Endless Knots

"The lovely experience"

When I relaunched this blog nine months ago, I promised to write about life as an independent consultant. I know there are others here who’ve chosen the same crazy path - and I know there are young people reading who are considering it. I haven’t done a very good job of writing about this so far as I’ve felt some conflict. Frankly, sometimes it’s great and sometimes it’s...

That said, this week has been one of the better ones. It’s been a mix of rat-a-tat-tat unexpectedly good meetings, contract reviews (love the plural there), comfortable travel (yes, I really said that) for a keynote with an unusually warm company, and then back to Boston for a stimulating day spent with a “collaborative learning community of business leaders and [university-affiliation deleted] researchers.”

I was pretty tired when I went into my study last night to shut down my machine, but took that last look at the old inbox. There I found this note from a client (posted with permission) that makes the tired worth it. Young 'uns: if you choose this path, don’t expect to receive this kind of feedback all the time - and I realize this may appear self-serving - but read the final sentence and tell me whether you feel as I do: that this is how we all want “work” to feel:

On the plane last night, I was reflecting on what a wonderful feeling it was yesterday - exhilarated exhaustion - after our very successful conference.  The excellent program you facilitated for our team will undoubtedly be a big part of the satisfaction ratings I am confident we will receive.  I was especially impressed with the really effective - and relevant - combination of practical, pragmatic tips and powerful philosophy to guide how we build and sustain our organizational teams.  As you so aptly inferred from observing us in action, we are an organization that deeply believes in the importance of achieving great results AND in achieving those results through means that reinforce and build our culture.  We have so much capital in the minds and hearts of our dedicated colleagues, and your work yesterday is already helping us to better cultivate that valued resource in service to our customers.

THANK YOU!!!

On a more personal note, I have so enjoyed our collaboration and greatly look forward to future opportunities...Thanks again for the lovely experience of working with you.  Somehow, it makes the word 'work' quite inappropriate, and that is about as good as it can get!

It's closed, it's open, it's closed, it's not...

Oh, Antioch. I've been following the saga since last June when the Antioch University Board of Trustees decided to temporarily shutter the college in hopes of saving it. In June, the board took its decisive vote; seconds later, the alums rose up in protest; in November, the trustees voted to reconsider their decision after a few alums banded together and formed a new 501(c)3 in hopes of taking over the college; and just last week, the board voted again to keep the college closed. Disclosure: I've got friends on both sides of this struggle -- trustees, of which I was briefly one, whose judgment I honor and respect, and officers of the new non-profit, Antioch College Continuation Corporation, one of whom has been a close friend since we were at Antioch together and whose business acumen is unparalleled (in my experience).

I don't know how to solve this one but I do know that this predicament calls for the greatest shoring up of maturity imaginable, including giving one another the greatest benefit of the doubt. I've heard a lot of conversation that is not that, frankly, and have been on the sore end of some of it myself just for saying that the board was brave to make its first move. I repeat what I said then: the college was not viable when I went onto the university board (1998) and things have only gotten worse. The trustees took a controversial decision that finally woke up the alums. Now, everyone, please talk civilly and productively. Not talking is not going to solve this. End of sermon.

Food fetish

This is not a paid post. This is not even a normal post for me as I don't flog products and I delete the "comments" people make trying to flog theirs. But...my daughter introduced me to something truly delicious, low in fat, high in protein, and, well, they should put me on the commercial. A container of Face (pronounced "fah-yeh"), Greek-style yogurt, meaning that it's very thick and very creamy, fits right into any diet (except for those nutty vegans, meaning they eat a lot of nuts, of course, nothing more than that). For the 2% version, you have to surrender only 130 calories for 17 (seventeen) grams of protein. And the 4 grams of fat, which some no doubt will sniff at - FOUR grams of fat! How could you! - give that all-important feeling of satiety (look it up). I'm not a fat-free advocate. Having lived that way during one of my many health-kicks, I would never recommend it as it requires eating all the time while remaining hungry. Let me be clear: I also eat butter. Now have I lost most of my readers?

Metanet at 25

Metanet, the online conversation started a quarter-century ago by Frank Burns and nurtured forevermore by Lisa Kimball, is celebrating with a party in Washington, DC, at the end of March. Lisa is such a prodigious networker that we profiled her in The Age of the Network (see "All the way to New York to buy a modem," Chapter 7). Wish I could be there. Metanet was the second online community I joined (EIES was first). Over the years, many good ideas and, more importantly, deep friendships have grown from the connections it's spawned. All will miss Frank at this celebration, whose laugh I can hear just typing this. Congratulations, Lisa, and warm fuzzies to all my friends from Spirit, the women's conference there.

With Lisa's permission, I'm posting the anniversary party details here as I know at least some friends from those days are reading:

MetaNetwork is 25 years old this spring and we're having a party!  You and all your family are invited !

It will be held in the afternoon of March 29th - probably around 2pm ...at the home of:

Lois Mandelberg
6303 Waterway Place
Falls Church, Virginia  22044

mamalois[at]hotmail[dot]com

703-658-7776 (h)

Plans for pot luck are being organized in the MetaNet25 conference on Metanet ..

Hope we'll see you there!  * lisa

Heads up, Netizens

Tomorrow, Monday, February 25, 2008, is a big day for the Internet. The US Federal Communication Commission - the FCC - is taking a field trip to Harvard Law School to hold a public hearing on the fate of the Internet. Will telecommunications companies (Comcast, for one) be allowed to decide what information can be transmitted over the net? David Weinberger, an early and perceptive digital sage (see The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything is Miscellaneous, his blog), explains how high the stakes are in "Beyond net neutrality," an op-ed in yesterday's Boston Globe.

It's worth clicking through to get the full effect of David's thinking. Here are 410 words from his piece, under the copyright limit of 500:

...The idea behind Net neutrality is simple: Decisions about what information should move over the Internet most expeditiously should not be made by those who benefit financially from those decisions. The companies that provide the bulk of the nation's Internet connectivity should not be allowed to decide that, for example, YouTube videos are less important than their own Hollywood blockbusters. They should not be allowed to skew the market in favor of large companies by charging for delivering their bits faster than those of a start-up. Net neutrality is basic to keeping the Internet the greatest seedbed of innovation in history.

Comcast has gained FCC focus because it seems to have been blocking the Internet service BitTorrent, which is useful for downloading large files. But what's at stake isn't simply the value of BitTorrent. Rather, it is a struggle between two visions of the Internet...

Comcast and the other major Internet access providers see the Internet as a way to broadcast content to users. Its value comes from what is on the Net. This suits the providers, who come from the world of telephones and cable TV, and are structured to make money by selling content and services to subscribers.

The other vision, and the one that has brought a billion people onto the Net and has stirred hope around the world, says the value of the Net comes from who is on the Net. The "who" isn't a solitary face; the "who" is us, together. The most exciting developments on the Internet have been about how we are connecting with one another, touching one another, and building ideas, services, and new social forms together...

...An Internet delivered by a tiny handful of old-technology providers, even if constrained by Net neutrality, doesn't get us to the second vision. It doesn't give us access laid like a blanket over the entire country, rich and poor alike. It doesn't give us a Net that we make together, rather than a Net the contents of which we consume.

For that, we need more than Net neutrality. We need a structural change.

We gave the incumbent providers their chance. They have failed. The FCC could decide to once again require them to act as wholesalers to local Internet Service Providers, which would offer genuine competition on price, access, reliability, services, and whatever other differentiators an open market would devise.

We have to have Net neutrality, but we should not settle for it.

When do we need face time?

Back in December, I began a series of posts on "green teams," the idea being that it's not only us as individuals or them as companies who/that can do something about CO2 emissions. Teams can too by making wiser choices about whether they need to meet in person or not. Very soon thereafter, The Content Economy, a blog written by  a handful of good thinkers in Sweden, picked up on the idea, posted to their blog that there might be something to this. Soon they held a meeting (face-to-face, causing one wag to criticize them for that but they had a good excuse - there was also a client meeting at the same time) and came up with a basic checklist for making teams greener. I posted that list back here.

Thanks to a client, who's looking to promote virtual teaming more broadly in her organization, I had reason to noodle on The Content Economy's list some more, adding to it. Some but not all of The Content Economy's list is included (reworded in some cases). I'm posting the expanded list here with the hope that you, my darling readers, will give this some thought, add some ideas, and we'll all end up with something useful. If anything belongs to all of us, it's a list like this one. (Thanks again, Oscar and company. If you'd like me to specifically annotate those considerations that you all first came up with, let me know.)

Before your next face-to-face meeting, consider these questions:
    1.  Do you need to have a difficult conversation?

    2.  Do you need to make decisions that depend on interpretation of subtle cues in body language?

    3.  Do you need 8 or 16 hours of continuous work together?

    4.  Do you have to share “things” that would be difficult to experience at a distance, like touring a facility or using a piece of equipment?

    5.  Have you calculated the true cost of the meeting in terms of direct expenses and personal wear-and-tear?

    6.  Have you done a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the meeting’s contribution to CO2 emissions?

    7.  Do you sometimes travel because you like it or get the feeling that you are important for doing so? Is the meeting you’re planning one of those?

    8.  If you do absolutely need face-to-face, could you:
            A. Organize a high-end video conference if people have never seen one another?
            B. Or, conduct a series of highly organized conference calls over a week’s time?

    9.  If you absolutely need face-to-face, are you traveling to the most convenient location for everyone?

    10. Is everyone attending the meeting essential? Could some call in for part of the meeting?

    11. If you choose not to travel, can you explain your decision clearly to others?

Is this a good thing?

You can check out your blog's reading level too. Thanks for the tip, StellaCommute. /Ooops; updated link--this one is kaput--to a different site that has similar information as of August 2017 from Blogging.com.

Get out!

Friends, Bostonians, New Englanders - I come to praise the weather, not to ... Just slipped on the long undies, layered on a few more, donned the possum hat and gloves from New Zealand, swaddled into the old down jacket, leashed up the pups, and took a brisk walk in very clear air. It is gorgeous and invigorating out. Get moving before the snow comes - just heard we have another 4-9 inches on the way.

Stone Creek - advance reading copy

I won't do this often as it's very risky but I am so enthralled with Stone Creek, the forthcoming novel by Victoria Lustbader, that I want you all to know about it. The book doesn't come out until late May -- and I'm only a third of the way through -- but if your reaction is anything like mine and that of the editors at HarperCollins (as recorded in the book's ARC, advance reading copy), you will love this book. Beautifully written, it's a multi-dimensional love story with passionate characters, including a grieving husband with a young child, and a woman who, well, I'm not certain what's ultimately happening with Lily, but she's a keen observer of life, of her husband, of a younger man, of children...I wish I could spend the day reading.

Bravo to Victoria, the first of what I expect will be multiple kudos to the author, whom I met thanks to her talented husband, the writer Eric Van Lustbader.

Under the desk

For the past two days, the unthinkable: I couldn't get online. Since early yesterday, things have been going increasingly dead. First, beginning around 6 AM yesterday, I haven't been able to send attachments. Throughout the day, I periodically couldn't get my mail or use the web. Then this morning, no access at all. Had it not been for a few other items -- a flash drive, a computer in our office, my Blackberry (so there all you loathers of it) -- and Annie's major problem solving, I'd have been out of business. Thus, I've spent a lot of time under desks, tracing wires and cables, disconnecting, reconnecting, screaming...I think, I think, it's the wireless router, the blinking device that connects to the cable modem, that allows online access throughout our house. And all it may require is a download of new firmware but that would mean tinkering with the configuration of another person's machine, another person who's been lucky enough to be swishing down a mountain these past few days while I toil away...........Fortunately, a sometimes-member of our family is here, Sola, the 'Linden Boulevard" ('cause that's where she came from) Retriever who cares not about online anything but does enjoy a brisk walk.