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The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check Wally's Three Star Leadership Letter

Find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.

Find out more about Wally's coaching services.

My mother did not like to cook and so, when I was a boy we ate most of our big holiday meals at the Liederkranz Club in New York City where we were members. The club was famous for many things.

There were famous members including Theodore Roosevelt and Carl Schurz and William Steinway. There were cultural achievements like serving as a chorus for the Metropolitan Opera. There were cultural exchange programs. And there was Liederkranz cheese.

Liederkranz cheese came into being because many of the Germans in New York lusted for a soft, smelly cheese called Bismarck Schlosskaese. Only a limited amount could be successfully imported. Demand far exceeded supply and so Alfred Tode decided that opportunity beckoned.

Tode ran a popular deli in New York but he also owned the Monroe Cheese Company. So he directed an employee, Emil Frey, to come up with a cheese that tasted like Bismarck Schlosskaese.

Frey did something better. The cheese he produced in 1891 had the same texture as his ideal, and a strong aroma. But it had a unique and pleasing flavor.

Tode tested the cheese on his fellow members of the Liederkranz Club. When they pronounced it wonderful he named it Liederkranz. The Monroe Cheese company set about happily and profitably producing Liederkranz cheese.

That's how things stood until 1929, when Borden bought the Monroe Cheese Company and it began its corporate period. In the 1980s, Borden sold the natural cheese division that made Liederkranz to General Foods which was acquired by Philip Morris and merged into Kraft General Foods.

Along the way, someone in some corporate office decided that natural cheeses were bad business. They stopped making Liederkranz and other natural cheeses and, till this very day, make only processed cheeses.

Among other lovely terms, the USDA defines processed cheeses as "a homogeneous, plastic mass." Processed cheese manufacturers love this because the "mass" can be produced in multiple shapes and has an astoundingly long shelf life, even if it tastes like caulk.

We've done much the same thing with home financing that we've done with cheese. We've replaced something natural and human, with something slick and manufactured. Remember that great scene from Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life?"

There's a run on the Bailey Building and Loan and George Bailey is trying to explain to the people who've shown up with their passbooks how the system works. Here's what he says.

"No, but you . . . you . . . you're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house . . .(to one of the men) . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then, they're going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?"

That's how mortgages used to work. You borrowed from someone who knew you. And that someone was also going to be the person collecting the loan.

That kind of lending involved "trust." Trust is the foundation that the economic system stands on. With trust miracles are possible. It's the basis for successful microlending programs that have transformed communities.

The trust at Bailey Building and Loan was based on personal knowledge. Sophisticated credit scoring systems can approximate the judgment of a good local banker. But they only work if there's documentation that can be trusted, if the information fed into the system is accurate and if people have an incentive to be honest.

But the fact is that processed cheese is not cheese. You can sprinkle all the marketing foo-foo dust over it that you choose, but it remains "a homogeneous, plastic mass." And in the economy, there's no substitute for trust and honesty. Replacing them with slick systems just postpones the final reckoning.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

Request your free copy of "Meeting the Challenges of the Boomer Brain Drain: An integrated approach."

Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.