner. She or he would assess the cost in national security of the release compared to the requester’s assessment of benefit, then it went up the chain. The chain acted quickly when seeing the assessments side by side, and a final decision arrived at the National Security Advisors staff in short order. Hardly as momentous as Booz Allen & Hamilton inventing critical path methodology, but every little bit helped.

I founded my consultancy in 1991 to handle freelance work for small businesses, and shortly got into real-world high-level global management consulting with Booz Allen after retirement. I sold a few million in services in the Middle East, then moved to a technology company that was establishing its own management consulting service. That was in freefall when I joined it as a hired gun to fix engagements gone bad; it turned out that was most of them. When it was simply abandoned, I started a supply chain consultancy, ran it to a few million, then started an operations management consultancy and did the same. I then took over a global division of its manufacturing business for three years before going around the CEO to the Board of Directors and showing them what I had uncovered in corporate accounting. I resigned, slept for six months, and started my own consultancy up again, in earnest.

That put a roof over our heads and food on the table for nearly thirty years. It also allowed me to meet and work with an astounding number of fascinating people. I’ve had two clients, both manufacturing company owners, who surprised me years apart by saying they had a personal dedication to supporting specific marginalized groups. I didn’t ask why, assuming they would tell me if they wished.

I had a client, a South Korean immigrant, whose father financed $1M of her new business, intended to compete with Alibaba. Her father was very traditional, and insisted that the company be headed by a man. The woman was bright, her boss was well-known in the Korean-American community and had great interpersonal skills. He was also easily led astray by self-serving advisors, such as the intellectual property attorney he hired off the internet to be the corporate attorney. The woman facilitated diversion of funds from the registered non-profit he headed to pay his salary, the client’s salary, and the excessive hours billed by the attorney. I reported her to the California state Board, which told me I had no standing to report illegal activities by an attorney since I wasn’t her client. Thank God attorneys don’t run the fire department. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but unless you’re the homeowner you can’t report a fire. You need to contact the homeowner and ask her to report the fire.”

The man signed a contract to build a custom multi-vendor storefront at a time when such software was available off-the-shelf. The programmer ran them completely out of money. And the attorney told them not to listen to me because I wasn’t a programmer. The relationship between programing and systems is fairly analogous to the relationship between typing and literature. Shakespeare must not have known anything about literature, because he never learned to type. My client and her father were both led astray by threats they couldn’t discern.

A client in Canada ran a consulting business for escort services. I learned far more from her than she did from me. I learned the value of never discarding contact information. A client in Ohio needed pallets on which to ship his product. I called a Michigan pallet supplier with whom I had done some work fifteen years earlier, gave him the specifications, and he told me to use an automotive pallet. I had learned so much about pallets that another ten years later I told a Florida pallet supplier how to save an average of twenty cents per pallet, five percent of a repaired pallet’s price. He, in turn, gave my client a discount.

That was confirmation of something I had learned years earlier. Ultimately, the only way to reduce the price of your purchases is to reduce the supplier’s cost of doing business. Many of my clients believed the class-warfare propaganda that you had to reduce your supplier’s profit margin to the bone to save money. Such advice couldn’t be more wrong. You want your supplier to make as much money as possible while charging you as little as possible. You do that by finding ways to reduce his cost of doing business with you. Often, it’s necessary to know what drives the supplier’s business, and what levers are available to manipulate the drivers. An example is transportation services. The provider can minimize and predict most of his costs except fuel. I’ve gotten multiple clients to agree with a transportation service provider to split the cost of increased prices of fuel, and to split the benefits of reduced prices of fuel. Both benefited.

Many clients became friends far more than clients. A hot-shot salesman for ADP, the outsourced payroll service company, wanted to buy a smaller company in the same industry. He introduced me to his partners, one of whom was operations-oriented, the other a fund-raiser. I was suspicious of both. On meeting the owners of the company, I was able to learn in ten minutes that their technology was two generations behind, and they were days from bankruptcy. Of course, they were eager to sell. That same day I learned that the fund-raiser did not know anyone with money to invest, but planned to rely on his skills as a bullshit artist. Exit one partner.

I found a source of funding who wanted a business model – how will you make money? We worked out a model novel to the industry. The whole industry paid sales representatives full commission on the sale of a multi-year contract, but the average contract was canceled several yeas early by the client. The reason was simple: they no longer felt valued. We changed that by hiring client advocates whose were paid based on client satisfaction, and hired sales reps willing to take larger commissions paid out over time based on client satisfaction. The source of funding sent my client a check for slightly over a million dollars that night, and two days later my client called me, struggling for breath. The second “partner” had embezzled all of their funds, which were actually withheld taxes owed to various taxing authorities, the IRS, and Social Security. The IRS didn’t care, they threw my client in jail. I posted bail, he was released, the judge reduced bail to zero, I got my money back, until the IRS arrested him again. He was arrested like clockwork, every six months for eight years, until he had personally repaid the money stolen by his partner. My client had already sent back the check because he was ethical. I met a great many fascinating people.

When I was diagnosed with late-onset hydrocephalus I contacted all my clients and told them I could no longer serve them. That was two years ago, after three brain surgeries to slow the advancement of the incurable disease, which will eventually lead to non-Alzheimer’s dementia. By then my practice was limited to small business owners who relied on me for advice in existential circumstances. I told them I could no longer ethically serve them, because I did not know when my cognitive functions would fail me and them.

Late last summer I felt much improved, and foolishly took on two new clients who were seeking a solution to the wrong problem. The simpler one was easier to fix than the more complex one, and the client was pleased. The more complex one wasn’t difficult to fix, but did need a financial model to execute the solution. That was when I began sleeping all but two hours per day. I hired a financial modeler to complete it, paying him twice what my client had paid me, but the client was not satisfied. He had every right to be dissatisfied. In addition to the hydrocephalus, which has left me wheelchair-bound, I have stage three COPD, which severely limits many activities. I’ve had one heart attack, one cardiac arrest, two major strokes and two bouts of bladder cancer, on top of more neurological disorders than most people can spell. So, I sleep.

Something else that wasn’t in my owner’s manual was that I would take longer to dispel grogginess upon wakening. I am often wide awake at six a.m., get up, get breakfast, and fall back asleep until three p.m. By the time the grogginess is dispelled, it’s dinner time. Days aren’t getting shorter, but they are going by in a flash.

Another part of dying turns out to be well-intentioned friends and acquaintances who want to help by sending me lengthy articles they’ve read in periodicals or on websites claiming insights that most of the Western medical profession ignores. There are reasons Western medical professionals don’t take the articles seriously, because they are – how to put this politely – rubbish. One friend sends me endless articles on breathing. Those worth considering, I had already read, or was aware of. One proved to have been written by me nearly 40 years ago, translated into Esperanto for the International Academy of the Sciences, and then picked up and retranslated into English. The new version was unrecognizable. But I have to at least skim the articles in case he wants to discuss them, which he invariably does.

Then there are the people who write to me, promising that “Doctors don’t know anything. My uncle’s neighbor’s dog’s previous owner’s brother-in-law was given six months to live two years ago and he’s still alive.” How do I argue with a dog’s previous owner’s brother-in-law? And, I’ve watched patients I’d just examined, who were healthy, simply die of unknown causes. Of course, there are others whose lab values confirmed they were dead who were talking to me.

Yet another thing not in the handbook is the opportunity to let go of long-held fantasies. Watching television today, I heard reference to the Drake Equation, which took me back years, to 1961 when I was beginning to understand probabilities. For those not familiar the Drake Equation is an estimation of the number of civilizations in our galaxy capable of communicating with us. It looks very scientific:

R * Fp * Ne * Fl * Fi * Fc * L = N

It’s bullshit. Each factor is completely unknowable, with equally defensible values ranging from zero to infinity. When even one factor in a multiplication equation is completely unknowable, the answer is completely unknowable. Another word for that is useless. Drake never intended the equation to produce a reliable answer, rather to spark discussion. I have had to give up the Drake Equation. Farewell.

In a similar vein, every day I wake up and am astonished by how much my ignorance has increased in the past twenty-four hours. I engage in internet fora to test my own theses and learn from others. I remain a skeptic about many things, including anthropogenic global warming, but have realized that my skepticism is itself getting between me and my desire to learn. Remaining a skeptic while becoming aware of skepticism’s dangers is very tiring.

A great many other things have happened that I’m sure weren’t in the user’s manual, which I seem to have lost. Perhaps one of you knows the address of the publisher. Until then, I’ll continue chronicling these new discoveries.