The last mile of any journey is bittersweet. A lot of energy, expense and time are expended to reach it. Often the last mile is actually thousands of miles, because the vastness of the vision is practically unreachable. The vision is the direction and target, not the plan. Building the plan to mirror the vision ensures the project will never conclude. This seems obvious, but seems to pervade all walks of business. Superficial understanding of the vision creates mediocrity.

Consider the next wave generation with a more progressive attitude towards life and work. Their relationship with the Company is fundamentally different – faithful until they find another. The idea that they would come, go and return is highly probable. Challenges exist in the brain churn as talent moves through and efforts sustain beyond their presence. Travel the last mile with the next wave generation and you will lose your talent while they grow tired of waiting for you to realize that the last mile is less rewarding. Making it even part way toward the light is more engaging and interesting. Success can be experienced and value realized – talk about really being agile!

A leader’s ability to embody a vision and practically plot a course that nurtures talent and delivers value is one of the ultimate performance measures. Avoiding last mile marathons focuses all the attention on the actions and deliverables that bring short and even long term value. An organization might still desire the last mile, but planning for it is next to dreaming. Boats use lighthouses to navigate the waters, not dock their ship.

Understanding what makes great software developers needs to become a top imperative or everyone’s desire to successfully leverage the developing economies of the globe will result in the next decade of disastrous implementation. We will all literally be digging out of the worst collection of computer code the world has ever seen. This is not to say programmers in developing countries are not capable of creating great code – clearly that would be too broad a generalization. What I am saying is that there is a core set of existing developers – waves one through five – that have created the software and network conscious of the world. That experience and knowledge is not easily portable locally or internationally. More needs to be done to consider the ways in which we grow developers. The fact that everyone is quick to move to emerging markets is simply exacerbating the fact that the Western world contains much of the building blocks everyone takes for granted.

There are classes of programmers that have never written the basic code to connect a web application to a database. They use any number of indirect frameworks to achieve what is a relatively straight forward activity. It may be laborious, but it also results in a development team that understands what is happening at every moment in the system. Delegate to someone else and your risk is that whatever was to be done is performed less well than if you performed the task yourself. There are plenty that will tell you it is a given since it’s the only way to scale yourself as a person. When we are talking about computer code the exposure is as great as the worst written code. Perfection is not required, but ignorance is worse.

I recently got passed the essay Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford and with a little positioning should be the playbook for America’s future – possibly, eventually, the world. Crawford does a delightful job exploring what it means to be engaged in a trade – its scarcity, importance and value.

My recent gap in blog posts reflects that my life got too busy to support the usual post – selling a house, buying a house, moving and building out a studio to compliment the changing lifestyle. I share this because it is likely the first time I took on the challenge of building something by hand that I would usually create with money. There is no shortage of cerebral activity in building and Shop Class as Soulcraft makes this point well. It is easy to liken it to software programming in that you need to understand fundamental principles – logic, algorithms, design patterns etc. This is not much different than a builder understanding material strength, stability and appropriate use. Programmers feel the same pride and satisfaction from code well-built as a trade person elegantly executing their craft. While there is a notion of mentorship and hierarchy the trades have a more structured concept around apprenticeship. This is a critical aspect acknowledging that some of the knowledge to be had is hard if not impossible to distil or consume in traditional forms. Experience efficiently encodes more information that our conscious mind processes, yet our beings embody the knowledge.

There is no shortage of computer programmers in the world, yet there is a dearth of individual and shared development experiences. We can’t expect everyone to live through the trials of personal computers or the Internet, but we do need to bridge the gap or not only will we repeat history, but we won’t have enough people to fix it all when it is broken. No different, Crawford points out that with the dwindling ranks in the trades the individual that understands how to do something with their minds and hands will become the most important person in the village. While I clearly agree for the need to embrace the world’s crafts, I believe we are facing an epidemic that must be reversed. Just as the established markets have created a pile of stinking code, failing to pass knowledge to newer generations, we extend the work to nations that have even less shared knowledge. We must apply the methods of the trades to software development or fail faster before the shared knowledge ceases to exist.

I will wear a blue collar any day since it transcends what use to imply class and embodies a healthier balance of being. Read Shop Class as Soulcraft and figure out how to help fix us before we are broken.

All of the Honda videos are personal, intimate and provoke the question – so, now that you have seen this, what do you plan to do? These people have stories, you should have stories too. Where are you going? How do you plan to get there? Why isn’t the destination something you are not sure of – that escapes current reason – that is beyond current horizon?

Everyone knows that failure is a necessary part of innovation. However, failure often has social consequences that inhibit real innovation. To get to the future, we need to invent it. Along the way we will face trials and learn from those failures. How tolerant are you of failure? How often are you failing? How do you know if you are not failing enough? When rich with success people tend to ride the wave instead of continuing to manage their innovation on the failure line. Managing innovation often means managing culture and that is often at the root of poorly run engine.

Great people believe in impossible visions. If you don’t plan on having your own dream, latch on and believe in someone else’s so that at least you are not a passenger or a piece of furniture. Spend your day doing things that align with your personal values and you will naturally lead or find others that share the same passion.

Watch the videos. Get inspired. Kick out the ladder.

There is a lot to learn from past experience – if there is enough in common context. There are endless factors as to why things happened they way they did. Often the context is radically complicated. My guess is that war historians face this often. The context of a given war is a scope that can be appreciated but only broadly learned from. Specific battles however, can be abstracted as patterns for future engagements. Executives at large companies often play a game of “big boy” chess working agendas in the marketplace that may take five to ten years to deliver. They balance their need for immediate returns with the clever game of creating future business. Watched too closely an employee may think a high level executive is missing both opportunities – it is all about context!

Looking for inspiration outside of your specific domain is an excellent way to ensure you are not repeating yourself. My dad always said, if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always gotten. History is an informing resource not a road map – the context is often too different to offer the play book most people are looking for. By reaching to other domains, you create interdisciplinary connections and innovation.

A few years ago the IT world was drunk with the concept of mashups, where a web hacker type would take the services exposed by more than one application and assemble it in a meaningful way. You will remember this phase because the most profound examples had content plotted on a geographic map. One had to wonder, is the radical new approach the introduction of extendible, shareable map services or the introduction of a new programming paradigm? Mashups permeated popular culture to the point that at the time a hot new show Glee used it as a creative way to create new music for the cast to perform – a music mashup. Mr. Schuester, the Glee club faculty member, would mix two songs together and challenge the students to do the same. The IT world has moved onto other booze, but the Glee Empire found a new way of introducing more related, varied and original content into their production. YouTube is filled with content mash. Similar to the desirability of adopting a mutt at the pound, I quickly take the derivative over the original. Mutts embody diversity. Derivative choices often have the benefit of more information. Let the thousand flowers bloom, pick one and when it dies, pick another – if you are paying attention you will get better. Some people get really good at picking the right ones, but rest assured most are bad. The key is not losing what was at the heart of the original. It is all about context. Ever look at Seurat’s La Grande Jatte up close and in person?

Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte by George-Pierre Seurat

Seek out diversity in both your references and the level at which you examine. Past experience might let you question what you see – objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. In the 1999 block buster The Matrix, Neo speaks to a little boy that apparently knows how to bend spoons.

A screen shot of the bending spoon from The Matrix

Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Boy: There is no spoon.

Neo: There is no spoon?

Boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Quote from IMDB.

 

Sometimes you get what you always got because you can’t see you are repeating yourself. Stop acting drunk and disorderly and get yourself a pint of diversity.

People do it all the time and yet complain that they haven’t traveled as far. That is not to say taking breaks from some of the journey is not important – heck required – they are! Your daily life diversity makes you better at everything you do. It is what makes you uniquely qualified to do something remarkable. In the variety of things you do, how far down is the gas pedal?

From the moment of conception, we are dying. Life is not a dress rehearsal, yet we deliberate over most of our waking moments. It is this that makes time so precious. We have plenty of time, but spend it and spread it thin, leaving fragmented leftovers. Time and attention management skills go beyond the workplace helping you more effectively execute your priorities. What are your priorities?

If you know what is important and have the intensity to focus and dedicate time to those things, then your foot is on the gas moving you in all the right directions. When your foot falls asleep make sure you look around and make sure you are where you intended to be. Finding yourself off course is less critical than moving quickly and correcting direction – think of it like Agile development for living.

Microsoft asked “Where do you want to go today?” with the help of Wieden+Kennedy, a bold question in a time where computers were in the infancy of becoming bullet train to station you. Aspire to the grander responsibility of making a better you by spending your time attentively on the activities you love. Along the way help everyone you can do the same. Stop fretting over the destinations and start getting there intently. How we do what we do is as important as the doing and destination. The world is happy to pay you to do less. What is your time worth?

Inspired in part by:

Music by The XX

Attention and Intelligence by Johna Lehrer

Riding my newly acquired 2004 MV Agusta Brutale

Time is one of the key battles marketing message fight. Given enough time, anyone can sell anything (ideas or products), some better than others. People have been told time is money and usually that is true for the other person – your time is someone else’s money. Someone else’s time is likely yours. As such, marketing messages are short and repetitive – visually and aurally. It gets cleverer when the messages appear genuinely – products placed in unassuming ways that relate activity or quality to the product or service. Simplified messages attack the largest audience to force an action – thought or behavior. How much of what we know is fabricated?

Science and technology folks are all about details and complexity. One cannot fully appreciate wonders without understanding the complexity – one of the reasons we know less than we should. Scientists strive for truth or work with it to change it. Exactness is important. Any fudge work is noted and already calculated to be insignificant in the context of a more import result. They are biased, but their motives are purer. Of course corruption exists everywhere, so absolutes are tough to swallow. Scientific evidence is often positioned to accentuate the beauty but hid the wrinkles. We hold beliefs that are not always proven by a scientist or better yet ourselves-we call this faith. What do you have faith in?

I am not as interest in what people have faith in as much as that they do so readily. With good marketing, people believe and behave under the influence. People are generally anxious about mind control yet almost everything has been fabricated and more importantly specifically for you and people like you. As much as we are individuals we are actually more alike than not – scarily alike when it comes to what you think, what you believe and what you buy.

We are all participants in being under the influence

It is no wonder that so many people in the fields of communication, branding and marketing feel so powerful – their message in total create so much of the world. They start as the rock falling into the pond allowing ripples to hit us as they may. They drop more pebbles at the right times reinforcing messages, creating relationships and intimate richness. They are the origin and orchestration of the following conversation in what appears to be naturally occurring ripples. As individuals we faithfully internalize, reform and repeat – generating thoughts and actions that others listen to. These messages become defining attributes. Many people like fine wine, food, clothes, automobiles and the latest personal technology. Many desire upgrades to their current lifestyle in those ways and aspire for private jets, multiple homes in multiple countries and more. People consume what is made consumable. The rate of new content production for the individual is slower than the rate of content an individual produces based on someone else’s content. How much of what you think is new? When you talk, how much of what you say is something someone else said? How much of what you feel is yours?

Marketing messages create physiological changes in our understanding of reality – they are not artificial impacts. What is suspect is the initial message we chose to have faith in. If we inspected every message for such qualities we would crawl to a halt. It is not practical and, for better or worse, we are unavoidably consuming. This is excellent news for those who actually know how to communicate. The power to create the world’s thought and behavior is in the hands of those that strike clear and simple messages, rooted in fact and garnished in fashion.

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.

Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.

In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.

There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.

Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?

Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.

What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.

Incentives are a common method of influencing behavior. The most powerful of which communicate social or professional status – titles or black credit cards. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an executive with a fancy title, but the meaning of such a label has power within the organization and possibly with other groups that identify with similar notions. Everyone else, especially an indigenous tribe in a far away land, has no idea what it means. Creative workplaces often poke fun at organizational structures encouraging titles to be fun – Guru of Internet happiness. It is easy to not realize why what you desire is fabricated. Ensuring the “why” of “what” comes from you and not someone else is the key to freedom.

Breaking free from your organization makes you a more effective contributor. It is impossible for your relationship with an organization not to contribute to your identity. The longer you groove over the same mental and physical paths the more efficient traversing these passageways become. Realizing any path is possible often means breaking some of the psychological and physiological habits associated with the current context – the more deep the groove the more resistance and pain involved in changing. This can be an emotional break up where the individual is reorganizing and reestablishing the relationship with the organization. People tend to change organizations instead of changing their conception of the organization – guaranteed to repeat the pattern. Your organization defines you, but you can define the organization and leave and define something else somewhere else if need be. The terms of your contract are not to be a hamster in a running wheel. That is just what happens when people accept things as they are.

1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years [1999-2001].

3. Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet – contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls – including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

How much information? 2003, Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

All of which is insanely outdated considering YouTube alone was only founded in 2005 and yet the community produces and views more content than all the commercial production houses – consider in 2008 10 hours of video per minute were uploaded to the site. Since the 2003 study of 2002’s information explosion, we can safely say it has only grown in magnitude since. The eruption of information could easily bee seen as an individual’s need to communicate, which brings us to the modern day where a considerable amount of content is being created, vetted and spread by social networks.

Aric Sigman authored an interesting article in the February issue of Biologist titled, “Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, where he presents various findings and side effects of our social affliction.

Britons now spend approximately 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people (ONS, 2003). Couples now spend less time in one another’s company and more time at work, commuting, or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic media devices.

The Office for National Statistics has just reported that “over the last two decades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group.

A study by the Children’s Society recently found that television alone is displacing the parental role, eclipsing “by a factor of five or ten the time parents spend actively engaging with children”. Another ongoing study reports that 25% of British five-year olds own a computer or laptop of their own. In particular, the study noted an enormous increase in ‘social networking’ among younger children which “has overtaken fun (online games) as the main reason to use the Internet”.

“Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, Aric Sigman, Biologist

All of this is shown to affect health and for that matter society. Family is a historically critical element of survival. It is the embedded network that should be active for life.   Yet, we see that even among married couples there is less interaction even when sharing the same physical spaces. Consider that population of 25-44 year olds that are living alone and likely having less long-term intimacy and as such fewer babies. One could see this as an expression of independence. Either way, it is an alarming trait. We are expressing more than ever, constructing our identity, in some cases identities, and yet are physically more alone than ever. The Internet equals social equals the primary content of our youth, bypassing the parental input that has developed generations prior.

One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them.

Teens’ nude photos get unexpected results, Irene Sege, Boston Globe

It is not surprising that teens would use their devices to express their sexual curiosity and interests. The porn industry paved the way for almost all commercial transactions, streaming video technology and collaboration tools. Scary, but true. Mobile devices make it easy for our pervy teens to be more out there than ever. If you can see it on FaceBook, you know the real material is floating over the mobile network. One might conclude that this level of openness is part of a generation change and thus a societal shift. There are likely others hoping our virtual fetish means teens are not having sex, clearly not the case. Sigman (the guy who write the article for the Biologist) was making a point, that it is not common for a physician to advise on a patients sex life, and yet he feels that is exactly what needs to happen. As we grow further apart, we lose some of what keeps us healthy (sexual intimacy being part of that). Teens sext, teens have sex and yet as a society we have less meaningful relationships. What exactly would Sigman have to say about this? Maybe we need to do a study on our youth, as they are the future of the world, we just get to help avoid self-destruction a while longer.

The information explosion and social networking storm are replacing the therapeutic and developmental tools of the past. Instead of parents and therapists, people are in a constant creation and editing of their identities through new media. If the online world is the safe place to explore one’s self, then why has it become a destination to a better reality? What is fascinating is that our growing immersion into a hyper-virtual-reality, where we mentally masturbate around all things “me”, is removing us from our social reality where our developed selves act and all the while, evolving into a sexually explicit twittified frenzy. Forgive me, I missed the sexting revolution, I was too busy typing on my BlackBerry, what was that?

There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.

Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.

Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.