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The Tyranny of the Immediacy of Now

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:23:00 +0000

I was traipsing through the NYT Magazine's best ideas of the year edition and happened on "The 2000s were a great decade." It's a desultory oxide of a rust-gathering irony that an article designed to elevate perspective-gathering contradicts its own sense-making. The 00s? The uh-ohs? What opinion are we rounding off to which decimal place?

Here in world-is-flat matter-of-factness, the current century is shrink-wrapped as bite-sized summaries. They're easier to maintain, cheaper to make, and grant us permission to close the books on the nameless decade.

Remember that decade? It begins with a Y2K bridge to the 21st Century and ends in the rear view yearning for some fantasy period -- lost innocence for sure. Was it a lost ... century? Really? What generation is self-important enough to warrant that responsibility? The naming rights are still open bid.

The New York Times Magazine article maintains that the drumbeat of boom-bust recyclables delivers us passenger/audience dwellers within the awareness range of the 24 X 7 squad car dispatchers. The static in our ear buds is tuned to a closed circuit of finites, futilities and fatalisms:

"Two recessions. 9/11. Iraq. Afghanistan. You might think the last decade was among the worst in modern history. But according to the economist Charles Kenny, author of “Getting Better,” a forthcoming book on global development, you’d be wrong."

The passage moves on to echo Mr. Kenny's cheerful aggregates:

* Average worldwide income up 25%
* Cereal production outpaces 3rd world population growth by half
* Mortality rates from measles plummet 60%, from birth, 17%, and so on

The numbers shrug at our self-centered pessimism and smile on our civilizing progress. It's a greater time to be alive than us grousing romantics might concede. Have we overstayed our welcome in the new century? Time to get on texting terms with the social media bureaucracy, right?

But where exactly does human progress part company with personal experience? It may be the time in human history where our own personal histories were severed from an abstraction of greater consequence to our lives. Encouraging factoids be damned. That was the moment we reached constant communications and the false and implicit assumption that "instantaneous" equals "understanding." It's a disservice to human potential and achievement that a reproducible world of zeros and ones can accurately portray and scale the sum of human experience in a pre-digitized form.

(One promising departure from our immediacy fixation is Google's NGram -- a byproduct of Google's literal assault on digitizing all things punctuated. Here in the 2.0-teens it's a little like the 1860s and we're seeing the dinosaurs in the headlights for the first time.)

The passing of the nameless decade is celebrated in the the pages of the current issue of BusinessWeek. A retrospective on the first ten years of recorded Wikipedia history is a breathless reverie on how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill clocks a Wikipedia entry before the rig inferno burns out. Even this afternoon here comes the health status of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, one ER procedure after the same massacre claims six other victims.

Conversely the fluid and bending fashions of Wikipedia's self-selecting editorial staff skews the importance of group pastimes far beyond their merit as cultural influences:

"Popular cultural looms large. The entry for the game Halo, for example, is significantly longer than the one for the Protestant Reformation."

This kind of self-identity cuts us off from divinations that run deeper than any religious sect -- let alone gaming application.The tyranny of the immediacy of now there is no longer a grace period or a honeymoon or the requisite down time to take in the tumult of disruptive events and accord them the proportion, connectedness, and possible redress they deserve.

Thinking on our feet is important for remaining on them. It's our grace under pressure when we refuse to be overcome by events not of our design or intention. But running to a rescue or maintaining serene calm in the most perfect of storms doesn't confer a clear understanding of the chaos we are wrestling with in these volatile and eruptive moments. Likewise our poise does not impart a deeper connection to why these catastrophic cinders rain down on us, no matter how laudable the march or modest the parade.

Faith is a partial answer. Much of this is beyond us. But the missing human ingredient in all of this is the biggest picture. It is the deeper pre-digitized history that places us in the historical context that we once called our calling or destiny. This biggest picture shows us that our own blood is no bloodier, our own adversities are no mightier, and our own bruised hopes are no less romantic than our forebears.

This is the slow resolve of wondering off the network reservation and letting in the days. These are the days that we share freely with our predecessors and the unborn. The limits to the biggest picture are not measured in lifetimes or pixels but in the ancestral community of living memories.

Higher Edification

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 03:08:00 +0000

Fear is terrific for meeting deadlines, demonizing adversaries, and filling us with inertia. Freedom as Jon Stewart pointed out is not the best tonic for creative output. But the fear contagion squeezes those last drips of inspiration from the creativity juicer. There they go. Down the drain of risk aversion. Hence a climate of uncertainty is all corporate America needs to sits on its hands -- or in the case of Haliburton move to Dubai so taxes can be treated with the respect a balance sheet treats pure profit -- a revenue-gusher harpooned from the veiny arms of the U.S. Treasury.

And what happens when Government 2.0 takes matters into its own hands? It trips over its own unfunded regulations or runs into corruption on highway projects that overbill taxpayers with the same confidence that our officials voice when campaigning to fix our crumbling infrastructure.

These are the familiar invective-laced villains that managed to escape economic gravity up until the end-of-life care for the American middle-class (remember when that was an actual voting bloc? I don't either). But there's a whole section of the economy that's escaped the wrath of every cable diatribunal. It's even escaped the sights of the most vehement members of the tea party freshman class. In fact a March showdown over the debt ceiling is likelier to see the chandeliers crashing on well-heeled Medicare recipients than any fingers wagging in the direction of this most elitist and blameworthy of our domestic cartels.

American higher education is the envy of the world. But it is in the unenviable position of being out of the reach of most Americans. According to Jonathan Alter America's college graduation rates have plummeted from #2 to #16 over the last generation. And how much of the swelling amenities lining the tax exempt pockets of American Universities gone to enriching the commonweal for which that privilege was first extended? And why the free ride? Harvard doesn't have to move to Dubai to evade taxes. (That's where the action is for American Universities as they tap out of the elites over here).

Here in New England (formerly American Higher Education headquarters) 40% of Boston proper is off Mayor Menino's tax map for this reason. But does that policy foster good collegial neighbors or a trust for sheltering the otherwise taxable excesses of former HBS grads who never counted a dollar they couldn't depreciate (or compete on)?

Harvard's trustees weren't sure just how far the sky had fallen by the time its endowments had shriveled in the wake of the financial meltdown. It also served as the reason that major capital works in surrounding Allston were suspended -- even though that justification has since subsided. But hey, the future's still an iffy proposition, right? Especially for an asset pile as high, precious, and potentially imperiled as the Harvard endowment.

It's interesting how unquestioning the media is. Is a college degree worth getting? The question's no more open than bargaining for the size of one's tuition bill. In fact it's a rigorous debate compared to performance-based degree programs. Can you imagine basing student tuition debts on the actual career benefits the degree advances? No skin in that game.

Still, it's good for the higher ed business if we accept the long-held premise that college grads earn a good deal more than the rest of us. In last week's New York Times Brigham & Young Economist Eric Eide reasoned that the costs of college are not going up any "faster than the returns of graduating from an elite private university." In other words the cost of an ivy league degree is commensurate with competing for jobs in the 21st century -- either you're in or you're out.

That may be true. But until the surrounding community is completely out of their ivy league the national debt should be no less abstract to economists like Mr. Eide than the institutions that keep cranking out those economists, tax lawyers, robber-barons, and Oval Office holders.

Requiem for a Working Stiff

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 05:31:00 +0000

There are two reasons that economies exist: (1) to remunerate the owners of capital to the optimal degree; and (2) to maintain social stability, a.k.a. so the renters of capital keep the roofs on their backs and don't storm the gates of McMansionville.

The further the U.S. strays from reason #2 the more convinced I am that there is a price for greed. There is a cost for fear. What us humans will stumble over the brambles of adversity in the life auction to bid for at any price is stability. What's the market doing today -- name your price. It's stability that's priceless. There's actually a third reason -- electing more Republicans to public office by promising to cut the taxes of all Americans (dead or alive). But I digress.

I showed you my economic cards to foreshadow a recent get-together with a former colleague once removed. It happened at a completely pass-up-able trade show in Boston few weeks back. I wasn't speaking, I wasn't listening. I wasn't paying or expensing or conventioning any of it. But I went because it gave me the opportunity to run into folks I normally graze indirectly through a fleeting tweet or a bump on a blog. The fact that these are "chance" meetings with no formal agendas or hard stops is sometimes as appealing as the names that drop into these calendar openings.

However, there was one meeting of particular merit because it reminded me of a time in the past where terms like "career-building" and "ladder-climbing" were more than platitudes to gold watches and indentured supplicants. The gentleman I was meeting with had just accepted a job to work as a KM grunt with a prestigious and high-flying brain factory fired from piping, fresh HBS idea ovens.

George (I'll call him here) had a much better run than I as an independent KM consultant with longer feasts, shorter famines, and enough returning engagements to get him on the short list of folks who are called into bless, validate, and handicap most big ticket enterprise content decisions.

What search engine do we buy? Why is garbage-in, garbage-out the only process flow that works with any regularity in our document life-cycle? George was the guy who could address the daunting and predictable questions looming on the radars of cash-rich, strategically impoverished IT shops left minding the information management store.

Maybe it was another college tuition to meet? Perhaps it was a spouse furloughed by the uncertainty that the future includes a place for over educated Americans who expect promotions and raises? Maybe it was the shock of knowing that mom and dad are now not just confusing our names with our siblings but referring to us as their own siblings?

Whatever landed over the top on the wrong side of the watershed bed, George decided that being paid twice a month was preferable to the prospect of fatter, inconsistent pay days. He confided that it stung a little to see no press release parading the new home of his worthy track record and talents. The simple fact is that companies don't crow about their costs and George's new employer doesn't sell KM consulting for a living.

Do they want to deliberate about how the only thing standing between them and bigger deals is better knowledge-sharing? Nope. And especially nope if they can't bill for it. Community-building? IP propagation? That's what we hired you to do, George. Let us know when you've fixed it and we'll have something.

I sympathize with George -- to a point. But then I need to remind him -- not of his senile parents or farcical former clients but that he is now firmly under the radar and cleared for take-off. This is a glide-path where he can pilot the hypotheticals. The slideware is gone. Every new hire is not just a collegial grunt but a recruitment opportunity: what is it from me you expect? If the answer is a blank stare, I'll mold the fillings. You'll be pedaling your fulfillment right out of our showroom (or intranet for those of you viewing at work).

It's worth noting that in my own family my wife had her own recent breakthrough on working stiff etiquette. Rather than lamenting the fact that her basket case nonprofit closes its firewall to remote access, she saw her dysfunctional IT operation as the gift that it is -- six uninterrupted hours on Acela to wifi her way to a job that leaves her alone long enough to live her life.

In conclusion, George, believe your indoctrination into the land of working stiffs will offer its own rewards – not the least of which is far greater flexibility to unleash your pragmatic creative problem-solving in an environment that will benefit your new colleagues in ways they scarcely know.

Lessons Learned as a PI Instructor

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 05:36:00 +0000

I did something last week that I've never done in my professional life. I fired myself from a job -- not just any job but the one that pays me back on a reciprocal level that is far more nurturing than my average pay day. I resigned from my five year-long gig as an adjunct in Boston University's Center of Professional Education. That's the school within BU that awards certificates to mid-career adults looking to cut a new career path. My students were aspiring PIs. Unlike them I was never into CSI or apprehending alleged perps. Maybe I see too much good in the bad guy and visa versa to carry that moral clarity which captivates crusaders of all stripes (and many capes).

But the one thing that justice seekers and knowledge planners share in spades is an insatiable appetite for evidence. Not just smoking guns in the firing lines of law enforcement but any shred that could piece together the mysteries surrounding how people act on what they know, a.k.a. "why people do what they do" -- especially of an unspeakable vintage that only deepens both the mystery of the case and the resolve of the investigator.

If I shy away from moral judgements I'm certainly not on the fence about my participation in this worthy program. The students taught me more than I could ever learn in someone else's classroom about the tenacious and painstaking business of assembling a reliable accounting. Their case work tested by the slippery sequencing of tangled outcomes from competing versions of self-selecting interpretations. Now that's a complexity that only Mother Research could love and take under her watchful spyglass. But that's the education I got from teaching these budding detectives how to tackle the web as a research medium.

If my role was restricted only to this thrill of the hunt, such gratitude would have sustained my participation for years to come. But over time the experience began to shift, particularly in the online version of the course. A vocal and growing minority of students lacked both the personal confidence and institutional support to put their fears aside and reconnect with the same bold exploratory spirit that led them to sign up in the first place.

Too often my teaching (or facilitation as it's called in the distance learning segment) consisted of talking time-starved students down from their isolated towers of despair. It's trying hard enough that they juggle family and work schedules with their online education. But when the curriculum's too hard to grasp? That's when the sinking ship comes to anchor on the feeling that everyone else "gets it." The rest of one's virtual classmates are all on the same page.

The inconsolable student is in need of an immediate emotional rescue. It's 2 am. There's no life line. They are catastrophizing, big time. All sympathy aside, this routine sapped me dry. It consumed the energy I had been able to invest through the luxury of eye contact and 1:1 consults with my classroom students.

In addition to the lack of real-time human interaction, the course materials for the Internet Research section were treated the same as the other program components. This is not a minor omission. The world of surveillance, fingerprinting and case management doesn't require new readings, war stories or legal updates just because the program is cycling through a new class of students. I might not know my way around a crime scene barricade but I do know I could do a whole class on FaceBook -- a phenomenon that wasn't even a glimmer on horizon when our course materials went to press.

Internet Research not only warrants but demands a blanket refresh to stay in step with changing capabilities, rewritten interfaces, and expired resources. The course text predates social media. Even the online materials were produced three years ago, further alienating the virtual classes that call online their home, not just their subject matter.

I believe with a little more attentiveness the program can provide the stewardship that comes with a commitment to continuous improvement. Either way it's been an affirming, valuable experience and I thank CPE Director Ruth Ann Murray, Program Director Tom Shamshak, and curriculum manager Nancy Ahern for the opportunity to have helped pour the original foundation. That grounding will continue to establish BU's Certificate in Professional Investigations as a nesting bed for what Brendon Perrone calls the truth seekers among us -- the "modern day dragon slayers" with the courage to carry a questioning nature into the lines of battle.

To my former students thanks ... so much for inspiring me in your PI quest and your determination to engage a distracted, confusing, and often uncooperative set of circumstances that will ultimately answer to the justice you seek.

Radio Interference

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 03:01:00 +0000

I attended a focus group for WERS 88.9 FM a week ago on Boylston Street. The management invited 16 random listeners to weigh in on the play mix of this eclectic and sometimes meandering college station. Seventeen of us showed up and everyone told the facilitator the same thing: “Surprise me!”

The consensus among us 35-54 year-olds was for novelty. However, the facilitator was more interested in a comparison shopping of radio formats. Is it just me or is the format of the focus group itself as outdated as the goal of this facilitation? I say that because he kept trying to draw these forced linear parallels between the upstart powerhouse WERS and the balance of the remaining Boston-based FM rock choices. The whole point was to co-opt any style, manner, or focus smacking of the slightest originality from anywhere else.

I told the guy that WERS was in the unique position to build bridges between the contemporary alt bands that draw inspiration from the sounds us middle elders grooved to in our bigger-headed and delusional college days. Wouldn't it be cool to hear testimonials from the new regime rationalizing what's preservation-worthy and what deserves to be flushed from the clammy grip of passing hot flashes?

Ephemeral or perennial?

The facilitator was having none of it. He wasn't biting if it wasn't already being done somewhere else. This bummed me out, man.

Flash forward to a recent Friday afternoon ritual, a.k.a. "Friday afternoon musical challenge" where knowledge diva Sadalit "Sadie" Van Buren petitions an unpolished list of 95/128 hub-based miscreants and would-be session-hands. Each week Ms. Van Buren invites us to disrobe from our silicon-coated techie armor and into our secret musical selves. Sadie picks out a segue-conducive musical theme and then we strike our collective encore lighters for a jukebox jam. We pool the soul and body-piercing rhythms and melodies that line the standing room only sections of our most favored play lists and treasured performances.

Sadie tosses that spinning platter into the air and we lunge for those hidden stashes of inspiration we would never entrust to social media -- let alone the servers we prune and pamper to exasperation behind our rave-proof firewalls. The resulting pile-on is impressive -- sometimes the majority of list members join in. One collaborator who I divine some similar inspirations from asked the group how much of our constructions were supported by Google validations when fumbling for the misplaced reading glasses of our inner listening ears.

Q: (courtesy of Philip Edward Kret): How many of you in this group honestly think these things up on the spot and how many are in front of you (your whole collections to peruse!) on your iPods, and how many use tools like Google to cheat your aging memory. Lots of memory aids going on here methinks or maybe you just have a nice neat record collection and have all you need to know (lucky you!). Thoughts?

A: (courtesy of Adrian M. duCille): It’s mostly in my head – I’m bopping my head & singing on a daily basis (long commute)?

These Friday afternoon bolts of lightning remind me of what my first wife said many bumps in the road ago. She said that sanity itself rested on the presence of music. With it we have a chance to do great things. Without it we’re shattered, collectively and solo-wise. Everyone has a song inside them. Every collaboration is a variation on that theme -- a tireless novelty that enmeshes our thinking and our emotions.

In that spirit we all appreciate the conductivity powers of "our" Sadie -- a possessive coined by Lynda Moulton and seconded by her gallery of musical challengers.

The Privatization of Privacy

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:18:00 +0000

In a recent Newsweek piece called Privacy is Dead, Jessica Rose Bennett peels back the post Face book packaging of personal background profiling to support her case. Using her own identify as the target she is pegged for a druggie because she once filed a story addressing pot production in the Golden State. I wonder what "state" that would find her employability score in if her undocumented preference for bourbon had also surfaced?

Whether the metric of interest is number-specific such as our number of network contacts or a hodgepodge of inputs that concoct abstractions like "aggressive demeanor" or "persistent complainer," only one thing matters. Those placeholders in the source data cannot go unpopulated. They must be filled even if it's with erroneous facts. Empty cells are neither "on" or "in" the table. The business case is not premised on accurate reporting but a rationale to freeze-out entire hiring pools of potential new hires with a blink of a single metric.

We are long past warning our kids not to sanctify their latest drinking game conquests as some post-worthy rite of passage. A simple flag can be raised without a single infraction.

The check box will be populated one way or another and it tips in favor of a demerit any time the target wants entrance into the increasingly exclusive club of gainfully employed Americans. That's because filtering out a ballooning number of applicants within some quantifiable range of conduct is now a done deal. And as our author as pothead example illustrates, questionable data can perform this function just as reliably as an accurate and verifiable fact base.

A profiling application has only one clearinghouse to hurdle -- none involving civil liberties,due process, or the quaint idea of privacy -- a notion that has as much to do with our 21st century citizenship status as the constitution has to do with affirmative action, bomb-sniffing dogs, unicorns, biblical verses, or holding onto our jobs and homes.

The only true barriers to subscription-based rating systems such as those described by Ms. Bennett is the ignorance of the subscriber and the discretion of the service provider. The chances we'd be cut into the loop of our own demise? Question time: when's the last time you got a full post interview accounting of why you never made the final cut?

It's that veil of closed-loop decision-making ensuring complete privacy is maintained ... for all employer-subscribers. Unlike a delinquent payment in a credit report there is no traceable course of events. Most of us don't even know how these scores are produced, let alone what they mean or that they even exist. Finally, there is no reportable consequence. Having your car repossessed is reality. Remaining out of work after you were invited back for the second round? That's a non-event. For falsely-accused professionals who can connect baseless accusations to the effect on their business? There's a service for that called Reputation Defender.

So there's no incentive for profiling customers to wise up or even own up to retaining such services. The only buyer motivation in terms of background screeners is to find the same thing for less. And that's the passive end of the profiling frontier.How about the blunter tools at the disposal of hackers? How about the malicious assaults now being plotted on tomorrow's Android devices?

There was a data glyph published in a recent issue of BusinessWeek that shows the ongoing price for the scattered pieces of our transactional identities. Email addresses and credit card numbers are available in bulk, an acknowledgment that deactivations are present in every batch. Some others command a far heftier per profile fee. In fact the price of a login credential increases with the balance on the account it's accessing. Pure genius. Quaint, this notion of privacy -- like a nod to the days when phone security was about dropped calls and lost phones.

Who said that all consumers were created equal? Certainly not in any termination contracts that include the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of other people's identities.

Wikipedia Has Intimacy Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 03:52:00 +0000

"Romantic deception is the unrestrained misrepresentation of significant facts in the context of an intimate relationship."

- Sally Caldwell

My Wikipedia might not be your Wikipedia. So I am disclosing upfront that I'm reporting here in the second-person. No investment of mine has been helped or hurt by my pondering 15 immortalizing minutes in some future wiki entry. I have never lifted an editorial finger. I have won no prizes and I have entered no drawings.

But I have contemplated the definitive boundaries that pass for flag-planting on the territorial vapors of intellectual capital. All of us in our own way are traipsing soiled footprints across the ash heap of post copyright history.

Wikipedia is a self-selected guild of fact-selectors. Wikipedia is a tease. We fancy an all-volunteer brigade of scribes banding together to preserve text-based civilization against the backdrop of the cave paintings of a new millennium. In actuality those scribbles only pass for recordings after they've had all passion drained from their inspirations. A personality-blocker is the bouncer at the back door of the Wikoteque. All music must have stopped by the time those recordings hit the wiki stage. All secret handshakes have had their locks changed by the time the stench of impropriety is removed from the surface of the choppier editing channels.

As mentioned I have not stepped forward to claim, alter, deny, or crow about any contestable, explosive, or simmering interpretations referencible to my clouds and stars. I'm aroused around Wikipedia's merits as official scorekeeper of recorded history -- society's C drive of shared experience. But it's the misguided attempts at governance that lock in my fascination. "Do no self-promotion" is their Google mission-like equivalent to abstaining from evil. They are the counterpart to the wages of exposure. They are faceless book. And their book is far from open.

Do No Originality Unto Others

How does one exactly flunk their Wikipedia auditions? One wiki editor pulled rank on one of my college pals over the appearance of original research tucked within the recessed annals of Beatles history. Judging by the concentrations of the wiki Beatles history review board, me thinks Jimm would have had an easier time sneaking a 12 story litter box low rise past the NYC Landmarks Commission than footnoting a single moment in Lennon's life on Wikipedia.

The second instance involves a former student Darlene Adams who is now partnering with Sally Caldwell, a professor at the University of Texas, to publish a book and survival guide addressing Romantic Deception. She tried to post the definition and was promptly struck down by an administrator for "advertising." Despite a credible reference (to the book's first edition published in 1995), they dismissed the follow-up on the grounds it is self-published. Another non-no: only one attributable reference to the entry in question (not that this blogging entry counts as two...)

Man, talk about perpetuating the myth that publishing is the exclusive domain of standalone publishing houses. Just how big a house? According to Darlene they wanted an "encyclopedic reference." There's even a time stamp with an expiration date. That's the deletion-facing deadline for having your substantiations in the proper order. Translation: proof that an article is not "advertising for the book cited in the source."

Sounds like the cart before the horse but not the driver. Those wiki patrollers may say and truly believe that they're maintaining roads and bridges. But they're also the road agents. And the horses stand a greater chance of passing through than we do.

Ice Preserver

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 04:23:00 +0000

I've started a postcard writing campaign. Yes, it's a hallmark moment served up in one economy-sized wireframe panel. Partly it's a marketing ploy to compete for attention that no one is servicing -- hence the complete abandonment of the U.S. mail as a non-Holiday social medium.

Partly it's to reconnect with people whose memories remain with me, worthy of safekeeping no matter how or where they're kept (or even on display). This treasuring of closeness to past intimacies carries on regardless of present friendship status. Any comparisons here to Facebook are unavoidable and baseless.

The icebreaker overture got me thinking: with unlimited storage, an email account for every persona, all-you-can-eat bandwidth, and a generous calling plan, what's to keep us from reaching out and rekindling the warmth of those reflexive and reverberating friendships?

These days it feels like pretty much the gravity of foreseeable times and dates flies against this mission. From the deep long-term commitments of bosom parenting to the fleeting distractions of surface life there is, no calendar for holding dates like the ones I'm proposing. The out-of-the-blue barge-in has been abolished to the forcible entry ways of high school reunions and rounded-off milestone birthdays. The community of boundary crashers has no place in a perennial state of "what's expected of me lately?"

Our consumer-driven culture is no different in the affection economy. It's the hunted down fixation that love chooses you (you having no choice in the matter). Once you've skirted universal cosmic loneliness you may run into the arms of the most fashionable boulevard. In the light of day it remains a blind alley. But we never saddle up the same fatalistic sand bags around families. Perhaps the fact we don't get to choose family members is obscured by the lengths we go to isolate ourselves from our appointed siblings and parents.

Even a hospital visit is an ice preserver. That's the shivering sting of one chosen family member's determination. His rationale? A discharge was not merely a release from another friend's post cancer surgical recovery. It was a reprieve from needing to pay a single bedside visit. Ironically, he was released from responsibility the same day the other guy was released from the hospital? Why? Because the other fellow could not face another sting from our old friend, Coz Loneliness.

"Thanks for being out there" was a line attributed to our walk through a suburban Toronto phone book in 1979. We were mounting our own cross-border field investigation to discover the mystery behind the majestic melodies of a Canadian band named Klaatu, inspiring quests to conquer the same cosmic isolation now prompting the very postcard campaign. Is the great expanse of time still within the reach of our brotherly grasp? The constancy flickers in blocks of sawdust, anytime minutes, and a dim, thinning glass of hours, now out-of-circulation.

Will we pick right up where we left off? Will the postcard carry all the weight of a 20th century telemarketing blitz? What's to become of these living memories? Is there a conversation to be joined here?

How News Travels Now

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 18:18:00 +0000

It's an ancient cognitive impairment: what comes through our ears into our brains positively obliterates "the way" it comes through the same cavities. The modern day vessel for this malfunction is called "the channel" and ours are clogged the moment we're on -- mentally alert enough to take calls, send texts, browse faces, and read screen-presentable situations.

The state? Connected.

The place? Anywhere at anytime.

The enabler? Receiving electronic signals over synthetic devices.

The pathogens?

- Certainty of Sender -- Receiving pointed messages from senders of unknown origin. Case-in-point: Argumentation is now searchable and replaceable. The same macros used to make wholesale changes to the names, places, and file structures in electronic documentation are now done on a scale formerly known as mass communications. Only now macro communications has no consistent authors or addresses -- just the incessant need to influence the most minds for the least cost.

- Theory of Mind -- Confusing the ease with which we make sense of these messages with any clear understanding of what they mean to others. Case-in-point: Remember the famous last words of a dying friendship jeopardized by a media firestorm? It goes something like: "why did I have to read about this in today's paper? Why couldn't you have come to me first?" Nowadays the idea that we can reduce a piece of information to the plot points on a calendar traversed by a series of interactions is going the way of other 20th century conventions like privacy, the public trust, and a free press.

- Confirmation Bias -- An unwillingness to openly question our own motivated reasoning -- especially when our biases are based on the inability of message receivers to handle their own doubts and uncertainties. Case-in-point: curiosity, exploration, and debate succumbs to the iron-fisted simplicity of authoritarian rule or an over-reliance on the scoreboard clock of the zero sum game. The latest mid-season update? Politics "1" Governance "0."

So how do we trap this restless, resistant, and relentless messaging stuff in lightening bottles of a 21st century vintage? It all boils down to our two natural message sending and receiving states: (1) as individuals and, (2) in groups. Degrees of separation is the Y axis that completes the matrix. Think of this in terms of verb conjugations from a timeless grammar school:

* First, second, and third person singular (for individuals)
* First, second, and third party plurals (for groups)

The micro-speck formed by our Facebook profiles and blogging sites is the first-person version of our own social media channels. But your day job is to safeguard your firm's LinkedIn alumni profiles? If you're representing the throat and ears of an organization speaking for "us" then you've channeled over to first party status. And so on.

Source conjugation is a straightforward framework for understanding both how electronic communication travels and how the humans who traffic in its signals tend to behave on behalf of our own vested interests and biases. It doesn't make the world less complicated.

But it does sort out the actions we take with the information we're given into a sortable bucket of outcomes and conclusions. And that's a whole lot better than any product we're going to be sold -- unless we're the ones doing the selling.

LinkedIn First, LinkedOut Later...

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 02:26:00 +0000

To a metadata freak, LinkedIn is a marvel of information science. It is the botanical garden of social media.

Every germinating seed is dutifully watered in flower beds tended by a volunteer army of self-selected gardeners. The blossom worth budding here is that the attentiveness is anchored to the premise that our professional fortunes depend on this.

The LinkedIn premise is a massive database of self-administered professional life narratives. Access is determined by a network of click-happy connections: show you mine if you show me yours (both the resumes and the contacts).

The database gets regular feedings and weedings because -- hey -- those are my bowling trophies and and inflationary job titles and biopic documentaries I put on my reality series reward card program. Psst ... got any seed money?

What I'm unpacking here through unlicensed metaphor is a database of resumes. The splendor of the architecture is that the profile templates are self-organizing. There are no semantic web quibbles over taxonomies versus folksonomies, what vocabulary is worth controlling and which tag clouds deserve to float above the fog. In doing so, LinkedIn has achieved organic adherence to the age-old riddle:

How do I describe my uniqueness in the least invasive and most universal way possible?

That vessel is the cross-fertilization of the knowledge garden we researchers, sales animals, and job-seekers can all cultivate, horse-trade, or hunt down online through the sprinkler system known as LinkedIn's "advanced search features."

I did a session on this for the career options folks at my Alma mater of Hampshire College last month. It was fascinating to map the academic disciplines signified by each of the colleges schools to the requisite job skills, career paths, and institutional dimensions reverberating in the professional odysseys of Hampshire grads.

Then just last week I get pinged at work by Jon Lee, a Hampshire cohort from a 1.5 separation degree of overlapping concentric social circles circa 1980-84. Who better than a former Hampster and current job-seeker to put that ivory-coated knowledge harvest to the test?

Jon writes:

So, anyway, I want to harvest some of these connections. At first I thought I'd contact the person I knew, tell them who I was looking for and ask them to search the name and find the 2nd degree connection. A little awkward and time consuming (for the person I'm asking the favor). Yeah, so then I see the "Get Introduced Through A Connection" link. I choose my connection, then:

He continues...

My question is this... What happens, how does this work?

I hit send, a message goes to you. Do you only see my note to you - or the message to X (Leslie B. in this example) as well? And what about the person you know, who knows Leslie? How is that connection made? Automatically - or do you have to find the connection for me? Do they see my message to you, my message to Leslie?

The hypothetical scenarios go on for a few more paragraphs before the logic is tortured right out of the motivation for getting to the actual conversation stages -- the linking out phase of the process. I appreciate these questions because they underscore the associative clunk factor of shuffling through an overloaded circuit of lateral connectors.

The community spirit of pay-it-forward reciprocity might work for random acts of kindness. But maybe not so much for calculating and indiscriminate emails -- especially from people we know more for their degree of separation than we do about them. Period.

The artifice of the social media back-scratch points to the exit ramp or the link-out. This is the realization that as gorgeous as that well-groomed garden is, all the growth happens within the narrow confines of Linkedin.com. It is a walled in garden. That's why a thousand Facebook weeds makes more advertising perfume than the most painstaking bouquet of freshly cut resumes at LinkedIn.

You need to step on a few weeds, maybe even some poisonous ones before any meaningful conversations can happen. That's where a nose for research meets an eye for opportunity and an ear for discussion. That kind of growth can only happen in soils and climates where the greatest variety of vegetation takes root.

If I didn't answer your question, Jon, that may be because six years and 750 connections later, I still haven't plunked down $24.99 a month to find the answers.

Generation Landmine

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 17:51:00 +0000

I have a "thing" for AMC's "Mad Men."

In the current season that allegiance has risen to the level of a school girl crush. Remember the shrill of victory surrounding Don's scoring of the Beatles tickets for Sally in last week's episode? That's the tonal range. My screech is exceeded by the portfolio of character-builds and plot twists from the inter-generational histories that co-mingle in the fertility clinic otherwise known as the writing laboratories of the Mad Men Control Center. There's excessive social angst under the surface -- even if it's just Matthew Weiner and cohorts cranking out those dangerous scripts. How else to explain how deeply we care about the numerous fates of unsympathetic characters?

This admiration is not contained to the scaling of an entertainment level reached during the airing of each show. It's way more personal than that. There is a certain lifelong lesson that we either let life teach us or we fight at every turn. That's the notion that the preceding generation is doomed to fail us -- specifically mom and dad. Not because they're bad people or even fundamentally flawed but because they join groups. They become figureheads and role models. They sign up for things they didn't know they were now responsible for providing (and which they could never rightfully deliver). They're way over their heads, lose their way. Then they climb back on the relationship wagon and "they" lose "our" way -- the kids their new spouse has no interest in helping raise.

This is another way of saying that I made my peace with my parents by seeing them as people. Their failures as parents were to be acknowledged, never rectified. When they married in 1959 that was about catering to the place-settings of matrimonial lineage. This was the social norm. Not the personal discovery that came later with open marriages, no fault divorces, and piss poor step-parenting.

The fact that I'm now one marriage deeper than either parent ever waded is more of a personal mystery than journey. The fact that I strive to appreciate others for who they are -- not what they represent or signify -- is something I try to live up to in my current marriage and teach to my 17 year-old. He teaches this right back out to me!

That's what I bring to each wrested secret, indiscretion, and dilemma of strangle holds in each unfolding act of Mad Men. Perhaps the greatest payoff is not the resolution of that mystery but the knowledge that our parents' failings is what lifted us to levels of self-preservation and inner-resourcefulness we could never have attained had they actually been there for us latchkey Mad Men offspring. Here's the reason I know this. We post boomer parents were determined to make the difference. If not in the world as the over-reaching boomers believed than in the worlds of our over-achieving kids.

What is it about 20 somethings? The impacts are plain to see:

* School grades are now about inclusion: B+ is the new D-.

* The family nest is no longer empty once the graduation ceremony ends. Lousy economy you say? Look at the unemployment rate in the first Reagan administration when we purchased our liberal arts degrees. It was a full two points higher than today.

* It's not just that our kids are ill-equipped to make it on their own. We don't want to let go. They're not just our flesh and blood. They're our friends and confidants. That's something that Mad Men and Ladies didn't embrace with their Mad Boys and Girls until the grand kids had escaped reality for an alternative life of instant texts, online gaming, and the willing suspension of face-to-face communications.

That's the reality series of generation landmine. That in our quest to be world's greatest moms and dads we haven't given ourselves the room to disengage. This means being removed long enough to encourage the same growth we're stunting in our kids. But how could we not? We know all too well the allure of the surrogate parent that made Don Draper -- but it didn't raise Don Draper.

Like all past TV obsessions I never want the drama to quit. But instead of rewinding the DVD box set, my fixation longs to burrow deeper into the scenes of bedrooms, kitchens, and garages left unmapped by conventional storytelling. I want to follow all the characters home and walk through the rooms of their lives unimpeded by electronic screens or paper scripts.

Now that's a lifetime that may not happen in this dimension. But I am grateful to Matthew Weiner, his writing team, and the cast for enabling me to fathom it.

Experience Before Branding

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 01:39:00 +0000

Jack Vinson tweeted the following Fast Company rave-up of IBM's entry in the Face Share social media ring. It read like the Gulliver's Travels caught in the virtual web of social nets. All those tiny people are Facebook customers -- aahhh, let me cut loose and wait for Jack to seed my next beanstalk venture, please!

All raves aside it was transparently partisan to Big Blue and I too found myself pulled into the story's gravitation. That's not because IBM is inherently better at social nets than Microsoft. Just that they possess and propagate their own homegrown infernos -- the molten core of critical social mass. When Microsoft eats its own dog food often it's been predigested by a beta pedigree behind someone else's pit bull fence. Not IBM:

"IBM's internal network served as both an incubator and torture test for its latest offering."

Of course, just because IBM cultivates its own crash tests doesn't mean that its dummies don't bleed the same R&D reserves as any other experiential wannabe. Whoever wins at Face share will have the ubiquity to melt the word "social" off the future face of software. And why call it software when it's no longer a substitute for firsthand encounters but "the real thing?"

We'll come to know this in time -- not by some IDC forecast or self-selecting straw poll but by the disappearance of brand IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etal. from the face of experience.

Across the Credabyss

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 02:14:00 +0000

The dark fantasy of an evil twin brother to Facebook may come to lodge inside the inflating vacuum of influences vintage to this post credible century. It may inhabit a place once reserved for reporters who arbitrated once definable and containable questions like:

Can the public handle the truth about...?"

Facial truth may arrive without malevolent intentions. Some may even be noble in their naivete. For instance, it may be a libertarian impulse from the Good List of Craigs. If no one knows what breeds we kennel on the Internet then surely there's a universal understanding that flies under the longest of tails we wave. In the book of Craig, what people do in their uninhibited privacy is not only their own business but endows the publisher with the right of keeping their total headcounts under the roof of a one SF-based Victorian.

It may be the egalitarian bromide of the net neutrality sage who believes that all data packets were created equal under a Constitution that protects free speech by splitting the difference between the right to remain silent and the right to remain anonymous.

It may be a social media partisan who believes that transparency, consensus, and may-the-best-idea win are all wrapped and sealed in the protective popularity of a Survey Monkey referendum.

It most certainly is a loyal Wikipedia correspondent who adheres to the sacred tenets of the ancient disciple scribbles. Thou shalt do no original research (or synthesis of two or more existing ideas) in the unquestioning isolation of their passive voice and their hollow curiosity.

With those seeds in motion is the particle-smashing collision that awaits this doubting world be that surprising? Would we really be spinning off the orbit we're on now to subscribe to a site where:

Alias predators post dubious half-truths that only needs a popular vote to determine how convinced the fence-sitters are that they're getting the whole story.

How would we stop these allegations?

As Andrew Morris-Friedman imagines the only way to lower the temperature without changing the subject is to post even more reprehensible stuff to attract even higher scores. One can't see their accusers unless they suffer the fools of self-effacement. That's how we actually identify our detractors in a world devoid of credibility -- by being our own worst enemies.

In-Our-Face Book

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 01:48:00 +0000

The most fundamental disconnect of current state web 2.5 lies between our dual roles as content producers and consumers. It's one thing to shed aliases and handles as fluidly as we're pressed for passwords. It's quite another to be torn between our need for peer approval and self-protection. That's not a minor misalignment. That's a deep and impassable identity crisis. How the two are reconciled is not the next big app. It's the staging ground for the gathering storm perfection of:

* The rise of Facebook
* The fall of journalism
* The abyss of credibility

For the last five years or so we've been feeding the sociable media beast with friend affirmations. We want a sense of belonging, of inclusiveness. But if we pay for that community-building with back-scratches and platitudes that leaves a gaping hole between what we hope to be expressed and what we know to be true. It's not that Facebook praises are empty but enforced by a culture of reciprocal transparency. As much as positive reinforcement is the elixir of choice for self-expression, it leaves us hungry for how others perceive us. It's tone deaf to the indifference of outsiders. Those are the potential employers who background check us out. But they're not looking for suitors, social circles, or listening to our echo chamber of megaphones.

They just want to know they can trust us and can't just take our word for it.

What would happen if none of us were allowed to post to our own social media profiles? Would our friends make up for the shortfall? Could our enemies commit "face crimes" and libel us with half-truths and fabrications? In a regulated web, non-vested observers would honor their own reputations by speaking to objectives, standards, and rankings -- not how they've been blemished by greatness or influenced by the people they're profiling. Sounds like the ghost of journalistic myth-making? Sounds like a reason to pay for content in cash -- not gratitude.

Build It -- and They Will Dump

In the web 3.0 future to be this darker Facebook will be compensated from both sides of the message exchange. Anonymous enemies will get to post unsubstantiated kiss-and-tells once they sign-up. Group members will pony up too. But they'll have to preempt these negative reviews with their own cathartic self-examinations. Post enough of these face-saving gestures and perhaps they can learn the actual identities of their blasphemers. Now that's a business model no practicing journalist is in any position to bargain over.

The most intriguing difference in floating the counterweight to Facebook idea is that my peers see it as a license to print money. "You can't call it 'BlackFace Book' -- too facial," one friend quipped. They suggested names like 'Disgrace Book' or even 'Evil Facebook' and the servers would crash from the endless lines of partisans queuing at the chance to shape a fair and balanced view for each profile holder: "can I subtract you as my enemy?"

However, when I rolled out the same business plan to a 20-something colleague they headed immediately for the cyber-bullying exits. 'Controversial' was the diplomatic term they used for unleashing the innert tensions between editorial control and open source opinionating. That perspective carries a greater educational value than any social or anti-social medium and the business models that will dwell there.

Making the Web Safe for Research

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:18:00 +0000

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” -- Charles McKay

Wired Magazine says the web is dead. They say that two decades were spent: (a) planting the mass media seeds of e-commerce; and (b) dispelling all doubt that any non-Google property downstream of this snake oil spill was going to prosper from it.

Whether all sites and pages can now be reduced to apps and devices remains to be seen. But I fervently hope that the marketers reading these signs run for the exits. Wired would have us believe each storefront is littered with abandoned shopping carts. Bargain-crazed shopaholics can only keep so many uncertainties in their stomachs and details in their heads. Big box retailers are dismantling their web domains and firewalling their fortunes to their own Internet turf safe -- a gated community of high margin members. That information superhighway is turning into a private driveway patrolled by in-house security.

This sounds like we're taking that narrow speculative turn towards the narrative that casts down the little girls and guys. It's the lost cause pamphleteering for net neutrality. It's the New York Times ceasing to publish all the news that's fit to print (in a print edition). Hell, the fall semester is upon us and Amherst Mass is down to a single record store -- that's on or off-web.

I'm rooting for all that doom-perbole to come to pass. But it's not because a darker web will be a dead one. I will hold open any rear entry that the big advertisers and the catalog herders wish to exit. Then us researchers, scientists, and writers can thank them all for this gorgeous infrastructure they left us.

My first pre-HTTP shopping trip was taken on a 300 baud modem through a passage way called Tymnet. My fellow info-brokers in the Quick Information Center at FIND/SVP would brag how we could stack our line commands ahead of our logins so that our per article charges were actually higher than our connect fees -- up to $150/hour for Investext -- the forerunner of Thomson Financial. And what glistening product commanded those early nineties recession-based fees? It was a stack of unadorned print-outs. The most visually appealing part of the whole package was the enhancement of bracketing keywords with asterisks:

[set KWIC *]

That way the readout would display as...

"*Forecasts* and *projections* for canned peaches are not so keen and that's not the only ominous sign for *corrugated packaging* executives in the coming year."

That was how the magic happened.

Nowadays we marvel at our distraction-prone and paperless world, having let go any notion that a planet turning this fast could ever pause long enough to get its documentation in order. But as the hyperstimulated flea the web for the ways of fee-based information, us analog online natives will have the web to ourselves.

Better still we will embrace the unclaimed property that answers to mouse clicks once or more removed from the dollar sign radar. The surfing days of non-searchers are waning. For those of us who prize learning as the ultimate getaway, our best investigations lie ahead. For every scattered and boredom-deprived gamer at home in his electronic playground, I guarantee this: There will be an unflappable researcher with an unbreakable concentration leveled at attentions worthy of payment.

So we can mine our browsers for all the facts, opinions, and cash neutral transactions otherwise lost in this hasty retreat. We may even go "off" line to gather distance -- both physically and mentally an increasingly scarce commodity. Will there be a place for that in tomorrow's Internet? Meet me on the World Wide Web and we'll talk.

Parse-Snips: Up Close and Impersonal

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 02:28:00 +0000

This remember the Ground Zero Alamo stuff around the Cordoba Mosque has everything going for it: two opposing teams, a murder scene, demagoguery, bullhorns, and a global audience that can say we-told-you-so no matter what's been communicated by which side.

This story's legs are so long that we don't have to wait for the economy to recover, the next spill to evaporate, or the insurgents to reload their rhetorical weapons. But there is one element missing here. And it just may turn out the lights before the next line of stem cells is showing trace elements of salmonella poisoning.

There are no coveted interviews awaiting attention-starved witness-experts of the paranormal infidels. There are no human circus acts posing as brokers between victims and perpetrators. Pending any celebrity appearances there are no book deals or screen rights in the balance. With little chance of a false confession, embarrassing disclosure, or an ingratiating nut bug to keep the cameras rolling, this story has no leading star. Just bit players. But what did we expect? No laws have been broken in the sale of this property.

A Cause Smaller than Ourselves

There are two teams but neither one lays claim to a single magnetic contestant. The mulahs are all too pleased to don their dark road jerseys on our competitive-crazed home turf. But with no stars in the lineup and the nagging potential that both sides have a point, the air time will escape from this balloon long before it pops.

And even if there was a whiff of corruption, it's mired in the intricacies of leasing agreements and zoning restrictions. Not exactly the gavel-pounding foray into a cable news auction for the fuzziest cellphone photo.

The problem with this story is that it's about principles and policies. We expect debating points to be packaged as shouting matches masquerading as contests of ideas. But our attentions will not hold to this level of abstraction. NPR's Morning Edition reported this morning that only 41% of all Americans even knew one of the billion-and-a-quarter Muslims on the planet. It's hard to personalize a story when you don't know the characters.

That's a whole lot of fuel burned for keeping close to home. And that's where those attentions will stay barring the collision of continental shelves set adrift by climate change or the next big militant Islamist outbreak inside our clammy and porous borders.

When We Come Back

A movie deal is still attainable. A self-appointed victim steps forward a year from now to bask in the 10th year anniversary of 9-11. They're onto something and promise to spill fresh explosives on these dying embers.

Why will they have waited a year?
Will their story be riddled with inconsistencies?
Are the retainers of their own legal teams riding on these answers?

The vetting of that process is not to be an interview topic because it compromises the talent and the networks: "It's a very defined underworld of behavior that people really don't talk about," says a former storybroker in the News merchant piece by Sheelah Kolhatkar running in the current issue of the Atlantic.

It's also the one history lesson of competitive politicking that bears repeating.

We conclude with a new term and three of its casualties:

The competifying of politics

- Thoughtful debate ("you have a point")
- Just punishment ("debt to society")
- Win-win situations (the "greater good")

Living Outside the Discomfort Zone

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:59:00 +0000

At my son's last IEP meeting the district SPED director threw out one of those warm, fuzzy compliments that could penetrate the battle armor of the most game-faced, contrarian parent. For the parent of a special needs kid this is not about making the honor role or the JV squad or the likeliest to become whatever classified aspirations define success in 2010 America. She applauded him for his courage and open-mindedness for trying new challenges.

He, his mom, and me all nodded with the understanding that no new road is traveled on at all without a sense of boldness no matter how pedestrian that adventure may seem -- even if the exploration is testing out his fondness for opening new chapters that are closely affiliated with his core interests. But the explorer role comes with its own set of boundaries and limits. Some are nature, some nurture -- none of them are open to negotiation either in an organized school meeting or in other tests of will and a willingness to grow:

* He can't attempt more than a single test at one time. The inability to tackle multiple steps impairs all follow-up actions before any momentum for change can build, e.g. learning how to drive while simultaneously holding a job in order to save up for a car.

* He will not advance to a next level or willingly expand a commitment. To take a liking to something is to fortify all boundaries with comfort and compliance. Once the comfort zone is set in place, it will not stretch -- no matter how much he enjoys the activity.

* He will not coordinate his own program because that's messing with "the schedule." The schedule refers to the third rail that lies between "the pull" of the status quo and the "push"of his unexplored potential.

The stronger the push, the more resistant the pull has become. It will endure until the day he concludes that passive acceptance is a choice -- not a disability -- and that there is much to make of himself in ways he can't possibly know now. Until that day he will continue to call on girls who string him along because they don't have the gumption to break someone whose heart is as pure as his senses are dull to the slights of nonverbal cues.

That same reluctance to turn him down for a date may well be the same reason the SPED director's praises carry a patronizing ring and the same reason that after a few hours on the road he is confident of passing his road test. That's because he's used to being told that any mental sparks beyond retardation levels are crowning achievements. The truth is that his intelligence is as vast as it is undeveloped. That would not fit within the schedule, comfort zone, or the number of steps it would take to address. In addition to his kindness and expressive self he is also handsome and could be quite a catch -- once the girl catching him is free to be his companion and not his surrogate mother.

It is always going to be easier to step in and save the day than it is to let events running their own course to teach the next class. You don't have to be a helicopter parent to be deaf to the most debilitating phrase we clueless parents ever taught our special needs kids:

"Here. Let me try that..."

That doesn't mean we do it all while they sit idly by. But if we plan their next driving lesson, floor the gas, point the wheel, and fill the tank, it's important that our student drivers assume more of the responsibilities the next cycle through. Completing a task that's 90% pre-finished means beginning the next time at 80% complete, and so on.

Another well-intended but self-defeating lesson is to script them when petitioning on our own behalf. For instance a state agency we've been working with encourages potential employers to take on disabled workers with cash incentives to train and pay them while still pocketing a meaningful margin for their efforts.

Now try putting that into some persuasive talking points as my son re-approaches the dozen or more rejections he got from employers when he inquired about summer jobs back in June. Not only does that mean going off-script the moment a question arises but he is unclear how to propose, advance, or close a deal that would include something as complex and threatening as a 3 or 4 way negotiation that crosses over into each of his discomfort zones.

A simpler more tangible way to focus on an achievable goal is to teach him how to ride mass transit so that getting on by himself on the city bus to community college becomes less an adventure and more one of those things he does. Once we achieve second nature status all those formula-rattling multistep problems can be addressed -- in one less step.

Investigation Entry

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 04:23:00 +0000

The cognitive psyches have weighed in and it's nearly unanimous -- a brain on wireless is one that's rewired. Our circuits are abuzz with new spongy cells burning neural pulses into the trendy new places brains like yours and mine are looking for action. We're as easy to find as the answers to our searches. That's because we're conversing freely and openly, punching our surfing sessions into Google-enabled keypads -- the MRI scoring each mental discharge.

Critics like Nicholas Carr argue that more neurons firing (or even faster processing) doesn't necessarily mean a brain capable of lucid thinking for sense-making or problem-solving in support of sound, evidence-based decisions:

"Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

The more interesting question to me is not about brain shape or mental depth but the enfeebled analytical muscles of an unquestioning generation of digital natives. That's not to say Carr's cautionary polemic is an indictment of GenY. I'm sure for every would-be hedge fund trader there's a budding journalist willing to hold a day job too. But we've barely begun to assess the damage of coming of age in a world where:

* Capital (not English) is the universal language of the species

* First Amendment rights are surrendered with the wave of a coupon, and

* The healthy skepticism of an informed electorate is confused for the faltering missteps of a business model (that being the demise of newspapers and the cleansing power of public investigations)

Rather than lamenting the golden age of impeachable offenses it might be more productive to consider some of these recoverable assets if we taught investigation skills to home bound couch-surfers sniffing for cheese in their own white Google lab coats. Here are a few initial thoughts:

1) Paying for information doesn't necessarily mean a vendor or an identity thief owns your credit card. Another form of payment is attention. Short of subpoenaing a suspect's surfing sessions how does one capture that?

2) The web 2.0 world is a giant echo chamber when you're trying to be heard. But if you can tune your research ear you can better understand the motivations of your search targets and the social circles that they travel in.

3) With the advent of suggested search Google is now in the business of completing your thoughts for you -- or at least sketch them out early enough to reward their Ad Word buyers for their advertising dollars. Other than to follow the herd there is no useful purpose to keywording one's way through a Google-based investigation.

4) A stealth researcher doesn't file FOIA requests or hack into the hard drive of a person of interest. They can use frameworks like Oceans, Lakes, and Ponds to determine where to search and source conjugation in order to determine what to believe.

5) It's not just about the right approach. The right tool-set is essential for knowing what evidence passes the smell test and comes with the pattern-matching potential the researcher needs to press their case. Here's what Carr has to say about the random and undisciplined way that critical mental thought rolls out to sea in most search sessions:

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

That buffer that Carr finds lacking in working memory is a reservoir of resilient research exhibits called an RSS reader. Consider the sound operation of one to be the price of investigation entry.

So that's the start of teaching Gen-Yers how to teach themselves at the Academy of Higher Skepticism. When those questions become the properties of digital natives, the immigrants will feel a whole lot better about turning over the messes of our creation. We'll also stop waxing nostalgically for the big three networks, the Sunday papers, and paid subscription media.

Taskonomy -- Where Resource Meets Resourcefulness

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:10:00 +0000

How does an information architect get their IP connoisseurs to feast on delectable helpings of choice information?

This morning we had an interface designer in to look at our search outputs. We showed him lots of buckets brimming with appointed rounds of patterns and hit counts that speak to the taste, smell, and texture formed by tens of thousands of documents and list items simmering in the stew pot called SharePoint.

But as orderly and configurable as each displayable facet, this designer made me realize the ball of confusion that awaits the untrained eye. No matter how complete the documentation, each bucket spills into a claustrophobic interface. Point and consider isn't quite so convincing as point and click. Every patch of white space already claimed by some rankable re-ordering of some expandable (if not expendable) subtext.

I'd like to think that we stock the best content store that any interface chef could conceivably conjure in devising the smartest possible holding tank for knowledge transfer.

I own that with equal parts frustration and pride. Pride speaks to the hard-won realization that we are not stockpiling content for the sake of collecting it. It's calibrated, populated, and ready for serving. Each artifact passes more than a knowing glance that it's intended for re-assemblages to support some new revenue-bearing endeavor.

The frustration is that our basis for action stumbles in a poorly designed interface. In fact our design is about as kludgy as our metadata is immaculate. Why are we so late to this table? Perhaps there is no rapid translation on intranets from look-and-feel to shop-and-spend? Then again we've squandered resources straying off the SharePoint reservation because of our unwelcoming and cluttered interface.

What we've executed on is metadata and the assertion that an action-based taxonomy is foundational. But the front door that swings open to users can dignify the underlying structure by exposing the proper detail at the moment of instigation -- that user becomes a producer by synthesizing those not-so-raw materials into a refined and unique deliverable.

Whether the end game is simple (the completed form is in my out-box) or glorified (IP creation), it takes the marriage of taxonomy and design to deliver a taskonomy -- that stretchable dimension between what's been conceived and what will become conceivable.

Gut Checks and Balances

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:45:00 +0000

This PTSD economy does not indulge in confidence. How strange a twist is that? If this land is still made for you and me here's the new century rationale: Individual enterprise demands a life-giving blend of creative spark, market magic, and the delusional conceit of "why not me?" Now where are you hiding my mojo?

How do we shift the momentum in favor of a sustainable recovery -- one that might actually spill into the next electoral cycle? The biggest miscalculation here by President Obama isn't whether to split the difference in clause B by dropping the provision in bottomless loophole X. It's the notion that his re-election rests in the balance of his legislative record. That's over-thinking -- an Obama indulgence. The decision to cast a presidential vote? That's the biggest impulse buy since they started making electoral cycles from the unused inventories of local TV stations.

Obama may "get that" when his advisers remind him of this obvious point. But his gut is playing catch up. He continues to see his temperance and self-control as a corrective hedge against the excesses of parasitic capitalism and the fat foxes in our foreclosed hen houses. But then there's the falling out. That's the cooling of Obama's ties to the American business community as a standby explanation for swelling unemployment at a time of record-setting earnings.

Long story short: CEOs have soured on the relationship because the President surrounds himself with ivory tower eggheads whop couldn't tell a payroll tax from a roll call vote. The other deal-breaker is more personal: that when Obama admonishes Wall Street elites for playing by their own rules he's the teetotaler at the lectern -- the law professor-in-chief, not the bully populist.

It harkens back to the last big bull rally where the animal spirits of sustaining job creation were matched only by the unbridled mojo of executive lust. That doesn't mean cheating on Michelle is the surest way to put people back to work. I'm not even saying that President Obama should unhinge his austere nature. The man rarely seems to meet a gratification he can't delay.

But maybe he could nudge the Fed to do the right thing -- the fiscal equivalent of charging $5 for a gallon of regular. That's the political suicide pill known as raising interest rates. A lot. Not at the margins but 2-3 points in one rate hike. Obama will then double the shock (after all we're already in shock so he has free reign to keep going). He will release the unspent TARP funds as the after-burner stimulus that a broken and divided Congress has no moxie to pass. This extreme, bad ass cocktail is Red Bull laced with whiskey. We're stepping on the brake and gas pedal. Both feet. At the same time.

This is decisive. This is leadership. This comes from the gut -- one of the less developed of this President's formidable assets. Best of all this is not a brokering at the margins. This Heimlich-like maneuver is dramatic, not reckless. It's not driving the car over the cliff like starting unfunded and infinite wars with tax cuts for the upper one percent. Those are the folks who've cashed out of this economy and are not dependent on its return.

We're still crashing the car but it's within the lab test facility. Barack likes it when his resolve does the testing and not the reverse. This is a reckoning. It's not about kicking capitalism in the balls. Au contraire, it pumps high, life-giving octane back into the Fed tank for dangling carrots and wrangling sticks that were burned for kindling in the meltdown.

That kind of calculation not only takes guts -- it attracts votes, especially from the same non-plussed and marginalized supporters who will protest the sluggish economy by staying away in droves this November.

Must Ask. Must Tell.

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:54:00 +0000

It sounds like a Monty Python sketch.

The most telling search I can use to introduce a new hire to the collaborative dynamics of consulting communities of practice is to shine a bright search light? On display: the compromised zealotry of an overextended consultant who needs the kindred consensual wisdom of the domain experts (a.k.a. group list in MS Outlook) in order to move forward with a proposal.

Even among the most self-assured practitioners the apology always grabs the lead. Every message is prefaced by the "sorry for the SPAM' proviso, meaning Please pardon this untimely interruption. I know I've just potentially added another item for you to check off from your appointed rounds today and it may have little or nothing to do with your own immediate priorities ... until you too seek the endorsements and experience of the crowd sourcing elites and find yourself offering up the same humbled state of manic curiosity.

This is real. This is sincere.

This can also be effective in a systemic and scalable way if the rules of the road are written to include the Must-Ask-Must-Tell ("MAMT") give-back. Before that mating call heads offline and skirts under the radar the information seeker owes it to the betterment of the community to post the most useful responses to SharePoint.

That's how interruptions become know-how pumping arteries into hearts of matters settled many times before. FAQs are not in and of themselves uninformed or brilliant. But frequently answered questions swallowed by poor documentation is a sure sign of a scatterbrained and underperforming community.

To sum it up: MAMT means that if you interrupt your colleagues for advice, the burden falls on the requester to share the counsel and attached IP they receive. if you’re going to spam your colleagues you have an obligation to share what you learn. 90% of all CoP messages have no follow-on thread. That’s not so much due to hoarding but to not wanting to cause further distractions to the community. The answer is to cc: the CoP discussion board (or the KM grunt).

Here's the platitude it serves: Establish leadership communities that inspire and reinforce the sharing behaviors to develop a sharing culture.

I think the social norm – at least in terms of sharing – is maybe 1-2 degrees of separation over email. Any more extended than that and trust factors drift out of one's immediate circle. The model is still in-network. But the collaboration is based more on a friendly rivalry than an extended peer group.

The compliance rate for documenting epic projects has doubled over the past two years. Is that because everyone wants to reinforce sharing behaviors or because no one wants to be seen as an IP freeloader?

Me and God at Hampshire

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:33:00 +0000

Fullest disclosure: I have experienced nirvana on earth. It's a place where you set the bar in terms of expectations around what to learn, how to learn it and who you're learning it with. It's called Hampshire College. The good news is that I realized what a blessing this was as it passed by. The downside is that assembling a Div II committee has as much to do with getting a job as interdisciplinary crossovers have to do with the marketability of a Hampshire degree. Not much.

I conveyed those post graduating years of buyer's remorse to Greg Prince at last week's Hampshire's 40th anniversary weekend and he had an interesting and market-worthy response. He said that he didn't report to a jerk until the ripe old age of 45. He said a little post grad adversity might have helped him better handle this high probability event.

Greg also weighted in on who came back to camp Hamp. He said that most college reunions pull on the impulses of the founding classes and the more recent rounds. In the case of my Alma mater that means any cycle from the mid seventies through the pre-aughties only accounted for about half the attendees.

But even though the numbers didn't support too many chance double takes and flash memory floods there were enough ancestral underpinnings to leave this celebration to redemptions of far greater consequence than chance. In fact when a current student used a Q&A session as a chance to parade his grievances with the administration in front of us bystander alumns.

I turned to a total alum stranger and we shared the uncanny sensation that these peeves were of a perennial vintage and could be vented on any administration by the close of any semester (not to diminish the hopes that inspire these hard questions!) Perhaps the ultimate icon of Hampshire uniformity was Eugene Mirman's observation that the Q&A sessions of all workshops began with some grad saying how very interesting the discussion had been. "Now for the next ten minutes I want to talk about something very weird and only vaguely related to the topic we've come to discuss."

It's especially comic that Mirman picks up on the digressive patterns formed in the first workshop I attended on the role of improv comedy in schools led by Ari Friede 87F and Tim Sniffen 87F. Their whole inclusionary bent is to own up to accusations: "yes, I'm that jerk" as a way of moving beyond blame association. The tool they stressed was to append "yes, and..." to the dissenting opinion as a way of steering towards a defensible consensus. In practice the best response to "this is a terrible situation" is "yes -- and we have to deal with this." Subtext: you are stagnant, lonely, isolated, and we need to find our way out of this toxic environment. I liked the hand gestures for facilitating the consensus-taking temperature in larger groups. For or against could be responded to as five fingers (on board), 2 and-a-half fingers (halfway) or a fist (completely resistant). Great feedback tool.

I volunteered to perform an open cycle of "yes, and" loops with another alum and found it revealing (and humbling) how much I was closing off the discussion rather than opening it up. And I wonder why I'm hard to collaborate with!

The next session was called Making Media -- the Emerging Futures. Too much of this resembled a corporate round table about where to park your investment dollars -- the answer for now is cable. Higher abstractions like the future of journalism and participatory democracy were either trampled by this quarter's P&L or tabled in favor of some future business model that could restore our collective sense of 20th century equilibrium -- a trained cadre of reporters that process raw information into meaningful know-how.

Jonathan Friedland 77F hinted at the direction this was heading: "People pay for mobil information." What I infer? The difference between a set of Google results and the five restaurants on your iPhone that won a certain dining award is that you're going to act on the latter -- that's where the justification sets in. Eve Burton 78F reported one hopeful reference to Hearst's Times Citizen Union paper in Albany and how ad revenues were spiking on the days the staff promises to nail indefensible officials through a concerted effort to do hardcore investigative reporting.

Less sanguine was Jonathan's summation of his employer's assessment that what's bad for papers "is good for Disney" in the same way that anyone with a wholesale message to sell is happy to sidestep the retailer (or in this case the distributor). The biggest buzz in that message this week is getting consumers to buy their Toy Story 3 tickets online and inviting their Facebook friends to go with them. Groups of 80-90 have vouched for their love of Buzz, Andy, and the distribution model.

The last session (and the one where I bumped into former President Prince) was Dirty, Rotten Capitalism: Hampshire College Entrepreneurs Challenge the Hampshire Status Quo. This title implies an inverse relationship between the corporate and the public interest. Fortunately this session was about the attendees, not the facilitators, one of whom posed the ultimate gold standard for self-referential alumni objectives: how can we create more of me? Gratefully, the collective weight of the topic was not bogged down in Hampshire dogma and mis-applied correlations between self and collective interest.

My favorite response to the alumni role wasn't about "learning" or inbred innovation but having it "beaten into them" by the schlub factor -- the fear of being anything other than average that permeates the risk-averse boards of nonprofits -- why would nonprofits deserve any less non-protection than for-profits?

On the chance meeting front I couldn't pass Margaret Cerullo in the airport lounge without rekindling the memory of Michael Current. In fact his presence reverberates more greatly than any of the earthbound friends still within our midst. I talked up my Internet Research course with Aaron Berman. I also met up with Joel Olicker and reinvested my admiration for his prescient Greening of Northampton documentary. Perhaps Joel will release his musty master from the shackles of 3/4" in the less-than-handy industrial box. I also found the ever-humble and legendary "Gunther" who has been forever the guardian angel of the Hampshire video community.

John is the guy who makes the things happen in the overpriced collateral that school cranks out. Of course John has always existed several beaming signals under the official radar and that beacon continues to shine because of John's love of the work that Hampshire students produce. Does he care about hierarchy? Does he feel slighted for all the non-promotions that never broke his way? He could not be bothered less. In fact the one remark he took personally was when I told him that of my twenty addresses Amherst was the only place worthy of a return ticket. Now, that's an endorsement worth ringing.

Gunther did say something I found puzzling, flattering, and galling all in one breath. He said that mine was the "golden era" of Hampshire video -- as if the show Infinity would go on forever? To be more specific he said that the school lost momentum with the departure of Jerry Liebling and Greg Jones, perhaps because their interdisciplinary focus was framed by real world practicality. Man, just to hear the title "Visual Literacy" come up in cocktail reception conversation sent me to the warmest of fuzzy places.

One of many unplanned newer acquaintances sprung from a Gunther conversation including Jud Willmont F92 who produced "A Taiji Journey" -- a work on his father's odyssey to China to connect with his Taoist pathways. While we were viewing the work I was reconnecting with my first memories of the basement TV studio -- inaugurated as the spanking new color video mecca when Mark Geffen's Beckettesque dad played the title role in his 1984 revival of Krapp's Last Tape.

The Malarians: Head Music Meets Thundering Heart

Finally there was the house of Hampshire band -- those maverick, raving, psychedelic Malarians. The band, fighting trim in their navy blue turtlenecks, was in midseason form despite a double-decade hiatus. The animated tour-storming and play-list was finally unsealed in their recent Boston, Worcester, and NoHo gigs. Reading glasses anyone?

The irreverence began with a manic and cuddly Mal Thursday trampling over the reputation of the current ex-Yalee President. On what grounds? On the suspicion that a gradeless div system was being drummed out of Hampshire diplomas and replaced with the dreaded accuracy of academic "standards."

As the heavens pissed down some hard rains the dance floor broke open in a mindless abandon. And what burdens were abandoned for this fleeting revival? Pretty much anything a former Hampster does to get by in this the big, square world. Yup.

All those out-of-Hamp accommodations gave rise to the soaring harmonies and sonic exuberance of these garage legends on a stormy, raw Saturday night under the clammy circus tent. Those dance steps were not made or born but grateful for their improbable pirouttes through makeshift sanctuaries of past and future. Non satis scire: To know is not enough and the Malarians had us leaving the banquet hungry for more.

One Competing Version

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:36:00 +0000

I admit there is an everlasting fascination with the sexual apparatus -- what makes it go, how it finds pleasing distractions that are fantastic enough to hold sway and feasible enough to role play. But my lazy shorthand state of the sexual union is pretty much the opposite of the locker room talk of my male peers. Not only am I not the athlete -- I'm not even sure I'm in fighting shape to perform as spectator.

I took some heart when a beloved lifelong pal called me an early influence of sexual handcraft. Regrettably my modeling license has petered thin. I am powerless to impart some of that resourcefulness to my own son. Only the answered prayer of a wet dream visited upon him by the angels of his own imagination can grant this deliverance.

My gratifications with women have taken on a decisively sexless turn. Drawing tears from my wife when I finished help moving her to NYC easily out-conquested any jarring thrust imagined or real within the boundaries of my imagination. This was a woman who had made her unilateral choice months ago (to live on her own again).

Now I was helping to make that choice happen knowing that I too was pulled by the same allure. But it wasn't sexual freedom that fired my desire. It was breaking free the pattern of what my pal has exquisitely meted out as the law of "diminishing returns" -- i.e. coming home every night to set the same table and face the same cable -- the vast universal remote of the empty nest.

Unlike my fact-based phallus-ies I have a completely ungrounded theory working on the origin of our less private evidence of aging. Rungs in a tree trunk are traceable to the annual pedaling through the season cycle. A wrinkle that buckles back on an eye lid or redoubles as a sagging tub of girth under a chin warble? That's evidence of a concealment. It's the carriage of an unrelenting secret. It's the mental scorecard required to track competing versions of the same story -- which version did I give to so-and-so? Did I cc him when I bcc'ed you?

No, I don't believe that the number of narratives we need to keep straight is analogous to the footprints of crow's feet that shuffle their way into our complexions. DNA owns the science and I will not be circuiting the talk shows to dispute this. But I would challenge a panel of the world's best compensated plastic surgeons to deny evidence of the inner torment that infests just below the surfaces they restore. We live by the skin of our vanities. The not-so-secret ingredient in our anti-aging ointments? That we stress over the inevitable.

I wonder what simmers through the bonfires of former U.S. Presidents when they sit for their legacy portraits? Are they thinking about the bullet they took yesterday for some team that will excoriate them tomorrow? Are they letting go or holding on to the idea they can keep all the brightest hopes under the shades of their discretions and directions set by internal compasses? LBJ said that "they'll forgive you for everything except being weak." What could be a more accelerated aging formula than that?

In terms of the sexual rungs around my soul trunk I have this to say to the male youth of America: a dick that limp is more sincere than an engorged one. Hard to swallow, yes, but an erection is not a terrible thing to waste.

Merger in the First Degree (and 2nd and 3rd)

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:56:00 +0000

The SIKM Boston group convened last week for a lively workshopping session. There was lots of discussion and very little discussion on what to discuss. The focus? What to do when peering straight into the inscrutable eyes of Chess Piece Face. Yes. we're talking about takeovers of the most alien kind across the hostility spectrum. I especially liked the idea that the discussion gravitated to source conjugation:

* First degree: what can I do unilaterally to keep my job?
* Second degree: what can I do to convince you?
* Third degree: how would the disinterested consultant organization counsel their acquirer-client?

The premise starts not with the pieces but the game board. The game we're playing is capitalism and the rules are by, for, and to the owners of capital. Us custodians, gardeners, farmers, bodyguards, and gatekeepers must take in a deep breath and a full step back from our cubes and Outlook boxes at the dawn of a newly waking work day, knowing that the lights may already be turned off.

To be on board is to be prepared to jump ship once the manifesto has passed from one shipping magnet to the next. The crew, however, is not part of the negotiation or even the inventory. To miss that reality is to be held hostage to our own lethargy and inflated sense of importance. Unlike the good captain, we can't go down with the ship. It's not our board to begin with.

Part of the ship-jumping drill is conducted in the self-renewal of our daily vows (including refresher swimming lessons). From the first degree perspective Kate Pugh recommends declaring "a major" to resist being tagged as cargo (overhead). In the consolidations to come it helps to eclipse counterpart "majors" by playing the "best practices" hand in trying to stave off commodity status and marginalization. I concede that the part about personal branding and sucking up to the brigadier smacks of a Fast Company survival guide written by that same doomed captain after the life boats have left for good. Animal magnetism is what seals deals and wins business. There are limits, however, to personal charisma outside the school of self-preservation.

The options seem more leveragable in the second degree where self-declared majors can double as brokers for the teams they've assisted and the projects they've led. One of the more thoughtful second degree contributions to our meeting came from Dave Wallace who spoke in terms of what farmers provide hunters in acquisition terms that is also certain not to show up on a balance sheet:

"How do you reward firefighters for the fires that never happen? he asks. "How can you document that demonstrated ability to diffuse the crises?"

Here it helps to take a page out of Kate's playbook for connecting personal outputs to winning outcomes by elevating those contributions to revenue-generating status. Dave was also quick to address the match-ups and shake-outs around the re-ordering of org charts: who is your equivalent in the new organization? Do they have a higher title, a lower salary band? What expectations do they answer to and what problems do they resolve?"

The third degree is about the ultimate out-of-body merger drama. The active disinterest that speaks to the dispassionate observance for how outsiders advise their conquering clients to carve out the crown jewels of the predatory spoils. Beyond the aggressive cost-cutting that finds a home in bull and bear markets alike there is the need to safeguard the knowledge flows that drive the sales cycles -- not just the profit centers they flow to. I've always carried this implicit understanding with the type A bosses I've supported in their sales efforts. KMA's Mike Gilronan was incredulous how under the radar this realization lands on the operational side: "Some non-revenue-bearing folks don't get it -- How do we justify ourselves?" This is not a rhetorical question to Mike: "Have you ever been held to a quota?"

That unwritten contract trades knowledge flows in the form of competitive intelligence, task-based search results, and accelerated proposal generation for job security. Pure and simple. The easiest way to demonstrate this systemically to an outsider.

That's where the appeal of an enterprisewide tool like SharePoint can play to a farmer's advantage. There's nothing a hunter-gatherer likes better than the map to the treasure -- especially if it spares them any unnecessary turf battles or homegrown improvised explosives designed to blow-up in their faces. That's the beauty of what Chris Rivinus described in my KMWorld Reality Series as the Rorschach test-like properties of SharePoint.

It's a system designed to unify and synchronize all the moving pieces -- prized assets and headcounts alike. Flush the red dye of a bloodless acquisition coup through the SharePoint plumbing and you'll see where the information travels through the anatomical heart of the enterprise. Conversely you'll see the blockages too -- where gangrene is setting into the outer corporate limbs because of information-hoarding, silo-keepers, and other forms of fear, loathing, and clog-hardening lethargy.

Here's a conversation that an acquisition leader and a SharePoint manager can have. It's not "take me to your leader." It's more like the building inspector flushing the pipes to show the rust in the plumbing. That's the kind of knowledge that transcends where the bones are buried and speaks to where the integration needs to happen -- hint: it lies below the financial reporting radar.

Sadie Van Buren referenced the ultimate third degree solution based on a New York City-based copy editor who joined Google Adsense and gamed the vanity results. Every time the agency googled itself it got the gamer's resume. He got his choice of offers.