Emerging Commitment

Wednesday evening's TechFlash Women in Tech event didn't just shake up my sense of self. It also gave me some facts and figures bolstering a view I've long held regarding the value and importance of gender equality. My perspective is simple and boils down to wanting to maximize value more than caring that much about fairness. Tough girls can hack it and find a way to fit in - I did - but when it's a matter of a system that's sub-optimized, I'm more motivated to want to get in and fix it at that systemic level rather than rely on one-off solutions.

What emerged from that event was a picture that my rather passionate sense of the problems in gender inequality developed over the past 40 years is not wrong. There is indeed a system sub-optimization problem worth addressing. Some of the figures quoted that stood out to me:

• The majority of patents evaluated as highly innovative came from mixed gender teams but only 9% of technology patents have female contributors. Implied conclusion: get more women involved and you're likely to see more innovation.
  
  
• Women typically get 30% less than men in venture capitol funding but maintain similar output to their better-funded counterparts. Implied conclusion: get more for your money when investing in women because often they really have learned how to do more with less.
  
  
• Women are primary wage-earners in 4 out of 10 families but only 5% of tech startups are women-owned/led. Implied conclusion: Women are capable of doing the work; families and the tech sector would both benefit from increased contributions from women.
  
  
• Although women make up about half the general workforce, women make up only 24% of tech; in 1985, 37% of computer science majors were female, now it's down to 17%. Implied conclusion: instead of growing the numbers of women in tech, their ranks are actually shrinking; given the other stats, this is "key talent de-selecting itself and not coming to the table."
  
  
• Only 16% of Fortune 500 companies have women on their boards. Implied conclusions: not only do the numbers of women shrink in the higher ranks, there is a de-motivating effect on all women in tech/business because there are fewer role models and the system is again missing out on key perspectives.

And this was all just from the TechFlash event. I learned today that apparently the World Bank is of a similar mind, but from the perspective of poverty, that there is an economic advantage to investing in girls.

In my mind, these numbers paint a scary picture - fewer and fewer women in a key business sector that doesn't necessarily stop to consider the value they provide so doesn't miss them when they're gone. With fewer women available as role models, fewer girls and young women even stop to think of going into tech. With fewer women in the ranks of tech workers and no one else motivated enough to bring them into the fold, policies and attitudes that make tech a less attractive option to women remain in place and so they simply make other choices about the work they do. And the cycle continues to devolve in that way.

Considering what these numbers really mean, I can only conclude that it is in everyone's best interests - male and female, families and individuals, tech sector and general economy - for us to work together to find a way to bring more women into science and technology. It's not about devaluing men's contributions. It's not about playing the gender card or whining about what's fair (my personal favorite anti-feminism beef). It is simply about what is best for us as a society.

These numbers tell me that our system is more seriously broken than I'd realized, that we have reached a point somewhere along the way when it started to get worse instead of better. While not perfect, the laws and larger policies seem to me to be generally good enough so that's not the biggest problem right now. Where we're falling down is in day-to-day culture and implementation of those policies and in the choices that we each make. And when I stop to think about who is in a position to start to get that part fixed, I see a couple of obvious answers outright.

The first answer is we are all responsible for doing something about this collectively.

Men - find ways to listen to the challenges that women face in tech and help eliminate them, sometimes (perhaps) by taking them on as your own.

Women - don't give up on yourselves just because there are easier options available. Toughen up and do the hard work for yourselves and other younger women to follow and find a way to make women in tech a more, rather than less, common occurrence. Not everyone enjoys being a pioneer, but someone's got to do it or the path is never carved out for others to follow. We had one started and we let it get grown over.

Men and women both - encourage and support women of all ages to think of becoming involved in tech; be creative, it's not all just about the programming. It's about being cutting edge and changing the world, hopefully for the better. That last part is something a lot of women can get behind so it shouldn't be a tough sell. Remember to mentor individual women and also to actively advocate for their individual and collective success.

The second answer was a bit of a gulp for me. Between feeling I had so little in common with women for so many years, especially seeing so many of them not really push themselves to their true capacity, and feeling more drawn to men because it was easier for me to see what we had in common, it never really occurred to me to be that involved in advocating for women. And I say this as a person who has openly asserted how stupid many of our attitudes and policies are when it comes to women.

It wasn't that I thought I was better than other women; it was more (I believe now - I'm still trying to figure it all out) that I didn't realize just much of an impact the advantages I enjoyed (familial support, a genetic predisposition to stubbornness, and an unequivocal sense in key areas of my ability to provide value) really had in influencing my choices as opposed to the choices made by other women. I realize now that while I am indeed different from a lot of women, I am not, in fact entirely alone amongst my gender in those differences. Compared with that subset, the real difference is that the challenges I found difficult might seem insurmountable to others - or not worth the effort. Tough as it is to admit, this thought really hadn't occurred to me.

What I truly did not realize fully was just how troublesome it is that the women who could be doing this work, aren't. And in coming to these realizations, gulps and all, knowing my own experiences - both successful and not so much - with playing in a variety of male-dominated fields, knowing my sense of history and understanding of the playing field (as it was, is, and might be), and knowing I have the coaching skills and the leadership skills, and the general business skills to do it... I can only conclude one thing: that I too am not only capable of directly influencing the short-term and long-term outcomes with regard to women in tech, but that I have an outright responsibility to do so.

That said, I have practically zero clue at this point exactly what that looks like. I only know I have to be involved in some way. First and foremost, it occurs to me that it is important to recognize that responsibility in my sense of mission regarding what I'm trying to accomplish with my business. That means actively seeking to support women and women-owned businesses in tech with my coaching and my consulting. It means making it more clear how I can help.

I also sense an importance in figuring out how I can help younger girls when they are first electing to move toward or away from tech, even though I have a son instead of a daughter. On that front, if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them. One of things I like about being female is an increased willingness to take the crowdsourcing approach.

Feel free to also enter into dialog on the matter. Your own thoughts and observations, suggestions and conclusions. This is a big one and we'll all have to get behind it to be able to move the ball in any significant way. As they say, though, awareness is the first step.

What conclusions can you draw from the evidence around you about what responsibilities you now (or no longer) have?

When a Major Delay = Fabulous Service

Have I told you my Hertz story yet? No? Then you might not believe it's possible to equate a 3-hour delay in a car rental with the most excellent customer service on the face of the planet but I'll swear till my dying day that it's true.

Although I've told this customer service story lots of times to anyone who will listen - that's what people do when they are ecstatic, incredulous even, over the amazing service they've received - it's been a while since I've shared the whole thing and I haven't mentioned it here. It's time I fixed that.

I was reminded of my Hertz experience twice in as many weeks when members of my LinkedIn network asked related questions about service - what constitutes 5-Star Service and a request for examples of Moments of Truth in Service. Although my answers differed slightly in focus, both brought to mind the vacation that almost wasn't.

First, it helps to know how much this mini-vacation meant to me. While everyone else recently has been ridiculing the passenger who missed her flight, I have some ideas how she might have reached that state of collapse. There but for fortune...

In my case nearly ten years ago, our company had gone through yet another in a series of sizable layoffs a couple of weeks earlier. I hadn't had to let go many people myself, but this was one of the few times the line managers had not had much input into the process and that lack of involvement had resulted in some mistakes that made things messier.

Much of that didn't impact me directly but layoffs are never an enjoyable aspect of a manager's job and this was still even more emotional than normal. Helping people cope - on my team and others - and mitigating the hit on productivity was taking its toll.

Then there was the house that we were supposed to be building. The time that wasn't already spent on coaching employees or caring for a 3-yr-old all went to packing up moving boxes so we could tear down our existing home to the dirt. The packing up was happening but uncertainty and delays over the tearing down part meant we had to cancel our midwest baseball stadium tour. After having enjoyed our northeast baseball stadium tour so much the year before, this was a major league disappointment.

In the midst of it all, Tall Person learned of a family wedding and decided it would be important for him to attend. A weekend alone with a toddler for me when I was already feeling stretched - how fun. I started to feel envious of my sister's planned trip to Telluride that same weekend with her infant son.

When my father caught on, he quickly suggested that I fly into Salt Lake City with Small Person. It would be a bit of a drive from there, but certainly manageable. We'd spend a long weekend together as a sort of mini-family reunion. It gave me something to look forward to and I kept myself focused on that ray of hope the way I've focused at other times on the finish line of a long and brutal race.

When departure day arrived, Tall Person drove us to the airport, then went to work for a few hours before leaving for the airport himself. The flight itself was non-eventful, but when I went to the car rental, Hertz had not yet installed the car seat I'd requested. The attendants wrestled with the installation while the agent stood there with my paperwork and driver's license, waiting to hand it over to me when the car was ready.

Still they struggled with the carseat, so being more experienced with that operation, I jumped in to help. The agent tried to stay out of the way and idly looked over the paperwork in his hands. Doing so, he came to a realization and called me over.

"There is a problem with your license. It's expired."

My heart sunk. Immediately I realized the truth of what he was saying. In the midst of everything else that had been going on in my life, I'd managed to overlook that important detail just long enough to have forgotten about it altogether during the intervening months. And just as quickly, I realized the enormity of the situation, even before he spelled it out for me.

"Without a valid license, we can't rent you the car."

There have been very few times when I have come up against truly irreversible mistakes but when it happens, it has always resulted in the same hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach - no, no, no... it can't be true. In that moment, I may not have become the woman in that video, but I understood how she felt.

Not generally one to allow emotions take control (crying at movies doesn't count!), I was suddenly unable to prevent months worth of pent-up tears as they began to slide down my face. I tried valiantly to keep my composure and found I just couldn't. It seemed there was nothing to do but go back inside and re-book myself on a return flight. I wasn't even sure how I would get home from the airport.

As unwanted as they were on my part, the tears were too much for the Hertz agent. He started casting about for solutions. Could my family come get me? No - they were too far away. Did I know someone else in the area who could take me? No, I could think of no one who lived in the area. I had flown all this way for nothing. I was going back home to an empty house, both literally and figuratively.

Still, the agent kept looking for answers. Still, none of them were workable. He went to make some phone calls to see if there might be other solutions he hadn't considered. I collapsed into the chair near the car I wouldn't be driving, my son trying to offer hugs for tears he didn't understand. I called both my husband and my father to share the bad news.

Ultimately, the Hertz agent returned. The very last thread of hope he'd been following showed some promise. Maybe, just maybe, I could get a driver's license in the state of Utah. It had seemed like a slim chance at first, but he'd called around and he was reasonably sure it could work if I thought I could pass a written test. He'd have one of the attendants drive me.

It seemed like a lot to go through, but I don't struggle too much with multiple choice exams and anything seemed preferable at that point to cutting my trip short. I regained control of my emotions, keeping tight rein on hope as well as distress, and Ahmed drove me over to the nearest Department of Licensing office. I called Tall Person to share the shred of hope I was clinging to.

We arrived at the DOL office just before noon, with lunchtime crowds building. I stood in line forever, filling out the license application form while Ahmed, the Hertz attendant, entertained Small Person with paper cranes he folded from forms others had discarded. Finally, I reached the head of the line and explained my plight. The woman was sympathetic but we hit a road block when she realized I could not supply a local address.

"Don't you know anyone in Utah? Anyone at all whose address you could use?"

I tried to search my brain but it was quickly becoming addled with all the stress and the knowledge that the line was building behind me just compounded the problem. No, no family or friends in Utah came to mind. I could think of women with children my son's age all across the US - Indiana, Texas, California, Massachusetts, Georgia - but none of them in Utah. No work contacts either. I started to feel dizzy. The line continued to build behind me. I was sure I was about to become so much bureaucratic roadkill.

Instead, the woman encouraged me, "I'm sure you can think of someone. Just step aside right over there and when you've come up with a local address, come straight back to me so that you don't have to stand in line all over again." I found it easier to breathe again; the tunnel vision that had been encroaching began to recede. I thanked her profusely then pulled out my PDA and set to work looking through my address book for a clue to a local contact.

Finally, I hit on one. A work colleague of my husband's... I didn't know his wife well, but hadn't she mentioned her family was from Provo? I called Tall Person for a third time. He was at lunch with the colleague in question and they had already guessed what I needed.

"I bet you're calling for Jennifer's parent's address, aren't you? Here it is..."

Two major roadblocks down, one more yet to go. Ahmed the Hertz attendant still patiently entertaining my son, I began working on the open book multiple choice exam. The only tough part was locating the information in the pamphlet they provided. I had to will myself to slow down and not panic, and even to remember to breathe. Finally, I had just two more questions to answer. I kept flipping through the pamphlet and could not seem to find the right sections containing the answers.

Then, with the worst possible timing... "Mommy! I have to go!" For that matter, so did I, which was not helping me think. And we were both hungry, having had very little to eat all day. But just two questions to go... I looked pleadingly at Ahmed. He was kind enough to come escort Small Person to the bathroom while I finished my exam. Clearly that was way above and beyond the call of duty; I knew it and was beyond thankful.

Turning in my exam was an exercise in torture. The man responsible for validating my responses pulled out the correction key and started checking. The first couple responses marked wrong didn't surprise me, given the situation. The next few concerned me; how many could I miss and still pass? Then as his pen bled red all over the paper, I stopped breathing again. Feeling dizzy once more, it barely occurred to me that this couldn't possibly be right. No matter how stressed I was, there was simply no way that I could have gotten every single answer wrong. No way.

It seemed odd to him also and he took a second look even before I thought to ask. "Oh, wrong key!" I nearly collapsed with relief.

Validated against the appropriate key, he reassured me that I had indeed passed. I went through the motions of having a photo taken and scheduling the driving portion of the exam I knew I wouldn't be taking and then rushed back to Ahmed and my son, full of smiles and a temporary Utah driver's license in my hand.

Three and a half hours from when I first stepped into the Hertz office, I dropped off Ahmed at the airport again and headed south and west to Telluride, arriving just an hour after my sister and in plenty of time for a late dinner.

When I returned to Seattle at the end of the weekend, I wrote an extensive thank you to Hertz and set about getting a new Washington State driver's license which, given that I was beyond six months overdue, would have been much more difficult had it not been for the Utah license I had in my possession at that point. Meanwhile, somewhere in Provo is a family who has never even met me, receiving junk mail in my name.

Nearly ten years later, I still love to tell people how out of the way the Hertz people went, both personally and professionally, to help. They didn't just provide excellent customer service; they helped me deal with a problem that was entirely of my own making. And while I have no idea which licensing office I visited, I am equally thankful to every agent there who helped me, encouraged me, reassured me, and in every way possible, made it easier for me to accomplish what I needed when just behaving as we've come to expect bureaucrats to behave would have made it tougher - or even impossible.

Some people talk about delighting the customer or excellence in service. Instead, I believe it comes down to just caring enough to do whatever is in your power to have a positive impact on the customer's experience with your brand. Every customer interaction is a tangible exercise in brand management.

That day so many years ago, every individual I encountered provided me with a brand experience that has stuck with me all this time because of how superbly positive it was in the face of utter hopelessness. Who wouldn't want that kind of customer service? The beauty of it is that it doesn't have to cost the company extra.

Sure, not having Ahmed around for a couple of hours had to have been a bit of a stretch for the Hertz guys. But it's not like someone shows up every day with an expired driver's license, so going to such extremes is probably not needed often enough to drive up costs significantly. And I like to think that my continued raving over my experience with them is worth more than enough to cover whatever costs they did incur. The long-term gains for great brand management in the form of great customer service can be huge.

How is your customer service influencing your brand?

Raising a Compassionate Geek

Amidst the chaos of students readying their collection of engineering contraptions based on ancient Chinese technology, Kristen found me and put a copy of ParentMap into my hands. "The story on the Dalai Lama starts on 42," she said as I started to thumb through the pages.

The story wasn't about the more general relationship between the Dalai Lama and his native Tibet. She had read an article I'd written about Small Person's encounter with His Holiness last spring and wanted follow up on what sort of lasting effect he and I had noticed since then.

The educators at Seattle Country Day School get it - science and technology are important, but these are not the only keys to success. Learning how to collaborate with others and to see the world from more than one point of view are important too.

I see this pretty clearly when I'm coaching geeks. When technology professionals have more than sufficient technical skills but still aren't achieving all that they want, we often discover that the missing ingredient is further development of their (sometimes neglected) soft skills - collaboration, compassion, and building strong working relationships.

Small Person is most definitely well-rounded in that respect. As innovative as he is, and as good as he is at building things on his own, he also shows a talent for working well with others, listening to differing viewpoints and integrating them with his own ideas. I have no doubt he'll go far.

As a parent, I encourage that balance because I see how much it helps my clients. It is important to play to our strengths, and it can also be a good idea to take another look at areas we may have dismissed in the past as unimportant and consider the possibility that there may be some value there too.

What role does compassion play in your work and life?

Tech Support of a Different Kind

These days, we're often too busy to nurture relationships. Sometimes we don't even get to know our our own neighbors very well. The isolation and relative anonymity of the internet sometimes exacerbates this problem - but not always.

My friend, Mike, tells me today that his brother-in-law's house in Gig Harbor burned down earlier in the week - the kind of event that is always tragic and hugely impacts a family. Someone has already been kind enough to have posted a website with information and photos about the fire - started by a raccoon, most likely.

Best of all, the site also makes it easy for people to contribute to a fund supporting the family and it also lists various other kinds of contributions that would be helpful for them. Something like this makes it so much easier for friends and neighbors to support one another in times of need and I'm always impressed by the ingenuity and compassion involved.

More than once, I have seen friends and family support one another through grave illness via the CaringBridge website. Caring Bridge has been descibed as "social networking for sick people", providing "connection, love, and support when you need it most" by making it easy to post updates and photos to people who want to stay in the loop, with minimal impact on those immediately involved. Guest book entries where people can express their love and support work even better than filling up answering machines and keeping people notified of news is hugely helpful, whether it's a premature baby waiting to come home from the hospital or a loved one battling some disease process.

Network for Good helps us find charitable organizations looking for contributions - and makes it easy to give to them. I love using this site to handle all of my year-end donations all at once. They also make it easy to match volunteers and organizations needing help.

Sometimes the internet helps bring us together. Let's celebrate that capability and help it help us to be better humans.

Do you know of sites that help us help each other? Please do share. It's the time of year when it's that much more important to be thinking of how we can help one another in an economic climate that demands we do whatever we can. However badly we may each be hurting, someone else is hurting more. Even if it's just to reach out a hand or a thought, it's something that can make a difference.

How can you improve your connections with other people?

Pause. Think. React

Just because we grow up doesn't mean we get that much better at behaving like adults. More than once as a manager, I've had to referee disputes between employees that would have been more fitting on a playground than in the workplace. It's worse though when we receive one-sided reports of poor behavior. When it's kids, we call it tattling, and there are good reasons to hold a bias for kids/employees to work it out amongst themselves.

Parents generally know something about getting dragged into the middle of such "Did!" "Did not!" arguments that managers often forget and voters hardly seem to know at all. Smart parents understand the importance of taking a moment to pause before reacting, to think about whether what's just been reported is actually true. They ask themselves first, "Does this even make sense?"

They also recognize that sometimes individuals providing their accounts of the matter often have their own agendas or biases that color their perceptions even when they are honestly trying to be truthful. The only sure-fire way to ascertain the truth is clear-eyed research using objective resources although sometimes getting both parties in front of you to respond to probing questions works too.

Then, when you have a better understanding of the truth, ask yourself what the potential impact is and how much it really matters. Only at this point is it safe to react, so it helps to practice your poker face for all the time in between.

I'm just glad I've already voted. Now I can ignore the rest of the crazy-making accusations flying around this last few days before election day. It will be like turning up the music in the front of the car while kids argue in the back.

What research do you need to do to make an informed decision based on objective fact?

Healthy Lunching on the Eastside

Seattle Lunch 2.0 was an interesting event this month. For one thing, it was on the Eastside, which always seems easier somehow than crossing the Big Water even though technically it takes me as long to get to Crossroads area as it does to get downtown.

For another, Microsoft was a great host - way too much food and all of it good (geeks like good food) and pretty cool pedometers to boot, complete with USB cables for automatic data transfer to your computer. The pedometers and the lunch were courtesy of the Health Solutions Group which has their new HealthVault platform currently in beta, so we got to hear quite a bit about HealthVault and their plans in that space going forward.

People attending the Lunch 2.0 event had lots of questions - good ones too - and most of them centered around privacy. Listening to the answers, I didn't once hear the sort of 'trust us' comments that always put me on edge.

Instead, what I heard was how closely they'd worked with privacy advocacy groups to make sure they were taking the right approach. And when you work with stakeholders closely enough that they can feel satisfied that you've done all the right things (or done them as well as you can, anyway in some cases), then that's probably the best possible outcome.

Although lots of us were interested in the platform and what it can do, I'm not sure everyone was convinced. I tend to go back and forth on privacy myself anyway so I came away not exactly sure at first. But look at what we've done with debit cards and credit cards over the years. I remember when privacy advocates yelled about the dangers of those in the beginning. My father's tongue-in-cheek approach at the time was to take advantage of his position as an airline pilot to use them all over the world and hope to confuse anyone who might be paying attention. These days, we don't give it a second thought and in fact, many of us operate nearly cash-less.

So - while I do care about privacy myself and certainly care that Microsoft and their partner vendors are taking appropriate precautions in that area, I also take a long view of the risks vs. what I get out of it. I figure it's not unlike my approach to being a first-time mother of an infant - once I heard that mothers of two babies tended to not wash pacifiers nearly so rigorously the second time around and in fact, tended to let the dog lick off the big hunks by the time they got to three or four babies, I jumped straight to the less-than-hyperclean approach with my baby.

And just what do we get out of it with HealthVault? Well, I like being able to upload and track all my new pedometer data, especially since these new pedometers are ever so much more accurate than they used to be. The HealthVault interface itself leaves quite a bit to be desired but once I remembered that it's the platform and the other services are the real interface, I didn't mind that part so much.

Trying to find the right service was a bit of a scavenger hunt. I checked out all the HealthVault-compatible currently available, trying to fine one that made the most sense for my needs. I'm not trying to lose weight and I don't have a particular condition like diabetes where I'm trying to track specific information, although there are services that are relevant for people who are.

Neither am I old enough or sick enough to be taking multiple medications such that I'd benefit from tracking prescriptions and how they interact. And while reasonably active, I'm not training for a big athletic event these days so those services weren't quite what I was looking for either. I also wanted something a bit more comprehensive than a service designed primarily to make health information available to appropriate parties in case of an emergency (ICE).

In the end, I decided that what I really wanted was an all-around tool for managing day-to-day healthcare information and healthcare records once electronic information sharing with my doctor and pharmacist becomes a bigger part of my life. Being able to do that for all the members of my family was on my wishlist too. HealthyCircles appears to meet all those needs quite nicely and, as an added bonus, it's also free so I signed up for that service and started testing it out.

Nearly a week later, I'm starting to enjoy having data to review and have a plan in place for digitizing all my paper health records so that I can keep all that information in one place and more readily accessible. I'm thinking that will make that part of our lives considerably easier - that much more so thanks to digital filing.

At some point, I'll probably want more devices that work with HealthVault. I'll shift to a scale that allows me to directly import data and the same with our blood pressure monitor but manual data entry is probably good enough for now. We already have a HealthVault-friendly Polar heart monitor so I just need to get that set up.

Of course, as often happens in such situations, the more I play with this stuff, the more my imagination kicks in and the more I want to be able to do with it. I've already sent probably 4-5 suggestions to the HealthyCircles people so hopefully they're watching their inbox!

Noticing the issues I have seen as a consumer and having worked with hospitals as clients in the past, how ridulously silo'd information still is these days, the HealthVault platform is likely to be a game-changer. One of the services already offered is appropriately titled NoMoreClipboard. I mean, how stupid is it that I should have to fill out the exact same information from one time to the next - sometimes even on the same day if I happen to be visiting two different doctors in one fell swoop? That alone is bound to give us back some important chunks of time and that is certainly worth a lot right there.

There is so much more around the corner in this space. I'm looking forward to watching it unfold.

What helps keep you healthy?

iPod Mini Weirdness

I've been feeling like a person possessed lately, what with some of the projects I've been working on, trying to get caught up after my sister's visit to town, and getting (no-longer-quite-so) Small Person ready for school. But really, what's possessed at the moment is my iPod Mini.

I haven't the faintest clue what's up with it - all of a sudden it's on, making little clicking noises like someone is using it and trying to find a song or an album to play, and it won't even turn off anymore. Fortunately, I've got it plugged in so the battery won't drain completely but the most convenient spot for that puts it right near where I work at the computer, so I'm constantly hearing the clicking noises or noticing the backlight go on and off. Urg.

And no, it's not the alarm. Even if it was, I don't believe that would explain why I can't turn the darned thing off. So - when I feel like I have the time, I'll research the matter some more and hopefully will come up with some kind of workable solution. There is truth, though, to the notion that we often put off doing things until it becomes more painful to live with the problem than it is to address it. I am most definitely in that mode at the moment with the Mini.

If you have suggestions or just care to commiserate, feel free to comment.

What are you tolerating and what will it take for you to stop tolerating it?

My Hero

We're often asked about our heroes - sometimes by friends and family, sometimes for job interviews. My answer is nearly always that my hero is my grandfather, Joe Kimm (for whom I'm named). The true answer is too long to share here today, but here's a thumbnail sketch about why he's so important, and not just to me and our family...

Joe Kimm is an aviation pioneer who didn't take up skiing until very nearly 60 (and didn't give it up until his 90's), learned television repair after retirement and then taught himself about computers - including machine language - and still golfs today. In fact, he played in 95 degree heat just a few short days ago. His one concession is that he now uses a cart.

Sunday, we had a family celebration of his 97 years, the day before his birthday. The cutest photo of the day included Grandpa Joe (Grandy) and a various assortment of some of the younger grandchildren and as many great-grandchildren who could make it.

As for his actual birthday - he celebrated by delivering Meals on Wheels to senior citizens who are mostly all younger than he is and then had dinner with a couple of his daughters and their husbands.

Truly, he is my hero, today and always. Happy 97th, Grandy!

Who is your hero?

Anniversaries

Sixteen years ago yesterday (a Monday that year), I walked into the Attachmate offices in Factoria for the first time as an employee. I didn't have a phone, computer or even any furniture, so it was tough to do much, but they sat the two of us who'd started that day down with video tapes of Lisa Ford teaching great customer service skills. I soaked it up because there wasn't anything else to do with my time.

Though I heard lots of complaints from other people about those tapes, I haven't ever come across anything else that teaches customer service any better than that. For customer service, Lisa Ford is my hero.

I'm not sure exactly when the furniture arrived - that was the joke - "Do you have furniture yet?" Some new hires went a couple of weeks or more in those days without even having a chair to sit on because they hadn't found or purchased a spare one yet. Hiring was outstripping the capacity for facilities to keep up.

What I do know is that the first thing to arrive, even before the computer was the phone. That was in the afternoon of Day 2 or 3. Anxious for something to do that approximated technical and/or troubleshooting, I started punching buttons. Hey, why not?

Here's why not... suddenly I found myself connected with an inbound customer call and I had no idea whatsoever of how to handle it. I had no computer, no product knowledge yet, and no idea even how to transfer the call to someone else who could help. Heck, I hardly knew the names of the guys who sat near me.

"Psst! Kevin! I ended up with a call by accident, what do I do?!" Kevin (I think it was Kevin; honestly, it was 16 years - less a day or two - ago!) was kind and patient enough to walk me through the steps to transfer the call and he took it from there. Whew! Get this girl a computer, stat! It'll be so much safer that way and far better for everyone!

The weekend after I started, I got married so in five more days, I'll be celebrating my 16th wedding anniversary too. Somehow, it never occurred to me to negotiate anything beyond an extra hour of sleeping in the day after my wedding so I wandered in at the leisurely hour of 8am that second Monday of work. Somewhere in there, I ended up with a computer and a copy of the software I'd be supporting - EXTRA! for Windows. We wouldn't be trained until the rest of the new-hires started, so I began by seeing what I could figure out for myself. That turned out to be a pretty reasonable strategy as it also gave me an opportunity to assess how intuitive the software was and provide some feedback to Development.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the rest of the Summer of '92 class started. One of them is, to this day, one of my closest friends, as is another of my co-workers who had started a month or so ahead of me, and a high school friend of mine who had started there another couple of months before that. Another co-worker who first decoded the mysteries of hardware adapter I/O addresses and interrupts ultimately became my boss, mentor, and well-respected (by way more than just me!) friend, teaching me more than any single other person I know about what it means to be an effective leader.

In some ways, the intensity of that time period, all that we learned and gained, and the lasting impact (friendships and otherwise), had a certain summer camp feel about it. It's tough to believe it was that long ago, or that I lasted at Attachmate a total of nine years.

Long gone are the days when so many calls came in that we could never get to them all real-time, leaving the departmental receptionist to keep up as best she could with taking down names and phone numbers such that we would head up between calls to grab a stack of "callbacks". Ultimately we brought in enough new-hires and refined our processes enough to make that particular approach a thing of the past.

We also matured to the point where we were able to have desks all set up for our new hires - with a chair, even! As a manager, I always ensured that my employees never received a phone without also (or first) having a computer, even if it meant I had to steal the phone for a while until the computer arrived. You never quite know what sort of trouble a geek will get into if they haven't got a computer to play with.

If you have enduring memories of a past experience that still impact you today, do share. Or maybe there is some anniversary you're celebrating. Let's hear about it.

In the meantime, thank you from the bottom of my heart to Shawn, Burkery, Toot, and Eric (E). I'm better for knowing you. And best wishes to Renee and Shauna, whatever you're each up to these days. As Garrison Keillor might have said, it was a group that time (almost) forgot and decades cannot improve, at least in my memory.

As for my husband, the tall person, this is about the time when I remember our anniversary is coming up soon, so I'll say now - thanks for continuing to love me all these years. I know that living with a geek isn't always easy and you've made it seem to me and the rest of the world like it is. I love you (still!) for that and so much more.

What (besides a chair) do you need to get started?

Tales Worth Telling 2 - What IS That?

I keep up pretty well with current events - at least the sort that make it into the newspaper and broadcast news anyway. So a lot of times I understand what some of the hot searches are all about. Google Hot Trends searches are also a great way to catch breaking news, such as the crane collapse at the refinery in Houston the other day.

Then there are those entries in the top search list that make me scratch my head. I have no idea what they're about until I go look. Sometimes I'm sure I don't want to know or that finding out will simply be feeding some prurient interest. Sometimes I worry that by following the links to learn more, something bad might happen like I'll be placed on some government watch list or something. Of course, if it's on the Hot Trends list, in all probability I'll have lots of company there.

Today, there are a few of these. The first "Wha-aa?" is at the very top of the list, Green Gulch. On investigating, though, it turns out just to be one of those "I know what you're watching" things.

It seems that CBS News Sunday Morning profiled Green Gulch, and it must have sparked people's innate curiosity to learn more. Of course, Voice of America did a similar piece on Green Gulch nearly a month ago and I don't recall seeing that kind of spike in searches. Best guess(es)? CBS got the idea from VOA and more people watch CBS Sunday Morning News than listen to Voice of America.

For a while, I was confused about what that story had to do with "stone by design", considered by Google to be a related search. Then I discovered that Lew French's Stone By Design had been profiled by CBS News Sunday morning back in November. A-ha! Mystery (probably) solved.

Lake Placid Ironman competition - seems pretty self-explanatory. I'm not sure I'm all that curious about it or the results.

From the looks of it, not as many other people are all that curious either. As I write this, that search has dropped to number 17. The occasional spikes in searches on the Lake Placid Ironman probably have to do with coverage from CNN or people wanting to find out more about race results. And, having looked into it a bit more now (see there's that curiosity thing again. Really, the internet is a black hole), I can imagine that thunderstorms today and an expected finish time of midnight for some really would pique a bit more interest.

Roomsaver, pass. Probably featured in some news report and people are even more interested than usual right now in saving money. The most interesting aspect of this hot search item is that I can't seem to get to the website at the moment. That tells me they may be pretty new, perhaps not yet built for scaling, and some news piece grabbed enough people's attention that they're overwhelming the site at the moment.

Which brings me to my favorite on the list. Katie Holmes and her purple hands. Why would I care about Katie Holmes in the first place? And why in the world are her hands purple? Should I care about that?

Guilty pleasure or not. Inquiring minds want to know.

Investigating that one pays off with interesting stuff. Google Hot Trends searches are indeed helping create news. I'm not the only one finding out new things because of what other people are searching. Are her hands really purple? And if so, is it because of some kind of Scientology ritual?

You know what, after finding out that much, suddenly my curiosity has died. It's really not something I care about after all. There are way better things to think about than whether or not some celebrity's hands are purple, and why.

Update on the Roomsaver website - it finally loaded. It's a website (who'dathunkit). It helps you save money on hotel rooms (surprise!). They provide coupons for saving on rooms such as you might find on road trips. Okay, not a bad idea. Not super sexy either, but hey, who am I to judge? Saving money is saving money. Just remember to keep the coupons in the car.

Huntington Bank is a little trickier. It could be a bank robbery, but that was back in April and the most recent news story on the subject was three days ago. It could be because of recently posted profits when we're all feeling a bit skittish about the viability of some banks but again, that story came out Friday and none of the other banks mentioned in it are that high in the searches. Hmmm, still no joy. Time to give up for now.

On the creepy side of that search though, my concerns about randomly following links from the Hot Trends list may not be completely unfounded. It turns out there is a website called Businessuu that seems to operate by taking some of the text from top searches like these and then turn them into something vaguely... icky. I can't tell for what purpose, but surely it can't be good. I'm not linking to it. Trust me, you do not want to go in there. And if you ignore that recommendation and decide to go look for yourself and come across something unseemly or contract some gross virus, don't say I didn't warn you.

On that note, it's time to turn my back on the moving target. So, no storm chasing with Tropical Storm Dolly. I'm going to perhaps indulge in some voyeuristic tendencies and check out the Danica-Milka video of some exchange/fight they apparently had recently while trying real hard to ignore some of the idiotic comments by others. And then I'll see if The Long and the Short of It family can manage to combine some bicycling and ice cream to celebrate National Ice Cream Day.

Happy Sundae!

What puzzles you?

In the Book

You pretty much know when you get a phone call at 5:15am that it's not going to be good. Today's call was a spoof - sounding like it came from DirecTV, trying to sell me on some new service but caller ID said I was calling myself. WTF?

Actually, if the call had come later in the morning, I might not have noticed my own name on the caller ID but at 5:15am, there was no way I was answering. In another stage of my life, when I was never home and had no answering machine I probably would have, but not these days. Hopefully it will die a quiet death, forever to remain a mystery. It sure beats the alternative anyway of having to track down some phishing punk to get them to quit calling me at odd hours.

Being in the book does have its downsides.

We're celebrating another member of the family being in a different book altogether this week. Tall person made it into the 2008 edition of Chambers USA for his environmental work and he just recently received his free copy. We've been "ooh"-ing and "ahh"-ing over the printed compliments ever since.

Unlike the Who's Who Among American High School Students that I regret to say we spent money on when I was a kid (it was tougher to know back then what a scam that was), Chambers is a highly respected directory of top lawyers used by many in-house counsel to find attorneys that other top clients recommend. It's a coup to be listed and we're very proud of the tall guy. Fortunately, he's tall enough, it'll be less noticeable if his head swells.

Speaking of books... if you've got some goal you're working on (like, say, getting rid of unwanted early-morning callers) and you care enough about the outcome to want to improve your chances of success, you might want to check out Get a GRIP on GOALS, the new eBook that I just released with Kjerstin Klein. It's totally free at this point but we're sure the value is much, much higher. Maybe not as high as a listing in Chambers but pretty worthwhile anyway and a lot easier to obtain.

By the way - comments are fixed now. Join the fun . Talk about how much you like the eBooks, don't like most lawyers except the ones you know who are actually cool people and "nice too!", whatever. Getting spoofed phishing calls doesn't make me feel less lonely. Hearing from you does!

Where would you want your name listed?

Men, Women, and Bison

Right next to the embarrassing Attachmate-related article this weekend was an article containing an embarrassing number regarding women-owned businesses - fewer than 3% hit $1M, according to Susan Solovic, addressing entrepreneurial women at the Vision to Venture event put on in Seattle by Microsoft last Friday. And this is despite numbers indicating that twice as many women as men are starting businesses, although the Kaufman Foundation says the ratio of male and female entrepreneurship is just the opposite.

In fact, the Kaufman Foundation is very interested in identifying and addressing the obstacles to success for women entrepreneurs and with the women's entrepreneurial success numbers so low, that's probably a good thing, no matter who's starting businesses more frequently than whom. Personally, after reading Berkun's excellent book, Myths of Innovation, I believe that women are ideally situated to become successful innovators.

Think about even the basics, when it comes to innovation and risk.

Innovation and entrepreneurship both require risk and being in a risk-averse situation or stage of life is perhaps one of the bigger obstacles to becoming an innovator or an entrepreneur. My assertion is that women as a group are in a much better place to accommodate the sorts of risks associated with innovation and entrepreneurial activities.

Single women are just as well educated and have no more to lose than single men, so from a mathematical standpoint, women should about equal men in their younger years.

When men and women share a household as couples, it starts making far more sense for women to take on the risky business of entrepreneurial innovation since on average, men still earn considerably more than women. If you're going to risk a paycheck, make it the smaller of the two.

When those couples have children, higher-earning male partners become even more risk-averse, or would if they stopped to think about the math. At the same time, introducing the cost of childcare into the equation makes having both parents working outside the home less mathematically attractive with each additional child.

Sure, finding the time to innovate or start a business gets tougher with children around but no more so for women than for men, especially if they're willing to share the workload and perhaps relax their standards a bit too. And the more flexible paid work that mothers often seek is well-suited to a side venture, whether that happens while children are still young or whether they wait until the extra time is available for something other than tending to youngsters.

Mothers who get involved in volunteer activities are quickly becoming adept at virtual organizations, providing them with valuable skills in working virtually on entrepreneurial pursuits as well, and they're often great at networking even if that doesn't always include asking for what they want for themselves. On top of all that, mothers who stay home with their kids get to see natural innovators up close and personal each and every day.

Although I have lots more thoughts where these come from, you begin to get the idea. I am sure there are even more arguments that I haven't even yet considered, also supporting the assertion that women are well-positioned to be innovators and entrepreneurs. If you have any - counter-arguments too - please share. I'm always interested.

In the meantime, mamas please don't let your babies grow up to be wannabe cowboys who find it necessary to ignore open-range laws and go around shooting someone else's herd of bison. Aside from showing poor judgment that, as pointed out in one comment, is quite likely is not limited to bison, it's flat out embarrassing to those of us who have any past or present connection to the proud history of Attachmate and WRQ. Help them grow up to be fabulously successful innovators instead. Start with teaching kids innovative thinking. Then think about becoming great role models for innovation yourselves.

Where do you see room for improvement?

The Changing Nature of Communication

You can tell we're in the midst of a shift that doesn't yet really know where it's going. The below-30 crowd almost exclusively communicates very publicly with one another using Facebook and MySpace while at the same time somehow expecting more privacy than such openness would suggest. The over-30 crowd, having mostly come to terms with the usefulness of email, is starting to venture into social networking a bit late into the game. They're not quite certain of its relevance in their own lives and more wary of the additional exposure.

While these things shake themselves out, I keep coming back to thinking about how what we say is impacted by how we communicate.

Over the years, I've given a fair amount of thought to that. There was a time in my life when the idea of a graduate degree - just to have done the work to get one, not for any particular use for the degree itself - was appealing to me. As my mind wandered down that potential path, I pondered over what sort of research I'd want to do. The question that interested me the most was "How does the method of communicating impact the nature and effectiveness of communication?" - or something like that anyway. I'm sure a good advisor and mentor would have helped me refine the question into something better if I'd ever gone down that path in reality.

Context is helpful here. When this question first came up for me, I was a college student at a time when only scientists, military, and government had ready access to the internet as a general group. College students, if they had access to the computing labs did too, but that capability was generally limited to those of us in engineering or computer sciences in the earlier days.

This also pre-dated today's ubiquitous cell phones, and flat-rate long distance plans and inexpensive calling cards were also still well out in the future.

So, the communication landscape of the day consisted primarily of letters and post-cards. If you had money and it was worth the expense, you might call long distance on the telephone occasionally but it was something a starving college student thought about before doing... and even then, we tended to count on parents with enough money to reverse the charges and kept the calls fairly short out of necessity.

In mass communication, the notion of satellite transmissions making a broader range of television programming available to more people was just catching on for real, finally becoming more of an expectation than a novelty or luxury. The 24-hour news machine that burst onto the scene in the form of CNN coverage of the transition from Desert Shield to Desert Storm was still in our future. We were just getting cozy with the joke of "50 channels and nothing to watch."

These days, it's more like eight hundred and fifty. And still nothing to watch.

When I think of the fact that being limited to these forms of communication is entirely foreign to my 11-yr-old and as good as that to the 23-yr-old in my family for all he remembers of life before the digital divide opened up into a chasm, it boggles my mind.

Pen pals were fun to have but the time it took for letters to transit state lines took special care and nurturing to keep the relationships going. Overseas pen pals were even more cool but further complicated by the typical two week lag (one-way!) and the space restrictions that accompanied the use of the "aerogramme" letters. Still - if you ever received one, that characteristic lightweight - nearly flimsy - blue paper held such an exotic quality that it made one think of faraway places and the other cultures found there.

The real-time chattiness of phone calls was reserved for cross-town family and school friends. Cross-country calls were rare for "regular folks" and were usually placed only if there arose some urgent need - such as to communicate a death or some grave illness. I don't recall much overseas calling at all - telegrams were still the more common method for communicating urgent messages and paying by the word meant everyone kept telegrams brief.

Having grown up as a world traveler at a time when such a life made me and my lifestyle exotic, the global nature of relationships made possible by the Internet felt like coming home. I felt at more at ease with BitNet communications than any other form I'd experienced previously. I temporarily lost any sense of urgency with regard to ham radio and fully embraced the beginning of the digital age.

And this is when I began to notice that just as email was different from snail mail (though I doubt we'd really started calling it that yet - more likely it was just 'real' mail) and phone conversations, it was becoming clear that email was also different from group internet relay chat, which was also different from the person-to-person BitNet messages, with their 80-character limitations.

Have something quick to say with the expectation of a real-time response... send a BitNet message. If you want to say more, save it for an email. These days, text messaging is similar to that earlier counterpart, but more prevalent because we all have cell phones and so with an even greater expectation of immediate responses.

The more public, group orientation of Facebook adds yet another dimension to communications while Twitter is particularly well-suited for announcements made just in case anyone out there cares. In fact it doesn't seem a lot different from times when Small Person (along with others I've known) announces to no one in particular that he's heading to the bathroom. Good thing he's far less technical than I am at this point. Maybe he won't feel inclined to be mad at me by the time he realizes I've invaded his privacy in such a public way.

The question of privacy in an online life is a tricky one. I don't pretend to understand how we'll come to terms with that one. The best I can guess at this point is that we may adopt some digital version of the traditional Japanese sense of privacy. In a world where many walls were nothing more than shoji screens, made with translucent paper, Japanese created privacy where there was none by politely pretending not to notice anything that couldn't be seen directly. Such sensibilities have even spilled over into forced face-to-face environments such as trains where crowds are necessarily able to see and hear things they might prefer not to witness.

Already I have friends online with whom I'm likely to pretend when together in person that we don't know as much about each other's private lives as we do. We're open and honest with one another and I believe that's admirable - it just shouldn't come back to cause problems or embarrassment later.

Until we figure it out, I think of my online presence in much the same way as I think of keeping teeth brushed and hair combed. Good personal hygiene is good practice anyway - and really important to make sure it's done before leaving the house. Similarly, I still advocate being ourselves - our best selves - online. Being our best selves means that we don't have to worry about whether parents and bosses are watching - which they probably are these days, along with a lot of other folks. .

It's an interesting conversation to have - what we have to say to one another, how we say it and what sort of expectations we have (and can have) around privacy - and whether that's the same as anonymity. I definitely encourage you to comment and get the discussion going. The more publicly we hold the conversation, the more robust it will be.

What do you have to say, and to whom?

Yes, It IS Big News

It's interesting watching the comments fly about Microsoft purchasing a stake in Facebook... and now just a couple days later, Google announcing OpenSocial. Despite some cynics, I contend that this is a big deal.

Social networking technology is finally catching up to a pent-up demand to satisfy the desire to connect with other people, despite living in a harried and fractured world. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others have each addressed part of that need while at the same time, segmenting our lives further by remaining as entirely separate silos.

I'm not alone in feeling like it's crazy-making to keep up profiles across several different networks... or to choose to focus on just one or two to the exclusion of others.

People of all demographics want to feel connected. The younger folks, the young at heart, people who want to stay connected with them, and people who don't want to be left behind while the hiring game changes, all want to use technology to do this. That's a pretty sizeable group of people when you start to add it all up.

Most importantly, these people want social networking to make life easier and better, not harder, and the technology is finally beginning to catch up to that.

Of course, it mostly starts out with forging virtual connections with people we already know and care about in real life. As that capability matures, however, there is the capacity to learn more about each other than we often learn IRL, and to learn more about people we didn't even know before. So yes, these kinds of moves by the giants of the industry definitely could have an impact on quality of life and understanding fellow humans.

More than a decade ago, back when most of the folks I knew didn't even know what the internet was (including many of the geeks I worked with), and only a handful were just starting to get the idea about email, and the best form of electronic connectedness most of us had was through electronic bulletin boards of which only a handful were connected to each other... Way back then, Howard Rheingold wrote The Virtual Community, and it really spoke to me. I tried speaking to him too, but that didn't really go anywhere at the time.

Between then and now, the Internet became more widely accessible (and I only had to suffer through ten years' or so worth of withdrawal, after leaving school), started to offer more to the average person, and connecting electronically has become second nature to most of us. Between then and now, I and about 150 other women and some of their partners came together through the internet in support of one another throughout the duration of our pregancies - and our group was just one of many.

Though I can't speak to the others, I can say that our group is still going strong nearly a dozen years later, and I'm sure that between us, we can name every one of the people who was ever part of our clan (plus most of their kids and partners and a lot of other relevant details about their lives), even if they're not still an integral part of our thriving community today.

We're very close-knit and the connection we share electronically has been a real important part of our day-to-day support through pregnancy, child-rearing, trying to being good partners in our relationships and how we show up in life and work in the broadest possible terms. We help each other maintain sanity, offer differing points of view for consideration, celebrate successes and provide plenty of {{virtual hugs}} during times of grief and challenge.

If you want an example of how people can use virtual communities to improve quality of life and understanding of fellow human beings, just ask me about the November Moms of '96. And make sure you have a lot of time to stay and get the answer.

How will this new wave of technology-aided and abetted community shake out? I'm not all that sure yet - but I can tell you that I'm mostly excited about it. The news of the past week makes a lot of new things possible. That's great news for those of us with social networking on the brain. It's also great news for Startup Weekend participants or anyone else tapping into the value of community on the web.

In the meantime it's probably a good idea to go back and read some of Howard's thoughts on the downside of virtual communities - while the examples are perhaps dated, he accurately predicted a lot of what we've seen since his original writing of it all and the risks that haven't already been realized are still out there. It's probably a good idea to spend at least some time thinking about how to mitigate those risks and to keep thinking about how to realize the full potential of this notion of a virtual community that complements, not replaces, the real thing.

You probably have thoughts on the matter. I'd love to hear stories, predictions, concerns - whatever. Send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and help design the future.

What does community mean to me and how do I express that in my life and work?

Recall

If others are like me, people are waking up to the memory that this was the day. This was the day we started calling September 11 or 9/11. And while we might wish we could take it all back and trade it in for another day, this is the one we've got.

For most of us, it was a flashbulb memory-creating event. My tech support manager role six years ago meant that unlike most west-coasters, I was wide awake and walking in the door at work about the time the first plane hit the first World Trade Center tower. And then of course, a lot followed after that, both professionally and personally.

Last year, I figured enough time had passed that I could delve into the memories etched into my mind by the events of that day, see what lasted and what was worth remembering. The result was Memories of the September 11 World Trade Center Attacks - 5 Years After - a piece I wrote for Associated Content that focused on the impact that day had on me as a tech support manager and a mother while colleagues and family were dealing more directly with the attacks and their aftermath.

Like the memories themselves, frozen in time, that piece is but a snapshot. Others have their own September 11 experiences and memories to share. We were all affected - in profound ways and in small ways too. While we can't rewind time and send it all back, we can choose how it shapes us and how we choose to remember.

In so many respects, September 11 changed so much. In others, 9/11 and its aftermath maybe didn't change enough, in my opinion. But that's a different piece.

Today is about honoring the fallen, the memory, and the lasting shifts in our lives. Find what's good about it and hold on and let go of the rest. That much we can do.

You're probably thinking things today that are different from normal. Let's share stories - send thoughts and memories to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and we'll sift through the sands of time and memory together, looking for what's good and worthwhile.

Which memories are the most important to hold onto?

All Clear

After exploring the connection between nomenclature and expertise, I thought it might be fun to delve into terms that are so self-explanatory as to make such a connection meaningless.

I'm talking about words and phrases that are so descriptive all by themselves that very little explanation is required, even if you've had no direct experience with the referenced matter and have never heard the term before.

Even people who have never carried a drink or food tray in their lives would have a pretty good idea of what it means to be in the weeds. And you don't have to be a restaurant worker to appreciate the view from the weeds. On the upside, those having been there will find that time in the weeds may be advantageous later on. I like to think so.

Plenty of people use the term, behind the power curve, without having any experience flying airplanes. Yet the basic meaning of the expression is so clear that even non-pilots essentially use it correctly to convey a point that readily resonates with other non-pilots.

The notion of a blowout diaper is equally descriptive. Even if you've never been near one, you know you don't ever want to be! Of course, blowout diapers are just one out of a wide variety that new parents are so fortunate to get to face. Just don't go investigating what you don't want to know!

Then there's the onesheet. I can't tell you how it is I've missed running across this term over the years but somehow it's true. And so when I asked for a summary describing the concept behind Startup Weekend that I could give to people who wanted to know more about it, I was anticipating something like an FAQ. What I got was even better - and I immediately understood both the term and what it described.

And for those of you who are interested in knowing more about this project that we're planning to bring to Seattle... I encourage you to check out the Startup Weekend onesheet.

After you've done that, give me a shout and let's talk about how you might like to get involved. It needn't be anything obscure or fancy. Whatever is self-evident to you might just be that obvious because it's a talent unique to you, something the rest of us don't have in as great a measure.

So make a comment or send a message to techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com with your ideas. We're looking for space, talent, sponsors/backers/underwriters, ideas, you name it. If the Startup Weekend concept sounds at all intriguing to you, clearly we can find a way to get you involved.

What things are obvious to me that are not so clear to others?

SMOG Is Back

It may be a perfectly sunny late-summer day in Seattle today, however I learned over the weekend that I was SMOG. Oh, and Tall Person was FOG. As a former meteorologist, I found this rather disconcerting at first, because even though we were in Spokane at the time, the weather was great there too.

It turns out, this was just Rev. Mary's way of identifying Step-Mother of (the) Groom and Father of (the) Groom. Today I am no longer SMOG; today I am simply a Mother-In-Law. While that news hasn't really quite sunk in with me just yet, the weekend of wedding festivities gave it a good start and I was reminded of how important ritual can be at times like this.

It was explained to me once that all the major rites of passage in one's life - births, coming of age, marriages, and deaths among the most important ones - typically involve ritual as a way of making the mental shift from one way of being (and relating to others) into another way. Understanding what I do about change management these days, this makes sense to me and this weekend, I had a chance to see this process up close and personal.

It wasn't just a weekend full of partying. My son and his new wife will have an easier time embracing the notion of starting a new life together as a couple because of having taken the time to mark the passage of their old ways of being. These same rituals also help family and friends to stop seeing them as they had been and begin seeing and relating to them in new ways.

My son is now grown-up in ways I hadn't really thought about before. I have a daughter now in addition to my two sons. I myself am now a Mother-in-law. And on top of all that, there are new people in my life to think about and perhaps bond with as a result of this marriage. These are strange new concepts for me and yet they have more sticking power because the wedding and all the trappings of the weekend help me get my mind around all the changes this marriage means.

My experience is that it is no different in corporate life, especially in the fast-paced world of high-tech. People come and go, managers change, new products are added while others are dropped, processes are added, improved, or eliminated, companies are created and then they grow, shrink, merge, move or fold altogether. All of these changes impact us to some degree or another just like weddings change our relationships in some way, even when we're not the ones getting married.

All the best materials I've seen about change management say that no matter what the change is, it helps to identify what is going away as well as what is new... and to properly grieve that loss first as a necessary step in the process of moving forward. Seen now in the context of a parent of a child who has just gotten married, I have to say it makes even more sense now than ever before.

It seems I've been pretty successful at one challenging role - that of a stepmother - so I'm hoping that I can learn from that and be an even better mother-in-law. The idea is starting to grow on me at least.

If you've got good advice about making that shift, I'm open to hearing whatever you feel like sharing with me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and I'm sure you'll hear more about my experiences and progress as I go along. As always, I'll try to keep it relevant. After all, the connections between the ideas is as important to me as the connections between people.

In the meantime, I'll probably still laugh from time to time at the coincidence that of all the people on Rev. Mary's map, we should be the two to end up with the meteorologically-inclined acronyms.

What do I have to give up in my life or work now, in order to make space for what's new?

Contextualize Me

The resident small person is pretty sure today that I'm crazy. We had a good gentle soaking rain going and since he was bored, I had him entertain me with the tale of Hansel and Gretel. After writing about trails of breadcrumbs recently, I panicked momentarily, thinking perhaps he didn't know the story and therefore might not understand the significance of things like breadcrumbs in current parlance.

It turns out, I didn't have any reason to worry - he was able to tell the story quite well with full detail and a lot of good storytelling technique. Apparently it's in one of his books; I guess we've been better than I'd feared at ensuring his cultural literacy. Whew!

It's in the interests of establishing a fluency in cultural literacy that I let the small person watch and encourage him to listen to old stuff that shaped my own generation and those that came before me. At least I hope it's more that than bad parenting or an occasional guilty indulgence in what we jokingly refer to around our house as "Bad 70's music" - and no fair saying that's redundant!

I believe in the adage that those who are ignorant about history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. I also believe that understanding context is key to understanding anything. You know - the inside jokes, kind of had to have been there kind of thing?

I'm sure you run into the same sort of thing at work - where there is historical context that is as critical to avoiding past mistakes as it is to understanding current language, decisions, culture, and so forth. That doesn't mean living in the past or adhering to old practices simply because "we've always done it this way." History needn't lock us into the same old problems. Sometimes what didn't work before will work now because the situation has changed. Understanding the context helps provide the clues as to what will work best in the current situation based on what has gone before.

What we need in organizations are storytellers who can capture the history and keep it fresh for all who need it. If that person isn't you, I hope you know who is!

I'm interested in your thoughts on the relationship between progress and historical context. Send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and let's find the the creative edge between past and future together.

What am I doing to capture and learn from where we've/I've been?

Follow the Leads

In which Kimm draws parallels between reporting, troubleshooting, geo-caching, and intuition... In the newsroom, I had a basic plan for tracking down stories that worked mostly without flaw - I'd poke around enough to come up with a handful of names worth contacting to get more information and I'd talk to them if they did. Sounds simple enough, except a lot of times they didn't have the sort of information I was looking for, so that's when the plan kicked in. I never let anyone off the phone until they answered one other question - "Do you know anyone else who might be able to help?"

It might take a few calls, but this method almost always worked; I'd just keep following the trail until I got what I wanted. Looking for the next clue if I couldn't get at the answer itself helped get me out of a few jams when I was in tech support too. Sometimes it was as simple as following a single thread and other times it was tougher and more like following breadcrumbs - find one breadcrumb then start searching for the next one, hoping the birds haven't eaten it.

This summer, small person and I have discovered geo-caching and I'm finding there are some similarities. We go to the latitude and longitude coordinates identified for the cache and then start following whatever clues and intuitive instincts available until we make our find. Sometimes the GPS coordinates are just the starting point - there are more clues or coordinates to find and follow before we actually find the treasure box and that makes it all the more fun. Or frustrating, depending on our perspective at the time.

Sometimes I stumble upon clues by accident and it occurs to me that this may be the best metaphor I've stumbled on yet for how to understand intuitive insights - especially the really strange ones defy any kind of reasonable explanation, even when "reasonable" is stretched enough to include some mechanism such as uncommon senses beyond the normally agreed-upon five senses. Sometimes where you're led isn't the ending point. Sometimes it's just the next clue in the trail of breadcrumbs we're meant to follow.

If that's true, recognizing whether we're at the destination or just another step closer is probably part of the puzzle to be solved. Good thing I like puzzles!

How do you solve puzzles? Send your methodology to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and let's talk about what does and doesn't work, when and why, and when & why not.

Where might the thread I'm following be leading?

Interpreting Shadows

On rainy weekends like this one, we sometimes watch movies. Small person has rediscovered Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Yes! I must be doing something right!) and has even worked out the "llama theme" from the final opening credits on the electronic keyboard - or I guess it's actually the music from the brief intermission near the end, now that I think about it... his playing is plenty good, it's just my memory that's faulty. All scariness aside that my son might (for the moment anyway) actually know this film better than I do, I wonder if getting him piano lessons will help nurture that talent or stifle it?

Anyway, except for a new-found enjoyment of one of my favorite movies, his most recent favorite has been Flushed Away. Every time I see the sewer-bound rodents draw conclusions about what life is like "up top" based solely on cast-off artifacts, I can't help but think of how much it reminds me of Plato and his Allegory of the Cave. In Plato's cave, there are individuals who see shadows and believe they are looking at the sum total of their world. They are aware of information about their surroundings that is accurate as far as it goes, but without the knowledge that the data is incomplete. And so, without that realization, the unenlightened draw conclusions that seem consistent with the available information and yet those conclusions are still wrong because they do not take into account other unseen details.

Interestingly enough, I see this phenomonon play out in corporate work as well as in life and animated movies. How often do we misinterpret what we see and hear because there are additional details about which we have no knowledge or hint? Rumors typically contain at least a grain of truth - but which grain holds the truth? It's so tough to know until after we get the full complement of information. Every time we attempt to read and understand management behavior and motivations, we run into this issue of misinterpreting shadows as real and complete information; and managers themselves quite regularly face this same challenge when understanding their employees or their extra-departmental counterparts.

Waiting for all of the information isn't always practical, so fortunately, it's often enough just to know that you probably haven't got it all. The simple fact of knowing that you're looking at shadows instead of the real thing makes all of the difference in how you do your interpreting and is bound to improve the accuracy of your conclusions. I don't know about you but personally, I strive for a keener sense of logic than that displayed by Python's Sir Bedevere, so I'm after all the improvement I can get.

After all, when moving lights and shadows stop masquerading as the entirety of reality, they make pretty decent entertainment, especially on rainy days.

If you have advice for how best to discern what's real and true, send me your thoughts at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com - or just send me recommendations for best family-oriented rainy day movies; I'm sure I'll appreciate both.

How do I sometimes misinterpret signals?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.