Eugene Eric Kim

Groupaya Brown Bag: The Secret Life of Groups

2011-12-13T05:44:06Z

I’ve been knee deep in Groupaya work since launching a few months ago. It’s exhilarating to be creating something new with such great people. However, if you’re not careful, you can actually go too fast.

One of the things that often goes by the wayside when you’re in startup mode is learning. Sure, you’re learning by doing, but you’re not necessarily giving yourself the time you need for proper reflection.

We were wary of this happening to us, and the counter we came up with was to hold weekly brown bags. They’re for us to learn from each other and from our friends, and because we strongly value openness and community, we open up the brown bags to anyone who wants to come.

I’m particularly excited about this Thursday’s brown bag (December 15, 2011). Kristin Cobble will be sharing her secret sauce in working with groups in a session entitled, “The Secret Life of Groups.” She’ll explain how to apply David Kantor’s family therapy work to groups of all types, shapes, and sizes — project teams, leadership teams, a group of friends, you name it.

Please join us this Thursday at noon at Fiore Caffe in San Francisco. If you’re planning on joining, please RSVP in the comments of the blog post. Hope to see you there!

Close Encounter with Tule Elk

2011-11-27T08:27:18Z

A few weeks ago, I went on what I thought would be an uneventful hike with Pete Forsyth. We decided we’d go up to Point Reyes to check out the Tule Elk Preserve along the Tomales Point Trail. Point Reyes is one of my favorite places in the world, Pete had never been, and Tomales Point Trail is a long, easy, and scenic trail, perfect for us since we were getting a late start.

I was worried when we arrived in Point Reyes, because it was foggy and cold. However, the weather patterns change quickly there, and it was sunny at the trailhead, and so we decided to push on for as far as it made sense. That turned out to be a great decision, even in light of the scary adventure that awaited us toward the end of our little jaunt.

The Tule elk were out in full force that day. I had been to the Preserve once before, but there were many more elk out and about, including many more full-horned bull elk. They grazed openly along the trail, no more than a few hundred yards away.

As we stared at the elk, I started telling Pete about a conversation I had had with a friend before a trip to the Boundary Waters last July. My friend and I had been joking about my lack of outdoor savvy when the conversation had turned to a recent grizzly mauling at Yellowstone. Those unfortunate hikers had come across a grizzly and its cubs along the trail. The hikers had apparently done all of the right things (although later reports indicated otherwise), but the grizzly ended up mauling and killing one of the hikers anyway.

My friend had suggested that the bear should have been euthanized, but I had defended the bear. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “You’re on its turf, and nature is not something to trifle with.” I told the story to Pete with a note of irony, given that I was standing completely in the open, a few hundred yards away from a few dozen bull elk, snapping away on my camera like a fool.

We continued to walk without incident, marveling at the natural beauty along the trail. Although we saw patches of fog, the fog always seemed to clear ahead of us, and we pushed along to Tomales Point, where we were treated to the raw beauty of the Pacific Ocean meeting Tomales Bay.

We lingered for a while at Tomales Point before heading back. Even though dusk was near, we knew we had enough sunlight to return before dark.

The walk back may have been even more beautiful than coming, as the late afternoon sun created wonderful hues along the hills. We passed some elk cows, lazily grazing along the trail, and we saw more fog starting to roll in from the ocean.

We were deeply immersed in conversation, and we didn’t pay much attention to the fog. Even as the fog encircled us, we still moved forward, unconcerned. We couldn’t see more than ten feet ahead of us, but it was still light, and the trail was not particularly treacherous.

We continued to press forward when we heard the sound of an elk bugling in the distance. I say now, with an air of confidence, that the elk was “bugling” (the mating call of a bull elk), because the noise sounded a bit like a bugle and because I looked it up on Wikipedia afterward. But the truth was that we had no idea what the sound was, and frankly, I still can’t say what it was for certain. We stood there for a few moments speculating, and we continued to walk.

A few moments later, we heard the noise again. This time, it sounded much closer, and it sounded like something had started galloping toward us. Now we were concerned. We couldn’t see anything ahead of us, but something was definitely moving toward us, and we had no idea what to do. Pete and I stayed calm and discussed our options. We decided to slowly backtrack to see if the galloping stopped. It did. Then we discussed our next move.

I couldn’t help but think of our earlier conversation about being on nature’s turf. Here we were on what we thought was a safe, comfortable trail, and we were suddenly thrust in a situation where we had completely no idea what to do. I was worried that a bull elk was trying to send us a message, and I wanted to listen to that message. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what that message was. That elk was standing between us and the trailhead. At this point, no one else was on the trail.

We briefly discussed going off trail, but we decided that staying on the trail was probably our best bet. We had seen elk on both sides of the trail, and we hoped that the elk considered the trail to be human — or at least neutral — territory.

Pete suggested that we forge ahead slowly, so we tried that. We moved about 20 yards when we heard the bellowing again, this time much closer and from both sides of the trail. We decided to backtrack again to higher ground and reconsider our options.

We still couldn’t see a thing because of the fog, and it was starting to get dark. We continued to maintain our heads, and we managed to joke about our situation, but I was scared. I had no idea what to do. We decided to check to see if our cell phones were working. Mine wasn’t (damn you, Verizon!), but Pete’s was (thank you, T-Mobile!). He decided to call his friend, Colin, who was an experienced hiker and camper.

Thankfully, Colin picked up. He suggested that it might be runting (mating) season, which might have explained the bugling, but he wasn’t sure what we should do. While his partner looked up the ranger station, he stayed on the phone and offered his thoughts. At one point, he asked if we had anything to throw. “Dude,” I responded, “we can find something to throw, but you’d better be damn sure that that’s the appropriate thing to do in this situation.”

At that moment, two hikers emerged from behind us in the fog, seemingly out of nowhere. They were locals walking home after an evening hike, and after hearing our plight, they assured us that they knew exactly what to do. Walk forward, keep moving, and the elk will leave us alone.

And so we did, this time with confidence, partially because they seemed to know what they were talking about and partially because if the elk did charge, they would hit the other two hikers first, leaving Pete and me additional time to escape. Having played basketball with Pete and having seen him run, I knew I would have a third buffer if necessary.

It was pitch black and still foggy. As we pressed forward, the bellowing stopped, and we moved quickly, mostly in silence. I kept my eyes on the trail, straining to see the path ahead, badly wanting to return as quickly as possible.

Suddenly, Pete nudged me. “Look!” he exclaimed. I turned my head in time to see one of the most surreal, hauntingly beautiful things I have ever seen in my life. A herd of elk was walking alongside us in the opposite direction. They were close enough to see through the fog, and they moved quickly and with purpose. We kept moving, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off of them.

I was awestruck by what we saw. I have never felt so exposed to something so wild, and while I was still scared, I felt blessed to be experiencing that moment.

We got back to the car without incident, and after a beer and the warm ride home, I almost felt normal again. Still, thinking back, I am struck by how many things we take for granted in the world, how disconnected I am to the world around us, and how much I still have to learn.

Ducking Thanksgiving Tradition

2011-11-27T01:59:29Z

Thanksgiving is a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity to give thanks, to be with family and friends. On the other hand, it’s a holiday that’s loaded with stress and unrealistic expectations.

Specifically, I’m talking about cooking turkey. In my family, that foul fowl is single-handedly responsible for raising the household holiday stress levels to undue proportions every year.

First, we go through the same dance every year trying to buy a small bird. Every year, the store takes our order, then calls us a few days before Thanksgiving and says that the turkeys are in. Unfortunately, the smallest bird they have is double the size of what we ordered. This happens every freakin’ year.

Then we have to clear out space in the refrigerator to hold the giant bird, which is just about mathematically impossible, given that you have about quadruple the amount of groceries in your fridge for the rest of your dishes.

Next comes the cooking. For the past 10 years, I have been bestowed with the responsibility of roasting that wretched bird for my family. I’m a good cook, and I’m especially good at cooking meat. And yet, every year, I somehow manage to butcher the bird, and not in a good way.

I’ve tried roasting it, brining it, barbecuing it, butterflying it, and braising it. And somehow, I’ve never managed to cook a good turkey. (Actually, braising works great, but I only braise the dark meat, so you still have to figure out what to do with the white meat.)

There are two things I hate more than anything: undercooking meat and overcooking meat. My little sister says that whenever I undercook or overcook meat, a little black cloud forms over my head. Yes, yes it does. Fortunately, it only happens a few times a year. Unfortunately, it happens every November.

Finally, there’s the eating. Despite the adversity, the bird has always looked good. And it’s always tasted okay. But why settle for just okay? It’s Thanksgiving, for pete’s sake! It should be mind-numbingly delicious.

The truth is that none of us even like turkey. We ate it every year, because that’s what society expected us to do. Well this year, after once again ordering a 12-pound bird and hearing once again (after our order had already been taken) that only 20-pound birds were available, we finally said, “Enough!” We decided that we’d eat duck for Thanksgiving instead.

It was shocking to realize how liberating this decision was. First, we all love duck. I mean, really, who doesn’t? Duck is a magical animal — all dark meat and hauntingly beautiful fat and skin.

Second, we never cook it. I had never even touched a raw duck before. So cooking duck would be special, perfect for such a festive occasion.

Third, preparing duck is an order of magnitude easier than cooking a turkey. It’s small, meaning that it fits in the refrigerator and that it cooks quickly. It’s all fatty, dark meat, meaning that it’s hard to overcook. And duck actually tastes great medium rare, which means that it’s okay to undercook as well.

Fourth, the Pilgrims ate duck at the first Thanksgiving. So we were still being consistent with tradition.

Win, win, win, win.

Armed with J. Kenji López-Alt’s helpful guide to roasting duck, I decided to prepare two: a jerk-spiced duck and a Chimaya chile-coffee rubbed duck. I dried both ducks in the refrigerator for a day, then rubbed them and let them dry for another day.

We roasted the jerk-rubbed duck for Thanksgiving on a soda can so that the fat would render out. It took about 50 minutes to cook, and we let it rest for about 20 minutes. It was without question the most stress-free Thanksgiving ever. Cooking was a breeze. We all pitched in as usual, and we made plenty of delicious sides, but we didn’t have to do any extraordinary prep, nor did we have to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning.

As for the taste… well, did I mention that duck is a magical animal? This was unquestionably the best tasting Thanksgiving meal any of us had ever eaten. At one point, we were all eating in silent, focused concentration as we savored this delicious food. My dad, who is the most critical eater in our family, spent most of the meal with his eyes closed and a blissful smile on his face.

We actually thought that we would need the second duck for Thanksgiving, which was ludicrous. We barely had room to consume the first duck. We ate the second duck the day after, which was like having Thanksgiving two days in a row. It was as good as our first meal, only much easier to prepare, as all of the sides were already ready.

Furthermore, the ducks were gifts that kept on giving. We made sweet potato fries with duck fat (baked, not fried, so that we could pretend they were healthy), which made my dad smile even wider. We boiled the duck carcasses overnight to make a rich, meaty stock, then combined it with butternut squash, garlic, and habanero to make an unctuous soup. I was even able to restore the boiled duck meat from the carcass — which had been literally rendered dry and useless from the stock-making — with a little dollop of duck fat and salt. It had a pulled pork consistency and tasted like duck heaven.

So this year, I’d like to express deep, stomachfelt gratitude to one of the most wonderful animals in the world for restoring peace, harmony, and joyous food coma to my family this year. I hope other families can learn from our experience this year.

Tasting Exotic Foods Around the World

2011-11-23T04:35:53Z

I like to travel, and I like to eat. Thanks to the pervasiveness of video cameras, I’ve been able to channel my inner Bourdain quite a bit over the years. Here are my tastings from the past year, including from my trip to Seattle last week.

Fried Kool-Aid

At the Fillmore Jazz Festival in San Francisco. Didn’t have to travel very far for this!

Wild Berries

Last July, I went trolling for wild berries with my friend, Ed, up in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. We were definitely not experienced foragers, and we didn’t realize that tiny did not mean unripe (possibly missing out on the best strawberries ever as a result). Nevertheless, our search wasn’t entirely futile. First, we found a wild raspberry:

We later found tons of wild blueberries:

One of the recurring themes you’ll notice if you watch enough of these videos is that my commentary is often wrong. In this case, the blueberries absolutely were ripe; they were just miniscule.

Horse

My friends, Alex and Claudia, gave me a wonderful tour of Zurich when I was there a few months ago. During one of our many long conversations, they casually mentioned a funny story about some tourists who unintentionally ate horse at a nearby restaurant. “Horse?” I asked. “People eat horse here?” That predetermined our dinner destination for the evening:

It really does taste like beef… “but better,” as Alex would say. Alex’s commentary in this video is priceless. If you’re disturbed by the notion of eating horse, read these articles in GOOD, Slate, and the New York Times.

Shigoku Oysters

Tasting and providing commentary on Shigoku oysters at Taylor Shellfish Farms in Seattle:

These were wonderful — probably the best oysters I’ve ever tasted. Again, ignore what I said about plastic bags. They are indeed farmed in bags, but they are more permeable than plastic of course.

Geoduck

Also from Taylor in Seattle. I had actually eaten (and disliked) geoduck as a kid, but I had never had it so fresh, and certainly never raw:

Call of the Mountains

2011-11-23T03:59:03Z

Great things are done when men and mountains meet. –William Blake

I’m a California boy at heart, and I’ve always been drawn to the ocean. But California has mountains too, and my last three work trips have reminded me how much I love them.

Truchas Peaks near Taos, New Mexico:

The Alps from Luzern, Switzerland:

The Cascade Range from Seattle:

I think the universe is telling me something.

Branding = Story + Community

2011-10-12T04:01:13Z

My big angst about the Wikimedia Strategic Planning process was that we didn’t focus enough on story. We did a great job creating space, building relationships, guiding conversations, and structuring the process, all of which was why we were successful. But our only-okay execution on storytelling still sticks in my craw to this day.

This angst led to a heart-to-heart with Jelly Helm shortly after the project. Jelly is all about story, and he continues to inspire my thinking. It also led to bringing Gwen Gordon onto a subsequent project in a very outside-the-box role, an experiment that I loved and plan on continuing. Gwen is all about story and play, and she brought life to a project that involved a traditional IT department at a large, global company.

My angst also led to several conversations and a collaboration with Chris Grams. This post is about Chris’s recent book, The Ad-Free Brand, but in order to talk about the book, I first need to talk about Chris.

His title suggests that his book is about branding or marketing. It is, and if you’re interested in those topics, you should read it. But the title doesn’t really do justice to what this book is really about: Engaging with your community, and telling your story.

I first met Chris while leading the Wikimedia strategy process. He convinced Philippe Beaudette and me that we had a great story to tell, and then he pushed us to tell it.

A few months ago, I knew that Groupaya’s launch date was drawing near, which also meant that Blue Oxen’s time was coming to a close. Neither of these were secrets to those with whom I interact often, as I’ve been very open about both of these things. However, I wasn’t sure how to deal with it at a broader level.

I was strongly leaning toward the Big Reveal. You all know what I’m talking about: A cryptic note, all in black, with a mysterious gnome in the background, and the words, “Coming Soon….” Or something like that.

Chris talked me out of it. We spoke for about an hour, kicking around ideas and discussing philosophy, and it amounted to the following advice: Be yourself. Tell your friends the news when you’re ready to tell it. Keep the conversation going.

I know this stuff. It’s what I do. But somehow, when I put on a “marketing” hat, I started getting these crazy ideas about the way it’s supposed to be. I needed to take off that hat and throw it in the incinerator.

Which brings me back to Chris’s book. The Ad-Free Brand is a field guide for how to tell a story and how to engage with your community. That is what branding is truly about. This may not sound as sexy as the gnome-in-black reveal, but it’s much more important, and it’s at least as hard.

The conceptual essence of his book is contained in Chapter Two, entitled, “Ad-Free Brand Positioning Basics.” If you only have time to read one chapter, read that one. In it, he distills the basic framework for ad-free branding into four points:

Competitive Frame of Reference. In which market are you competing? The answer may seem obvious, but it may also be worth deeper exploration. Starbucks isn’t actually competing against other coffee shops, it’s competing against “third places” — places you go outside of home and work, such as parks, restaurants, the mall, the library.
Points of Difference. What makes you unique from your competitors?
Points of Parity. What makes your competitors unique from you, and how do you counter? You’re not going to be better than your competitors at everything, but you should be at least good enough. Target is not as cheap as Wal-mart, but it’s still pretty cheap, and it’s stronger in other areas.
Brand Mantra. This is the essence of the first three points in a few words. It should not only say who you are, it should say who you’re not. Nike’s brand mantra is authentic athletic performance. You will never see a Nike dress shoe.

If you’ve worked out these four points, then you’re halfway there, because you’ve articulated the key points of your story. Of course, how you work these out and what you do with them afterward is hard. That’s what the rest of the book is about.

Chris tells a lot of great stories and provides a lot of tools. If there’s a weakness in the book, it’s that he tries to offer too much advice on how to do certain things well. For example, in his section on designing and facilitating a brand positioning workshop, he starts by introducing design thinking, a worthy philosophical frame, but, when presented in such a short amount of space, one that may detract from the tactical aspects of throwing a successful workshop.

His stories are the great strength of the book. He tells countless stories from both his own experience at Red Hat and from others (including our Wikimedia strategy process) that reinforce his central premise: Building an ad-free brand is ultimately about engaging with your community.

I’ve shared his book with the rest of my team at Groupaya. It’s already proven invaluable in helping us figure out our story, and it will serve as a great field guide as we work with our community to tell that story.

Groupaya

2011-10-01T22:26:38Z

A web site for a new company called Groupaya quietly cropped up last week. If you read the first blog post, you’ll see that I founded it with Kristin Cobble, and that Rebecca Petzel is part of our little cohort. I did a bit of explaining over there, and I’ll be doing much more over the coming weeks. What I’d like to do here is tell a more personal story about why Groupaya came to be and what it means for me moving forward.

Leading Change

2010 was a great and a challenging year for me professionally. My professional reputation had crossed some threshold where I had a steady stream of projects coming in, and the projects were getting bigger, harder, and more meaningful. I was also dissatisfied and completely burnt-out.

Blue Oxen Associates should have failed back in 2003, shortly after I had started it. We had no clients, a misguided strategy, and lots of debt. My cofounder had just left the company, and I felt very alone. We survived because of faith (both in ourselves and from others), because we worked like the dickens, and because we were very, very lucky. That survival process is a great teacher, but it comes at a personal cost, and if you’re not careful, you never heal.

As well as things were going in 2010, I wanted more. I was getting work opportunities, but I didn’t feel like I was fully empowered. I had big ideas about possibilities, and I was gradually moving toward those, but it was too slow, and I was exhausted from seven years of scrapping.

So I started creating space for myself so that I could think about what I really wanted and what I could do to get there. It was the healing process that I had put off for years. As I got clarity, I created new structures for myself, and the cycle of healing and clarity reinforced itself. One thing became very apparent very quickly: I was ready for a big change. I just didn’t know what that change should be.

That’s when beautiful, reliable serendipity took over.

Courage and Vision

In 2009, Pete Leyden, a journalist and entrepreneur who had been one of the founders of Wired, was returning to San Francisco after a stint in D.C. as director of New Politics Institute. He had this brilliant, wildly ambitious idea of combining the best of Silicon Valley and the web with a more traditional think tank as a way of revolutionizing public policy. He called his new company Next Agenda.

Part of his vision entailed bringing the best tools and processes for both face-to-face and online collaboration into a single, coherent practice. He started recruiting a team to help him make this happen. Henry Poole, one of Blue Oxen’s advisors, suggested that he talk to me.

Through his friend and former colleague, Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, Pete also discovered Kristin Cobble. Kristin was an organizational and leadership development superstar. She had started her career at Innovation Associates (Peter Senge‘s consulting firm), and she had served as the Director of Strategic Change at Banana Republic.

Several years ago, Kristin had started to formulate a vision of a large-scale, participatory process that would empower the people in this country to take ownership of our future. When Pete discovered her, she had just left Monitor Group to try and make this vision a reality. She called her new company, “Courion Group,” where “Courion” was a combination of “courage” and “vision,” values that she herself embodies.

I immediately bonded with Kristin. We shared strong values around group process and the future of the world, and we brought complementary lenses and experiences to our work. Plus, I simply admired the heck out of her abilities. She is a tremendously skilled coach, designer, and facilitator, and she has the ability to think through complex, systemic challenges quickly and deeply.

We spent a lot of time outside of Next Agenda talking about our respective philosophies around collaboration, coming to a much deeper shared understanding in the process. Kristin also became a valued friend and advisor, and I started leaning on her as I worked through my professional angst.

New Life

By April 2010, I was 99 percent sure that I would shut down Blue Oxen and pursue new opportunities, most likely at someone else’s organization. I was exhausted, I needed a break, and frankly, I was curious to know what sort of opportunities were out there. Then I got an unexpected email.

My friend, Scott McMullan, is responsible for partnerships for Google Apps. One of his customers (let’s call him “Harry”), then a CIO at a Fortune 500 company, wanted to explore an initiative for improving collaboration across his organization. It was a very big, very vague idea, and he was looking for a non-traditional thinking partner who understood collaboration deeply and who wasn’t afraid to play and take risks. Harry asked Scott if he knew anyone, and Scott generously mentioned me.

So Harry sent me an email. One energizing conversation later, I realized something about myself: As tired as I was, I still felt passionate about my work and my path. All it took was the right conversation with the right person to get excited again.

I knew that Harry was talking to other larger, more reputable firms. I also knew that we could do a better job than any of those firms. So I started putting together a team and a plan.

This was also an opportunity to start testing some of my structural changes. One of those was a requirement that I bring in a senior partner for all big projects. The first person who came to mind was Kristin, who, to my delight, agreed to join me.

Another change was an intention to create opportunities for people who were less experienced than me, but who were as passionate as I was about collaboration and who were hungry to learn.

I had recently met Rebecca Petzel at a tweet-up organized by Christina Jordan. I was literally on my way out the door when I met Rebecca, but she stuck out for three reasons. First, she had started a cohort in graduate school that called themselves “collaboration ninjas.” Second, she had moved to the Bay Area without a job because she was drawn by the people here and their purpose. Third, when I told her I was a collaboration consultant, she was absolutely delighted. She had no idea that such a job title actually existed!

We had coffee a few times, where I learned more about her work and her drive. In the process of putting together our team, I learned that Rebecca was thinking about transitioning from her job as community catalyst at Myoo Create. I told her about Harry, and I set up a meeting with Kristin. The three of us clicked, and the third member of our team was in place.

Groupaya

Kristin and I filled out the rest of our team from our network of colleagues, we made our pitch, and we got the gig. Thus began the best working experience of my life. We were working on a complex project in a large, global organization with strong leadership support. We had a superstar team in place that kept challenging my thinking and motivating me to work harder. Everyone on the client’s team was smart, great at execution, and simply good people.

Working with Kristin was just really generative. It broadened and deepened my thinking, and it emboldened me to step into my vision. It had a reverberating effect on the rest of my work and even my personal life. I was happier and more productive, and I felt a renewed passion for my work.

In September 2010, we decided to join forces. Rather than ask Kristin to join Blue Oxen Associates, I decided I wanted to create a new organization with her. I’ll explain why in a more detailed post on the Blue Oxen blog, but the short explanation is that I wanted a sense of closure and starting anew.

We’ve spent the better part of a year figuring out what we were going to do together, and we finally signed our partnership agreement last month (September 15, 2011). We’ll be documenting that part of our journey over the next few weeks on the Groupaya blog. It’s a great story, and it involves a lot of important people in our lives. I can’t wait to tell it.

And the journey continues. We’re still getting clear and moving forward, but we wanted to start sharing earlier rather than later. It’s part of our ethos of openness, and it’s also a great way for us to learn with a broader group of people.

In some ways, I feel like I’m getting married after living with someone for a long time. It’s special, but it’s not really new. Kristin and I have been working together for over two years now, we’ve been working with Rebecca for almost a year, and we’ve been operating as if we were already a company since the beginning of the year. That said, we have so much ahead of us, and I’m really excited to be making more and more people a part of this story.

You can follow the ongoing Groupaya saga at our blog, on Twitter (@groupaya), and on Facebook. I’d love to hear what you think!

Moneyball and High-Performance Collaboration

2011-09-23T06:34:43Z

On Friday night, the movie, Moneyball, opens in theaters nation-wide. It’s based on the book by Michael Lewis, which I reviewed on this blog back in 2003. I was pretty shocked that they turned a book about how data is changing baseball into a movie starring Brad Pitt. I’m even more shocked to hear that the movie is pretty good, even by sports fan standards. Regardless, it’s a great excuse to revisit the ideas in this most excellent book and to explore the implications on high-performance collaboration.

In a nutshell, Moneyball is the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, who used (what was then considered) radical new ways of measuring performance in order to stay competitive in a market where other teams (e.g. the Yankees) were spending orders of magnitude more money on talent. It documents the huge, ongoing culture shift in baseball away from old-school, hard-scrabble views on player evaluation to a more data-driven system.

In my book review, I wrote:

How do we measure the effectiveness of collaboration? If we can’t measure this accurately, then how do we know if we’re getting better or worse at it? Baseball has the advantage of having well-defined rules and objectives. The same does not hold with most other areas, including collaboration. Is it even possible to measure anything in these areas in a meaningful way?

I think we’ve made progress in exploring this question. There’s a world-wide trend toward leveraging the tremendous amount of data now available to us in order to try and understand, in real-time, how we behave and why. This is a good thing, and we need to see a lot more of this.

At the same time, we also need to be careful about a potentially false sense of confidence about what all this data actually means. I love what Joe Posnanski wrote about Bill James, the father of sabermetrics:

If there is a guiding principle to all of Bill’s work, it is this: What difference does it make? The world is a complicated place. Baseball is a complicated game. This, more than anything, is what the Bill-as-cartoon people miss. He does not think that there are RIGHT answers and WRONG answers, certainly not to the questions that rage in his head. He just thinks that there are ways to get closer to the truth.

“We will never figure out baseball,” he says. “We will never get close to figuring out baseball.”

This, I think, is the critical final piece. Curiosity might have been the flint, distrust of conventional wisdom might have been the steel, but that only gives you a spark. What turned the work into a raging fire was that Bill James has never really believed that he had figured it out. He never even believed that you COULD figure it out. All he wanted to do was get the conversation going, advance the ball, give people new things to think about, let the discussion evolve and keep evolving.

Replace “baseball” with “life,” and you have a philosophy worth living by.

Picture by pursuethepassion. Licensed: CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

My Ideal Project

2011-08-15T08:12:36Z

I had coffee with a colleague last week, and she asked me to describe my ideal project. I didn’t even have to think about my answer. My response:

Socially impactful
Collaborative
Very, very hard

I love projects that make you stop and think, “How the heck are we going to do this?”

I love projects where stuff gets done, not just talked about.

I love projects that require you to gather as many smart, passionate, caring people as possible and to get them aligned and activated in order to even have a chance at succeeding.

I love projects where everyone is working their butts off, learning, and having the time of their lives.

I love projects that are meaningful.

Not all of my projects are hard, but they’re all meaningful, and I feel very fortunate about that. Still, I’m constantly craving bigger, more impactful challenges.

Recently, I’ve been turning down a lot of speaking opportunities. I love to give talks, and I want to give more of them. They’re great excuses for me to reflect and synthesize and tell stories. But sometimes, I get the feeling that people are asking me to speak as a proxy for actually doing something.

The more my reputation grows, the more people give weight to what I say. It’s a nice feeling. It’s gratifying, it’s safe, and it makes me uncomfortable. I hate safe.

In theory, I know that all of this translates to more opportunities to work on the kinds of challenges I crave. Still, I would much rather have someone say to me, “I don’t want to hear what you have to say. I want you to show me.”

And when my reaction is, “Wow, that sounds super hard and super scary, and if we pull it off, a lot of people will be better off,” then I know that I’ve found the right project.

Wednesday Play Days

2011-08-10T03:20:52Z

This is my calendar for this week:

It’s a pretty typical week for me, except for one thing. Can you see what it is?

One of the things I need to be happy, creative, and productive is space. Lots of it. I usually fill it up quickly, but that’s okay, as long as I have space to fill. One of the things I’ve done poorly since starting Blue Oxen Associates is create space for myself. It’s hard to do when you have your own company, especially if you love what you do. But it’s necessary.

Over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been making some structural changes to try and create space for myself. One of those changes was to start taking vacations. I took my first extended vacation in eight years last October, and last month, I went on vacation again.

(Vacations, by the way, are awesome. I highly recommend them to everyone — real vacations, where you leave your devices at home. I know this is obvious to most people, but for the rest of you, please, do yourself a favor, and take a week off.)

Another change I made was to raise my consulting rates. I had not raised my rates since starting Blue Oxen eight years ago, and I was below market rate, so it was definitely overdue. That made a difference as well, partially because it gave me a bit more financial peace-of-mind, but mainly because it allowed me to hire more and better people for my projects. That made the work better and more fun, and it created some additional space for me to focus my energies on the stuff that excited me the most.

Still, at the end of June, I decided I needed a heart-to-heart with my partner-in-crime, Kristin Cobble. We had just finished a massive project together, busting our butts toward the finish line. Along the way, we had also been pouring hours into building our business, cultivating new clients, recruiting new talent, and planning and thinking together. Not surprisingly, we were exhausted.

So Kristin and I sat down together, and I said, “I want to take the entire month of July off. I don’t know if we can, but I want to. And then we need to make more changes so that we have more space — space to rest, to reflect, to play.”

Kristin was supportive and enthusiastic. We both already had vacations planned in July. Our previous client wanted to do some more work with us, but we weren’t sure when that would get started. We were also in discussions with other potential clients. We knew at worst that we’d have our vacations plus a small break from client work. But knowing that was not enough. I wanted to make more structural changes.

We decided to experiment with a new practice: Wednesday Play Days. In short, we would essentially treat Wednesdays as a weekend. That meant no meetings and no client work. Beyond those constraints, we could choose however we wanted to spend that day. We were using “play” in the broadest sense of the word.

We had several inspirations for this. One was Kristin’s dad, who believes strongly in working intensely for two days, then taking a break. He’s been practicing Wednesday Play Days for a long time. Another inspiration was my friend and colleague, Odin Zackman, who keeps his Wednesdays clear so that he can use it for thinking time. I was originally surprised that he did it in the middle of the week, but he made a really compelling case for breaking up the week that way.

We put it into practice immediately. Kristin has since stopped doing it, finding that, as a mom, it works better to distribute her rest time throughout the week. I’ve been doing it for a month now, and I’ve been absolutely loving it.

In the beginning, it was painful for me to schedule around Wednesdays. When client work is light, I tend to schedule more meetings. Wednesday Play Days prevented me from doing that.

It got easier quickly, though, because the impact was immediate. Whenever I look at my calendar and I see that blank space in the middle, I feel joy.

I’ve filled that space in different ways. A few times, I did “work” — not client work, but thinking and writing work, stuff I really enjoy and never find enough time to do. One time, my parents were in town, and so I spent the day with them, completely guilt-free. One time, I literally did nothing. I just relaxed.

So far, it’s had the desired effect, and I’m going to try to maintain it. This week, I’m being severely tested. A new project is starting, and we’re going to be working our butts off again. I also have some proposals to write for potential projects that I’m excited about. We’re in the middle of an internal strategy process, and we have the usual laundry list of things to do for everything else we’re involved with. What’s truly making it challenging is that all of this stuff is actually fun!

I am sorely tempted to break the “no client work” rule tomorrow, but I’m going to do everything in my power to resist. It may be easier to lift that rule and just keep Wednesdays meeting-free, but I’m not going to lift it without a fight. Things are picking up, but not insanely so. Leaving space in the middle of the week is enabling me to maintain that sanity, and I think the results will pay off for everyone — my clients, my colleagues, my friends and family, and most of all, me.

See you all on Thursday!