Management

I, rather notoriously (talk to some of the people at Central Dallas Ministries), don’t do management. I may do a little administration, when I have to, but that’s about as far as I’m willing to go.

Not doing management is mostly a matter of choice for me. I think I could probably do it if I wanted to, but I want to do things myself; not tell other people what to do. We do have processes for the things we need to have them for—mostly accounting and financial (my good friend and brilliant CPA, Tom Millner, was the first new person we brought on board when we started Central Dallas CDC, and he doesn’t mind doing a little management). We don’t have any rules or regulations that we don’t need to handle money safely or to satisfy the requirements of the law or grants we’re working under.

I understand that refusing to be a manager is limiting in some ways. I can run an organization of five or six (that’s roughly how big we are) without being a manager because I know everybody who works here pretty well. I know what they do and have a pretty good idea of their strengths and weaknesses. I know where I may be able to help them and where I won’t.

It also works because the people working at Central Dallas CDC have lots of strengths, not many weaknesses, and are extremely dedicated. I imagine (because I don’t really know) that the atmosphere working here is similar to places like the early days of Google or some other Silicon Valley start up. Everything may look chaotic, but you feel the energy in air. It almost makes your hair stand on end. I don’t need to look over people’s shoulders to make sure they work. I can’t even imagine working in an environment where that was necessary, and I would probably just go do something else if it ever did.

Our organizational chart is almost flat. Theoretically people report to me, but everyone has their own area of expertise and they know more about it then I do. We don’t have any mediocre people here.

Whether my dread of becoming a manager will ever prove a problem for Central Dallas CDC is hard to say. Most real estate development companies, even for-profits, are small. The business is for entrepreneurs; for people who aren’t afraid of risks. To do it you have to love the art of the deal and thrive on challenges. It is hard to systematize, although a few large companies have found a way to do that successfully. Thankfully, by the time we get big enough to need a manager rather than an entrepreneur in charge, it will probably be my successor’s problem.

In any event, if you ever decide you want to work here, or volunteer a few hours, don’t ask what our process is or our requirements are for volunteers. We don’t have them. Send me your resume and I’ll put it in my file in case I’m ever asked to write a recommendation, but I won’t do more than glance at it before I talk to you.

I want to know who you are and what you can do. Show me your energy and your ideas and your skills and your passion for our work and you’ll be somebody I want to work with and we’ll find a way to make it happen. My idea of the perfect co-worker would be someone I hire the day before I go on a two-week vacation (if I ever get around to taking such a vacation) and when I get back then I find out he or she has put together a deal to house fifty people that are now homeless, found the site, figured out how to finance it, and it only waiting for me to come back to sign the formal documents.

That’s the day I get to retire.

Vision Dallas: The Winning Designs!

The winning designs for Re:Vision Dallas have been announced. You can take a quick look at them here:

But we’ve copied at least one view from each design. A lot more information will be available soon on the Urban Re:Vision website and I’ll be discussing all of them in detail in my blog, but I hope that you’ll start looking and thinking, and I look forward to hearing from you about what you like and don’t like in each of the designs.

Vision Dallas: More Jury Deliberations

The second day of jury deliberations for the Re:Vision Dallas competition to design a sustainable city block began with enormous optimism. After looking at the results from the first day, it was obvious that the jury had retained most of the entries from the first couple hours of deliberations but the longer day went the fewer entries made it to the second round.

The assumption was that as the jury became more accustomed to the quality of the entries that the jury became tougher. Everyone thought that a quick review of the entries from yesterday, applying the tougher standard set by the entries themselves, would result in narrowing the remaining entries pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, everyone was wrong. Whether by happenstance or otherwise (the entries were numbered by their registration date, so maybe the earlier registrants had spent more time on their designs) the earlier entries were, as a group, simply better.

Several hours of work only resulted in reducing the remaining designs from about thirty to twenty-one. Worse yet, occasionally a judge would reach back into the entries that had already been eliminated and find reason to bring it back, so progress was slow and sometimes no progress at all was made.

Finally the jury decided to try a different tack. The twenty or so remaining entries were laid out on long tables, and the jury starting looking for exceptional entries; for the winners rather than for entries that could be eliminated.

Two entries immediately came to the forefront as exceptional in design, in innovation and in the quality of their thought. Another four or five entries had something more to recommend them than the competition (at least in the jury’s eyes). Now the task became picking the best entry from those few entries to join the two winners already selected.

Once again the deliberations slowed down as the jury discussed the relative merits of the various designs, but after some time the candidates for the third winning entry were narrowed to two, and then the jury decided to vote between them. As each juror stated his opinion, though, a consensus emerged, and in the end there was no need to vote. The winning entries had been selected.

And I was enormously relieved. The winning designs were beautiful and they all looked buildable. I didn’t realize how worried I had been that the jury might select winners that I couldn’t build until the decision was made.

Vision Dallas: A Brief Note on the Jury’s First Day

The first day of the jury is over, and I thought I’d post a brief note. The day was both exhausting and exhilarating. There were 90 qualified entrants for the project (just a few were disqualified for gross violations of the rules—the folks at Re:Vision were generous in letting entries go to the jury). There was also one last minute substitution on the jury—Cameron from Architecture for Humanity was called away on a project, so Nathaniel Corum, author of Building a Straw Bale House, filled in admirably for him.

Nathaniel is an interesting man (he’s in the center with his back to the camera of the two jury photos here). He’s spent much of the last several years working to improve housing on Indian Reservations in South Dakota, Montana, Arizona and New Mexico—mostly straw bale houses. The newest technique he is pioneering is tilt-wall straw bale houses—he could explain (especially with drawings), I can’t in a short essay. But it’s radical, innovative work.

The pictures of the jury don’t show very much, but the day was grueling. Trying to review ninety entries is an overwhelming task. Many of the entries had not only the six pictorial boards called for by the competition rules, but also as many as twenty or thirty pages of supporting material. There were charts, graphs, spreadsheets and other types of graphical representations as well. Even working ten hours, that meant reviewing a new submission every five to seven minutes.

The jury worked by projecting the projects on a large wall screen so that every one could see them. A number of projects were quickly eliminated, usually for one of two reasons. If a project wasn’t well designed (I would have said if it were ugly), then it wouldn’t advance. If a project wasn’t buildable, then it also wouldn’t advance. Sometimes that was immediately obvious. Sometimes only by reviewing the supporting material was it possible to know if the designer had done sufficient work to indicate that something that might have looked improbable could be built.

Of course there were a few outliers. Projects that were well beyond budget or that did something other than what we had asked for in the contest rules—but, as allowed, made an argument that even though it wasn’t what we had envisioned, it was a better approach.

Finally we had the entrants whittled down to about thirty, our goal for the day. A few of the more unusual ideas that entrants proposed were sent with someone as homework so that the most expert juror in that area could try to assess whether the idea proposed really worked. Then the jury adjourned and went to dinner.

Crop Circles

Sour Milk

We’ve had some milk go sour at home this week. Something I’m sure almost all of you have had happen to you. Of course I won’t throw it away. I’ll find a way to use it. I don’t believe in wasting anything that you can use. But it’s started me thinking about a bit of food history.

There are dozens of old recipes that call for sour milk. Part of the reason is that before refrigeration, when the cows were producing a lot of milk, then you had to find a way to use it up. Cheese (“milk’s leap to immortality”) was one result. Milk didn’t keep very long before going sour.

But using sour milk wasn’t only a way of using up food resources that you couldn’t afford to lose. It was actually necessary to make certain kinds of breads. Back in the good old days, before sliced bread and preservatives, if you wanted bread then you had to make it. Everyone wanted bread, it was one of the basics of life, and it had the advantage that, in the form of flour, it could be stored indefinitely (or until the weevils got into it). Making yeast bread, though, is a big effort and somewhat unpredictable. You have to proof the yeast, mix and knead the dough, let it rise, punch it down, and then let it rise again before you can bake it. Even if everything goes well, the process takes a couple of hours and you can’t wander away while it’s going on, although you can do other work and check back from time to time. The results depend on the temperature, the humidity, the amount of moisture in your flour and dozens of other unpredictable factors.

Contrary to family histories, most of your great-great-grandmothers probably couldn’t make very good yeast bread consistently. Ingredients weren’t uniform and trying to get an even heat in a wood stove for baking is extremely difficult.

Even the hardest working cook (almost always women in the early days of this country) would find it difficult to make yeast bread every day. This is especially true when you think about how difficult it was to do all the other every day tasks by hand—laundry, making butter, making soap, etc. There just wasn’t time. In Europe and the larger and older cities in the United States you could buy your bread from the baker. Many of the traditionally homemade bread that we have were only made once per week—on the baker’s day off. But on the frontier and in the small towns of America, there wasn’t a baker, so you were on your own.

The salvation of many cooks was “quick bread”. That’s bread that is leavened by use of a “mechanical” leaven rather than yeast. The earliest quick breads were leavened with ashes. But wood ash (at least the one time I tried it) leads to a heavy, dense loaf
that tends to taste gritty. Baking soda was an enormous step forward. It’s pure sodium bicarbonate and when combined with moisture and an acid, baking soda releases carbon dioxide and causes rising.

If you try to make soda bread with regular milk, it won’t rise. The milk is not acidic enough. But if you use sour milk, than the baking soda will react with the acid in it and you can make a nice chewy loaf that rises. Of course there are other sources of the acid you need to combine with baking soda to make bread, but for our forefathers sour milk was no reason for worry. Sour milk meant soda bread (yes, I’m Irish by descent) and that was a good thing.

The next time you have milk go sour don’t throw it away. Think of your ancestors and the nutrition they got from bread made from sour milk. Nutrition important enough so that if they had thrown out sour milk; they may not have survived and you might not be here today. Instead, in their honor, make yourself a loaf of soda bread. Here’s a recipe:

Irish Soda Bread

3 cups white flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 ¼ cups sour milk (you can also use buttermilk)

Mix all the dry ingredients together, then add the sour milk all at once. Stir the ingredients with a wooden spoon until just mixed. Turn out and knead for a brief moment. Divide the dough into two round loafs, place each on a baking sheet and let rise for ten minutes. Slash a cross in the top of each loaf in honor of St. Patrick and bake in a 400 degree oven for about forty minutes. It’s best eaten within a day, and even better eaten with sweet butter while it’s still warm.

P.S. Not all milk that has gone bad is sour milk. Make sure you know the difference between “soured” and “spoiled”.

What do you see?, Part II

I know that I see the world in a limited way. The standard greeting in Nepal, and apparently some other places in South Asia is “Namaste”. The word means something roughly like “I honor the light of God within you”. I imagine that in everyday life the word has become simply a rote phrase with little thought for its meaning. Much in the same way, we say “Good-bye” usually without thinking of its original meaning “God be with ye”.

I’ve never been to Nepal. The closest I’ve come is a couple years exchange of letters with a friend who served in the Peace Corp there. But on occasion, I’ve met people who don’t look at someone and see their outward appearance, but look within and honor the image of God that is within us all, no matter how disheveled and dirty someone may be.

People that see that way are in my mind Saints. Not in any theological sense—I am probably the world’s worst theologian. But in the sense that people that see the image of God in every person they meet model the goodness to which I aspire.

In the unlikely event that I ever reach that goal, then I will set myself the new goal of seeing the world as the poet and engraver William Blake saw it:

“When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’”

Unfortunately Blake did not leave us an engraving to match these words, but the engraving copied here, The Great Red Dragon and the Women Clothed with Sun, gives you some idea how Blake may have seen the rising sun.

Until that day comes, I will begin by trying to remember that a greeting can mean more than “Hello” and that good-bye can mean more than “I’m leaving now.”

What do you see?, Part I

There are times when I am reminded that you and I don’t see the world the same way. My wife comes from South Texas. You can see in the picture what it looks like—on a good day. I come from Glen Lake, Michigan, and I’ve put a picture up of Glen Lake as well, so you can see what it looks like.

For the life of me I cannot understand what my wife sees in South Texas, but it’s beautiful to her eyes. It is just as beautiful to her as Glen Lake is to me. (Objective observers would, of course, find Glen Lake far more beautiful!).

Everything we do, remember and have been influences how we see the world. Once I was examined by two lawyers selecting a jury. The prosecutor asked me: “Do you think your experience as an attorney would influence how you reach your decision in this case?”

I answered “Yes”.

The defense attorney asked if I could put those experiences aside and make a fair judgment solely on the facts as presented and the Court’s instructions.

Once again I answered “Yes”.

The two attorneys repeated the same questions twice more, always getting the same answer from me. Finally the judge became exasperated with me, and asked which was it, would the fact that I was attorney affect how I came to a judgment, or could I put that aside and be fair.

I answered: “Both your honor, my experience as an attorney affects how I see the world but I think I can make a judgment based on the facts and your instructions.” At that point the judge threw me out of the courtroom. As mad as he was, I was lucky not to be held in contempt.

I still think my answers to both questions were true. I would have made the same answer to the first question if I had been asked if that fact that I was white or Irish or loved basketball or had two children or had a cup of coffee for breakfast would affect my judgment.

If, however, I had been asked if South Texas were beautiful, then that would be a question where I could answer “No”.

Banking Should Not Be Exciting

A Man and a Turtle

(John is in San Francisco taking part in the ReVision Dallas design competition. Look for his posts on the results and his thoughts upon his return. This piece and others that may appear on his blog were written prior to his leaving. Enjoy!)

Driving home yesterday afternoon, I saw a car stopped in the right lane, emergency blinkers on. I slowed down and pulled to the left. When I passed I looked out the window to see what the problem might be.

A man, dressed for the office, was marching solemnly down the embankment through the muddy grass towards the Jackson Branch. His elbows were held out to the side and in his hands, held well away from his body, was an enormous turtle—at least the size of a dinner platter.

An entire story sprang to mind. The man is driving home from work when he sees an enormous turtle in his lane. He slows, then stops and puts the blinkers on so he won’t be rear ended. Now he has a decision to make. He looks at the turtle, then at the muddy bank, then ruefully at his shoes.

Decision made he unbuckles his seatbelt and walks around to the front of his car. Again he looks at the turtle. Then he carefully picks the turtle up wondering whether turtles bite and watchful of his clothes.

Watching him there was enormous ceremony to his steps. This well-dressed man had decided that a turtle was worth both his time and muddy shoes.

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