On to business

Now if one may change the subject a bit. This is part one of what I expect will be several. This is an issue that is important for reasons that will be addressed.

One of the things that I do for a living is in the area of manufacturing engineering. I've worn a lot of hats and carried a number of titles in the career.

Over the last 20-odd years in this line of endeavor, I've been through just about every sort of buzzword improvement program that has made its appearance in the New section of the business section of the bookstore of your choice. I've served on committees - usually concealed as ''Cross-Functional Task Teams'' or ''Quality Circles'' or even, Heaven help us, ''SPC Groups'' or any of a number of other terms with the word ''team'' to hide the fact that they are committees. I've received and distributed wagonloads of hats, shirts, coffee mugs, pens, notepads, and just about every other 'tchotchke' imaginable. In many of these ''great leaps forward'', the shirts and coffee mugs were the only lasting sign of the whole blasted thing. Oh, and the promotions and honors for the people who were clever enough to push the thing while avoiding the blame for the failure to produce. I still have memories of a certain now-vanished division of General Motors where the person pushing the management fad du jour arranged himself a promotion to 'Director of Excellence', and handed out wallet-sized 'Excellence' cards with slogans one was to memorize and chant like Mao's Red Guards. The division, as I said, no longer exists, and any improvements gained were largely illusory.

I've said all this to provide some background. I am sure that most of these efforts have been well-intentioned. I am sure, since I've been there, that many who get involved really do want to make things better, to gain the improvements, to remedy the issues that most thoughtful people can see, to do the right things.

So why are so many working so hard to such little result, if indeed that is the case? And what thing or things needs to happen to put the train back on the tracks?

First of all, I want to talk about some of the methods and tools that have been employed. Most of them have some good features. Almost all of them have some unintended consequences, some negative. And some of them work in some situations and not in others.

We need to recognize the Japanese influence. Starting in the late 1970's to early 1980's or so, and particularly in the of automotive area, the competition from the Japanese makers was overwhelming. Being adaptive if not particularly creative, some of the Bright Young Men in the automotive arena determined to copy what the Japanese were doing, or at least as much of it as they could fathom, and install it wholesale into the American factory. Things were to the point that if the Japanese did it, it was worthwhile, and if they didn't then it was counterproductive. I really did hear people, some highly placed, say almost exactly those words. Remember when everyone was expected to have a copy of ''A Book of Five Rings'' and to go about spouting the lessons that an author put into the mouth of a long-dead Japanese swordsman? This was supposed to provide insights into business processes, somehow.

This is not to trash the reputation of people like Shigeo Shingo, Genichi Taguchi and others like Deming. Some of it was very good and the approach has been immensely valuable.

But that does not mean that everything that they did or said, or that the practices of the Japanese manufacturers is immune to improvement or even to criticism. Who among us has not seen silliness like the adoption of unisex uniforms for all employees at all levels, and justified because ''the Japanese do it so we should too''?

The fact is that the Japanese approach works well in Japan, in Japanese culture, Japanese financial structures, etc., and doesn't necessarily translate well to American equivalents. Not to mention that some of their financial machinations would result in lengthy prison terms if attempted in the U.S. By the way, by most measures the Japanese economy has been in a deep recession for a decade or so. This is something to emulate?

In any event, the efforts have largely been in vain. Some of the organizations I once saw heavily involved in these exercises either are in bankruptcy (Delphi), no longer exist at all, have been bought out by the slash-and-burn predators, have moved their battered remnants to Mexico, or have simply outsourced everything to China. Net benefits have been very limited.

Now, much of what I have said already would get me banned from certain polite discussions, and saying what I have already said has not been helpful to the career. Yet most people in the business know these things, and will even admit to them privately. Not publicly - the pressure of groupthink is too strong.

It will get worse.

They're here!!!!

Last evening was tense. My beloved, my one true love in this world, called yesterday afternoon to say ''We're on our way right now''. I sat in tension waiting out the minutes ..... OK, so I did spend a couple minutes straightening up the mess in the hotel room. She finally made it off the I-85 around 8:30 last night, we met, dropped the car at my office overnight, took the cats to a place already arranged, and then went to the hotel. They were an incredibly wonderful sight. God has been very good to me and my family is an important part of those blessings.

She spent much of the day on the nuts and bolts of the relocation - meeting the electrician doing some finish work, arranging a new telephone number, arranging for the electricity to go on, etc. She is wonderful and I couldn't go on without her.

Now I feel more complete than I have felt in more than six weeks.

Looking back in amazement

It's a Saturday afternoon. My beloved called me earlier today and told me she probably can't make the trek down to join me until Monday. Possibly tomorrow, but Monday is more likely. Some things need to be done, there is no one to rely upon, and she has to do it personally. So yet another delay. I miss her desperately.

We are acting on faith that all of this is ordained of God, that He is in control, and that we can rely upon Him. He has never let us down, though we have let Him down, and the blame for that rests upon me. He has been faithful, and I haven't always been. My fault, His grace.

This has been a bumpy ride. The comments about the hollowing-out of U.S. manufacturing are based upon experience. The below is longer than I planned. It's not a pity-me, it's more of a detailed testimony.

In the last sixteen years, we have endured downsizings and plant closings associated with some of the big names and major manufacturing operations in the United States. From Packard Electric Div. of General Motors (now Delphi) through a now-defunct wire manufacturer outside of Akron, a division of what was for years the most admired company in the US near Knoxville, a top-tier supplier to the top appliance maker in the world in Arkansas, and a top-level automotive supplier in eastern Tennessee, we have seen up close the hollowing-out of manufacturing in the nation. We have also endured great privations as a result of all of this. The last, the auto parts maker, literally shut down in the middle of our move there.

That was a setback, financially and emotionally. We lost virtually everything we had as, over the next 18 months we lived on unemployment (until it ran out) and a few short-term projects, and what my wife could pick up while I sent resume's everywhere. I heard numerous versions of ''we'd love to have you with us, but you're far beyond our needs and we feel you'd leave when something better came along. Good luck and goodbye''.

Try going from 'respectable'' to destitute. We've been there, and we're still pretty close to the line. Not quite the life the college professors painted for me. And yet ......

God has, somehow, been at work through all of this. He has constantly been opening doors, making a way, providing, blessing, carrying us through some frankly tough situations. Along the way, we've met people and encountered situations that, left to ourselves, we would never have been in. We've found wonderful people in a number of churches who have ministered to us, prayed with and for us, loved us, and generally been the walking presence of Jesus Christ in this world. We are grateful beyond measure, and looking forward to what He has in our future.

Another nght

It's Tuesday night at the roach motel. I took to calling it that after killing the 5th roach bug in the bathroom Sunday evening. Probably an unfair depiction. Then again, this is a motel, and that was a roach bug. It fits. And I'm feeling a bit less than totally charitable right now. Took a real major effort to get into my motel room. It looks like the little key card reading thingy on the door has a dead battery. After three sets of key cards failed, they called out a maintenance guy with a little programmer box, who was able to over-ride the system and let me in. But he couldn't replace the dead battery, that requires the oversight of the daytime manager, so they'll come by some time tomorrow and put one in. If it wasn't so aggravating, it would be amusing. Look, this isn't the Ritz. But they haven't had Housekeeping in for 6 days now, and the sheets are the worse for the experience, and so are the two bath towels I've been alternating since last Wednesday. Too Much Information there, probably.

The good news is that the family will join me in a few days. I expect to see wife and daughter on Thursday afternoon. Bearing in mind I haven't seen them in more than a month, I can't wait. God has been good to me in very many ways, and the family He's given is one more example of that. They will never realize, no matter how I try to convey it, just how much I love them.


There are a lot of things I'd like to be writing about: the Bill Gaither program that's playing on the TV right now, better ways to design and operate production facilities to accomplish the real aims of the organization, how to deal with the death cult of Islam, the relevance of the prophet Isaiah to our world today, the benefits (and limitations) of Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing principles to a variety of operations, as well as the damage that can be done through the misuse and brainless adherence to them. A lot of topics, really. Hang around.

Another Week

This is being written from yet another hotel room. I've been in this town for a month now, and this is the third hotel I've stayed in. The first two were paid paid the company, so they were a bit ''upscale''. This one is being paid for, by me, so it definitely is not. One of those 'by-the-week' extended stay joints, populated by four-illegals-to-a-room, single moms on the lam, and a remarkable collection of empty beer cans in the trash. For $30 a day, I guess that's what you expect. Generally, once I get out of work, I head back to the room and stay there until the 04:30 alarm goes off. Sometimes I stop at Wally World and pick up the el-cheapo food stuff to eat, but for most of the time, that's as exciting as it gets.

We recently ''celebrated'' our wedding anniversary with phone calls. This is not what I'd call a romantic way to celebrate the milestones of our life.

With a relocation comes the need to establish oneself. Get the right car plates, driver license, find a bank. Those are easy, if a pain. Find a new church. Now that is hard. Those of you in church leadership need to give the matter some prayerful consideration. As one in the midst of the matter, I can assure you that it is a stressful and difficult matter. Too many churches are more or less family reunion/weekly social club arrangements. Oh, God is involved surely. But it's a rather closed society, limited by family ties, or social condition, or race, or background, or other criteria.

Love endures

This is going to be a tough week. Most people realize that Monday is the 5^th anniversary of the 9/11 attack perpetrated by the devil-worshippers of Islam. It will be all over the TV, the papers, the magazines, the outlets for the claques of the appeasers of our age. But tomorrow, September 10, is also our wedding anniversary and we are 365 miles apart. This will be the first, and I hope only, time we will be apart on this day. It’s hard to have to endure that.

The proximity of the two dates will always be an oddity for us. Five years ago, on Sept. 10^th, 2001, I received one of those rare gifts: my beloved wife sent flowers to me at the office at my employer in Fort Smith, Arkansas. From the looks on the faces there, such had not happened before there, and my stock rose perhaps. It didn’t last. When we got out of our every-morning early meeting the next day, the time when some informality was the rule before we really got down to the events of the day, the phones were already ringing and computers went on-line to Fox News, Drudge Report, and other reliable sources. (not much of the ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN, I note, we’d learned about the folly of trusting propagandists) and saw the events unfolding. Needless to say, the day’s events overshadowed any ribbing about flowers.

What a contrast! One day dedicated to love and devotion and strengthening our life together, the other a reflection of the effects of the evil that is Islam. Ideas have consequences. In a 24-hour period, we saw the truth of that.

Much has happened since those days. Blood and death and destruction, surely. I’ve had two employers teeter on the brink of collapse out from under me, have moved twice now over three states. Yet God is good, and still rules, and the woman who loved me enough to send me flowers just called a few minutes ago, to my little hotel room, to say, once again, ‘’I love you’’. I’d rather have that than riches and fame.

Love one one hand, and hate and evil on the other. Jesus the Christ, Yeshua ha-Moshiach as love, or Allah the demon-god of evil. Easy choice.

Grace and peace.

A good day

This is an amazing picture, and precious to me beyond words. A bit of background: I never knew either of my grandfathers, they died before I was even born. The male link to the family past that they represented was severed.
Yet here we see FOUR generations, little Max, his father Tony, his grandfather Ward, and his great-grandfather Eber. This is, to me, a memory beyond price. No matter what the future brings, the memory of that day is one to be treasured.

This is written in a hotel room more than a thousand miles from the spot of this family gathering. I know that it is possible that we will never again all be together on this earth. And while Heaven will be wonderful, that day provided a small glimpse of it. God is good, and that day was just one of the many blessings He's given me.

And a further update .....

Posted from temporary quarters in Montgomery, Alabama
Well, yours truly has made the trip, nearly 400 miles south and west into the heart of Alabama, leaving family behind for the moment.
It looks to be a nice area, though it is always difficult coming into an area you've really never been before, dealing with people you've never met, and losing all of your familiar surroundings. The family is far away, and we want to be sure this move is a good one before we move everyone here. Without going into detail, our last move, two years ago, had the manufacturing plant that had hired me as a manager suddenly close the plant while we were in the middle of the move. I can say with great sincerity that this is not an experience to be desired. As a result of this, we're inclined to be a bit cautious.
At the same time, we need to get established. Just finding a church -- look, finding a Southern Baptist church in Alabama isn't the hardest thing to do. But finding the right one, the one that God has assigned for us, that is the difficult part. We have been enormously blessed in our last few churches, 2nd Baptist in Tennessee and 1st Baptist in Greenwood, Arkansas , that we look forward to the next with great anticipation. Any person having a suggestion is welcome. I am staying, temporarily, in a hotel, pending the completed move. We are thinking either the east end of town or perhaps out towards Wetumpka, a bit out of the city's congestion.
And pray for us. We do not do well when separated.

Moving update

Just as we were hoping to get this blog up and running on a regular basis, we are going into a period of uncertainty. I will be leaving in a few hours and, leaving the family behind for a period, heading out from the mountains of East Tennessee to the rolling terrain of Montgomery County Alabama. It is always wrenching to leave behind those you love, the friends that have come to mean so much to you, the roots you had begun to put down. It is also exciting to look forward to the new places, the friends you will make, the people that God will put in your path. We have faith that all of this has not taken Him by surprise and that somehow He will be glorified in our lives. May it be so.

Sunday night we said goodbye to our church family at Second Baptist Church in Clinton. Brother Mike once again referred to me publicly as a Job character. I don't know about that, Job is described as being a righteous man, and what little of that applies to me certainly is not a product of anything I have done on my own, but perhaps little glimpses of Jesus in me. May that be so as well. Personally, I feel more like Abraham, going from one place to another, not knowing where he was going but having faith in the One who called him.

So come along with us. The next few months are likely to be interesting. Anyone having some insights on a new church home for those of us of the ''Bapti-Costal'' persuasion is invited to comment.
Grace and peace.

News

This will be brief, and I hope to post more on this later.
We will be moving soon. I have received a job offer which will require us to pick up and move, once again. Our pastor told me that I remind him of Job; I responded that I feel more like Abraham, going from one place to another in faith alone, not knowing what the Lord has for us. The official job offer letter is due to arrive any minute now by one of the express package services.
Pray for us. Our journey over the last few years has been bumpy, part of the by-product of the hollowing-out of American manufacturing, and partly as a result of a vow taken to go wherever the Lord sends us. I know that He is in command and that the landing will be a good one, but the flight has experienced some turbulence.

Today's Reading

Psalms 50, 51, 52 Acts 27:1-25
There are those who publish abroad the message that the Christian life is one free from struggle and strife. It's never been clear to me where this originated. By human standards at least, Jesus didn't get much out of His time on the earth. Neither did the apostles nor most of the Church through most of the intervening centuries. Today's reading in the Acts of the Apostles reminds us of this. Paul is a prisoner being sent to Rome for judgment and eventual execution. Along the way, he is on a boat overtaken by a fierce storm, a storm that eventually wrecks the ship. This is not a description of the circumstances any of us would seek out, yet Paul accepts it all, knowing that the storms of life are not necessarily a sign of God's displeasure with him. He is confident, knowing he is in God's will, and has no reason to fear nature nor man.

Compare this with Psalm 51, the repentance of David after he sinned with Bathsheba. David knew right well that he was out of God's will. That's a very bad place to be, and all of us have been in that spot. Punishment had not - yet - come upon David. It would, of course, later.
All of us go through storms, difficulties, problems. They may be a sign of being out of God's will. They may be a sign of being in God's will. They may, even, just be the result of living in a fallen world.

We need discernment in order to know whether our worldly situation, good or bad, is a reliable indicator of our spiritual health.

In the beginning ...

Beginnings are always delicate times, and since this is the very first posting here, one wants to be careful.
This is a blog that accepts moderated comments only. The reasons for that should be evident to anyone who has been around been around the 'Net for any length of time. To steal a concept from Lucianne Goldberg, ''this is a salon, not a saloon''. Even more so, this is intended to be a family-friendly Chistian site and we intend that the Almighty be honored here.

I have my own beliefs and opinions on a variety of matters. I have been wrong before, and possibly will be again. Discussions are intended to generate light, not just heat, and I am willing to enforce that principle. Flame wars are intended for other venues.

Since I will be asked, a few personal references. I am an engineer by training and inclination, with some twenty years in manufacturing operations. I live in the area of Clinton, Tennessee with my wife and the second of two daughters. We are members of Second Baptist Church in Clinton. Anyone is welcome to join us there on Sundays, and visitors will certainly be made welcome, particularly as we move into the new buildings around the first of September.

But if not .....

Faith, family, country, and technology