New job, part 1: My New Commute

How's the new job, you ask?  Like most jobs, you have to get there first, and that's what this entry is about:  the commute.  So how's the commute, you ask?  Great.  I bought a new bike, my first in quite some years, and my first electric bike ever.  Technical details here, but the key point is that it's fast and does most of the hill-climbing for me.  Indeed, it reminds me of a motorcycle and, like a motorcycle, the main challenge is staying warm.  I deal with this by donning a fair bit of gear (picture credit:  Felix):

Felix, ever alert, requested some warmer cycling kit himself, and we obliged (photo credit: me):

Geared up, it's off we go, sometimes together (I drop Felix at school on Fridays), but more often apart. Below, a typical ride:

Loved my Amsterdam commute, but this is as good or maybe even better. Still, early days yet, and tomorrow I face my first rain...

Steuben

It's the end of an era for me, and of an era and then some for Steuben. I've admired the lead crystal produced by Steuben artisans for years, from a time even before I started my Corning research.  As a teenager I encountered one of their masterpieces ("Innerland," by Eric Hilton, shown above) in the National Gallery on some now-otherwise-forgotten visit to D.C., and, somewhat later, stumbled across their wonderful store in Manhattan.  For years that space, a cool, gray gallery on 5th at 56th Street, filled with beautiful objects I would never own, was an obligatory stop whenever I happened to be in the city.

Then came my time with Corning.  In the course of many trips to their corporate archives and offices I made excuses to visit the source itself, the Steuben workshop and, best of all, the furnace from whence came all of the glass used to make their crystal.  On the day I viewed it the furnace was near the end of its functional life (or, in the parlance, "campaign") which, for a glass furnace, is a pretty exciting time.  Pardon me if I get technical here, but it's one of the most interesting industrial processes I know of.  A glass furnace is itself constructed out of glass blocks.  Why?  Because molten glass is highly corrosive and will therefore eat its way through any material whatsoever and using anything other than glass--metal, ceramic, what have you--will result in contaminating each batch with non-glass ingredients.  Build the furnace out of glass (or at any rate something very close to it) and the only thing that gets added to the mix of materials is more of the same.  This does not solve all problems, however:  no matter how thick the refractory bricks used to build the furnace, eventually they will wear thin, signaling the end of that campaign.  This, in turn, means you are facing a total shutdown, dismantling, and reconstruction of the furnace before more glass can be made.  This is a very expensive operation and the glassmaker accordingly seeks to delay it as long as possible by using a special technique to prolong the life of the furnace.  And what is this technique?  As I witnessed it at Steuben, it consisted of a guy with a garden hose, occasionally spraying the bottom of the furnace with cold water so as to slow the increasing number of drip-throughs.  So in viewing Steuben's furnace at the end of its life what I saw was a glass ceiling through which occasional slow streams of red-hot molten glass began to drip, only to be met by a blast from the hose, after which the guy would go back to reading his paper.

We wrote the Corning book, Meg and I, in anticipation of (and part of) Corning's 150th anniversary.  It was a wonderful project, and in addition to the experience and pay (both of which I badly needed), Meg and I (as well as several hundred other luminaries) each received a piece of Steuben glass unique to the occasion.  And so I got to own a piece of my own after all.  I would show it if I could, but for now it's packed away somewhere; look for an update in, say, 2013.

As for Steuben's history, there's enough online, but the salient facts for this story are as follows:  having been founded in 1903, it was purchased by Corning in 1918, run not so much for profit as for pride for nearly a century, and then, in 2008, sold for @80% to a private equity group presumably eager to add it to its stable of luxury brands.  Ah, but this horse never ran as part of a team, so here we find ourselves, three years later, watching the old girl being put down.  It is a real shame, a loss to Corning and, dare I say, the nation.  Also to me.

But before it goes Steuben is selling off its stock, and so I did something I never expected to do:  I bought some.  Or rather, one.  And here it is:

I don't know that Talia ever wanted a piece of Steuben herself, but given her patience these past couple of years she has certainly earned it.  This one is for you, darling.

Job hunt, concluded

What a long road it has been since my last posting on this.  Long, and yet the road went where it was supposed to go, and got me there in time, albeit just in the nick of.  More than that:  the road ran just about as I thought it would, with mile markers about where I'd expected them, and nary a decreasing-radius turn (my father's most detested of highway design miscegenations; mine, too, having ridden a motorcycle for some years).  I did not crash, I did not miss my exit, I did not run out of gas...though the warning light had quite unambiguously flared on.

I think of myself as a planner, but in truth most of the "big" things I have done were executed with very little forethought, and most of the "big" decisions made on the basis of embarrassingly trivial factors.  Abandon a career in historiography:  no plan.  Spend a decade as an independent consultant:  no plan.  Amsterdam: no plan. This time, though, I had a plan, and on top of the great relief at exiting this period of relative penury and excessive parenting, enhancing the genuine excitement at the prospect of new intellectual challenges, there is a certain feeling of exultation at having seen my plan succeed.

I guess the real reason I think of myself as a planner is that planning successfully is what I most admire in others.  I think here most immediately of my mother-in-law who has on more than one occasion produced an artifact, stored for years or even decades, at exactly the right moment, and transferred it to someone (typically one of her children, of course) who is just as grateful as she imagined they would be when archiving the item all that time ago.  There is something to it of Roger Staubach's perfectly executed Hail Mary pass in the 1975 NFC Divisional Playoff (he says, displaying nothing but his ability to click on a highly ranked item in Google's search), that is to say a wonderful mix of daring, preparation, and luck.

But given the title of this post I suppose I really should be talking about the job and about how, in the end, I got it.  The story is simply told, especially if one is willing to simplify:  the company I had in my sights had provided any number (well, nine actually) of "informational interviews" (plus two more after I had applied for the job, and that's not including communications with recruiters), and while most of those had concluded with mutual agreement that the company would be well served in employing me, none of them had actually led to that end.  Along the way, though, a job opening was posted for which I was well suited and to which I applied.  In addition to submitting the resume and cover letter I marshaled my forces, who started bombarding the hiring manager for this position with recommendations.  Impressed by my network (which included, among others, her boss) she agreed to interview me, and the rest is history.

As if.  You may recall (I know you don't, and yet it seems the right thing to say) my comments about how tortuous and dysfunctional the "hiring" process has become, and indeed it proved true here, too.  I submitted my resume and cover letter, and had I left it at that I never would have heard another thing:  the recruiting intermediary, for reasons I will not speculate on here, did not act on my resume until specifically ordered to do so by members of my Hiring Team.  There have been and will prove to be yet more benefits of having infiltrated this organization, but the most immediate one was that it saved me at this critical juncture from falling between the cracks.

I am to start my job on the third of January.  I will assume the role of Senior Analyst, which is to say I will help the business understand itself, and will translate its desires as needed into plans and designs. Flatteringly, people seem excited at the prospect.  We are rearranging our child care, shopping for a commuter's dream bike (30 minutes each way, 20 if I really lean on the electric assist), and trying to get Gideon to sleep through the night.  Come January I will spend a good deal less time walking these village streets, but I will do so free of the haunting sense that I am living here on borrowed time.

A Goldilocks story

What on earth is that, you ask?  That is Felix's toothbrush in Felix's toothbrush holder which has been stuck onto the cap of Felix's toothpaste by--you guessed it--Felix.  And frankly, I admire him for it.

I don't think anyone can accurately predict what sort of parent they will turn out to be.  Having become one, however, your natural parenting style manifests itself in short order.  I was unaware of this fact and thus long before the birth of my own children imagined I had already chosen what sort of parent to be.  I had three models before me, having observed my eldest three siblings with their own kids over the years.  It looked (upon what was never better than casual inspection and that with the willfully callow eye of the bachelor) like a Goldilocks story:  one was too strict, the other too permissive, the third just right in her (oops, I gave it away) balance between the two.  Well now, I'll be, let's see, hmmm...hey, I'll be just right!

I'm not.  I'm too strict.  At some deep level I feel it better to be feared than loved.  Misbehavior offends my sense of order.  With sleep in short supply I exist in a base state of annoyance.  Whatever the reason, several years of experience prove that I am not just right, I am certainly not too permissive, I am, simply said, too strict.

Felix is a bright boy with ideas of his own.  Lots and lots of ideas.  His latest such was that his toothbrush and its holder should live in his room.  Do I need to explain to you what a bad idea I found that to be?  Are you surprised to hear that I dismissed this proposal out of hand?  No.  But did that stop Felix?  Of course not.  Felix, tired of the toothbrush always being in the same place, certain there was a better arrangement to be had, invented (quite behind my back) a compromise.  I am delighted to see it and hereby publicly confess that he is the better man for having found it (or even looked for it) first.  Good for you, boy.

And how will Gideon deal with this too strict father of his?  As my other entries have perhaps suggested, Gideon is mischievous by nature.  Suggestion, however, is but a part truth, so let me state it more baldly:  that kid is flat out trouble.  So, how will Flat Out Trouble deal with this too strict father of his?  I don't know, but something tells me the thoughtful and practical compromise will prove more characteristic of the older child than the younger.

Confidence man

My father-in-law, who knows me well enough to have had me (among others) in mind when he posted to Facebook Yesterday at 7:13am near Philadelphia, PA, recommends an article in a recent issue of the Times:  "Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence" (nor is he alone:  it's the #2 emailed article even some days post publication).  He took from it the following lesson:

In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

True dat, but how, practically speaking, do you tell the difference between an actual expert and, say, Supergid?

You could develop your own opinion on the matter at hand and compare it to the expert's supplied opinion. More conveniently, you could examine the reasoning the professional expert included (or is, one hopes, prepared to supply) by way of supplement and background to his or her own assertions, and evaluate its soundness for yourself.  Either way, you are prepared to evaluate a chain of logic, aren't you, and surely you care enough to try?

My business experience suggests otherwise.  In the course of some years' consulting I have worked for only two people who wanted to review (much less understand) my chain of reasoning in any depth, and one of those two was way ahead of me at every step regardless, being altogether more expert in the subject at hand, not to mention even more powerfully possessed of the feeling of confidence.  People have typically hired me as an expert (or, on more than one occasion, as someone they expected to become expert) because they were not prepared to do that thinking themselves.  In general, you should not take anyone at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about--after all, underconfident people are as misguided as overconfident ones--but the fact is we seek the opinions of others, in business life at least, precisely because our capacity to evaluate is limited by our own bandwidth, experience, and abilities.

You want some really actionable advice?  Never trust someone wearing a cape.