Dear Member of the Keep the Joint Running Community

I’m delighted to introduce my good friend, colleague, and the new proprietor of Keep the Joint Running, Greg Mader.

Greg Mader is the President and Founder of Open Source Integrators (OSI), an ERP systems implementer and integrator.

Well, not exactly. Under Greg’s guidance, OSI’s teams don’t think of their job as implementing ERP Suites or any other type of software. They figure they’re helping clients achieve intentional business change.

Greg insists KJR has had something to do with this. I’m happy to take credit where I can find it.

In my 28 years of publishing KJR, the best compliments it’s received were that its advice has been pragmatic, real-world, and concrete.

Which is a big reason I’m delighted to introduce you to Greg – he’s an excellent person to continue this tradition. At OSI his clients range from Fortune 50, publicly traded companies, to small, multigenerational family businesses. And he lives where real stuff happens, in his multiple roles – as leader of a successful organization, consulting “guidance counselor” for his clients’ executive suite teams, and, prior to that, having done the day-to-day work of making technology-enabled change happen in other real-world organizations.

His career spans more than 25 years and his credentials give me a bad case of Imposter Syndrome, seeing as how they include experience in business, operations, manufacturing, and leadership, along with two master’s degrees.

Not to mention 21 years in the Army National Guard, Army Reserve, and Active Duty, where he retired at the rank of Major, serving in several deployments.

Most important, he grew up on the least successful farming operation in North Dakota, was involved in FFA and won a dairy cow weight guessing competition, and at one point was a certified septic system installer in South Dakota.

I’m not sure how Greg’s septic system installation credentials will help shape his approach to KJR, but I’m sure he’s up to the challenge.

Today, Greg lives happily in Arizona, on a small hobby farm with his wife and daughters. During the winter months he lords Arizona’s balmy climate to me as I shiver in my Minnesota misery. During the summer months we reverse our climatological one-ups-personship.

Please welcome Greg to the community, or, more accurately, to his new role in the community. As you can see he brings a lot to the party. I think you’ll like KJR’s future with him at the helm.

– Bob

Years ago, I asked my dad to review a piece of promotional copy I was hoping to use to sell my company’s services. He flagged a sentence that presented what I thought was a compelling benefit. It began, “You will learn to …”

“Don’t ever use “learn” if your goal is to attract customers,” he told me. “’Learn’” means you’ll make them work.” Nobody wants you to make them work.”

“What should I use instead?”

“’Discover’! ‘Discover sounds interesting and enjoyable.”

I’ve been publishing Keep the Joint Running and its predecessors once every week since the ball dropped in Times Square signaling the beginning of 1996. In that time I’ve … discovered … a few insights into How Things Work I’ve shared with the KJR community.

I discovered that process optimization is both simpler, more difficult, and harder than it usually gets credit for. It’s simpler because few processes are so complicated that they can’t be cleaned up through a Theory of Constraints loop – find a bottleneck, fix the bottleneck, find the next bottleneck, rinse and repeat.

It’s more complicated because while most process diagrams look like box-to-box-to-box flows of work, they’re really queue-to-queue-to-queue flows.

It’s harder because processes fail if all of those responsible for process steps don’t trust each other. If they don’t the result is massive amounts of rework.

I discovered that leadership is hard. Not hard the way neurosurgery is hard. Hard the way digging a ditch is hard. When I’ve led leadership seminars, after explaining the eight tasks of leadership the question that stymied participants the most has been finding the time to undertake even a few of them.

I discovered that, Adam Smith notwithstanding, money is a lousy motivator. Used well, though, it’s a highly effective communication channel.

Tell employees you value something they did and you’ll be likely to get an eye roll in reply. Give them an Amazon gift certificate and explain that it’s your way of thanking them for going above and beyond and they’ll conclude your expression of appreciation is sincere.

Another discovery: IT focuses so much time and attention making sure its solutions will scale that we fail to notice when our solutions won’t scale down.

Project management is a fine example. The official disciplines truly will help your teams build skyscrapers and nuclear submarines. Use them to build a house for your dog and they’ll choke you in paperwork.

Helping those responsible for small projects scale their methodologies down is what I wrote Bare Bones Project Management for. Based on my correspondence at least, the world needs scaled down project management far more often than it needs the scaled-up version.

Something else I discovered: Things that are fun succeed. Those that require sweat and gruntwork are more uncertain.

In the PC’s early days they were fun. GUIs were prettier, but the early PCs, for which a broad assortment of hobbyist-grade customization tools were readily available, were more fun.

PCs succeeded. So did the world wide web. In its early days, putting together web pages was fun. Now? Fun isn’t part of the job description.

Except, perhaps, for some of Agile’s variants. As I dug into Agile … an approach anticipated in these pages two years before the Agile Manifesto was published … it was clear that the early versions of Agile tried to restore fun to application development.

It worked and worked well.

Then scaling happened, Agile became heavily proceduralized, and the fun is draining out.

Perhaps the most important KJR discovery was that, at the risk of looking like I’m trying to sell books, there’s no such thing as an IT project. I came by this insight honestly – by ridiculing Larry Ellison and his 2001 assertion that Oracle could deliver global CRM in ninety days.

Sure, it might be possible to install and maybe integrate Oracle’s CRM solution in 90 days. But managing customer relationships better? That would require everyone who touches a customer to change how they go about it. In 90 days? Not a chance.

What else have I discovered over the past 28 years? That in the end it’s always about the people – those pesky human beings who, as it turns out, have a greater impact on organizational success than all the process designs, technical and business architectures, and so-called “best practices” that seem to have dehumanizing the business as their central operating principle.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be turning over the reins to my friend and colleague Greg Mader. I’ll give him a more formal introduction as part of that process.

It’s been fun. And more than fun, it’s been a privilege.