Nice while it lasted

As I was getting into bed the other night, a phrase popped into my head. I turned the light back on and wrote it on my whiteboard. Today I decided to google it and see if someone had already said it. No matches. I'm going to write it for you now, so when someone searches for it in some distant age, they will find that it first appeared at 17 Word Street in the second decade of the third millennium.

Literacy -- just another flash in the pan

Words as vectors

For the past 12 months, I've been working with my partners Chris Hart and Todd Israelite to launch a new venture by the name of sr4. Recently, Chris has been giving a presentation that he calls The Path to Sustainable Change. Chris has also been leading our effort to replace our provisional website with a much better one, and as I looked at the design for the new landing page, I saw that The Path to Sustainable Change is now right up there next to our logo -- like a tagline!

I thought I should start taking that phrase seriously. So, when I had the opportunity to name four buckets on the landing page, I chose to use the word "path" in each heading. One day, while Todd and I were discussing the right designation for the entrance to our blog, he blurted out, "Live, from the Path." I wrote it down and sent it to the website designer.

So now let me talk about the vector-significance of two word choices: "path" and "live" (vector: a quantity with both magnitude and direction).

That word "path" suggests a way forward, worn by feet, discovered by trial and error, which can broaden out and narrow back down according to circumstances, and which remains a path only as long as it works -- to get people from where they are to where they want to be. With that as a picture in your mind, you know you will now write about your work in a certain way--in the style of an experienced guide on a path not at all well-known by many who would like to get to where it leads.

And when you think of filing dispatches "live," from the path, you know you're no longer waiting for some brilliant insight before you sit down to write. You're not painting on a large canvas; you're just taking a snapshot of where you are right now, right here, on this little bend in the path.

The choices of two little words -- made pretty much on the fly -- carry the magnitude and the direction to change how you talk about what you do, and how you talk about what you do begins to shape the scaffolding of your brand.

The lightbulb came on for me on March 13. I posted on the sr4 blog that day, and then for five of the next six days. I used to wonder if I had something worth posting about, and usually I didn't. Now I just wake up in the morning and ask myself, Where am I on the path? That, I know. And I don't mind writing about it. Check it out and you will see: it really is live, from the path.

To own a word

In the month of February I heard two different people, each speaking to a diverse audience, mention the word "practice" -- and both times they could not stop themselves from invoking the name, Allen Iverson. How long ago was it that Mr. Iverson said what he said about "practice?" Seems like only yesterday. But it was almost nine years ago, May 8, 2002. And 20 years from now, those who inextricably link Allen Iverson with the word "practice" will still be doing it. We can't help it. The rest of you will just have to tolerate us.

Through and through

The medical director of the trauma and critical care unit looked into the cameras and said, "She was shot one time in the head, through and through." After all the education, all the Latin words learned for things anatomical, when the chips were down, those were the words he chose: "shot...one time in the head...through and through." And we got it.

Mies, 1938

Something sent me to the bookshelf for the big thick book on Mies van der Rohe, Mies in America. I was looking for things he had said, and I found this, from a speech in 1938:

Let us guide our students over the disciplined path from materials through the practical aims of creative work.

Let us lead them into the healthy world of primitive buildings, where each axe stroke meant something and each chisel stroke made a real statement.

Where can we find greater clarity in structural connections than in wooden buildings of old?

Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form?...

What feeling for material and what power of expression speaks in these buildings.

And buildings of stone as well: what natural feelings they express!

What a clear understanding of the material. What certainty in its use. What sense they had of what one could and could not do in stone. Where do we find such wealth of structure? Where do we find more healthy energy and natural beauty? With what obvious clarity a beamed ceiling rests on these old stone walls, and with what sensitivity one cut a doorway through these walls...

The brick is another teacher. How sensible is this small handy shape, so useful for every purpose.

What logic in its bonding, what liveliness in the play of patterns.

What richness in the simplest wall surface. But what discipline this material imposes.

Thus each material has its specific characteristics that one must get to know in order to work with it.

This is no less true of steel and concrete. We expect nothing from materials in themselves, but only from the right use of them.... Each material is only worth what we make of it.

Axe strokes. Chisel marks. Such unity of material, construction and form. Such wealth of structure. How sensible. What certainty, what logic, what liveliness. What richness. What discipline. What obvious clarity.

A culture-change sentence

My colleagues and I have been busy with a series of culture initiatives, working with teams of people entrusted by their organizations to write the words that will hang on the wall and be pointed out as the essence of who they are. As they struggle to arrive at just the right phrasing, they tend to ask two defining questions: Is this aspirational? Or is it real? We like to steer them away from the dichotomy, toward: This is who we are when we're at our best.

Here's what that sentence does for you: It says that the culture you aspire to is not detached from your current reality. It's just not everywhere, all the time, in full bloom. If you travel around your company, you'll find your cultural ideals in play now and then, here and there, more or less. So we're asking you to step up in a big way, but not to step outside of what's real. We're aiming for consistency across time and place and uptake, to be "at your best" more often, in more places, with greater clarity.

It's the culture-change version of the (alleged) William Gibson quote: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."

Authentic voices #5

The history of an industry in one man's tale, that's what it was. My friend Doug Cassidy hooked me up with Ed Latek in the summer of '03. I turned on my digital recorder and Ed took it from there.

It was 1959, in the south suburbs of Chicago, when Ed's dad started a rental business on the side while finishing his career working on telephone equipment at Illinois Bell. "I'm a senior in high school," Ed says. "Mom runs the store during the day. I get out of school at 2 o'clock and go straight to the store. I run it the rest of the day and close up. Dad runs it on weekends."

Ed ran the store all that summer and then went off to St. Joseph's College in Indiana to major in accounting. In the middle of his sophomore year, the American Rental Association (ARA) brought its annual convention to Chicago and Ed cut classes to attend. He roamed the exhibition floor with lust for a Cub lo-boy tractor and an air compressor, among other things. His wish list grew to $10,000, which was about $10,000 more than he had. So he arranged a second lien on his dad's house.

After graduating with an accounting degree in 1963, Ed attacked the rental business for real. As he grew his dad's business into a multi-branch Chicagoland franchise, he was irritated by one thing: no one would let him borrow money using future revenues as collateral-- not the banks, not the finance companies, not the equipment manufacturers themselves. To Ed, there was not a surer bet in the lending business; if you bought $10,000 worth of equipment this year, you'd make it all back the next year, and that same equipment would continue to make money for you another 10 or 15 years. In the early 1970s Ed sold the family business and got ready to become the banker for the industry himself.

He started Reli Financial Corp., where he borrowed money from banks and loaned it back out to rental companies. At the ARA conventions, Reli was the only finance company on the exhibition floor. Ed describes it:

I had a booth that looked like a bank. When they opened the doors, everybody lined up at our booth. Every year I would take some of my bankers to the convention so they could see what we were doing. Every manufacturer in the world was there. And we were putting millions of dollars on the floor. By the time I got back to Chicago, I would have messages from the banks upping my line by two million, three million dollars.

In 1985 he sold Reli to a major insurance/financial services firm. He was ready to slow down, but the third phase of his business life was already kicking in. Before he knew it, he had structured a merger between two rental companies in Salt Lake City, done a couple of acquisitions in Southern California, found a buyer in upstate New York for a renter who wanted to retire, put together a deal in Houston. He was starting to look like an investment banker, and in 1990 he made it official it by forming Latek Capital Corp. In short order, he became the man in the middle of the consolidation wave, connecting the roll-up interests with the fragmented owners. In many ways he was undoing what he had spent decades putting together. But he was a money guy, and he understood how money worked:

It took us 40 years to get where we were as an industry, and in three years it turned upside down. All the leadership of our industry was taken off the table. No matter how much you wanted to hang onto your business, you couldn't do it. You had to sell. There was just too much money on the table.

It hasn't been the happiest of times for Ed, but he has a healthy respect for extracting value the founding generation never imagined.

When I started out, everybody in the business was my father's age. And they were all like fathers to me. Now, someone I've known a long time calls and says why don't I stop by the next time I'm in the neighborhood. I know what that means. So a few weeks later I give him a call and tell him I'm coming to town. We go to dinner. We talk. We think out loud. We pull his financials together. We figure out what we think the value of his business is. We compute the tax implications of selling. We consider how it's going to affect the rest of the family. We both know he wants to sell. That's why he called in the first place. But now we have it all laid out and he says let's go ahead. So we develop the buyer. We educate the buyer on our industry. Then we finally bring them together. Those transactions take a long time. We're closing on a deal next week. I started talking to the owner over a year ago. After about six months I felt like I had a good reading on it. I put it together about a month after that. Here we are now, eight months later, finally ready to close. And I started financing this guy in 1981. I know him. I know his family. I find a buyer who's a good match. And that's what it's really all about.