make magazine

Blog readers might want to look for Make Magazine. It's not all woodworking like the magazines I usually write for, but it gets people making and gets their hands busy learning as they must be if we are to survive and prosper as a nation. My article about making spoon carving knives is in issue #27 which is coming out this month. Blog readers can find the article on-line through this guest link.

Richard Bazeley sent a note describing a student's response to completing a set of dovetailed joints...

“Dovetails from Heaven” exclaimed a student who had been working intently on a small drawer for some time and had just experienced the pleasure of the tails and pins fitting snugly together. He was proudly showing the freshly cut dovetails to the other members of the class.

Richard says the student had been diagnosed with ADHD and that, "Creative energy is such a positive force. Moments like this which make it feel worthwhile and I believe you will understand."

“Many, perhaps most, people never get an opportunity to do dovetailing, but every human being, man or woman, may acquire from it the habit of doing well whatever he/she is called upon to do.”—Otto Salomon

On another subject, here is an article suggesting negative effects of MBA degrees on American business. One would think that with the number of MBA graduates in the US, we would be a manufacturing leader and be able to balance our nation's budget. Instead, business is in arrears, profits and productivity are in a slump. Is the current debt ceiling debacle in the US government an example of what MBAs have done? Upper Mismanagement Why can't Americans make things? Two words: business school.

After World War II, large corporations went on acquisition binges and turned themselves into massive conglomerates. In their landmark Harvard Business Review article from 1980, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” Robert Hayes and William Abernathy pointed out that the conglomerate structure forced managers to think of their firms as a collection of financial assets, where the goal was to allocate capital efficiently, rather than as makers of specific products, where the goal was to maximize quality and long-term* market share.

Make, fix and create...