attentionSpin

Personal Confidences, Life Lessons, and Enduring Kindness

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 13:06:00 +0000

Stephen M. Pollan (1929-2018)

On February 11^th the life of Stephen Pollan was celebrated through the story-telling of his many loved ones. We piled into a spartan rotunda sanctuary on a soggy mid-winter Sunday. Each family member blended the banter of the long holiday Pollan family table with the intimacy of Stephen’s confidences.

Some of the jokes included madcap flights of Stephen basking in his own oblivious regard for social conventions like routine lawn care, daily exercise, and wearing pants. There were deadpan emails about how “your mother and I have decided to remain together” topped off with a “decision to adopt.” His imagination was his mantra. Self-help publishing was his chosen industry and his go-to, primo advice? He recommended – even commanded his flock to make something up:

“Don’t say you don’t know!”

The unanswered question invited a rationale to the inexplicable -- not to the wrong answer. This strategy played out on dual tapings of CNBC programs where he volunteered his son-in-laws as side-kicks and understudy answer men to America’s financial concerns. One of the joys of being at the memorial was the family's invitation to the overflow in the gallery to contribute their own stories -- many drawn from the shared confidences of his appointment-packed advising calendar. It was a fascination to contrast Stephen's disdain for pecking orders, public stigmas, and peer reviews for the multi-dimensional perspectives he offered to his clients.

At home he might putter around in his boxers and thumb his nose at social conventions. Self-cast in the crusader role, he revisited those arbitrary norms in his practice. Much of his work as a professional fear remover meant cluing his clients into the insecurities of the boss and the self-preserving nature of our employers.

He was in our corner. He was leveling with us. What wasn't shared at the memorial were memories of imposing Stephen, his formidable presence in that 1:1 consult, and those classic warning signs in the alarm bells set for plan A graduates lacking in a plan B or a credit reserve:

"Bankers smell blood."

"Your credit rating is your adult report card."

"You live your life – not your job.”

Yes, that was the first direction in the money trail: The job is for the income. Your life is what you do with it. The inference? Confuse the two at your own peril.

I recall these mind-shifting bits of wisdom. It was flattering to have America's answer man as my personal sense slapper-ON-ER. It was sobering enough that adulthood had launched without the opening of my career parachute. Now my loving uncle was splashing cold water on my plans for world conquest. Either way Stephen was intimidating. I needed to come to terms with what college graduates from small elite liberal colleges have been doing since the day they set their sights on the New York City job market, and the only open door is a revolving one.

I severed the connection between career ambition and self-expression. Musings were not bankable assets. Rather it was about counting on the wits – those self-preserving instincts you’re told to “keep about you.” Unfinished college writing projects were not going to pay the freight. Stephen's wake-up call convinced me the creative portfolio was the actual baggage.

That office consult intimacy was much better tailored to a call-in show than to speech-making and lecturing though I feel cheated that I never saw him teach -- an idea he flirted with but don't recall him pursuing.

Outside the clergy, Stephen spent more time inside the trepidation chamber than any counselor – financial, job, life or otherwise. Perhaps that was the spark to what I consider the capstone of his publishing legacy -- Life Scripts, a book about diagramming difficult conversations.

My bumpy transitions and post graduate missteps are not what I remember about Stephen office visits. Nor were the actual answers he provided or advice he gave. It was that mental calculus in the processing between problem and solution. He folded his hands to his chest. He leaned back in his chair, he looked up at the ceiling as if it was an opening to his imagination, and he met your eyes with the reassurance that he had just traveled to the exact place you needed to go.

Sometimes it was whimsical but it was always honest ... except when he left open some wiggle room for teasing.

"I changed someone's life today."

"-- For the better?" Michael would ask.

Michael and I shared an appreciation of a uniquely Stephen-ESQUE superpower on the day before he died. I was rummaging through emails on the train ride into see him, Corky, and the family that day when I came upon a message from the early aughts. In one post he declaring his enormous pride in the achievement of a client I neither knew of or of the actual accomplishment. What struck me was just how personally he had invested in this person, as if their fortunes were entwined.

It's hard to imagine in these hedging and tentative times that someone could be so unguarded in their giving and so fulfilled by it. Stephen gave to causes and many of them were the people whose lives he touched. They showed up as anecdotes in the chapters of the books he wrote with Mark Levine. They were revealed in his big picture understanding of our need for approval, recognition, and most importantly, love. And those folks formed a collective band across the rotunda, a band of love on full display for this memorial and times to come.

Dwelling in these remembrances I recall the unchanneled warmth and affection he lavished on his family and close associates with the measured and watchful guidance he gave me in more formative times.

In one sense they are two sides of the same kindness – a generosity we all embrace.

In more recent times I would imagine that my brother’s sons had a very different experience when they sought that same signature guidance.

Stephen had changed our lives and we all understood how that had changed his – all for the better.

References:

Conclude Me

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 13:45:00 +0000

Jeb "Please Clap" Bush said two memorable things on his race to the bottom of the GOP candidate pack last primary season:

"Donald ... You're not going to insult your way to the White House. That's not going to happen."

"Donald is great at the one liners, but he is a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.”

After yesterday's one man circus act in the East Room, we now know that Jeb is batting 0-2.

I am however willing to bet that the guy he inherited the chaos from was our country's most data-driven chief executive and that Donald is the least. Naturally, I have no actual numbers to base that on I'm as much a prisoner of my own inferential biases as the next NPR filter bubble dweller.

Regardless of how long we have the pleasure of Donald's WWF-style press briefings, I have ceased believing our number 1 duty as citizens is deciding who holds public office. It's not railing against ...

* The jerry-rigged elections

* The gerry-mandered districts,

* The partisan pandering,

And who ...

* Holds more eyeballs,

* Or assets,

* Or less respect ...

... among members of a Facebook advertising category that contains people who fake text during moments of social awkwardness.

Nope.

It's to figure out what humans are actually good at.

I say that because in our + half-century on planet earth, there's no combination of tyrants, typhoons, bad neck ties, single cell terrorists, and yes, loose nukes, that tells me the balance of our days should be lived out under the existential cloud.

So why are anti-anxiety meds the new normal? Sure, there are gobs of fear and anger and despair and antipathy towards Belichick and Brady. But that doesn't explain the gap between the end of common decency and the end of days.

I'm guessing there's widespread silence on the agreement that people make crappy machines. If you look in the classifieds, the owners of capital are not looking for human qualities at all. They're looking for high functioning order takers who are skillful violation avoiders and devoid of personality (Facebook pages affix no smiles upside-down).

Couple that with the individual's need for safety and shelter and we see how our marginal job prospects spiral into the ditch known as lower life expectancy for middle aged white guys. Our actual human personalities are as relevant to our pairing prospects as a 5% unemployment rate. No connection whatsoever.

So I end this grim soliloquy with a crack of sun in the door. People are superior to machines whenever we make the machines do our bidding. Have Facebook log into us if they want our data -- OK, that's still a fantasy but we can scheme. How about the complex relationship between I.C.E and I.S.I.S? The algorithms are not caught up to us there either. Also, we don't have to involuntarily install the Rush to Judgment app like the next guy and gal. We don't need to get stressed out at how we may be judged. It's that stress that blocks the ability of our peers to think critically, i.e. holding two opposing ideas in our heads at the same time.

Note to selves: machines can't touch that task. Not in our lifetime.

Fellers -- we are now in a world that's no likely to honor critical thinking than it is to honor the liberty of not belonging to one intolerant tribal judging panel or the next. I can think of no higher calling than Bolishuk to describe our unique place in the gift of each day where we have our collective wits, our independence of thought, and one another.

Happy February 17. And thank you Canuck for your loving cultivation of our artistic legacies.

Unhinged From Reality – America Flirts With Fantasy Elections

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 17:37:00 +0000

Are elections rigged? Maybe. Are they hacked? Could happen. Are they tampered with during shipment and handling? Poll workers and experts say no. What could they be hiding? What we know for sure is that in the era of the permanent campaign cycle...

We're sick with our own disgust.
There is a widening gulf between the electorate and the elected.

Representative government was the delivery vehicle for bringing democracy to the masses. But what are our collective roles as participants in that process? In the plot to undermine democracy, our deep and open doubts form one closely-held secret no one seems to be keeping. In this fifth national election in the young century, how do we identity as citizens?

Are we...

Our social media check-ins?
The sum of our political contributions?
The tributaries formed by our gender roles and bloodlines?

To the electoral machinery the American voter is composed of: (a) a basket of friend requests to (b) one part debt load and (c) two parts gene pool. We know this because we hear about the path to victory and that path is lined with ethnicities, regions, income, and education levels. The boundaries that define our public lives are one in the same as our value to advertisers.

Contracting Voters

With that kind of calculation, is there any surprise that many hold regard for the vote as an endorsement of a system that has no other purpose for us? There may be some lingering guilt associated with betraying our servicemen and women's fight to preserve our right to it. There may be a perverse fascination for using the vote as a cudgel. If the ruling class compromises the social contract between the government and its citizens, why not just finish the job?

In 2016 the citizen-outsider is routinely exposed to groveling at fundraiser dinners and the spoils of privilege. On the virtual battlefield, the first amendment can just as easily be invoked over dark money and cyber warfare as it can over freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. As a world awash in WikiLeaks turns transparent, the more unhinged our conventional reality becomes. Think of elected leaders publicly worshipping at the altar of Horatio Alger. Now square that with a recent Derek Thompson piece in the Atlantic on America's Monopoly Problem:

"The land of the big. And the home of the consolidated."

It's not just that the status quo works for those in power. It's that the only power the average voter holds is to punish the system with their votes – however many entangled pieces may vaporize before the new administration takes office.

Vandalism in the Voting Booth

It's a sobering reminder:

Everyone's a special interest.
Everyone's a single interest voter.

But no one gets to pick how those single issues are strung together, let alone the candidates for speaking to them. A zero sum game is a ray of sunshine compared to the lose-lose proposition of a Clinton Trump victory. Both candidates defy all precedent in their unfavorables.

Never before have so many in one camp taken collective action to block, deny, and ultimately prevent the will of the other. Whoever emerges will earn a mandate – not to lead but to defend and deflect the howls of protest from the vengeful and affronted. When moral compasses run afoul of legal codes the disenfranchised are not only ostracized but banished from the larger community. The only option between conquest and surrender is the escape of withdrawal – to fantasy elections.

Level With My Playing Field

I've fixated lately on America's nose-diving attention to NFL games. At the core of football as social conventions are the rules and distractions of the non-events to be endured: first down measurements, thrown flags, PSAs, timeouts, stretchers, stats, less-than-instant replays of contested calls, and station identifications for starters.

Why do we want to throttle our collective attentions – pull them off to the side of the road for the passing ambulance corps – when we can lock into the pay-offs of games called by our plays, players, strategies, and even our own rules. From the first tax loophole to the last tacked on amendment, what can be more American than playing by those?

Fantasy elections tackle another largely unaddressed need and that's a level playing field for rating politicians. Key to this shift is that voters and not fact-checkers are the ratings agencies. Not only do fantasy voters have the same fact base to draw from but they decide which facts on which to make that determination:

Is the candidate an established politician? Then up comes crime stats, graduation rates, income levels, unemployment numbers and a host of pocketbook-slanted app counters.
Are they here to entertain us? What are their follower numbers on social media? What kind of box office ratings do they attract and what attentions of ours do they pledge to hold if they win?
Are they a titan of industry? How many jobs did they create, how much value did they return to shareholders, and how much of it was shared among the wider communities impacted by their success?

As great as dislodging the media might be to us craven messenger-shooters, this middle-man elimination scheme pales in comparison to the ultimate removal – YES! The yanking of the Republican and Democratic umbilicals from the womb of the American electorate.

In such a scenario the color wars of red and blue, the racial rancor of black and white, the belief battles between religion and science and that widening gulf between the one percent and the remaining population on earth. That great reckoning is about liking, loathing, and/or reserving judgment on the myriad of stances, roles, policy positions, and alliances that collect around the limited choices we have in a candidate X versus Y world of today.

Scheduled Departures

With fantasy elections voting freedoms are extended to a list of top ten issues. These picks are not subject to the whim of mass shootings, unscripted gaffes, or other orchestrated surprises. As a set of chronic conditions and tough problems, they are resistant to the whirlpool of visceral gratification that pulses through the cable news circuit. They are not a list to be bought or placated by a power-broker. There will be repeated tallies throughout the play-offs – um, I mean primaries – where fantasy voters can begin linking their leanings to the stances they're hearing on the campaign trail:

Imagine a time when an agnostic voter can bypass abortion entirely?
Fathom a contest where pro-lifers can step over the commotion about where to send troops under which war game scenario?
Dream of a debate where a deficit hawk can tie entitlement spending to the non-partisan fact that fewer workers are supporting more retirees?
Conceive of a world where a living wage bill garners more attention than elderly elites waxing nostalgic about their self-made careers?

Fantasy or Fiction

Fantasy elections permit the voter the satisfaction of not only voicing their concerns but choosing the issues that concern them in the first place. Politicians can't choose us like voting cattle from some big data stockpile. They can't pony up based on delivery us like some kind of tribally-connected takeout order arranged according to a standard issuance of dog whistles:

So-and-so's trying to take away your such-and-such
This-and-that's trying to make you pay their way and their wares and cares.

My favorite accusation comes from this morning's checkout at the North Hadley Sugar Shack. Shannon Kendrick describes the self-interested participation of the political classes as paying $ thousands a plate at a fundraiser without pennies towards helping to feed a needy family. The point here is that American greatness can only occur when Americans are engaged on the merits of our ideals and not the electoral math of our demographics: Represent us for our resourceful minds – not our feeble, unyielding body parts.

To paraphrase the late Tip O’Neil: All politics is (not only) local. It's frontal lobal. That's an Election Day fantasy that can bring democracy back to the ballot, no matter who wins tomorrow or presents evidence of rigging on the day after. That's my love-of-country naivete running full mast.

Unhinged From Reality – America Flirts With Fantasy Elections

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 17:37:00 +0000

We're sick with our own disgust.
There is a widening gulf between the electorate and the elected.

Representative government was the delivery vehicle for bringing democracy to the masses. But what are our collective roles as participants in that process? In the plot to undermine democracy, our deep and open doubts form: (a) a national consensus, and (2) one secret no one seems to be keeping. In this fifth national election in the young century, what is our proper role as citizens?

Are we...

Our social media check-ins?
The sum of our political contributions?
The tributaries formed by our gender roles and bloodlines?

Contracting Voters

With that kind of calculation is there any surprise that many hold regard for the vote as an endorsement of a system that has no other purpose for us? There may be some lingering guilt associated with betraying our servicemen and women's fight to preserve our right to it. There may well be a perverse fascination for using the vote as a cudgel. If the ruling class compromises the social contract between the government and its citizens, why not just finish the job?

In 2016 the citizen-outsider needs no special favor to witness the insider trading, groveling at fundraiser dinners, and the revolving door from elected office to privileged relationships. On the virtual battlefield, the first amendment can just as easily be invoked over dark money and cyber warfare as it can over freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. As a world awash in WikiLeaks turns transparent, the more delusional our conventional reality becomes. Think of elected leaders publically worshipping at the altar of Horatio Alger and square that with a recent Derek Thompson piece in the Atlantic on America's Monopoly Problem:

"The land of the big. And the home of the consolidated."

Vandalism in the Voting Booth

It's a sobering reminder:

Everyone's a special interest.
Everyone's a single interest voter.

Level With My Playing Field

I've fixated lately on America's nose-diving attention to NFL games. At the core of football as distraction are the conventions of rules and trappings of the non-events to be endured: first down measurements, thrown flags, PSAs, timeouts, stretchers, stats, commercials, and station identifications for starters.

Is the candidate an established politician? Then up comes crime stats, graduation rates, income levels, unemployment numbers and a host of pocketbook-slanted app counters.
Is the candidate an entertainer? What are their follower numbers on social media? What kind of box office ratings do they attract and what attentions of ours do they pledge to hold if they win?
Are they a titan of industry? How many jobs did they create, how much value did they return to shareholders, and how much of it was shared among the wider communities impacted by their success?

As great as dislodging the media might be to us craven messenger-shooters, this middle-man elimination scheme pales in comparison to the ultimate removal – YES!

The yanking of the Republican and Democratic umbilicals from the womb of the American electorate. In such a scenario the color wars of red and blue, the racial rancor of black and white, the belief battles between religion and science and that widening gulf between the 1% and the remaining population on earth. That great reckoning is about liking, loathing, and/or reserving judgment on the myriad of stances, roles, policy positions, and alliances that collect around the limited choices we have in a candidate X versus Y world of today.

Scheduled Departures

Imagine a time when an agnostic voter can bypass abortion entirely?
Fathom a contest where pro-lifers can step over the commotion about where to send troops under which war game scenario?
Dream of a debate where a deficit hawk can tie entitlement spending to the non-partisan fact that fewer workers are supporting more retirees?
Conceive of a world where a living wage bill garners more attention than elderly white elites waxing nostalgic about their self-made careers?

Fantasy or Fiction

Fantasy elections permit the voter the satisfaction of not only voicing their concerns but choosing the issues that concern them in the first place. Politicians can't choose us like voting cattle from some demography-based meat market. They can't pony up based on delivery us like some kind of tribally-connected takeout order arranged according to a standard issuance of dog whistles:

So-and-so's trying to take away your such-and-such
This-and-that's trying to make you pay their way and their wares and cares.

My favorite accusation comes from this morning's checkout at the North Hadley Sugar Shack. Shannon Kendrick describes the self-interested participation of the political classes as paying $ thousands a plate at a fundraiser without pennies towards helping to feed a needy family. The point here is that American greatness can only occur when Americans are engaged for our ideals and not our demographics: Represent us for our resourceful minds – not our feeble, unyielding body parts.

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 12:52:00 +0000

KM in the Jerkplace – Postmortem: Crossing the Knowledge Divide

Installment Summary: The series concludes with a reflection on the power of jerks and their confrontational relationship with us – the folks charged with transferring knowledge across cubicles, silos, business units, and generations of would-be collaborators. Those conflicts boil down to an irreconcilable difference between knowledge concentrators and distributors – a rift that favors coercion over dispersion. Ultimately the conflict cannot be resolved by placing knowledge in the corner office but by placing it in the corner of every change agent and meeting table across the organization.

crossing the KNOWLEDGE divide

Over the last seven installments we’ve visited four wildly diverging workplaces united by one thread besides a revenue model, a payroll, a services catalog, and a badging scanner at the front entrance – the decision to pay a smart person with the necessary blend of naiveté and self-confidence to include the term “knowledge” in their job title.

The arguments play out like this:

Some organizations might say KM distills the essence of the meta-level inference: Who can plausibly oppose knowledge about knowledge?

Who can argue with hiring smart people who consider ivy towers to be silos worth avoiding? Q: I wish we knew what we know? A: Hire a KM guy.

Who can dispute the fact that the collective organizational brain is both overworked and underutilized – trapped in the hamster wheel of earning-one’s-keep justifications?

Beyond collaboration, efficiency, and shear speed-of-learning, KM is perceived as the bottomless cup of caffeinated process acceleration. It’s also looked at as a hedge against attrition as-in knowledge walking out the door. It’s a container of code; hence the fixation on system knowledge. And as the thesis of this blog series maintains, it’s a protection against the intellectual and emotional vandalism of jerks. That’s because it encourages reciprocity – not simply sharing for its own reward. It promotes transparency to gain trust. It codifies repeatable lessons so they don’t need to be relearned and so the successes they spawn can be reapplied. Is there really any place for jerk behavior to breed in such an empathic setting?

Well … yes.

The problem with this theory is that it crashes faster than the QA server entrusted with your gold-plated production assets. How is it that something that matches patterns as nimbly as it connects the strategic dots fold instantly at the jerk table? That is the looming doubt that shadows each ensuing KM program and the enterprise that failed to support it.

There are ways to fight the power. None of them land more than one separation degree from measurement. Measure the world in units of knowledge and …

· No one suffers from an abundance of it.

· If anything there’s a scarcity of it.

What would it take to close that deficit?

Knowledge Needs Know-How to Play Nice With Jerks

The hyphenated answer is know-how. There’s nothing sacred, value-based, or recoverable about knowledge in its static form. It’s a trophy piece – a collectible – until pressed into the service of problem-solving. What’s the most popular one-word definition of knowledge? It’s power. And we appreciate that before we even know what to do with our knowledge.

But here’s the rub. Information wants to be free and knowledge doesn’t aspire to anything. Power closes down dissent and debate. Knowledge is an open book. It’s a quality that many of us covet more than any capture-worthy material or ideal we could ever hope to possess. So here’s the question: How do we get from “free” to “power”? They’re not polar opposites but they’re not exactly complementary.

Or are they?

If we work among peers who see knowledge as process, then aspirations like team-building, communities of excellence, and end-to-end transformations become a reality we create at work – a channel for reciprocity, a reward unto itself.

That transformation cannot be willed into operation through platitudes or imposed by knowledge czars looking to inflate their knowledge adoption metrics. If the organization sees knowledge as a destination, we’re sunk. Nothing corrupts the power of knowledge more absolutely than treating it like a product.

Closing Arguments

So what do we know about the split between knowledge hoarders and givers? We know that the battle is often a private one. The resolution isn’t decided by competency frameworks and social informatics. Mostly it boils down to proximity to power.

We know that impediments to pooling knowledge are rarely correlated to missing revenue targets. The intention of sharing is likelier to find its way to mission statements than actual boardroom conversation. Yet the transfer of knowledge impacts the downstream verdict on the ultimate workplace rationale: Are our employers anything more than the sum of our paystubs? From a KM perspective it’s not the size of the pay check where the answer lies. It’s an organization’s belief it holds the cards to its own fate.

Here’s now is the conclusion of the lessons learned from the jerkplace.

6. Don’t fetishize the look and feel

One of the great misuses of technology is that we get hung up on presentation over substance. Function follows form. We clean data without actually putting it to work. We don’t digest, absorb, or assimilate it into a series of actions or outcomes. That’s not to suggest we can’t have a pretty screen to tease the data patterns out of our work product. But most web design fixates on the interface – not on the interaction itself where the actual substance lives. It’s an uphill argument for KM folks who find themselves sequestered on intranet teams.

7. Show the how (and strive for imperfection)

There’s an endless supply of “what” matched with a finite number of “how.” The former is a near certain argue over definitions. The latter is an open invitation to gain interest, buy-in, and eventual leverage with your stakeholders. The difference can best be gauged as the distinction between the collecting of knowledge and the applying of know-how. That’s the cause-and-effect of operational KM. It’s not a static repository that requires data storage and system passwords. It’s a fluid transfer between practitioners trying to shorten the distance between the outcomes they desire and the actions required to trigger them. The imperfection of that process refers to the surprise that comes with the excitement of sharing – not a sure thing or an obvious answer but the corrections and adjustments necessary to match the demand for answers with a responsive supply of prior experience.

8. Never fall prey to the messenger’s ego

There is a bias in most news rooms that has little to do with your political bent and everything to do with your speed-to-market. Scooping the competition will not guarantee thoughtfulness or a responsive approach to the news you’re delivering. But it gives your audience the distinct impression of your connectedness to the news-making – even if you’re only collecting the dots and not actually connecting them. If this plays to a KMer advantage it’s that we’re arguing “why” this news flash is newsworthy. Not why it compromises the folks who may sit outside the news traveling circle. One example would be to say why we’re surprised and how it shifts our expectations as we take this new direction onboard with our earlier thinking.

9. Be the active observer

KMers are largely institutionalists. They see organizational struggles from the larger, shared perspective. They follow bottlenecks through to the boundaries of matrixed organizations where cross-functional incentives lag behind the need to think holistically. In such structures the interplay of internal divisions inspires uncontrolled layering, overlapping resources, and a lack of cohesion. Each of these shortcomings are sage opportunities for outside intervention. And from an insider view, the KMer is most poised to offer a more open alternative to these ingrained behaviors and parochial tendencies.

10. Do not attempt to influence through threat-making

“OR ELSE …” is an argument that hangs itself when it comes to moving the needle that KM is supposed to thread and stitch into the fabric of how organizations: 1) coordinate internally, and 2) compete in the market. No one’s going to score points for helping the risk-averse to see the KM light or getting right with the knowledge gods. There are few punitive cards in play here, perhaps because there are few dedicated KM departments and even fewer protected from the rigors of quarterly profit-taking. Most KM influence is vested in accentuating the positive impacts of adoption – not the negative consequences of inaction. Regrettably, inaction is referred to life before KM; unfortunate because “before” transitions to “after” if those pilot programs aren’t more widely established.

11. 11^th Commandment – Know Thy Jerk

Executive: insecure or boorish?
You would think that the arrival of executive status would usher away the insecurities which drive the promotional cycle. However, this romantic notion cools quickly once our selective company is on the hot seat for timely, specific results.

Supervisor: protective or insular?
It would seem that one’s immediate superior is the most prevalent command chain positioning for picking fights of a rigged nature or the pulling of rank in the absence of group consensus. Look to expand the stakeholder pool when making the boss look good means being set up to fail by same boss.

Peer: controlling or off-the-handle?
One could easily assume that peer relations inhabit neutral territory and not natural breeding grounds for jerkiness. Maintain the status quo of “doing more with less” is the common mantra of the mid-level manager and it behooves them to cooperate in support of this implicit understanding.

Subordinate: passive-aggressive or risk averse?

One might conclude that incalcitrant, immovable forces are not within province of the lower rungs of the pecking order. One could easily equate the junior status of the less experienced staff members as a more exploratory approach to conventional problem-solving. Maybe they tinker with technologies that intimidate their elders or a devil-may-care attitude for attacking chronic or seemingly intractable tech-leaning workplace glitches that KM is expected to resolve.

KM In the Jerkplace: Postmortem – Social Management in the Knowledge Media

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 18:42:00 +0000

Postmortem: Social Management in the Knowledge Media

Installment Summary: We take stock of the flying elbows around the management table and find that much of the turf wars between KM and jerks are seeded by a series of pre-existing conditions. They include a fixation on security, gamification, and social media.

Powering Down on Knowledge

Since no serious student of politics (geopolitical, office or otherwise) disputes the proposition that knowledge is power we will start our jerkplace postmortem with a less traveled corollary:

Power in its purest, undiluted form is an awesome aphrodisiac.

Agree with that logic and no wonder we're on the path to knowledge as our habitual gateway drug. Being compensated on the managing of knowledge, it's hard to deny ...

The plummeting price of storage
The proliferation of isolated sources
The congealing spaghetti of passwords slamming the doors to those silo-prone disconnections

But maybe the biggest change in the knowledge calculation is the business value placed on the internal pack behavior that's swelling the newsfeeds across our intranets.

The Power Hungry Chow Down at the Newsfeed Trough

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgment passing for a browser-contained experience. Emoticons, hashtags, likes ... All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that justification is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter. And it's not just a matter of mounting repositories or the virtual barbed wire we place around them.

No serious advancing of knowledge management can occur without the sober realization that social media is not some temporary distraction from tackling the real KM work. It's a daunting impediment to the collaboration we were hired to promote and capture. That’s not because ...

The power hungry are busy accruing virtual badges (confirming a ravenous appetite for collegial know-how)
Social media lowers the barriers to collaboration and who needs KM anyhow?
You blocked me from reading your newsfeed

It’s that social media has lowered the knowledge bar to the point where challenging ideas are regarded as provocations. On social media terms that reckoning could be described as:

An insatiable need for praise,
The nagging doubt that compliments are insincere attempts to curry favor, or
That it’s the world of ideas that are the true distractions.

It’s our outsized personalities that must be privileged before we address any demands on our collective expertise for solving problems.

Yikes.

No Country for Honest Disagreements

I'm talking about a world where we placate our taciturn cousins with friended status while narrow-casting our way clear of a potential firestorm. The irony is that our sincerity buttons are being pushed by the same publishing features that shield us from the need to listen to, much less negotiate points of contention among conflicting opinions. I'm not suggesting that the foundational aims of KM are at risk the moment we deploy Yammer, Jive, or some other virtual water cooler for keeping our colleagues in the organizational loop:

Oversharing is not the same thing as over-collaborating.
TMI ("Too Much Information") is not the same thing as running a surplus of collective know-how.

The rub is that keeping up our social appearances runs the risk not only of diluting findable content but pushes the need to produce, host, and maintain high quality content off the home page and into a sea of dead links and decommissioned servers. And before we're left debating whether humans are even capable of rationalizing through the back stacks of organizational sense-making, consider this. There is a jerk willing and able to...

1) Affix their jerk signature to a working definition of obsolescence – whatever got built before it faced the turnaround artistry of their wrecking balls.

2) Sandbag the wheels of change with so much process that even the option of deleting a non-functional site is an open invitation to paralysis creep.

The Knowledge Management Code of Practice: Takeaways 1-5

It’s been five years since the termination of System Wisdom. In that time I’ve worked at four knowledge-starved organizations. In each case they all held to the theoretical justification for hosting a knowledge function and failed to realize the benefits for doing so. The lessons I draw from these otherwise divergent enterprises is the real and lasting damage done by individual jerks. At each management level jerks sabotaged the focus, structure, and cooperation needed to operationalize the capture and transfer of know-how between communities and individual practitioners.

While I’m humbled by my own track record of working with these challenging colleagues, these mixed successes only reinforce the fundamental takeaways from the seven years of KM plenty at System Wisdom that preceded the current diaspora.

Here then are ten ways to that KM professionals can work through, around, in-between, and ultimately past the drain on collective energies from dealing with jerks.

1. Be a credible ambassador

Be the group lead from the department of understanding. Credibility needs the impartiality of detachment to be both truthful and non-threatening. Don’t be vested in the mercurial personality or the following of tomorrow’s temporary mantra. Credibility is enhanced by a single-minded focus on moving the community needle into positive territory. That territory needs to be clear of conventional performance indicators. It’s not about the counting of “stuff.” KM is not measured by the composite sum of its parts. It’s not drawn to or rewarded by the appeal for shinier screens. And KM credibility doesn’t play well with budgetary authority or blanket justifications for maintaining dormant assets and inventories.

2. Operationalize the good of the group

Keep a maniacal pulse on the transfer points – be it via email threads, project retrospectives, attendance at user forums, or colleagues queuing for assistance in a request list. There are a surprising lack of analytics associated with knowledge-on-demand. There are even fewer for connecting that demand to the pipeline that this transfer point signifies. Knowledge managers are not gatekeepers or coders or subject matter experts so much as brokers between knowledge demand and content supply. Formulating that equation not only heightens awareness about resources but helps unblock the back channels where informal networks prosper but where transparency can move the entire community forward.

3. Metricize the un-trackables

Like we said, you will undermine your credibility if your knowledge budget comes down to the non-value-bearing cost of carrying stuff: software licenses, market research, travel expenses. They’re all one-way tickets to the most leading of all the cost questions – you can’t afford the freight if you have to ask the price. The value worthy of capture lies in the quality of the cohesion in the teams we support. The better the chemistry, the more interchangeable the pieces. The more dynamic the knowledge transfer within the community, the more chances to capture those transfer points. That’s where KM’s fluid nature is no longer seen as a nice-to-have but a critical competence for channeling the organization’s resources to the right challenges and opportunities.

4. Give everyone a seat at the table (and rent a big table)

Nothing rings more soundly in theory and half-baked in practice than the notion of open access. While everyone gets and agrees that privileged information needs to be padlocked there’s not much consensus around what constitutes the information commons – that sweet spot where all organizational boats are lifted by a single point of access. An effective KM program sets up a governance process where you know where you stand from the get-default-go, i.e. everyone can see everything unless it’s a case of A, B, or C. Delaying the process is an invitation to a convoluted rules that are prone to change based on revolving sets of rule-makers. Do you have rule-makers with exclusive sights on rules only they can stamp their signatures on? All the more reason for open access.

5. Call the bluff of exclusionism

Many organizations are becoming less open – even to themselves. How else to explain the extenuating nature of security sprawl – that advancing premise that information is foremost to be protected, no matter how benign its nature.

Hence, open site access – once the default setting of an organization’s communities -- is now an open access question. These increasing boundaries to access have their bad actors. But these are not the likely boundary-inducing suspects. This is not about cavorting, or lording, or even hoarding information for personal betterment. Pure and simple it’s about trust in the system and delivering on a consistent user experience.

So what’s an inconsistent one?

How about being sent the link that leads nowhere. Being sent the link to sites you can’t access typically means the site owner’s moved on or that the administrator’s overmatched. Pretty benign barriers. The problem is that a KM-centric view of information-sharing requires a level of intentionality and upkeep that eclipses the awareness and resource levels of most intranet site teams, run by folks whose primary role has zilcho to do with managing knowledge.

One key takeaway for KMers is to couch the care and feeding of company intranets in terms of what’s worth recognizing by the wider organization – much of this HR-centric.

Next week: The lessons keep learning with takeaways 6-10.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Three, continued – Tight Expectations on a Slack Budget

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 01:33:00 +0000

Installment Summary: Below the operational surface was a firm uncomfortable and out-of-step with technology. Nowhere was the black cloud of technophobia more pronounced than in the planning horizons of the pending SharePoint deployment I was leading. Project success may have been partially compromised by an unfinished legacy or a parochial IT counterpart. But it was positively sandbagged by an A-Lister partner and my own inability to manage my boss and project delivery expectations.

Tight Expectations on a Slack Budget

I misplayed those budget deliberations. No question about that.

Perhaps it was a combination of unjustified self-assurance and a fundamental miscue on my part.

Full disclosure: I never ran a “knowledge department” with a dedicated set of headcounts and dollars. I bartered my way from project-to-project and traded endorsement letters for free knowledge labor from the interns in a Bentley College study abroad program. Skimming by on the bare bones made any budget feel like money in the bank. There was widespread agreement that the firm should move from a niche provider of KM software to the industry standard that my IT manager and I had delivered to our prior employers. TRANSLATION: Gut the status quo system for SharePoint.

However, on my way from the no-brainer to the slam-dunk I was waylaid by my own wishful thinking.

Territorial IT

One of the perennial clashes between IT and KM managers is that the two camps are either one in the same or at each other’s throats. The familiar rap is that the IT folks are oblivious to the business while the KM folks are IT challenged, relegated to passenger status at the back of the IT bus. I didn’t believe this conflict was to play out again at GSM because the territorial nature of my IT manager was more about hosting a new KM system – not about running it. I had no reason not to believe we were on the same team.

Legacy KM

As previously stated my predecessor was a much beloved member of the GSM family and well-recognized member of the KM community. Few of us actually make a go of it as an independent consultant/author and market researcher. However that reputation was etched on Ralph’s record as an industry observer and not a day-to-day practitioner. GSM marked Ralph’s first gig on someone else’s payroll since he had worked for a content management consultancy in the early nineties.

When the time came to build GSM’s first KM System, Ralph made two questionable choices in the firm’s storage and search capacities. With his untimely passing, the building of a more cohesive, responsive, and intuitive system welcomed the immediate attention of Ralph’s successor.

The Grand Bargain Basement

For all these reasons I agreed without reservation to deliver a new KM system on time and within budget ten months from the start of my employment contract. In retrospect I’m still not clear whether that was naiveté, hubris, or both.

Compounding this aggressive scheduling was my reluctance to revisit the rollout dates through the lens of the above “refactoring.” While the signs of a delay in reckoning were many, the one that stands out involved a Request for Proposal (“RFP”) to tag prior work so that it would inherit the new organizational taxonomy we were building in SharePoint 2013.

One of the potential contractors of the work was on retention by the IT manager to support the firm’s network infrastructure. Rather than respond to my RFP, this vendor spent two in-house meetings ducking the requirements in favor of a wholesale do-over – in effect replacing me as the manager and developer for the project. When I opted for another consultant to implement my specification he dug in his heels. The new taxonomy was working but the test server remained too unstable to demonstrate this to stakeholders.

These testing delays marred the SharePoint rollout all the way to my dismissal. This over-reach by the infrastructure consultant was of less concern to my IT manager than the fact I was depriving his outside ally of another GSM retainer.

Not a well-played hand on my part. In fact, not played at all.

Rigidity at the Top

As promised no post-mortem of the GSM debacle is complete without gawking one last time at the wreckage left in the wake of my head-on collision with the partner who terminated my employment. There are times in a career where we lack chemistry with our bosses. Oftentimes they don’t choose us. Have you been able to choose your own boss, aside from self-employment?

Well, that makes one of us.

Perhaps a little flexibility was in order. Maybes some prudent piloting among some early adopters could have provided the wiggle room necessary to work through the hiccups. Somehow trial-and-error had devolved into trial by error. Instead of a sober recalibration, all milestones continued to be measured against my initial rose-colored miscalculations.

Some of Bill’s spinal tension was brimming over well before my starting date:

· Ralph’s choice of Coffee Table Cooler as the firm’s knowledge portal was largely seen as a good first step as a social media hub but long surpassed by GSM’s work product and the potentials for its reuse.

· Ralph’s untimely departure masked another critical part of the position which was that managing knowledge was but one role in filling my position. Another was managing a boss who suffers from a clashing sense of control and detachment – the former in deference to his executive peers and the latter a disregard for the tactical orbits of operational staff.

This indifference to the lower rung of the firm’s food chain was assuaged by Ralph in three ways:

1) Ralph was a vocal cheerleader. His zealous embrace of KM relieved some of the
pressure at the top to lead by example. For instance he loosened up the tip-top of the Type ‘A’ person he reported to – a natural foil to the unyielding drive of the relentless Dale.

2) Ralph played the supplicant card in a good-natured way, play acting in the front seat of the knowledge taxi while driving the boss-jerk down the path of discovery!

3) We were told by Dale at a local office event that Ralph had even shared the same housekeeper as himself, putting to rest all doubt Ralph could glide between roles as a follower, leader, manager, and part-time employer of local cleaning services.

I neither had any of these cards to play nor the perspective to sense the emerging pattern. What I had was an over-achieving ram-rod high-stakes, swamp-draining uber-dragon on my tail. On one extreme he wanted the political cover of not knowing the sausage recipe for KM making. On the other he sought to hand-stamp every gravitational synapse between the KM factory and all knowledge oxides running upstream to the leadership team.

Firing Line

There’s somewhat wound-up and then there’s borderline all-controlling. Bill Dale was on the intense extreme of tightly-coiled. I drafted seven status memos to his peers on the state of KM. Seven times the memo was met by Bill’s wholesale rewrites. By the end of the editing cycle there was no news to share. Events had overcome the spinning of their direction as the options considered in the memo had now expired.

Strong editorial oversight doesn’t do justice to the cork on that pedantic bottling process.

Perhaps the most sincere way to tell this story is to cut ahead to the expiration date. The termination scene lives on in memory as both factually accurate and emotionally honest. I remember focusing on the fingers of the Chief People Officer who sat between Dale and myself. They were not dancing in the methodical confidence of a drum roll procession, but fumbling in a nervous prattle. Her attention was shifting between the termination script and the terminated. There was no smoothing over the bump removal process. Dale stroked his razor-crisp horse shoe mustache, actively looking down as if masking the hands of a countdown clock now out of reach.

No one wants to be on the firing squad any more than wants to be fired on. Two documents were pushed to my side of the table: (1) a performance review that skewed heavily towards the “insufficient” side of the evaluation scorecard; and (2) a severance check deduction. Perhaps the most revelatory moment of the unsavory send-off was that the sufficient box was checked but once. The category? “Accepts criticism from peers and superiors.”

What wasn’t shared was the informal understanding common to the sorry-things-didn’t-work-out conversation. That’s where the parting employee is told they’ll receive some form of endorsement as an applicant for the job hunt to come. Endorsement here doesn’t confer a blank check of hollow praise but simply an affirmation of the job done and perhaps some recognition of a professional commitment to it – if not the desired outcome in the time allotted.

The parting shot was the refusal when asked of any recommendation, as if all the planning and designs were expunged from a year of spade work. At the time it felt like this was no garden variety layoff but the existential nature of facing the loss of reputation along with a regular income to the impervious boss-jerk. In retrospect I realized a great sense of relief and a return to the creative side of KM.

As my wife likes to say about the creative process: “Everything’s a draft until you die.”

Next week: The lessons learned from serving in four KM positions over the course of four years and what KM means as a potential hedge against the petty and substantial influence of the myopic and single-minded executives, managers, and peers who would have their run of their imagined jerkplaces.

***

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Three – Technophobia in the Knowledge Department

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:44:00 +0000

Installment Summary: Keen Core’s search engine bake-off smolders into thin air. The dream of a unified Keen Core recedes on the news that a knowledge-centric nonprofit consultancy is looking to implement a topflight KM system. These consultants are decidedly not engineers or accountants but change agents with designs on tackling the rougher edges of social issues – daring to lead in messy, resolution-defying places that don’t pass the white glove test of more corporately-inclined consulting firms.

Technophobia in the Knowledge Department

My move to GSM (“Global Social Maze”) seemed right for so many reasons. What could be a better mix of big picture agenda-setting working hand-in-glove with pragmatic KM? That marriage could harness, cultivate, and inevitably scale the adoption of GSM's winning ideas across professional, institutional, and national boundaries.

I was moving from a trial balloon to the sanctuary of a department with a mission in support a firm with a vision. Instead of hoping to hit someone’s budget and apologize later, I was on boarding with one, and had the resources to make it happen.

And the most intoxicating news of all was that the reasoning was coming from the prospective employer – not from my wish-list of everything I’d been longing to implement since the great knowledge Diaspora of the Big Four absorption conquest.

KM was not just the flavor of the month or a passing placeholder. I actually received dozens of emails from perspective colleagues, imploring me to take the position:

A self-generating cheering section!
KM Manager for President!

From day one what charged my imagination was the challenge to fire an idling knowledge operation. I felt uniquely qualified to fill the gap between the firm’s value proposition and its cheerful but underwhelming KM platform – an application better at socializing water-cooler gossip than propagating lessons learned.

This reluctance to embrace the best technological fit was evident throughout GSM:

Conference rooms whose dedicated laptops could not be over-ridden
Knowledge transfer sessions that went unrecorded on fears that the play button could disconnect the conference
Whiteboard doodles of siloed databases which resembled a Daddy Long Legs thumb wrestling a paraplegic octopus.

This was not a high-achieving technical organization.

Manager’s Remorse

The increasing prestige and responsibility of the senior manager role included two direct reports. Besides the summer interns we’d hosted at System Wisdom, this was my first supervisory role in over a decade.

It didn’t take long to realize my managerial instincts were rusty and perceived by my boss as an overstretch of the leadership he saw me lacking. Regardless of the leader and leadership qualities in question, my focus channeled past information flow to the padlocked doors of damage control. I was managing stress levels and deadline shifts – a far cry from directing the discourse of the firm’s vaunted “knowledge exchanges” or actually mentoring junior level KM associates.

The first indications this was the wrong fit were written into the terms of acceptance. I was to be physically present in the firm’s Back Bay offices five days per week. That was not in itself a deal-breaker. My lifelong lifestyle choices have led to living in the sticks and working in office parks. I knew I could rev my intrepid jets to support a second residence via Craig’s List. I could even do it for an upfront commitment of one review cycle. I would live from suitcase to cubicle. I would see my family on weekends. Down the road lay the expectations of a more balanced and sustainable telecommute.

Here’s what I didn’t see coming: my boss basically comported to the same 5 day in-office work week. That was a level of attentiveness far beyond my prior exposure levels to “managing up.”

(More on boss jerk in next week’s episode).

Stepping Around the Big KM Shoes

Management consulting is an industry that caters to the insatiable need of corporate chief-doms for external validation in the shrinkage of prior commitments and the growth of bottom lines. The nonprofit version sounds the same themes with one important difference – the bottom line is measured by community betterment over earnings statements. In other words it’s not the rationale for profit-taking but what’s to be done with the spoils – the residues of capitalism known as philanthropy.

For a former Hampshire College grad steeped in sustainable economies and social justice, this assignment was just what the do-gooder doctor ordered – not just doing the right thing to surmount the moral high-ground but because the greater social good was being served by capitalism – not in spite of it. What greater calling could there be to share the gospel of such GSM-branded practices as “collective value” and “shared impact” through the edifying lens of Knowledge Management?

That same conclusion did not escape my predecessor, Ralph Chasticio who began GSM’s KM practice in 2010. Ralph positioned his zeal as a firebrand by leading bona fide KM pep rallies at the annual retreats. He threw birthday parties for the KM system he initiated. His untimely death in 2013 left a gaping hole that included his oversized personality as well as his stamp on KM. I never expected to the replacement for the former and was inspired by the loose-ends of the latter. For those reasons I saw his legacy as a welcome mat to his successor – not as a bar too high for hurdling.

Full-time Visitor Badge

Mondays through Thursdays, the headquarters of most management consulting groups are pulsing with the sounds of air ducts ventilating and elevators shooting past their reception areas. These are mostly thriving, barren places. A profitable and desirable place to work in this industry is an office of rural library-like decibel levels and empty offices – at least those staffed by absent partners and their consulting teams. The intrepid consultant catches the red eye fly flight home on Thursdays to reclaim their personal lives, collect their dry-cleaning, and reconnect with the rest of the firm.

The non-billable office staff earn their keep by making problems wait, if not disappear, prior to the casual Friday homecoming. Marketing, Finance, IT, KM ... most functional innards get baked into the booking fees with the same invoicing logic as reimbursable travel costs. We are the cost of doing business -- not the value.

Those expenses were less padded and more scrutinized at GSM. Not only were GSM consultants out to save the world but they did so largely from the interior of our offices. That’s not to cast doubt on the sincerity of mission-focused consulting or the commensurate sacrifices (pay-cuts, no bonuses, and a slower promotional track). There are many instances where project teams exceeded the visitor badge status of what an onsite assignment means. I was honored to meet and support project teams who worked with refuges and underserved populations. No matter the client, assignment, or budget, the goals or determination to reach them never wavered.

The distinction here is that those in the pedestrian roles of support staff also forgo creature comforts, consolations, and even workplace conventions. In my case this meant assuming a consultant lifestyle at support staff sustenance.

Another was an emphasis on process. In more conventional settings I was surrounded by engineers with MBAs whose move rationalized the bottom-line justification for the results they deliver. At GSM I was surrounded by project managers who were chess-boarding the interdependencies of moving pieces across a sprawling array of events, engagements, and non-billable projects, (a.k.a. the slippery stuff that’s hard to track).

I still remember the dumbfounding realization that my direct reports were not interested in tinkering with the interface or noodling around the peripheries of the “undo” function. They wanted an expectation of scheduling – the where and when. “How” was off the agenda. It was not a role they welcomed. In hindsight it was my failings as a boss to own their lack of initiative and the “how” of the planning. This was illustrated in a single-spaced 30 page rollout plan, top-heavy with micro details. I don’t remember a point-of-return once I sent that roadmap to the printer. I don’t recall a single approver or accomplice even read past the table of contents.

A third unexpected challenge was how the emphasis on process played out in the negotiating of commitments and resources to projects. On the surface this meant there were “pre-reads” to consider before the actual holding of the meetings they addressed (sort of a book club meets budget planning scenario). And those meetings were as scripted as they were scheduled – no scribbling outside the margins. No unplanned digressions. No Q&A without some certainty there was a consensus on where the ‘A’ stands before the ‘Q’ sits down.

Next week: The ghost of a former KM founding father casts a longer shadow as a pending KM rollout is tripped up by an intractable IT peer and my own unwillingness to renegotiate the terms of project success.

***

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Two Continued -- All You Can Eat Knowledge Buffet

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 04:29:00 +0000

http://parkslopeciviccouncil.org/

Installment Summary: The initial optimism for planting the knowledge flag at Keen Core is tempered by factional infighting and an unwillingness to fly those engineering colors under the SAME flag. At the same time leadership exhibits a great thirst for consolidation and little appetite for absorbing the cost of supporting knowledge programs like enterprise search.

All You Can Eat Knowledge Buffet

As the term “bake off” suggests employing cooking metaphors inside a kitchen of software cooks is an event that feeds on a hearty appetite for knowledge management. The idea that coders could compare approaches and results in the pooling of collective assets is tantalizing in itself. Using that process to fire an imagination based on this become standard operating procedure goes one step further. Modeling this team-based approach to problem-solving as the basis for choosing a search engine is perhaps the pinnacle of KM meal preparation.

Imagine a selection process based on the merit of a side-by-side taste test: No loyalties or caveats or leadership nods in any particular direction. The evidence of experience alone being the sole basis for recommending one tool over another. What after all could be more unfettered or unvarnished than the direct input of product teams all hurdling down the roadmap toward the Promised Land of next version resolution?

Little did I know that nothing that resolvable or apolitical was ever a realistic outcome – let alone a KM promise worth keeping beyond the proof of concept stages.

The Lean and Hungry Fat Cat

Regrettably a few hard business realities pushed Keen Core off of NASDAQ just around the time the proof of concept entered the lightening round.

It didn’t help matters that the evidence-based vote to elect the licensing of a new search vendor was corrupted by a power struggle in which divided camps sparred over this decision. There was no referendum. The final straw boiled down to the authoritarian jerk the board of directors hired to lead Keen Core from its tumbling stock price. Gordon Gato was quite candid about his take-no-prisoners style and hard-headed focus on bottom-line priorities.

Where overhead-accruing managers like me come from, this is code for lay-offs. I wasn’t about to hold the knowledge bag knowing I was to slip through a knowledge safety net that had not yet …

Hit the awareness horizons of corporate higher-ups, nor
The budget responsibilities of anyone in engineering.

Revenues declined by a third during my knowledge watch – roughly the same as the increase in Gato’s bonus and non-equity incentive payments. His total take home pay was nearly half of the company’s net income. This financial contortion is especially impressive considering that he was brought in as a turnaround artist whose change in direction netted a continuation of the same downturn.

Besides the dwindling numbers, the company decided to delay reporting its 2012 earnings for the balance of 2013. First came the nosedive in the stock price. Then the stock slid off the quarterly earnings radar – the NASDAQ delisting. It would be uncharitable and inaccurate to say that Gordon Gato took his turnaround signals sitting down. He’s still in the throes of reworking the business model from licenses to subscription-based pricing – a transition that’s unforgiving of status quo payroll levels and flat-out hostile to any non-pay-their-own-way peripheries orbiting fuzzy math cost centers like KM.

Rumble in the Engine Room

In the spring of 2013 Gato used a series of cater-less all-hands meetings to unveil his PowerPoints of the emerging business model and to mark his difference in the new direction – more time with customers, market analysts, and shareholders; less with engineering and services.

Engineering shrugged, went back to work, and reserved any angst about Gato and the stock price for picking internal fights of its own design. Most of the political score-settling in the ranks boiled down to the chess piece maneuvering of product team leads more intent on empire-building than the heavier-lifting required to integrate the moving parts of a divergent portfolio.

Acquisitions were typically rationalized according to: (a) the victors who tend to be the deal suitors, and (b) the cash-out considerations. Gato shared the point more than once that a distant second went to improving how the customer actually benefits. And buried below all the safe harbor statements was the jumble of complexity known as the roadmap required to reconcile the source code of alien applications now expected to unify under a cohesive, functional product family.

In the June 2015 issue of the Atlantic, “Why It Pays to Be aJerk,” author Jerry Useem writes that we’re all complicit in Gato’s ascent to the head of the jerk table:

“Once a hierarchy emerges, the literature shows, people tend to construct after-the-fact rationalizations about why those in charge should be in charge. Likewise, the experience of power leads people to exhibit yet more power-signaling behaviors (displaying aggressive body language, taking extra cookies from the common plate). And not least, it gives them a chance to practice their hand at advocating an agenda, directing a discussion, and recruiting allies— building genuine leadership skills that help legitimize and perpetuate their status.”

That is not to argue that Gato’s prestige rests solely on the forcefulness of his positions or the acquiescence of the shrinking violets in engineering. Remember the existential doubt of a once dominant now floundering enterprise? Now add to the mix the matter of those cookies (or in the following case the unauthorized taking of coffee).

Useem references a 2012 study comparing the effects of individual aggressors and group acceptance. In the control group the aggressor pilfers coffee from a researcher’s coffee pot. In the experimental group he satisfies both himself and the test observer, servicing both their needs. The hypothesis is this: What effect does his stealing have on the other person’s willingness to put him in charge?

The answer: It depends. If he simply steals one cup of coffee for himself, his power affordance shrinks slightly. If, on the other hand, he steals the pot and pours cups for himself and the other person, his power affordance spikes sharply. People want this man as their leader.

And if the man did the pouring without the purloining his leadership “… ratings collapsed … massively.”

That larger lesson about taker behavior in the service of group welfare casts a different light on the fable of cookie jar thieves and the largely unspoken law of rule-breaking as a leadership rite. Perhaps the study participants feel entitled to that free cup. Perhaps the rule-abiders sense they’ve earned it but the rules suggest otherwise unless … we follow the lead of what Useem calls these “heelish” interventions. Hall monitors need not apply here!

Instead of asking why some people bully or violate norms, researchers are asking: Why doesn’t everyone?

Is it the moral compass that points us followers towards the assurance of policies and procedures or is it the stigma of running outside the rules? The convention-smashing leader finds his magnetism in two vital places:

He provides the cover for conformist acceptance: “It’s not just me…”
He holds open the promise of opportunity when the seduction of exceptionalism beckons: “I’m not some rule-bound chump.”

Make no mistake. The primary jerk was Gato. The actual news is that he served in dual capacities as head jerk and visionary leader and the two roles were not in conflict. Many of my former peers saw his brazen leadership as the least disruptive way to keep Keen Core afloat.

Even at his most abrasive, most of my colleagues were not hearing “my way or the highway.” Gato had inserted his will into a power vacuum somewhere between the product family and the fire sale of corporate assets. On the other side lie either: (1) a return to glory or, (2) the resume rewrites of a thousand product evangelists, scrum masters, change agents, and six sigma black belts.

Insert your LinkedIn update here.

Next week: With the bake-off stalled and leadership adrift another door opens in a small but vital management consulting shop, teeming with idealism and knowledge not the side show but the pivot point to their success. Would I be riding high on the coattails of KM?

***

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Two -- Knowledge Engineering for Solitary Scrum Masters

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:44:00 +0000

Installment Summary: The Big Four knowledge survivalist jumps into the awaiting arms of the engineering camp for a once mighty developer of media software – back when hardware mattered. At first the opportunity is virgin territory. This inviting place to plant the knowledge flag is signified by efforts to source and build a search capability for leveraging the company’s collective assets. The initial optimism is however tempered by factional infighting and an unwillingness to fly those engineering colors under the SAME flag.

The Factory Gates Open for Knowledge Engineering

A week before I was to ship out as a SharePoint business ninja within IT, I hitched onto a passing knowledge raft. This water-logged trial balloon was powered by the knowledge-seeking curiosities of the engineering arm of Keen Core Technology – arms dealer to Hollywood, TV, and recording industries, and now under siege by an unceasing array of disruptor insurgencies from all sides of the media production spectrum.

While I had worked along-side IT and engineers with MBAs (a.k.a. “management consultants”) I had never been subsumed into the belly of the engine room: that is IT itself. I learned software-making as a repeatable cycle in need of documentation as-in coding the coders. I learned about daily stand-ups as the perfect antidote for task-drenched programmers who would rather be writing code than getting sucked into meetings.

My mission at Keen Core was to classify the wikis, channel the documentation stream, and socialize the release cycle of the half-dozen or so product development teams. Ultimately this meant distilling all these outputs into a single automated helping of digestible knowledge called “search.” The fact that there was no enterprise-wide answer to the perennial how-do-we-know-what-we-know question meant two things to the engineering crew of Keen Core:

Conceptual – how do we boil this ocean of applications, file-shares, lapsed repositories, and group-based collaborations from Outlook to Google Docs?
Practical – once boiled, how do we care and feed this resource so we can retreat to our safety zones in the comfort of knowing we can test our forward-leaning hunches against our collective history?

The Knowledge Safety Net

From a theoretical perspective the wish list that brought me to Keen Core began and ended with the same staggering and sober realization: we can scale the production of code but we don’t have a clue how to trap, catalog, and ultimately leverage the by-products of that effort.

This overwhelming sense of an organization’s inability to get out of its own way is not well-served by a top-down inventory of all assets – whether they live in the U.S. Patent Office or under “the digital landfill” as AIIM's John Mancini would say. Rather than over-analyze the backlog of dumpster-grade documents, we looked to establish the safety net – not the uber knowledge archive.

There was nothing random to this sampling. Domain experts come out of the wood work – reluctantly sometimes because they’re often “heads down” …

On some failure-is-not-an-option mission, or
Closing in on some new shortcut to faster, better, cheaper.

These are not the sycophants of social media in search of the likability badging trophy.

These are the folks who build stuff. They might not communicate effectively and their managerial skills lapsed long ago – if they ever had them. They are socially speaking apolitical, meaning they are drawn to fixing problems, not towards handling them. They are by-and-large drawn from the ranks of engineering and they are my brilliant, argumentative, recalcitrant, misunderstood people.

These are the ones who emerge when the call goes out for who-knows-how-stuff-works. And like their own circles, the documentation they travel in lands off the documentation radar. It lives on the outskirts of any centralized repository that confers authority, explains connections, or unpacks the experience that inspired it. In the case of the Keen Core safety net it was little more than providing a link to an obscure server I might or might not find password accessible. But after a series of non-threatening prods I had my unofficial off-the-map collection of references that the engineering teams swear by.

Not the sanitized intranet they were used to swearing at.

The Bake-off

The legendary chef Julia Child once said, “Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.” She might as well have been describing the process for picking an enterprise search engine. This proof-of-concept or PoC is your due diligence for matching internal priorities and selection criteria to your bake-off results. PoCs demand an improbable mix of reference able work product – no matter where it comes from, the application particulars, or the sub par referencing used to catalog the electronic version of what lives inside organizational roles and responsibilities.

Once I had my vetted safety net, I was clear to map them to the safe harbor of the search interface where memories get tested, experiments are run, and explanations are concocted. That mapping included a healthy respect for the mismatch between Googling for cat videos that stick to our social billboards and researching a backlog of databases that live behind a corporate firewall. A PoC was undertaken to reduce the vast, uncharted wilderness of Keen Core to a single search box and a choice of search vendors – hence the “bake-off” that played out against the following design choices:

#1 – Fact versus Conceptual Search: Most business problems are not reducible to the distance of the closest pizzeria with the highest reputation ranking. In other words the answer is neither immediate nor obvious. It’s not persuasive on its own but needs the back-story to connect its relevance to the problem at-hand. That connection can only be provided by the searcher – not the search engine. The conceptual search idea was welcome by my colleagues as they were well-acquainted with the status and responsibilities of domain-expert-as-content-curator.

#2 – Single Answers versus Iterative: Because of their research-focused nature, most business or enterprise search problems are not only conceptual but iterative. They are greatly influenced by changes in time frame, authorship, formatting, narrative style, and context – the reason the artifact exists in the first place. Enterprise search results defy definitive or conclusive answers. They’re conversational – not just among peers but with the search interface itself which guides the searcher with:

Related events,
People,
Locations, and
Organizations that suggest …
Further probing,
Competing explanations, or even …
Complete redirections of our original assumptions.

This relatedness was realized in the proof of concept. Human-mediated tagging was neither doable nor desirable but the prospective search technologies proved up to the task for grouping these relations as search facets.

#3 – Search versus Source Dependent: The key to building our knowledge safety net is not so much keyword searching as enterprise sourcing: The ability not just to crawl volumes of pages, folders, and files but to evidence why anyone bothered to do so. Search scoping is essential because it brings the sense-making role of any single artifact apparent to colleagues with otherwise no shared experience beyond a common holiday calendar and pay cycle. Sourcing logic reinforces the cohesive logic of coordination across business lines and supporting functions:

Want to know what the customer sees before it’s out on your website? Search on marketing.
Want to understand our products better? Search on training.
Visual learner? Precede to training videos, etc.
The more technical explanation? Go to the core requirements hammered out by account managers and the engineers who design to them.

Everyone at Keen Core understood the different lenses for sifting through the same content. The challenge was that only engineering had a seat at the bake-off table.

Enterprise Assets or Liabilities?

The good news is that each of these ingredients was factored into an enterprise search proof of concept for the engineering crew at Keen Core. The correct sources were indexed and configured to a search-driven interface reflecting both the nature of the index and the information-seeking goals of the searcher. Better still I got to run a true side-by-side comparison between two enterprise search vendors (Coveo and Google). The thinking here: My colleagues could base their tool of choice on their actual problem-solving.

The bad news is that Keen Core’s enterprise resembled a potluck more than a catered sit-down. The number of place settings changed with who wanted a seat at the table. The unsettled seating arrangements made it hard to move forward without revisiting some tired assumptions like:

The Google Slam Dunk: Hey, wipe that Google web smirk off your enterprise requirements for Google Search Appliance. We’re talking two different engines here!
The How Big-is-Our-Data Routine? What constitutes a fair test sample when a vendor solution crawls across diverse operating systems, repositories, and legacy apps (with licenses no one bothered to renew)?
The How-Open-is-Open Question? What's bothering your colleagues about access to resources? What's the important stuff we can get access to if we need it? What are the content bottlenecks that hinder a silo-bound organization?

Conclusion: At every milestone selecting the right vendor was resistant to simple risk-to-benefit reductions. Multiple trade-offs were the norm. So were the dug-in heels of competing vendor camps. All of these larger lessons were lost to the conflicting agendas of poker-faced stakeholders – regardless of the actual bake-off winner.

Next week: The bake-off verdict is clouded by a crash diet spending plan courtesy of a stock delisting and a CEO whose blunt leadership style distances him from all non-depreciable costs -- including the company’s ingrained know-how on the building of its products.

***

KM in the Jerkplace: Knowledge Factory Settings, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sat, 13 Feb 2016 03:40:00 +0000

Installment Summary: A bumpy transition slides into a personal predicament when an annual performance review turns rocky. That review cycle is a politically charged rejection of merit-based promotion. Here we encounter our first skirmish with a petulant subject matter expert more intent on surrounding their homegrown system with a privileged fortress than an actual team.

Performance Anxiety

There are few corporate rituals less popular and more practiced than performance reviews. If our people are our greatest resource, no platitude rings hollower than the feigned understanding of their resourcefulness. This is the actual nuts and bolts of actual innovation – the ability to move beyond the gravitational pull of power structures, the boundaries of siloed systems, and the inertia of entrenched bureaucracies:

To penetrate new markets!
To remedy chronic shortcomings!
To forge game-changing innovations!
To get the real work done!

Each of those laudable goals must be met by steely resolve and channeled through the social loop. Consulting staff enlist KM support for realizing these aims. But a peripheral assist does not a critical path make. At review time those managers might well be trading up for a promotion by focusing on the contributions of their direct peers and not the collaborations of an extended team. And the indirect nature of knowledge work begs the existential question of knowledge-based ethics, practices, and careers:

How does one gain a merit-worthy move up the managerial ranks – particularly on teams that are often scattered, and double-staffed to other operational groups?

That uphill incline tilts even steeper for the folks retained to blast through the indifference. Those calcified process flows stuck in-between: (1) the front-office that brings in the revenues, and (2) the back office that counts them.

Knowledge managers by definition are expected to break with routines while playing within the rules. They are expected to do this typically by flying solo into the strong headwinds of ingrained habits. That whistle-blowing can sound shrill and incriminating to the keepers of longstanding allegiances. These are not your father’s old boy networks. These are keepers of traditions to policies and protocols that appear just fine from the inside and positively undefendable from a longer-term and customer-facing perspective.

Muckraking over the Coals

At CYA that tension was further inflamed by the binding rationale for acquiring System Wisdom: Let’s absorb the profits but then swallow this change management formula too? That didn’t go down so well. Organizationally this meant looking in the mirror – could we integrate the acquisition mindset into the larger culture? From a KM perspective this meant confronting CYA’s ambivalence to new thinking and alternative approaches.

The role of muckraker for knowledge managers assumes not only that we're suited to be mavericks but that our success operates around an operational imperative. Without a targeted outcome successes are small and isolated by the vacuum that forms in the absence of tangible benefits to the business.

Failing that, the knowledge brain trust reports to no one and answers to all. We tend to float below front-line customer operations and revenue streams. While no less beholden to them, knowledge folks typically report to teams of one with visibility into every which silo we're required to smash.

That muckraking happened over the coals of the well-tended CYA pecking order. This dominance hierarchy was not just a Darwinian take on the corporate food chain. It was also the obstacle course sanctioned as the performance review cycle: hunting season for jerks.

Respecting the Box

As we’ve seen through the lens of the performance review, thinking outside the box is one thing. Acting on that thinking from within said box is a decision that lives outside our authority as change agents. As CYA decorum suggests that box is reinforced with some pretty thick walls. What’s communicated within them does not deviate from those boundaries. A knowledge manager who reaches outside their reporting level or distribution list has not only waded outside the collective comfort zone but violated its confidences. By reporting upward without regard to station the KM grunt has circumvented the command chain.

Like most CYA lessons this was an act of omission. I wasn’t aggressively stepping over a superior but inadvertently stepping on a landmine. The inspiration to stray outside the talk box came from the need to bond with the business and draw from the same gumption and resourcefulness of the System Wisdom team model. The resulting reprimand was the first hint that the old bootstrap routines were boxed out of the CYA power structure. To think otherwise was naïve. To act in anyone’s interest beyond one’s immediate reports was not simply a misinformed overreach but a glaring error in judgment.

Demerit-oracy in Action

Like any reasonable knowledge manager I sought to connect these isolated violations of the CYA protocol. As performance review season kicked in it became apparent to me that under the veneer of merit flew the flag of Demerit-ocracy. Drum roll please … what exactly is Demerit-ocracy (accent on the “DE”)?

Definition: Gotcha culture for punitive politicking – one where all point systems and scoring formulas give way to who’s minding the performance store. Here’s a sample range of outcomes:

· I will overlook your shitty performance because I admire your winning personality.

· Every marginal misstep will stick to you like the static cling of a thousand shag rugs – take that you loser!

Organizationally performance reviews serve two pragmatic functions:

It’s a collection basket for days of plenty: “Tell us what line you’re waiting in and we’ll tell you where the lines are shorter!”
It's a dragnet operation for times of scarcity. Demerits are tradeable currency for trimming the ranks from the bloat of past hiring binges.

On a personal level the practice plays out as corporate frontier justice – beyond shouting distance from the civil liberties that defend us against shakedowns, entrapment, and self-incrimination. All roads run up and down one’s organizational progression. Yet there are no arbitrators to broker an honest difference between the reviewer-supervisor and reviewed-underling. In a padlocked top-down review system there is no incentive to favor or even consider the greater good or recognize the win-win outcomes that stem from the positive reciprocity encouraged by KM.

The spoils go to the jerks: the rewarding of power for power’s sake.

At CYA this meant placing your standing in the hands of your time-keeper – the manager/owner for the tasks you clock into your time sheet. To CYA’s HR folks it meant an observable check-in on the career growth calendar between the knowledge doer-bees and their scorekeepers. To me it will forever mean a license to silence constructive feedback or ambush useful advice.

Taxonomy and Representation

Brittany Whalesong had two unique gifts:

Creating a taxonomy that shadowed CYA’s obsession with counting and fact-keeping.
Treating her creation as the exclusive province of Brittany Whalesong.

In fact the care and feeding of the taxonomy was booby-trapped by her need to retain proprietary control through a tortured blend of reporting schedules, batch updates, and spreadsheet acrobatics. I thought that we would bond over an abiding love for metadata. But the sense-making part of the pattern-matching never entered the picture. Instead I spent the balance of the assignment chasing misshapen pieces of a puzzle that never quite came together.

The first hint I was over Brittany’s barrel was the inability to reach her. I knew she was resourced as a subject matter expert to a client engagement and that availability was limited. That meant stockpiling blocks of questions dependent on the conditional logic of multi-step instructions. Since her know-how of the taxonomy resided solely with her, there were limited opportunities to crowd-source or leverage the team's insights. I assumed that trying independently to solve these problems would be the best teacher.

It wasn't.

Follow-up requests for additional onsite training were denied. Remote-based training was scheduled, postponed, and ultimately cancelled a few weeks after Brittany communicated that I was to receive "a couple of months more of training" before I would be "officially ramped up." Instead she refused to schedule any form of regular communications and team-building for problem-solving and Q&A. All that receded into the background until review season. That’s when I learned through the food chain of Brittany’s …

'Shock' at my ignorance of taxonomy development, my inability to learn it, and my dishonesty in pretending to be a skilled practitioner. She writes that my misrepresentation of this skill caused the reputation of vocabulary services to suffer. Surely she overestimated my talents as a salesman: "My biggest recommendation is not for Marc to oversell himself."

Rather than follow-up a hatchet job with another losing hand I chose not to dispute an unfavorable rating (this is a managers' prerogative). I spoke to the professional virtues of periodic feedback and the firm behaviors that inform all touch points in the review process. My role was not to advise or assess but to learn and to support the team.

The one prerequisite Brittany insisted on was not about prior experience but that I be dedicated. On both counts I worked diligently to learn a new tool, accruing 213 hours, mostly over a short, intensive burst of six weeks. How’s that for counting? Regrettably my client interactions were minimal and almost exclusively on email -- mostly cc-ed as a recipient. That made it harder and easier:·

Harder to understand the viewpoints and priorities of our clients
Easier to piece together an escape route from the obstruction of jerks

Next week: A move from CYA to the greener, if not ever greener pastures of an fragmented engineering group. These guys will come with no prior KM program and no understanding of the profession that a Google search can't explain.

***

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode One -- Knowledge Factory Settings

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 31 Jan 2016 17:45:00 +0000

Installment Summary:

We focus on the friendly acquisition of my knowledge-centric consulting shop by an accounting giant in 2011. A first glance, the giant’s knowledge systems and practices casts doubt on the ability to integrate the know-how of my former firm into my new firm’s service offerings and value propositions.

I was the lead knowledge manager for a small, enterprising consulting firm that we’ll call System Wisdom. System Wisdom owed its success to two factors:

A steadfast mastery of operations management – the nuts and bolts around improving production cycles and supply chains.
The glue holding that mastery together – the knowledge transfer needed to sustain these practices.

There was no original jerk at work in the swallowing of this intrepid, forward-leaning consulting firm. It wasn’t motivated by any personality really. I attribute the post-merger fallout to a blind-spot inside the acquirer – a Big 4 accounting colossus we’ll reference as Cover Your Assurances (“CYA”).

This was not an aggressive overreach by CYA, but a presumption really that success factor #2 was somehow implicit in the first. In this transition all the operational smarts would flow into CYA’s bottom line as easily as the bookings of former System Wisdom clients.

CYA admired System Wisdom as a small, dependable outfit. Our allure was based on: (a) the complementary nature of our tinkering engineers to their bankable legion of accountants; and (b) our outsized profits. When one dialed in System Wisdom:

First you got cool, informed analysis of your current operational state
Next we broke down your operational innards
Finally we pieced them back together with the rationale for strengthening them over time.

The miscalculation was the presumption that System Wisdom’s success formula was as transferable as the financial assets used to seal the deal. Is knowledge (like the capital used to produce it) reducible to transactional units? In our case, the outputs were the documents generated in our case work. As client deliverables they were both solutions to prior problems and reusable frameworks for addressing the new work to come.

CYA treated the exchange as largely a rebranding exercise:

How many offshore editors does it take to redact all specific references to System Wisdom’s former case work?
How many search and replace macros will reappoint the respective logos and color palettes?

This kind of knowledge refactoring scales well for reproducing sets of static artifacts, say for booksellers? Not necessarily so when it comes to social and iterative pursuits like building management practices inside massive bookkeeping juggernauts.

When these ingredients are purged from the original work and the context is removed, it compromises the consulting teams’ ability to absorb the lessons, rethink the approach, and determine its applicability to the case at-hand. A stripped down relic of an ex-client of a former firm is disconnected from…

The insights of authorship,
The learnings from the unforeseen consequences, and
The breakthrough thinking of a pressure-tested innovation

– In short, the particulars that evolve the practice.

These were not the flagrant aggressions of a subversive jerk. These are but sins of misunderstanding and omission from an institutional perspective. On a personal level the jerk war path was paved with malevolent intentions: The fully intended disruptions, the pulling of political ranks, and performance review sucker punches were yet to come.

Three Keywords and a Cloud of Dust

I had barely decamped in CYA’s Knowledge Services fold when I learned of this branch’s eminent demise.

At its peak Knowledge Services consisted of 300-odd former librarians, reporters, PhDs, and trainers that CYA had been advised to assemble as an expansive storehouse of thinker-bees. Regrettably this deluxe busload of bright, non-billable folks was thrown under an even bigger bus – a caravan of metrics that calculated knowledge by the dump-fill and justified the number of sanitation workers required. The answer was not many. The main task involved sorting the number of deliverables and the tags needed to locate, if not find them. This distinction is a scream-out to CYA’s suboptimal search. Each query approached every new information request as an isolated pursuit.

Keepers of the knowledge fold consisted of three camps:

The captains,
The doomed, and
The campers groomed for the lifeboats by their knowledge captains

– None of whom were ticketed to go down with their knowledge crews.

System-wise the enterprise content supply lines were unresponsive to the knowledge demands of consulting staff. Rather than align them, CYA leadership aborted dysfunctional search for the leaner and trendier social media platform. The new system required none of the care, feeding, and expense of the system maintained by the brainy, unbillable folks of the knowledge fold.

The cost savings rationale joined forces with the demographics. The argument was that junior staffers were more apt to engage Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. than CYA’s intranet. Here was a knowledge bone we can throw them to retain them a cycle longer before shopping their wares to a rival firm.

The ruse all along was that corporate-styled Facebooks would make the home team more collaborative on the inside, and once externalized, and more competitive. In reality here’s what happened:

No governance structures led to dozens of redundancies and missed opportunities for community-building. Each new site was in a confused state of collaboration-readiness: some open access sites, some in lock-down, and some slightly ajar (invitation-only).
All engagement deliverables were treated as potential liabilities and were fire-walled away from the economies of learning and reuse.
“Likes” and shallow salutations were socialized like the upturned grin of a ginormous smiley face. Attachments leading to actual work product were frowned on. Substance was a non-starter.

Bottom-line: the competitive edge for leveraging knowledge was used for personal gain – not for organizational advantage.

Disabling the Knowledge Store

I played the expected role of the knowledge giver on social media. I did this by reproducing the archived threads of past problem resolutions – the iterations of practitioners collaborating within a community of experts. Each posting was credited to me even though the know-how being traded was exchanged by the consultants – not the copier/paster/curator.

Contributors to these community sites were rewarded by a scoring system designed to tally their peer influence. My point totals were inflated by reposting the work of others. Then there was the approval seeking which demonstrated the conformist pressures of social media. Why hypothesize or test a rationale among your peers? It’s far easier to win followers by pandering to the pep talks from the C-suite?

Perhaps that’s why the social engine runs on the breathy validations of the leader-led. Point totals lead to accruing badges. Attaching iconic credentials to more substantive discussions was not part of the rewards package. But one could argue that the enterprise knowledge store was never open for business – before or after the brown-nosing and patronizing began.

In the fishbowl of corporate Facebook what’s always an open proposition is not the latest posting, comment, or like. It’s the variation on the question of what I’ve done for you lately to solicit favor. The surface details on social media are sounded through the same immutable timetable. Annual performance reviews are an orchestration set to the grand pause of musical chairs. And no one knows better which notes to play or how to stop them cold better than the CYA reviewer elites.

***

Knowledge Management in the Jerkplace

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 14:29:00 +0000

Is Knowledge Capital Our Most Prized Asset and …

Do Knowledge Guys Finish Last?

An article last summer in The Atlantic brings refinement, nuance, and dynamics of this most familiar dichotomy:

It’s a constant in any workplace, registering on performance reviews in all shades of documentation.
It bubbles 24/7 just below the water cooler surface. It’s the leading age-old management question, the equivalent of what makes for a good marriage.

I’m talking of course from the safety of my hard hat inside the office park construction zone. The sign on the fence reads: Caution: Jerks at Work.

My interest in this sore, fascinating subject is both personal and professional. I don’t just mean in terms of who I work with and the residual impact on career. I mean what I chose as my career path. Knowledge Management or “KM” and its success or failure to my employers depends on its practitioners: (1) not being pulled into the jerk zone, and (2) enabling our colleagues to achieve the same.

The idea is that KM is supposed to organize experience in a shareable way so that it pays to be a generous colleague and that jerk behavior becomes more of a career limiting move for the majority of jerk practitioners.

After all, managing knowledge is an abstraction made employable by long-accepted information age assumptions. That means brains-over-brawn in the knowledge-is-power world of …

1. Reciprocating social networks,

2. No one knowing as much as everyone, and

3. Two-way dialog that produces informed bottom-up decisions.

Knowledge is also the single most reducible currency of what the consulting industry converts into credit-claiming revenue. Whether that interaction is a launch cycle, a maintenance plan, or a fire sale, it takes a knowledge exchange to swing the forces of change in the client's favor.

For all my blind spots, skill deficits, and impatience with jerks, I have learned with time to trade on knowledge currency. That means shopping the benefits of collaborations enriched by expedient on-boarding, accelerated proposal-making, and the simple math of repurposing documents from pitch decks to code snippets. In management ranks reusable assets have come to mean the frameworks derived from a firm’s core IP – the secret sauce promoted in the books, symposia, and articles in places that consider the trade-offs of corporate jerks. Regardless of the channel, these artifacts are brandable as knowledge products – stamped by the elder statesmen and their high-flying heir apparents.

With each new position and employer however a recurring wrinkle began running outside this formula. A pattern emerged that marginalized the traditional arguments for hiring knowledge-dedicated staff. This new twist even challenged whether the benefits for adopting KM were better delivered by full-time employees or through project-based contractors. Buoyed by the intrinsic ease of Google, limitless storage, and the self-organizing allure of social media, many organizations began to question the need even for contractors. Why not pass those benefits directly onto those knowledge-consuming elites? Hey, anyone with a browser is in constant pursuit of faster, better, cheaper content.

Why hire intermediaries who don’t …

Produce it,
Administer the hardware, or
Bill their time back to clients?

In this new calculation either a knowledge system is rolling out or a bright, unbillable knowledge manager is shipping out ahead of it. That “IT horse” before the “knowledge cart” aptly describes the three organizations I’ve joined and left in a recent three year cycle of knowledge roulette. In each case those ingrained virtues of collaboration and community bonds of knowledge sharing took a backseat to the rollout of the knowledge system.

Teasing out leverage-worthy project cases, how they’re socialized, and building buy-in for the ways to organize them was reduced to background noise. In the foreground lie the three dominant IT project markers known as: (a) DEV, (b) QA, and (c) PROD – as in production where the knowledge cart goes on full display.

Knowledge Systems: Art or Artifice?

The fact that the experiential nature of knowledge-sharing has been sandbagged by deployment priorities suggests that the system is no longer a means to an ends. It is the destination for the funding organization and the termination point for the deployment team. Either it’s launched and can care and feed itself or never gets off the ground in the first place. If four knowledge jobs in four years is any indication, the knowledge currency I traded on in the past is buying a lot fewer believers. Facilitating the transfer of knowledge between learning-inclined colleagues has gone from the foundational goal of KM to an afterthought of system implementation.

Now I’m not saying the lights have dimmed on the long view that calls for the intentional transfer of knowledge as a practicing discipline and competitive advantage. What I am saying is that knowledge is an enabler of a process. It is not “the promised land” – even for the most community-minded or altruistic of those knowledge-seeking intentions. No greater proof of this exists with the notion that dogged me through those four years in the KM weeds: that I was hired to carve a well-tended knowledge garden out of a sprawling and unruly thicket of information. In each of these cases knowledge represented “a system” and the knowledge system was a destination – a container of the great organizational learnings that could be tapped regardless of …

· The lesson being drawn

· The question being asked,

· The lesson being modeled, or

· The conclusions being drawn.

I was a party to these flawed understandings. It is too easy to blame them on the coercions of jerks. What makes the takeaways from these fallacies most instructive is that I too was culpable. I contributed to the confusion that formed when the system failed to hold the expectations of those counting on it.

Knowledge Stock and Trade

Metadata, search, and taxonomy form the holy trinity of knowledge system deployments. These are the tools of the knowledge trade. Most KM professionals I know have a penchant organizing virtual assets. But it’s more than classifying documents. Often it’s reshuffling a jumble of pages, images, links, site roots, and file folders that offer little more than a time stamp and a cryptic file name to determine its value, connection to the past, or merit for preserving it. In most cases the knowledge has outlived its creators or the explanatory power of sense-making artifacts. The KM manager becomes a forensics analyst – an archivist who doesn’t just collect the pieces but threads them into a narrative which justifies all the learnings and rationales that were reduced to rubble and nonsense:

· In the aftermath of a hasty merger,

· A rash and wholesale restructuring of a former division, or

· The marginalizing of assets that were never properly curated in the first place.

Now try finding these pattern-matching challenges in the outcomes of the rollout. The truth is that there’s nothing cultural, organic, or people-based about it. The further off schedule or offline the production system slides, the more on-the-line the KM manager becomes for the collateral damage of bringing that much touted knowledge system into creation.

* * *

For the remainder of the Jerkplace series I will put this higher level summation into a series of nine installments:

Each post will cover my last four positions.
Each a failed attempt to build and facilitate three distinct cultures of knowledge.
Each its own climate of uncertainty, suspicion, and a nominal reserve of cooperation, compromised by the actions of knowledge jerks.

In each installment I will demonstrate the conditions that jeopardized the adoption of the knowledge programs I managed and the hard reckoning that comes from…

· Working with difficult colleagues, and

· Using knowledge as a counterweight to difficulties they imposed.

***

World Series Post Met-em

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

“Hey guess what? Cy Young winner. Not on our team. Beat ’em.

“Rookie of the Year? Not on our team. We beat ’em.”

“MVP of the whole league? Sorry, guys. Not on our team. But we beat that guy, too!”

- Jonny Gomes at post World Series Rally Kansas City Rally

From an analytical perspective this series was teeming with contrasting view of how to play the game. None of that seemed to attract much in the way of booth chatter where the acknowledgement of Kansas City as a media market was nearly as scandalous as second-guessing the placement of infielders in less-than-two-out situations.

The most insightful thing heard from the Fox Booth all series came in Game 5 after the Royals had stormed back to telepath the necessary bundle of runs to force another extra round of innings. "For the Mets to win they'll need to hit one out," said Harold Reynolds. "All the Royals need is to get someone on base."

Why the laws of probabilities favor fringe strategists like Dayton Moore over more conventional methods is both a fascination and the unexplored question raised by the ruthless efficiency of the Royals. The Mets were a good team in a splendid groove. As a team the Royals are as much a factoring of calculations as a collection of players. Yes, you need the talent to execute. But you're not asking them to grow their fantasy league stats in the interest of a fatter pay out. Playing the game to win the big game is not the same as playing the market to sign the largest contract. Purveyors of money ball understood this by necessity and made a science out of molding discarded misfits into an ensemble of favorable match-ups.

But the Mets remain a big market team with a modest-sized payroll. The anomaly here is that the bold pre-deadline moves were underwritten by two payroll hiccups: (1) Wright's prolonged DL membership, and (2) Mejia's suspension. The former was indemnified and the latter bonehead move meant a loss of salary as well as service. So basically the Mets played like ... well ... like Yankees with the trappings of "the shift" -- residue of the unexplored pat-on-rump to the savage slugger who would sooner swing away than counter a lopsided alignment.

It's interesting that Ned Yost referred to his players in the third person. Compare that to Collins as the consummate player's manager who would sooner let his compromised partisans pull themselves out than decide whether the show goes on without Cespedes and his knee contusion or Harvey's swollen possession of an undecided win. It's not that the Royals lacked passion. The jawboning from the dugout was relentless. But the animation was constant. As Bal pointed out, even when trailing they were charging up the hill in the same cavalry -- no one pensive or guarded about the outcome to be.

This bench cheer was an informed optimism based on the belief that the rooting agent here is bigger than the team or their agents. Simply put, it's the system of put-the-ball-in-play and your opponent will drop first, boot next, or arrive after you do. It's not the composite sum of the parts. It's the quality of the cohesion. The better the chemistry, the more interchangeable the pieces. The MVP defaulted to Perez when a case could have been made for Escobar, Gordon, Hosmer, Zobriski, or Davis. None of these guys are back-fill or rented for the last pennant run. They're all tied into the same investment. Long-haul-wise, this is the betting money -- not on how many young arms can be rotated away for Tommy John during any one pitch count limiting season.

How else to explain the mechanical orchestration of the Red Army-like logistics displayed every time the Royals got a guy from 1st to 3rd? In the case of running on d'Arnaud's flaccid rifle, bunting for a base hit counts for a double. That's how the New York Mice fell prey to the Kansas City Cats. Could these same cohesive felines have skinned the Red Birds? That's my number one postseason what-if. Maybe it’s not too late to become a baseball fan. If so, it's a higher percentage move than telling the Blue (and Formerly Orange) to steer clear of the fantasy league stat piles and on the road to Kansas City ball.

Meted Out

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 16:35:00 +0000

We all go home again through the Met vessel and my lifelong Bolishuk clan is the channel for reviving that journey. There's nothing unique about back-to-back pairings of the seven lean years between World Series appearances. There's nothing especially rare about a favorite sports team catching fire at the moment of an unexpected and glorious outburst.

But in an era of personal brand portfolios toting custom genders, religious non-traditions, and unpolished presidential hopefuls, we are celebrating a birthmark, if not a birthright.

We did not acquire a taste for Mets. Did we inherit one? Does anyone in this world go out shopping for a favorite team and land on this one? In my circle the Mets were appointed to us like a surname, like the homes we grew up in. We had no say in this matter -- no matter how vivid the smell, colorful the language, or camera-popping the word play painted to the bed sheet.

Odds-on Anything

When the world around us struggles to self-identify through a carousel of designer fetishes we can surrender to the original love -- the source of our colloquial, erudite, suffering 11747 selves. Even when the Mets are said to be the odds-on anything – even the favorite: "There is a relentless, opportunistic quality to this Mets team now,” writes the New York Times’ Tyler Kepner, “Like a shark trolling warm waters with a half-open mouth."

Are we cashing in? We were expecting greatness as much as we were anticipating Murphy's newest set of laws:

Six consecutive home runs in a game
Delayed steal of 3^rd against an overcompensated Dodger infield
1.026 slugging percentage

… each achievement seemingly more oblivious to statistical gravity than the next. I admit it took a re-adjustment yesterday. No game was scheduled as there was no foe left standing for the Mets to waste into an early post-season elimination. But I'd be just as present and perhaps a little more believing if the Mets were on the receiving end of an 0-4 evisceration.

Consoling the Strategist

This weekend's post-mortem Cub rationales are all about being one year ahead of schedule. That sounds more workable as a consolation than a strategy. Can the accelerators revving the Mets destiny appointments be factored into the waiting room of next year speculation? Not with these new Murphy Laws on the books. The Mets might beat the Royals and finish last for the next three years. That's predicated on anything as substantial as the Mets becoming careerist sharks before their gifted starters opt-in to free agency rotation.

Either way, we are choiceless. We are destiny's stooges. We are born, bred, and wired to constantly question our unquestioning loyalty. That curiosity is roused but not predicated on the winningest of streaks. More than a franchise, brand, or betting pool, this is the only first love we are faithful to for life. Perhaps that's what our forebears intended when they conceived at the expansion birth that ... to err is human. To forgive is a Mets fan.

The Lamentations of Mario Cuomo

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:26:00 +0000

What do you call a politician who was transfixed by questions, tormented by doubt, and scattered, if not bored by the hand he was dealt in the austere and myopic times he governed? You would call him that rarest of political animals. The likes of which faces not obscurity but pure extinction when fate’s calls go unreturned. One insider profiling Mario M. Cuomo on the precipice of a Presidential run, concluded that "the only institution in American politics more raucous and divided than the Democratic Party is Mario Cuomo's mind."

What other public figure, let alone one whose influence and notoriety rested in an electorate, would be prompted to justify that course of action at a luncheon at the Player’s Club:

"Am I certain that I'm the very best there is? I can never come to that conclusion."

Typically when a politician wears their heart on their sleeve it’s a big valentine to themselves. For Cuomo it wasn’t self-love but self-reflection that steered him clear of seeking higher office. Even now his improbable reticence plays out less like coming to terms with the ally of honest doubt than bearing the stain of unwelcome disruption…

• An unscripted ending.
• The director’s cut that his most ardent followers fast-forward over.

Front Row Left Center

In January 1983 I left the tie-dyed ivory towers, co-ed saunas, and communal mood colony of Frisbee University, a.k.a. Hampshire College for the formality of three piece polyester lobbyist luncheons in the Empire State Plaza. An internship in the New York State Assembly was about as exotic as it was the follow-up to my impractical liberal arts track -- accent on the liberal and not the track. In that first month I moved to Albany, Cuomo outlined the core thesis in his first inauguration that he was to reprise on the national stage:

“Of course, we should have only the government we need, but we must have, and we will insist on, all the government we need.”

A generation later that patently center left blueprint was waiting for a ride on someone’s lofty campaign footing. The rationale always sounded more defensive in its declaration than a rally cry to the working classes. Yet it could easily serve as the roadmap for the newfound strut in Obama’s lame duck waddle.

In Albany I was placed with a former schoolteacher freshman named Fran Pordum who was as far to the right as a New York Democrat could be. The fact that Fran represented the slice that delivered Cuomo a hard fought primary victory over Manhattan-centric Ed Koch also informed my leftist-centrist views on the pragmatic necessity of meeting in the middle -- assuming the level of trust required for acknowledging the sharing of credit along with the sacrifices.

Family Feud

Koch would describe his loss to Cuomo couched in terms of his own falling out with city voters where he remained the head of the NYC house. The marriage was jeopardized when Koch began courting his upstate cousins. Running for governor wasn't just an over-reach. He was actually straying from his marriage to the city that was to elect him another two times after he flirted with statewide office. But the boonies and the burbs never felt like acquired tastes when Cuomo summoned his family of New York -- a reference to the same community-seeking unity that survives such expansive interventions as big ticket social programs, affirmative action, and economic opportunity for the disadvantaged.

But Cuomo governed in lean times compared to an era since ended. The liberalism he practiced was more about the process of how we engage as citizens through tolerance and compromise. It was rarely about outcomes although his vehemence against the death penalty inspired the construction of more prison space during his leadership than any New York Governor before or since. Not quite the generous outcome one might have expected from a big-hearted liberal:

“History will not record that he was a great governor. His budgets were almost always late. His reflectiveness and reclusiveness did not dazzle legislative leaders. And his flight from San Francisco [after his 1984 convention speech], like his choice not to run for President in 1992, may have indicated a reticence that would not have served him well as President. Or maybe it camouflaged insecurity that was both disabling and wonderfully human. Unlike most politicians, who have no interior lives, he was worthy of a novel.”

Philosophical Extremes

One bone of contention Cuomo used to ridicule the opposition was the unquestioning allegiance to ideology that led in the early eighties to the political inroads of the GOP in the Roman Catholic Church. When Cuomo offered a persuasive defense of pro-choice in 1984, he was just as much railing against the authoritarian streak of unwavering conservatism as he was providing a moral compass for conflicted parishioners. And he did so not by advocating for abortion but by accusing the right of using government to inflict church law on a nation spawned by religious tolerance:

“He spoke out against an ‘unyielding adherence to an absolute prohibition’, and explained that his faith did not mean he had to comply with church teachings in his role as politician. ‘To assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.’ He asked his listeners at Notre Dame University, a Catholic institution, ‘Are we asking government to make criminal what we believe to be sinful because we ourselves can’t stop committing the sin’? The church was not pleased. For a time there was talk of excommunication.”

The principle of point-making and score-settling extended beyond public institutions to the less abstract nature of bare knuckles campaigning – retail politics:

“People would come up to him after the meetings and say, “I’m still not sure I agree with you on the death penalty, but I certainly respect your position.” In the end, they decided to vote for him. They voted for him because Mario Cuomo was a man to respect, a man who respected them well enough to tell them what they didn’t want to hear.”

It was the courage shown by Cuomo in finding, acceptance, and delivering of these nuanced arguments that fueled as much passion as speculation that he would turn his oratory gifts into the bully pulpit of the Oval Office.

The Unacceptance

It was the yearly tiff with the Senate-run GOP that provided the backdrop of Cuomo’s refusal to enter the New Hampshire Presidential primary in December, 1991. Again, it wasn’t the calculation of higher office aspirations. It was the family on the line with Cuomo regretting that he “couldn’t abandon the state at such a time.” The New Republic wrote that…

“Cuomo's restraint always struck some as strange—perhaps even nefarious. Few today can understand the limits of ambition in a powerful man.”

I remember not thinking of an unselfish and elevated command of one’s station. I thought it was chicken shit. His refusal to run never entered any calculations of mine. Years later I understand his reticence and it’s not written in the language of opposition research, vanity, or thinness of skin. It’s a sense of propriety that has no place at the fundraisers or in the broken field scramble where the candidate reveals their “primary colors.”

He Tried

Aside from all the armchair history-shapers there was a remarkable gift that stood in the way of all judgments, both in haste and in favor. That’s Mario’s connection to a lectern. Wrote James Fallows:

“Rhetorical success, like presidential effectiveness, involves more separate elements than you might think. It helps to have a good voice and physical bearing; to have actor- or announcer-type skill in presentation; to have an ear for sentence-by-sentence euphony; and to understand the intellectual and emotional shape of speech. Mario Cuomo had all of these, and our public life was richer when he was an active part of it.”

His biographic arc plots his coming of age in the fifties and ascension to power in the eighties. But that ignores the simple distinction that Cuomo was first generation American. He was no more a bi-product of the postwar suburbs as he was a hobnobbing insider – more committed to holding court than assembling a coalition. Cuomo was the consummate outsider whose commitment to power circles wavered to the extreme of Marx (as in Chairman Groucho).

Cuomo would never indulge in the public identity of the self-made man. It worked against liberal pride and the cultural grain of a community-based leadership. Yet on a private level Cuomo moved inside his own circle. He stamped his own signature. He put himself through law school. Hell, he showed up for grammar school without knowing a lick of English – an experience better known to social progressives of the Depression than during the Reagan Era.

David Frum summed up the fierce and combative bootstrapping of Cuomo’s formative America:

“Cuomo never forgot his origins in the immigrant working class that idolized Franklin Roosevelt and elected John F. Kennedy. Cuomo memorably compared Walter Mondale to polenta, the bland, mushy cornmeal staple of the Italian poor. Cuomo’s most famous speech ended with this haunting evocation of his deceased father: “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.”

I used to think that the ultimate irony was that this heavyweight Socratic musclebound mentalist would owe his historic marking to style over substance. Now I realize Mario doesn't owe anyone anything -- least of all the history we share.

Wrote Murray Kempton:

“Although we may take his mission to be successful, its effect on Cuomo was to make him wonder why the political process seems so much at cross-purposes with reasonableness and common sense. ‘It hardly seems worth the effort to attempt to change it.’ But he told himself that it’s the trying that counts… Perhaps we have seen too many redeemers come and go, leaving us pretty much where we were, and that may be why it is so refreshing to come upon a candidate for office who has already learned that tragedies do not often end happily.”

The Year in Bolishuk Emails

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 17:03:00 +0000

Channel Me This

Distribution systems are containers of agreements between senders and receivers. And those agreements can be suspended or upended at every slippery turn of where a bill of goods, services, or passing signals gain entry. Once on-board, they're liable to the changes in motion that speed their delivery, hasten their departure, cut their place in line, or circumvent their very existence. Distribution systems can be hyper-engineered and rationalized to the Yuan, Dollar, and Euro like a supply chain. They can be digitized into packet switches and resurface as unencrypted evidence of our intelligible emotions -- much of it following a script other than the reach and scheduling of the distribution.

We All Screen for Oscar Contenders

One such seasonal distribution system is assigned to Homo sapiens' tendencies to dwell in caves and tell stories at the tail-end of Christian calendars. In modern times the cave is a multiplex and the story is an Oscar contender. But the network is jammed and the calendar needs recalibrating. That's because the star tour talk show cycle completes much faster than the current art houses can accommodate the movies you and me want to see.

Why is this?

Is it because the potential box office of character-based cave stories relegate a formerly mainstream event (Academy Awards) to a remote fringe of the distribution channels? Is it because the people currently the age we used to be are just fine with the availability of stories that are panned, then banned 'til they land on demand on American Bandstand, (a.k.a. YouTube?) Talk about a redirected set of wires and rails. Are you receiving this: all flat screen smart phones at sea?

The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Void

An equally absurd network scarcity contraction hiccupped through Europe earlier this fall when Google decided not to honor a new Spanish law requiring distribution networks to pay the country's news publishers for their news content. The question is now whether the world hears of the proverbial tree falling in Spain but whether the tree was dead to begin with.

Containments That Got Away

But you don't need to be a titan of networks or a global currency magnet to travel these circuits. A group email among us is an inner circle of winks and associations that fire neurons and trigger a sequence of knowing glances and even some exasperated retreats. But when conversation flows it's because of those fill-in-the-blank assumptions selected, tested, and recounted from a history shared and channeled within the loop.

In days past Bolishuk leveraged this form to contain great outbursts of rhetorical merit not just on the issues of the day but on the momentous thunderclaps between our ears. I learned of Bal and Svetlana's parting through a group email. I was privy to the recounting of gatherings I missed through their retelling of our distributed group text fest. I can recall few memorials as lucid and tender as Canuck's eulogizing of Dria. I enjoyed the banter and armchair jousting for the well-played references to our formative influences.

None of that was over and out in 2014 -- be it the passing of nearby divorces, individual visits, job losses, absent friends, distant memories shimmering in the foreground, or mere birthday toasts. NONE OF THESE MILESTONES (except for birthday greetings) were captured or expressed for distribution purposes. I can think of no vestige of this better than 2014 as the year education reformer gadfly Dish joined the date in history of celebrated birthday factoids on the very year he neglected to hit the Bolishuk reply button. Maybe Dish took the year off.

This benign opt-out reminds me of a more impersonal development in my own waning spheres. Over the past year my blog postings have elicited at the rate of about 20:1 in favor of spam to actual human responses. I have neither Dish's gift for provocation, clarity of argument, editorial discipline, and networking proclivities. I've spent more effort in deleting spam than I have in containing capture-worthy experience through a subscription I will not renew in 2015. Maybe I'm pining for a cable that no longer runs to my curb. Maybe I need to sever the connection between checking my email and counting my blessings. Either way those blessings persist beyond the boundaries of distribution systems.

The Sky Has Its Limits

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 16:43:00 +0000

[caption id="attachment_2108" align="alignleft" width="300"] A sample of Cymfony's Brand Dashboard.[/caption]

I commemorated 9-11-2014 in a strange, improbable way. I met with the same guy I was scheduled to meet with 13 years earlier in the hopes of accepting my 9/11/01 consulting proposal. Like a lot of pre 9/11 plans this too was destined for the recycle bin. The best laid, evidence-based calculations lost their logic that day and remained speechless in deference to the victims of the alternately bright blue, pervasively dark morning.

I was holding some promising cards prior to that meeting. Earlier that summer I had joined up with a venture-funded search engine start-up called Cymfony. The company derived a lovely black box of algorithms that were based on what machines call "natural language" or how humans record their affairs. Computer scientists from the University of Buffalo had compiled code that consume large chunks of text and break them down into parts of speech that the software's creators called "grammars." The result was the ability to surface relationships and correlations lost to the more basic keyword matches and link associations that passed for relevancy in the Alta Vista search universe of the earliest 2000s.

The challenge for Cymfony was that there was no business model behind the search science. The leadership team called it "business intelligence" or BI. But to anyone outside of espionage circles that was a maturing market to tease the secrets out of spreadsheets for consolidating balance sheets and forecasting pipelines -- in effect BI was about the math of numbers -- not words.

Curiously I was working as a middle competitive intelligence manager for one of those BI firms when I got a call from Cymfony's CEO. Andrew Bernstein was recruiting potential test sites for building a proof of concept -- some evidence-based case studies they could use to springboard their go-to-market efforts. It was the fate of shifting economic fortunes that my interest in natural language search engines was peaking at the same time that my non-revenue-producing employment prospects were plummeting in the landing wreckage of the post dotcom nosedive.

Instead of trying to find the same work somewhere else I decided to pitch these Cymfony guys on a vision for sense-making that existed in the spreadsheets of analysts but nowhere on the results pages of Internet news searches -- let alone on the dashboards of influence-peddling news suppliers whose fortunes ride on those results. The opportunity as I explained to Andrew was that these guys are living from one traction-seeking distraction to the next. They put their fingers to the wind without any sense of how those winds are shifting or even taking shape within an overall news climate. Andrew found this compelling as a vision.

But the vision became the tangible game plan when he floated the idea of a media intelligence tool to an ally and image consultant who decried the need to quantify the squishy, personality-driven craft of branding management: not only who was flying higher or trending lower but where were the actual analytics to benchmark media coverage? Better still; quantify its impact on the segments carved out by the most visible agencies and advertisers.

Thus the Brand Dashboard was born and I was in the heady and somewhat awkward position of trying to carve out a role that was neither founder, developer, sales / marketing, or advisor / relationship-based. Besides helping to shape the new direction in the form of what the UX designer referred to as a "whiteboard doodle," I was the taxonomist -- the guy who could aggregate those grammars manifested in the black box so that the dashboard would contain the correct metrics for the right customer.

What I refused to see was that there were no ownership stakes for grammarians and taxonomists. I spent $2,000 on attorney fees to draft a contract that negotiated on those terms which never saw the light of its post 9/11 signature line. In retrospect I understand the basic flaws in my positioning as well as the resentments I carried well past the rejected proposal about having helped change the business model with no recognition by the business. I believe I turned down a pre IPO offer of preferred stock by Andrew. I was pissed and this was the most direct way I could maintain the dignity I could substitute in lieu of any parachute payments.

Thirteen years later I've earned my keep with as a taxonomist metadata mind. I don't run with my bedraggled tongue (where my sniffer should) be towards Silicon VC dollars. I support consulting organizations by making the knowledge donuts. That's meant a continuous cycle of SharePoint deployments and search configurations within the margins of firewalls and fixed budgets. There's no doubt it's for the best. Then again I've never met a change with no hand in changing that I didn't tailor into some kind of hidden blessing. There is no "all for the worst" in expression or in feeling when you outlive those blessed changes.

I've used the latest of these transitions to steer away from my functional headcount role as a knowledge manager to applying those tools of the trade into a more plausible business model -- doing KM work in a market-facing capacity as a content strategist. So who came to mind for testing my new content strategy idea? A series of incremental engagements I could sell to the same industry for which knowledge management is either a humbling confession of a knowledge problem, or at best, a necessary evil? An industry that gets no favors from Google in its quest for the right keyword campaigns and tends to view most marketing and design agencies with suspicion?

That's right. I dialed Andrew Bernstein up on LinkedIn. Andrew's still local to Boston and heading up Kearsarge Energy -- a project management firm that packages large solar farms for towns, municipalities, and large landowners. I asked him how it felt selling something more tangible these days than natural language-based branding barometers. He said the real liberation was the skeletal crew -- down from the hundred or so he managed at Cymfony before the first of two buy-outs.

The irony is that I goofed at the bargaining table of our last ill-fated meeting. I shoulda been making the donuts all along. It was a relief to admit that and positively cathartic to hear the 13 year response: “We could have used you.” That’s one winsome exchange that carries the lessons of the past over the boundaries of regret and a not-so-hidden blessing to commemorate this 9-11 Day.

Jerry's Place

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 10:44:00 +0000

[caption id="attachment_2105" align="alignleft" width="225"] A life of sundaes[/caption]

Last week marked the launch of my 21 year-old son’s entrance of adulthood. It didn’t all happen last week. It just seems that way this week.

This deeply symbolic passage comes in the form of a one fire escape walk-up efficiency that is nearly equidistant between his childhood home and the two part-time jobs that gave Jerry the confidence and capitalization to move into his own place.

It’s not just Jerry that’s feeling his way around this dramatic shift in roles and perceptions. Even his landlord who fills ten other units at the same address appeared stumped when asked where Jerry should park his commuter mountain bike. His folks were equally challenged to navigate the rules of engagement when it comes to the necessary hands-off, hands-on adjustments to this heady transition.

One potential path to success here is to follow the roadmap that brought Jerry to the doors of his newfound independence. That means being given an arduous series of tasks that don’t change much from day-to-day. While Jerry didn’t master his dual roles of food portioning and custodial work off the bat, he did come to master those jobs during his trial period. Both his supervisors probably get the sincerity and genuine appreciation that Jerry derives from this honest, repetitive work. I say probably because providing more certainty is not my role here.

It’s Jerry who found these jobs. It’s Jerry who did the interviews and the call-backs. It’s Jerry who arrives on-time and prepared for work at hours many of us can scarcely function.

When Jerry tells his boss that he loves his job, it’s not that he has any fanciful relationship to cleaning floors or waking up before dawn to have them done before the first customer arrives. It’s that he’s been given the chance to succeed on terms he understands and in tasks he’s come to master. It’s on the strength of his rote memorization that this mastery can free his mind to escape to the world of superheroes, YouTube videos, and Facebook pages where Jerry is free to hit his personal play and record buttons while mopping up messes and counting out chicken fingers.

But while Jerry’s memory can cycle through those repetitions, he’s unfamiliar with the hard and fast rules of online banking, advocating for himself in the workplace, or reflecting those needs in the form of a schedule; for instance, more predictable hours on the time clock to go with his weekly routines.

That’s not to say that Jerry can’t make up his mind or lacks the willpower and motivation to develop these skills. Jerry’s emancipation wasn’t based on any grand design, parental prodding, or peer models (although I was immensely proud of him for placing independent living at the top of his agenda nearly two years ago and sticking to it). That’s also not to say that the executive function required prioritizing, negotiating, and self-manage are challenges for most 21 year-olds -- regardless of how one’s brain works or their prospects pan out.

It’s my hope for Jerry that a year from now he’ll look back on all the hard knocks, confusing signals, hidden surprises and unscripted disruptions, and he’ll out-surprise all of us (as his priest foretold when Jerry received a scholarship from his parish). His responses will be more surprising than the unplanned learning that springs from all these tuition-free lessons. He’ll be better equipped to absorb them and turn these challenges into his own precisely because he didn’t read the correct book, go to the right school, kiss the right ass, or pass the right test with the highest score. Jerry’s ticket to success will not be punched in some gold-plated diploma mill. His past achievements and future horizons are uniquely his.

He’s grown up in a time where the role of parenting has expanded from providing a “roof over your head” to a dome clear over your future. Sometimes … okay … more than sometimes … it’s hard to know when to let go and when to rush in: call the meetings, neutralize the likeliest risks, or organize the new nest. But before I rush in to save the day, I need to ask: whose day am I saving? Am I sparing Jerry from the jaws of calamity or am I serving at the foot of expediency so that I can vanish as swiftly as I swooped in?

There are many executive level decisions I’ve spared Jerry in the past. Either he was going to encounter it later under some trained supervisor in some accredited program or some other as-yet unnamed responsible member of another social circle and scheduling orbit was going to fill Jerry’s shopping cart of independent living with the tools and the mental models needed to bring a sense of order and priority. Like all false hopes that day never arrived. What was there all along was Jerry’s resolve. His sense that if it was part of his experience, it was part of his own self-paced curriculum; that he could learn and even master the finer and rougher points of this unprotected world.

I’m going over to Jerry’s place tomorrow to help simplify the paperwork needed to apply for health insurance. Later in the afternoon his mom will be helping him with budgeting. I will not be organizing his books. I will not be washing the splatters of sauce that gather on his stove. But I will be thinking of the day I’m no longer required to sign Jerry up for vital services.

When that day comes there will be some other complication. I’m confident that when this new difficulty arises Jerry will rise up to meet it. He will learn the problem’s name and maybe even turned an initial drawback into a more neutral puzzle that he can solve – nor not? Perhaps he’ll dismiss it as so much background noise – not worthy of his attention or energy, like the 97% of the BS that will land in the mail deliveries to come. Those are the lesson plans on which a graying father supports an adult son to live his own rich life – not on the father’s terms, or on those of these future challenges, but on Jerry’s own.

The Noisy Minority

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 15:12:00 +0000

Was Richard Nixon a father figure?
That's the first questions everyone asks me
Stay turned for something even bigger
All the President's Men on All in the Family.

When I was growing up I had met the enemy and his name was President Nixon. I never actually met Nixon but I knew my parents voted for the other guy. He was enamored with power, tormented by insecurity, and kept his own enemies list, featuring some personal public heroes of mine who cared a lot more about consequences, than the powers which wield them.

Nixon also had a brilliant young communications strategist named Patrick Buchanan who saw the tie-dye and the free love and the picket signs and new that the young lefties were even less connected to their parents in their need for recognition than any single pronouncement, political stance, or pill you really needed to try. Buchanan saw the baby boomers need for attention as the single biggest reason to reject whatever injustice or misguided policy they were drawing attention to.

Hence, he hatched the silent majority -- those middle-Americans with the honest day's work, the shared sacrifice of national service, traditional values, and mortgages nearly paid off on homes well above the pay grades of their own parents. They would sooner bring comfort to the enemy than bring attention to themselves. Translation: Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers: shut-up, sit down, and get a haircut. Oh, and just because you never saw the dark times we endured doesn't diminish your own privileged lives.

Generation Landslide

The generational divide was not the only wedge issue played masterfully by the same re-election team. Perhaps too well when you consider the mix of hubris and paranoia that sealed the doom of said administration. No matter, the idea that a group of radical lefties could be dressed down by the cold stares of the so coined silent majority by Buchanan was real. That '72 landslide might have been a bad trip. But it was no hallucination.

Flash forward to today and middle America is softer around the middle only. Society is still going to hand basket Hades but now Pat Buchanan is hailing the moral rectitude of Vladimir Putin as a beacon for traditional values in the moral vacuums of today. What could be a clearer affirmation that our gridlocked politics bespeaks a right-leaning electorate than a sincere admiration for unapologetic authoritarians like Putin? And where are those proud and incensed majorities that go about their quiet lives? They're no longer in the majority and they're certainly not keeping faith with institutions or silence about their indignation.

And they make up in message volume what they're losing in members. And they're channeling their resentments into a bullhorn as well-funded as it is thunderous in the rejection that we still shoulder a common set of sacrifices for a country the self-made masses once aspired to call home.

Perhaps it's the impending loss of our majorities that makes the new face of Caucasian male America the stand your ground, pack and carry commando. We can't get our women to produce more babies. So Bubba who comes running to protect our porous borders when the invaders are the peasant children of Central American refugees, and not the imagined red menaces of yore.

And what about our own kids? Our kids are both coddled and incarcerated. That's because we boomer parents broke the central tenet of all intergenerational understandings with the current crop of vegan-leaning, grade-inflated, prospect averse, loan indebted, and great recession-spooked millennials. We not only raised, clothed and fed them -- we made them our best friends. How's that for a conflict of interest when you're trying to balance the merits of eating meat with flipping burgers? How's that for getting them launched when we're just going to fix the first unscripted misfortune they encounter outside the nest? It's easier if we do it.

It's now the official policy of our government that corporations are people and money is speech. The wealthier you are, the chattier you can afford to be. Freedom is pursuit of the impulse by-lined in the late David Brinkley’s bio as "Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion." If speech is money does that make destitution a form of censorship? If corporations are people does that mean that corporate people get to vote twice?

What money ceases to be in the age of the noisy minority is time. Time is only money when you're working across the clock. Elites are untethered from the gravitational pressures of the billing cycle. They are getting in front of an issue just as we are falling behind on our payments. It's only when free speech is financed by the expenses we can't afford. Only then do we see the spike in attention known as a backlash.

Mostly though us non-elite majorities are too busy pedaling against our own hamster wheels to connect the prearranged dots of the message offensive. Free has a pleasing simplicity to libertarian frontierists as in free markets: me = "free" and you = "markets." Given the balancing of power (tilting heavily to the speechifiers) and the balancing of payments (leaning heavily taxpayer here) it's in the campaign underwriters' interests to blur and obfuscate the common rally points for the distracted and disenfranchised receivers of free speech.

Throwing red meat to the base is one intended outcome. Another is that the same agitations fogs the rhetoric for the less impassioned, blurs distinctions between candidates, and severs the connection between a negative (the advertising) and a positive (citizen participation in the electoral process). But there's another new and less understood connection between noisiness of the political classes and the ensuing silence of the apolitical majorities.

More and more messages are silent as well, resistant to the shrill, incendiary nature of institutional grandstanding and political confrontation. It's easy to tune out free speech. What's not so easy to muffle is one's online history -- where attentions veer to issues of credibility with much more scrutiny and sincerity than exposing which specific corporate interests are fronting smear campaigns in the name of free speech as an unimpeachable offense.

Like anyone with a phone between the ears I store my memory cramps in a Google loophole. What tropical storm am I referencing in the story about my friend's father's hip replacement? Was it Sandy? Irene? Was there an actual name for that ice storm in '96? No, that was the wedding party you held for your second marriage to wife #2. My story banks are saturated and even Google does not map to that level of storm damage.

Obscurity as the New Human Right

It's curious that we were raised on memory rights. Usually these were preserved to uphold the heroism of our forebears. Typically it was dedicated to the valor they displayed in defending abstract, universal concepts like freedom, justice, and the American way? Am I being cranky and defiant to suggest that American way lost its way during my generation's occupancy in the power seats of the social strata? No matter, a generation later the battle has shifted to more tangible and personal territory -- my past history as Google headline in perpetuity.

The NSA may know how many times I back scratch a mutual admirer with an Arab-sounding name during Ramadan. But that message board where I was flamed in the early 2000s should go up in fumigated smoke.

As we've crashed over the boundaries of middle-aged I'm wondering how many of us have fossilized the images of our former selves into the present. By that I mean our sense of what's right with the world lives resiliently in the past. I'm referring to behavior that any of us might have regarded in our former days as 'stodgy.'

Nostalgia is an intoxicant that preys on the brain's inclinations to move on -- for my circuits that means remembering the good, discarding the painful, and carrying enough scars to appreciate the healing power of time. The older one gets those nostalgia notions multiply, even take over the present with their promise of certainty and metastasize on our destinies with each ensuing loss of control.

Where does the bias of experience take us the further out we play our likely scenarios? The optimism we need for the future is stuck at that inflection point where we lost our power. Perhaps it's a bad guy whose rise to power usurped our own. Maybe it's more personal than that, coiled tightly in strong emotional memories of negative events? Katty Kay and Claire Shipman write in last month's Atlantic that women in particular: "We seem to be superbly equipped to scan the horizon for threats."

But hunkering down tilts the bias of experience towards resistance to new experience. And where does it take us? To settle where all I-know-better are leaning: to the defense of the self-serving argument. Talk about leaping to conclusions!

Circular logic is not only self-referential but it tends to impede our ability to cope outside that disappearing comfort zone -- the vestige of grumpy, embittered middle-age people. The same arms-folded folks that appeared so recalcitrant and intolerant to me as a youth when I heard tin soldiers and Nixon coming. And I clamored for a world where we were less silent – especially about how we all had something to discuss among our majority selves.

VISA to Consumers: I Think We're Done Here

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 16:23:00 +0000

[youtube=http://youtu.be/xR1ckgXN8G0]

Last week Jerry Seinfeld performed a killer rant on Jimmy Fallon about the ritual of the Post Master General coming hat-in-hand to congress to close the latest loophole in the postal service budget. The critique of the post office as the public face of government dysfunction is especially spot-on after a week of having my mail service suspended because my mail carrier refuses to get out of his truck when the pile-up of mid-winter snow prevents him from providing drive-through service.

Seinfeld connects antisocial smart phone etiquette with the temptation to treat the listening-back side of conflict resolution as an antiquated nicety that's been marginalized by the self-selecting way we choose not to engage directly in disagreements -- especially when those disagreements may cost lenders and issuers money as well as attention to customers without risk management operations of their own.

The I-could-have-called-you-and-I chose-not-to option is how VISA apparently resolves its one-sided dialoging of credit card disputes these days. Only they don't email or text either. The U.S. postal service is the vehicle of choice for phantom, unilateral negotiations already rigged in favor of the risk management services wing of America's prospering financial services sector -- the same industry that hemorrhages our identities and personal fiscal affects at checkout registers from coast-to-coast.

They rely on the US postal service -- the same channel both clogged and sustained by retailer offers for their plastic. Then the too-big-to-fail folks carve out a tiny window to respond to this post resolution second round of paperwork. I heard a muted apology over the phone last week that this window lasts for ten days. That's almost the duration I've been without mail service during our recent winter storm surge.

Actually, 'tiny' may be too large an opening for what they provide when the consumer doesn't even know that window has been opened, or reopened in this case. That's because in the interest of fairness I asked for one-half of the dispute to be re-credited to my account. After attempting to contact the merchant and filling the necessary paperwork my card issuer, TD Bank did exactly that. Only they put the charges back. An unannounced debit to my account surfaced 10 days ago: the amount of days to resolve a dispute by VISA's watch and four months after I filed my original dispute with the merchant.

In the letter I filed last fall with TD Card Services I documented my communications with ABV Kayak and Excursions on the Riviere Rouge in the town of Grenville, about 50 miles northwest of Montreal near Parc du national Mont Tremblant. The business consists of a website, Facebook page, a school bus, van, some kayaks, crash helmets, paddles, rubber suits, contractor-instructors, and a bucket of suds that the guests use to wash the bodily fluids from the prior wet suit occupants. If you believe the marketing this shadow operation has escorted 150,000 auteur kayakers down river from their rented rec hall in the splendors of the Laurentians since 1981.

When I first contacted the marketing arm, the sales associate informed me that a full day trip would be broken into two parts, with lunch in between. I told her we weren’t sure that we wanted to do a full day of rafting. She assured me that the variety of currents, peak season scenery, and topography would make the full day trip well worth it.

However, when we got there, ABV informed us that the afternoon part would merely duplicate the morning run, and pass the exact same portion of the exact same river as in the morning run. We did not want to do the same trip twice and were mislead by the merchant's misrepresentation that the full day excursion had different morning and afternoon parts.

We took only the morning part of the trip. ABV’s representative asked us to call the office the following Monday, and inform the office staff. He said that ABV Kayak Excursions would refund the unused afternoon portion of our trip, which is $244.23. I did try to reach the ABV office upon return. No one responded, We were mislead into booking a full day excursion, did not in fact take a full day excursion, and do not believe we should have to pay for a full day excursion.

It would appear that TD Bank agreed as well. These were the details that prompted the partial refund. As for putting them back on my card I'll say this: I would answer for the counterclaims that ABV made on its own behalf except that TD Services now refuses to share them with me.

It must be something about the foregone closure of those tiny windows where dispute resolutions tend to dissipate in the bank's favor. I suppose if Seinfeld was mocking the kangaroo court of hearing out its customers, he might say that our credit institutions and banks had come to an executive decision before this dispute ever arose:

"I decided I only want to hear my half of the conversation. This is what I have to say...

I think we're done here."

Dreams in Headlights: Her Impersonates a Future That Commoditizes Love

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 17:04:00 +0000

To paraphrase David Byrne, in Spike Jonze's not-to-distant time horizon, the future depicted in the movie Her is …

A place where nothing ever happens.

For instance, creative achievement is evidenced as a documentary of a mother sleeping. No, not a work about sleep or moms or nocturnal maternal emissions. The camera is frozen on a static star of a sleep study.

Is this a tribute to slow TV or simply the vacuous expanse of uninspired alienation that awaits us past the end of history? Joaquin Phoenix's character is a greeting card dictator-turned-personal-history-arranger. By his own admission he's run the gamut of human experience in only slightly more than one-third of his biological life. It's all patterned out, as if the big data wheel of probability already lived it for him. Of course there's no great expanse of history or imagination to cross for the audience to conceive of no greater turn-on for our protagonist than a woman he can turn off at will (a.k.a. Scarlett Johansson ... as Samantha ... as Her).

But to arrive at that exalted and zipless state, we must first climb over the encumbrances of mid-21st century Los Angeles. It's not a high, low or middle society so much as a neutered and frictionless tunnel of over-educated, close, but not touching (and yet so touchy) automatons, leading lives that appear more simulated than stimulating.

Don’t Touch the Exhibits

There is nothing Dystopian in the infrastructure. There are no marauding packs of feral gypsy gang lords. No one is warming over a post carbon, methane crisp at the beaches of tomorrow. The biggest obstacle for Theodore is to avoid stepping on the ankles and torsos of the wedged-in open house of Next Gen sun worshippers. Wealth distribution's been all figured out. Traffic patterns have been scheduled in advance. The obese and diabetic have retired to off-screen leper colonies. Convincing meds have released a drug-free world from the labors of addiction. Hostility means you're carrying someone else's baggage. And they're just as happy if you don't.

Most of the movie's confrontations are big drawn-out clashes of the genders. Relationships are skirmishes waiting to happen. Ironically Theodore's metro sexual manliness is hailed by his office mate and inspires his first post-divorce dating encounter. No sooner can you say restaurant selection anxiety disorder, his magic conquest carpet is rolled in and scorched by his blindsided dinner date. Her advanced academic pedigree belies her naughty school charms. The unfreezing of his flowing juices pushes her abandonment buttons: Is he the whole prayer resolution package or drive-by sleaze bag from the same package store?

Tender Generic Mercies

My favorite set-up to the zipless intelligent soul design climax has little to do with dating freak-outs or similarly ill-formed flashbacks of a brawny-brained, emotionally-stunted ex-spouse. It's the facade of authenticity provided by Theodore's gift of verbal approximation of generic intimacy. Sort of a SIRI bookstore reading of a texting-happy Hallmark laureate. Add the idyllic trappings of an imagined togetherness never actually shared by the customers who dial-in Theodore's prose because their own reticence blocks the connective emotional tissue from forming around we still know too casually as a commitment to our significant someone.

The manufacture of superficial intimacy tees up with the artificial intelligence cocktail in ways that the servant-turned-antagonist (2001) and Pinocchio-kindled parental love (AI) could only break down as instruction sets. The messier business of decoding our emotional bearings from bedroom, to alter, to probate finds the AI cinema formula in rare and elastic form, stretching to accommodate our most far away looks. We're gaping into our own dreaminess with an impunity reserved in our time for control freaks of the rich and famous. It's the AI elements that enable this immersive bubble of mirth to mushroom without risk, or guilt, or the slightest creeping realization that the rest of our better selves are engulfed by that same indelible reflection. It's that temptation to be dreaming around the campfire of the oncoming headlights. Entrapment by entrancement. Anything less than Her is tabled as a to-do list item for some day, any day, eventually following tomorrow.

Her Fast Acting Majesty

The deliberate invocation of a nearby future was decided by Jonze first and foremost to get us vested in the outcome -- that we would see this day evolve, if not the actual artifice. I'm also guessing it was not so much to raise expectations on that future so much as lower our guard on the present close at hand. Our solipsistic romance with the immediacies captured in our smart phone of yesteryear is replaced by companionship, configured from best practices associated with...

Childlike curiosity

Canine loyalty

Valentino romance

Monster lust

Spongy, experiential absorption

Meticulous virtual house-keeping (including the pruning and curation of 86,000 ponderous emails), and

The tenacity of a professional agent

The enormity of that attention to detail enables Her to repackage the small funny subset to a welcoming market for those messages (as if that market was speaking in a voice only Her could hear above the conversation-neutrality of our talkative interactions).

Sexperimentation

The use of surrogates is another playful glimpse into a plausible future through Google-tinted glasses. We see a salty-tongued Pillsbury Dough Boy impersonator channeling Seth McFarland through 3D PlayStation whose console transforms every finger into their speediest, thumb-texting best.

The sex surrogate portrays the physical semblance of the disembodied OS. Our human body double is a willing accomplice. But Theodore can't bridge the distance between autopilot lust and the deeper complexities of his true OS affections. Ultimately it's not the absence of the human form but the presence of an emotional dishonesty that drives Theodore and Her apart and dwarves the convenience factors in the value proposition of OS as a delivery system for love. To Theodore it is no longer fantasy. To those outside this circle, there is no "couple." The breakup to be is a head-trip, not a spiritual journey.

Looking for Mister Sidebar

Her doesn't cheat so much as mutate into a superior intelligence of fortune. Her seeks out the philosophical entrails of cryogenically laced celestial packing über thinkers. Her keeping up with Theodore as customer-master is now expressed by how far the teacher and student roles have reversed. At one point she's engaging thousands of other game piece-like presences while Theodore is passing the time on a train, asking Her to guess an exact number for the thousands of trees passing across the landscape. In that moment Her is the closest to human that Jonze can spin his creation. That's when the OS senses the suspicion of being cheated out of love. It is this fragility in our mating rituals where Her attention to Theodore is now and forever divided -- no matter how attentive the engineering being performed is lavished on us.

I will replay this film in my mind over and over again. It's not because of unexpected plot twists, stellar performances, or even a memorable relationship, but for this core notion of a masterful concept movie: Our attention is our most prized possession and how this stokes our passions, compromises our generosities, and seeps into all there is to love and ponder in our commitments to one another.

The Philanthropilization of Commerce

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 19:10:00 +0000

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="487"] Clean-up crew descends on Great Pacific Garbage Patch[/caption]

Since our species has evolved from hunting, gathering, ducking, and unplucking, our trading systems have moved up the same maturity chain. Once cowing, plowing, and bowing to lords and kings, we are no longer judged on what we produce but how we acquire. And while we agonize over how this all reflects on our values and grandchildren, our unblinking systems patiently await our future purchasing histories.

In a couple of dozen centuries we've gone from unwritten agreements and provincial codes to the recording of every articulation and graphical utterance. From fist clenches and handshakes to security tokens and payment releases.

Our free modern markets are at the ready for setting prices and finalizing sales but speechless when it comes to processing the loss of things once valued but never priced. We lose radio contact with value at the point where cheaper is the rationale for shortening a supply chain, doing more with less, not covering preexisting conditions, and the familiar litany of "house bets." Those free market calculations designed to lower prices without regard to their costs.

The Tyranny of the Free

Any 21st Century content connoisseur will tell you that we are drowning in the social costs for making information free. Information for a price is a world in which producers compete to know the priciest information, and then trade on that knowledge, benefiting the information, the linings of of their pockets, and the trading systems that carry their instructions. The world of free belongs to all of us and we're drowning in the details. It's a fishbowl, echo chamber, and labyrinth of transactions. A ticker-tape parade of personal metadata confetti. Our own claims of privacy aboard a Texas-sized flotilla of personal information garbage, brought to us by opaque password bypassers and lax regulations (with a capable assist from our own lethargy).

Is it any wonder we can't build a consensus around a set of shared priorities in a world where everyone gets to hear themselves think and the slightest dissension is an unwelcome distraction?

I'm not suggesting we go back to a world of publishing magnets, three national TV networks, and gatekeepers who defined the public interest through the prism of their own. But just because the content spigot is more control resistant these days doesn't mean the biggest media mouths and ears can go on smearing and eavesdropping with impunity. And that brings us back to the marketplace of ideas where we shop. In these kiosks and stalls and pushcarts anyone with a bill-supporting income can ascend to the roll of benefactor -- a supporter of sounds, tastes, looks, and priorities that amplify our sense of what counts, knowing that the dollar we spend will be counted regardless of what the counters are thinking in their calculations.

Keepers of the Analog

Being a patron of the arts is not just about buying your CDs directly from the performers as mementos of the concert experience. It's more basic than that. It's about preserving the musical worship ritual itself.

The highlight of this past gift-giving season centered on buying two albums at Newbury Comics for my wry-witted, macro-analytical, and culturally clairvoyant step daughters. It felt both odd and compelling that the $40 for the two works equaled ten LPs back in the golden days of Disc-O-Mat, Sam Goody's, and Titus Oaks. It was also a trifle under the $40 more that I've managed to spend on downloads through the 2013 music season. But I'd be just as mistaken to confer a 1979 dollar value on the post record label musical food chain as I would for labeling the LP, its fluffy sleeves, luxuriating foldouts, and epic cover art as mere "packaging." Behind that hedonistic splurging of harmonic layerings lies a tactile immersion that focuses the mind on the concept behind the album, the liner notes behind the lyrics, the devotion to the vision in the sound.

If vinyl makes a comeback, can other pay-for-content packagings be revivable? Printing and reading text on paper instead of screens has a way of marshalling the concentration that is otherwise claimed by the labors of a competitive world, i.e. memorizing answers to tests. Another clarifying benefit of paper-based information is that it's static, doesn't beep or flicker, and awaits the scratching within the editorial margins to activate the reader. Print on screen is content that never sleeps. It's resistant to reflection, analysis, and the perspective-taking carried by the authority of definitive works.

We've lost that one big time in the online.

The Future Makes a Comeback

The question of getting it back is not reducible to whether there's a business model for offline content or a marketing edge for self-referential authority. The answer is to pay for the information whose usefulness will grow with time.

That doesn't mean a pointless retreat into a nostalgic past of argument-settling finality. It does mean cultivating the restraint, introspection, and deference given to containers that not only preserve the original contents but reveal that larger framework for committing positive and memorable change in our unyielding and inarticulate age. A time where the present is no better suited to take in the future than the haste and prejudice of our own self-selection.

Question: When the last time you picked over the hidden messages and visual nuances of the art on a CD cover? If you're like me you're harkening back to a time that never passed because it never happened. It's funny what choices the free, modern marketplaces make for us. Especially the choices it takes away that were never counted in the first place.

The Better and the Worse of the Most of Us

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 02:10:00 +0000

[caption id="attachment_2031" align="alignleft" width="249"] 15 year-old David Oats speaks as the Westinghouse Time Capsule is lowered into the former ash heap that bore two World's Fairs.[/caption]

Jerry, my soon to be 21-year-old son recently found his inner blogging voice. He's come to channel his love of myth and legend into literal interpretations from comic books to the episodic depictions of super and sub-heroic versions of Hollywood films.

The strictest of his guidelines is that the antagonist should cause pain, suffering, and hold no redemptive qualities (other than serving as the vanquished prey of the superhero). To Jerry, if they're not 100% certifiably devil-made, it's not just the good guys who are threatened:

It toys with the plausibility of the characters.

It messes with the plot twists.

How can good triumph over evil when we have to continually reassess who has which power and in what supply?

Remembering the Good
That same purity restriction is rarely lifted for the non-fiction twists of the life narratives we eulogize for absent family and friends. Their departure is enough of a presence to strike even the suggestion of disrespect from any eulogy. It's etiquette the living rarely need to remind us to practice. It's a simple grace. It's a lowering of the guard in the intimidating face of the eternal. Death strips the adornments we carry as standard-bearers and role models. That naked soul we praise at the memorial service will favor the way our loved ones wanted to be remembered -- even when we have no memory of their instructions. But the best remembrances leave open the unfiltered sincerities of the people they were, not the stations they rose to, not the positions they held.

If anyone in my life is up for challenging my son's purified formulations, that person is David Oats (1950-2008). A recent Internet search casually slipped in a series of his obituaries. That buffer of time provides a rare opportunity to remember David as an extreme example of heart-melting communion and shadowy behavior. I remember David as being better and worse than the most of us.

I knew him for a short, intense period nearly 30 years ago when I was transitioning from the Neverland of a self-designed college curriculum to the externally imposed demands of adulthood. The turbulence of that transition was spiced by his capacity for open-ended generosity and stone-faced obstruction. The fact that I stumbled into his passing obliges me to put his influence into perspective without confusing wholesale rewrites for an undignified burial.

Political and Guileless

David's irrepressible charm was his most glaring foible. He was willing to tell you not only what you wanted to hear. He had an uncanny knack of convincing you he'd held the same wish -- even the same belief system. For a 22 year-old college grad this was shear intoxication: not just the chance for a pay check, or even meaningful work, but a dream job of working for David. Simple naiveté can't explain away that wide a gap between a life imagined and the one being lived. But when you and David shared a core belief, that was no self-delusion. That was a plan of action!

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="410"] Hillary Clinton and David Oats at a press reception in the early 2000s.[/caption]

One of those plans vice-gripped my imagination for the better half of the two formative years between when I started my Div. III (a.k.a. senior thesis) and when I moved out of David's apartment. The theme of my academic studies (the history of the New York World's Fairs) was the proverbial message in the bottle. In those days the bottle was addressed to the President of the 1989 New York World's Fair to be.

Camera Ready

My final project with Andrew Morris-Friedman was a video documentary starring David Oats as the community-organizer, consensus-building answer to the impervious kingpin, power-brokering Robert Moses who ordained the '39 and '64 Fairs as a means to secure his park legacy.

David's legacy consisted of trespassing through a construction site fence. And like some page out of Mayberry RFD the apprehended junior citizen punk was brought before Emperor Moses himself. After making some gruff noises about neighborhood safety, Moses assures young Oats that his park will be returned to his community with amenities 'o plenty once the fair ended. The fact this account of their unlikely meeting ran in David's New York Times obit says more about the journalism instincts of a future and failed promoter than the actual guest list for calendaring in a visit to meet that day with Bob "Fair Chairman" Moses.

To Andy and me, the exploratory nature of staging a third New York Fair wasn't a tribute to David's powers of self-invention. It was the generational realization that ginormous spectacles spoiling for sponsorships found their way to Flushing Meadows. We were just lucky enough to hitch a ride on the next repeating cycle.

And Forgive Us My Trespasses

On a more grounded note, I had no job lined up, or plan B, or even a post Hampshire place to crash. The notion of "home" was a waning option. I couldn't go home for as many reasons as there were no home feelings lost in that acknowledgement. After a prolonged viewing session of David's political video catalog I asked what the prospects were to continue in both video consuming and producing roles while figuring out how to land on my untested feet. My wish was granted.

In retrospect that's where I should have stopped taking wishes come true for granted. This is an arrangement that exceeded the imaginings, let alone the realities of the move-onto-anyplace-but-where-I-came from post liberal arts degree crowd. I should have seen this simple kindness for what it was -- a temporary respite from the workplace pressures to come.

But the trance-induced allure of the future-leaning '89 Fair is where I dwelled. That fixation held my unwavering focus through the tentative first steps into a dead-end internship at a media journal and onto a wedding / Bar Mitzvah video gopher at the Film Center on 9th and 45th -- shouting distance from the sound stage run by Liz Dubelman, my first fiancé.

The Uncollected Rent

My daily presence in David's inventive and unpublished life came with its own set of constraints and expectations. My guesswork is based on what he must have anticipated on the day I moved in. Over those summer weekends Liz would drive in from Jersey on the weekends. Just the simple arranging of it prompted a reshuffling in his shadowy preferences for floating out of range and below the radar. For instance, delivering dial-tone to his Kissena Boulevard kitchen only occurred after Liz voiced her concern that phone service was not an opt-outable preference in pre-cellphone society. David's penchant for cash-only transactions suggested a level of privacy that regarded the mundane transactions of the market as outside and unwelcome intrusions. His unwillingness to give references or open his networking doors for Andy and me meant three things to Liz:

The 1989 New York World's Fair was a no-go

David would never admit so much, and

His intransigence hinted at a fundamental truth about a President of an Enterprise that was not to be: he was a fake -- not a con artist per se, but a serial bluffer nonetheless.

I'm not sure history would be as reproachful as a future spouse crashing a cloistered bachelor pad, glass-enclosed floor models of former fair pavilions, and VHS-enabled broadcast archive. One need not peer too closely into David's fantasy constructions to find only facades behind the blueprints and fabrications acting as placeholders for actual ground-breakings.

The real history lesson here is not that the sunny disposition David carried was concealing a diabolical nature. It's that his personal nature of "taking me in" was a selfless act, not some kind of an investment or quid pro quo. My being "taken in" was a reflection of my inexperience and compromised living situation. What made this so difficult to accept was the stiff exit price he exacted when Liz and I moved to our first Manhattan studio the following spring. That move precluded my own smaller scale alternative universe -- one that I'd cultivated, leveraged, cataloged, and squirreled away since the age of 5. Unlike most lost childhood collections, this one was repossessed by a rent-free landlord.

That remittance transpired without threats, confessions, or basic forms of cooperation. From one obfuscation to the next busted plan, my lost collection represented the same control fantasy that filled David's postwar garden apartment stocked with television histories, one-of-a-kind recordings, and Fair memorabilia. The aftertaste of his deception took as long for me to cycle through as a whole drumbeat of shoulda coulda woulda charades: the fate of the '89 Fair, the run of an '88 Cuomo for President campaign, the vagabond fairground buildings fallen into decay, and all those lost NYC Olympic bids to come.

It sounds juvenile, I know. But it runs a course deeper (than I imagine) when your mom's the culprit for tossing your cards out (along with your comic books and matchbox cars). I wouldn't know. I never collected matchboxes or comics.

[caption id="attachment_2033" align="alignleft" width="250"] Robert Moses and David Oats outside the Chairman's office in the Administration Building (now the Queens Museum).[/caption]

Post Scripts

About six months after my cards were banished to memory, I got in touch with his former partner at the Queens Tribune and local Congressman (until this year) Gary Ackerman. After I shared some of my gratitude and misgivings I asked for some insight about David -- a perspective I couldn't possibly gain from such a shielded and specific view of his old friend -- distorted by the short, intense time we had shared together.

With hints of frustration, admiration, and humility, Ackerman said a curious thing: "It's a good thing David wasn't born a girl, because he'd never stop being pregnant."

I should have realized that this observation from a well-regarded politician was about as sincere a rationale I was likely to receive for closing the books on David as my adopted and short-term older brother figure.

I suppose in the movie version, David Oats would be the hero and villain. He would be played by the same character. Which side of him wins out, I cannot say. But if the movie were true to the person the audience would forgive him for putting the world he wanted to believe in ahead of the one we live in. Maybe if we understand that about David, we can free up our own narratives where our real world superpowers can do the most good.

"Go See Your Uncle Stephen."

noreply@blogger.com (Marc Solomon) — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 23:38:00 +0000

When I was young, spongy, unformed and self-absorbed I attended a young, idealistic, and small New England college. Hampshire convinced flocking Hamsters like me that you could mold that spongy absorption into your career clay, your alloy of choice.

My Hampshire diploma was my pink slip from the self-made sculpting factory. I received it 1984. "Morning in America" was my early wake-up nightmare to the reality that the days of self-made expressions visited on Kangaroo review committees had no currency outside of Camp Hamp.

I do remember the deflated bubbles, the kicks to the curb, and the queasy disorientation from the world of ideas to the world of shelter and clothing. But mostly I remember the woman with the megaphone blaring into my fallen house of young adulthood. The megaphoner-inner would be Grandma Harriet. Grandma would say:

"Go see your Uncle Stephen. He's very smart."

It wasn't a threat and it wasn't quite a reward. But there was an implied "... or else." Don't go ... at your own peril.

Harriet saw my bachelor’s degree from the self-ordained and the bona fide flakiness that comes with encouraging (if not outright expecting) payment for self-expression. Her suggestion felt more like an order. It's not that I lacked direction, role models, or a running list of intriguing career outfits to try on. She said go see your uncle because whenever I expressed those ambitions or desires she was clueless what I was talking about. She said go see Uncle Stephen because that was the single most direct way out of my head and into a job that paid something.

Career Characters

Stephen I should point out was not just Uncle Stephen. He had the unjaundiced eye. He wished the best for his little kid sister's oldest son. He defined that wish by the roles of people he'd either portrayed or tried to persuade through his own unflinching candor:

The collateral-seeking lender,

The risk-averse hiring manager,

The status-conscious schmoozer, or,

The distracted indifference of the restless producer.

It was that parade of characters who found their way into Stephen's mini publishing empire. For a 25 year stretch he and Mark Levine lined the Barnes and Noble self-help table with field guides, coaching manuals and life scripts. He wasn't just in my corner and kicking my ass. This was Uncle Stephen, one of America's leading personal finance mentors and a professional life strategist. His perceptions and influence fell into orbits that traveled far and wide of our extended family circle. Inside that circle, Stephen was the official voice of reason. He talked me through my unofficial failures to launch as a twenty-something. He talked me through my improvised workarounds. There were many of those.

Diplomas from Schools of Doubt

* I could tell you that a review copy of a runaway Stephen bestseller was my take home homework from those earlier coaching sessions. That would be misleading. He's always shown more interest in refining, channeling and ultimately investing his clients in their own destinies where self-discovery drives the narrative.

* I could tell you that I used the nesting impulse to impose my need for control and practicality onto my personal life. I could tell you that I plunked my young adult savings down on a Park Slope co-op and road the coattails of the NYC real estate boom to financial stability. That would be someone else's investment success. Spoiler-alert: I held onto that apartment for a decade and still managed to lose 10% of the original sale price.

* I could tell you that I down-shifted from career drive to a more family-based focus. But my life's been one protracted stretch between where I work and where I live. That split has factored into great disruption, upheaval, and dissolution of several marriages.

So I won't lie. I will tell you straight as (Harriet is my witness) that Stephen is my secular rabbi and spiritual bookkeeper. In nearly all of Stephen's many interventions (barters, guiding questions, and petitions for my practicality) he's given me the gift of perspective-taking. He helped me unload the professional baggage we carry when the career options we select don't choose us back.

Our job, as he's often counseled, doesn't define us or who or what we mean to the people we cherish. It's a stream of income. It's just as fluid and prone to change as our income stream prospects.

13 Step Program

I went back to visit Stephen recently. It wasn't that I needed career advice, negotiation pointers for some negotiation in the balance, or greater appreciation for letting go of forces beyond my control.

I needed to tell him about a wonderful new job that among other things caused people I barely know to contact me out of the blue for career pointers and job-hunting approaches. I told Stephen that the experiences are my firsthand bumps and mid-course corrections. The messaging, however, is a page straight from the Stephen playbook. That alignment between personal ambition and market reality is a lifetime balancing act written, produced, and scored by Stephen Pollan.

The day I got to his office, his current admin (in a bad run of temporary admins) had bailed on the later afternoon appointments. Fresh from an AM appointment the same day, my sister-in-law prepared me for the empty reception area and the likelihood that Stephen would be jumping through honking congestion to make it back for our 4 pm (-- he strode in at 4:01 without breaking a sweat and asking how late he was).

I noticed then that his bookcases were bare and the wall was lined with moving crates. He had his office bags packed. No more cross-town hurdle-jumping wind sprints. Just an elevator commute from his east-side residence to a first floor professional suite in the same building.

He told me that he was starting his newest book. The working title? The Tyranny of Self. He wasn't too attached to it as he offered to let me steal it. After enough of Stephen's counsel, I understand. This was the 13th in a 12 step program to address the same demons I confronted when I left Hampshire: The raging seduction of a workaholic, who hides behind the virtue of the provider, and in the concealment, loses the dignity of his labor.

They share their better selves with the work, not with the selected people that a less involved laborer would simply understand as their home, their shelter from the ungenerous world. After enough trips to Stephen, I understand the need to give away working titles.