I, Pencil

By Leonard Read _{web posted October 1997}

^{I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery-more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe; a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me — no, that’s too much to ask of anyone — if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an aeroplane or a mechanical dishwasher because-well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realised that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the USA. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye — there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labelling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser. Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the states to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!

Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation from California to Wilkes-Barre!

Complicated Machinery

Once in the pencil factory — $4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine — each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop — a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this “wood-clinched” sandwich.

My “lead” itself — it contains no lead at all — is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth — and the harbour pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow — animal fats chemically reacted with sulphuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions — as from a sausage grinder — cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all of the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made, a beautiful yellow, involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labelling. That’s a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black? My bit of metal — the ferrule — is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the centre of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Then there is my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as “the plug,” the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called “factice” is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulphur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy, and the pigment which gives “the plug” its colour is cadmium sulphide.

No One Knows

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field-paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the in first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

No Master Mind

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realise that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies-millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolise, you can help save the freedom mankind is unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand — that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding — then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free men. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Once a government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognises that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of a faith in free men — in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity — the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “masterminding.”

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony, galore; it’s all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard — halfway, around the world — for less money than the governments charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organise society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.}

The Cluetrain Manifesto

95 Theses

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Markets are conversations.

Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.

Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.

Bombastic boasts—"We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ"—do not constitute a position.

Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.

Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.

Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

But first, they must belong to a community.

Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

The community of discourse is the market.

Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.

As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.

These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.

Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.

However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false—and often is.

Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?

As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.

The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your conferences—what's that got to do with us?

Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.

If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.

Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.

We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?

You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.

Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.

Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?

We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?

When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.

When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.

We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.

We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.

Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.

Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.

To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

How I "Do" GTD

This is the follow-up to a previous post on my GTD tools, where I'll share my process for GTD, and how I use the tools.

In the beginning there was a big pile of stuff on my desk, and a couple of drawers filled with who-knows-what. It didn't help that we had just moved and some of my reference books and papers were still in boxes. The stage was perfectly set for a thorough organizing. I picked up my copy of Getting Things Done and followed the instructions. I was inspired by the following quote from page 87, 'Much of learning how to manage workflow in a "black belt" way is about laying out the gear and practicing the moves so that the requisite thinking happens more automatically and it's a lot easier to get engaged in the game.'

So I gathered everything that I wanted to incorporate into my system, as well as all of the tools listed on page 92. Then I attacked the stacks and boxes, applying the rules to each item: Is it actionable? If no, then trash it, tickle it, or file it. If yes, then do it (if it takes less than 2 minutes), delegate it, or defer it.

After this massive purge-and-organize session, I was left with a clean home office and a stack of loose-leaf paper with ideas and notes on them. I had made my 48-folder Tickler File, and Reference Files for every topic that I had come across (utility bills, bank statements, printouts from blogs, web reference material, etc.).

Finally, I sat down with my folders and went over the list of "Triggers" on page 114 in order to clear my head of ideas, incomplete projects, what have you. I wrote down each thing on its own piece of paper, and laid them out on the floor. Categories appeared naturally ( i.e. Computer, Home, Work, etc) and I stacked like things together. The "Trigger" list was invaluable in helping to clear all of this information from the back of my mind. When this was complete I started to organize these loose papers by filing the appropriate sheets in the Tickler File, Reference File, or into a coherent system of lists in order to start the Next Actions needed to complete them. These lists were copied onto 3"x5" cards for my hPDA.

Now, with my Calendar, the hPDA, my Tickler File, and a Capture Notebook I was all set. Or so I thought. Each morning I get up and check the Tickler File for any notes, then sit down with the Calendar and hPDA to organize my day. At the end of the day, I sit down and make sure that any Next Actions that have been completed have been marked off, any notes are filed or scheduled, and everything is captured. If any of the cards need to be replaced or updated, I do it at this time, and archive the old card for the end-of-the-month review.

Of course, this routine has evolved a bit, and the notes that I generate from the Weekly Review are archived for Monthly Review also. I have also winnowed the number of categories down, as tasks have been completed and Contexts have been more clearly defined. I have also created a 3-ring binder for a Tickler File at work, and a second 3-ring binder for a Customer Tracking system that I put together. Now when I get to work, I go through a second iteration of planning for the day.

The hPDA and a Pocketmod are used to capture ideas and customer information when I am away from my desk. The Capture Notebook is split into sections where I write down ideas, books that I come across that I'd like to remember, and so on. There is also a section for jotting down interesting websites that I encounter.

So far, the system is working, very well in fact. The only glitches that I have run into are being disciplined about the evening consolidation and keeping to the Weekly Review. I know that it can be improved, and as time goes on it will continue to evolve, and I will keep you posted.

I would appreciate your feedback, suggestions or tips in the comments.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: Stephen,
A very good writeup of your process on how you got into GTD. You have gone through the initial process, and came out of it with a greater sense of productivity. As for suggestions, you mentioned the only suggestion that you need..."being disciplined". There is nothing that you can do to make the process and better or more fun. After awhile, it will become second nature. Once you get to that point, it will be a struggle. I still have struggles doing my daily review as well as my weekly review. Just keep with it, it will pay off in the end.; 3/01/2007 9:26 AM
Anonymous said...: Thanks, I am looking forward to the challenges ahead.; 3/01/2007 9:46 AM
Anonymous said...: Andrew is doing his collection process today, wish him well.; 3/14/2007 10:07 PM

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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

How I "Do" GTD

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