Tough Work, Worthy Goals
I rode the boat from the Vineyard to Woods Hole a few days back to see the energy efficiency work we’re doing to Katharine and George Woodwell’s house. George is the founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, where we are currently in the middle of construction of a major Deep Energy Retrofit of a large 1905 carriage house 
recently acquired by the center (the completed building will become office and meeting space for their expanding staff; they’re in the climate change business, so theirs is booming!).
It was the first time I had been to George and Katherine’s house. I got off the boat, walked up the road, and turned right on Church Street. As I walked I gawked at the sprawling old-world summer mansions on the right side (the water side) of Church. Woodwell’s is on the left, and is smaller and more subdued, except for the giveaway large solar thermal system on an outbuilding to the left. 
Built by George 26 years ago, it has provided half the home’s heat and hot water ever since. But the house is a big old leaky rambler needing many fixes. We’re doing some of them now, as partial steps toward George and Katherine’s eventual goal: eliminating the use of fossil fuels altogether.
Several of our carpenters were working there. Just as I turned into the driveway our foreman, Pete D’Angelo, was ripping a 2×4 on a table saw and the grain was running all ragged so it bound up and kicked back on him. He turned to one of the carpenters, Curtis, who was right next to him, and said, “What else could possibly happen to screw me up today?”
At that moment he turned and saw me walking up the driveway, threw his hands skyward, and said, “Oh no – not him!”
I checked out the job. Tough work. Tearing stuff apart, re-working, insulating, and airsealing in a messy old attic with cast iron pipes and BX cable running everywhere.
As we looked at the work Peter (who is also one of my co-owners) revealed to me that I was the least of his problems on this particular day, unlike on so many other days.
I was glad to hear that but troubled to see how hard this important work is.
Unlike the Carriage House, the Woodwell project does not qualify as a true Deep Energy Retrofit as we’re only doing a part of what needs to be done – picking the low hanging fruit. Hopefully, over time, we’ll be able to do the rest.
On the Vineyard we have another complete Deep Energy Retrofit in progress, for Bill Lake and Morgan Hodgson in Aquinnah. Bill and Morgan bought a typical patched-together summer camp from the 50’s on a beautiful site overlooking Lobsterville. The realtors were selling it as a tear-down (obviously nobody would want that worn out hunk of junk) but Bill and Morgan were interested in saving it and fixing it. It had charm, character, and some good parts – why cart it all away to the dump?
We helped them figure out how to make sense of it. This is a gut re-hab, which makes it easier. When it’s done, it will still be a charming old camp but with more light and space and new aesthetics. And it will perform, in terms of energy use, comfort, and durability, nearly as well as the high-performance new buildings we are making these days. In my last post I said “On the Vineyard we have approximately 18,000 existing buildings. Each will – at some point – need to be brought into the 21st century, or just thrown away.”
One down, 17,999 to go.
The Lake/Hodgson House and the Woods Hole Research Center Carriage House will be, when completed, the first true Deep Energy Retrofits our company has produced. Sometime in the future, when we have monitored and measured, I will quantify what this means, discuss the components, tell of the successes and failures, and try to explain what it takes to do these (aside from committed clients, which is the most essential requirement).
Meanwhile, on March 6th we are hosting an open house at Lake/Hodgson’s, mid-construction, with bones exposed, so people can see what goes into such a project and how it’s done. We will examine the troubles and the triumphs midstream. If you’re around, join us.
I’ll be there – if the carpenters don’t kick me out first!
SHOP CLASS & DEEP ENERGY
In 1980, when Hurricane Bob ripped through Martha’s Vineyard, it tore down a big hickory tree alongside Humphrey’s Bakery in West Tisbury. We took the butt log, hauled it to our yard, and milled it into planks. Until a few months ago they sat on stickers somewhere deep in our wood storage building waiting for my son Pinto to make a rocking chair for me and my wife Chris.
No more. He just finished the rocker. I’d show a picture but I don’t have one yet that does it justice 
(I do have a picture of a prototype reclaimed wood SMC floor lamp he made; here it is).
Pinto’s a superb woodworker (and one of my fellow owners at South Mountain), a sublime musician, a great Dad, and many other things that make me proud. (No bias here, of course). The rocker is so artfully crafted that to look at it takes your breath away and to sit in it makes you sink into reverie and wonder who will be sitting in that chair in 200 years.
Pinto grew up watching and helping my colleagues and me build. He wandered around the shop. He made stuff all the time. I didn’t grow up with that. But I did have shop class in seventh grade with Mr. Eddy. I built a slalom water ski out of mahogany. To bend the tip I had to slice it with a bandsaw, glue in lots of small pieces and bend it on a form. I wasn’t that good with a bandsaw, so if you look at the edge of the ski in the picture below (I still have it today; it’s gathering dust in the rafters of our shop) you’ll see that the laminations wander.
Can you tell?
The laminations may wander, but the ski is true and the experience of shop class was so memorable that I remember it clearly almost 50 years later. The thought of that shop class – which is a dying part of our educational system – leads me to the juxtaposition of craftsmanship, factory-produced housing, and the work ahead.
In a 2006 essay called “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” (which has become a book of the same name that I haven’t read – the subtitle is “An Inquiry into the Value of Work”) the author, Matthew Crawford, makes a case for the importance of manual work and craftsmanship:
“Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials – that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”
Eliminating shop class assumes that it is a good idea to herd everyone into college and get them busy in front of a screen as soon as possible. It assumes that there is little to be learned from manual labor and little value to society. But who’s to say that the “jobs of the future” in a “post-industrial” economy are more fulfilling or more valuable?
Meanwhile, Inga Saffron wrote an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in January called “City’s Green Groundbreakers” about the Philadelphia Four, a group of rising design firms that see architecture “as a weapon in the battle to stave off environmental ruin.”
The four are convinced that conventional building methods are as obsolete as “hunting and gathering.” Building takes too long, wastes too much, and costs too much. “Rather than attempting to make our system greener, these architects are bent on overthrowing it,” says Saffron.
It’s all about digitizing what we build, electronically sending models to factories, building under controlled conditions, and snapping together components on a site.
Doesn’t sound so new, does it? It’s the old modernist call to arms, which has been going on for a century, and still nobody’s figured out a way to do it better than the Sears Roebucks kit homes of the early 1900’s, which combined craftsmanship with factory production and automation.
(Between 1908 and 1940, Sears customers ordered about 75,000 houses from the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogs. The houses were shipped by rail all over the country. Each kit home contained 30,000 pieces, including 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint and varnish. A 75-page instruction book showed homebuyers, step by step, how to assemble the pieces. Many of those houses still exist.)
Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, the elders of the Philadelphia Four, wrote a manifesto called Refabricating Architecture in 2003 that says that buildings should be produced like airplanes and cars.
I’m not convinced. A large part of the process of building has already found its way to the factory – building is more a process of assembling manufactured parts than ever before. Maybe most of what can successfully be produced in factories already is.
This is especially true of the big work ahead in the building realm, which (in the times of diminishing resources and declining population to come) will be about fixing the buildings we’ve got in transformative ways. Deep Energy Retrofits for profound energy use reduction, increased comfort, and greater durability.
Here on Martha’s Vineyard there are 18,000 existing buildings. Each will – at some point – need to be brought into the 21st century, or just thrown away. This is true of the entire developed world (in the developing world the story may be different).
This work is not going to happen in a factory. It is going to happen with teams of well-trained designers, engineers, technicians, analysts, craftspeople, tradespeople, and laborers.” The digital information will flow from studio to site rather than from office to factory. Much of the digital information will be collected at the site, in the same way that a craftsperson collects information “through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems.”
Craftsmanship is the practice of staying with a pursuit for a long time and boring deeply into it to get it right. That’s not something we want to disappear; it’s something we want to encourage. We’re trying to learn to do Deep Energy Retrofits this way. Let’s bring back Shop Class, get the kids away from the screens for a bit, and let them make their own wandering saw cuts which will, in due time, straighten out. Mine did. Sort of.
MAKING THE LEAP
I was meeting with some clients with whom we’ve had a long, ongoing relationship (designed and built their house, then an addition and a barn/garage, maintained both through the years) to review a just-completed inspection report. The house is 20 years old so we had produced a document outlining the major maintenance to come and predicting when various measures might make sense to do.
The house needs a new boiler, so it’s a good time to think hard about the best approach to heating and cooling for the next 20. It needs a new roof so it’s the one chance they’ll get (for decades) to add insulation under the roofing. Is it worth it? 
Is now the time to add a solar electric system to stabilize long-term energy costs? A detailed energy evaluation will determine the answers to these and other questions.
When we discussed solar electric I was struck by a comment they made (I’m paraphrasing but I think this is close): “We do not want to look at that option as ‘making a statement’. Until our country makes a serious commitment to doing what we must, and we’re all in it together, we’ll base this decision on economics.”
I thought that was particularly well put – clear and simple. The implication: the massive political failure that has led to our current predicament is holding people back.
My friend Matthew Kiefer recently wrote an essay in the University of Colorado Law Review called “Toward a Net-Zero Carbon Planet: A Policy Proposal“ in which he says that “the global economic adjustment now underway was in part caused by a prolonged period of living on excessive credit – of borrowing from the future. In a similar fashion, we have borrowed the planet’s carbon absorption capacity to finance our economic growth, and after more than a century, the debt is coming due.”
He calls for a scientifically derived balanced carbon budget to replace the current arbitrary greenhouse gas reduction targets. 
Carbon sub-budgets could then be allocated to each nation, each region, each state, each city, each town, even each neighborhood. Those affected would have choices about how to implement.
My client would be part of something instead of feeling like a lone wanderer spitting into the wind if he puts some solar panels on his roof.
I should add that here in Massachusetts the Department of Energy Resources is about to announce a very strong solar electric incentive program that is likely to make many people install solar who previously might not have – like my clients. The economics will look better than ever. I don’t know the final details yet – more about this later – but the intention of the program is to encourage the installation of 400 megawatts of solar electric in the coming years. The current installed PV capacity in the state, after years of attractive incentive programs, is right around 20 megawatts. The 400 megawatt goal amounts to 20 times more in the years to come – quite a commitment, and a giant leap forward.
Unlike yesterday’s Massachusetts senate election, which was a backward stumble. Ted Kennedy’s none-too-happy about this one. Hopefully it will serve as one big wake-up call.
CO-OPS ON THE RISE
I’m still excited about the budding alliance between the United Steelworkers (USW) and the Mondragon Cooperatives – and the general awakening consciousness about worker co-operatives and co-operative business in general that I wrote about last month.
And there’s more.
Rodney North of Equal Exchange (the Massachusetts-based worker owned co op fair trade coffee company) 
made me aware of an article on the New York Times Economix blog by Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts. In “The Case for Worker Co-ops” she says, “Since many of our most prestigious economic institutions have embarrassed themselves at our expense over the last year, maybe it’s time to look around. Worker-owned and -managed businesses combine the romance of entrepreneurship with solid family values and commitment to community. What’s not to like?”
In addition to the Mondragon/US Steelworkers agreement and the worker co-ops featured in Michael Moore’s new movie, she says, “Rousing examples abound. CNN Money recently profiled six worker-run businesses including Pelham Auto, whose mechanics have cheerfully fixed every car I’ve owned for the past 20 years.” One of the companies CNN profiled, by the way, is South Mountain.
But all this attention being paid to worker co-ops makes Folbre, the economist, wonder what the economic research says. Not much, according to her. Worker owned and managed companies are “largely ignored in economics textbooks.”
I have found that even the socially responsible business movement, to my ongoing surprise, pays little attention to true workplace democracy.
But she does, at least, find a little research – or maybe it’s just opinion. Mostly it’s about the troubles – or potential troubles – with employee ownership. One of these is that worker-owned and managed companies, with more complex goals than maximizing profit, tend to be less growth-oriented than other companies.
“Don’t tell Wall Street,” says Folbre, “but that could be a good thing.”
I want to say more about the USW/ Mondragon agreement.
The Mondragon initiative is not the first innovative Steelworkers alliance. In the 1990s, the USW helped found the Blue-Green Alliance together with the Sierra Club and other environmentalists and they have been involved with Van Jones’ Green For All.
And now, if this new alliance works, it might make a system of worker-owned enterprises assembled with the purpose of a green restructuring of the U.S. economy. That could be a powerful force.
The USW-Mondragon collaboration grew out of a ‘green industrial revolution’ project that created a partnership with Gamesa, 
a Spanish wind turbine firm, to retrofit abandoned steel plants in the U.S. (40,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities have closed since the beginning of the current economic crisis) and produce wind turbines (there are 200 tons of steel and 8000 moving parts in every large wind turbine). Gamesa’s connection to nearby Mondragon brought the USW and the co-operative giant together.
While this historic business alliance gives hope to the possibility of reviving manufacturing (and the communities that have been devastated by the losses), there is also congressional activity coming along to support employee ownership. According to the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
will introduce two new bills that would seek to expand employee ownership in the United States.
The first, the Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act would create an Office of Employee Ownership and Participation within the Department of Labor to promote employee ownership and employee participation in company decision making. The second bill, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act, would provide loans and loan guarantees to employees to purchase a business through an ESOP or a worker-owned cooperative.
On the eve of the Copenhagen meetings, this collection of related activity is heartening. Perhaps the most important thing about the expanding co-operative business movement, in the long run, may be as an avenue to the large-scale collaborative alterations to the architecture of the economy that will be necessary if we are to successfully tackle the challenges of climate change and the post peak oil transition to come.
Living Local & The Next Generation
The third annual Martha’s Vineyard Living Local and Harvest Festival just ended. It began with a Friday night forum called Opportunities and Challenges – a Panel Discussion with Next Generation Island Leaders.
It was about youth. 
Having just turned 60, I am acutely aware of the role of young people (in their 20’s and 30’s) in my work life and civic life. At work they are a constant theme and a growing force. There is a great transition in process at South Mountain Company – from first generation leadership to the next. It’s a long, gradual journey, sometimes a bit frightening but mostly thrilling, and it’s gathering steam.
In Vineyard politics and civic affairs the young are quieter. Those of us in our fifties and sixties have been active, but we’re graying. Sometimes, in the rooms where policies are being shaped that will shape our future, there’s very little representation from the next generation. What does that mean? I know they’re here – it’s not like some places where the young have jumped ship – and I know they’re active and vital, but where are they? What are they doing? What are they thinking?
The forum was an attempt to find out by putting four of them up on the stage in a public setting and asking the following questions:
• How could your age group be more engaged in next generation leadership and governance of the Island?
• In considering our Island’s future, what do you care about the most that’s not being done now, or could be done better?
• What’s your one or two sentence dream for the island in 25 years?
And one other, a beauty that came from one of the panelists, Jeanette Vanderhoop, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah:
• How do we keep the young and idealistic still idealistic when they’re no longer young?
And, of course, how do we keep them here? My friend Tom Chase, who grew up here, says that his father once told him that the Vineyard has two exports: fish and brains. As he tells it, his dad told him that just after Tom told him he’d decided to stay on the Vineyard (hmmm). Re-localization is about keeping our fish AND our brains right here where we’ve raised them. And doing more to do what we can within our local economy.
It was a lively evening. Besides the diverse panelists, we had two born-and-raised “elder” questioners and an engaged audience. I was the moderator. The panel consisted of a farmer, a boatbuilder, a Wampanoag environmentalist, and a mother of two with many civic responsibilities. Three of them were born and raised here; the fourth summered here and then married into an old island family. They all seemed a bit nervous, but they spoke beautifully, from the heart.
Each of the four individuals is so different that I hesitate to lump them together, but themes developed quickly: the appreciation each has for their many mentors and the community that has nurtured them; their love for the island and the delicate mix of their attachment to the “way it was” and their pragmatic sense that change must come; their understanding that sufficient affordable housing, meaningful work, and limits to growth are all keys to the future; their shared certainty that the time has come for them to take the ball and run with it.
It became a celebration of a way of life that they want to preserve, renew, and re-make. But not only a celebration. They also stirred the pot, and were clear that when we talk about the wonders of this place we also have to talk about the painful parts – the homelessness, the alcoholism, the fractiousness. Jeanette said “I always read the court report in the paper to remind me.” And they subscribed to the belief that you “can’t complain unless you’re willing to change it.”
The most poignant moment for me was when one of the panelists, Myles Thurlow, who described himself as “more interested in boats than school” when he was growing up, fielded a question. The question, from an audience member, was “How do you feel about Wind?”
Big question. There’s no hotter topic on the Vineyard right now. I will say more in a future post about this, but this piece isn’t about the topic, or the content of the response (although I will mention that all basically responded that “we gotta get real; this is an important, necessary, and desirable part of our future”).
It’s about what happened when Myles answered. As I listened to him, speaking off the cuff, I heard a compelling, coherent, elegantly worded statement. And I saw something in his face. It appeared to me that he was saying to himself “I said that? Wow.” And I sensed that he was feeling the stirring empowerment that comes from expressing yourself well, in public, about a controversial topic that you feel deeply about.
I was glad for him, and glad for us. In these perilous times, when these young men and women will be facing and contending with global climate destabilization and its monumental effects, they gave us Hope.
Thank you Chris Fischer, and Katie Carroll, and Myles Thurlow, and Jeanette Vanderhoop. We’ll have to do this again. You guys want to organize the next one? I’ll be glad to help.
Sharing Ownership of the Future
One more post (which might become two) about employee ownership and workplace democracy before I veer off toward some related topics. . . .
Despite the Obama administration’s recent shift in emphasis from homeownership to rental housing (which I will discuss in detail in a future post), homeownership is at the very heart of the American dream. Owning our work, and finding meaning there, seems as essential to a good life as owning our homes. But although many of us own homes, far fewer own our work.
But the idea that the people who use our productive assets should own them is as old as America. As John Logue of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center says in The Real World of Employee Ownership, “Thomas Jefferson argued passionately that what set this country apart from the Old World and made it so suitable for democracy was the fact that the ownership of productive property was widely dispersed: farmers owned their land in the countryside; artisans owned their tools and shopkeepers their shops in the towns.”
Employee ownership is emerging from beneath the radar. There is an awakening interest in the potential of broadly shared ownership of enterprise. The idea is beginning to surface all over the world in companies small and large. Today over 11,000 companies nationally, with over 13 million employees, have some form of employee ownership. In fact, today more Americans work in firms partly or wholly owned by employees than are members of unions in the private sector. Most of these do not share the SMC co-op model, and many can hardly be characterized as democratic, but all indicate that we may be learning something as we try to assemble the components of a restorative future.
The context is important. My fellow baby boomers own several million businesses, and during the next two decades, most of these founders will exit. The businesses will either be shut down, or sold to outsiders, or passed on. Selling to employees is an option that deserves to be more widely understood, for it offers powerful benefits to all parties. There is a need for more information as employee ownership becomes an important entity of choice, not only for aging boomers but for the millions of young people intent on finding real meaning in their work. Employee ownership is one way to open that door. There is new knowledge and there are new practices that make employee ownership more widely applicable, and growing interest among these business owners.
Tom Greer is one of them.
Many people pass through Martha’s Vineyard (how’s that for understatement?). Some of them want to visit our facility, or see some of our work, or talk business. 
Each of these visits takes time, so we have to be careful. It’s a delicate balance because, mostly, these are well-meaning people with good stories and legitimate interest. How can you possibly turn them away, how can you possibly not generously accept? Maybe someday we’ll have designated visiting days, but for now we field the e-mails and calls and decide whether time will allow and the inquiry is serious enough to warrant the time.
Tom Greer, a builder from Charlottesville, Virginia, was on the island. He asked to visit, and and wanted to ask a few questions. Turns out his successful, stable business 31 years old, has 25 employees and annual revenues of $8 million (about our size). A decade ago he took two longtime colleagues in a partners; each owns 20% and Tom owns 60%.
He is interested in examining the possibility of becoming a co-op. I asked him why, given the success story, he is interested in rocking this stable boat by considering a shift to co-operative ownership. He responded, “As I have grown up with my people, I have wondered what it is like for them to give their working life to a company, and then upon retirement walk away from their life’s work with only Social Security. I have benefited greatly from their sweat, loved every minute of my ownership, and think that with the co-op concept I can help paint a better picture.” As he digs deeper he’s beginning to understand the challenges. Whether they ultimately make the shift or not, Tom Greer is the kind of person who will change the way we do business.
He knows that it’s about sharing ownership of the future.
Are We Different Enough??
At the recent conference of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC) in Burlington, VEOC board president Paul Millman asked an important question to the attendees, who represented some of the many remarkably progressive companies in the Green Mountain State. “Are we different enough?” he wondered.
Good question. I wonder about that often when I think about South Mountain. Are we promoting a system that would, if widespread, create fundamental change in our broken economic system? Or are we just avoiding one avalanche chute by traversing to another with a slightly more gradual incline?
Hard to say.
In 1987 I re-structured my company from a sole proprietorship under my ownership to an employee owned co-operative corporation. It was a dramatic hinge point in the history of the company. Ownership became available to all employees, enabling people to own and guide their workplace. The responsibility, the power, and the profits all belong to the group of owners. There are no outside investors and no non-employee owners.
That’s different.
Profits are essential , but our cooperative ownership structure assigns the wealth we make to those who make it. Our democratic system of decision making offers everyone a voice. Our employees, who live in the community, and are raising their children here, and are part of the civic landscape, are making the decisions; therefore, community accountability is woven into the fabric of our system.
That’s different too.
Low environmental impact and principled corporate behavior share the same status as profits.
That’s different too.
But principles aren’t really principles until they cost something. And this year some of our principles began to cost something. Last fall, as we considered the re-building of our decimated work backlog, we re-considered some of those principles. Many of them. Here’s just one.
We have had a long-standing policy of only doing work on the Vineyard, the place that we know. That one flew the coop when we had the opportunity to do an extraordinary project across the water, for the Woods Hole Research Center, at a time when our future workload was less secure than usual. It wasn’t the first time we had such an opportunity, but this was the first time we forced ourselves – due to circumstances – to confront the logistical hurdles and internal complications we are faced with. I’ll talk more about this project – and its implications – in future posts.
As a company, we express many ideals. One that we express less often might be the most important of all – to assure that at all times the 30 families (and other associated individuals and companies) that rely on us for their incomes are secure in the knowledge that the work – and the income – will be there. Not so lofty. But this is the real deal, the rubber on the road, and other principles must work in service to that one.
That may be less different, but our democratic structure ensures that we will struggle, at least, to uphold our principles while we keep our business healthy. And struggle to be different enough, even when there is genuine conflict between our principles and the practical matters of doing business successfully.
The beginning of the Obama era is frustratingly slow; it’s not different enough. Each of us can have only a minor impact on the political process. Meanwhile, however, our democracy offers other choices. We have the liberty to invent the corporation of the future right now. We can make whatever kinds of companies we want.
Nothing stands in our way, except us. But we are a significant obstacle. It’s easy to say that we knew all the things the economic crisis, climate change, and the approach of peak oil are teaching us. We did, in a way, but it’s not different enough just to know these things. We have to act, to make fundamental change in the way we work, to learn these things in our hearts and in our guts.
The patterns that we had established over three decades no longer work, and the challenge is to do the work that we must – better service, tighter finances, deeper energy makeovers, higher performance buildings, new forms of old crafts – in this new economic climate. Maybe, eventually, we can be different enough to actually make a difference. Different enough to uphold our principles, even when it costs something.
It shouldn’t be so hard, I sometimes say. But it is. And we have only begun to scratch the surface of change. That’s scary.
But there’s an old Chinese saying that “Man stands for long time with mouth open before roast duck flies in.” We have to roast the duck.
Rosenbaum on Deep Energy
This is a post about a local event, so it may not mean much to those of you far away.
When it comes to houses, there’s plenty of talk these days about Zero Energy, Passive Houses, and even strange new terms like Deep Energy Retrofit.
It’s not just talk. For old friend Marc Rosenbaum, of Energysmiths, it’s practice. And it’s passion, too. Marc has been working closely with us for the past 20 years.
Marc’s projects include three of the American Institute of Architects Top Ten Green Projects.. An experienced and enthusiastic teacher and speaker, he has trained thousands of professionals., including several trainings of Vineyard architects and builders.
Come to the Chilmark Community Center and hear where we’re headed with housing and how we might get there. It’s free.
Moving A Mountain
Blogging is new to me. In fact, this is my first entry. The question is: why am I doing this? Why am I doing it to me and why am I doing it to you? I hope for good reason. There are two I can think of, so far.
The first is this. Over time, as South Mountain Company has matured (sort of), and in the course of my professional relationships, book adventures, speaking opportunities, and teaching experiences, I have found a small group of people who seem to be interested in what’s going on at SMC – what we are doing and thinking about. I’m curious to communicate with you, and others – in some organized way – to see what might come of this far-flung web of relationships.
The second is selfish. There are many obligations in my life – external demands which require attention and discipline. Writing is not one of these; it derives only from internal desire. I have little discipline, but I do have an over-developed sense of responsibility. I’m hoping I will respond to the duty of maintaining this blog (I’ll try to write once every week or 10 days, and try to respond quickly to any responses I receive) by writing more steadily. It’s something I love to do, something I need to do to feel whole. But, like exercise, sometimes it’s hard to get to. Perhaps this endeavor will help.
I expect, in this space, to expand on the topics and issues tackled in my book, Companies We Keep (recently released by Chelsea Green), particularly the promise of employee ownership and the importance – and challenges – of conducting business with community, people, and planet as our top priorities. I will relate what is happening in our design/build and renewable energy business and how that may connect with larger events. I will pass on currents of relevant thinking we uncover in our interactions with others. And I will talk about new influences on my own thinking as they emerge.
Hard Times, Hard Work
At the moment we all seem to be holding our breath, waiting for economic recovery. We may be waiting for the wrong thing. Instead, I hope, the economy will shift, and I welcome the prospect, although I am frightened by it too.
As the warm glow of a thrilling election has faded into the stark grey tones of the hard work ahead, I still believe that Obama’s election said something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the current state of mind of the American people.
For us, at South Mountain, it has been a tumultuous year of change. We had to think about uncomfortable issues that had not previously been necessary to address. We had to think differently. We had to re-assess our own state of mind. Last September, while one of my co-owners was preparing the plans for a large project for construction – and nearly ready to begin – we received a call from our client, who said the crashing economy made it imperative that he and his wife put their project on hold.
That was the defining moment of our year – it was, in fact, the beginning of an avalanche of backlog-diminishing postponements. It jolted us from the petrified status quo that prosperity had layered into our collective company consciousness for many years. It became a catalyst that drove us to take a sobering look at who we are, what we do, and how we might insist on the future we’re after. It became, oddly, a very good thing.
For 33 years, every SMC employee has come to work each day of each week of each month of each year and had productive work to do. Now, perhaps for the first time, that legacy might come to be in jeopardy. For us, 2008 began like a carnival; we were in the midst of some of the best times we’ve ever had. But when the effects of the US economic collapse came, they came quickly. It became the year of trials and tribulations, stormy weather, scrambling to stay ahead of big waves, and trying to move mountains. Hard work in difficult times.
Tackling the Unthinkable
But difficulty and opportunity mingle; at times it is hard to distinguish one from the other.
The author Andre Gide relates the experience of a trip he took into the Belgian Congo: “My party had been pushing ahead at a fast pace for a number of days, and one morning when we were ready to set out, my native bearers, who carried the food and equipment, were found sitting about without any preparations made for starting the day. Upon being questioned, they said, quite simply, that they had been traveling so fast in these last days that they had gotten ahead of their souls and were going to stay quietly in camp for the day in order for their souls to catch up with them. So they came to a complete stop.”
We can’t come to a complete stop, but it may be that we need to find time, especially in these slower economic times, for our souls to catch up with us. This is what we had to do this year at South Mountain. It was our year of reckoning. I hope our souls are, at least to some modest degree, catching up.
Along with considering innovative ways to re-build our shrinking backlog, it was our moment to tackle the unthinkable: what happens when the day comes that there is not enough work for all? Countless businesses have had to do this in these times. For us, the examination of the unthinkable had surprising results. Our cooperative structure proved to be robust. After several meetings a policy emerged:
In the event of not enough work to provide full-time employment for all individuals in the company, we will take the following six steps, in this order:
- Voluntary temporary rolling furloughs;
- Employ our capital to do speculative work (income postponed) for a limited period of time;
- Employ our capital to do non-income-producing community work for a limited period of time;
- Strategically reduce hours worked;
- Reduce wages across the board, graduated from highest paid to lowest;
- Involuntary temporary rolling furloughs.
The thrilling part of this was that never, during these difficult discussions, did the word “layoffs” come up. Never did anyone suggest that those who had been with us for the shortest time should be at greater risk. Never did anyone suggest that we should use this time to rid ourselves of those who may be less productive or in other ways perhaps less worthy – to separate the wheat from the chaff. This was a time of coming together, as a workplace community, rather than a time of fragmentation and protection of individual self-interests.
Fortunately we have not yet had to take any of the steps outlined above, partially because my colleagues’ vigorous defense of community and democracy inspired me, as an individual, and us, as a company, to double our efforts to re-build backlog and creatively manage workload.
Each year we conduct company-wide individual evaluations. Part of the process is a written self-evaluation. One of the questions asks us to rate the company’s year on a scale of one to ten. Most years, the average hovers around 8. Last year, our most profitable and upbeat year ever, it was 8.4. This year, our most trying ever, it was 8.7. Hmmm. . . what does that mean? I think it means that collaborative discussion and constant internal communication enhanced our sense of community. People felt cared for, by each other. That’s what a culture of shared ownership can do. Self-interest was indistinguishable from the welfare of the whole group.
America the Possible
But we cannot just tend our own small garden; there are far larger forces in play. We are in the midst of a cascade of spectacular events. Several years ago, Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth. About the same time, NYT columnist and best-selling foreign affairs author Tom Friedman saw the green light and began to write about climate change and energy (which will be, he says, “the greatest innovation project in history”). Venture capital shifted its focus from software and internet to clean technology. Oil prices shot up. Climate change and energy suddenly became a high level presidential campaign issue. Never before.
After a childish financial elite ran the global economy unsupervised, and ran amuck, Wall Street was finally unmasked, revealed, and crumbled. With that, the impossible global economy – predicated on perpetual growth in a finite world – became wobbly. None of this came without warning or predictions. A few intrepid economists, and others, have insistently pounded the warning drum but nobody, as far as I know, expected it to happen so soon or so fully. Those entrusted with guiding us hadn’t a clue. That’s not unusual – as economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said “. . the reason for the existence of economists is to give credibility to astrologers.”
Our country is experiencing more mood swings than a teenager. But it may be a prelude to the good things we hope will come next. There are no guarantees, only possibilities. As my friend William Greider so eloquently tells us in his remarkable new book Come Home America, we cannot re-build the same economy we had before and the new one must be based on new knowledge and new circumstances. He calls it America the Possible.
It’s also America the Different. John Fullerton, former Managing director of JP Morgan, says, “At the beginning of the 20th century scale did not matter. At the start of the 21st century, scale redefines our economic challenge. The world may be flat, but far more critical in terms of its implications, the world is full, and that changes everything.”
Our future will require us to transform our economy. We will have to manage the sky as a commons, auction emission permits, and use the income to serve the public good – to re-distribute wealth and wean ourselves from fossil fuel. The current Waxman- Markey Energy Bill is only a crude and tentative first step by government. There must be far more to come.
Owning the Endeavor
I can’t help but think that this long-term global transformation we need – the “new operating system for the planet” as author Paul Hawken calls it – will require more than political will and appropriate investment; it will also require collaboration of a type and scale heretofore unknown. We will need new tools, new abilities, and new ways of working together. Businesses will need to “share information and support each other rather than engaging in competitive exclusion” says Tom Wessel in The Myth of Progess. All of us will need to own the endeavor. A central requirement may be the ability to own our workplaces and share responsibility for the outcomes, both good and bad.
Employee ownership may be an important part of this. It’s about the recognition that when the people who are making the decisions bear the responsibility for the consequences of those decisions, and also share in the rewards that accrue, better decisions will result. It’s about building community within the workplace and connections to the communities where we work and live.
The task at hand is to unwrap the complex bundle of convergences that suggests that the next twenty years will be dramatically different from the last twenty, to try to understand what the differences will be, and to change our businesses and our selves so we are ready, able, and above all willing to do what it takes. The challenges are immense, but I think it can be a rousing journey if we take the time to prepare – if we make room for our souls to catch up. It’s a time to breathe deeply the opportunity that this new era brings. 
There it is, my first blog entry. Longer than I meant it to be, but hey – it’s the first one. I will hang my hat here, and I hope it will stimulate an exchange that helps us learn to work together in healthier, more beneficially productive ways. If so, I’ll be glad. My colleagues and I look forward to communicating with others who are thinking about employee ownership, social enterprise, and cooperative, community based business that keeps our planet front and center. “Markets,” as Marjorie Kelly, the former editor of Business Ethics Magazine says, “are a subset of the earth and subject to its requirements.”
So are we.
Wherever you are out there, I hope you’ll join in and let us know what’s up with you!
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JOHN ABRAMS is co-founder and CEO
of South Mountain Company and the author
of COMPANIES WE KEEP read more
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COMPANIES WE KEEP is published by Chelsea Green Publishing
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