171026 I can jump start your small business in printmaking 

Feeling heady today with my success record, I’m entertaining the idea, Yes, I can! A word of caution, however, and this comes from the story of the Little Red Hen. She had an idea to grow wheat to make flour, and she asked all the barnyard animals for help. No one would help her, and with each refusal she said, “Then I will do it myself.”

When, after she tilled the field and her wheat was harvested and milled into flour, she made a cake! Then all the animals came to ask for some, but she denied them. The trouble then became that she ate her cake alone, with no one to talk to. Moreover, this bred envy and resentment and I don’t like to think what happened after that. It’s too ugly to think about.

I am the Little Red Hen, because I designed and made a number of things. However, I always had help from those around me—my family, first of all, who supported me and who continue to do whatever they can within their abilities to support me. This is the thing for which I am most grateful.

Then, too, there are my friends (I hope I can call them my friends) who support me in many ways—with “Likes” on Facebook, for example. There are former students who, even today, join me in my projects such as the Vladimir Chichinoff Interactive Sketchbook project, and buying the last of the Halfwood Presses.

I’m grateful, too, for the little seeds of new ideas that are sprinkled in the minutes of my daily work—like the name of Lucy Garrick, which came to me in a complex, circuitous way which you might compare to an intriguing novel or mystery story. By tracking her through her online information, I came to an organization with the odd name of Scrum. It turns out it’s a move in a sport and refers to a strategic formation used to win by surprise (I think).

Off I go—like the Little Red Hen across the barnyard—to the Scrum Website, there to find Scrum is a source to connect with consultants who use the Scrum methodology generally known as lean and athletic, fast and thoroughly intended to win in business. I understand this thinking and I’ve practiced it in my way since the days I was a college professor; that’s another story.

Scrum appears to me to be ideally suited to my current project, the Northwest Print Center Incubators. If these incubators were to become real, then each of the units (I estimate nineteen are viable startups) might all be trained under the Scrum framework, which is here copied from the Web:

The Scrum framework is deceptively simple: • A product owner creates a prioritized wish list called a product backlog. • During sprint planning, the team pulls a small chunk from the top of that wish list. That chunk becomes the sprint backlog. The team decides how to implement the sprint backlog within the time frame of the sprint. • The team has the given sprint (usually two to four week time frame) to complete its work, but it meets each day to assess its progress (in the Daily Scrum). • Along the way, the ScrumMaster keeps the team focused on its goal. • At the end of the sprint, the work should be potentially shippable: ready to hand to a customer, put on a store shelf, or show to a stakeholder. • The sprint ends with a sprint review and retrospective. • As the next sprint begins, the team chooses another chunk of the product backlog and begins working again.

Here, again, is the rub: Where are the people? Who are the people who want to jump start a small business connected in some way to printmaking? The Little Red Hen had her barnyard population to which she could make her proposal and hope to gain their help. Who are my friends? Who will help me “take a “chunk from the top” which is the Halfwood Press line?

Like Bob Dylan said in Brownsville Girl, “Oh, if there is an original idea out there, I could sure use it now.” Sam Shepard co-authored the lyrics of that song—it’s one of my favorites. I read that during the recording the group came to a sticking point and they needed some new lines to complete it; Dylan, according to the story, went off by himself and in only a few minutes came back with the needed words—so fast that it amazed everyone.

Back to the title of this essay, I can jump start your small business in printmaking, what does that mean? In my email today I see two items by artists I know, both of them graduates from the UW. One of them took a drawing class from me in the late 1960’s; the other was a student at the UW forty years later and both of them are selling off all their studio and looking for storage for their art. I think to myself, I could have helped you prevent this if you had asked and listened.

But, this won’t happen, any more than I can help that Eskimo I wrote about yesterday. Those I believe will listen are those who have more at stake than their own needs—people who are thinking about other people, too, in a sense of teamwork and winning Big Time. People like Lucy Garrick, maybe, and her colleagues in the Scrum network.