Reflections on a Graduation Commencement

Last Saturday, I passed a milestone in my life. My youngest son graduated from college. The last of my four children to complete the marathon of modern education. Every parent wants to give their children what is good, what is best. In our case we wanted to give our children the tools to succeed in whatever life sent their way. To that end we encouraged independence but required education. So it was that we sent them to go to college, a somewhat imperfect means of attaining that end.

I am proud of my youngest in attaining his degree with honors. He chose to attend his graduation ceremony, so it provided the opportunity to visit campus one last time. It was with some nostalgia as I sat in the auditorium watching the excited buzz of a graduation. I can still see my oldest daughter's face in the back seat as our car backed out of the driveway on her way to the first day of Kindergarten those many years ago.

Sitting in my slightly dirty but completely broken seat in the auditorium, I was lost in cherished memories of the past. But the man seated behind me had the kind of voice that carries. He was conducting a monologue in an authoritative, but somewhat pompous, manner. So I knew immediately that he must be my age. When his voice showed signs of running down, a younger male voice would ask a worshipful question, properly phrased to display knowledgeability of the subject of the monologue. Ah I thought, it must be a boyfriend of the older man's daughter. Not yet a son-in-law, as he is still trying to create a good impression.

The older man was speaking of how short sighted and foolish the voters in Colorado were. It seems they had voted down all the bond issues for education in the recent election. In short, Colorado had too many old people, childless couples and far right Republicans. The obvious solution was to move education spending from the hands of the voters to the wise and farseeing councils of Public Policy. It is probably with some jealousy that I listened to the conversation, as would have any man in my position. It isn't often that we get to speak at length. To be listened to with respect is just a fantasy. This man was living the dream.

Just then the ceremony began. Coming down the aisle before us was a long line of older people dressed in somewhat bizarre costumes, with some of them carrying colorful banners with archaic writing on them. Walking in a slow and self conscious step, they were a mixture of solemnity and nervous chatter. While their dress was the height of fashion at the court of Henry II or Richard the Lion Hearted, it was not so stylish seen against basketball nets.

Going out for lunch after the ceremony, my eye caught a newspaper headline that spoke of the latest failure of the Big 3 Automaker bailout. And the day's events made me sad. For I fear that our school system will follow our automaker's into bankruptcy. Or worse. Bankruptcy at least offers the hope of a new beginning. Continued funding of failed companies and managements simply provides for continuation of the sadness and failure.

The latest issue of the New Yorker magazine has an excellent article about teaching. The article points out that research shows the difference in student outcomes between good teachers and poor teachers is simply staggering. But, it continues, we don't know how to predict whether someone will be a good teacher or not. It compares teachers to pro football quarterbacks. We can't predict whether a college quarterback will make it in the pros or not. We just have to let them play, or teach. But our present system for hiring, paying and employing teachers depends on meeting certain qualifications. Yet none of those qualifications have any measurable validity in predicting or determining whether the teacher is any good at teaching.

Members of my family and friends of my family are teachers. They are good people and they work hard. More than most, they take ownership in what they do. Everyday they make a difference in lives of children. To quote a great book, they are the "salt of the earth". They trust their leadership to do right by them.

I don't know any of the United Auto Workers, or the leaders of that union. But I think that the same could be said of the UAW members who work on the assembly lines of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Their fathers were at Omaha Beach on D-Day. They jumped out of helicopters into the Ia Drang Valley. Many of their sons are on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan. They trusted their union leadership to do right by them as well. But their leaders failed them. And now they must beg for money, or else they will be thrown out in the street. And even if they do get the money, what of their pride, being forced to live on the dole?

But a long time ago, their union's leaders became more interested in protecting their people from competition and from new ways of doing things. Company management spent more and more time figuring out how to out negotiate the union. Cars weren't what they focused on. People were going to buy whatever they made anyhow. And so a few brave consumers started to buy Toyota's or Datsun's . You know the rest.

Now we have some brave consumers that are buying charter schools, or faith based schools. They are buying anything that is not controlled by the unions and the rigid managements that deal with them. I worry for those I know and love who are teachers.

Just Say No to Chili's

I lost my temper over the Thanksgiving Holiday. It happened unexpectedly and quickly. Late Sunday afternoon, we were in the San Diego Airport returning to Denver. Our flight was delayed for a couple of hours due to mechanical problems. But as I told my son-in-law, you learn to accept inconvenience when traveling. Otherwise the petty frustrations will take years off your life from induced stress. As it turns out, those were fateful words.

We decided to slip into the Chili's Restaurant at the airport for some food and drink. Finding a table we chatted amiably until the server made her way to our table. Asking for drinks, she took our orders for the art of the bremaster. As expected, she asked my son and son-in-law for their ID's. And then it happened.

She asked for my ID. Caught off guard, I looked back at her with a question in my eyes; and I am sure a look of pure evil. I got back a very determined and no nonsense look. Feeling my blood pressure rapidly to a dangerous level, I took my driver's license out with a decided lack of grace. Reacting to the new chill in the air, the server took great care in looking over my license. This was now a game of power and the victor would leave no doubt as to who won. While I had not raised my voice or thrown any tableware, my family was noticeably silent for some moments after the exchange. The contest had not gone unobserved.

But why did I get so mad so fast over such a trivial incident? Just to satisfy your morbid curiosity, I would be enormously flattered if anyone mistook me for under 50, let alone under 21. What little hair I have is gray, and there is more than a trace in my face of past laughter. Obviously I hadn't taken my own advice about letting petty frustration roll off your back. This was the definition of petty, and it had definitely not rolled off my back.

But where do we draw the line? Requiring me to prove my age to get a beer is silly. Mindless is the word I used with my family at the time. My age is so far past the legal drinking age that it is obvious. It is mindless and it is also petty.

And it occurred in that modern epitome of both the mindless and the petty, an airport. How many times have you watched as an elderly lady has her dignity removed while strangers watch during a "random" search of her person as we pass through Security? How many times have I discovered holes in the socks of my fellow passengers? Large signs threaten us with jail for comedy, as we, mindless robots with straight faces look straight ahead and mechanically thank the uniforms who wish us a nice day.

The outrage I feel is not for the reasons for which we engage in this mindlessness. It is because of the very banality of it. It is banal and we stand helpless as individuals before it. Fear of assault in the courts over perceived injustice or unjust discrimination has caused managers to take decision making from the hands of their employees. And they are sensible in doing so. Any prudent manager will decide that it is better to have a million embarrassed grandmothers or angry old beer drinkers than an ACLU lawsuit over discriminatory profiling.

I understand why we do what we do. And I do not say that I have a better idea. But I must protest. I must hurl my defiance in the face of "The Man". I must let some small part of the world know that I am a man, and I will fight if pushed far enough. Thus I declare to the world that I will take action. I will fight back.

I will say no to Chili's. I will take my business elsewhere. I declare that I will never enter a Chili's Restaurant again.

Happy Holidays and Moral Hazards

One of the journalists whom I admire is Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. I look forward to his column called "Wonderland" every Thursday in the WSJ. He isn't quite up to the level of adoration I have for Peggy Noonan, but I do like what he has to say. His latest, "Mad Max and the Meltdown", is right on target.

He points out that, as the holiday season approaches, we don't say Merry Christmas, we say Happy Holidays. We fear that we will give offense to someone by use of the word Christmas. Instead we trivialize with the neutral phrase, Happy Holidays. How many other words do we not use anymore? How many subjects do we not discuss because we fear giving offense?

That is not to say that we should be yahoos, speaking without sensitivity to the concerns and differences among us. But because we do not speak of the things that matter, we have become a people who do not know the difference between right and wrong. We live in a neutral moral universe. That is not to say that we are not ethical people. We are indeed ethical, but ethics is a lawyer's word. Ethics is about following the rules, not about right and wrong.

CEO's took hundreds of millions dollars home in pay and bonus compensation from companies that were shortly to fail. But we shall find that they were following the rules. They may have fudged the truth from time to time, but we will probably find that their words were carefully phrased and their actions calculated to stay within the guidelines of their agreements by which they earned that money. I have every reason to believe that they were ethical.

At the same time, millions of everyday people seeking home loans lied about how much money they made, or how much money they already owed. But what do you expect on a "No Doc" home loan? Wink, wink, nudge nudge. Perhaps they were not ethical, but unlike morality, ethics is always weighted in favor of the rich and powerful.

Moral hazard is the phrase that our euphemism obsessed generation has coined to describe what happens when people do what appears to be ok and is expected behavior, yet is clearly wrong. In the discussions of the causes of our current meltdown, the thoughtful among us cite moral hazard as the cause. Moral hazard is endemic among us. Are you surprised when someone goes through a red light anymore? Are you surprised when you look down at your speedometer and see that you are clearly exceeding the speed limit?

Mr. Henninger's point is that our society, any society, depends on moral sentiments. Capitalism depends on the great majority of the people in the system being able to be trusted. Our culture is based on us knowing right from wrong, and doing the right thing most of the time. Capitalism depends on its participants being moral creatures. Otherwise we live with contracts and laws.

In my years as CEO of ForeRunner, I had to negotiate numerous disputes with clients. In none of those disputes was the contract of any use. In each case, we sat down and negotiated a settlement. Sometimes it took years and extensive legal maneuvering, but in the end, we sat down and accommodated each other. We resolved our dispute, recognizing that each of us had done wrong and that there was right in the other's position.

Without a moral framework on which we agree, how do we live? Mad Max gives us a picture of the alternative.

A Tummy Tickler

The coming year, 2009, promises to be interesting. More than interesting, I can only compare my feelings to the last few feet of the climb on a roller coaster before it goes over the top to plummet into the interesting part of the ride. There is an ancient Chinese curse simply rendered as, "May you live in interesting times".

My business, my livelihood, depends, to a substantial extent, on money spent by our client companies to develop natural gas supplies in the United States. The direction of that market is up for grabs. There are powerful forces pushing in opposite directions. It is like two freight trains heading toward each other. A crash seems inevitable.

The election of the Obama administration confirms the nation's desire to become green. The fact that the Democrats control the legislature ensures that green legislation will pass with little challenge. This is unbelievably bullish for natural gas. Every green initiative turbocharges natural gas usage as a practical matter.

Yet the very success of the industry in increasing natural gas production over the past few years, along with the oncoming recession and credit crunch, have dropped natural gas prices by close to 50% since July. Idle drilling rigs are lining up in empty lots across the energy producing states. Producing companies that have led the drilling effort have been heavily dependent on easy access to credit, which is no more. The number of natural gas wells being drilled in the United States seems to be coming down hard and fast.

But the natural gas wells that we have drilled in the recent past are different. All wells decline over time. But as an industry, we are used to thinking in terms of 10-20% declines in production per year. Our new wells, in shales and tight sands, decline at 60-70% per year rates. Without large numbers of new wells, natural gas production is going to fall hard and fast.

Yet there is a doubling of LNG production capacity coming onto the world market over the next 18 months. LNG has not been a factor in the US, because Asian markets have taken nearly all of that gas. But now the Asian natural gas market is crashing because of the financial crisis worldwide. A lot of that LNG will now come to the US, because we are the largest market. And because we can pay for it with dollars. In times of crisis, everyone wants a secure currency. And LNG liquefaction plants run 24/7/365, because they have large debt loads to service. Any margin being better than no margin. It is likely that natural gas will flood into the US Gulf Coast and East Coast, as that is where the LNG terminals are.

I am convinced that the natural gas industry is bright. Our culture's desire to be fashionably green and our country's need to have energy security guarantee that. But we look to be heading into a hard dip.

When I was a kid back in the old days, my parents would take us for drives along the country roads. There were places where the car would go over a rise in the road fast enough to give you a little weightless feeling. As kids, we always knew where those places in the road were, and we would always beg our parents to speed up to give us that feeling as the car went over them. We called it a "tummy tickler". I think 2009 is going to be a tummy tickler for the natural gas business.

A Childrens' Beach and Raptor Nests

One of the pleasures of having adult children living in other parts of the country is the excuse to travel. My oldest daughter and son-in-law live in San Diego where we visited them recently. Since they live in San Diego they do get a few visitors and one of her favorite places to take them is the Seal Beach in La Jolla. Along with the beach, she has always loved animals.

It seems that the city fathers of La Jolla decided to build a breakwater some years ago. Their purpose was to create a sheltered beach near the very popular beach that fronts La Jolla. The sheltered beach would create a nice sandy beach and calm sea pool for young children close beside the natural beach where their parents would be. Very family friendly and Californian in its conception.

But there were unanticipated problems. The seals took over. No children there now, just seals and some daring adults. It seems seals can be pretty territorial, as the occasional human who trespasses is in danger of being bitten. Picture the middle of a busy beach in front of an upscale Southern California city, with a breakwater sheltered beach that supports a large and thriving population of seals and other wildlife. Occasionally the sea lions move in and chase the seals away, but the sea lions really prefer the rocks further down the coast. The day I was there, the seals were surrounded by innumerable tourists gawking at them, snapping their pictures. An elderly gentlemen disturbed their ease and chanced bite marks on his ankles by walking among them on his way to go snorkling. Two scuba divers followed the old guy, again chancing the seals displeasure.

Not only are the seals there, but birds and more birds. The ubiquitous sea gulls are there of course. But there are pelicans and many other species, oblivious to the humans that surround them. In fact, two sea gulls were within four feet of me when they decided to participate in the Circle of Life. In all it was a picturesque morning. Saturday morning at the Southern California beach. Human beings, animals and birds crowded together on prime beach front. A beautiful picture of live and let live, as well as witness to the beginning of new life.

And then I came home. One of our projects is just finishing. The project was a pipeline through the Wyoming prairie and it suffered major budget and schedule problems due to wildlife restrictions. Productivity issues associated with wildlife restrictions cost not thousands of dollars but millions. Bear in mind that the construction contractor was on a construction corridor 100 feet wide surrounded by trackless prairie for upwards of 100 miles in every direction. It seems that animals and birds in Wyoming are much much more sensitive than they are in Southern California. So much for the image of the prairie and its rugged nature.

At the risk of belaboring the point, there is a raptor mating pair that nests every summer within 100 yards of my house; in suburban Denver with constant traffic on busy streets within a few hundred feet. There is a family of coyotes, as well as foxes, that live within the same general area. In the early morning, an occasional deer can be seen trotting along the creek. Cottontails swarm everywhere.

And yet on a pipeline right of way, the sight of a raptor nest brings an immediate halt for at least 1/2 a mile. In large parts of the West, construction is not allowed for months on end because it will disturb the deer or elk. Sometimes the nature of the cultural and business environment in which we operate seems to me surreal.

I think every responsible person wants to exercise stewardship in the way we live in our physical world. There is no question that we have sometimes been shortsighted in the way we use the physical world in the past. Yet the scene of the California beach calls the rituals that we perpetuate in the wilds of Wyoming to account. There is much science and study validating the need for those rituals. But who pays the scientists who study the wildlife on Wyoming range? Would those scientists have a job if they found no need for the wildlife restrictions in which we engage on that range? They are hammers in search of nails. Like all other hammers, they find them everywhere they look.

Is our society arrogant? Do we suffer from what the greeks called hubris? Do we believe that whatever burden we place on the productive members of our society is ok? If we ask our businessmen to dig holes and then fill them in, that burden will have no harmful effect?

China and India rise in the east, awakened giants flexing their new muscles. Russia returns to the arena eager to regain its pride. Everywhere, new and old competitors build for a new future and seek their place in the sun. Accustomed to our economic strength, we debate how many angels can dance on the heads of pins.

What a Difference a Client Makes!

Two of our people received a note of gratitude by email from their client today. Rare enough as an event, it made its way through the company grapevine. I am always grateful for these expressions of thanks from clients. I am so proud of this company, the people in it and the projects that we do. It makes me feel so good when some of our people are recognized by a client for doing well. Believe me, the muted praise is a much rarer bird than its cousin, the disgruntled complaint.

But this note of gratitude was especially sweet. It was some 15 months ago that I spent more than a few hours in uncomfortable meetings with a very angry client project manager over the failings of these same people. It is seldom that things work out this way, but irony abounds in this instance.

Two projects, just eighteen months apart, for the same client. Two projects, similar facilities, and with the same construction contractor. On the project just finishing, our client expresses gratitude for the excellence of the job done and for the level of service given. On the previous project, that same client made it clear that he thought us to be buffoons, if not worse.

So what happened? Did they learn their craft on that first project and then put that learning to good use on the second? As these folks have long years at their craft, I don't believe that to be the case. While we all continue learning if we are worth our salt, I am more than sure that the quality of the work product and attitude of service were very similar.

In all honesty, the biggest difference on the two projects was the client. The client organization was represented by one individual on the first project and by a different individual on the second project. Both of the client's people were competent and experienced individuals. But there was a human connection, a relationship if you will, on the second project that did not exist on the first project.

To those of us who have experience in the project world, or just in life, this is not all that surprising. We are social animals and form connections with each other. It is how we feel about each other that allow us to work well with each other, or not so well. If you think well of those you are working with, you believe and trust them.

When the people you are working with inevitably make mistakes, you overlook them and understand what they were trying to do. You give them grace. When you are expecting those you work with to make mistakes, you will of course find those mistakes and think the worst of them for fulfilling your expectations. You give them judgement.

This is a world of business, for both ourselves and our clients There are large sums of money at stake. There is the safety of many people depending on the work that we do. We have responsibilities to many stakeholders to be diligent and faithful in the discharge of our work. There are contracts that spell out those responsibilities. There are professional codes of conduct that speak to those responsibilities. We can not, not do we wish to, evade the responsibilities that we have taken up, both ourselves and our clients.

Yet there is more to life than fulfilling contracts and upholding professional standards. The first project, where there was no relationship, was a bitter and vindictive place to work. As they always do, people chose sides and joined the battle. There was anger and many tense meetings. And that anger and tension was not only at the level of the folks doing the work. At every level in both our own, the construction contractor, and the client organization, unpleasantness reigned over that project.

On the second project, life was a lot more worth living.

Market Realities

The selling wave in the stock market has swept all before it. Like the tsunami that swept Malaysia a few years back, it has left destruction in its wake. To the extent that it influences the close US Presidential election, its effect will be large but uncertain.

But those who have lived through it will probably never view the stock market the same. The inevitability of positive stock market returns shown us by internet based retirement calculators and smooth financial planners is gone from our minds. Instead we have seen a savage beast that can turn on us and rip our guts out, leaving us bleeding and hurt.

Of course all those retirement planners and investment counselors warned us that the market was volatile and that we could lose all we invested. But then they turned around and asked us whether we wish to invest for a 7% return per year, or 10%. Indeed, they sounded similar to the clerk at McDonald's asking if we wished to super size our Combo Meal. Accustomed to the mind numbing disclaimers invented by lawyers, we assumed the warnings about possible losses of our investments in the stock market were merely the same drek we see when we purchase new software.

It has been nearly two generations since we have seen a real bear market in the United States. By bear market, I mean a stock market that goes down by 50% or more. It is a scary thought. Is this a market like the 1930's or the late 1960's-70's? I don't know. By the time you read this, we could all be breathing a sigh of relief as the market soars back above 10,000. Or we could be shaking in our boots as the Dow resumes its dive. Maybe it will do both.

I started following the stock market at an early age. I can remember charting stocks on graph paper, by hand, on the kitchen table. I couldn't invest because I didn't have any money. But I traded on paper and in my mind. With paychecks from my first job out of college, I bought some stock in a CB radio manufacturer. I bought at $ 0.75 a share and watched as it rose to $ 24 a share. I then rode it all the way down to bankruptcy, finding out the difference between trading on paper and trading with money. I would have said that I learned the difference, but I am afraid there is a good chance I would ride it all the way down again. So the word "learned" is probably not the right one. Much later, I bought Enron at $ 12 per share because it couldn't go any lower. We all know how that turned out.

The financial future for many of us looks differently than it looked a short time in the past. Whether the market rises back as swiftly as it fell, or continues to drop, we have been surprised. Something totally unexpected has happened, and many of us are groping for a plan of action. What do we do?

At a time like this we seek wisdom. We seek a model of action to guide us in how we should react to such events. Those who came before us were no wiser, or no simpler, than ourselves. But since they came before us, we can learn from their lives and seek to emulate their example, or avoid their mistakes. As you will not be surprised to learn, the American Civil War provides an example to me about what can happen when one is caught by surprise and at a severe disadvantage.

In the early spring of 1863, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia reigned supreme. They had defeated their opponent repeatedly, the Union Army of the Potomoc under various generals having fallen prey to Lee's genius. A new general was given command of the Union Army by the name of Joe Hooker. Young and charismatic, he laughed at the elderly Lee and declared that God had better have mercy on Lee, for he would have none.

Putting in place a brilliant plan of action, Hooker surprised Lee, exulting in his mastery over his opponent. Many would say that Hooker's plan was genius; with the first part of it executed perfectly. Caught between the jaws of a trap and outnumbered 3-1, Lee was surprised and in a bad way. Many investors are in a similar position today. Realizing that he was in a very serious position, Lee devised an audacious response. And importantly, he acted on it.

Two days later, Hooker has been surprised and his army shocked by Lee's counterpunch. Reeling from an attack he had not expected, he faced his situation. His plan was now in ruins, but he still vastly outnumbered Lee and had a very strong position. But he needed to act. However it seemed that Joe was in shock from the unraveling of his plans and was unable to make a decision. While Lee improvised and attacked, Hooker daydreamed and was unable to concentrate on what he needed to do. His officers waited in vain for orders while Lee's smaller force struck again and again.

Known today as Chancellorsville, it was nearly the end of Lee's career. Instead it became what many regard as his greatest victory. Joe Hooker put together a great plan and put it into action. But when reality kicked back, he fumbled and failed to act. Today Robert E. Lee's reputation as a leader of true greatness is secure, while Joe Hooker has given his name as a euphemism for the world's oldest profession.

It didn't have to be that way. But they both were given a catastrophic surprise that changed all their plans. How they reacted when reality kicked back is how we remember them.

Greedy CEO's and Leadership

Greedy CEO's are in the news. The words greed and CEO are pretty tightly linked. If you watch tv or read newspapers, I am sure that you understand. Type the words "greed" and "CEO" into Google and you get 1,080,000 hits. That 's a lot of hits. Type in the words "Britney" and "nutcase" and you only get 116,000 hits. As a former CEO, I feel both defensive and hurt when I think about it. But I can't really disagree with what is being said. There are a lot of stories in the newspapers that are pretty outrageous.

I think that the outrage is pretty widespread. Corporate America has a lot to answer for. Both sides of the current political campaign keep talking about CEO greed. The financial aid package over our sub-prime mortgage fiasco is hostage to the need to punish CEO's. While the idea of congressmen berating CEO's for greed and immoral behavior is both comic and outrageous, we expect more from our business leaders than we do from our politicians.

Here in Denver we are periodically treated to pictures of former CEO Joe Nacchio walking in and out of courtrooms with what appears to be a smirk on his face. For those of you who may not be familiar with Joe, he was the CEO of our local telecom. In a familiar story, he pocketed hundreds of millions in pay, options and bonuses while his company did a swan dive. Joe was quotable when he was on top and insufferably smug. When his company went on the rocks, he was indicted for insider trading. He was somewhat tenuously convicted. He is now appealing and widely expected to win on appeal.

Joe Nacchio is our evil CEO in Denver, but he is just one of dozens, or even hundreds, around the country. A lot of people were hurt by Joe, and his counterparts at many other companies have done the same and worse. Fat cat CEO's presiding over failing companies have left a legacy of distrust and suspicion that have poisoned us all.

There exists a school of thought that says, "Business is business". We negotiate contracts with each other. We hire each other through formalized procedures that try to completely define our responsibilities to each other. That school of thought would say that if it isn't in the contract or the Law, it doesn't exist. That school of thought would say that if the contract or law doesn't specifically prohibit something, it is OK to do it. I would expect that in reality, everything Joe did was legal or in accord with his employment contract.

But I think that very few of us want to live in a world where "Business is business", with other obligations non-existent. The evident passion of those talking about greedy CEO's shows evidence, strong evidence, for the truth of that. And that is not to say that we want to be socialists or communists or live in communes. Those alternatives have been tried and found wanting. We do want to live in a free market country and are comfortable with business. Our market, and our businesspeople, have given us a standard of living that is the envy of the world. The material prosperity created by our business people have allowed opportunity for the broad mass of us to pursue leisure and personal growth undreamt of anywhere else in time or space.

And yet we are unhappy with them. To judge by the political debate, passionately unhappy. Why?

Because we are human beings. We are not the idealized robots, ruled by logic and seeking to maximize our income, used by economists in their models of the economy. We are the same people who hunted mammoths and built wooden ships to find new lands. We naturally come together in social groups to better our lives or protect our families. Today we call those social groups, companies. Rather than hunt mammoths, they engage in business. Whether we hunt mammoths or engage in business, we need leaders. Without them, we get trampled by the mammoth, or we go bankrupt.

But leadership is a special calling. In all times and places, leadership has its rewards. Even more, leadership brings with it, power. Successful groups delegate power to their leaders. Decisions have to be made, and decisions without the power to enforce them are not decisions; instead we call them the minutes of committee meetings. But when we allow another power over our life, we do so willingly only if we trust them. And we trust them only if we feel they deserve our trust.

When one of the hunters slips and the mammoth rounds on him, we expect the leader of the group to be concerned about saving the one who slipped rather than his own escape. It was expected that the captain of the ship would go down with his ship when disaster struck. We expect our leaders to look into the future and see the opportunities and dangers coming down the road toward us. If they use that knowledge for their own gain rather than for the good of those they lead, we feel betrayed.

We used to call that honorable behavior. We don't use the word "honor" much anymore. Actually, I think that it is officially a politically incorrect word. But honor is what is missing in the behavior of our business leadership, our CEO's. But then, where would they have learned it? We don't talk about honor. I don't recall it being evaluated in performance reviews. People are promoted into the executive suite because they are "accountable" and have good "metrics". Why should we have any reason to expect it?

Cui Bono?

The title of this post is not a misspelling, but instead a Latin phrase. I hope you don't think me pretentious, but in my fascination with all things Roman, I find their ancient culture very insightful into our own day. That Latin phrase, contained in a famous speech delivered nearly 2,100 years ago, is translated to mean "Who benefits"? In our own day, an equivalent thought might be expressed as "Follow the money".

The phrase was originally spoken on a tension filled day before the Roman Senate by their President (Consul). Named Marcus Tullius Cicero, he was telling them to not only listen to what was said, but give consideration to who stood to benefit from what was said. The lives and fortunes of his audience depended on discerning the truth between very different stories being told about the events happening around them. I have a print in my office, a cheap print, of a painting showing the moment of Cicero's speech. Arms raised with face expressive, he asks his audience to not get caught up in the oratory, but instead to think about who had the most to gain and why.

Wise words that echo to our own day. Today, our well being and future prosperity of our children are bound up in a public debate about energy. Our civilization is based on the use of hydrocarbon fueled energy. We have achieved wide spread health, prosperity and material wealth undreamt of in earlier ages because of our access to plentiful and cheap energy. Now our elites have decided that such energy use causes unacceptable harm to our environment and must be largely ended. It is with almost a unanimous voice that our leaders in government, science, media and last but not least, business, speak this vision of future disaster to us.

As Cicero warned his colleagues, "Who will benefit"? The broad consensus of people and institutions speaking this opinion should cause us to heed the warning. Consensus of opinion has such a poor track record that we should always be suspicious. When everyone believes something, they are almost always wrong. But why is this such a passionate issue, and pursued with such righteousness by those who are charged with leading us?

We have heard those that speak talk of our responsibility to our children and grandchildren. How can we leave them a world caught in the grip of a warmer climate? Imagine the horror of Denver having a climate like Houston? I admit that to be a frightening future prospect.

Who among us will not sacrifice for our children? On the other hand, those who speak with such passion about the dangers of a warmer climate are silent about the looming Social Security disaster, or the dangers posed by the public debt of our nation and other governmental entities. Why the seriousness about a possible future trend in climate, well within past norms, when there is only silence about very real and large financial burdens we have already imposed on our children?

"Cui bono"? We look to our scientists for answers. Energy and environment are their expertises. The physical world has grown far too complicated for us to rely on common sense anymore. We have seen technology move so quickly with such impact on our lives that we have child like faith in what science tells us. Yet we fail to distinguish between engineering and science. Engineers build things that work, admittedly with a debt to the insights of scientists. Scientists speculate about ideas.

Engineers are paid because they build things that work. On the other hand, scientists are paid by the government or other public entities. This means that speculating about the correct ideas is very important to scientists. Refer to the life of Galileo for proof of this. His colleague, Giordano Bruni, was burned at the stake, vividly further demonstrating the danger of going against the consensus as a scientist. And then remember that the voices in the public debate about global warming are scientists, not engineers. Driving through the millions of acres of dead pine trees in Colorado is additional testimony to the power of politically correct ideas in environmental science. Scientists that don't support the idea of future disaster caused by hydrocarbon fuels simply won't get grant money or that university tenure. "Cui bono" indeed.

In a world of 24/7 news, prosperity is a non-starter. A future of happiness and peace fill no hours and sell no advertising. If there are no crisis, then one must be found. There is no celebrity gained, books sold or Nobel Prizes won, if there is no problem.

We look to business to act as a counterbalance to the sometimes presumed foolishness of the media and government. After all businessmen are conservative and sober, focusing on the facts, and immune to the whims of fleeting public opinion. But we forget that business exists to make money and that they exist in the moment, with little thought for the past or future. It was Lenin who declared that businessmen would sell him the rope that he used to hang them with, showing he understood business very well.


Permit me a moment to state my real opinion. As a civilization, we are in the middle of a debate on energy which will have very real and very serious consequences. In that debate virtually everything said in the public square is demonstrably nonsense. But who will stand up and say that the emperor has no clothes? Cui bono?

Monongahela

In the early history of ForeRunner, our administrative assistant brought up the idea of naming our conference rooms. I suggested that we name them after historical events. Nobody said no, so I gave them the names of different battles. No one ever asked why, simply writing it off to one of my many eccentricities. The battles chosen were never asked about either. As it happens, they are all from US history, but not the most well known. It may well be that today ForeRunner employees think the names simply obscure places on the map.

As it happens, they are all battles. To me they represent management lessons. They are metaphors for ideas and situations that I believed, at the time some 6-7 years ago, were important for me to remember. Many times as I have sat in those conference rooms, or walked by them, I have meditated on the lesson that I saw exemplified by the name on that room.

Over the years, things change. My perceptions of the way people work together and a company is managed have grown more nuanced. If you think on things over time, your thinking on that subject becomes more complex as well. A case in point is our smallest conference room. Its name is Monongahela, quite a mouthful unless you are from Pittsburgh.

The Battle of Monongahela took place in July of the year 1755 near the banks of that difficult to pronounce river. A large force of British and Colonial soldiers were marching from the Colony of Maryland to evict the French from what we now call Pittsburgh. Moving through the wilderness of the Pennsylvania forest, they had spent most of their march building a road to get them where they wanted to go. The British column had just crossed the river when they ran into a combined force of French and Indians. Though the British outnumbered the French and Indians by at least two to one, the British were routed and suffered what could only be described as a massacre.

Moving along a narrow road through the forest, the British were ambushed by their enemy firing from behind trees and rocks. British officers responded by attempting to form their men into line where they could fire in unison per the approved drills they had been taught. The officers out in the open were of course prime targets for those shooting at them from behind trees and were soon casualties. Firing lines of British soldiers waited for their dead officers and sergeants to issue orders to load their weapons. The choking clouds of dark grey smoke from the guns firing hid everything. Groups of Indian warriors crept up behind them with tomahawks intent on taking scalps. The heat and humidity of a Pennsylvania forest in July completed the hell for those British soldiers in their bright - red - woolen uniform coats.

I must admit that the situation always reminded me of a project. Moving from the ordered world of an engineering or design office, I would go to the job site. The behaviors and reasoning that served me well in an engineering office often failed completely in the very different environment of actually building what had been designed on paper. Monongahela was always a very personal warning to me about the dangers of being an "engineer" in the field or on a startup. I must be careful to take off my bright red woolen uniform and replace it with the buckskins of the French and Indians when I went on site.

Having learned to wear buckskins and face paint while on site over the years, I was often in a position to watch engineering companies on projects. Well versed in the parade ground drill of providing engineering packages, they ran afoul of the realities of client organizational politics or construction contractor/client alliances. Just as the lined up red coated soldiers of General Braddock were tomahawked from behind and scalped at Monongahela, so too were the engineers and designers of engineering companies ambushed by the non-technical realities of projects.

That is as far as my thinking went then. Heeding the implied lesson of Monongahela, we created an organization that was able to move from the engineering office to the field, and back again. We stressed a flat flexible organization that could move among the trees and rocks of our project fields as the French and Indians at Monongahela did. We focused on people that could operate in the smoke of an ongoing project. No parade ground drill for us. We were going to wear buckskin, not bright red woolen uniforms.

But we grew and our clients changed. Loose groups of savvy individuals work well until the project becomes more complex with higher standards of performance required. The French and Indians handled the ambush well, but only the British could build a road through the wilderness from Maryland to Pittsburgh in 1755. Being flexible was no longer enough. We needed to be able to handle the parade ground drill, and all that it implies, as well as the flexibility to deal with the unexpected.

It is useful to look at the British after Monongahela. They did win the war. After all, we speak English, not French. The British learned painful lessons there, but they learned how to maintain their organization and win in the forests of America. They didn't abandon their well drilled infantry in the bright red uniforms, but instead learned how to utilize tactical innovations like skirmish lines. They added elite forces like Rogers Rangers to scout and keep the French off balance. It was the British who captured Montreal on the Plain of Abraham to end the war, the French and Indians never came near New York or Boston.

So that is why we have a Monongahela Conference Room. It is a metaphor for where ForeRunner came from, and where it is going. We still wear buckskin. If you want to see bright red woolen uniforms, go to Buckingham Palace (or Jacobs or CH2MHill or Washington Group). But we can do the parade drill of engineering packages as well as anyone.

Tales from the Front

Recently we got one of those phone calls. On a Friday afternoon, the client, normally a nice guy and generally inclined to spend a large part of his conversation on pleasantries about what's on ESPN, spoke to us over the telephone in a tense voice. We needed to be at a meeting the following week to talk about "the project". Our questions met evasive answers by an individual who obviously wanted to cut the telephone call short.

After the initial flood of depression, we checked with our accounting department. Our suspicions were confirmed. This client had stopped paying their invoices nearly four months before. Just as surely as thunder follows lightning, clients not paying their bills means they are going to take us to task. What had looked to be an upcoming pleasant weekend now looked to be time spent in worry.

The meeting at the client facility passed as you might imagine. With no forewarning of what was to be talked about, we found out that we were seriously deficient as engineers, designers and professionals. Not only did the client project people chastise us, but a spreadsheet wizard from corporate headquarters added that ominous cloud of unspoken power which corporate projects so well. While we were not accused of moral turpitude, the accusation of sloppy work is close enough to it for people in our profession.

In defense of our client, they are in a bit of a sticky wicket. As a business, their margins are under very serious pressure and their stock price is suffering badly. They are in the middle of a very large expansion on multiple fronts of which we are a very minute part. And similar to most everyone else's large capital projects, the news on the cost and schedule front is uniformly bad.

So here we are. A productive relationship, nearly 5 years in length, is at risk. The client now owes us a substantial sum of money. Any question about settling this matter is stonewalled by the client. They have our work product and are using it for the purpose it was intended. They are talking about all the future work coming up and their need for our services. We have been here before.

How do we proceed? We have looked in detail at the "shoddy work". Its hard to see what the uproar is about. The client and contractor are demonstrably deviating from the construction drawings with predictable results. But are we being objective? Reasonable people need to sit down and deal with the issues.

From long experience, I know that the client has no intention of doing so until the project is over. At that point, the client has a functioning facility and has our money. The client is then the sole arbiter of right and wrong, as well as the consequences that accrue from that determination. We may then stand humbly before their desk with our hat in hand to receive what they choose to hand out, or pursue the nuclear option.

A good businessman reading this will wonder how we let our client get so far behind in paying his bills. A good question. Going back to our accounting department, we did ask the question. We have been diligent in calling the client accounts payable group on a regular basis. We have been regularly told that the invoices in question were lost or had been incorrectly code, additionally the client is in the midst of an accounting system upgrade. Such problems are so common with large clients that we did not suspect a problem, given the length and closeness of the relationship with the client. You may draw your own conclusions about the truth of those statements.

Business often makes me feel dirty. When I operate as a project professional, I can see myself making the world a better place. I can do what is "right" without stopping to count the cost. There is little gray in the world of the professional, there is simply black and white. Of course that is not true, but when I am in my professional world, I can fool myself that it is so. But there is always a cost and somebody has to count it. And pay it. That is the job of the business person. The world is a very gray place and there are consequences to everything, both good and bad.

Yet there is something about business. Business seems to allow us to forget those things our mother's (and father's) taught us about the way to live in the world. As I said, business hardly ever makes me feel good.

Update on the House

As many of you know, I am building a house in the mountains. I say that because the subject of "how the house is coming", is usually what people ask about when they meet me. I am not a chatty guy and I suspect that most people struggle with what to talk about when they meet me in a situation where conversation is required. The truth is I struggle with what to talk about too. The well known pitfalls of building houses is a safe topic for both sides.

Safe at least conversationally. In other respects it is a perilous course indeed. As with any project, you don't know what you don't know, at least until you know it. And then, you knock yourself on the side of the head for not seeing the obvious. But then I am used to being thumped for missing the obvious. Not only have I been married for 34 years, but I have long acquaintance with clients.

The latest drama revolves around where the house is located. We have it located with precision on the drawing, to multiple decimal points in fact. We have designed it around the topography of the site. It is one with the land. On paper.

Actually the house will go on a spot of land that until late last fall was trackless forest. Of course being a professional with years of engineering under my belt, I brought in a surveyor to create a drawing of the site and its topography. Locating the shapeless box of the undesigned house on the created drawing, I engaged a contractor to cut down the trees for the driveway as well as the house site last October. Desiring to pour concrete for the house foundations as early as possible the next spring, the trees needed to come down last fall to accommodate our expected schedule. We needed to move fast to get this house built.

Over the winter months, design did not proceed with the dispatch assumed. And the footprint did change. Needless to say, we didn't pour concrete early this spring. Virtually all the assumptions about time and money driving my decisions last fall were wrong.

Since my wife is not an engineer, it often helps her to see things rather than just look at them on paper. In an effort to make the house more real to her, I took her and the drawings to the site in late May. We marked off the location of the house with stakes and string. To my surprise, the house was not exactly where I thought it was. To my surprise, there were a fair number of trees that need to be cut down.

But it seemed a fairly manageable number of trees to be removed. Since I anticipated construction to begin in a few weeks, we needed a contractor to begin work removing the trees in short order. As an engineer I know that only foolish general contractors do not require hard dollar subcontracts but not having the time to define the work scope exactly, I engaged a willing contractor to remove the trees on a $/tree basis. Since I had estimated the number of trees to be removed at around 30-40, I agreed on a generous figure per tree with the contractor. It also helped that he was my youngest son earning money for his last semester in college.

But remembering how the last contractor had mistakenly cut down trees that were marked to remain standing, I determined this time that I would mark all trees to be cut down with a large orange "X" spray painted on the trunk. Surprisingly enough, when I did this I found that I needed to cut down 85 trees rather than the estimated 30-40. My budget had just doubled. The contractor was very unwilling to renegotiate the rate. After all, he anticipated no repeat business from me.

About halfway through the work, a design change occurred, necessitating a small reroute of the driveway. With trepidation in my heart, I took my can of orange spray paint and the revised drawing to the site. Some time later the number of trees to be removed had grown to 180. Again the contractor proved unreceptive to renegotiation on the basic rate per tree. When I proposed that we withhold payment for the work already done to encourage our reluctant contractor's price discounting, my wife didn't think that would be nice. Telling her that my client's did it all the time in similar situations had little effect on her, and thus my, position.

Yesterday my son finished the job. As I sit here writing this I am anticipating his arrival and request for final payment. He is of course quite happy about the 450% overrun. Contemplating the resulting negative variance in my budget, I simply hit myself on the side of the head for missing the obvious.

Launch Jets

I think that I am an incurable romantic. Let me hasten to add that I mean romantic in the literary sense of the word. In the literary sense, a romantic is one who creates stories about the world. How that works out in my life is that I have a metaphor, or a story, for everything.

That serves as the platform for this day's post. As background to the topic, our company, ForeRunner, is committed to the idea of being a good place to work. This isn't an easy commitment. Once you get past the idea of month long vacations and four hour work weeks, the idea of what constitutes a good place to work means different things to different people. We are very concerned about what ForeRunner employees think about working here and work to find out. The results we get are certainly not always what we want to hear, and responding to the issues raised is thorny and often without any ability to solve those issues.

As one who has spent his adult working life in and around engineering companies, I have often thought an interesting way to see them is as aircraft carriers. They are full of highly trained people engaged in complex tasks requiring a high degree of teamwork. To carry out their job, the people on board must be committed to precision and smooth operation of sequential and interdependent tasks, which if not done "right" have serious consequences.

Yet there are two different classes of people on board that aircraft carrier. There are the pilots and there are the crew. Together they are a team, but the pilots experience a very different reality than those who stay on the boat. The glamour of "Top Gun" and Tom Cruise aside, carrier pilots live in a different reality. Their commitment is a different commitment than that of those who stay behind.

In an engineering company, it is a useful distinction to distinguish between those who go out to the job site and those who do not. We are all a team, and equally important to the ability of the company to perform our mission. But those of us who go out to the job site experience a different reality than those who stay behind.

In my teen years, I often daydreamed about piloting a Phantom over North Vietnam, imagining the sudden klaxon alert of a SAM launch or the flash of light signaling a MIG intercept. But very poor eyesight meant that it would always be a daydream for me. But those who were privileged to fly had a very different reality than the team back on the carrier whose work and effort allowed them to be in that position.

Too many times to count, I have driven a rental vehicle onto a job site in some remote area, or walked into a conference room filled with client personnel. Every time I did it, my body reacted. I am not sure if my heart could have beaten any faster or my stomach been more full of butterfly's if I had been in that Phantom. My reality of that project was much different than the draftsmen and engineers back in the office who also worked on those projects.

We live in the reality we experience. A good place to work is defined by the reality we experience. If we work in an office, a good place to work is often defined by the length of our commute, being able to work from home or having control over the work we do and how we do it. Professional decorum and reasonable expectations about timeliness are a given.

If we are in the "cockpit", we experience a different reality. We are lonely, in a hostile location and experiencing severe emotional upheaval. Then a good place to work is calling in and hearing a friendly voice that picks up the phone on the first ring. It is hearing that wonderful phrase, "I'll take care of it right away". Sometimes when we come back we are jumpy and might need a drink. Some of us might even kick our dog if they bark too much.

We are a company that contains both realities. We will continue to do our best to be a good company to work for. But mutual understanding and respect go a long way to bridge different realities. It is a foolish pilot who doesn't respect his deck crew. Most crews will cut the pilot some slack when they see his hand shaking.

But I would invite you to climb into that cockpit. Unlike the Navy, the qualifications to move into that launch position are minimal. Most anyone on that project team can work their way into the cockpit. All you have to have is that desire to strap in.

Once you launch off that deck, you will not want to be anywhere else ever again.

Low Imagination Energy

This week was the annual COGA (Colorado Oil and Gas) show. It is our local yearly come together where we brag, sell and commiserate with our fellows in the oil and gas business. Our keynote speaker this year was Boone Pickens, well known "maverick". Boone sounded a clarion call for windmills and natural gas fueled vehicles as a vision for the future of energy in the United States.

Windmills and natural gas fueled cars? Give me a break. My first thought was this is another example of why history treats those who know how to make money so poorly. Good businessmen, almost by definition, are lacking in the charisma that stirs the imagination necessary for great deeds. Of course we would all be cold and hungry, living in dirty caves haunted by vermin, if not for businessmen. But they don't often understand how to move beyond short sighted logic and excite the passion that drives us to the heights.

But my second thought was for the dullness of imagination in our present culture. After all Boone, and those like him, are not going to do more than hold a mirror up to what we believe possible. Currently there is an ad running on the radio about the wonders of HD Radio. The ad talks about the wonders of HD Radio and the built in intelligence of the radios that can use it. But the adman then wonders about where his flying car is? The ad is built around the idea that HD Radio is part of a wonderful future that was promised us decades ago (remember the Jetson's). Well the radio is here, but where are our flying cars?

As an immature teenage boy, interspersed with furtive visits to the pages of Playboy magazine, I was an avid reader of science fiction. In fact my absolute all time favorite novel is "We All Died at Breakaway Station" by Richard Meredith. But in everything I read was such a sense of optimism about the future that I am now living in. It was just an accepted fact that we would flying around the Solar System with large numbers of people living in "space" by now.

Well, teen age boys, despite their outward sophistication, are very naive. Reading Playboy to learn about women gives undeniable evidence of that. But our failure of imagination about energy is depressing. Our culture's expectation then was that we would be well along on the way to breaking the light speed barrier by now. Instead we are talking about building windmills to power our civilization. We are congratulating ourselves that the United States can be the "Saudia Arabia of Wind". I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I don't think that starships will be powered by windmills. I don't think they will be powered by natural gas either. We may create a really nice culture where every body uses hemp grocery shopping bags, composts their waste and takes a bicycle to work. We may "save the Earth" and all sing Kumbaya. I believe we can create that future if we wish to. And it may be a very pleasant place to live if you have a certain dullness of spirit. The Shire portrayed in "Lord of the Rings" comes to mind. But it will also be a dead end and exist at the sufferance of those nations and peoples who continued to imagine of greatness.

Gettysburg III

One hundred and forty five years ago today, the sun came up over the humid haze of mid summer outside a small town in Pennsylvania. The morning breeze carried that peculiar sweet and sour smell that visitors to a meat packing plant would recognize in the air. That distinctive odor mingled with the acrid smell of gunpowder as well as the odor of latrines for tens of thousands of men, further mingled with the odor of tens of thousands of horses and cattle. There was no mistaking it for a vacation spot.

Greeting that dawn was a manager without any good options. His opponent, the Union Army of the Potomac under George Meade, held a strong position and time was very much on the Union side. But perhaps most troubling was his sense that he had been failed by his senior leadership team. His soldiers had again displayed the élan that had won victory after victory. But their leaders had failed those men, and him, badly. But what to do about it?

The manager, Robert E. Lee, had made his choice during the night to attack the center of the Union line across more than a mile of open field. He was going to throw 9 brigades, 15,000 men, in an attack straight up the middle. His men would be advancing in ordered rows of marching men under Union fire for over 10 minutes before they would be able to return that fire. Even under the most favorable outcome, thousands of his boys would not return from that walk across the field.

But who would lead that attack? I imagine that Lee's heart ached for his strong right arm, Stonewall Jackson. But Stonewall lay in a cold grave back in Virginia, lost in Chancellorsville's wild melee. If Lee was human, he must have wanted to punish those who had left him with this choice, to make them accountable for this sad state of affairs. He had not wanted to fight here, and once engaged, opportunity after opportunity had been lost. Ewell had been cautious when boldness was necessary. Stuart had abandoned duty to engage in headline hunting. Longstreet had sulked because his advice had not been taken, letting victory slip from their hands because he was in a snit.

But instead of giving vent to his frustration and anger, Lee sought out Longstreet and engaged him in awkward conversation. Lee laid out his plans, tapping Longstreet to command the advance. Longstreet argued passionately against Lee's plan, advancing his own plans instead. It is a familiar argument for both, repeated many times in the past months. After patiently hearing him out again, Lee again orders his planned advance. Longstreet begs that command be given someone else. Lee, with sadness and resignation in his voice, tells Longstreet that no one else can do it as well as he. He, James Longstreet, is ordered to command the attack; seeing to it that it is coordinated and handled according to plan.

And so it happened. We remember it as Pickett's Charge, but it would be more rightly called Longstreet's Charge. Again it was late. Again the Confederate artillery was poorly coordinated. Again the Confederate attack was disjointed and poorly led. Again the courage and spirit of the individual soldiers and unit leaders was superb. Again the Confederate's failed, admitted defeat and returned to Virginia.

Who was accountable? Who was to blame? On whose head should the responsibility for failure be laid? In our modern world we believe in accountability. Review performance on objective criteria, measure performance and then mete out justice. When things go wrong, someone must be blamed for failure. Certainly the question of who lost Gettysburg has been endlessly debated in the years following.

Was Lee too bold? Was his invasion of Pennsylvania reckless? Was he overconfident and overcome by pride? In retrospect, this certainly seems the case. Yet, hindsight also argues that Gettysburg was lost by the Confederacy rather than won by the Union.

Did Longstreet let his ego get out of control? Did his pouting prevent him from doing the job he was assigned to do, and for which he was well competent? Certainly the operations over which he had control were carried out poorly and with no evidence of good management. Yet, is it right to assign responsibility for successful execution of a task to one who believes that it will fail?

True to his character, Lee accepted full blame for the action. He was not much for accountability. When his men succeeded, he praised them. When his men failed, he accepted the blame. If his judgement indicated one of his men unsuitable for their position, he quietly saw to it that they were posted somewhere more suited to their talents and without public humiliation.

The demands of the war required Longstreet to be sent, along with his men, to Tennessee. There Longstreet quarreled with his new boss. But rather than continue to work with him as Lee had done, his new boss exiled him to an out of the way backwater where Longstreet would be free to pursue his own plans. Those plans went nowhere and the following April found Longstreet back in Virginia under Lee again. After the war he rose to senior management in the federal bureaucracy where he seems to have been comfortable.

California Dreaming

I have spent the past week on vacation in California. Let me start by saying that I think about California very fondly. I spent the first 10 years of my married life, as well as the first 10 years of my career in the energy business in California. Three of my children were born here. I like California. To be honest, there isn't much not to like.

But California is different. California reminds you of that neighbor in your youth. Tall, blond, athletic and popular. Life was easy for them outside the classroom. In the classroom no one knew whether they were smart or not, because being smart wasn't cool in any case. They charmed the teacher. On tests and homework they had eager and willing help from those wanting to enter their golden circle. They breezed through college and just when faced with the uncertainty of the "real world", a remote elderly aunt passed on leaving her entire fortune to them. Despite their undeniable superiority, they weren't arrogant or bad mannered. They were just very likable. And it seemed the world had been created to be their private country club.

They lived in a different world. And that is California. We in the Rocky Mountains cherish the beauty of our mountains, but California has mountains too. Higher ones in fact. Everything that we have, they have more of it. Not only do they have more of it, but it is better too. We can only look on in helpless admiration and envy.

In the past, we made a curmudgeonly virtue of our envy. We put bumper stickers on our cars telling Californians to go home. But we have admitted our envy and little is now seen of that misplaced defiance. We now fund advertising campaigns for Californians to come and rescue our falling real estate values by buying our houses as vacation homes.

One soon learns that California is a green state. They are making great strides in reducing carbon emissions and becoming "sustainable". Everywhere there are signs and reminders that California is seeking environmental purity. My daughter and son-in-law live in a large city in Southern California. While the city is in near bankruptcy with dangerously failing infrastructure, they will be severely penalized if they do not properly sort their garbage into various "recyclable" bins.

Given California's history, I am sure that they will successfully meet their goals for carbon reduction and "sustainability". Driving through California one sees many utility corridors. Great corridors where large pipelines and electrical power lines bring our energy into California for their use. Not that they really need the energy, just like everything else, they have more energy reserves than we do. They just have chosen not to use theirs. After all, producing energy can make such a mess.

And to add insult to injury, foreign energy sources compete to supply California as well, thus keeping us in our place. If we don't help the popular kid cheat on the pop quiz, we will lose them as a friend and have to eat lunch with the rest of the nerds.

Looking at California, one can only conclude that God plays favorites.

Project Storm Clouds

We are considering a project with a client and I must say that it should be a great project. The project itself is right in our sweet spot. The client is solid with the two basics that every client must have. They want to build something and they have a lot of money. And I should add that they also possess the great intangible that is necessary in a great client. They like working with us and the personal relationship is solid, at least so far.

It should be a situation where everybody comes up a winner and life is beautiful. But my honest assessment is that we are both getting ready to walk into a deep and dark canyon of perilous events. It would be tragic to watch a good relationship turn into a sour and contentious one because we place people in impossible situations, i.e. projects beyond hope of redemption. I have seen it happen so many times and I would hate to see it happen again. People that once enjoyed each others company and trusted each other become bitter and vindictive. People and companies that once thought well of each other and operated in an atmosphere of trust spread vicious rumor and delight in finding fault.

Just as a strong wind and dark clouds on the horizon are a warning to the prudent traveler, so the prudent project manager watches the client's weather. The storm clouds on this client horizon are ominous and dark.

One of the storm clouds centers around the old standbys, budget and schedule. Of course the client will not share the details of his CAPEX. God forbid that we actually know anything about those deep secrets. But we listen when the client talks and we see the project stop and start. It is almost certain that the budget is being deliberately starved to meet a needed rate of return by reducing the cost and shortening the time before revenue starts. This fits because the schedule is being shorted significantly below what reasonable people would estimate.

Of course, most projects don't have enough money or enough time. That is just business as usual. We all know that if you give a project team adequate money or time they will just waste it. But what really concerns me is the evidence of fear within the client organization. I have been on many projects with clients driven by fear. I don't have any memory of where we, or they, were successful.

The second major storm center on the horizon is the client procurement group. They have enormous power within the client organization and they will buy everything on the project. They are all nice people and of good moral character, but they exist in their own world. They buy on price and do not see the need to involve engineers in purchasing decisions. While I have no evidence, I would be willing to wager fairly large amounts of someone else's money that they see expediting and shop inspections as a waste of money. I would also bet that client procurement hasn't the people or resources to do so even if they thought it necessary, having previously earned brownie points with their executive management by cutting waste.

The third major storm center on the horizon is the client operations group. It is a pretty safe bet in an operating company that Operations is an important player. Experience to date indicates that operations won't be involved in any meaningful way in the design of what is to be built. While this is pretty much SOP, we usually get at least lip service from the client about how important and necessary operations input is. With this client, the operations group is silent and headquarters is cavalier about the silence.

This makes me worry about how much good will or understanding exists between operations and the "home office." In the absence of good will or understanding, I have usually found either active hostility or indifference. Both are deadly to projects. Unless the project is a true "greenfield" project, there is an established operating entity that will take over the operation of the project to be built. Once the project moves to construction in the field, that project starts to move under the control of the operating folks. They can delay it, they can change it or they can use it to get what they want from the "home office". Any of these possibilities are catastrophic to a project already on the margin.

But all the above is not fact, it is only my guts rumblings. Brave and bold men operate on their gut. I am just a timid engineer trying to manage the storms of the energy business. There are many good people who rely on this company for their livelihood. If we just do cream puff projects, we will soon run out of work and those good people will have to look for another job. At the same time, some of the best projects we do are those we don't do.

Old Lessons Relearned

I got to spend a small part of yesterday working on what I hope is soon to be a construction site. As you may know I am hoping to build a house in the woods west of Denver, actually a place called Conifer. Last fall I cleared the timber from the driveway and house building site to be. Prior to clearing the area, I had a land surveyor do a topographic survey of that area to be cleared. I also had an architect work with me to develop house plans for the site, using the topographic survey.

Yesterday I went out to look at clearing some additional area in the trackless forest. In doing so, I used distances on the survey to locate some spots on the site that had been cleared. It turns out that the house is not where I thought the house was. Of course being a consulting engineer in real life, my immediate, almost programmed, response is that it is all on paper and changes are easy. But then the owner part of my brain kicked in and I had a tantrum moment thinking about the well known failings of contractors, surveyors and consultants.

The fact is that everybody did their job. But the project manager was a little out to lunch. The surveyor did an accurate job of surveying the topography of the site, but there aren't a lot of natural tie points to give somebody on the site an easy way to orient themselves to the drawings. If you can't orient yourself, you will orient yourself anyway. If the human brain doesn't have any facts, it will create a story. I did in fact have a story rather than an orientation. The surveyor, like most all service oriented people, did what the project manager asked him to do. The project manager should have asked for more.

But the real killer was that somebody did make a mistake. It simply boggles my mind that somebody made a mistake, but it did happen. There was a tree with a bright orange ribbon around it. It was located at a strategic point on the site and allowed easy identification of the front of the house. It was not supposed to be cut down. A specific conversation between the contractor and the project manager was had at the beginning of the tree clearing job. That conversation occurred beside the tree and was specific about the need to not cut it down, with many fingers pointing out the large orange ribbon.

But it did get cut down. The contractor, called to task, disremembered the conversation. The architect wanted justice done, the tree replaced and the contractor blackballed. The project manager hemmed and hawed. It was all business as usual.

While the architect fumed, the project manager remembered. Although the project manager in question has a real talent for hemming and hawing, he also remembered the wise practice of construction management and inspection that he had often advocated. And he was convicted by his own failure to practice his craft well.

I Love the Smell of Weld Smoke in the Morning

On a beautiful spring morning sitting in my office (with all due respect to Robert Duvall), my thoughts turn to the "right of way". I extend my sympathy to those of you in this business who have never experienced the freedom and beauty of the "right of way".

I came late to pipelines. My career in the energy business began in refineries. For a long time I thrilled to watch the big structures of steel and concrete come together in those big plants. My own specialty, control systems, allowed me to exercise creativity and independence, while having a star role in the greater things being done. But the winds of change blow and we find ourselves in places we would never have thought.

And so I came to pipelines; and so I came to the "right of way". After a career of being inside a fence, chance afforded me the opportunity to get outside the fence. After a career spent walking through canyons of concrete and steel, I drove a 4-wheel SUV along the apparently endless right of way of a pipeline crossing open country. After a career spent watching electricians bend conduit, I watched massive D-9 Cats push over big pine trees in the woods of east Texas.

While my arrogance knew no bounds when starting up process units in refineries, I knew my place in the pipeline world. After all, how many people do you know who got stuck in a pipe yard? I can still remember walking over to the foreman of the group unloading pipe to ask for a tow out of the washout where I was high centered. I still have a bias against Ford Explorers on account of that long walk in full view of the grinning crew.

And so now here I am, a manager sitting in an office. Its a corner office, with a great view of foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the occasional hawk that sits in the tree outside. But I miss the morning meeting with the inspectors and strategizing with the right of way agents on landowner negotiations. I miss getting into a pickup and driving out to watch the "firing line". I miss being a little slow when it comes time to close the gate.

Engineering is a dry business. We work with paper and computer screens. It is important work and the success or failure of projects rides on our efforts. But don't miss the opportunity to smell weld smoke in the morning. It makes it all worthwhile.

Gettysburg II

So I am up for another venture into history for insights in the management of people and projects. Gettysburg is such a fertile ground, because it was so important in our country's history, and the story has been so well told by folks such as Michael Shaara and Clifford Dowdey, among many others.

The second day of Gettysburg came early. The Confederates under Robert E. Lee hadn't achieved the success that they might have on the first day because of the unexpected aggressiveness of the Union forces and the unexpected lack of aggressiveness on their own part. But as usual, Lee had a plan and was ready for the second day.

On the left side of the Union's line were some steep wooded hills that could be dominating if held by the Confederates. To that end, Lee met with the man he called "his old warhorse", James Longstreet. Lee's plan called for Longstreet's men to move up from Seminary Ridge and occupy those hills early in the morning of the 2nd Day. The time that Longstreet would move up was fixed at 9 AM that morning.

Meanwhile, Lee would go to the far side of the Confederate line and coordinate with its commander, Dick Ewell. Ewell's had used the discretion Lee gave his senior commanders the day previous to pull up short, leaving the retreating Union Army with a strong defensive position. The old Dick Ewell had been an aggressive hard driving commander in the past. But he had recently taken a bride, and a new appreciation of life may have taken some of the fire out of his belly. Ewell's job today was to fake an assault by the Confederates to distract the Union from what Longstreet was doing on the other side of the line. Lee would be there to ensure that it was done with sufficient energy to be successful in its purpose.

But it seemed Longstreet had other ideas. Longstreet, recently returned from a semi-independent command, now fancied himself a strategist. Upon hearing Lee's orders, he disagreed with the idea and put forward his alternate plan. Lee politely heard him out and re-explained his own reasoning, but then told him to move forward as ordered.

9 AM passed. 10 AM came and went, 11 AM as well. Lee worried that something had happened and rode his horse the 3 miles back to Longstreet. Nearing noon, Lee found Longstreet where he had left him. Longstreet had not moved at all, presented a weak excuse to Lee and began again to argue for his plan of action. The imperturbable Lee heard out Longstreet, but ordered him to attack as originally planned.

Longstreet finally began moving his people into position. One can guess that he did so with a bit of an attitude and not with the dispatch that might have been hoped for. Finally at 4 PM, rather than 9 AM, Longstreet moved forward to occupy the positions that we remember as Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard and the Devil's Den. Students of the Civil War will be familiar with those names as they were scenes of desperate fighting that took so many lives. Longstreet's men were repulsed with heavy losses.

As it happened, the Union forces had got into position only shortly before the Confederates attack. If Longstreet had gone forward at 9 AM, the hills would have been empty and been his without loss. With the high ground in Confederate hands, the Union Army's position was hopeless. They could attack the Confederates in strong defensive positions or retreat, allowing the Confederates to put Washington D.C. under siege.

Lee's position at the end of the 2nd Day is one many managers have found themselves in. You have good people that know their job and do it well. But things have turned to crap, your people aren't following the agreed upon plan, but instead pursue their own agendas. When called to account and forced to comply, they follow the letter of the plan rather than its spirit. What do you do?

I don't believe there is a textbook answer. To go back to Gettysburg, we can see what Lee did. While we do not know what his thoughts were, we know that he took no public action, made no public criticism of Longstreet. On the following 3rd Day, Lee again entrusted Longstreet with the main action. Once more Longstreet sulked, pressed his own ideas and had to be forced into action. Again he failed, with resulting heavy losses. Again Lee took no public action and kept Longstreet as his chief lieutenant. For the failure of the entire enterprise, Lee accepted full blame and made no public excuses, while praising the performance of his people.

Was Lee correct in his response? Certainly, his overall record on the field would say that he was usually right, but then again, he did lose at Gettysburg. Longstreet was experienced and capable. His standard of performance was high based on any objective job description, a job that had few competent performers on either side. He was steady, but perhaps not the man for inspired performance. When in conflict with his boss, he was not a "team" guy, but pursued his own agendas. What would you have done?

Pine Beetles and Stewardship

I just got back from a weekend in the Grand Valley of Colorado, otherwise known as Winter Park. And I am mad. The beautiful green forests are no longer green but an ugly reddish brown, no longer the color of life but instead the color of death. Literally thousands of square miles of pine forest are dead, or dying. An epidemic of tiny beetles and their fungal parasitic host have nearly completed the process of destroying Colorado's pine forests.

Let me repeat that I am mad. What I see in those dead trees is a failure in stewardship on the part of those we trusted with our public lands. Stewardship is a very important word to me. I grew up on a working farm. My father is a farmer, and as far back as my family is traced, we were farmers. Stewardship is a farmer's virtue. It is a realization that you might own the land today, but it was there before you and will be there after you. It is keeping faith with those who came before you. They held the land in their time and provided stewardship over it such that you can enjoy its bounty today. It is keeping faith with those whom you will pass it onto in the future. As did those who came before you, you want to leave it better than you found it. That is stewardship.

Getting back to my anger, why? Those little pine beetles and fungus spores are simply nature. Contrary to Walt Disney, nature is violent and brutal, with wholesale extinction of entire species almost an anyday affair. Some of my most vivid memories of life on the farm are of late afternoon hail storms that obliterated our crops. I can remember walking out after a late afternoon storm and seeing the ground covered with white ice. The green plants that had been there just minutes before were now no more than a tossed salad. Months of hard work and all the money spent on seed, fertilizer and fuel, gone in just minutes, destroyed by the blind hand of nature.

But I also know that getting angry at nature is silly. Nature does what nature does; it is simply water running downhill. To be angry at what nature does is a useless exercise that only hurts you. Nature certainly is not out to get us. But that does not mean that we must accept what nature does without recourse. Nature can be negotiated with. That is what engineers do. That is what the profession of engineering is about. Water flows downhill, that is nature. But water can be dammed up and used to generate electricity as it flows downhill. That is an engineer's negotiation with nature. I have always seen that as an essential part of stewardship.

But why the anger about pine beetles and dead pine forests? I am angry because it didn't have to be this way. Because the forests have been artificially protected, they are dense, with little diversity and they are old. Forest fires have always been stopped. Logging has not been allowed. Nothing has been allowed. Pine beetles are always around, killing off the weak trees in the forest. But it takes special circumstances to create the near universal kill off we are seeing. Those special circumstances took human intervention. It took human action; or more accurately, human inaction, to create the circumstances that have ruined our pine forests.

Our public lands, our public forests, are being managed by caretakers. Caretakers do not practice stewardship. Caretakers are simply passive managers who erect fences to keep out the world. Caretakers simply deny that time passes and circumstances change. Behind those fences things fall apart and crumble. One of the most powerful forces of nature is entropy, the inexorable process of decay.

Stewards try to make things better, because they are keeping faith with those that came before and those that will come after. Sometimes risks must be taken in the attempt to be better. Caretakers simply keep it from being used and take no risks, ensuring that disaster will eventually happen.

Projects as Football

I've just had another meeting with a client that expects engineering drawings to be perfect, beyond misinterpretation and cover all possible questions that a constructor might ask. This is a seductive idea. As engineers we, of course, have no tolerance for error or ambiguity. As consumers, we expect what we buy to be without flaw. Put those two ideas together and the client is being perfectly reasonable. This is simply a reaffirmation of Murphy's Golden Rule after all. Package a reasonable client and Murphy's Golden Rule together and I am left without a lot I can say.

But how do you tell a client that is reasonable, as well as has the money that pays for our services, that they are wrong? Obviously by using diplomacy, charm and euphemisms, as well as picking up the tab for a long and langorous tasting at a trendy brew pub.

That being said, I think the issue is not about engineering, but about something else entirely. That something is the strategy of project execution. We simply establish scopes, budgets and schedules and go forth into the wide world expecting the success that is our due. But the strategy that we use to execute a project is critical to its success. Strategy is not an ivory tower concept, it is the calculated plan of action that takes into account the way the world works, the situation we are in and the result we wish to achieve.

Consider the way a football coach plans his defense. He has limited resources, eleven men on the field of action, limited by time and the skills those eleven men bring to the field. He needs to use those resources to prevent the opposing team from scoring points.

Coaches know that they win or lose the game on the line of scrimmage. But they also know that there is only so much they can do on that line of scrimmage and that they have limited resources. There are only 11 players and 60 minutes.

A project execution team can be compared to a football defense. Rather than preventing a touchdown, their job is to prevent the perversity (ha ha) of the universe from damaging the project they are executing. The way resources are deployed is the strategy for executing the project.

It often seems that the strategy we, as an industry, employ is simply a goal line stand. Everybody up on the line of scrimmage and try to beat the crap out of the guy on the other side. We go home to drink our beer at night bloody and bruised, but happy in the knowledge that we did the best we could. If a receiver or running back gets past the line, easy score. In the project world, that equates to perversity whapping us on the side of the head with a big stick.

In football, most teams employ a defense in depth concept. There is a defensive line that does the heavy lifting on every play. But behind them is a linebacker corp that adjusts to the situation and works closely with the line to stop whatever the other team throws at them. And behind the linebackers are the safeties and cornerbacks which take care of the mistakes.

Engineering services are the defensive line of a project execution team. They do the heavy lifting. Their job is to prevent perversity from scoring its points. They define what needs to be built and how it is to be put together. They are in charge of getting the material necessary to where it needs to be. If they do their job well and the universe isn't too perverse, projects go smoothly. In a football game, if the defensive line stops all the offensive plays on the line of scrimmage, the game is easy and scores are low.

But coaches know that people aren't perfect and that offensive teams (the perversity of the universe) are very crafty and have a lot of really good players. The defensive line does not stop every offensive play on the line of scrimmage. That is what the linebackers are there for. In this metaphor, project procurement plays the part of linebacker. Aggressive linebackers read the way the play is going and react accordingly. Strong procurement sees the way the project is going (expediting, shop visits and receiving) and facilitates adjustment with vendors, engineering and construction to deal with developing situations.

If the football makes it past the line and linebackers, safeties and cornerbacks pick it up and minimize the damage. That is the job of construction engineering in our metaphor. Construction engineering is charged with dealing with the problems that get through. They are the final line of defense. Aggressive backfield players watch the play developing and react accordingly, They can do this because they have the time and perspective to do so.

One of the key questions in the makeup of any strategy is marginal effectiveness. The quality or completeness of engineering services product, drawings and specifications, is a function of time. That time is measured both in manhours and as a time line. Increasing quality or completeness requires both, more manhours and more time. From the standpoint of an effective project execution team, where do we get the most bang for the buck by adding manpower?

As noted previously, most project execution strategies seem to be oriented toward the goal line stand. Occasionally there is a lone safety or single linebacker, Even more destructive, the line and the backfield almost always play on different teams.

Faith

I attended the Rocky Mountain Electrical League's Workshop on Carbon Issues. The focus of the workshop centered on what the electrical power industry thinks about carbon dioxide emissions. As it turns out, they think about it a lot. That thought is leading them to plan an unprecedented upheaval in the way the United States generates electricity. The cost of that upheaval will also be unprecedented, both for energy consumers and society. Paradoxically, the short term large scale beneficiary of that upheaval will be the natural gas business, not the nascent renewable energy business.

One of the strong impressions I carried away from that workshop is a renewed appreciation of how our lives and society are governed by faith. I define faith as that which we believe, but can not prove. Our workshop began with an excellent presentation by Randy Udall. Mr. Udall is a charismatic presence that powers his presentation about why carbon dioxide is a problem and the dire consequences of ignoring its increased presence in our environment.

Everything that Mr. Udall said however, depends on acceptance of his underlying beliefs regarding global warming. I stress the word, beliefs. While there is an ocean of data regarding carbon dioxide and global warming, there are multiple interpretations of that data. None of which show predictive power. Therefore, an objective person must conclude any interpretation of that data is faith, sometimes known as a hypothesis.

But Mr. Udall's presentation is the faith that our culture and government has accepted. Alternative ideas about climate are simply no longer treated seriously, at least in the circles of culture and government that matter. We have a faith, and that faith is global warming. A faith needs those who interpret the faith and tell us what that faith requires of us. That is Mr. Udall's job.

Interestingly, the people I knew at the workshop weren't persuaded that global warming was real, and that therefore carbon dioxide emission controls were not necessary. But as you might guess, they were all engineers. And in matters of faith, engineers are generally not welcome as we have a tendency to raise inconvenient observations. But we did not loudly voice our critical thoughts. Instinctively we know that we are dealing with faith, and official faith is always alert to heresy. Heresy is never good for your career. We may talk about foolishness over beers, but not in the presence of those who interpret the faith.

But as I look over our energy industry today, we are poised to embark on actions that will cost us dearly. Those actions may well be necessary, but we take that on faith.

Hillary, or Obama, or John?

The political season is upon us. The media, and news junkies everywhere, are in a frenzy over permutations in the penumbra of chance remarks by the political candidates. I used to be a dedicated political junkie, but had to swear it off some years ago. I just couldn't handle the constant emotional triggering. Talk radio could get me in such an uproar during commutes, that I had to quit.

But politics is important to the energy industry. We will always be an industry that goes through cycles as energy supplies go out of balance with energy demand. But those cycles are driven to extremes by the politics of our great nation. Our last major cycle of boom and bust was almost catastrophic, in large part because of US politics. Price controls on domestic oil and gas production had the predictable effect of depressing supply and increasing demand. Allowing "new" production" to sell at a market price, artificially inflated, predictably drove our industry into a wild frenzy of drilling.

When the price controls were removed the market, again predictably, rationalized. The resulting chaos, as "new production" prices dropped and "old production" rapidly increased left scars on our industry that are still affecting our thoughts and actions. I, for one, sold residential real estate for a year. If you don't think that the picture of me discussing the color of living room carpets with potential house sellers isn't funny, think about it again.

The recent debacle in ethanol simply reinforces the point. US energy policy has an enormous effect on the lives of people. While it is comforting to believe in the silliness of our political class, they are not stupid people. But they are driven by political considerations, not economics or engineering logic. They have the jobs they do because we put them there. They may be fools, but they are our fools.

So what Hillary, or Obama or John think about energy is very important to me, my job and future. I have to tell you that I don't want to apply for a job with ReMax again. It didn't work the first time and I have a greatly lessened tolerance for the effect of "realtor beige" discussions now. I have a lot larger mortgage as well. The potential collateral damage is huge.

My parents repeatedly told me that you should never discuss sex, politics or religion. So it is with a fair amount of inherited guilt that I write the next paragraphs. But what the heck, this is the 21st century.

I have to tell you that I feel pretty good about our future, electing any one of the three. Let me narrow that statement a bit. Concerning the impact to the Denver based energy market from election by any of the three candidates mentioned, I feel pretty optimistic. None of the three would appear to have any past interest in energy. That means that they don't have any axes to grind, beyond their obligatory lip service to our greed and the pain we cause Mother Earth.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of political fire behind high energy prices. We are all hurt by $3 gasoline, but it's different this time. The last time energy prices went up like this, there was fire in the political belly. Our political masters had to do something, and right now, or there was going to be rioting in the streets. Even the Great Father Figure, Walter Cronkite, was angry. I interpret that to mean that the chances of really stupid legislation this time to be relatively small.

What is very positive about Denver and energy is the need to do something about Iraq. If we were honest with ourselves, we know that the reason we went into Iraq is oil. The US public wants out of Iraq. Some want to cut and run, while others want to leave with honor and a declaration of victory, but the broad public wants out of Iraq. But the problem is that Iraq sits in the middle of the world's oil supply. Simply leaving the Middle East to its own devices and the consequent chaos in energy won't work without a fallback position.

At some level most of us know this to be true and will vote accordingly. From a political point of view, the only fallback position that will sell to the general public is "Energy Independence". "Energy Independence" is emphasizing and publicizing renewable energy, while working to increase domestic energy supply. On a number of different levels, Denver is the big winner here.

Increased domestic energy supply means greatly increased production from the Rocky Mountains. Denver is the regional hub of the Rocky Mountain energy production business. Denver can hardly lose. Our level of activity is high simply based on economic factors. But as politics begins to drive "Energy Independence", our level of activity will be turbocharged by the political incentives, in whatever form they may take, that will come from our need to increase domestic production of energy.

Renewable energy is the public centerpiece to "Energy Independence". Today and for some time to come, it is not a serious piece of the solution. But it is the necessary cover to cope with the perceived degradation of the environment caused by increased domestic production. After all, most of the increased energy production will come from federally owned lands. To allow this use of federal lands will require political trade offs, that is, a serious commitment of money to renewable energy development and production.

Here is where Denver is a double winner. Denver is rapidly becoming a hub of the renewable energy industry. Our workforce, our energy experience and our physical setting make this a natural development. A large part of that money committed to renewable energy will be spent in Denver. The public stance and actions of our current Governor lead one to believe that he has made this connection and is acting on it.

So my thought is that no matter who wins the election, Denver's energy future is likely to be prosperous and secure.