style="font-size:15px;"> Today 75% of the biodiesel industry in America is boarded up. We still haven’t figured out how to turn $3.00 oil into a $2.00 fuel. Piedmont is still chugging away.
For the past five years Rachel and I have driven past “For Rent” signs on our way to work. When the “Great Recession” hit we noticed an increase in abandoned buildings with signs in the yard. And yet there is a backlog of people who are trying to get space inside our fence.
Where we work, the co-products of one business are the feedstock of another, and the waste of one business becomes the heat source for the greenhouse on the hill.
In an economy that has allegedly ground to a halt, we are pulling building permits, and hiring builders. It appears the Abundance Foundation is about to move into the first “actually green” office building in Chatham County. And it’s tucked into the back yard of a chemical plant — nestled up against the sustainable farm that surrounds us.
We offer free tours of the plant every Sunday afternoon at 1:00 —as we have always done — and we have noticed a newfound interest in sustainability. What was once “all biodiesel all the time” has shifted ever so slightly into an interest in our rainwater delivery systems, and our worm castings, and our vermiculture digesters, and the banana trees that grace our campus.
This year we are not going to have to argue about climate change. We will simply show our guests a locally grown banana. At long last our banana trees in the yard are bearing edible fruit.
When you go down to the industrial plants in Moncure, you tend to be stopped by a security guard. Free tours are hard to come by.
And while both Rachel and I live down that way, I think we are glad to go to work in town…
In the early eighties I was fortunate enough to hire on to my brother Jim’s computer distribution business. I started out hanging drywall in his office, became a technical writer for his fledgling custom engineering group, moved into order processing when the administrative anchor of the business, Suzanne, quit. From there I launched a career in sales. We were lucky. Jim started selling computers out of the trunk of his car before Microsoft was invented. When IBM entered the industry we successfully retooled our business and our business exploded like the industry itself.
Lyle was delighted with his first edible banana harvest.
Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates went on to become the wealthiest man on earth and a popular computer evangelist. I met him once, on the show floor of the first ever “Windows World” in Atlanta where he rode the escalator like all the rest of us. And he was gracious, thanking people for coming to his show.
But I always thought Bill Gates was confused. He was always preaching “convergence” in which all of our technologies would arrive at the same point, and do everything for us. That struck me as being the opposite of how things happen in nature. In nature, species divide, they don’t converge. I believe the same logic holds true for business. Businesses naturally diverge.
The world that Bill Gates described had us balancing our checkbooks, and getting our entertainment, and reading our books on one splendid device that would allow all of our needs to “converge.” Yet it seems to me I have multiple devices piling up. My boys have a Wii console for playing one type of computer game and are saving up for an Xbox to allow them a wider range of game choices. I have a notebook computer where I tend to do different work than I do with our desktop model, and apparently I am in need of a separate electronic device with which I can download the books I want to read. While it is true that my cell phone has way more computing firepower than I can possibly understand, it’s not where I play games or do my banking.
I think “divergence” is what business does. When my brother Jim’s custom engineering business was floundering, he spun it out as a stand-alone company, where it found a niche and prospered.
That is certainly what Piedmont has done.
Another juncture where we depart from mainstream corporate America is when it comes to sharing information. We are the originators of “Open Biodiesel,” which borrowed heavily from the software industry.
In the software world there is a radical notion called “open source,” where the source code is often free to its users. In the parlance of the open source world, it is “free as in speech, not free as in beer.”
At the heart of the open source software proposition is the notion of a “community” of developers who work together to improve the product such that new features and functions can evolve rapidly. “Release early, and release often” is a common mantra from the world of open source.
The idea is that a small company with a community of contributors can have a larger development reach than it can afford, thereby permitting it to compete with giant “proprietary” competitors with large bankrolls.
In Small is Possible, I discussed how the principles of open source software development spilled over into community scale biodiesel. This caught the attention of Michael Tiemann, one of the founders of the open source movement.
Michael invited me out to his company, Red Hat, to speak to a lunchtime crowd as part of their “Lunch and Learn” speaker series. That began a friendship that has spanned a bunch of readings, and speaking events, and panel discussions in the public eye that are not half as interesting as the lunches and breakfasts we have had along the way.
At one point he introduced us to Tim O’Reilly’s venture capital firm. Rachel and Leif and I found ourselves in a San Francisco board room discussing our little biodiesel project with some extremely interested, well heeled, and powerful members of the open source community.
When Red Hat launched opensource.com they invited me to contribute something on how open source principles can transcend the software industry. Here is the column I wrote called “Open Biodiesel”:
I’ve had a number of career changes. I went from poetry to technology to metal sculpture to the Internet to biodiesel. And I must admit that although I have brushed against “open source” a number of times, I have had a hard time getting my head around it.
Once I was working the show floor of USENIX in San Antonio, in 1998, the year Free BSD was released. It created quite a buzz. But I wasn’t sure what to do with such a thing.
I later ended up as the CEO of an Internet company. The “bubble” had burst, the company I was to run was pretty much bankrupt, and my job was to fix it. As part of the turn around I invested in OpenNMS, which is an open source network management company. At the time I still didn’t know what “open source” meant.
OpenNMS was (and still is) run by Tarus Balog. He’s a charismatic champion of the movement and I quickly fell under his spell.
Tarus told me to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which I did. Tarus took me to the Triangle Linux User Group. For a moment in time “open source” was my life.
I’m not really a “turn around” guy. My brother Mark used to joke about my work on the Internet, saying, “They wanted a ‘turnaround artist’ and all they got was an ‘artist.’”
