Lessons from Honda #1:Know Thy Time

ed note, there is a lot of interesting waffle in this post but if you want the meat of it go to the bottom where 'meat of this post' is in bold.

I recieved a comment the other day, huzzah.

Tohm, I love your blog.
I just wanted to say that.
It inspires me to stop wasting so much time thinking about petty things and think about the important stuff instead.

Recieving comments on my blog is a rare thing, and how better to reward an individual taking the initiative to single them out. Which I don't mean to it's just that increasingly I am finding meditation the hardest thing to do because almost everything I come across or my eyes rest on briefly stirs up a frenzy of cognition.
And this comment was no exception, the people whom I know read my blog tend to give me feedback face to face, not in this forum, and I admit a blog is not a very good forum for communication. It's a log in which I try to disclose stuff.
And funny enough there I go having spent a whole bunch of time talking about the nature of blogs and my meditative practices and wasted a bunch of my time.
What all that was meant to some how lead to was that this comment got me to thinking about one of the million things I've already backlogged wanting to talk about.
The above comment was a little perplexing, it sounds sincere to me, and I choose to treat it as such but the '[inspires]... to think about the important stuff instead' could have been sarcastic as it was a comment left on my lengthy post of whether I thought poligamy was feasable or not. Arguably a petty waste of my time.
If however as I believe it was intended was as a genuine complement then I have to say it fills me with furbies inside and also provoked me into further thought.
I allude to Drucker's school of management that I have been studying of late and find highly impressive, its one of those schools of thought that is simultaneously intuitive but new and fresh, and whilst one could almost describe it as conservative it doesn't necessarily controvene other business guru's like Ricardo Semler's system of democracy in business.
And that gives me the giddy feeling that I have discovered another piece of the puzzle as I gradually move towards enlightenment. Another friend recently sent me an article on Lifestyle Design which I believe was erroneously titled 'the 4 hour week' I am a big believer in the four hour day, but more leaning in the direction of Clive Hamilton's criticism of classic economic rationalisation that people don't work because they have to but work because they enjoy it. (they both play a part but the top priority is enjoyment of work).
All focus around management of time, and the commentor Jess whose true identity I can guess at but not know for sure, hit the nail on the head of Drucker's starting point for effective executives (for more info read his book 'effective executive'), a starting point though I should sure up is no good without a goal or at the very least objective, Drucker says that the goal of the executive is effectiveness. The three primary responsibilities of an executive are Thinking, Communicating and Deciding and for each of these they take responsibility.
But the first step down the path of doing so effectively is to know thy time. That is to see where all your time (and presumably energy/effort goes) and then check that against your actual priorities.
For me this struck a cord, Drucker talks about effectiveness as learned behaviour and I certainly I feel have a lot of effective behaviours, my career management at Honda I think was peerless and I don't say so arrogantly but as the result of conscious efforts I've made. As for the future how effective I am remains to be seen, success in one sphere of experience doesn't necessitate success in the future by any means.
So enough eating of pies unhumble, and back on task, for me personally I have described myself primarily in self depreciating terms, I often even here in japan describe what I do or how I work as 'lazy','childish','easy' and so fourth. Probably to my detriment I sell myself as someone who puts in very little effort and cruises by on natural talent.
And largely this is how I see myself and would describe myself. Infact the only word out there... I might actually highlight that in red because I'm disclosing my own key weakness/strength...Infact the only word out there I can't abide being labelled is 'selfish' people with a lisp however I find hilarious when they label me 'shellfish' I remember a Jerry Springer episode fondly when just such a person hurling abuse at their sister got the audiance chanting 'shellfish, shellfish, shellfish...'
When I talked about my laziness in my exit interview though Rod pointed out that whilst I described myself as one of the laziest workers at Honda I was the only person who rode 15km a day on a pushbike to and from work. Rod is a thoroughly annoying man who spots tells all the time, and whilst laziness I will always consider one of my enduring core values I will concede that again he alludes to the principle of knowing thy time.
To sight another book, this one is good because you don't actually have to read it just pick it up and look at the back cover, called 'Nice Girls Don't get the Corner Office' a book that is a shopping list of all the ways women tend to sabotage their own careers subconsciously the authoer lists as '
Mistake #blah blah Hard Work' that 'mistake' underpins the basis of my self proclaimed effective behaviour. To come back to Drucker as my heavy weight opinion on the matter, hard work is of no value if spent on things that aren't effective.
Hard work is the misguided Moral of 'The Hare and the Tortoise' which for those who don't remember is the thrilling story of how a speedy animal like the Hare loses a Footrace to the Tortoise who slowly plods along. The morale is most commonly iterated as slow and steady wins the race, and in many cases particularly when it comes to something new slow is actually the quickest way to learn.
But from the point of view of 'work' as the exertion of effort or the spending of time it is the opposite. How the story goes from the work perspective is this:
The Hare and the Tortoise have a footrace, neither has any real experience. The Hare bolts at the starting line the Tortoise hangs back. The Hare seeing its lead grow gets comfortable in its method and adopts a regular stride. The tortoise realising its own strength and weaknesses devises a method by which to make travel more effecient, namely by employing the use of a fast flowing stream which being aquating the tortoise can achieve speeds above and beyond that of the current with little energy exerted. Having entered the stream the tortoise applies a little effort and arrives at the bridge that is the finish line well ahead of the Hare who arrives exhausted and having through its efforts done permanent damage to it's legiments. Morale of the story: work smart not hard.
That I describe most commonly as being lazy, for me lazy doesn't have the normal connotations of being unvirtuous or a negative character trait, it simply means, avoiding at all costs the unnecessary expenditure of effort.
As such (and I'm sure if I have readers now from Honda will be horrified (some may not be surprised)) I can describe every single one of the playoff matches of the NBA eastern conference as I watched them all at work via the internet with the abundancy of spare time I had.
Admittedly I lost this spare time due to training new staff and handing over my duties but for the most part of my career I easily had 2-3 hours a day to idle away on personal interests on the internet (descretely of course). And I call this lazy, I would also probably call it bored and let me tell you of all the challenges I ever faced at work, boredom was the one that terrified me most when I woke up on a monday morning. Nobody I presume would argue that I wasn't into setting new challanges for myself nor for creating lofty ambitions for the department, or that in any way I didn't have a full plate of sizeable projects to work on.
The major reason my 2-3 hours a day got spent on NBA games was that my boredom arose from being almost entirely alone in having time to work on important stuff.
The executives were in meetings constantly or overseas reporting on the past and projecting financials into the future.
My young colleagues were pulling their hair out with the stress of their respective workloads, yet I believe if they look at the mindmap and process maps I tried to create as accurately for my successor as possible I would bet my left nut they'd be surprised at how much I managed.
Thus far I realise this lengthy monologue is becoming increasingly a self congratualatory speech by me for me and I should clarify to anyone getting turned off at my shamelessness that the crux of the matter is/was: it broke my heart.
I really felt betrayed by how time was squandered in the working culture, and I don't in anyway imply that Honda is a dog and pony show company, I think it is probably in the upper percentile of Australian managed companies for avoiding petty politics, planning for the future and behaving as a responsible corporate citizen (apart from an unhealthy dependance on selling Dirt Bikes which are responsible for destroying vast tracks of National Parks in Australia) but even so business was moving away from dirtbikes into road friendly/baby boomer friendly scooters and cruisers.
But the fact of the matter was, I don't think many people ever sat down and analysed their time, the easiest temptation for me was to jump on the phones and whittle away the hours of the day chasing meaningless erands for customers, sales reps and dealers. But doing so is what Drucker would refer to as fire fighting. What I needed to spend time on was training up staff to better handle customer calls and discussing call handling procedure (communicating) so as to make sure once a 'fire' was put out it stayed out and we had the upper hand. The other best use of my time was to crawl through our procedures and see what was causing dissatisfaction and conflict amongst our customers internal/external and not so much end users unless it related to cashbacks or something. Thus trying to prevent fires from occuring and eating up all our effort. (that you would call thinking) and sometimes if my manager was away I could handle 4 calls simultaneously by taking costumer complaints to a generic level and deciding on the best response which I then communicating to the team (deciding) and all this at a very juniour level of the company.
All activities that reduced my workload, made operation more efficient and got me internal recognition.
So really, being lazy is taking the abundant work that is there to occupy yourself until 5 o'clock, and hardwork is infact acting today to reduce the demands on you tomorrow.
But 'hard work' as it most commonly manifests itself is precisely the opposite project, it is throwing yourself headfirst trying to take more calls in a day than the other team members, trying to be indispensible in the crisis that arise.
Put simply, instead of inventing a car with 400 bhp, you buy 400 hundred horses. Or instead of fixing a leak permanantly you stay up all night changing wads of paper towell.
This is hardwork that breaks my heart. It is more appropriately called stupidity. And I don't infer that people that work hard are intrinsicly stupid, I mean the process itself is not a learning one, it is not growth, it is the process by which one dedicates more and more resources to something 'petty' never freeing up resources to devote to important things.
Drucker prescribes executives to get their personal assistents (the 70's was long ago enough to call them secretaries still) to follow them around and write down what they were doing every 10 minutes for a week. Then to analyse the data after a week to see what time was being spent on.
This process assumes that one has already determined what is 'petty' and what is 'important' to use the terminology of my blog commenter which is 100% accurate.
Most people will be contributing little time to 'important' things usually because for the executive they are important at a company level that they themselves hold primary motivation for achieving whereas petty things are the concerns of the people making the constant demands of their time. Resolving disputes over issues of little to no consequence, talking to a customer who refuses to accept the proposal of a lower level staff member, talking to customers for no greater purpose than making them feel important, or in Honda's case from my sphere of experience/influence, preparing reports to feed ever onwards up the chain with little to no impact on buiness as usual (I don't recommend discounting the value of keeping an eye on things though).
What I do discount is bothering to read reports if you have dedicated no time to ever really act on them.
Hence the outcome of the drucker analysis. You see how you spend your time, eliminate as much as humanly possible that doesn't contribute to achieving your key priorities and then schedule in time specifically for your key priorities.
I suspect the head honchos at Honda did just this because I could almost never book time with them in the same two week period I was trying to book time in, but for the most part all I saw was people needlessly stressing and working the same systems and no time dedicated to improving their own working methods.

So that was the lesson for me, not so much know thy time, I wasn't very good at scheduling time, but did have an abundant supply of time to pursue special projects, and when blocked by lack of access to the people I needed to achieve the result with I either watched NBA or talked to Rod about learning and shit.
But it really all started with me in highschool, with the discipline of homework.
Namely, I almost never did it, this has been for me the key competitive advantage I possess (albeit indirectly) for a lot of people it is a fast track to failure, but for me not doing homework was a huge timesaver and I'll tell you why and then give you a contrary example as well that isn't mine but is instructive anyway.
It started philosophically as a process of drumming up righteous indignation, namely that teachers assigned homework to be done in time I considered my own. Most parents get behind the teachers fearful their kid will end up poor, or generally if they don't value education will discourage their kid actively or through apathy from trying across the board. My older brother though had aspergers, making him increadibly willfull and one could even describe as selfish, it wasn't diagnosed until after he finished uni so we all just thought he was an arsehole, but he set a precedent for my parents being pretty laze-faire or however the fuck it is spelt about getting involved in our school work because for Sam it was simply too exhausting and then putting pressure on me and my sister wouldn't be fair.
So I was left to determine my own policy and I did so through rationalization, that is I blamed the teachers for being inefficient and thus having to asign me work to conduct on my own to achieve the learning level they were supposed to deliver.
Now that in itself is highly debatable and people could take it all over the place but at the end of the day, the most obvious gaping hole in the logic was that for the teacher whether I pass or fail has some consequence, personal pride and let's not forget private schools are a business and a blemish on the stat sheet could hurt future enrolments. Private schools are supposed to deliver success, but overall I was a blip of a statistic to my teacher (I know emotionally I was more than that but using consequentialism thats the way it was) failure for me however meant limitations on my choices in life (though to wax philosophical limits imposed on the infinite number of choices are of little significance anyway) I in short had to live with the consequences.
My 'enlightenment' apeared by looking at the equation, it was the schools role to teach, therefore what it taught had to be measured in order to be delivered. The measurement was the key. Measurement was also obvious, the measurement was in assesible criteria. For the system to work, and be efficient the only thing that could be measured is what was taught, their was no extra advantage of significance to study indipendantly from what was assesable.
In short all these thoughts cascaded through as one crystal clear message 'I can only be assessed by what the teacher teaches me in class' and from then on homework was ajoke.
My minimum required effort was simply to ensure that I understood what was told to me in class. Private schools understand this well because they give you past exams to use, teachers can't catch you out because highschools have to be standard across the state, they all sit the same exams per subject because they have to standardise, teaching anything extra that what is on the exams is a waste of time because it isn't dedicated to acheiving the deliverable an ENTER score.
So my system was water tight, furthermore the Board of Education backed me up by removing Cats or take home draft based assesment, meaning in VCE hard work really didn't pay off, knowing shit did.
So all year 12 I simply read a bit, reflected on my classes and for the most part was in bed by 9pm pursued my own interests and ran. I had genetic advantages too, I retain most of what I hear as an Audio learner which teacher class delivery is favorable and I picked my subjects fairly effectively too and have a high IQ but here I learned indirectly that hard work didn't pay.
Anyone who has been through VCE and emerged on the otherside knows that holy grail of the ENTER score only lasts in real terms for 1-2 months, between being released and when you enrole in UNI.
So I got 95.5 which let me into anything bar double degrees and law at melbourne uni. I probably could have got 99 something if I worked really really hard, but the payload is small and would have set a bad precedent for later in life.
In short I analysed my time, albeit to justify spending more of my time on personal preference, but the act of looking saved me hours possibly months of my youth spent enjoying myself.
Uni was even easier because I knew that nothing that wasn't delivered in a lecture was examinable, therefore lecture slides/notes as provided by the lecturer were all that was necessary, and if it deviated from this you could rely on the bell curve to put you at no real disadvantage anyway.

Thus I entered Honda with one last trick up my sleave, the challange with workplace versus school is that in school the deliverables are obvious standardised pieces of assesment with clear and apparant criteria. Work it's different, whilst largely still school yard politics, perceptions of value are more subjective, hence the existence of a wide disparity between good companies and great companies, and the shortlived bad companies (unless the bad company is a government agency inwhich case it hangs around forever leaching off taxpayers from good companies).
I knew in my head that overtime was bullshit, because my brother had befriended the guy who first introduced me to the concept of the 3 hour day, said fellow was a software programmer and had an advantage most people don't he was an expert and his level of productivity was inscrutible until complete, as most employers couldn't read code. He observed that the most effort anyone really exudes in agiven day is 3 hours, so that if he dedicated three hours solely into uninterupted productive effort he had no qualms about packing up and heading for home.
As my teacher Terry commented the truth is most people achieve far less than 3 hours a day, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating, said programmer was loved for his efficiency overall.
He had his employer over a barrell, I on the other hand was going into sales support one of the most generic entry level jobs someone can do. I was also under contract to deliver 37.5 hours a week of my time to Honda, I had sold it. Interestingly enough the contract had a catch which was 'or until the efficient completion of your duties' which was the contracts way of saying, you work overtime pro-bono if you haven't achieved what we expect of you.
I never really challanged on that point in that I achieved most duties I could gather for myself (even after becoming the marketing girls part time PA) well ahead of time by heading home after three hours. This was only because we were expectred to keep our phone lines open to customers between 9 and 5 and I was expected to be available to take a call.
So I was easily replacable in terms of duties, and despite being able to easily achieve my duties in under 3 hours a day, it is one thing to work effectively and be percieved as lazy and another to work hard an be percieved as effective (or more commonly at Honda 'valuable').
The issue has the extra dimension of being subject to perception. If my boss saw me watching NBA games (something I started doing once I was no longer in my boss' line of sight) he most likely would think me lazy, redundant and dispensable. Yet my dilemma was that in the early days I simply couldn't find enough work to do. I just about quit because of boredom in my first year. Drucker too talks about the mistake of giving new people 'small' jobs when they should be given big jobs that challange them and hence the employer a better idea of what they are capable of.
The obvious thing to do was manage perceptions.
I guess here finally I get to the meat of this post. The perception of hard work as a virtue I think is the biggest challange facing companies in Australia. Culturally it is what most people are raised on, how hard the depression was, how hard the diggers did it, how hard Cathy Freemen worked for Olympic glory, how hard the journey is to the MCG Grand Final, how hard are stupid farmers are doing it in the drought...ad nauseum.
But hard work is precisely the opposite of progress, progress is making things that make life easier. I battled the perception of hard work as a virtue by discussing at every opportunity in my early days, the issue of perception itself.
One such manager called the Motorcycle department slackers because at 5pm their department was gone, this comment wasn't for my benifit but for his own subordinate but I took note that it was at least in his books a virtue to work overtime.
My policy was to be gone also at 5 on the dot which infact meant I spent the last 15-5 minutes tidying up my desk in my own haphazard way. Something I never stopped doing.
Which was fine as a junior staff member my work wasn't very important but how to set the precedent that no further overtime would be forthcoming should I recieve a promotion. Making it clear down the track was an obvious option but even better was to add a competing perception, one I believe is if such a thing exists the correct perception, I could at least I'm sure call it the effective perception.
A boss walks through the office at 5:30pm and sees a worker sitting at his desk he thinks 1 of 2 things.
1. (ineffective perception) that worker is dedicated.
2. (effective perception) I thought they where supposed to complete their work before 5, that worker is inefficient.

In various forms I reiterated this again and again. My boss once said the same thing about one of our suppliers which was: 'we told them they have to get our product out before cutoff every day, you don't acheive that by starting earlier than agreed' I've paraphrased heavily to try and keep the business as ambiguous as possible but he hit the nail on the head when it came to overtime. Overtime is moving the goal posts, a job that depends on overtime is one occupied by someone who has not achieved competency in at least one thing = time management.
I for one feal pity, and if close to someone yes, heartbreak when I see them working hard and working overtime. My perception is definitely that the person is inefficient.
Whilst it is without question I would gladly dedicate my time in an actual crises, most day to day work is not a crises, and most crises can be prevented by utilising the time saving of being efficient at what we do.
If I were a manager at any Company I would reduce the time available to my employees to complete their duties not extend it. Because overtime in most manifestations I've seen results in a lot of empty posturing, unbalanced lifestyles and little effective output.
And there's a whole other side unexplored yet, what I did with my free time after work, this is where Rod is phenomanlly good, better than I at spotting the tells. I was self proclaimed 'laziest man at Honda' yet as Rod pointed out I rode 15k each way to work every day, rain hale or shine, and most annoyingly headwinds despite being lazy. I told him this is because in the long run cycling would prove to be the laziest thing.
But above and beyond that, I read, I read and read and read in my time, learning how to be better. Internal changes are the hardest to notice in someone so the amount of learning I did that manifested itself at work would just be the tip of the iceburg, especially considering when politics, power heirarchies and company priorities come into play.
Then I was a 3 time volunteer, playing basketball with ESL students at RMIT, Helping Earthsharing wherever I could spare the time, and Teaching Zamin english through FLN I believe all are still linked to my blog.
The big joke here was, that whilst others stayed back a couple of hours, mentally exhausted beating their heads against the wall over the same old problems, I was sitting in a room with a professional strategic advisor learning how to devise strategic plans for the Fitzroy Learning Network, I was also often in a pub talking over the risky decisions involved in marketing and promotions for the Fitzroy Learning Network. On other nights I was engaged in numerous debates with the Earthsharing crew making decisions together I would never get a say in at Honda and being the marketing and communications expert. Whilst people work hard at low level jobs I was paving my career path by learning high level strategy, getting to make decisions and see their results, often dealing with the best products society offers when it comes to the volunteer economy.
The primary benificiary of course is me, but followed closely by Honda that had bought up most of my time, and it was really flexible letting me leave early to teach Zamin. Sadly not one of my peers followed my example, those capable of doing so, so that the next most impressive employ after myself was the single mother whose resultant latent leadership abilities need some coaxing out.
The great Irony for me though was that, in knowing my time I knew it was in Honda's best interest really to have their employees spend less time at work and more others. Even getting healthy sleep and spending quality time with the family is probably more productive than the sloppy work that gets tapped out after 5. Even claims that its necessary to do so because during the day their are too many distractions. Well handling those distractions is what time management is, not shifting the goal posts, its about setting precedents and prioritising and knowing thy time.
Sadly I fear there is a less talked about and far scarier reason its such an issue in most peoples lives though beyond lacking the know how of time management and that is, fear of boredome.
More commonly examined as a larger issue of 'Empire Building' I think often efficiency is not a career strategy for most people (even though it may be the overall corporate strategy) because they fear that the outcome is boredom. I for one already said boredom was my biggest obstacle at Honda, but I was also the go to guy for any new challanging projects on my level, especially ones I made for myself.
It is a perceptual problem that one improves oneself out of a job.
When really, and I know at least one specific example, my old boss said that 'we owe them an opportunity' again paraphrasing for me though I would never leave my career to the waiting game, the opposite is true until you are no longer needed to do the work you did, you can't be given any new opportunities.
terry my teacher told me about an incident in an office where they got a new printer that would do the copying for him from his desk. Pretty old technology now but the guys response was 'but what will I do now that I don't have to stand by the printer' he was concerned about the 40 minutes he used to spend a day walking and manually copying shit.
I have seen it again and again in a resistence to change that ultimately is a resitence of efficiency and professionalism. So pervasive is the virtue of hard work that we try to protect it at the expense of progress.
Telling someone to go home at 5 instead of 8 is NOT saying 'do half the work you normally do' it is saying 'find a way to do your work in half the time' this shouldn't (fuck I hate the word should) be the case in the first time because the effective perception is from the perspective of when you discover an employee working at 8pm 'hey we agreed you'd have this done by 5pm I see you here at 8pm everyday working, this results in me feeling like the work you do for me is undervalued or you aren't really up to handling it, what could you do differently?'

In its worst manifestation the fear of boredom results in factories that produce products the company can't afford. But they don't go bankrupt, instead the government bales the company out with subsidies, because so many 'hard workers' are employed by the company, the unskilled labourers have been encouraged to never develope efficiencies or new skills and thus never move up the line, they then are of no use to anybody else and become a liability the government has to keep on. A car manufacturing plant in Australia is effectively nothing more than a government agency, and a poorly disguised welfare system masquarading as business. Structurial unemployment results from rewarding hardwork over lazy efficiency.
I hope I had an impact on the new recruits in my department whom I made it my business to remind to go home at the end of the day, even going so far as to say 'you're not impressing anybody' which may or may not have been true. I also reiterated my philosophy of time management to Ashley an occupent of the marketing department that was new, I moved to the department despite remaining a member of the sales team for the peace and quiet it afforded, when I walked out at 5pm as per usual Ash said to me 'hey man you're in marketing now' but this time my articulation was nothing more than a laugh.

Time management in Australia is a matter of doing the Drucker Analysis, setting and scheduling priorities, ridding yourself of time wasters, leveraging lower wage employees through succession planning, and using the good old round file. But before that it is a perceptual battle. Australia has a precedent for this in the form of TACs long tested 'If you drink then drive your a bloody idiot campaign' and more recently the NSW add to combat street hoons, by demonstrating petrol head kids doing burnouts at traffic lights whilst attractive women waggle their little fingers at them to imply they have small penis's or more articulatly 'they are not impressing anyone'
In my dad's day drinking and driving home was a badge of honour of manliness, in my day it is just about as socially unnecceptable as you can get, probably beyond party drugs.
Time is the most precious resource an Executive has, any employee for that matter. Just as Cost Accountants make companies more efficient by cutting out uneccessary monetary expenditure, so too will any company that actively discourages overtime, enforces taking breaks, and thus creates efficiencies in time budgets too realise a competitive advantage. I gauruntee especially when weighing in the double whammy of how much benifit a company recieves out of an employees balanced lifestyle.
An employee that go's home on time is that much more likely to make it to the gym, that much more likely to prepare their own meal instead of ordering takeaway, that much more likely to see their kids awake.
Its not a recommondation this lesson, but an imperative.

The case of the dissappearing tohm

I remember Foram Mehta fondly, my first 'real' boss if you will. The Indian expat team leader of my AC&T sales team, a company that got used up and spat out. (They spent so long in training reassuring us they where a high growth legitimate company that was going to be around for a long time, something that told me they were a flash in the pan organisation based on explotation of cheap labour and quick kill sales that was going to be around only so long as their one real customer fancied) but I honestly loved Foram, all suited up on our first day in the field together he took me to watch him close a sale, then dug me up a sale for which I didn't even realise he'd closed but let me book in so I could get paid. I made 2 more sales after that after working for them for 2 months pretty much full time.
Foram though at my first sale sitting in some Carlton Fanatics apartment was the consumate professional to watch in action, turning their every question and concern (not many these folks were woodies) into a benefit of switching phone companies.
Then would flash his phone at me on which he had written the message 'this place stinks' and then and there Indian people shot up to my favorite ethnic group.
He had dated a team member who was German but left him when she returned to Germany, lived in a house in Sunshine with about 8 other guys, (all for the most part salesmen) and somehow, somewhere studied at monash.
What I can say for Foram is that whilst he may not have been exactly an effective executive I do have a lot of fond memories of working for him, particularly his baffling attachment to me as I made no sales but became the second seniour most member of his team in 3 weeks. Foram told me that when he started working door to door after 6 weeks he could see his ribs in the mirror, and he remarked 'fantastic'
he loved weightloss as a perk of having a job that paid very little and kept him walking out and about on his feet all week.
Recently I saw my long lost rib bones in the mirror and had a similar thought. Indeed since coming to Japan in the first two weeks I cracked the 77kg floor I had stayed at for months and dropped to 75kgs which I largely attribute to eating breakfast and running. That being said I thought before closing the matter as fantastic it would be a good time to relay here my philosophy of weight loss and body image, particularly as it relates to modern culture.

Weight loss should be functional:
My weightloss has occured in a specific context, it is the sideeffect of my desire to once again be a long distance runner, in Highschool I weighed 63kg, when I last checked I weighed 75kg that's a 12kg difference and to be honest 63kg is probably not recommended by the BMI, although at 173cm I recently found a net BMI calculater that said I could get down to 54kg without being 'underweight' probably from LA, it seems they are inconsistent.
This I will discuss later on, the major point was that weightloss for me was not an end in itself but related indirectly to another goal altogether, which is to get up to 20km fitness and stay there (for a while) I'm as of today up to 20km and running 8km real comfortably with hills. My knees probably kneed more strength and conditioning or switching to more supportive shoes, but this is a pretty dramatic step up considering just before I left although riding 30km a day just about I could barely run two blocks.
The weight loss occurs because my fat is a repository of fuel my body is using on long 8km runs. For the first time on Monday I ran 16km and afterwards had not only run out of sweat but salt had dried on my face, I'll post pictures on my facebook account later.
But weightloss as part of a package to be functional I think is the first criteria of being a healthy past time and also indicating a healthy mindset (hence hencely a philosophy of weightloss), this would also be okay say when you are losing weight because you current overweight situation is causing you to be sick or making you particulalry vulnerable to sicknesses such as diabetes, heart disease, infertility etc.
What I feel is unhealthy weightloss or the indications of an unhealthy mindset (I do want to take any personal kind of judgement out of that because this is a societal issue) is when weightloss occurs purely motivated by body image, with functionality being the biproduct.
For two reasons, the majority of the world is still dismally poor, if everyone who has clean water, safe housing, some method of heating for winter and the ability to light their dwelling at night is the cutoff point for being rich it is sobering to think that the vast majority of the population is still effectively living in the dark ages.
Yet it is so. And these people don't have enough to eat, but here in contries that are super rich, rich enough that you can read blogs, we have whole buildings dedicated to burning off all the surplus energy consumed, and burned off (or energy expended) to no functional purpose whatsoever.
I started going to the Gym at Honda to gain muscle and increase my fitness for playing basketball, thus making myself more able to do my volunteer work (which I also love playing basketball to death) and so to me whilst not the noblest outlet of some agrarian expenditure of energy it was to an end beyond something so self centered as wanting to be viewed as 'attractive' to not just the opposite sex but the public in general, which generally most people don't give a shit what the general public looks like anyway.
So if you aint satisfied with rolling around in your wealthy first person fat, you not have to only consume to excess but expend the money (the stored value of your productive efforts at work) and your energy (the stored energy of your over consumption) for the soul purpose of looking attractive vis a fucken vis body image, I'm not saying there aren't functional benefits to having a good body image but attitudanally this behaviour is a behavioural indicator of an unhealthy mind set.
Because the concept of using a gym, purely to look good is a new one, the girls at work that did use the gym when I was there did for functional considerations (one for health the other for kickboxing) and I think there is much to gain and very little personal cost to actually tie the process to a greater goal of some performance achievement eg. able to run 6km in under half an hour, being able to complete a 6 hour hike. Something that gets you out of the gym, out of the work/home grind and into an environment of personal enrichment.
Being attractive is not very enriching at all, because as the old cliche goes 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' which usually is tied in more with the whole 'one man's trash is anothers treasure' for say me and whoever courtney love dates next.
But what we should focus on is the appreciation of your achievement is no longer contingent on you and you alone. Sure when I score a put back in basketball over a taller opponent on the rebound I like to high five my teammates, but nobody appreciates the achievement more than me. I consider it an achievement even in a game when everything else goes wrong because I manage to get my timing and positioning right and have boxed out my opponent. I'd give my self a hi-5 if I could play alone.
When running I self talk all the time, and most of the time I am the only one who appreciates my achievement. When running with Shona I think I encouraged and congratulated her (although often my form of encouragement takes the form of 'come on you mother fucking pussy') but I lay it on just as thick to myself when running alone, infact running for me is often more about mental strength than physical strength.
Now if I ran to lose weight not to build my own stamina mental and physical and losing weight was so I looked good in a polo shirt (though my haircut always fucks that up anyway) I would be reliant on people I found attractive finding me attractive in return. Thus thusly suddenly all my efforts are moot if someone (and often in terms of attraction complete strangers) doesn't validate it. I've surrendered control of any esteem to be gained from my weightloss. And the sad thing is there's a myriad of components to attractiveness.
The other sad thing is that I don't believe anyone really cares, and I mean to say to a lot of people looks are important in picking prospective partners but I mean the emphasis is on the operative word cares how you look anywhere near the degree to which they care how they look.
Most affairs are motivated more by seeking reassurance that our ability to attract has not deserted us than love or necessarily in any shortfall in our partners I have read. And I believe part of that, I think there's more to it, but the myriad disastrous choices in affair partners I've seen people pick over the years definitely indicates that they often have an illconcieved basis.
So that's why I think often, infact the motivations for weightloss that I most often observe lead to an unhealthy attitude towards oneself in the first place. In a way it is submissive, it is unempowering. I'm not advocating people gaining weight, and definitely not suggesting people with low self esteem relating to weight don't act on it, but merely to tie it in with something functional so that you own it, because the only thing worse than someone overweight with low self esteem is someone formally overweight who has kept their low self esteem, and these people I have met plenty.

Weightloss should not be cultural:

I think destinctly there's a cultural reinforcement that I'll examine again in a later post here because I want to discuss Gender issues as I see them at length in a workplace context but for now I think Gender plays a big role in this, particularly at the moment tipped towards females and especially young girls but am worried at the emerging metrosexual trend that I succinctly hope is just a fad. Just as I hope Movember one day becomes the all important world festival.
That is to say idols. Boys have a distinct advantage self esteem wise by having athletes more readily available as idols. Particularly athletes that are percieved as cool, only in Australia I assume is swimming artificially boyed up as cool because we are good at it, but overall its a slow boring sport that observing in persons leaves an overwhelming impression of chlorine. Nor are Grant Hackett or Ian Thorpe really cool to anyone who isn't under 10 or over 75.
But the likes of Karl Lewis and Michael Jordan, Charles Barkely (in this context a particularly fine example), Anthony Koutafides, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Chris Judd, Anthony Wirrapundah (in his heyday), Maurice Green, Matt Shirvington, Mathew Lloyd, Scottie Pippen, Alonzo Mourning, Shaquille Oneal, Kevin Johnson, Shawn Kemp, RUN TMC, Pistol Pete, Steven Kernahan, Wayne Carey, Simon Black, Michael Voss, Jason Akermanis, Steven Silvagni all provide idols that though promote body images that are unrealistic for anyone who isn't a fulltime pro athlete (or African American in the case of the NBA players) but whilst unrealistic are functional. For the most part when growing up, their body image had everything to do with sport and indeed excelling at it and almost nothing to do with sexual success. Particularly for AFL although the recent horror show that is the Brownlow Red Carpet Special (probably enough to turn someone away from a career in Aussie Rules) has to some extent started to do that for a young boy it is the furthest thing from their mind. It is all about the ability to dunk from the free throw line like Jordan or rip the backboard down like Shaq. Or leap up on the man in fronts shoulders and take a specky like Lloyd or boot a goal from the center square. All relating to the functionality of athleticism, even though sports are really just games as entertainment that people pay for, it was still all about what you could do and if it became about who you can do that was a happy byproduct for adolescent boys (and sometimes the downfall of their pro careers).
Contrast that with a girl growing up, first competitive sport as played by women gets aired obligatorily by the ABC, simply because although fun to play, netball is not fun to watch, lacking in controversy and the rules more or less prevent any play from ever being deemed 'spectacular' and as such Australia's elite netball players for the most part don't earn enough for it to be their primary source of income. It's almost like a voluntary thing. I think the plight of netball in itself has much less to do with sexism or any deliberate structuring to keep women down in this world and more to do with the market forces that value a sport.
Certainly taking sports that are inherently exciting fast paced spectator sports such as football and basketball I still believe in my heart of hearts that consumers at large when aportioning media coverage between the two genders would still lean towards 99% male comp because mens physical endowments of testosterone factories tend to make them stronger and faster than women. That being said if their was one women who played as explosively as Jordan it could shift the balance in favour of that whole league, you never know.
But the point is female athletes as idols don't really cut the mustard, which personally I think is a shame. Without competitive sports to define heirarchy the next logical choice I believe is the downfall of the female species and certainly the biggest waste of their childhood 'maturity'.
I hold the belief dearly that 'maturity' is one of the most misused words in the english language, in economics there are two key terms the difference of which is ambiguous to a lot of highpower decision makers and some analysts and that is the key words of causation and corelation.

Just so there's no confusion for you I'll explain them here:

Causation: something that causes something to happen ie. eating too much energy will result in you becoming fatter.

Correlation: Two seperate variables that behave simalarly due to an indirect relationship but one does not necessarily cause the other. (much harder to provide a succinct example) ie. as the population of teachers increases in a country so does the volume of one sales, an idiot concludes that teachers cause an increase in wine consumption, infact it is only a correlation because it follows that in other studies wine consumption increase with any increase in the population irrespective of profession.
Another one highlighting the fallibility of correlations is that of the study that showed that children whose parents owned books (not children who read books) did better on their school papers than children whose parents didn't (in other words children in the presence of books where magically better learners whether the read them or not) which was a correlation resulting from a genetic cause
but a politician on seeing this study assumed that books magically caused kids to be smarter just by being present and thus started a program that bought every child in the state a book every week month etc at huge expense to the tax payer which had no real benefit because parents who recieve free books are not going to improve the genetic intelligence they have already passed on to their child.
Correlation is used as it is merely a clue or insight indicative of a deeper cause, many studies are presented with correlations only and no causes because that is the highest level of assumption they can scientifically prove.

And that's that all for the purpose of helping define the problem I have with weightloss and body image as a disadvantage to girls, and that is the possible cause of it to comprise a much more significant part of a girls self esteem and to more often result in an unhealthy lifestyle than it does with boys.
And that is the missapropriated favorite of mothers, teachers and womenkind in general as describing girls as inherently more 'mature'.
But what is 'mature' for me as I have observed it is certainly optional, the adult working world is certainly populated with a vibrant society of immature professionals. Some of these are even some of the most valuable and productive workers. Furthermore some of the most mature people I've met spend the majority of their time acting playfully childish. So the question that begs asking is for me what does 'maturity' mean.
When we talk about wine or cheese a mature wine is generally speaking something that has adged to the point it achieves optimum flavour. It is its most enjoyable.
When talking about people I believe that maturity generally correlates with a high sense of self esteem, good self knowledge, high ability to empathise with other people. I think maturity is personified in behaviour that is such as, putting the needs of others before oneself when appropriate, knowing which behaviour to choose at which time, engaging in behaviours that actively build others sense of self worth, taking responsibility for the outcomes of one's own actions. And that's it.
I think reflective thinking and empathising are the practices that lead to maturity. Generally speaking there is a weak corelationwith age, that is after a certain age there is a higher probability that someone will achieve maturity (and I would put that at 16, probability increasing till about 25-28ish depending on what the average age to finish uni/move out of home ends up being ie. the last behavioural causes that may lead to maturity) but note that age is not just a corelation only, a matter of probability it still remains optional that maturity is ever achieved. Plenty of men certainly behave as callously as 5 year olds right until there 40's plenty of women also are still daddy's princesses at alarming ages.
And thus the first inappropriate cultural misunderstanding, maturity is associated with age, boys I believe want to be older when they are young for recreational purposes, being taller, stronger and hairier will result in being even better at sport, it may also be related to driving and drinking beer and other activities that are percieved as fun or cool rather than mature and in later stages so they can not live with their parents and have sex with girls their parents would not approve of.
For girls from what I have studied the upward pull relates to this 'mature' concept which in turn because girls withhold generally (though this is much better now in australia all the hot girls at my school where in the seniour girls football team) from competitive sports, also fighting to settle disputes and establish heirarchy and instead resort to behaviour that is anything but mature. Petty mind games is the first one, or psychological bullying which is far more vicious than physical bullying (unless carried to extremes, that being said psychological bullying is carried to extremes that are probably far worse aswell not only do kids die, they feel awful about themselves when they do it) but the big one is: they try to be more mature. Instead of being taller, being faster, being a better fighter or stronger, girls resort to maturity in their teen years (and now tweens and probably younger) thanks to the missapropriation of a deep and rare quality called maturity.
I had a presentation from Libra or U or one of the fucking tampon companies about their website and their research on their target market teenage girls yeilded the result that the girl who knew the most about sex and other 'mature' things was the Alpha wolf in their school, thus access to Cosmo was a highly prised possession.
Cosmo of course is a bullshit rag that thanks to well meaning adults reinforcing a stereotype that girls are 'more mature' (my mother believes this wholeheartedly) girls have learnt faster and faster how to give blowjobs, select the right g-string, get the vaginas waxed or as was articulated in the book '100 ways America is screwing up the world' "selling fuck-me clothes to teenagers" thanks to a bizarre byproduct of the sexual revolution, some of the biggest perpertrators of commodifying women are now women themselves.
In the pursuit of maturity the girls instead seek sexual maturity and sexually maturity is in most of their learning sources linked to body image.
Girls idols are to use the words of Ariel Levy from 'female chauvinist pigs' "fuckable and saleable" that is the primary ability of a girls aspirational guide is being able to attract a man to fuck, and you are probably already thinking but most idols are hollywood stars and pop-idols who do something functional. Well firstly this bit isn't about functionality so much as it is culture, and that is that Kathy Bates is functionally one of the finest Actors in the world yet more girls aspire to Jolie type body images which is validated because she now dates Brad Pitt. Infact I can't remember the last time I saw an actor or popstar on the front of a magazine that was fully functional with a realistic body shape.
These people have more resources than most professional athletes to maintain there body image and most of the time for actresses of the school of Eva Mendez, Jessica Alba, that bitch that dates Tony parker, Lauren London and such is to score bit parts beside the actual interesting characters in sitcoms and movies.
Therefore whilst a boy growing up is more likely to idolise an athlete and thus develope body image in terms of functionality (even when it comes to actors the association is easily broken with the likes of Jack Black, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Anthony Hopkins, and even actors like Will Smith playing action roles with high degrees of physical activity [often non sex related]) and girls develope body image in terms of increasing their chances of having a 'immature' boy defile them with their filthy immature concepts of sex. (possibly also nudging somegirls towards believing that having sex with a thirty year old teacher is a good way to be more mature).
And that means that I believe if weightloss takes the form of achieving a cultural paradigm of being a desirable temptress it can lead to an unhealthy mindset, basically once again healthy weight with low to no self esteem.

Last but not least weightloss should be smart.

Give me a minute. I calculate that 58kg is when I hit underweight. Due to gaining muscle mass this year I don't want to get anywhere near that close to a BMI of less than 20. So whilst I wish to continue running should my weight drop below 68 I will have to reassess my diet, particularly given the nature of the way I've been losing weight. I'm running and burning more energy than I am eating in a typical day which means my body starts converting my fat deposits back into energy to be used to propel me. Furthermore my muscles in my legs particularly and probably lower back are reshaping themselves from pure bike riding applications to be better suited to the stresses of long distance running, so I'm not only consuming more energy than usual but consuming more protein than usual as my muscles go through the motions of damage and repair.
That said once I run out of surplus fat, my food intake particularly protein must go up. So it's imperitive I set a minimum weight. And this handles the S and M of SMART goals, specific and measurable, but remember my weightloss is functional, so my goal is actually related to running not weightloss for pure weightloss. Weight is one measure of my progress towards becoming an athlete and setting a minimum weight means it becomes a specific task, so I have a stop point.
Think about someone losing weight for the purpose of pure body image and making a SMART goal becomes very difficult. Firstly the measure of success, of achieving the goal is going to be in the power of the person(s) you are trying to attract, therefore your measure is not one you can just hop on the scales periodically to monitor your progress, there's so many variables at play, consider you lose a measly 300g (not measly if you already weigh only 40kg) and the next week at the local you meet an attractive guy/girl and hit it off, are you likely to stop then anyway? probably not, then in terms of the power to attract (from my experience for the most part a boyfriend is one of the least important opinions on this matter) goes on as an ambiguous measure. Or alternatively your personality is unbearable and it will be hard for you to attract anyone period unless you look like Naomi Campbell and last time I checked almost nobody else does.
So that takes care of specific and Measurable, how can you then put a Time limit on it, in the above example if you attract people too early on with godforbid you personality then your body image renovation timeline gets all screwed up, if you never manage too when or over what period do you stop. What amount of weight? fortunately now there are personal trainers with which to engage in this shallow exploit but for the most part weightloss for body image purposes only will only stop when you are satisfied with your own image (you can do this though without losing anyweight so its highley likely that half the time it won't directly relate to the weightloss) or it will stop when you percieve a general conscensus from the public that you are hot (oh but you have to stay that way now because its all you've got so you can't drop the ball) or when someone says you're annorexic, bulemic, depressed and intervenes, or when you die.

Fuck, long post, the ones I think I can say quickly, explore deeply in a short amount of time seem to take the longest, but to wrap that up in short. My philosophy of weightloss is that it should be purely functional (relating either to athletic ability or preventitive health concerns), it should not be based on cultural pressures/social modelling (it should be for your own personal benefit above and beyond anyone elses) and it should be a definite and structured activity with a point at which the process ends and one can determine whether one has succeeded or needs to replan.

That's it, now wouldn't the world be a better place if that's all that weightloss was ever about.

356.1 Posts

As of my last post, you could read one entry a year post, you could read one entry a year (including shitty, youtube posts which are kind of cheating) and in a years time you would kind of cheating) and in a years time you would be finished reading my blog. Except it will continue to grow. Suffice to say next year is a leap year so I better put some mildly substantive thought in this post for those of my devoted readership that would be stupid enough on planning to read one entry a day for a year to get back to here. If you do that I truly don't respect you, if for nothing else an inefficient use of the internet. And what innovations will my blog have? none, I'm still not gonna use that categories thing which probably would be useful.

Here's what I'm thinking though, in my old apartment room, for some reason in the old apartment room, for some reason in the mandatory architects are human too and therefore must make mistakes and ill concieved designs part of the house my room had not one door but two, both sliding and without locks. To cap it off it had big glass windows availing the tenant of no inherant privacy whatsoever. Anyway I haphazardly patched it up which probably still availed the unsuspecting housemate a view of my naked emotional choreography. What can view of my naked emotional choreography. What can I say I loved swan naked emotional choreography. What can I say I loved swan lake, choreography. What can I say I loved swan lake, but hated the costumes.Anyway they were always too polite to comment on my peculiarities, probably because they had their own filthy perverted rituals they carried on in my room whilst I was at work, so we all lived perfectly in peace and harmony.
Anyway one such square patch I covered up with a business card of I covered up with a business card of Mia's for earthsharing, said card she gave me on a whim at some syn function which I read as the usual giving a number to someone you think is hot, for the obvious reason that I am hot.
Anyway I also happened to be in the throughs of overcoming the massive boredom I faced at work. So I got the card out and looked up what earthsharing was all about. turns out earthsharing was for once, something I had absolutely no idea about before, and as an economic model has turned out to be one of the major players in how I divide up my time.
Similarly Damian my faggy old hosemate recommended a book called Godel Escher Bach which long before the God Delusion put the nail in the coffin for religion for me and completely changed the way I think about thinking and the human mind.
The moral is: an invite into someone's world is a very precious thing.
Not to be taken lightly, if someone ever invites you to check out something important to them, that is not their religion I say check it out. Especially if its some hot poontang.

Sexual vs Emotional Relationships

I am reminded recently, by the virtual impossibility and overarching stupidity of trying to start a meaningful relationship whilst travelling in a foreign country. Furthermore, I recently located another ex on facebook, previous attempts had failed because as it turned out I didn't know how to spell her name, a recurring theme in my relationships it seems.
I thought how misleading my facebook profile is in saying I'm interested in 'Men' and 'Women' this was intended to be self depreciating allusion to my desperation, similar to my highschool mate Vagg's standard of 'two legs and not Jacob' as if facebook let me choose 'interested in children' that would have been my first preference.
But of course with so little of language being verbal reading something like that I can sort of see how my friends could see my adopting a bi-sexual lifestyle plausible, a lot of my close friends are gay. I don't hesitate to wear fishnet stockings, knee high socks and other girly accessories. My current haircut can also look quite like something a lesbian would pick out as well. (I must admit its stupid assymetry is growing on me)
My close friend Shona in the past has articulated how society imposes the monogomous heterosexual relationship as the unquestionable norm. I have argued in favor of poligimy as a plausible and workable relationship (just much harder than a monogomous one) if one thinks about what makes a monogomous relationship or marriage successful in generic terms rather than treating it as special.
The most fascinating deliniation though came from Bryce when we waxed philosophical one day on a park bench.
He believes that relationships take two distinct forms, sexual relationships, and emotional relationships. Generally the relationships or most relationships are sexual, the impetus is a mutual attraction apart from arranged or political marriages where the participants get little to no say.
In time the sexual becomes familiar and possibly unimportant, but an emotional relationship forms by virtue of having spent time together and having intimate knowledge.
Bryce's thinking at the time was that the ideal model really was to have one lasting emotional relationship, but to change up the sexual relationship constantly to keep sex interesting and sexuality alive.
Most guys I know operate somewhere along this spectrum, myself I value the emotional relationship highly, it takes a fuckload of stress out of my life and my life thus far has been spent mostly in long term emotional relationships, having sex in monotonous regularity. Never so long as sex not to be an important factor in the upkeep of the relationship and a massive reliever of stress.
Some of my friends are a mixed bag, others play women like a commodity market, which again I have no problem with so long as they aren't bedding women under a false pretext of a lasting relationship ensuing.
SO fundamentally I agree with Bryce, that relationships take these two generic forms (though not necessarily mutually exclusive long term the balance will tilt in one or the others favour) and that how one approaches relationships is a personal choice. My female friends generally are strong advocate of the 'slut' archetype being a social taboo and as such I believe a lot of women I know feel enormous social pressure to only choose relatonships in their emotional form.
However I think one thing fucks up the poligamy model in terms of an emotional relationship with sexual needs sated by a constant stream of updates. And that is this, I'm Bryce's oldest friends, and this is a fact of which I am quite proud. Bryce is moreover a hero of mine for the high risk tolerance his life has which is virtually incomprehensible amongst the private school caste I grew up amongst where life is simply a process of seeking safe guaruntees. It makes me wonder how such families ever fucking afforded private tuition in the first place. Probably fucken propoerty.
But I digress, one could argue that Bryce and I have a strong emotional relationship, that for reasons of sexual orientation has never been sexual. Not even in an undercurrent. We are 'old soldiers' having a wealth of binding intellectual experiences.
Most best friends are based on an emotional relationship, a mutual affinity where one recognises in another all the good traits they themselves possess or aspire to and thus have a relaxed open connection. People with no real best friends I find to be some of the most pitiful creatures on the planet.
But the sexual relationship is a trump card and that is what I think makes Bryce's relationship model unsustainable or untenable if not impossible. That sex has a lot of emotion wrapped up in it, that's the killer. Many a time I have felt discarded or handicapped by friends who have savagely devalued our relationship because of the commencement of a new sexual relationship.
The sexual relationship is a trump card, it is very hard to compete with pure emotion to achieve the same return in energy and enthusiasm, and effort that sex gets.
I have rarely dressed up, cooked, cleaned, bought expensive presents, written personal letters, gone out of my way to introduce to my family, helped move or any other bit of effort that is a foregone conclusion in my sexual relationships for a friend. Which is not to say I'm not there for them, but I don't have the scoreboard mentality of working towards a relationship payload as I do when the relationship is defined by sex.
Other guys can get a sex a lot easier without the effort, but even the social dynamic of having friends and a new sexual partner is different. Only the worst partners abandon their sexual partner in a social situation, most stand close by to be attentive and facilitate the newcomer into the in group, even to the detriment of their own interactions of their close friends. And this simply means what the sexual partner gains, the emotional partner loses, or probably more accurately experiences a feeling of loss.
For most of my friends, this is simply a part of growing up, everyone realises the need and importance of sexual partners so you get over the change in social dynamics quickly knowing you are free to aquire your own sexual relationship if you can succeed in convincing a fellow participant.
I hate how clinical I sound but if this same model was applied to an emotional partner that had previously occupied that sexual partner pedestal it is a lot different and here's why.
For me my biggest problem with poligamy would be that a sexual relationship for me is a means to an end (and not the obvious one of sex) but the end being, I want to build an emotional relationship with someone. In the past I have tried to have flings, a 'pash and dash' if you will, but found myself almost compulsively tracking down the number and initiating a relationship. (once in I find it pretty easy to stick around and why not? I'm great)
For me to attempt Bryce's logical model I would fuck up faster than most because the transformation from sexual to emotional tends to kick of much faster but thus far takes longer to complete its metamorphoses than most me thinks.
(Paul my 'mentor' told me if you buy a big jar when you start dating a girl, and for the first three years put a dollar in the jar every time you have sex, and after three years take a dollar out every time you have sex for the rest of your lives you will never reach the bottom of that jar. A prospect I find horrifying, yet arguably a strong cultural testimony to the value of emotional relationships)
So I would have emotional partner 1 in this situation and sexual partner 2 for the first say optimistically month. Then after a month I would be in the untenable position of emotional partner 1, and emotional partner 2. The only person really contributing anything new to my life would probably be emotional partner 2, being most recently defining my relationship in sex.
I realise what Bryce (I think) proposed is he has emotional partner 1 and sexual partner 2. Then after a month he has emotional partner 1 and sexual partner 3. After two months emotional partner 1, sexual partner 4 and so fourth.
I think though that whilst conceivably doable and that in this situation over time the emotional partner would become reassured that they are special in that they will almost certainly outlast any new person in their lovers life (love not lust) but I think that if approach to relationships is a preference, much like Jungian personality types, it is an exceptional person that is good at both. I would credit myself as extremely good as a partner in an emotional relationship these days being in the top 10% of practitioners, which isn't to say I never go wrong but my fundamentals are pretty tight.
However I know I am almost inept when it comes to the sexual relationship (not sex itself) but the actual courting of someone unfamiliar to me, reading interest signs, knowing how to start conversations, not being a high and mighty arsehole and such.
So in summary I couldn't do it, I mean I could but it would take so much effort on my part and emotional cost to never make the prospect attractive. The payload isn't strong enough.
I think Bryce is probably exceptional in being capable of both but hazard a guess that he leans towards sexual in preference to emotional ones.
I have friends that for a long time seemed to have the 'emotional' relationship part of there brain missing. Such a friend once articulated to me in talking about my habit of being almost constantly in one long term relationship or another (From mid year 12 to 4th year uni I had 5 girlfriends but racked up a grand total of 4 weeks single time)
his words were 'how can you stand the same spice on your chicken every night?' similar to Eddie Murphy's 'Same old crackers' bit in delirious, or raw I always forget. And the answer in metaphore is that in this day and age the tried and true ministery position is no longer the only spice out there, my friends analogy would be more true if it was 'salt on your chicken' which is to say evasively that if you girlfriend is the chicken, then it takes your creative energies and efforts to mix up the spice to cook it in different ways. The spice changes constantly. I'd probably think of it more as something like pasta which I could conceivably have the same dish in a million different variations in a year.
Sure there will always be staple nights, keep it simple dishes like spaghetti bolagnese or salted chicken breast. But on the whole you end up valuing the simplicity as a form of diversity as well.
Put simply though there's more to life, for me it's less effort to spice up the same staple of my diet than to constantly seek out new and exciting restaurants. It's exhausting.
But I did say I could conceive of poligamy as a workable model, and in this I am quite arrogant. I would call this a 'pasta and rice' model, lets stick to the carbohydrates, and its based initially on this observation:

Good partners are rare.

The majority of people are crap, long have I observed situations where I believe more than one girl would be best of dating me, above other options. If you've seen 'A beautiful mind' then think the precice opposite of the Nash Curve (where if every guy goes for the blond they all block eachother and piss off the other ladies available) this is almost the situation where the blond chick says 'you can all have me' and no doubt her brunette friends think slut, and their bitter and negative attitudes help justify my model.
What I am getting at is that (and in Japan this model becomes stark) I told my friend who now works in Japan about an incident I had when I was first dating Misaki, my ex. Which was I cooked breakfast, fucking no big deal in Australia most of the time, you have someone over you usually provide some kind of breakfast before they fuck off.
But Misaki clapped her hands, and yelled out 'Ureshii' literally 'Happy' and was over the moon, I really couldn't put down what an overreaction it was. She was quite simply real easy to impress. But on the flipside, culturally women in Japan get the shit end of the relationship stick, it's all give no take. It is an institutionalised Lose-Win relationship. My friend on hearing this story tried it out one time with a girl here whom he said was delighted beyond delight despite him fucking up the eggs and burning the bacon.
Put simply, almost every girl in Japan would get a better deal out of life dating me than the local equivalent. I know there's more to choosing a good partner and qualities that are desirable than just a willingness to cook the occasional breakfast and wash dishes from time to time.
But put simply, you can see in this work being the tuesday morning girl, out of seven girls is better than never getting breakfast made for you at all. Maybe seven partners is a little too hard, and possibly the simplest arguement would be that my energies would be better spent trying to teach men this competitive advantage rather than trying to sub in for all of them, and sincerly i hope such a cultural change comes about. (instead in Japan women who avail themselves to foreigners are criticized as 'yellow cabs' rather than any real analysis of what may make foreigners attractive)
Anyhoo even in Australia I got a lot going for me, the sense of humour, the athleticism, the eyes, the big lips, the stimulating conversation. (recently my friend Stacey saved me from a conversation with a girl I wasn't attracted to but getting strong buying signs from and me panicing looking for a way to politely leave the conversation, thank god stacey turned up drunk for some up close loud talking about inane shit. I love you stacey) that I would bet my left nut that in my home culture I'm a good catch. If it wasn't for my penchant for stupid clothing and even stupider assymetrical haircuts I'd probably carve it up. These do serve the useful purpose of keeping away girls too uninteresting and limited in their creative capacities for me to be interested in though.
So thinking of a monogomous relationship and what makes it successful is the simple observation that 'it takes two to make a relationship work, but only one to end it' possibly the equation that causes more human heartbreak than one 100th of what belief in a personal god does 'one god can ruin more relationships than none' in my view.
Anyhoo, a poligimous relationship is taking this rule as generic and simply adding 1. 'It takes three to make a relationship work, but only one to end it' and that is how a poligimous relationship (with three participents) could succeed. I think the way it probably has traditionally been executed was as a power defined relationship rather than emotion defined relationship. That is the man was the focal point and then wife 1 and wife 2 fought bitterly amongst themselves and all were trapped in the situation.
But the focus should be the relationship not the power holder so simply stated (or less simply stated) my vision of poligamy working would be emotional partner 1 + emotional partner 2 from my perspective. from emotional partner 1's perspective it would look like emotional partner 2 + emotional partner t (tohm, that's me yay) and from emotional partner 2's perspective it would look like emotional partner 1 + emotional partner t. So in every direction one is one another's emotional partner.
Every body loves eachother. Not two people love one person one person loves two.
But I can only concieve of it working if its all emotional relationships and the emotional relationships are shared equally.
If one third of monogomous marriages fail (which is conservative if one third end in divorce, probably more than this are 'failed' relationships which should divorce) then one would have to raise by a power the odds of succeeding for every additional partner to somethin like from a 30% chance of failure going up to a 90% chance of failure. Making polygomy almost suicidal to embark on.
But a group of people skilled or talented enough could do it if they worked together. You'd probably have to add a token constant failure probabilty for forming a polygimous relationship that has it's newest member grafted on through a sexual relationship inception. And again it would depend on this being shared or one independant members recruiting method.
Again to the Japan situation of the patriarchal society making behaviourally foreigners attractive to local women, this is a mixed bag, I suspect often for foreigners Japanese girls are attractive precisely because of the low maintainence patriarchal culture the girls have inherited.
And furthermore poligamy would almost certainly leave the western man as the focus point so one at a time please.
My friends view though is that affair's in Japan on the man's part are almost just a fact of life here. So maybe there's fates worse than singledom anyway.
It's the good old partial versus pure loss.
Anyway, the point is it could workbut let's all crawl before we try walking hey.

Who reads Rules (Lessons from Japan Part 2)

My mother, known lovingly as Janice and beloved by all, had a tendancy to give me novelty gifts (often duplicated for all siblings) that have included but not limited too, parfet sundae glasses (to which I reacted 'a vase') and an indoor badminton kit (having never expressed nor played badminton ever) which all the same when it comes to gift giving, it truly is the thought that counts and above all its these seemingly useless gifts that I remember most easily and shall cherish as memories until I lose them. I mean you have to admit not many people actively sit down to recall their cherished memories.
But Janice did pick out a book one year for me as a gift called 'Lost Japan' written by Alex Kerr. I highly recommend this book, it is one of the best gifts Janice ever picked (or had recommended to her) and reading it before I departed for Japan gave me the priveledge of having a deep understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of Japanese culture.
So prepare for what will no doubt be a long post, when I first got inspired to write this post it was going to be a simple defence of how much time I spent in overseas libraries on holidays delivered as my contempt for people who 'don't have time to read'. Suffice to say I shall deal with the latter first then move on to Japan.

He who reads rules

As a teenager I spent time needlessly stressing about the mythical phantom that was 'my resume' it was an almost constant throb at the back of my head that more then anything else robbed me of the pleasures of holiday mode as I came of age and holidays in Ballarat became less about taking a much needed break to reflect, watch videos and play computer games, and go cycling around with mates committing petty acts of vandalism and trying to discover those secret places in Ballarat back alley's that by day where childrens playgrounds and by night no doubt used for date rape.
The 'resume' which didn't exist was a liability because of the age old conundrum of 'the experienced kid' gets the job, and its hard to get experience without getting a job first.
Which is or at least should be a myth to intelligent employers. A proven mediocre performer cannot profit where an unproven but potentially high yeild prospect would not. The job goes first and foremost to the applicant who potentially can deliver the greatest value.
And the value of most 'experience' in ballarat is proving that you can turn up to work, do some mindless task and go home, on an ongoing basis without dipping your hand into the till. and jackoff employers are probably going to write a golden reference no matter how well you perform safe in the knowledge that you are becoming some other companies liability. Or that the performance expectations of a shitty casual ballarat job are significantly low to make 'impressive' performance a foregone conclusion.
That is if your future employer even bothers to read your resume anyway.
And that's the clincher, I was advised not to just put down 'reading' as an interest on my resume because it makes you sound introverted and almost every applicant makes the claim.
I guess you could tidy up the presentation of such facts about oneselfs choice of spare time by stating the benifit rather than leaving the meaning implicit. Because first and foremost my competitive advantage in my brief working life and source of greatly accellerated development has been: reading.
If I could rely on a resume at all I would look for the simple words 'I read' above and beyond everything else, and here's why:

1. Reinventing the wheel is 'do' learning and of value to the participant but of little to no value to the greater organisation except in the hope that the lessons of undergoing the process may have some future application to the company's bottom line. Reading can accellerate this process by giving some simple preparatory insight into mistakes and reasons others have made in the past.
2. Most of history did not have access to quality recording devices, therefore the richest repository of the human races collective learning is found through literacy, and then a little extra insight through archaeology. One can look in and see what the few people that have ever 'moved the earth' so to speak have learned in the process and what made them successful, diverse people such as Napoleon, Genghis Kahn, Julius and Augustus Ceaser, Shakespear, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander the Great, etc.
3. Books are an active medium, you have to look at them, pay attention to them. This greatly improves retention.
4. If a person lives there whole life and takes a moment to write down the one or two important things they learned in that whole time, it represents an enormous time saving to the reader.
5. Writing is difficult, to succeed in getting a book published, and the book being attractive enough to get read, is a form of natural selection, the strongest books have a tendancy to get read.

And as such, I have to say being able to pick up a book by Drucker and reap the rewards of a lifetime spent consulting with executives around the world and being able to myself effectively know what makes a good executive and what makes a bad executive is something a lot of uni graduates could not even claim.
Reading the memoirs of successful businessmen like Ricardo Semler even allows me to contrast and analyse the recommendations gathered from drucker and gain a general understanding of organisational problems something that won't be contemplated by a lot of colleagues my age until they are sitting in the hot seat.
Reading Takuan Soho's unfettered mind, and Musashi Miyamoto's Book of Five Rings, or Yagyu Munenori's Life Giving sword can give me strategic philosophy that I can reflect on and make my own so I know why I'd want to sit in the hotseat.
Even reading Sci-fi is a competitive advantage as Sci-fi has inspired a lot of systems that have defined the modern era including genetic engineering, the internet, AI, cybernetics and so fourth, furthermore many sci-fis plot is based on a study of a particular human behaviour exagerrated, philosphy or system of government, such as 1984 and Brave new world. The distopia's created can still be powerful insight.
Infact any form of reading if reflected on, if done consciously can yeild a greater understanding of the human condition. Be it the simplest childrens book as function of the social conditioning inflicted on the young from an early age.
Reading as competitive advantage has only two necessities: reflection and diversity. Reading the Koran or the bible over again ain't of any advantage at all. (and their so spiritually profound you shouldn't be going making up your own interpretations anyway right? thinking is a lack of faith.)
That being said my recomendation numero uno thus far for Japan is that: All citizens be forced to read the book of five rings and I'll explain why.

Fettered Japan:

Zazen is a practice that takes two forms, rinzai sect sits in contemplation of koans, nonsensical puzzles (that you can now obtain the "answers" to over the internet) until one obtains enlightenment through the mental gymnastics. The second school is soto zen, of which sitting in the proper posture is the entire practice. The practice of sitting like a frog leads to an improvement in concentration and eventually enlightenment. Suffice to say I could use the benefits of such a practice to gain control of my mind.
Japanese people from what I have observed have no longer any real cultural heritage from zen when it comes to their daily lives. Japan is fettered to an inertia. Many of its most famous sword saints drew inspiration from zen, similar to Neuro Linguistic Programming, Zen is the art of attempting to stop one's mind from interfering with one's perception of reality, to minimise the filter of reality imposed by the mind.
To a swordsman this was litteraly the difference between life and death, anticipation lead to expectations so like comedy surprise was the key to ending one's own life.
Musashi had techniques to exploit this weakness in opponents, such as never attempting the same attack twice, he found 'using the same path to victory' after one failure shameful. It has often been articulated in western culture as the definition of insanity 'doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result' or as my principle use to beat into our brains at least 12 times a year 'you always get what you've always got, if you always do what you've always done' which to his credit cockhead though he was, was this legacy hopefully will live on in me.
Musashi also had 'ways of seeing' techniques of literally how to take in the opponent which he called 'looking at mountains far away' the technique consists really in what it doesn't involve, which is stressing something to watch, such as watching the tip of your oponents sword, or paying particular attention to his eyes, or watching his footwork to try and predict his next move. Musashi simply opened his eyes, relaxed, waited and reacted. Reacting to the reality of the confrontation, easier said than done and Musashi had a myriad more techniques to actually make this effective, but such technique methinks could easily be applied to poker where 'you play the man not the cards' to not be looking for the tell on your opponents face and as such miss out on the crucial twitch of their hands.
One takes in the whole picture without narrowing the focus so one has a greater chance of seeing what actually happens.
Now Musashi's Zen teacher was Takuan Soho, so progressing even further one can get a better insight into the mind of Musashi, Takuan Soho's treatise on the sword was called the unfettered mind which was to say, freeing the mind of thought in order to experience reality. There is close to no discussion of swordplay at all but Takuan had a profound impact on two of the greatest swordsmen of the day Musashi Miyamoto and Yagyu Munenori.
Now if I had to imagine that Japan the nation today was a swordsman here's how they would be:

They would be large, very large, fat and sluggish even.
They would have their eyes as narrow as possible if not completely shut.
They would hold their sword out infront of them.
They would be going 'la la la la la la la la la' over and over to eliminate the chance of anyone offering any guidance.
They would progress towards where they think they're enemy was at a slow but steady pace, unwavering in their courage/stupidity. Using their bulk to hopefully drive their sword deep into their opponent.

That's how Japan strikes me at the moment. I'll try and substantiate with observations later. But for the most part, if you were Japan's opponent, you would simply have to stick your own sword out and wait for Japan to impale itself, its vast folds of fat preventing it from having even an early nervous warning system.
But probably truer to life is that there is no opponent at all, Japan the mighty fat warrior will walk forward steadily and forces of nature (read externalities) will finish it off.
When I first read 'Lost Japan' in the late 90's, people were talking about the greenhouse effect, but the ozone layer was more pressing, nobody really ever talked about china or expressed any interest in going their.
Japan was known to have a stagnent economy at the time but the book and my own experience left me thinking that 'there is enormous opportunity in Japan' for many years I shouldered the dream of living and working in Japan and becoming an insider. When I heard my bosses criticise Japan I had assumed that they just didn't 'get' Japanese culture.
Last time I noticed the changes (my second visit to Japan), all girl carriages where coming in, mobile phones were flogging video, everyone could use email from their mobiles. Fashion had changed etc.
Now though I truly appreciate the impact of China's growth and Japan's growing irrelevance, what truly breaks my heart is that I see the Japanese people, simply doing absolutely fucking nothing about it.
From the country that produced the wiimote last year (something that prompted my friend Miyuki, a japanese expat in Oz to say 'I'm so proud of my culture') I have to say I expected more. But my initial observations are that, the Wii is an exception, innovation is not the rule. Newton's law of Inertia states that an object will continue on it's current path indefinetely until another force acts on it. Japan is careening off into space.
I have to admit, I can't follow the television here and have to look up the news on Google to find out what's happening in the country. But contrasting to the only other country thus far I really know, public debate is not really on the cards, I see no other force gaining momentum to deflect Japan's course from becoming 'the arsehole of the world' Sick as Australian democracy is, Japanese government is sicker, think the Howard dynasty, but with no opposition whatsoever.

There is no Game:

This is rule number one, in my opinion of game theory. A game is most easily lost by people using the rules. The most important rule, again in my opinion, is that of scope. If the scope of the game is not large enough, one 'narrows one's focus to one key point' then an externality, ie something external to the game one is playing ruins the game.
Think lightning at a golf tournament.
For years the Japanese's own word for foreigners was 'Gaijin' this means loosely translated 'outsider' I have come to accept over the years that I will forever in Japanese eyes be an 'outsider' no matter how hard I try to fit in, to know Japan and its ways and its people. But who is the real loser from that transaction?
History Lesson: The only word in regular use in English language that originates from Japan without specifically referring to an aspect of Japanese culture is 'tycoon' Commodore Perry's nickname for Abraham Lincoln and the Tokugawa Shogunate's diplomatic title in foreing correspondance. Perry bestowed this title on Honest Abe because America's gunboat diplomacy had opened up Japanese ports to trade for the first time in 200 years.
This is a perfect example of someone succeeding, indeed dominating in a game that's scope was arrogantly small. The Tokugawa's had one of the most stable and enduring reigns of any political dynasty in history, the Tokugawa shogun's conquered all of Japan and maintained peace for 200 years, expelling foreigners and kicking off Japan's cultural renaissance.
The Tokugawa's just overlooked the rest of the world whom in the meantime developed steam powered navies, and artilleries that left Japan entirely defenseless, having never progressed beyond simple firearms and fuedal era military strategy.
The whole world was incorrectly reduced to Japan and it simply wasn't the case.
The Japan I see today, really hasn't broken the habit, and thus complies again with 'the definition of insanity'. Japan is simply fucking insane if it thinks its nationalism will win out against an increasingly integrated rest of the world.
But Japan is the second largest market in the world? but poised to become no.14. The USA is going to probably slip to number 2 in the next couple of years after China, but in reality will probably still be a player for a while because of the inescaple fact of it's military monopoly from the Reagan years. What it chooses to do with that will even ill advised probably still be better than what Japan could do with it.
Case in point, my friend Brenton, working in Japan as a floortrader told me of a company that was poised to be aquired by a US company at 30% premium on the share price.
The nationalistic Japanese share holders voted down the aquisition in what was internally viewed as a victorious blow for nationalism, the cost to the shareholders 110% of the companies value. Any victory that involves depriving yourself of future growth can be loosely termed 'death' yet this is precicesly what nationalism is.
Whilst generally acknowledging that the future is in immigrant labour, Japan displays no behavioural evidence of becoming multicultural. Tokyo maybe I haven't returned their yet, but Tokyo is just 20 million of the equation, the other cities show little evidence of any significant migrant impact. Think Melbourne being reduced to a suburb of significance in Australia rather than second largest city, and the whole rest of Japan being ballarat and you have a fair picture of the multiculturism in Japan.
And all the while its companies are shrinking, yet rather than experience reality, Japan seems dedicated to experience the opposite, in reality following contrary advice to that of their own invincible swordsman's strategy for invincibility. It is not even a case of upbeat denial, it is childish denial, a simple nagging fear of being unable to face the facts. That Japan can't keep paving itself forever in a poor show of a functioning economy. It needs to become part of the global culture.
It as a nation has a rather disfunctional relationship.
The more PC term for a foreigner now is 'Gaikokujin' or loosely translated 'people from an outside country' whereas outsider at least has been acknowledged as wrong.
But in reality I have sufficient esteem to not take offence at not being a member of Japan club, I can still come here, live here, eat here. The club is a weight around Japan's neck. Outsider is recognising that club Japan has become a nightclub so exclusive, noone else even tries to go there anymore, it has become irrelevant.

Deadweight Nation:

By far the inescapable lie japan insultingly throws up in my face is that 'it isn't a welfare state' Japan I begin to suspect is infact the worlds worst welfare state. In Australia, the cowardice endemic in our political structure when it comes to running at the sign of any policy that might be of shortterm detriment to the business sector such as the limp dicked involvement into stopping the futureless forestry and rice industries in Tasmania and Victoria respectively makes me furious and discard democracy as a workable model of government.
But in Japan it is at a level most heinously insane. For example, where in Australia you would employ one casual teenager to do a job, in Japan you would employ 3 or 4 full time employye, these include a person to guide you into the petrol station, a person to talk to you through the window of your car about your petrol and another to pump the petrol and then the fourth to safely guide you back onto the street. Not only is this an inferred slight apon your judgement it is also a complete waste of resources. And at one time I just thought was reflective of Japan's love of service and ceremony but I now see is a necessity to keep thousands of people needlessly employed rather than face the problem of real unemployment, the failings of the education system and the extreme undercasualisation of the workforce.
There are people who are paid needlessly to stand at certain intersections and direct traffic, others at pedestrian crossings that have lights there are construction workers that simply sweep paths.
There is so much fat to be cut, but the obvious problem would be that this would leave about 40% of Japan's labour market unemployed.
This is why I take this situation as personally offensive:

1. I view the entire world as a communal birthright of all those that inhabit the universe.
2. Stalin used to break men's spirits by have them dig holes and fill them back up again endlessly until the were completely broken. Stalin's record is pretty clear, but Japan seems to tolerate this as okay, in abundance.
3. The worlds resources are scarce, using them needlessly is a theft from future generations.
4. Making people small is the best way to mediocrity, giving people demeaning job's is not a happy place to live.

This is an expensive exercise not like China were the deregulated labour market makes it cheaper to higher 20 people to cut your lawn by hand than buy an expensive foreign lawnmower.
This is the country that houses the best car company in the world, Toyota that more or less invented Total Quality Management, from doing a years worth of Car surveys I know in Australia Toyota more than any other company is semantically synonomous with innovation.
And they teach you to go through any system and cut out all the fat as a matter of course. It would be cheaper to pay welfare, use the dissent as a platform for education and make something of a future for the country. But Japan is the archetype of culture's that refuse to admit they have a problem. You cannot walk 100m in Japan without meeting a useless employee. Its too stark to be noticed.

Tradition is the worst reason to keep doing something:

By virtue of tradition being the only real reason to keep doing the same thing. A sample for posterity is good. The Japanese love traditions and festivals, but this is not what the human race is destined for. The human race is gifted with the ability to improve upon itself. Japan has transformed itself into a truly ugly place. Its city centers shine brightly with Neon, crazy fashion and a sea of department stores and friendly cosy restaurants. But you can never escape the concrete.
It is paved from here to nowhere. Brenton played golf after four months in Japan and had forgotten what grass looked like. He too has adopted a standard sufficient enough to call Handa where I currently reside, the countryside despite a factory being in our back yard and high voltage power lines marching across said countryside, In australia you would call it Zone 2.
And that's the clincher, for me I had assumed all the concrete was necessary to allow for stable living in an earthquake prone country, but turns out entire departments are dedicated in government beauracracy to identify projects to pave that have no need or function whatsoever simply to keep the construction industry running.
Useless effort is endemic, Japan is a deadweight, a deadweight precisely because it seems it is unable to learn, even from its own culture. Musashi, Yagyu, Tokugawa, Hideyoshi, Oda, Toyota, Honda, Nintendo none of these big Japanese institutions where made famous by their conservative inertia, there strength of tradition in the face of growth. None of them succeeded by giving handouts to their useless aspects. They are infact shining examples of breaking the mold, of active participative learning.
If I was the Carp Japanese ancients thought Japan was on the back of I would have tried desperately to shake it off too. It is heavy, dirty and ugly now, somethings got to give.

A Belated Apology:

People who critacise Japan are known in Japanese Academic circles as Japan Bashers. But the costs of Japans moment in the sun are starting to become huge gaping soars. I bought Alex Kerr's follow up book to lost Japan because it seemed to sing out a profound knowledge of the generic problem of which I was increasingly noticing the systems. Japan is killing itself. When I would guestimate aside from Italy it probably has the richest living culture to draw upon as an asset.
But people who complain often do so because they care deeply, for me Japan was a dream of mine, to see it so lost is like having a child that despite your every effort to communicate keeps engaging in self destructive behaviour.
Criticising is not the answer, it is not even the first step. Behaviour is what counts so here is my behaviour:

Japan can I give you some feedback?

When you don't engage with the team in the conduct of our work, you withold any value you may contribute, what could you do differently?

I'm happy to work on this with you anytime.

散歩する

I've been getting aroudn on foot for most of my time here. The benifits are many, not only do I believe that the only three means of transport for one to truly get their bearings are foot, running or on a bike but it also burns energy allowing me to keep trim.
The downside is that after 8 hours or so of meandering around a foreign city, though I may have a profound knowledge of my surroundings my feet sometimes ache. One time I got back to my hotel thinking my little tow nail was causing grief by digging into the next one along only to discover a blister the size of my little toe coming of of it. I'm no pussy when it comes to tolerating a little pain for the greater good though, and I'm not going to throw down for taxi's especially when I often have no idea where I'm actually going.
What I do know is that not all bike's are born equal. Recently a philanthropic neighbour gave me a bike. And its a donkey, an absolute fucking donkey. It must weigh roughly my weight again. Has three gears, a step through frame, an alternator in its front hub and a seat that is in essence a throw pillow mounted on a stick.
But I appreciate it non-the-less.
It has allowed me to explore handa proper, and riding here is a cultural experience in and of itself. Right of way for bicycles is a very confusing affair and I regard myself as one of the safest riders in Japan.

On the plus side:
1. No need to wear helmets.
2. Bikes acknowledged with their own lane on pedestrian crossings.
3. People don't yell stuff at you just for riding a bike.
4. Nobody steals bikes in Japan (especially not mine)

On the down side:
1. AT any given time you may be faced with a rider heading directly into you on a busy narrow street.
2. Hook turns are precarious at best, having billboards take up all corner to corner visability.
3. An alternator light stops working when you stop moving.
4. Japanese traffic lights take approximately 1 half century to change.

but all up it is good to get on a bike again.
My hands have become lady soft in the interim month though some of the bigger callouses remain, looks like I gotta work my way back to man hands as well.

Popping the Question

I struggled to think of a more inappropriate name for this blog, it was about a personal meets professional dilemma I face which revolves around Misaki and I was trying to think of something clever that something like TIME magazine or The Economist would use, and I thought of them 'the Japan question' sort of article headlines, and then i thought 'the misaki question' and then thought why not up the ante, so sorry to those that got excited by the relatively boring prospect of me having a lifestyle change into some kind of pussy whipped pussy, but sadly no, but you do get some insight into the creative process behind some of these creative blog titles.
No my question is much tougher than something romantic such as the notion of life lived together, consented to under the duress of public humiliation. Instead it is simply this, I have accumulated some knowledge of business over the years, through reading, studying, thinking and work experience. Misaki is just heading into her professional career, already experiencing the personal cost of being a working woman.
Namely some months ago we ended our relationship on account of her career path railroading her future.
This places me in an awkward position, and ethically I don't know what to do.
So I'm asking you what do I do?but first some specifics.
Miki left her course in Australia to return to Japan to work for Japan's number one Jewellery retailer, the attractive part of this internship is that her mother owns a famous as I'm lead to believe Jewellery shop in Shizuoka. Misaki will take over in a supporting role to her sister at the end of her internship. Suffice to say their is significant emotional investment in this career path, indeed a lot of Miki's emotional identity is wrapped up in it.
That being said, her current internship is for a company that pays a whopping $700 a month, based in Shikoku, initially in Tokushima, which is roughly the same population as Ballarat Australia, but much more 'countryside' and about as rural backwater as Japan gets.
So cynical tohm would infer, that a core component of said Jewellery guru's strategy is, to hire increadibly cheap labor (possibly criminally cheap) and then operate a direct sales model (ie. door to door) in one of Japan's neichingest markets. I have heard little to substantiate that this guy has more to offer in business saviness than this cost control model he has developed. And furthermore the little feedback I recieved from Miki was that it operated on the Win-Lose quick kill mentality of target chasing short term.
Bitter pills? well that's what I worry about. Let me compound it though.
The little insight I have into Misaki's mum's business leaves me unassured that it itself is a good business model, nor that there is any real ability in the business to allow it to survive through any means but dumb luck.
Specifically, Miki's mother needs to retire at some point and as such most of her loyal customers will retire from buying from her as she is the 'sales expert' this is however a vote in favor of her daughters and the trusted name taking over. (Yet no excuse for a poor business practice of indespensibility to begin with). The key crises they believe they are facing is a failure to attract new customers. (yet cannot state this problem in any other means but a solution)
However another problem is that the experienced sales staff seem to have an irrational problem with working for the next generation, the daughters because of their inexperience and complete abscence of knowledge of how to run a business. So a large threat looming is that they not only lose their key expert but the supporting cast as well. And like most industries, large scale chains seem to be gradually conquering the market putting the squeeze on independant retailers.
And on a personal level, the mother's own sister was hostiley bought out of the business and Miki feels a need to support her own sister as she due to the long ours of retail work here has had no time to start her own life and meet a guy, have a baby and so forth.
So that's the picture, and due to my skewed personal bias, I have chosen not really to intervene or even offer comment as I know how unpopular this can be in a relationship.
Yet without coming across as a pussy, is it worthwhile me communicating my below concerns/observations/recommendations to Misaki?

1. A family run business is a dangerous thing, despite some well known examples from the days of yore, generally a family business model doesn't work in the modern day and age, due to the successful ones usually being trade jobs and only family members having the priveledge of the trade's education, however in an age of standardised service chains and companies providing their own aftermarket service outlets in the pursuit of margin (such as car company branded dealers) they have generally fallen into decline and disrepute.
The art of sales having become science, and taught and trained well by various professional institutions there is not much competitive advantage to a family retail name. Furthermore underpinning all of this is basic knowledge, to draw from a gene pool restricted to one's own progeny, one is highly unlikely to place the best person for the job by excluding the rest of the population, particularly when this involves excluding tried and tested staff in favor of blood.
An example of a successful sustainable family business is Du Pont which gauruntees Du Pont family members an entry level position, however to progress up the chain of command, one has to be adjudicated by a panel of non-family employees and approved as exceeding in ability all other candidates. A form of internal quality control, because to assume that a family name is a preferable quality to say 10 years experience and a proven track record isn't stupid, it is simply placing one's personal interests ahead of that of organisational responsibilty, and that is above all else unethical management.
SO on the first grounds, Miki's business has a bleak future if the people decisions (some of the most difficult and consequential decisions any manager ever makes) are based on hollow sentiment. This means a company is exarcerbating a weakness (lack of experience) and needlessly discarding strenght (experience and customer relationships) its like deliberately taking ten steps back, and all this in a time of crises.

2. I have to assume, Misaki wants this career path and is not making this decision under duress or emotional bullying, her own personal value she can bring to the company (apart from her sales experience as door to door) is questionable. It is questionable because the business model employed by her boss is fundamentally flawed. By employing inexperienced staff he reduces his risk (wages) under the guise of internships he can pay them subsistence wages, probably obtaining as close to free labor as one can get.
I wouldn't stop short of believing that most of the companies employees are further subsidised with rent and/or petrol by their parents all to benifit from the learning opportunity.
But good business is generic, the problems of business profit and management are generic, porter devised the 5 forces as a linear generic method of analysing a given industry to understand how the game was played and now game theory makes industry analysis a relatively accessible exercise for all.
Thus said, looking at a successful jewellery business may by as usefull as looking at a successful bakery, the same business principles can be applied to a business in another industry, all it requires is a fundamental knowledge of your industry.
To compound this, unless you can replicate the problem you cannot expect to replicate the solution.
Miki is unlikely to be able to pay subsistence wages to her own workforce and demand the same output as a fulltime dedicated and experienced employee, largely because a regular member of the workforce wouldn't stand for it.
But by reducing his own labor expenses current boss can tolerate a higher advertising investment, a slower stockturn rate, in all he can apply far more risk elsewhere, risking more stock and so whilst whipping his staff into an exhaustive frenzy.
From my own experience generally as a commission only salesrep I knew that for my own $50 commission it usually meant my company was gaurunteed $150, it was no risk to employ as many sales reps as it could pull of the street and simply knock as many doors as possible. Virtually the only hitch was the client having an SLA of certain degree of penetration or 'positive churn' in an area, so failing to sell we got more annoying in the same area as the inexperienced reps 'burned' walks (the process where a bad rep barely talks to anyone and generates no leads, so he knocks all the doors on the streets he is assigned) so there was a degree of risk but not enough to prevent the company on loading up on as many sales reps it could fit in a bus and send out for 10 hour days 6 days a week to try and bring in a good $3-4k a day by knocking pure dumb luck.
And as such I could not apply any of my learnings (apart from some basic sales theory) to my job in sales at Honda, that needed to build long term profitable relationships.
The transferable skills where minimal. I suspect if you take a business model and don't reevaluate the basic assumptions or conditions, it is doomed to failure. If you do reevaluate the basic assumptions or conditions, you conclude you may aswell earn some decent money working at a bakery in civilization somewhere.
As such, I worry that Misaki as expert is not a viable strategy for overcome the crises of 'no new customers'

3. The bosses new business venture exposes his relative inexperience as a business man, from a poor marketing theme (too much creativity, not enough mnemonic appeal), poor positioning strategy (middle market on a high involvement purchase decision) and furthermore not really putting any investment into launching the new store.
As such business is starting slowly and suspiciously, its apparantly the first time a business like it has been tried (so one can appluad the risk element) however such enterprises often fold, nor does it seem to be the kind of experiment such as the London perfume and makeup store that arranged its merchandising by colour tones, and sents rather than by brand. A spectrum merchandising strategy if you will, run purely as an experiment to test the changing market conditions in consumer preferences.
This however seems to be a cake and eat it too strategy, and the same pressure to produce sales is being applied despite the distinctive lack of selling opportunities (think of a mercedes dealer in Bendigo demanding a sale from every staff member before they go home each night, just not going to happen).

4. Misaki sighted her motivations to support her sister in allowing her to 'get a life' that is relieve enough work load to allow her to go on dates, form meaningful relationships and have a future.
This to me has overlooked two things.
A) her sister chose the relatively 'low risk' (highest risk of all) career path of entering the family business. A relatively safe way to overcome having to sell yourself to a different company, and thus should take responsibility for her own predicament (though accepting of course that Misaki may have an emotional investment in her mother's business aswell)
B) to allow this, Miki has given up her own life effectively doubling the problem before trying to solve it, so in simple terms just moving the problem around. She has given up her relationship, moved to a backwater, working too long hours to form meaningful relationships with anyone and so fourth.
I am highly skeptical that infact Misaki will have any success at freeing up anyones time, remember that her mother still has to retire aswell and they may be loosing their experienced employees.
From my perspective given what I know, and have observed thus far, Misaki's support is to her own pure detriment and of superficial benifit to her sister, long term it will probably cost both of them their lives. (not in the lethal sense, but in the dreams and aspirations sense).

So that being that, I realise that Miki has said loud and clear, no matter how shitty this career path may seem to me, she prefers it to building a relationship with me. ALbeit one can never assume the level of ignorance or naivety one makes this decisions at.
I realise my predicament in that I can only find myself guilty and her innocent no matter how grounded I may seem. It just seems to me, that I would perhaps be remiss in my ethical duty as a manager, to not point out these areas of concern to someone who may not have considered them. Furthermore I am not the only loser from this situation, Misaki's friends and networks here have also lost out, including best friends and such.
The only person that seems to have gained is Miki's family, who communicate so often and freely and easily through channels I seem to never be able to use, to indicate an indecisive chat fest incapable of even effective communication.
SO what do I do or say? DO I continue trying to minimise the emotional cost of her decision and play nice guy say nothing tohm?
DO I tell her to her face what a bucket of shit she is lugging around all the while thinking it is a golden ticket to willy wonkas chocolate factory?
ANd if so how do I tell her, there are deep seated cultural values here that I know don't react in an open and gratefu way to such feedback, but are still susceptible to the ultimate feedback of reality.

DO I just put it down on paper and hand it to her and let her know the decision on whether to read it or not lies with her.
For me it is relatively low risk, as we are probably talking about grosse 3 hours of catchup in the rest of my life I may cost myself here, for her though it could be a confidence shattering bout of needless second doubts.

Where I've been coming from was to say, let her find out for herself, live her own life, I'll be fine don't worry attitude, but increasingly I feel like if I know something, or feel I know something I should communicate it.
All this is based on observed behaviours, and behaviour is hard to lie about. What I infere may be innacurate but I really, really don't know how to weigh up the costs.
So I guess that's the misaki question.
What do I do knowning what I 'know'

You Need A Horse to Ride

I now feel that I did indeed need to quit my old job. This belive it or not was not an easy decision for me. I mean there were a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which was simply I have the opportunity to do so now.
But in a very 'Good to Great' sense, I looked around and thought, me becoming MD of this company is only a matter of time. And I mean 20 years or so, and not discounting the facts that external competition is going to intervene, but suffice to say I knew I could pursue that if I wanted to apply the discipline necessary. And ultimately I knew for me then, that goal was simply not big enough, and I mean not 'not big enough' in a financial or prestige sense, but simply that this was not virgin soil, it was tilled, it had strong foundations, good backing and career paths.
I needed to be thrown into a dogs breakfast, and carved out Michaelangelo's David from the redeemable things I found there.
And leaving Honda has finally turned my mind back to this organisational soup that is my dream, and I didn't realise it for weeks, but I looked up in the library one day (yes thats right, I am travelling around the world and visiting libraries) and whilst perchad on a seat too small for me reading 'Cookie King flies' a japanese childrens book. I realised that I was taking this really seriously. I was taking myself and my organisation seriously. Finally. I was thinking in a Drucker sense 'what does the organisation require of me?' and that i guess is key.
SO if there's anything I can share with you, a little late in the spring season (southern hemisphere of course) its this:

Everyone needs a horse to ride, the first horse you can ride is your company, ask yourself 'is this horse going anywhere' if yes, it may be the horse you want to ride.

After that your boss is your horse, and I mean your direct boss, ask yourself 'is this horse going anywhere?' and if yes, that might be the horse to pick.

But at the end of the day, probably your best horse to bet on is yourself ask yourself 'am I going anywhere' and if yes, make sure its somewhere good.

If not, bet on me Because I'm going for $4.70 at this stage which I think is a steal.

Do As De La Does

I now have the 'De La Do' Trugoy the dove's uneven hairstyle from 3 feet high and rising days. I can now go bald complete, having achieved all hairstyles I could ever seek.

That is all.

Pockets full of shit

The first time I came to Japan, I noticed a complete abscence of public bins in Japan. Yet littering doesn't seem to be a problem apart from the occasional turfing of a cigarette but out the window.
This time I'm getting around on foot and discovered, that places that sell you shit are also expected to provide you with bins, so usually you use the bins out the front of a convenience store or one of the recycling bins that are increasingly paired up with vending machines.
I liked this because it smacked of responsibilty, however I must confirm that tatamae (officially stated position, presentation) is the most important thing because this relationship between the waste producers and those responsible for disposal seems to not have produced any result in the way of reducing packaging. I scratch my head at the logic behind buying a 600ml bottle of drink (half the price that it is in Oz) and then putting it in a 600ml bottle sized individual plastic bag. THEN providing a recycle bin and a combustables bin (japan simply doesn't have the land to use land fills).
In the meantime knowing the futility of this seemingly wise policy, I and up having to walk from Combini to Combini stuffing packaging and wrappers into my pockets (so as to have a free hand for photo taking) and feel like a hobo as I empty my pockets into the bin of a store I don't intend to buy anything from 500m away.
Everythree days (people should know I don't rotate my shorts that often) I empty out my pockets to find those bits and pieces of wrapper, excess packaging etc that invariably slips below my coin stash and thus never gets disposed of.
Fucking shit.

Daily Disciplines Reviewed

So here's how it's going,

Running: 4k is a struggle I still don't think I'm up to the 8k magic barrier but I am managing to do it most days, it was only really a problem in Osaka when staying at the capsule hotel, as it made changing a pain in the arse, adding an additional change to my day was in retrospect not worth the benifit of running around Osaka's busy streets and seemingly non existent parks.
But every morning I wake up and go for a run now. Including the dreaded sprint session, which when you say I'll do 10 sprints that's 1k roughly, and I'll be sprinting them so it'll take me, 140 seconds, which is 2 and a half minutes...well that's wrong, sprinting takes just about the longest to do.

Zazen: This is the hardest, and I let it slide for about half a week, and haven't done it today, which means really I should incorporate it into my running, something I also haven't done today. today is a day off. I decided it. Anyway as much as this is the hardest one, I think I definitely overthink, a dangerous thing to do when travelling because it can detract from actual experiencing, which is the point.
I have real trouble not thinking. I want to add it to my reportoire though because like a good musician, the music isn't just in the notes being played, but the beats when nothing is being ploayed, the placements of the rests. I do think already I'm getting better at recognizing when not to think, such as in a park or on a train, or while running. But still, I got a long way to go on this one.

Active Listening: This has been the easiest, as I'm naturally falling into this pattern trying to listen to what is being said to me, and scanning peoples facial expressions for clues, however whether this will result in my laxing back into lax ways when around my native tongue again I don't know, also my ability to understand is somewhat questionable, but I am in a more questioning state of mind, asking more people for feedback and such in my own channells kind of ways. anyhoo, the other side I guess, is I'm probably lax in asking the questions of myself of what questions I should be asking. To be fair I don't really know how to active listen, but I think I'm doing it every day.

Lessons from Japan 1

I firmly believe that people are essentially the same the world over. Everyone has the same resources, the same fundamental equipment to progress through life. As such culture is a set of learned behaviours. Its these lessons I'm looking for now.

The things intriguing me at the moment are:

1. filial piety - Japan are big into this.
2. conservation of space - particularly from a geoist perspective Japan uses almost every inch available productively, even national parks probably currently are extracting full realisable value. But they operate under a private land ownership system rather than resource rentals.
This does reduce the study to its other beneficiary - wealth distribution, I don't feel equiped though to follow the paths wealth takes through the population. I imagine speculation must just about be inflated to its logical extreme here though given the productivity per square meter. (if there is a space a vending machine can fit it is put there).
3. convenience is fixed - miki put me onto this one. Conveniently stores other than boarders are open until 11 at night here, infact almost everything is open until 11 at night. Tuesday is a great night to go out on the town. so is every other night. But what allows this to happen. Presumably the population and population density in japan makes this feasable, however Misaki inconveniently works retail here and so is occupied until 9-10pm at night. By virtue of her store closing early at 9pm. but the crazy thing is, Japan's workforce hasn't been casualised, so she is working 12 hour shifts 6 days a week. And from my wanderings in takamatsu this seems to be the case in almost all retail outlets. But says I, if everyone is working all the time, how convenient can the long opening hours be for anyone but tourists, uni students and the retired. Namely three groups with no money between them to be throwing around on consumer durables.
So such convenience comes at a cost, a terrible cost of shitty full time jobs. I think this would defeat the arguement against casualisation in one go, because I'm telling you, if you need the money from that kind of job with that kind of hours, then you have bigger needs than that, you have something wrong with your life, give up your house or kid or whatever is putting in that situation because god knows you can't appreciate it.
4. Attitudes to transport. The Japanese have much higher per capita utilisation of bicycles, also of umbrellas, also if you get caught drink driving even a little over the limit you get fined $2000 equivalent in yen, not just you but any friend in the car who has allowed you to drive.
5. Attitudes to water, every business I see is hosing down the pavement in front of its premis without fail sometime between 8 & 9. this is then mopped as pedestrians walk over it. Exorbitent, exorbitent water usage. You should see the baths also.

So I guess you couldn't really say 'lessons learned' more points of ponderisation. However I do believe the central learned behaviour of this culture is 'tatamae' or loosely translated 'appearances' the official reality is far more important than the actual reality. In other words, if the map doesn't match the ground the ground is wrong.
I really notice the strain Japan goes to to pretend things are okay, or that things are working well.There are big gaps and assumptions that dictate behaviour. As a foreigner these are easy to exploit, not that I want to, such as growing a beard my own highschool would never allow when an exchange student. (that time I wanted to) anyhoo, as easy as it is to exploit it is hard to correct, even using a powerful questioning technique such as NLP.
I did have some success getting Misaki to reevaluate her own mapping for withholding her opinion. The waiters at the restaurant were so fucking distracting though. I hate fancy restaurants.
Apart from that, I shall keep my eyes open.