Having spent an exciting decade+ bring what I uniquely offer to the workplace I have had many conversations with the next generation of technical and business leaders. Common among the thoughtful, is the struggle with their identity and the assimilating with the institution they engage with.

The corporate kool-aid is all the stuff the current business feels you need to embody in order to help continue the success of the institution. We drink it through the management team, internal messaging, external advertising, customer perception and market perception. It is enforced by the actions individuals and the business take to express its values and positions around various interests. The individual needs to resolve their own values and views against that of the current company and the historical institution. People get jaded when they feel like the kool-aid signals are not genuine, or if they see themselves acting because of direction, they disagree with or cannot reconcile.

The corporate kool-aid is sweetened for you, but you need to help make it even better!

The simplest way to stay sober while drinking the corporate kool-aid is to understand who you are, what you uniquely bring and what is the business and institution you work with bringing to the party. Understanding the signals of the organization you work for is important to execute today’s business. What you bring as an individual helps create tomorrow’s business and for that matter, the future kool-aid. If you lose your point of view, you become a passenger on the train, and that is an easy place to be cynical. Not everyone wants to be a leader, but if you do, not having a point of view makes you dangerous if you end up in a place of leadership. My guess is there is room for the pass-through-leader in larger organizations, but there shouldn’t be. It is natural to be influenced by your surroundings, but to rise above the cattle means you influence back.

More often than not, people don’t really understand the business they are a part of; they underestimate the amount of influence they can have, and they don’t know who they are. The quickest way to get a lobotomy is to ask anyone other than yourself who and how you want to be. Figuring out who you are is a good and exciting aspect of life and the better clarity you have in that internal mirror the easier it is to engage with people and employers from a position of interest and balance.

Balance is a constant struggle, so if you find yourself feeling blissful, what around you could use a little of your something special touch. If you are not helping to make better kool-aid, please stop complaining about that taste in your mouth.

Today, you might inherit a box of photographs from generations past. My daughter will inherit her parents’ and to a lesser extent grandparents’ digital identities – and all that makes you consider – what is it that she gets?

She gets the IDs and passwords to web hosting accounts where countless hours have been spent writing, editing and SEOing. It use to be you tried to leave enough behind so that your loved ones were not burdened with untimely expenses of departure. Now, to do right by them, you need a trust to pay for all the digital services we subscribe to. Either that or face the digital trash bin where photos that no longer have any sentimental feelings go.

With Facebook in news with their IPO paper work, I wonder what would happen if for some reason a world disaster occurred deleting 50% of the profiles. Forget the impact to the company, what would people do with all that living gone lost? This criticality speaks to the value people place with FaceBook‘s future, but ultimately should have everyone wondering, what would we do if we actually had to show up to live? Did all that stuff really happen if my timeline doesn’t show it? Is “checking in” proof I did something? How about the GPS coordinates of my phone – is that where I am? Sure glad it’s all for entertainment purposes, for a minute I was getting nervous.

Unfortunately many of our children will likely grow up knowing no other way and reality is subjective making the permanence of things different, not better or worse, just different.

It’s estimated that the average human has 60,000 thoughts a day. This is not surprising. What is disconcerting is that 90% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday. Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Ever since I read this passage as a teenager one of my goals was to do better than repeating 90% rethink. One way I tried to accomplish this was to be endlessly curious about anything and everything. I carefully investigated, considered and questioned what appeared to be an unrelated set of interests. Of course, I was the rhyme to my reason knitting together my evolving point of view and discovering what makes me tic.

Experiences in doing are not only tied to a person’s day job. In fact what someone is interested in on the side is often more interesting than the remarkable but expected accomplishments of talented professionals. For me, this year launched a new chapter in my family with the arrival of my daughter in August.  She is currently amazed by her hands, that they are useful and more recently that they are her own. Babies may be sponges, learning all the time, but parents are blessed with the opportunity to learn as well in a deep and personal ways. Sleepless nights are rewarded with knowing how precisely delicate a baby’s breath can be – subtly sweet and endlessly delicious. Our daughter gets the majority of our attention and in turn the things we use to make time for get brutally prioritized (Did you notice the gap in posts!). It also drives a new level of communication and compromise as mother and father work as a team to ensure things get done despite the competing desires.

Recently I was on a three month assignment to a large customer in the healthcare industry working through what cloud computing could mean for their business. This was an opportunity to diversify – as a professional and as a family. Sadie was just old enough to travel and my wife was on maternity leave – off to California we went. I had the luxury of working full time as part of the customer, leveraging my connections into IBM to help drive value. From first day to last it was endless learning about the good, bad and ugly from some very special people. It has irreversibly changed my understanding and insight – a priceless experience. For my family it was an adventure trying out a different land and experiencing the time warp of not being in Eastern Standard Time. Points of view are relative to the perceiver and it helps to be reminded how fragile that “reality” is.

We settled on a great area of Oakland called Rockridge. It reminded us of Brooklyn – strategically located with more diversity in people, food and shopping. It also came with stadium seating of the Occupy Oakland dance and what seemed like daily violence. California in general seems to need to go to driver education. On any given morning a mostly sober population of motoring public gets into no less than half a dozen accidents on the major roadways. I know there are a lot of people etc. but have you seen the size of these roads?! Like anything there are many contributing reasons, but it begs the question as to why a place has such an impact on its people – so is true in the workplace.

If diversity of doing is a desirable element in developing greater talent and creating remarkable teams then there too is a responsibility to create a climate and environment to enable such performance. One without the other is having this amazing thing called a hand, but not knowing its yours.

Consider what you have seen in the social software landscape and ask yourself why the actor is almost always the sense maker. Why is it that there is an explosion of great social islands but a pathetic showing on how to leverage that information to create richer, contextual spaces? Most of the time solution designers attempt to create context employing a nicely designed banner and carefully selected color pallet. Unfortunately, the skin is only but a small element of context and while I believe that people are ultimately required to appreciate the meaning of a given confluence, we could do a better job surfacing interesting information and enabling interaction. One of the fatal flaws with traditional portals is the visual and physical boundary of information. There was a time when products enabled connecting one portlet to another, but failed to resolve that portlets do not inherently know how to collaborate with each other, a design activity outside of the technology. Unfortunately, some of our best examples of dynamic experience modification are also some of the most annoying commercial applications. You have to love the real-time markup of content where hovering over a word opens a thought bubble and video obscuring the content. Given a strong page framework and similar techniques integration could be this fluid and easily less irritating – a very simple example, abused, justly hated and hopefully soon to be abandoned.

Opportunities to do more have been around for years, and yet it feels as if the social technology landscape has just stalled. The best work is not even web bound, but device focused now. There is so much to do; I would think it would inspire people to push a little harder to realize the next revolution of user experience instead of hanging out in the kiddy pool all day.

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.

Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.

Lehrer ends presenting…

One of the main remaining controversies for sleep researchers is whether or not REM dreams are a mere side-effect of a subterranean process – this would suggest that the narratives themselves don’t matter – or are actually a core feature of the sleep-remembering cycle. This is an academic question with plenty of practical relevance, as it will determine whether or not it’s worth recounting our dreams in polite conversation.

Regardless of the potential findings people respond to storytelling as a method of engagement and understanding. Stories provide context for other more important content. Done well it involves the listener in a mentally interactive exercise making it easier for them to find meaning and relate the underlying messages to other important ideas. Dreams may be a “side-effect of a subterranean process” but it would be such a waste of fantastic stories.

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