Painting The Foundation

One Summer, my friend T and I painted houses.  After doing what had been my other job that Summer – selling encyclopedias door to door (and these weren’t Encarta discs, kids) – sweltering under the eaves wasn’t such a big deal.  The woman whose house we were painting turned out to be a real pain – switching shades after we had done quite a bit, finding invisible missed spots, and, at the end, demanding we paint the foundation even though that hadn’t been part of the original job quote.  It wasn’t so much the additional labor – only an extra day or so – but the fact that to do it right we had to rent a power washer to clean off the foundation so it could be painted as well as buy a lot of extra paint.  Goodbye profits!  Honest young men that we were, we bought what amounted to white-wash, threw it on to a foundation we had cleaned off with a hose, and prayed it wouldn’t rain until the check cleared.  I’m still bothered by it 35+ years later.

No, we haven’t turned this into True Confessions.  I tell you this tale because that it exactly the sort of job many folks do all the time.  They make sure that the paint looks good but there is something rotten underneath.  How many spreadsheets have you read that seem to add up but a little checking shows you either an errant formula (bad) or a number of faulty assumptions (worse) or both?  How many impressive reports have you been handed that are mostly an aggregation of tangentially relevant materials but no attempt is made to synthesize the data and advance your business?  Finally, how many executives do you know that get by on a handshake and a brown-nose but are the quintessential “empty-suit”?

Of late I’ve noticed a number of blogs and other sites I read recycling one another’s stories.  AOL is even making noise about building a “content” business by simply aggregating, in an automated manner, the content others produce (Drudge‘s legacy, no doubt).  This is, to me, simply painting the foundation and when the first good rain hits (as most of the last year has been), all the cracks are exposed.  Rather than building a content business of your own, you’re throwing a layer of white wash on what’s already there.  You’re not doing much of a job – you’re just hoping the checks clear before the rain hits.

Thoughts?