8- What Matters: an epilogue

Part 8/8 of -Transformation Flows, Flaws, and Fails

• In retrospect: Visiting Yosef, my Yoda
• Akko, a year earlier before the Chicago dinner with Rex and Bledge

I find Yosef at his shop intent over a length of wood.  

Today I am in Akko for a few days on the Mediterranean, but mainly to see my old friend. In the past years, I'd pop up when I'd visit my technology contractors in Jaffa. 

He nods an acknowledgment, without pausing work, as if I had not left since my visit a year before. He knows I’m finishing my last months at the innovation helm of Europe’s largest information and communications company.

The shop is redolent with shavings. Rosewood pieces hang along the back wall, awaiting a viola or cello to be restored. But today he’s intent on a massive door, likely for one of the heritage sites. Yosef, once a tool-and-die master, retired to northwest Israel’s Akko where he is known, amazingly, as a wood restoration artisan.  

On the phone several months before, he had cautioned on my dismissing politics; my false peace in turning inward to focus on my work itself. 

Several years before that, when I had mentioned an imminent launch of a major innovation culture transformation program, Yosef had said, “How wonderful!

“Yet, I wonder, my friend. It is a culture of micron-tolerance group processes and steel, don’t forget. And when everyone's response is ‘Perfect!’ - it leaves not much room for better, I think.”

Conversations with Yosef are interesting for being mostly long silent gaps between my questions never asked aloud; and his thoughts seemingly in a distant circumferential flow.

Presently, he looks up. Pointing to the lathe motor’s controller, “Do you remember fixing that? Mismatched impedances, you said. First, turbulence, then inefficiency, then much heat, then, zap. And to the store for a new controller.” He laughs.

“Circuits are pretty much just flows," I echo absently.

“From a distance,” Yosef says, ”A water current can seem to flow across and away. But a careful man might feel the current lightly tugging, when it’s turning back and around as it tightens into vortex.”

Yosef has finished the frame piece. He explains the allowances he’s measured into the grooves for the panels’ inevitable shrinking and swelling. 

I am looking around his shop. Magical, I think. Bright sunlight from the window, mottling, softening into the curled shavings: an infinite palette on the floor. “I could hole up here. And not miss people for a long while.”

.

Yosef is turning the piece to and fro in wordless scrutiny, running a thumb along an edge. “You couldn’t guess the many dozens of times this hard-headed tool-and-die person gave up working on wood.”

“Who knew, wood isn’t a metal?” He laughs. “ Oh, I’d so work a fine piece of wood, so finely. Shaving its flaws to nothing. Till not much wood left either.” 

“But hold wood to light the right way,” Yosef smiles, ”Ah, such strengths hidden in its grain and its knots. Such a beautiful thing, wood is,” he winks.