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Liz Davenport has five cats, two
dogs, 10 finches, four hens and a rooster. The walls in
her North Valley home and office range from shades of
cantaloupe to chartreuse, and a china cabinet stuffed to
the gills sits next to her desk.
This does not seem like the home of an organizational
consultant — someone dedicated to getting rid of clutter
and creating order from chaos. It seems much too warm
and cozy and alive. But Liz Davenport is living proof
that unruly creative types can get organized, and she
wants to spread the gospel.
"The thing is: Organized people cannot tell disorganized
people how to be organized," she says. "They're two
different species." And Davenport has figured out the
system.
"I'm the disorganized organizer," says the 5-foot-9-inch
brunette. "I'm just like my clients." Now ... how could
that be? Most disorganized types can't wade through the
piles of clutter in their junk rooms — er, home offices
— much less tell anyone else how to get organized.
But Davenport, 48, was born legally blind. "My vision is
20/360," she says. "What most people can see at a quarter
of a mile, I can't see until I'm 20 feet away from it."
As a child, she couldn't tell her Lincoln Logs from her
Tinker Toys when they were scattered on the floor of her
room. "So I always put my toys away," she says. "I had
to have a home for everything or else I couldn't find it
again. I can't 'look' for stuff. 'Looking' is a learned
skill."
A correct diagnosis of her condition wasn't made until
she was 30, when contacts helped correct her vision.
Still, to read something, she has to hold the text 8
inches from her nose. But while her vision may be a bit
fuzzy, her mission is not.
Today, those organizational skills she first learned in
her bedroom have grown and developed into expertise that
she uses to whip into shape clients that range from
Intel and Coldwell Banker to your next-door neighbor in
his home office "I just do offices," she says. "If you
try to organize homes, you get into marital issues,
family issues and then family-of-origin issues — they
refuse to pick up after themselves because their mother
made them do it."
Defining goals
The first thing she asks all her clients is: "Why am I
here? What isn't working for you?" And the strategy has
paid off. Davenport has parlayed her one-woman company,
Order from Chaos, into a Web site (orderfromchaos.com)
with related products for sale, classes that she's
taught to more than 10,000 people and now, a just
released book, "Order from Chaos: A 6-Step Plan for
Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life." It's
just that kind of fast-paced creativity that can cause
organizational disasters.
"Those of us who are disorganized are creative
geniuses," she says. "We are great optimists — we think
we can run back to our offices and do everything in 60
seconds and then we don't. We go off and chase the next
wild hair."
Taming her own creativity was something that happened
gradually. As the child of a professional secretary and
an artillery and tactics instructor in the U.S. Army
("he taught the fusiliers, those guys who marched and
twirled guns — we called them Daddy's 'hup-hup' boys"),
Davenport admits she may have had an edge on the subject
of organization. But her parents simply expected her to
explore and embrace life. "I just think it's in my DNA,"
she says. "Both of my parents were the only members of
their families to leave their hometowns." Her mother,
who died last year, was lauded in her obituary as "the
heart and the historian" of the State Bar of New Mexico,
where she had worked for more than 25 years. Davenport
was a talented artist even as youngster — a pursuit she
still follows today as a fine artist in watercolor and
oils — and she continues to seriously explore fields
that capture her interest like astrology and tarot.
After dropping out of the University of New Mexico
during her first semester, Davenport logged stints as a
pizza delivery person, professional dancer, cocktail
waitress, bartender, hostess and artist's model. She
also raised cotton and milo on a 750-acre farm in
Deming, owned a Laundromat and, with her dad, a detail
shop.
"I have a theory about the decades
of a person's life," Davenport says. "From zero to 10,
it's about finding out what the rules are; from 10 to
20, it's about breaking them; 20 to 30 is sex, drugs and
rock 'n' roll; 30 to 40 is 'I'm different from everybody
else'; 40 to 50 is doing something about that
difference; and 50 to 60 — I haven't gotten there yet."
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In her 30s, Davenport was busy defining herself. She
began working at Intel in those years and while there,
started and finished a bachelor's degree in business at
the University of Phoenix campus here and a master's
degree in adult education at the University of New
Mexico. She started as a temp at Intel and when she
stopped working there some 10 years later was in project
management and scheduling.
In plain English, Davenport explains that job
description. Imagine that a new factory needs be built,
she says. That means new equipment has to be attached to
a computer, which has to be attached to a main computer.
Equipment is arriving at different times and as it's
arriving, the company wiring needs to be available at
that spot, and that area has to be attached to the main
computer. "You're talking acres of factory space," says
Davenport. "So it's working with all the manufacturing
people and construction people and making sure
everything is working." And that's where she discovered
her strong suit. "I found I was really good at getting
things done in the shortest number of steps," she says.
"Back in the '50s, they used to be called efficiency
experts. I just kept doing it on a larger level." And
what she found was this: "The further you got away from
an individual, the less trying to organize things
mattered." In other words, each individual's level of
organization was the key. "Somebody, some person, was
always the monkey wrench. "The biggest bang for your
buck, as far as a company is concerned, is to organize
the individual."
Changing direction
After she was laid off at Intel, and then rehired there
as a consultant, she went into business as a free-lance
project management trainer for other companies,
continuing to work for Intel and other companies
throughout the country. And then, in '93, two things
happened that made her think of changing her business.
"My father died and my mother wasn't comfortable with me
flying all over the country," says Davenport.
At the same time, a good friend of hers, Loralee Makela,
a feng shui practitioner, was working with an
organization consultant who moved away. "I told her,
'Liz, you'd be good at that,' Makela recalls, adding
that she thought Davenport would be great with clients.
"She's funny and very flamboyant and very practical."
So Davenport called up the consultant to confer and came
to the same conclusion. And now Davenport and Makela
often refer clients to each other. "If somebody says, 'I
don't like to be at my desk,' I might pull out my feng
shui info and see if maybe it should be facing a
different direction," says Davenport. "If that doesn't
work for them, I might refer them to Loralee."
Makela, in turn, may see a client whose clutter seems
out of control and suggest Davenport's help. Davenport
recognizes that different strokes work for different
folks. "The great thing about hiring women who are in
their 40s," she says, "is that you not only get their
technical wisdom, you get their life wisdom."
Hiring Davenport is like getting an earth mother to hold
your hand, while calmly pointing out your blind spots.
She once suggested to a client, whose office was piled
high with notebooks, that a bookcase might be in order.
"She said, 'Omigod! You're a genius!' I felt guilty for
charging her."
Her "spousal unit," as he calls himself, Bob Tierney,
says he was never surprised by Davenport's success in
business. "She has a charm, a drive," says Tierney. "All
good minds have this underlying drive to be the best and
go from there."
Today, Davenport feels she has hit upon the thing, the
talent, she has to contribute to the world. "My mission
is to increase people's productivity while decreasing
their stress," she says. She keeps a bust of Nostradamus
in the place of spirituality and knowledge, per feng
shui, on a tall cabinet behind her desk. "He's a symbol
to me to not be too attached to anything I'm doing," she
says. "If you're going to be successful in business, you
have to stay on the bleeding edge of what's going on."
Davenport thinks that in time, the business of
organizing will be called the simplicity movement. "And
in a sense, that's what I'm doing now," she says,
"telling people how to simplify their lives." |
