Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you’re making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter. I don’t think that’s asking a lot—and I don’t ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you’re putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as “meat.”
I was angry, too, in the usual ways: with my mom for having me, for being stupid enough to love me. With my brother for not being a fuckup like me. With my father for dying.
What makes a Wagyu steak so desirable is the unbelievably prodigious marbling of fat that runs through it—often as much as 50 percent. Its resulting tenderness and richness, and the subtle—repeat—subtle flavor. When grinding a hamburger, you can put in as much fat as you like—just reach in the fat can and drop it in the machine—so there’s no reason to pay a hundred bucks for a burger. A burger, presumably, already is about as tender as a piece of meat can be—and a taste as subtle as real Wagyu’s would, in any case, be lost were you to do something so insensitive as bury it between two buns and slather it with ketchup.
Nevertheless, the Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.
Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the Military Base”). Or just al-Qaeda (“the Base”), for short.
The same month the Anglophone powers agreed on a screw thread, they established the International Organization for Standardization (better known by its short-form name, ISO). It was to be a United Nations for things. It had an administrative committee modeled after the UN’s Security Council: permanent seats for the five great powers (United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union) and rotating seats for other countries. The first president was from the United States.
Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis, a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president).
But you can’t overdo it—you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel.
Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.
The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)
Write down a list of what you’re worried about for each project and person so you can immediately see when the list is getting too long and you need to either dive deeper or back off.
If we hadn’t thought through installation with the same care and attention that we lavished on the thermostat, it would never have occurred to us to put a screwdriver in every box.
