The canyon

On one side are the people who do the work with their hands. Plumbers, HVAC techs, electricians. They are genuinely good at what they do. Many of them are uneasy with computers and with numbers on a page, and they have built real businesses anyway, on memory and judgment and twenty years of pattern.

On the other side are the people who came out of school with the computer knowledge. They can model anything. They can put a dashboard together in an afternoon. The ones I have worked with had not held a wrench, or been in an attic in August, or watched a homeowner's face change when a number comes out of somebody's mouth.

Standing in both places is rare. I think that gap is the most expensive thing in this trade, and it never shows up as a line item.

Software keeps getting sold into the canyon by people standing on one edge of it.

Technology was supposed to close it. Every year something new arrives promising the owner he will finally see his own business. The ones I have been brought in to clean up were designed on the far side, by people solving the problem the way they understand it, which is a data problem. The man it was built for has a different problem. He needs the thing in front of him to speak in the language he already thinks in.

So the system arrives, the training happens, and months later large parts of it are still switched off. Somebody calls him resistant to change. He is a man holding an instrument whose dial is printed in a language he never learned.

Standing in the middle is what I do. Twelve years running a plumbing company on one side. On the other, the years since, spent inside the systems that are meant to run companies like it. I can hear both. That is what I bring and I am not going to dress it up as more.

Three things follow from standing there. Each one is an argument I would defend in a room that disagreed with me, which is what separates these from the notebook.