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.

What follows is dedicated to all of you who asked me to replace KJR with a political blog. As always, you should be careful what you ask for. – Bob

When I was growing up, antisemitism was a joke, and the experience most of us in my community had with actual antisemites was on a par with our real-world experiences with Big Foot and the Yeti. I did once hear someone use “Jew” as a verb – a stereotype that from time to time I wished was more accurate – and in my college years once overhead an inebriated patron in a local bar complaining about f***ing k*** lawyers.

But everyone in earshot was content to ignore him, and he eventually went away.

I was in high school when, in 1967, in response to Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, Israel launched the so-called “6-Day War.” Most in my high-school community thought of Mideast policy in much the same way that we thought of the Chicago Cubs – a team to root for, even though we couldn’t articulate why. I had no idea what even a single Strait of Tiran was, but it didn’t matter. Israel was my team and I rooted for it.

My views on the subject have, I hope, become a bit more nuanced than that, and, on the grounds of my being Jewish, I’ve been asked about them. So here goes:

Where it started: WWII and the concentration camps, in which something like 12 million people were slaughtered, half of them Jews. One reason I stopped thinking in terms of MOTs (Members of Tribe) was how many of my fellow Jewish MOTs ignored or trivialized the 6 million or so non-Jews also murdered by the Nazis.

Regardless, public awareness of the camps led to a widespread perception that fair-is-fair: Jews deserved a homeland in which they could feel safe.

Which is why, in 1948, the Jewish residents in Palestine declared the founding of Israel as a modern sovereign entity, at which time, with no noticeable delay, the nations surrounding it launched an invasion with a goal of destroying it.

And it’s then that the historical record and assessments of cause and effect become confused. Some historians claim Israel expelled the Palestinians. Others assert that the Palestinians fled because they were urged to do so by the Arab leaders of the time.

What has been lost in the dueling narratives is that no matter the reason Palestinians left Israel, the nations they fled to – especially Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt – settled them into refugee camps and radicalized them rather than welcoming them and providing assistance.

Nor did Israel do anything to encourage the refugees to return.

Which is why facile good-guys/bad-guys storytelling is of no value in thinking through what should happen next. Nothing can excuse Hamas’s recent invasion. Read about Hamas and it’s clear it doesn’t represent the Palestinian community. It has more in common with an organized crime syndicate than a political entity.

Read about Israel’s response to the invasion and a cynic might think it’s Netanyahu’s way of maintaining his leadership position, not of creating a just peace.

Read about the war and its contribution to resurgent antisemitism. It has underscored, in no uncertain terms, that just as is true of all other forms of bigotry, all antisemites needed to crawl out of the woodwork was an excuse.

Far from being the jokes I thought antisemites were when I was a youth, they were just as much MOTs as I was, just members of a different tribe.

And most of them understood that, back then, belonging to that tribe was socially unacceptable.

Do I have a solution? Not hardly. I do, however, have a notion, for all the good having a notion ever has. It’s for the entertainment industry to take The Blues Brothers as an exemplar: Create entertaining fare that ridicules bigots of all tribes and stripes.

Not the earnest, preachy fare that’s usually paraded in front of us to “raise our awareness.” Entertainment.

Because raising our consciousness asks us to acknowledge that our consciousness needs raising, and to be willing to expend cognitive effort – work – to raise it.

Entertainment, in contrast, is, by definition, fun.

Maybe fun enough to embarrass the MOTs who are, for some reason, proud of their idiocracy.

Bob’s sales pitch: In a more traditional KJR vein, I’m keynoting OSICON 2035 this coming Wednesday. It’s free. If you happen to be in Toledo you can catch it in person. Otherwise, it, along with the rest of the program, will be streamed.

Check it out!