It was 3 years old, with just under 9,000 miles, sitting around gathering bird poop and cut grass from the landscapers and mysterious scratches that also probably came from the landscapers. Aaaand that time my kids tried to clean the snow off my car with sticks.

This was an amazing moment for me, because it mean that I had escaped. I escaped the two-car family lifestyle. I escaped the drive-to-work lifestyle. I escaped the suburban sprawl lifestyle. I escaped the first-world-country-privilege lifestyle.

My new mode of transportation? My bicycle. And the commuter rail train, on rainy and icy days.

Stress Free Transit

I love public transit. There’s something about being downtown in a city and not stressing about how much time you have left on the meter or what the parking cost is going to be which is absolutely liberating.

I’ve loved bikes since I was a kid. I spent hours outside taking my bike apart, fixing things, breaking things, and making repairs while lacking the necessary tools. I would go online and read Sheldon Brown’s bike repair tutorials for my direct pull cantilever brakes, then go outside and try to fix mine.

My First Car

My parents bought me my first car in 2005, while I was in college. It was a red 2001 Honda Accord EX, with leather seats and a 6-CD changer. A guy in my building named Phil had gotten his car through a guy named Devin who went to auto auctions.

I purchased the car sight unseen, and the first thing I did was walk around it. It was in worse condition than I expected. I wouldn’t have purchased it if I had seen it first. It wasn’t even the right shade of the color I asked for. And thus, my 11-year relationship with that car got off on the wrong foot.

Not long after I purchased it, the paint started to peel. Apparently it was a bad year for paint on Honda cars, and to make matters worse, this one had been in a minor accident and taken to the cheapest paint shop in town.

The amazing thing about that car is that it ran perfectly. Aside from replacing tires and brakes and rotors and shocks and struts, nothing ever broke down. Ever. It was as reliable as a brand new car.

I loved it and I hated it. The frugal side of me loved that it was reliable and low maintenance. The critical side of me despised the peeling clear coat.

Finally, in 2016, when the clear coat on the hood was completely gone and the leather seat was beginning to split, the car failed its annual inspection. Worth only about $500, I was told that I needed to put in at least $1,200 to pass. The mechanic offered to buy it from me on the spot.

Brand New Car?

I read The Millionaire Next Door in High School, and I was convinced that I would never buy a new car. Financially, it doesn’t ever make sense. Logically, I started searching for a used car. I went to every kind of dealership. I sat in dozens of car. I’m 6’5″ and need good head room. I was commuting 50 miles per day round trip, and wanted good gas mileage. And I wanted a car that made me happy, since for the past 11 years I had dealt with a car that I had mixed feelings about.

I wanted an orange Subaru Crosstrek, but it was too small for me. I opted for the Subaru Legacy, with a sporty redesigned body and a beautiful blue color. No sunroof, so I could get the extra headroom. Leather seats for durability. It turns out that leather with no sunroof is an odd combination only ever ordered by fleets of cars. I looked at 10 used ones, and all were covered in scratches, dents, and other damage. Too much like my Honda.

After months of looking, I realized that a new car was the only way to get what I wanted. I went out and bought one.

Shortly thereafter, I went on sabbatical.

I resumed my commute again on the worst project ever for 5 months.

Then I took a role working from home.

Then I started working from our office in Boston, taking the train or biking in.

The result was a 3-year-old car with 9,000 miles on it.

It was the right decision at the time, but didn’t turn out to be a smart decision in the long run due to unexpected (yet extremely positive) career changes. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

My father was a Strategy professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, one of the top MBA programs in the nation. In high school I would read books from his bookshelf like “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance” by Lou Gerstner, about the turnaround of IBM, and “Liar’s Poker” by Michael Lewis, about Wall Street excess. I always knew I wanted to get an MBA, but after starting my career, getting married, and having children, the timing never seemed quite right.

Fast forward 10 years, and I realized part of the reason I hadn’t applied to programs was that I was afraid of not getting in. In a lightning-strike moment, I realized that when I was 80, not getting an MBA was something I would regret. I needed to at least apply. I discovered that MIT was accepting applications for another 4 weeks, and I got to work gathering transcripts, asking for letters of recommendation, and writing vulnerable and honest essays about my ambitions.

Accepted

I was thrilled when Beth Chartier called to tell me I had been accepted. It was early evening and I was on my bicycle, a block away from work, when I stopped at the corner of Boylston St and Fairfield St to take the call. The smile stayed on my face the entire ride home.

You see, I don’t know that I would have or should have been admitted to a program 2 years out of undergrad. I was immature, naiive, and not making a meaningful impact at work or in the world around me. But in the subsequent years my perspective, decision making, empathy, and impact grew a lot.

Funding

The program cost $175,000. It’s common for companies to pay for part of Executive MBA programs, so I asked Accenture to support me. I pitched to my Level +2 boss, I proposed a broader continuing education program, I researched policies and precedence. In the end, Accenture offered to pay $5,000/yr and cover some of my time off. I searched for funding elsewhere in the organization but came up dry.

In the end, I paid my own way. I was disappointed in my employer and had hoped for more support after over a decade of loyal, hard work.

The question going through my mind was “will this pay off? Is this a good idea?” I ran a number of simulations based on potential raises and payback periods, and concluded that even in the worst case scenario, I would break even by the end of my career. The spreadsheets didn’t stop me from returning to that question time and time again.

The Program

I took 26 courses in my 20 months at MIT, including some which were half-length electives. The professors were excellent – well published, passionate teachers, and credible. There were only 3-4 who I felt were weak teachers. All in all, the quality the teaching met or exceeded my expectations.

This section deserves a lot of thought and effort, and as I’m writing this it’s 10pm on a Friday night and I have COVID which I contracted at MIT’s make-up commencement. I hope to write up more about the coursework later.

The program director is Jo Hising DiFabio, and she’s supported by a strong team. There was good communication about dates, timing, meals, courses, COVID-19 impacts, etc. I felt that things were generally well organized, which is important when you’re juggling a full-time job on top of a heavy school load, and then a global pandemic hits.

One wish – it would have been nice if professors used Canvas in similar ways, or if the program team organized the list of reading and written assignments into a holistic to-do list for the core classes. It was tedious and administrative for the students to have to do that.

Was it Worth It?

Absolutely. I love learning, and even though the program was fast-paced, much of the learning stuck with me. System Dynamics was by far my favorite course. Check out Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows for a quick primer.

I should also mention that when I graduated I got a job at my dream company, Google. I’ve admired and studied Google for over a decade. I had interviewed twice before. Now I’m in a role that suits me well and am able to be a part of Google’s growth trajectory in the cloud business. How did I get the position? Networking with a classmate at Google and preparing extensively for the interviews. It was a direct outcome of my choice to go to MIT.

An IT department is a cost center. You need one to do business. It’s a necessary evil. It’s even an enabler of core technologies related to your profit centers. But at the end of the day, IT is still a cost center.

All the DevOps examples talk about how Etsy deploys 50 times per day and Amazon deploys 1079 times per hour (every 11.6 seconds). Those are phenomenal results. Part of the reason they can deploy so frequently is that they are deploying to their core product. It’s their profit center.

We can’t talk about this without mentioning the Consumerization of IT. People use products from Digitally Native companies all the time outside of work. You use Gmail, Wunderlist, Spotify, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They work well, and they look good. We take those expectations and then look at the internal tools we have at work and wonder why ours are so awful.

The Digitally Native companies are on to something. They don’t host things on-premise. They let other companies do what they do best, and focus on their profit centers. When you use a SaaS product, you generally don’t see or know about the upgrades and patches. Any time you bring software in house you are signing up for the ongoing maintenance, support, and resources that will need to be dedicated to it. It’s a distraction, and unless there is a compelling business case, buy instead of build.

I wrote the first part of this post years ago and never finished it. Back then, I worked at Accenture and spent a lot of time with corporate IT. Now, I work at Google Cloud, and spend a lot of time with both product teams and corporate IT.

This still remains true.

General Book Overview

The novel is about the Prices, a Christian missionary family who move from Georgia (US) to the Belgian Congo in 1959, just before political turmoil hits in the 1960’s. Different chapters are written from the viewpoints and in the language of the different characters.

The Interesting Story

The Prices have twin girls, Leah and Adah. Adah is born with what is (falsely) diagnosed as hemiplegia, which causes weakness on one side of the body. She walks her entire life with a limp, slightly dragging her leg. She also refuses to talk, spending most of her childhood in silence.

Fast forward, Adah goes back to the US and enrolls in medical school. In medical school, a neurologist (and love interest) tells Adah that there’s actually nothing wrong with her, and that he thinks she can be cured of her dragging right side and encourages her to take part in an experimental program. For six months, she doesn’t walk at all; instead she crawls and uses a wheelchair. One day, she feels a snap on her right side and is soon able to teach herself to walk again — this time without the limp. As someone who always defined herself by her disability, Adah now wonders who she is without it.

The Insight

Sometimes moving forward is not the right way to proceed. Sometimes you need to move backwards, undo, and reset completely.

It used to be that if you wanted to run a website, you had to buy a physical server, networking equipment, storage. Then you needed to install an operating system, webserver, database, and other software and tools required to run the website.

You don’t have to do that anymore. Owning physical hardware didn’t add differentiating value. Managing an operating system didn’t add differentiating value.

What do you do when something doesn’t add differentiating value? You outsource it.

Those activities don’t disappear, they’re just done by someone else. Someone (attribution required) cleverly represented this with the analogy of “Pizza as a Service”. Every time you eat pizza, those activities are going to be involved (except possibly soda, because I’m not a big soda drinker). There will always be cheese, toppings, sauce, dough, fire, an oven, fuel, a place to consume it.

“Serverless” computing is a misleading term. In essence, whereas you used to need a server to run for 24 hours a day listening for certain things to happen in order to execute code, companies like Google Cloud (my employer) now have services where you don’t have to leave that server running anymore. They’ll run the server that’s listening. When a request comes, they’ll run your code. Instead of paying for the server to run 24/7, you’re paying for the 10 minutes per day that your code runs. You’ve eliminated waste (muda) in the system.

Now on to the point of this post. What if we applied the principles of serverless computing to our jobs? We don’t need to be up and running for X hours per day, we need to deliver the output that is expected of us. Our differentiated value.

The concept isn’t new, and I’ve thought about it in some variation for years, but it hit me in a different way today. There is still a contractual agreement, written or unwritten, that employees will work XX hours per week. We don’t know how to get beyond that. There were experiments with Results Only Work Environments (ROWE). A lot of people have explored the space. Nobody’s quite nailed it yet.

Idling some machines in a system generally leads to better system outcomes than overproducing just to stay busy. Read “The Goal” by Goldratt. There is so much of Lean in agile, devops, and hardware and software architecture, as well as business models.

In the spirit of challenging traditions, I’ve decided to start challenging one myself. I started this website and blog to share what I was learning and thinking with others. That’s no longer the intent. If you look at the frequency of my posting, you’ll notice that it’s down to yearly. At the same time, my list of things to blog about has over 200 items on it. Where is the disconnect? Me wanting blog posts to be perfect for other people to read them.

My solution? This blog is now going to be my online notebook. I’m going to publish my first draft of my thoughts. If my thoughts evolve or I want to add more detail, I’ll make changes. If some of the writing is rough or half-formed, it’s because the biggest theories in life take years to work out. Read about The Slow Hunch in Stephen Johnson’s book “Where Good Ideas Come From”.

I started working for Accenture in September of 2008, right when the financial crisis hit. Unlike other aspiring young consultants, I wasn’t interested in weekly travel, hotel points, and airline miles. I’m a fairly introspective person, and had identified my core values.

At the heart of my core values was balance. I believe in excellence at work, and I also believe in having a life. The two aren’t as diametrically opposed as people make them out to be.

When evaluating a project opportunity, my filter evolved to be:

1. Can I sleep in my own bed every night?
2. Is the team properly sized and staffed for the work?
3. Will I learn something important?
4. Is it interesting?

I spent the first 8 years of my career at Accenture working on local SAP implementations. This scored me an A+ on points 1 and 2, a B+ on point 3, and a C on point 3. My work life balance* was amazing, but the work wasn’t interesting.

*My projects have all had peak periods of activity with intense hours, but have by and large been properly scoped and staffed. I’ve worked Saturdays. I’ve been in the office at 3 AM. But I never felt set up to fail, and crazy hours were always the exception rather than the rule.

What’s in it for me?

While I was less engaged in my day-to-day work, I looked for ways to learn about things that interested me. I started blogging, launched a web development company called MediaSpine, and even landed a side gig managing social media for Fundly, a Silicon Valley startup. Mentor Dave Boyce flew me out to the Silicon Valley to interview at a few companies, and although I left with two offers, didn’t accept any.

In 2012 Accenture launched a social media tool called The Stream, an internal Facebook/Twitter mashup to encourage global sharing. The tool was new and adoption was slow. Naturally, I was interested and began to explore it.

Alongside the launch, an Accenture community of practice I was a part of in Boston hosted a competition to win a free Apple TV if you posted the most in a 3-month period. At the same time, a global group was giving out a $100 gift card for… wait for it… posting the most in a 3-month period. Two birds, one stone. It was a no-brainer.

I started cross-posting blogs from my personal blog. I pulled in interesting articles from my Twitter feed. I rated documents which had been uploaded for relevance. I developed a posting schedule, and stuck to it.

I won the Apple TV. I won the $100 gift card. And then something interesting happened. Casey Solis, who was leading the group, said “Derek, you’re a good example of how this should be done. Do you want to help others do it?” I joined the core team and became a champion for the new sharing tools.

Nerd Night

Fast forward two years. I had done the obvious things, like start a book club*. My next idea was a little less orthodox and requires more explaining.

*The book club has a fun origin story as well: I asked Accenture if they would give me a budget for books, since I spend so much time and money training myself. They said no. I started a book club to get around that. It not only paid for some of my books, but also got 5-20 people discussing some really interesting books each quarter. Win win.

Rather than holding a traditional networking event, where the company buys food and drinks and the employees walk out empty-handed, I proposed we skip the food and drinks and buy the employees interesting technology they could take home and tinker with. I called my idea “Nerd Night”.

We held our first Nerd Night, focused on the Internet of Things, in fall of 2014. Nearly 50 people showed up, and it was a huge success. After an inspiring presentation, everyone got hands-on and built and played with the technology. At the end of the night we raffled off $2,000 of Little Bits Cloud Kits, Raspberry PI’s, Arduino Starter Kits, Chris Anderson’s new book Makers, and a handful of other prizes. (We did end up serving food and drinks, which probably helped.)

Under my watch, the Hub went on to hold Nerd Nights with titles like “Inside the Computer”, “Wearables”, “AI is the New Black”, and “Let’s Go Fly a Drone”. These events took a lot of planning and preparation, and a dedicated and passionate group of friends helped me make them a reality.

At “Inside the Computer”, I scrounged up 15 old computers from Craigslist, bought a bunch of screwdrivers, and told people to start taking them apart. They were hesitant at first, but picked up speed as the cases came open and they gained confidence. It was awesome.

Fortuitous Connection: Someone named Kevin Mintz attended “Inside the Computer”, and we began to chat about innovation and emerging technology. Soon after, he followed his wife to Chicago for her career, and he joined a team within Accenture called the Tech Garage. He later made the connection for me that changed my career.

The Day Job

Back in my less exciting day job an amazing mentor, Steve Aftosmis, took me under his wing. He taught me two main lessons: 1) add in validation logic to double-check all your calculations in Excel spreadsheets and 2) there’s a way to find a “win” in any situation. It’s all in how you frame it.

In 2013 my first son was born. I took 3 weeks off and didn’t check email once. Steve and our amazing team helped make that happen.

In 2014 I also interviewed for jobs out west, and again received two job offers, but elected to stay put.

In 2016 my second son was born. I took 16 weeks off in an amazing sabbatical. Again, Steve helped make that happen.

Mayday, Mayday!

Coming back refreshed and renewed after a long sabbatical (and to a promotion that I hoped for but didn’t expect), I jumped headlong into what turned out to be the most challenging project of my career. Within two weeks of my starting as project lead at a client, the COO and the CFO left the company. This led to a domino effect of company politics, landgrabbing, and increased workload on already stretched resources.

I lost 20 lbs on that project, and I’m a fairly skinny person. I would wake up all throughout the night thinking of new things that needed to be done. For 5 months, I was putting out fire after fire. I worked all Christmas break. My team was disastrously close to breaking. I was a nervous wreck.

We pulled it off, although not as cleanly as I would have liked. I was exhausted, disheartened, and ready to quit. The client wanted me to continue on to the next phase of the project. I knew I didn’t want that.

I can’t reflect on those times without thanking Renita Reddy, who joined the project to provide air cover, took me under her wing, and coached me through the worst of it. I could not have made it through without her.

Remember my priorities from earlier in the post?

1. Can I sleep in my own bed every night? Does it matter if I’m waking up every night with anxiety?
2. Is the team properly sized and staffed for the work? No
3. Will I learn something important? Yes
4. Is it interesting? No

#2 had changed from a Yes to a No, and that was my breaking point. I was unwilling to do work that was not interesting while also working long and stressful hours. That was not in line with my core values.

The Long Shot

Lucky Timing: Near project go-live, Kevin reached out to tell me that a position was available on his team. Was I interested in moving home* to Chicago? We had spoken about this twice before, and I was in a different mental space now. I said yes. We scheduled a phone interview with the team lead, then I flew out to spend a day and a half with the team leads.

*I grew up north of Chicago in a town called Wilmette, and graduated from New Trier Township High School (go Trevians!) My love of the mountains had always disqualified Chicago from my “places I want to live” list, but I was willing to overlook that if it meant my dream job.

A week or two after my in-person interview, Melanie Cutlan, the visionary and amazing team lead, called me to say “You’re not quite what we’re looking for. I know that’s not what you wanted to hear. But we’re willing to try you out for 4 months in a slightly different role, working remotely.” I was disappointed but also excited, and said yes.

The only reason Melanie was willing to take a chance on me was because my time leading the community of practice had exposed me to so many new and emerging technologies. I had built an Alexa skill, built a chatbot, tinkered on IFTTT with simple IOT devices, read TechCrunch religiously, spun up EC2 instances on AWS and Droplets on Digital Ocean. None of that was part of my day job.

One month into my trial run, Melanie called me and said “We want you. You’re in.”

That was the start of my full-time career in an innovation capability.

The Tech Garage was an amazing, inspirational, visionary, fast-paced experience. I went deep into AI and blockchain, immersed myself in The Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Design, Bold, Exponential Organizations, and other great frameworks. We built and designed impactful products and prototypes. The team was amazing.

In addition, I got to try working remotely, which I had wanted to do for a long time and was a valuable experience for me. I saw a lot more of my wife and kids and loved when my 1-year old would crawl to the door and start scratching it until I went out and picked him up.

One more thing. The Tech Garage sits within Accenture Operations, one of Accenture’s five business. Of the five, it’s the least prestigious. Most people generally try to increase the prestige of their group, yet I did the opposite. I realized that what matters is the work you are doing, not what group you sit in. I’d rather be working on AI and blockchain in the least prestigious business than SAP in a more prestigious business.

Decisions, Decisions…

The same month I joined the Tech Garage full time, Accenture announced that they would launch a Liquid Studio in Boston. This piqued my interest, as I’d seen launch videos of the other Liquid Studios, and it was another one of those dream places I wanted to work.

I asked everyone I knew who was in charge of building the Liquid Studio, and no one had the answer. Finally, Steve told me to reach out to Max Furmanov, the global lead, to find out. I was hesitant, because Max was important and I felt a little sheepish bothering him*. My fear was unfounded, because he replied within the hour.

*I told this story to someone in a mentoring session recently, and she said “that’s how I felt reaching out to you!” It’s good that we both got past that initial fear.

I called Chris Scott, in charge of launching the Boston Liquid Studio, and offered to help. What still surprises me to this day is the no one else reached out to him. We have well over a thousand people in Boston, and everyone knew a Liquid Studio was being launched. Yet I was the only one who successfully got in touch.

Plan A was to move to Chicago to work with the Tech Garage, and the Liquid Studio would be Plan B (only if my wife refused to move). I flew to Chicago with my family, we looked at neighborhoods, we put down an offer on a house (and unfortunately didn’t get it). Accenture offered an amazing relocation package. Things looked great.

Suddenly, a structure change in the Tech Garage (splintering into two groups to pursue one of our ideas) led to a leadership change in the group (Melanie wouldn’t be my boss anymore). In the new structure, my route to career advancement would be slower and less clear. At that same time, the Liquid Studio asked if I was interested in being the director in Boston.

The decision was agonizing. I felt fierce loyalty to Melanie and the Tech Garage team, who took a chance on me, taught me, developed me, and inspired me. At the same time, that team was changing in a big way, and wasn’t going to be the same group with the same vision.

I flip-flopped, telling the Liquid Studio no, then telling them yes. After 9 life-changing months with the Tech Garage, I moved on to launch the Boston Liquid Studio.

Building a Liquid Team

The first thing to address is that I’m not a software developer. A Liquid Studio needs to be able to build cutting-edge solutions on the latest and greatest technologies. To do that successfully, you’ve got to have the best software developers around.

I pulled in Kent Cseh, an Accenture veteran with an AI background and the go-to person for any Accenture custom software development in Boston. He took on the Liquid Studio Director position. I then recruited several people who had worked with me in the community of practice and spoken at or helped organize Nerd Nights.

I fought endlessly with HR, muddled through confusing procurement processes, and managed to build a team of some of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with.

My focus turned to hosting our C-level clients for innovation workshops and design thinking sessions. I had familiarity with design thinking, but needed an expert. After a long interview process, I found Adriane*, who took our capabilities to a whole new level.

*I’m not writing her last name because if you try to hire her I’ll have to go all Tonya Harding on you and break your knee cap.

In Summary

There are dozens more stories to tell and people to thank for the roles they’ve played in the last two years of my life. This wasn’t intended to be an Oscar acceptance speech so much as an outline of the path I followed.

Here are my key takeaways:

• It was my passion projects on nights and weekends (social media, web development, virtual agents, IOT, Nerd Nights, etc.) that gave me enough exposure and experience to eventually turn innovation into a full-time job.
• Asking for the things I wanted (book budget, Nerd Night, Tech Garage role, Liquid Studio info) was the first step in getting them, but I rarely got the answer I wanted the first time.
• Along the way I created several things that didn’t exist previously (book club, Nerd Night, Liquid Studio), and that’s incredibly valuable.
• I had a list of talented people in the back of my mind, and when it came time to build a team, several of them became the first members. In life, you rarely start from scratch.
• I had phenomenal mentors who guided me and played pivotal roles in every step of my career.
• I had great friends who helped me turn ideas into reality.
• I got lucky along the way.

Misalignment creates friction, misunderstanding, and problems in the system. If your back hurts, you go to a chiropractor. A misaligned spine causes pain. Alignment of that spine reduces or eliminates that pain.

Are you aligned for success? Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, has identified some of the misalignments we are often faced by at work or at home.

• Think strategically and invest in the future – but keep the numbers up.
• Be entrepreneurial and take risks – but don’t cost the business anything by failing.
• Continue to do everything you’re currently doing even better – and spend more time communicating with employees, serving on teams, and launching new projects.
• Know every detail of your business – but delegate more responsibility to others.
• Become passionately dedicated to “visions” and fanatically committed to carrying them out – but be flexible, responsive, and able to change direction quickly.
• Speak up, be a leader, set the direction – but be participative, listen well, cooperate.
• Throw yourself wholeheartedly into the entrepreneurial game and the long hours it takes – and stay fit.
• Succeed, succeed, succeed – and raise terrific children.

You cannot be a people-pleaser. You cannot keep everyone happy all the time. Set priorities, objectives, and key results for your life and your career. Align your actions with your desired outcomes. Someone will always disagree with what you’re doing, or share a pithy saying explaining why you should do the opposite.

If you are aligned, you will be successful by your definition of success. Don’t set yourself up for failure, and don’t set your teams up for failure.

Amex Fraud Alert: Did you just attempt a 1,000.00 USD charge on Card ending 11006 at LULULEMON GIFTCARD? Reply 1 if yes, 2 to call Amex.
I pressed 2.

American Express verified my identity and then assured me that I had nothing to worry about – the charge had been rejected.

Yesterday I was hosting two different clients in the Accenture Liquid Studio and drove my car, not knowing how late I would be coming home. In addition to my backpack, I carried a package for UPS and a reusable grocery bag full of frozen lunches for next week.

With my hands full, I pulled my badge out of my pocket, and I suspect that my corporate AMEX card fell out then. It just so happens the Lululemon is immediately outside the lobby of my building

There are two unrelated yet interesting things about working in a mall:

1. You’d think with stores everywhere I would get some much-needed shopping in. Hasn’t happened yet.
2. Last week they were playing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic over the speakers. Never let go, Jack!
   —

With US credit card rules being the way they are, I would not have been liable for the charge even if it had gone through. I’m glad, however, that it didn’t.

Isn’t it amazing that American Express could do that?

They know my buying habits. They know the buying habits of other people in my company. The can use the data they have to predict when something doesn’t “feel” right. We take a lot for granted these days – do yourself a favor and watch Louis CK again – Everything is Amazing Right Now and Nobody’s Happy

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term that describes a ton of technology – natural language processing, search algorithms, image recognition, analytics, etc. If you were to take all the technology that is lumped into AI and try to categorize them, your categorization might look like this:

Sense – perceive the world (e.g. computer vision, audio processing, sensor processing)

Comprehend – analyze and understand the information collected (e.g. natural language processing, knowledge representation)

Act – make informed decisions in the physical world (e.g. physical machine/environment control, inference engines, predictions, expert systems)

Learn – improve quality, consistency, and accuracy (e.g. machine learning, deep learning)

In the words of Ken Jennings – I for one welcome our new computer overlords.

PS – Speaking of computer overlords, last fall I got to meet Dr. Chung-Sheng Li, who played a key role in the IBM Watson Jeopardy work. Brilliant guy.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption. – Alain de Botton

My bio on LinkedIn, this website, my work People page, and just about everywhere else says “I read, on average, a book a week.” This was true for the last five years. In 2017 I didn’t even come close. And it’s okay.

Let me tell you why I failed, and why it doesn’t bother me.

I now have two children, and I spend a lot of time with them. They’re cute and fun and frustrating all wrapped into one. I have promised myself that I will not be a parent who is absent from their lives. Other things get sacrificed so I can create memories with them: television, reading, exercise, time with friends.

In prior years my daily commute was 45-50 minutes each way, and I listened to audio books or podcasts to pass the time. This February I started working from home, which eliminated 90 minutes of “reading” at 2x speed. For years I’ve wanted to try working from home, and I got to do it for 8 months. The experience was amazing. I felt extremely productive and got a lot of work done. I saw my children every time I walked out of my office to get food or refill my glass of water. It’s something I could definitely do again.

My new position at work does require me to be in the office most days, so I’ve got a commute again and am burning through Audible credits.

2017 was an amazing year of firsts. I have been learning so much and at such an accelerated pace. What mattered to you five years ago might not matter today, and what matters to you today might not matter in another five years.

Every action has a consequence, and each consequence has another consequence. These are called Second-Order Effects. Every change you make to a system will have Second-Order Effects, which may affect the system’s functionality. Be careful when making changes, they may have the opposite effect of what you aimed for.

Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA

Dark alley. Thug with a gun. Two well-dressed opera goers with their son. A stickup. The gun fires multiple times. The parents fall to the pavement. Batman begins.

The thug shooting and killing Bruce Wayne’s parents was a first-order effect. He took an action, and they died. However, the consequence of that was the tortured childhood of Bruce Wayne, which, combined with the deterioration of Gotham, led to the rise of Batman.

I recently spent a week in Manila, Philippines, for work. At dinner one night one of our local hosts told me that due to the bad traffic in Manila, there are restrictions on when you can drive cars with license plates ending in certain numbers.

“The Unified Vehicular Volume Reduction Program (UVVRP), commonly called number coding or color coding, is a road space rationing program in the Philippines that aims to reduce traffic congestion, in particular during peak hours, by restricting the types of vehicles that can use major public roads based on the final digit of the vehicle’s license plate.” –Wikipedia

The following table shows which plate number endings are barred from traveling in Metro Manila:

On the surface, this seems like a good idea. It logically seems that people will carpool or take public transportation on the days they are prohibited from driving. When I asked our host how this changed his commute, he said “It’s simple – I have six cars”. Two are for him to get where he needs to go, two are for his wife to get where she needs to go, and two are for fun, because he’s a car lover.

Anyone can think through the first-order consequences. It takes talent and time to think through the second and third-order consequences.