Is this formula for business success too obvious? Too simple?

(I do not mean "Help people operate efficiently.")

I'm saying that for my kind of success, my company needs to do two things:

• Provide services that help people

and

• Operate the business efficiently

My life-long drive to help

Since childhood, I have felt driven to create, to improve – not just for one person at a time but for thousands. I’d be working on something as a child and my father (34 years older) or brother (7 years older) would come up and say “What are you doing?” and “Why do you want to do that?” “If that’s all you want to do then you don’t need to do it that way.”

They were both excellent problem solvers, and they solved whatever was in front of them, usually just something they wanted for their own use, or sometimes for a neighbor in our small farming community in Kansas.

I had a bigger vision, which was something that was not valued in my family. I wanted the things I created or fixed or improved – to be useful on a wide scale – to thousands or maybe millions. Not just to me, or two people I know, but to people on the other side of the world as well.

Influences and challenges

My father was a grand visionary – don’t get me wrong – his vision was just different from mine. My father literally believed that **ideas** were wrong. That technology and ideas were the cause of more problems in the world. His mind operated constantly on how things worked, how to improve for instance mechanical devices, he could fix literally anything mechanical or electrical. But he believed that medical technology and every kind of technology actually hurt people more than before they were invented. He felt “addicted to ideas” and tried to live a simple life with minimal use of technology. He endlessly read books on philosopy and visited with other modern day philosophers. Wes Jackson, the founder of the Land Institute was one of his best friends, in my view. I loved to hear Wes talk and he was also an influence in my life. Wes tried to get my father on a speaking tour at colleges but my father just could not handle the conflict between saying what he felt was the truth – and the embarrassment feeling that these socialized civilized people wouldn’t want to hear it. Their worlds did not match, in his view, and he wasn’t willing or able to say “this is me, take it or leave it” and go on. He wouldn’t accept money to tell people what he felt they weren’t interested in. That’s what it boiled down to. I experienced him to be a man of integrity and he really tried. He tried to understand the world and make sense of it. He did not believe there was anything he could do to change things.

My self-perception as an adult has been that I am one of the worker bees. I have skills and I can make a difference in certain areas. What effect that has on the larger problems of the world – that’s not so much my worries. Living my life with integrity and doing the most important things *I* can see to do – is enough. (And certainly a great challenge.)

One thing I learned from my father and my brother was “if it was assembed, it can be disassembled.” In my youth, there were no computers, and I learned about things like rivets, right and left-hand threading, German steel vs at that time poorer quality American steel, micrometers, how a crankshaft is imperceptibly flattened just by driving a new car around the block, friction, why a motor and generator and a battery don’t make a perpetual motion machine, etc.

How to Get the Electric Company’s Attention at Age 5

I think I was in first grade when I decided I wanted to make a lamp. I took a paper cup and a light bulb and an electric plug with nothing on the end of the wire. I thought the lightbulb would look good in the paper cup, with the wire fed hidden up through the bottom. I had the ends of the electric cord stripped. Looking at the bottom of the bulb, I “couldn’t remember” where the wires should go. So I twisted the two wires together nice and tight and taped them securely to the side of the bulb base, wrapped really nice with the black electrical tape. It was a very interesting effect when I plugged it in. The two breakers up on the pole on the hill above our house shut right off which fed everything on our property. In retrospect I’m glad it happened that way since I don’t think it would have been good to have a 100 watt light bulb cradled by a waxy paper cup.

My grandfather had a TV repair shop with fascinating high voltage stuff and tube radios he gave me with no covers on them. It was really not in style for a girl to be into this stuff. It was an era when it was just maybe acceptable for a girl to wear pants instead of dresses. I learned from him how to solder and where the stuff that you never touch is, in a TV chassis, and that capacitors and inductors can hold some charge even when the thing is unplugged. When I was in third grade, the teacher tried to restrict me in the school library to only the shelves she felt were appropriate for our grade level. I remember her angrily telling me that I couldn’t possibly read a book I had picked out, that I was faking it or something. I got a note from my mom saying I could get any book. The next book I got was “The Boys 3rd Book of Radio and Electronics” and I built many bad renditions of projects from it. I recently got a copy from Amazon just so I could prove to these kids today that there was a time when there was no “Girl’s 3rd Book of Radio and Electronics” – wait – that’s still now

Twenty years or so after I shut the power down in my parent’s house, my boyfriend tried to forbid me from doing electrical experiments in the house. He was scared and insisted that I was going to damage the breaker box. He really didn’t know much about electricity. I never even tripped a breaker at that house and I felt absolutely driven to do some research related to photovoltaics (electricity from the sun) charge controllers. The upshot was a pro se patent for charge controller hardware, offer of a job at a leading charge controller manufacturer, collaboration with U Mass Lowell, an article series in (THE OTHER) Bill Gate’s magazine “Midnight Entrepreneur”, a PV system simulation software distributed by Night Owl, and the award for Terrestrial Systems and Technology at the 21st international IEEE conference in 1991. The paper was accepted to additional conferences in Geneva and Florida in 1992 but I was unable to attend either for financial reasons. Bill Berg of U Mass Lowell presented it for me in Florida if I recall correctly.

Incompatible with Higher Education

Several observations about this: I was not interested in going to work for the charge controller company who would then own every idea I came up with – and not interested in leaving my idyllic Island home for Sandia (the government national laboratory for photovoltaics in the New Mexico desert) or even Lowell Mass. I was and still am, an uneducated person who does not qualify for IEEE membership. Out of the 600 presenters at the conference where I won the award, I am told I was the only one without a PhD. I was one of 5 to get an award. I had some other PV related research I proposed to do for the cost of equipment – and a sponsor. However, he directed the funds through an institute which never sent the funds on to me, and when asked later said “sorry, we spent it.” It was not worth making any stink about, I just felt disappointed. When I chose to have a baby, I laid aside another invention which both a the president of local relay manufacturer and (separately) the founder of American Biophysics Corp had both urged me not to let go undeveloped.

I turned my focus to computer consulting for non-profit agencies in my home state. I built white box computers, set up networks, wrote custom database software and advised on security and backup issues. One of my favorite successes was an agency which had their accounting computers stolen. They were back up and running the next day because of a single diskette backup of data which was faithfully carried out. I guess today we would laugh at the idea of being able to store the vital data on one diskette. I certainly long for such elegance of design and function.

I worked exclusively for non-profits for many years because I thought they had a moral high ground. Of course, working closely with their accounting departments over many years dispelled this myth in my mind. I also came to see that many for-profit businesses also do service to the community, improve people’s lives, and may in some cases do so more efficiently than SOME non-profits. (Please don’t take this as meaning that I support exploitative privatization of all government functions.)

Non-profits had a term called “technical facilitation.” They didn’t mean the same kind of “technical” that I did. But I adopted the phrase anyway. I identified one of my life purposes as:

“To technically facilitate for those who can inspire others.”

By helping people who are doing good work for the world in some non-computer field, I can leverage my time to help the most people and get the most good done. I make no distinction about whether these people, businesses, or organizations are for profit or non-profit. If they can inspire others in ways I see as positive, then I am anxious to provide them with the best appropriate technology to make things happen for them, enabling their reach to broaden, their work and their message to get out.

I believe that technology should be transparent to the user. In other words, you shouldn’t have to learn something new, do it THEIR way, and get distracted from your original goal. If something goes wrong – it wasn’t your fault for being a stupid user – it was the software creator’s fault for not error-trapping.

My highest goals for my customers are productivity and stability. I don’t recommend an upgrade just because a new upgrade is offered. Change usually risks stability. If  the potential for great benefit to productivity is there, then we do our best to mitigate the stability risks.

The formula we started this article with predicts the experience I have had:  if the only skill I have is helping people, I will only be able to help a few people. If I operate a business efficiently, but my end product or service is exploitative, I won’t have the kind of success I am interested in. This blog begins the next part of my journey in efficiently transfering appropriate technology to large numbers of people in ways that are truly helpful.

P.S. I wound up living next to what to me looks like the "Arc de Triomphe" ... an electrical transformer station borders my house on the south side, elevating the EMF levels in my yard and house to many times the normal levels. Occasionally I've seen spectactular "fireworks" from high resistance junctions that developed and arced over coincidentally as I sat programming at 3 am. One could hardly miss the brilliant flashing even with blinds drawn. I reported it to both the electric company and the fire department and in due time they came and jumped the bad connection with kind of a big patch cord. I think it was supplying power to the left half of the town. When I moved to this house I noticed the voltage was 130 instead of 120. Light bulbs didn't last long. One year I told the guys who came to check on the transformers next to me and he turned it down for us. Now I'm free associating on electrical workers and I recall that I tried to get into the IBEW when I came to Rhode Island but I really think at that time (thank God) they could not conceive of a woman in their ranks. Almost no one has laughed at my "Arc" de Triomphe reference, so if you appreciated it, please let me know.