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Marc1, It's difficult to square your perspective. One the one hand you posit that there is a moral obligation for a business to profit, then you undermine the practical approaches to cooperatively achieve that end with a Nihilistic exercise. I don't think Nihilism is an intellectual exercise, it's just feeding a parasitic host of depression until the lights go out. I think the whole class conflict theory is for the birds as well, for mostly the same reasons, but especially because it inexorably leads to stealing. That's working against human nature, which is why systems built on this thought consistently fail. Even great apes object to stealing. I'm sorry if you've lost faith in humanity. Maybe it would help to look for things that mysteriously work out. It's been my experience that truly excellent leadership is often confused with being lucky, or possessed of a great team. This is due in no small part to the tendency of great leaders to encourage and motivate their staff. History is full of examples to illustrate excellent leadership. As high-minded as we might pretend this concept is, the majority of questions resolved in leadership come down to fairly obvious alignments with the core mission. All the confusion comes in because of human nature. Reward human nature, and the obvious problems tend to resolve themselves.

Marc1 I don't think there's much reason to dispute your central thesis that businesses have a moral obligation to profit. There limitations of that thesis begin to show when dealing with problems that are not clearly aligned with profitability. Especially as it applies to the concepts of fairness and civil discourse. I've encountered plenty of managers who insisted that their abrasive and unaccountable approach was critical to their performance. I've also encountered plenty of managers who seem to effortlessly preside over success after success without any apparent friction or drama. If it's possible to be profitable without misery, why not choose that path? A very long time ago I was a long-distance cross-country runner on a very successful team. My senior year, we went undefeated, however if you watched any one of the races, it wouldn't look that way for the first half of the race. We trained to run "negative splits" which means that each increment is quicker than the preceding increment. From the beginning of the race to the very end, we were constantly picking up speed. It's not dramatic looking against able competitors because we'd barely be mid-pack at the middle of the race. However to our competitors, it was psychologically devastating to be passed at an increasing pace. We'd not only pass them, we'd get so far ahead that within a few turns, they couldn't even see us any more. Many of our competitors would rely on a big sprint for the last 100 or 200 yards. I can tell you it was very dramatic because I was always done in plenty of time to see them finish. I wasn't the fasted guy on my team, and there were plenty of competitors that had quicker people than me. Some of them beat me with the big dramatic sprint. That being said, their team overall lost to mine every single time. It's a different approach entirely. Whereas most runners mid race were worrying about how much more there was to go, we were thinking about how much more we had to give. I've found that when you're part of something stronger, and more composed, you can get farther than the people with a coach screaming from the sidelines.

Frosty, I'm truly sorry for your loss. We lost a young dog to a poisonous mushroom several years back. His last days were painful, the "false recovery" that preceded his passing felt, just cruel. As I tried to console my family, I reminded them that we often find the things we're looking for. It felt unfair that such a radiant light should go out so soon. However, by being grateful for the time we shared with him, we honored his life by looking at life the way he did. In so doing, we could find a steady supply of things to be grateful for. Eventually, I think we were earning the gift his life was to us. Danged dust is in my eyes as I think of him.

Speaking as an Electrician, I feel an obligation to warn you that many insurance policies include a requirement that everything connected to the electrical system be listed for the purpose. Insurance adjusters have been known to cite such violations as reason to decline completely unrelated claims. If I lived closer to you, I'd happily help you to get the necessary parts.

Frosty, I think Thomas pretty much nailed it in terms of illustrating how the peter principal can be avoided. It's a perfect counter example of the false choice I started with. Tying compensation levels to places in the hierarchy rewards bad behavior, and always has. If compensation was based on actual returned value to the firm, the world would look very different. For any of that to exist, business owners would have to stop pretending that proxies for performance are valid indicates of value. More to the point, society as a whole needs to recognize that personnel really is policy. I've run into more than my share of shady managers in my line of work. Every one of them was the first link in a chain of shady people ending with the owner of the firm. It doesn't happen by accident. Everyone from HR to the mail room was chosen and more importantly, retained for a reason. Management wouldn't exist if working people simply showed up and did their jobs. Being a bit more charitable, management wouldn't exist if there wasn't an occasional need for judgement, leadership, and accountability. pnut, I've encountered a lot of soft-spoken or introverted people who struggle with being perceived as pushy. I sometimes wonder if they see that extroverted people share that struggle. I have consciously avoided even temporary field management positions because employers quickly notice that I'm exceptionally good at getting people to do their jobs. Every past boss that has seen me in action, wouldn't let me do anything else. It makes me miserable because I don't like yelling at people. I don't like to be surrounded by people who only understand or respect displays of force. The whole thing is a waste of human potential.

Frosty, you're right about the guy I worked with, and the micromanaging boss we worked for. It's difficult to make a living working for people and companies at the extreme limits of professionalism. That being said, I've learned that practitioners of malicious mediocrity are a much bigger threat to others because they're far more numerous in the working world. They hew a careful line where they hit whatever figures are being measured, without delivering the work those measures would normally verify. These are the people who consistently deliver a project that is late, over budget, yet somehow profitable. In their wake, there will be a convoluted story about the tragedy of good intentions meant to justify every broken promise, delay, additional expense, and dispute with their coworkers. They resolutely believe that saying; "this is how the game is played" relieves them of any moral obligation to act in good faith. Every achievement in their professional life comes despite their actions. Woe betide anyone depending on a partnership with these people. They are the living embodiment of the Scorpion in Aesop's fable about the Scorpion and the Frog.

Frosty, your story reminds me of a "fish out of water" situation I encountered professionally when I worked for a General Contractor. The company hired on a really friendly older guy who previously worked in management for a subcontractor. He was supposed to manage all warranty work, plus fleet/tool maintenance. This guy had over twenty years of experience getting things done in the field. We had management meetings every couple of weeks where each department had to report on what was going on. The owner was a very detail oriented person who gauged his follow-up efforts in exponential proportion to weasel wording in your report. "I don't know" would generate a managerial air strike. Your first "um" might elicit a pot-shot about whether or not you knew what you were doing, your second "um" typically resulted in a public show-trial, followed by a lengthy post-meeting reaming to the next standard diameter. Simply put, this wasn't the sort of boss who allowed half-measures, or plays for plausible deny-ability. Anyhow, this super nice guy who was used to making on-the-fly decisions throughout his career, simply could not see that it was his job to tell subcontractors what and when things needed doing. He would routinely call a sub related to the warranty issue and politely ask them when they had time to come out and do the repair. Invariably, the response was that they were all super busy, but they'd call him right back as soon as they knew. He considered that adequate, and simply let weeks pass without any further action. On the rare occasion that he actually did get someone out to complete warranty work, the sub doing to repair would frequently blam the issue on a design shortcoming. "If we used X instead of Y, this wouldn't fail" sort of thing". He accepted these excuses, even going so far as to pay the subs to "upgrade" the warranty repair to something completely different from the original contract design. All without consulting his own company, his client, or the design team. We're talking about stuff like overhauling entire systems, or replacing a fixture with something that doesn't match. He was basically a walking lightning rod for liability concerns. I made several attempts outside the office to explain how he could avoid causing trouble for himself. He was very gracious, but in the end, he solemnly believed that his good intentions should be sufficient rebuttal to all the liability he generated. He genuinely believed that it was unfair the owner "just didn't trust him", and couldn't see how his actions created that condition. It's one of my bigger regrets that I wasn't able to get through to him before he was let go. He had all the necessary knowledge and experience to go with a wonderful personality, but it all went sideways for him because he lacked perspective.

Some tools are so cheaply made that one could almost argue that the Zinc coating is structural.

I saw a Dilbert cartoon today where Dilbert told his boss "You don't go to war with the data you need, you go to war with the data you have." His boss replied "Did you just make it sound noble to use bad data?" Dilbert replied "And noble". This got me thinking about how I often encounter bad business decisions on the part of people who feel they have no choice in the matter. In my experience, there are two main forms that this takes. There are the the "default to action" people who equate their need to be "doing something" with a moral imperative to act against a poorly defined obstacle. The second are the "default action" people who are primarily making decisions on a risk-aversion basis. For these people, their response will consistently be less about the actual problem, and more about their perception of consequences to them. I've worked for many companies where production staff consistently made bad decisions just to get something done because management consistently avoided answering a question just to avoid accountability in case it went wrong. Both groups felt they "had no choice" because the production people don't get paid to sit around, and the management people know that nobody gets fired for taking too long to make a decision. The crazy thing to me, is that this entire construct pivots on one serious problem. Nobody trusts anybody else to cooperate. Like most things in life, incentives matter. If you want better decisions out of your workers, make an effort to measure trust as an indicator of leadership and cooperation.

I have a two completely different suggestions Door stop Beach side fishing rod holder

First off, there is a form of farrier hammer which is like a ball peen but instead of a ball, it's got a spike. It's used in a devilishly cool manner to pinch out some metal at the sides of a horse shoe, which is then pulled down over the edge of the anvil to form what they call a "clip". As near as I can tell, the "clips" sit against the side of a hoof and keep the shoe oriented. You might have one of those hammers. Now it could also be a handled punch, but you're going to want to check the hardness on that tool before you use it as such. Striking hardened tooling with your hammer is dangerous. To the best of my knowledge, the main difference between a drift and punch is that a punch is creating a hole, whereas a drift is used as an "internal" anvil. In most of the instances where I've seen the term drift applied, the tool in question did not have a handle. So long story short, you've either got a unique hammer, or you've got a handled punch, all depending on the heat treating of the tool itself. The photo leads me to wonder if the "face" of the tool is swelling outwards. If so, you might want to dress that flush before using it either way as chunks can spall off and cause injury.

People in the upholstery trade use something similar as well. I'm inclined to go against the farrier thinking for a few reasons. First, there is a nail pulling tip on one of the handles. Second, the gap between the inside jaw and that nubbins is just about perfect for stretching fabric over a wooden frame. Finally, all the hoof clinching pliers I've seen in my very limited exposure to the craft featured jaws that did not mesh. That makes sense because they're trying to pull the top facing jaw down towards the edge of the hoof. These pliers look like they would have the handles too far apart for the farrier to clinch one handed if the bottom jaw was against the shoe, and the top jaw was laying over a nail tip in the hoof.

I wonder if a pin could be put in those notched holes to incrementally stretch a line over that bobbin.

I watched a youtube video over the weekend where this ex "rocket scientist" guy took over an old abandoned French trademark and started making tin-lined copper pans to match the originals. He and a helper spun the copper stock to shape. One guy provided the pressure, the other guided the roller. The do beautiful work, but I couldn't help thinking that their methodology seemed clumsy compared to other spinning videos I've seen. I was a little surprised that the tin lining was applied using an ordinary commercial cooktop burner. Seems like an unattended pot left to boil dry would eventually melt it's tin lining.

One thing that often escapes people making round objects is that you don't have to bend around an object like a horn. You can use a plate sitting on your rail to create a void over which you hammer, thus generating the bend. If carefully arranged, you can coil the progress so you always have clearance to swing your hammer. You might use that technique on a thickish piece of stock to make a sector of the radius to match your desired circle. For something as thin as an arm band you might be able to use it like a sheet-metal dolly.

Frosty, Well said!

PWS, I think there's an easily overlooked element in your statement. You're referring to an entire field of study that primarily exists to impose order and regularity on data sets. The primary application of statistics is to reduce a data set to a smaller set of indicative figures. In short, the entire practical purpose of statistical analysis is to trade accuracy for brevity. That trade-off is exactly the sort of thing that specialists like to overlook, because it admits to limitations. It's therefore understandable that people feel they've misplaced their trust in these specialists when reality doesn't match the model. If those 1940's era air-force specialists had less faith in precision, and more interest in accuracy, they wouldn't have killed so many pilots before deciding to make an adjustable seat.

Thank you both, that makes sense.

I've long used seasoned cast iron pans for their non-stick properties. After many years, I finally picked up a carbon steel fry pan and got to use it for the first time last night. HOLY COW was it awesome! 15 minutes of seasoning is all it took before I tested it with a pat of butter and an egg. The egg was moving like air hockey! Seriously, this is significantly better than any non-stick pan I've ever used. I can't recommend it enough. With all that said, I got to thinking about the seasoning. My limited understanding is that it's burnt-on oils filling in the surface roughness until you get a super smooth surface. I know of people who used "seasoned" mild steel plates as griddles with no problem, so I don't think the carbon content has much to do with seasoning. This got me wondering if they're just calling it "carbon steel" to indicate that it's not pig-iron, or if they're trying to suggest it's high carbon steel. I haven't seen where any of these pan makers actually specify the steel type. If they're using high-carbon, I'm curious if there's a reason why mild steel wouldn't work just as well. Either way I'm curious to hear what people know about these things.

Glenn, I hope I never do meet a .52 person, that sounds pretty sad. Irondragon, that's a funny way to explain it. I actually have a book entitled "How to lie with Statistics". It explains how the figures are "tortured" to generate the desired message. John, I like your analogy with the map and the terrain. In my line of work, averages aren't too useful on their own. Where they start to have some relevance is when the averages of two related things are compared. For example, I track my bid results by dollar value, and by bids per year. The average of winning bids has the potential to be heavily skewed by a wide range in winning bid values. In most cases, my average winning bid amount doesn't look anything like my typical contract. In contrast, the average percentage of winning bids by count, is just going to show how selective I'm being with my bids. If I have a low percentage, I'm probably chasing stuff that I can't win. As I've already indicated, the average winning bid amount isn't reflective of my contracts. The hit rate by count is nice to know, but it's not telling the whole story. A relatively high hit-rate by count implies that I'm only targeting work I can win. If I only chased stuff that I was the only bidder for, my hit rate would be 100%. If I only chased stuff with one other bidder, I'd have a theoretical 50% chance of winning. So both averages have relatively obvious skew. However comparing the hit rate by value to the hit rate by count tends to reveal a few things that wouldn't be observable any other way. Lets say I've got a client who regularly puts me up against one other competitor. Over the course of a year, they bid ten jobs of varying value, and I won five of them. True to form, the average winning bid amount doesn't match any one of the jobs that were bid. Obviously the five winning bids out of ten total gives me a 50% hit rate by count. If my hit rate by dollar value is less than 50%, it's an indicator that I'm winning the cheap jobs. We could rerun that example where maybe I won six out of ten bids, but only won 30% of the total dollars bid. That suggests that they have four large bids a year that I'm not winning. Focusing on the 60% hit rate by count would lead a lot of people to believe that this client is a source of steady work. However, if you're only contracting 30% of their annual construction budget, you should be asking yourself why that is. I also track "low" bids which means that I was the lowest bid to my client, but the bid didn't lead to contract. Finally, I sum the won and the low for a composite percent which illustrates how often I'm the lowest bidder in the field. Again, I calculate averages for all of this by count and by dollar value. Over ten years, I can see that my composite percentages for value and count have grown closer. For each of the last five years there's less than 3 tenths of a percent separating the averages for count and value. I believe that's because I've become far more selective about what I pursue, and I've worked my way onto invite lists where I only have one real competitor out of the bunch. Maybe 1% of my annual revenue (won) is negotiated agreements, so I have to win 99% of our revenue by hard bids. I'm hovering in the 47%-48% hit rate range for composite percentages. One of the most frustrating things about this work is that I'm the lowest bidder in the market roughly half the time, but I only get a contract out of half those wins. The main reason for this is that there are a lot of clients who will put their job out to bid repeatedly. I've had jobs where I won six consecutive bids on the same project before they finally awarded it to me. I know for a fact that there are a whole lot of firms that win less than 5% of their bids. It's pretty obvious from the outside because these people bid everything they can, on the assumption that they can expect one contract for every twenty bids or so. Since they average nineteen losses to every win, their estimators don't worry too much about quality, accuracy or ethics. They have no strategy beyond pursuit, which is only made more efficient by losing quickly.

The other day I stumbled into an old article about an even older event. Back in the 1940's the US Air Force was experimenting with jet planes which caused an incredible increase in crashes, errors, deaths, and injuries. It's a very interesting story, but the important bit is that the Air Force commissioned a study of the physical attributes of 4,000 or so US Air Force pilots to determine if there had been any significant change in their average size since the previous study in 1926. The new study took 140 separate measurements of all 4,000 pilots. Keep in mind that all 4,000 were within the strict tolerances for height, weight, etc. Armed with all 560,000 data points, they calculated the average for the 140 dimensions. The guy running the study chose the 10 most relevant average measurements, and went through the dimensions of the 4,036 pilots to see how many of them were "average" size. There were none. The guy reduced the list to three average dimensions, and learned that only 3.5% (141) of the 4,036 were close. This lead to a revolutionary idea. If there is no such thing as an "average" pilot, then the planes had to be custom fitted. Initial response from industry was to protest that this would be incredibly expensive. In time, solutions began to come forward. Truly novel ideas like adjustable seats, or helmets with adjustable straps. Stuff we think of as commonsense today. So what does this have to do with business? I've met a whole lot of entrepreneurs who target imaginary averages. "If I could just land a contract for $X amount every month, I'd be set" I've even encountered people who would negotiate against themselves when their estimate came in higher than their average. There's this trust in a familiar average that leads to poor decisions. Success in a capitalist business is a risk versus reward relationship. Competition constrains the reward, so the business must turn it's attention to managing risk. Just like the Air Force, a business needs to adjust to reality instead of building to an average that doesn't exist.

John, Thank you for your posts, they really drive home what I'm talking about. Thomas, Frosty, your exchanges remind me of a youtuber who presents on general contracting issues for residential projects. A while back he had one titled something like "Improve quality and productivity with this one weird trick". His big idea? Trailer mounted Air Conditioning unit. He provides temporary climate control to residential construction sites. I think he's somewhere in Austin Texas. The video started with a lecture on how material shrinkage due to temperature change affected quality on his jobs. Since clients lived with climate control, it only made sense to install materials in that relative environment to maintain tolerances. Only after he explained how it affects the woodwork, did he make an offhand comment about how you see more work getting done when people aren't suffering. "Electric" jackets are becoming more popular on construction sites. They're generally powered by cordless tool batteries. I've seen some trade-show attempts at "cooling vests" using fans and evaporative cooling. When I started in the trades, coordless drills were too expensive for the average worker to afford. Now they're cheap enough that apprentices have entire "suites" of cordless power tools. Hopefully we'll see something similar with portable, personal, air conditioning. I can see huge sales opportunities in military and construction.

My whole life, people have told me that a good attitude was essential. Along the way, I heard quite a few of my elders say "it all pays the same" when they were given a repetitive, boring, or frustrating task. Obviously the idea was to re-frame the dynamic so as to focus on the reward. I met quite a few managers who dearly appreciated workers who didn't complain or take unpleasant tasks personally. When any concise philosophical approach is universally applied, it won't take long to find extremes where there are unintended consequences. In my line of work, I see a lot of failed estimators/entrepreneurs who kept grinding along with the repetitive and frustrating task of losing bids. "It all paid the same" until the bosses money, or patience ran out. If we knew everything from the start, there wouldn't be any reason to estimate. Risk is often interpreted as the cost of things going wrong. The more familiar something is, the less risky it appears. Often, the reality is that familiar things are constantly going wrong. Things turn out well because correcting course and fixing problems have become habits. My point, is that the skills involved with managing risk and handling problems, can be applied to new challenges. When you're looking at a fruitless transaction in terms of "it all pays the same", that "positive attitude" is actually working against your purpose. Switch roles in the transaction and ask yourself if mindlessly pursuing lost causes is better than mitigating the risk of unfamiliar opportunities with a modest dose of optimism.

George, I see your point about design accountability. Latticino is writing mainly from the perspective of a consultant to the Architect. If the Architects aren't asking their consultants to maintain a budget, it's probably because the Architect isn't maintaining a budget. This is likely because their contracts studiously exclude taking responsibility for hitting their clients construction budgets. You may already know this, but most collegiate Architecture programs have no courses on estimating, contract law, project management, scheduling, or leadership. This is very likely why Architecture has one of the lowest job-satisfaction levels of any career. They spend a lot of their time in management meetings trying to avoid accountability for things they barely understand, and definitely don't care about. It's terribly unfair to these people. All of the common construction delivery methods involving either the GC, or the Architect as owners-rep are essentially "the fox guarding the hen house". I came up with a potential solution to this problem in one of my blog articles which was published in an estimating trade journal. I believe that the construction/design industry needs a new player; an independent "At-risk Owners Representative". These individuals need to be independent of the contract design and construction companies. They need to come from market-leading General Contractors so that they are equipped to maintain effective oversight throughout design, as well as effective leadership throughout construction. They would establish a budget, which was tracked with internal estimates throughout design and construction. They would track and manage every other vector the client cares about like quality, schedule, code compliance, feasibility, etc. We can't keep pretending that accountability is a matter of finding virtuous people. We need to arrange things such that it's profitable for the wrong people, to do the right thing. This starts with aligning accountability with the people most capable of mitigating risk. If my idea took off, I suspect that a goodly number of Architecture schools would merge their curriculum with Construction management. Architects are the leading cause of construction delays in my market. Denver is absolutely covered in hideous "copy and paste" apartment buildings. I've read a fair number of architectural critic articles which claim that developers were basically using interns to make iterative CAD plans. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. What I can say with certainty, is that the majority of Denver architecture firms can't get their construction documents through the building permit process on their first, second, or third try. In a busy city like Denver, that can delay the project start by several months.

Latticino, You presented a huge amount of variability in your projects, which truly speaks to me as an estimator. As difficult as all of this is, I can't help thinking of the thousands of conceptual bids I've done free of charge to help design teams to arrive at bid level documents within budget. Most of them include value engineering alternates to save money. If I'm lucky, they'll give me a week to prepare the estimate. In most cases, they'll have at least half a dozen alternates, each one equal to a full-blown estimate in terms of work. Despite all of this, I've never missed a deadline. Some of the biggest names in the Denver metro design community routinely blow their construction budget on projects I've conceptually priced several times over the course of six months to a year. Every one of my revised bid tracked the cost changes to illustrate what happened. Without exception, I can tell you precisely what that design team did to blow their electrical budget. I often provide "follow the bouncing ball" overlays to plainly show how the money shook out. I've been hauled in front of hostile clients and their design teams to explain why the price is so high, when I just won a competitive bid against every leading contractor in town. My price wasn't high, or I wouldn't have won. I've had lunatic lighting designers accusing me of profiteering on projects where they added 200 hand-made decorative chandeliers between my most recent conceptual estimate and the competitive hard bid I won for the contract. At no point along the line does the design team ever provide meaningful feedback. What was their budget at each stage? Why didn't they use the information they requested from me? This happens all the time.