wonder how Seeds are built?
I paid 50 bucks for something I could have done myself…
“We can’t fix it.” My Dad would never have said that sentence. Taking it in at all would probably have been beyond him … standing at a counter and admitting he could not fix a thing. Well. That would have made me wonder. I had 2 turntables. I fixed 1 of them easily, because the beauty of the internet is that somebody has already filmed themselves doing exactly the thing you are trying to do. The second one I got most of the way and then hit a piece I knew was past me, so I took it to a shop. Fifty dollars later I had it back, with that sentence…
My Dad grew up in the Depression and was taught by his own father first, then developed a thoroughly scotch instinct to repair anything rather than replace it. His particular gift, among many, was a sense of wonder, and it was not the artsy kind. It was the “take it apart and find out how it works kind”. Half our projects were punctuated by “oops… oh, THAT is how that worked,” followed by some improvised redesign that made the thing better. NEVER better looking. Better. Solid. Dependable… like him.
…over time… with lots of wonder…
By the mid 70s Riley was known to everyone and still on the early side of legend… the odd stretch where better players available to him, better writers, and no obvious next thing. So he recorded a song written by 2 people who were themselves on the early side of legendary. Stevie Wonder wrote it with Syreeta Wright. The single came out in June 1973, produced by Dave Crawford, and it debuted on the US chart on 8 September 1973, which is 53 years ago this month. Number 12 R&B, number 38 on the Hot 100.
A man in his late 40s, at the top of his own field, recording a song by a 23 year old. He did not need it. There was no version of his career where that was the obvious move. He was still taking things apart to see how they were built, which is the only reason he was still interesting at 48, and at 68, and at 82.
…Seeds from mistakes…
Then there is Zaire 74… a 3 day music festival to promote the heavyweight fight. When George Foreman got cut in training, the fight moved 6 weeks. The festival went ahead anyway. Riley played to 80,000 people. Not one of them was there for the reason the stadium had been filled, and it turned out to be one of the great performances of his life, and the recordings from it followed him for the rest of his career.
Most of what a leader actually builds gets its meaning from an event that is going to move. The reorg you designed the structure for. The launch the roadmap was cut to. The boss whose priorities the whole plan was shaped around, who is leaving in March. The Seeds you plant are almost never harvested on the day you planned to harvest them, and the leaders I watch do well are the ones who can play the date they are standing on.
…with enough wonder to relax…
My Dad missed rock and roll entirely but loved high fidelity and stereo in the early 50s. He built his own speakers, including designing and hand-winding the crossover networks. There was a man in his church group who had built exactly 1 Klipschorn, the holy grail, and I am sure Dad would have loved to make a pair, but they were beyond complicated. He gave me my first stereo, an 8 track receiver, and the important part of that gift was the enormous T antenna he helped me mount so I could pull in a station out of Dallas … which sent me in a completely different musical direction from his. He handed me the tool that took me away from his own taste, and I do not think that was an accident.
I still have his speakers, 3 by 4 by 5 feet, enormous. We built a quarter scale pair for my room with the same loaded horn. I have his slide rule, his professional engineering stamp, the first computer we built together, and the wings of the airplane he built for my son. Every one of those started with him saying, out loud, I wonder how this was built.
…so what have you stopped taking apart?
You got into engineering because you love to see how things are built…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Pick the process you inherited and never questioned. Sit with the person who runs it and ask them to walk you through the actual mechanism, not the summary. You are not auditing them. You are doing what my Dad did on the kitchen table, and about half the time you will find the thing was designed for a constraint that stopped existing 4 years ago.
Helping leaders find which of their own machinery is still load-bearing, and which is just still running, is a good part of the work I do now. Schedule time with me here.
He left me when I was 38, nearly 30 years ago now. His funeral was not large, and every person there had their own story about the wonder he had put in them.
He was the definition of it, and so was the man who taught me that wonder is a thing you hand down. To Know You Is to Love You.
