Some people have asked why I’m growing a mustache and raising money to support awareness and improvement of men’s health this year. After all, Movember has taken place annually for ten years now, but I’ve never participated. What motivated me to jump in now?

In July 2012, my stepfather, Fritz Triebold, was diagnosed with bladder cancer. He subsequently received a series of six injections of Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine to kill the cancerous areas on the wall of his bladder. BCG treatment is a form of immunotherapy that involves flooding the bladder with live tuberculosis bacteria, which have been found to kill cancer cells in the bladder in 67% of all cases. Immediately following each of the treatments, he would come home and sleep for a few hours, then endure several days of pain related to the insertion and eventual removal of the catheter he was required to use. Not much fun.

My dad was retested for active cancer earlier this year. Unfortunately, the first series of treatments did not fully eradicate the disease, so he underwent another course of six treatments. While the experience wasn’t easier the second time, Dad was both more tolerant of the pain and more positive in his outlook. Hopes were high that he would be cancer-free when he was retested at the end of the second intervention.

And he was.

Dad’s bladder has been clear of cancer since last month. However, his doctors want him to undergo three more BCG treatments, just to be sure. This is standard procedure, but it means that there will be more pain and queasiness for my Dad to deal with, probably early next year.

This ordeal will always be remembered by our family. One way for me to do so is by participating in Movember, which aims to raise awareness of, and funds to combat, mens’ health issues. Bladder cancer may seem like an egalitarian disease, but statistics show that men are three times more likely to develop it than women. Approximately 23,000 American men will contract bladder cancer in a given year and about 5,000 of them will die as a result.

I hope you will join me by making a generous donation to Movember. Your gift will help our family celebrate Dad’s victory over bladder cancer and fund related awareness and treatment efforts for others. Please make a donation, in whatever amount you can afford, on my Movember page today. Thanks!

Ten years ago, the Movember movement was begun to raise awareness of mens’ health issues. Thirty men in Melbourne, Australia shaved on November 1, 2003 and let only their mustaches grow for the rest of the month. The attention generated by the appearance of a new patch of hair under their noses gave these men (Mo Bros in Movember vernacular) an opportunity to start conversations about mens’ health concerns and to raise money to help address them.

This ritual has since spread across the globe and grown to include women (Mo Sistas) who officially register for Movember, support men in their lives who are participating and actively fundraise for the cause. Initially, the Movember movement focused on diseases that are unique to men, such as prostate and testicular cancer. Over the years, the scope has broadened to cover any physical or mental illness that may afflict a man. You can learn more about Movember by checking out the movement’s website.

I have decided to join the Movember movement this year and have a six-day old mustache as proof. I’ll detail the reasons why in forthcoming posts. For now, let it suffice to say that 2013 has seen some bouts with poor health suffered by both me and a family member. If you’d like to follow my adventure, hit my Movember webpage once a week for updates.

I’m asking you, and anyone else who would like to help men improve their health, to make a donation today to the Movember movement. I’ve primed the pump by giving $500. Should you wish to join me, you may make a donation here  It doesn’t need to be large; even $10 or $20 gift helps by showing that you care about the health of one or more of the men in your life. Of course, your donation will be tax deductible, and the Movember movement will send you a receipt for use with your 2013 income tax filing.

Please join me in elevating the conversation about mens’ health and giving money to combat physical and mental diseases that degrade the quality of mens’ lives. I hope you will be as generous as you can. Thank you!

I first met Carl in 1999, when I interviewed for a job at the Delphi Group, which he had co-founded a few years earlier. Our initial meeting, which was scheduled for an hour, expanded into a conversation that lasted well over five and a half hours. When I left his office that day, I had no doubt that I very much wanted to work for and with Carl. Such was the immediate and overwhelmingly positive effect of his large personality.

I reported directly to Carl during just my first two years at Delphi, but he mentored me throughout my employment there and beyond. In fact, on separate occasions within the last month, I sought out Carl’s guidance on a professional matter, and he presented me with a potential business opportunity. I knew I could always turn to him for not only advice, but also for active assistance.

To say that Carl was a mentor is actually an understatement, because he treated me almost as if I were his son. I was always overjoyed by the pride he displayed when I performed well. On one occasion, I failed a potential client (and Carl, by extension), leading to Carl being so intensely disappointed in me that neither he nor I ever forgot the incident.

After hours, Carl was a delight to be with. I have many fond memories of eating, drinking and laughing with him , mostly while we were on the road serving a client or working a Delphi event. Carl nearly always had a joke or an entertaining story to tell. I will forever remember the two exhausting, exhilerating weeks we spent together in Western Europe, where we worked very long days on behalf of our client, but found time to have fun later in the evening or on a rare day off. Perhaps the best stretch of that trip took place in Milan. Carl always openly and enthusiastically celebrated his Italian heritage, and he was literally in his element while we were in Italy.

In fact, Carl was a bundle of contradictions. High strung and easy going. Profound and vulgar. Deeply serious and (more frequently) smiling and laughing. A very active and competent speaker, but also one of the best listeners I have ever encountered. Someone with many insightful answers, but also an unparalleled ability to ask the right questions.

I have learned so much from Carl over the last decade plus. Anyone who is at all concerned with Information or Knowledge Management has. His too-soon passing leaves an enormous hole in those fields and an even bigger void my life. Goodbye, Carl, and thank you for the genuine concern and compassion you displayed to me and everyone you encountered. Thank you for teaching me so much about consulting, business and being a good person. Rest in peace.

If you knew, met or were otherwise impacted by Carl, please consider remembering him by making a donation in his name to the Italian Home for Children, located in Boston.

This post has been moved to http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryhawes/2013/02/28/marissa-mayers-yahoo-mistake-its-not-what-you-think/

Yammer announced on Wednesday that it has acquired oneDrum, a UK-based provider of file sharing and collaborative editing tools for Microsoft Office users. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. oneDrum’s technology and people will be integrated into Yammer.

In a briefing on the acquisition, Yammer CTO and Co-Founder, Adam Pisoni, stated that the deal was done to quickly accelerate movement toward Yammer’s primary strategic objective – to be the social layer, spanning key enterprise applications, in which its customers (and their extended business networks) get work done.

Yammer’s action is consistent with its strategy to release usable, but not ideal, functionality and then improve upon it as quickly as possible. Yammer introduced the homegrown Files component into its suite late last year. With oneDrum’s technology, Yammer will be able to improve its Files component by enabling syncing of files to desktop folders and mobile devices, as well as automatic sharing of new and updated files with other members of Yammer groups. As usual, Yammer seeks to occupy the middle ground, offering file sharing functionality that has some of the necessary enterprise-grade security and manageability that consumer Web services lack, while retaining as much ease-of-use as possible. Yammer’s ability to balance complexity and usability is what differentiates it from the majority of the other enterprise social software offerings in the market.

The current file creation and editing capabilities available in the Pages component of Yammer will be nicely complemented by the introduction of oneDrum’s ability to co-create and co-edit Office files (Excel and PowerPoint now, Word in development) with others. Many may interpret the addition of this capability, together with the added file sync and sharing functionality, as an indirect attack on Microsoft SharePoint by Yammer. Pisoni clearly stated that Yammer will continue to offer customers integrations with SharePoint, as well as with Box, Dropbox and other content repositories. He did, however, acknowledge that while Yammer is not intentionally targeting SharePoint, many of its customers see their Yammer networks negating existing SharePoint use cases.

Yammer’s real target appears to be email, which offers a single place where people may communicate, share content and get work done. Pisoni spoke about the symbiotic relationship between content and conversation in social networks, as well as the blurring line between content and communication. The former is clearly demonstrated by the frequency in which enterprise (and consumer) social interactions are anchored around a specific piece of content, whether that be a traditional document, blog post, wiki entry, status update, audio snippet, photo or video. The latter is evidenced by the growing enterprise use of blog posts, wiki entries and, especially, status updates to share content (and explicit knowledge) in small chunks, rather than waiting to gather it in a document that is distributed by email.

Pisoni’s assertion that the distinction between content and communication is blurring is interesting, but less persuasive. Much of the asynchronous communication within organizations is still only secondary to the content that is contained in attached (or linked) files. Corporate email use as a transmission mechanism for documents is a clear, common example. Yammer’s vision for decreasing email volume appears to involve using oneDrum’s support for real-time chat between individuals working together in an Office document (Excel and PowerPoint only at present) as a means to blend content and communication to help people get work done faster. It will be interesting to see if Yammer network members adopt this envisioned way of working as an alternative to entrenched communication and content sharing norms.

oneDrum was not well known in the U.S., as it was a very small vendor with a beta status offering. However, it appears that Yammer has made a good acquisition that will help the company, and its customers, address the changing nature of business organizations and work. The devil, of course, is in the details, so we will have to watch and see how well Yammer assimilates its first acquired company.