Dec 5, 2007
Back To The Cottage
If you didn't catch the latest chapter of John Sipple's Back To The Cottage, you missed a great overview of the key values he learned from the family's Cottage business.
Value #1: Knowing What You Stand For:
My father's motto was wrapped up in a statement I heard many times, "If it's worth doing it's worth doing right."
He brought this home to me when I was about twelve. I was making a wooden jewelry box for my sister, Ellen. I had it assembled and sanded and, thinking it was good to go, I asked Dad for the stain. He said, "Got it ready to go, eh Bub? Let me see how it looks!" He took a careful look at it and said, "This is a really good looking jewelry box Johnny, but it needs more sanding before you apply the finish." He must have noted my discouraged look — after all this was for my sister, did it need to be so perfect? "Always remember son," he intoned, "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right."
Download this chapter to read the other 6 Cottage Principles
Download Back to the Cottage PDFs
Preface
Chapter 1: Field Tested
Chapter 2: The Cottage
Chapter 3: Cottage Principles
Want to know what's next? Here's a little preview of Chapter 4 - Shuttering The Cottage:
The advent of power systems: steam, electricity, and the gasoline engine, opened the possibility of developing machines and manufacturing processes to mass produce and distribute products that had always been built — if they were built at all — one at a time and delivered locally. New products, like the automobile, electric lights, and the radio might be prototyped in Cottage settings but they could be produced affordably only when scaled for mass production.
Industrialization made textiles uniform and dirt-cheap. In Europe, machines made things happen faster and faster. In North America, Henry Ford prototyped the efficiencies of assembly line manufacturing, and then paid his workers the remarkable sum of $5 dollars a day so they could become his customers. All of this revolutionized economic life and the social order — but not for free. Part of the price was a shift in our perception of the value of each individual. The age of machines enabled large factories employing hundreds and even thousands of workers and requiring new thinking about maintaining order and getting things done. "Management" was born and, strangely I think, much of what had gone on in the Cottage for thousands of years was tossed — the baby with the bathwater.
