Endless Knots

Start your week right with "Baby Dancer"

Valdis Krebs on face-to-face

Priceless. Below Valdis, one of the originals in social network analysis, comments on whether face-to-face is necessary. Had to elevate it:

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then a day F2F is worth a 1000 emails/tweets.

Margalit Fox on Tomas Eloy Martinez

Fox, mentioned below, has a thorough bio of Tomas in her obit, including some extraordinary moments in his life that I remember his talking about. Poignant.

Is face-to-face necessary?

“I am writing to you this evening with what seems to me to be a slightly paradoxical request,” the email began. “I am looking for a presenter (live and in person) on the topic of Virtual Teams.”

He was writing from Europe, where the event would take place, with colleagues and clients joining from across North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia. I was impressed with the emailer's self-awareness.

We’ve received speaking queries where people don’t appear to notice that a virtual teams event might by rights take place virtually. There is a certain symmetry, a coherence of the message, that is hard to miss. Some do.

So this post, roiling around for some months, as the plethora—of books, articles, “studies” (I use quotes because some of them are of questionable provenance), and off-the-top-of-the-head posts on how to ensure virtual team success—proliferates.

A striking one came last year, a request to write another book foreword. It turned out to be a solid manuscript, based on sturdy research, and we ended up writing it without hesitation.

But I remain troubled by its—and the rest of these formulas’—Rxes for virtual team troubles: first meet face-to-face.

If that’s the primary requirement, rarely put forth with any theatre-of-the-absurb quips, then many virtual teams are sunk from the outset.

Unstated in the always-begin-in-person requirement is that otherwise people cannot learn to trust one another, that that only happens when you can watch how others fondle their coffee cups, pick at their cuticles, make faces (voluntarily or otherwise), or hang around a bar together.

Face-to-face, particularly for global and cross-country teams, is just not practical for everyone who has to work together—for example, flying across the US or taking the train from Chile to Venezuela or helicoptering across the Hindu-Kush.

I feel almost silly listing the reasons: it’s expensive; it’s time-consuming; it’s not particularly green; and, most important, there is no incontrovertible proof that it guarantees superior results. My bold assertion: It's an opinion, not a fact, that when teams meet face-to-face initially they always produce better, faster, and cheaper.

The problem in proving the opposite is that it's hard to imagine any organization actually performing this experiment, especially given the prevailing business climate. Would a thoughtful leader pay for the proof: give the same project to two teams—complex ones that require the best minds—funding one to meet first in person, the other to start virtually?

We need a number of well-designed studies that examine teams of similar diversity with comparably complex remits and roughly analogous resources, budgets, and schedules.

My hunch—based on our experience studying teams that never meet face-to-face—is that beginning in person may be desirable but it is not necessary.

It’s nice. It’s fun. It may even get some friendships off the ground more quickly.

But it also may create cliques that wouldn’t otherwise form; instill some prejudices that come about in the split-second when people first encounter one another; eliminate the possibility of serendipity that often comes about in the online environment; and, need I add, stress people out because travel is now so appealing.

Meeting face-to-face doesn’t guarantee success. Think of some of your own experiences where your team only met in person. All perfect, right?

I love being with people. There’s no substitute but …

Do we absolutely need to have our kick-off meetings shoulder-to-shoulder?

Should the “experts” continue drumming that we have to begin that way to be successful?

Thoughts?

 

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 6

Page 6, "The Persuasion"

I blinked. I shut my eyes and opened them. I did this faster. And slower. I inhaled. I exhaled. I coughed. I swallowed. I choked a little. I made more involuntary noises. I watched the hair on my arm rise—and I became very cold.

The woman, the Sarah Margaret Fuller whose life I’d just taken notes on, stood not five feet away, motioning to follow her. But just as I had not deliberately turned to the page where I’d read about her, I did not voluntarily rise from the chair and follow her into the garden.

She stood beside a granite bench and smoothed her hand along the back of her skirt so as not to muss it, sitting. Here. She patted the bench.

Mariana, we have met before. May I call your attention to as recently as yesterday, for instance, at the café when a woman of your generation made a penetrating, might I say, illuminating, comment about the condition of man? Her voice was strained and starchy, the phony English accent old American actors used to sound sophisticated.

I did remember that person in the café whom she mentioned—and then I couldn’t recall her at all. Every word was audible but I didn’t think she was actually making any sound. I could see what she was saying in my head, as if she were writing on the walls of my mind in flourescent ink or in the crevices of my brain or right onto my eyeballs...I wasn’t even certain where.

 

And now from the inventor of crash blossoms, "snailpapers"

Further to my "Crash blossoms" post, I received this comment below from Dan Bloom, inventor of the meme, a comment that is just so delicious that I've elevated it to its own post. Now he's invented "Snailpaper," which takes about a quarter of a second to figure out. Terrific. Go, Dan!

As the goofy guy who coined Crash blossoms , and i am named BLOOM, a blooming idiot if ever there was one, here's my latest coinage and please blog on this too it is MORE important than crash blossoms and i was JOKING about the term and it took OFF, i have no idea why.... DAN BLOOM in Taiwan...I wrote THE SNAILPAPER STATEMENT today, and here's a preview:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that while the Digital Age is upon us fast and furious, the print newspaper -- hereafter dubbed the "snailpaper" -- shall persevere as a good daily read, a fascinating look at the world around us and a valuable tool for understanding oped pundits and above the fold headlines. Sure, the dear snailpaper will also be seen as a useful tool

for wrapping fish at the Fulton Fish Market or lining the bird cage in the den, but all kidding aside -- har! har! -- the daily snailpaper can hold its head high and be certain of its place in the culture. While news migrates in pixels and bytes to the Internet at an exponential rate, piling breaking story upon breaking story and turning everyone and his mother into a 24/7 news freak and RSS aggregator, the plodding snailpaper will nevertheless remain the bedrock of analysis and insight, from sea to shining sea, delivered at a snail's pace, yes, read at a snail's pace, yes, and absorbed, word for word -- on glorius printed paper! white newsprint reflecting inked letters! -- at a snail's pace, yes, as long as the Republic of Letters shall live."

Full blast here:

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/02/snailpaper-statement-mini-version-by.html

Timberland's Jeff Swartz on Haiti: "My heart still has not come back"

Jeff Swartz, Timberland CEO, is one of those who dropped everything to go and help. His report is wrenching, inspiring, frustrating...and heart-opening. Posted to Paul Levy's blog here as "Bearing Witness to Haiti." Thank you, Jeff.

And here's the paragraph whence the title of this post. (There are so many stunning lines in Jeff's piece that I've already changed the title twice.):

We went back to handing out the food. The crush didn’t go away, but the fear of a bad scene did. I’m still kinda pinned against the truck; from under the truck, a little brown hand reaches out and grabs my cargo calf. I look down, and there is a little hand clutching my leg. Can’t see the child — he or she has crawled through the densest crush of people I’ve ever seen, wriggled under the truck, and grabbed me — signaling, "I beat the line, now give me a meal." I slipped one down to the hand; the hand grabbed it and vanished. My heart still has not come back — a child, figuring out how to get a meal.

Tomas Eloy Martinez...

...has died. The Argentine journalist, who for a number of years headed the Latin American studies department at Rutgers, was also a novelist whose books played with reality, Santa Evita perhaps the emblem of the genre. What genre, I'm not certain, but Tomas did it masterfully. The story of an investigative reporter on the hunt to find Eva Peron's body, the book is carefully footnoted to the point that it's nearly impossible to distinguish what came out of the author's mind and what the reader can actually google.

I have two photos of Tomas, neither very good, taken at book club at our house in 2006. The backstory: as previously reported, I often take the train back and forth to New York. As some measure of my particular karma, I often meet a writer on that journey. As karmas go, this is a good one.

But sometimes I'm very tired on these trips and don't want to talk to anyone at all. Such was the case early one Sunday evening in 2006 when I was a little late getting on the train. There were only a few seats available and I chose the one where I anticipated the least interaction--a couple sitting opposite each other, both with their laptops running. I sat down next to the woman (Gabriela Esquivada, far right in photo), we exchanged smiles, and I settled in for a rest.

A few minutes later, Gabriela asked if she could get by, then offered to get me a coffee for disturbing me...and we were off and running. She introduced me to her husband, who was deep in concentration, watching some sort of thriller, as I recall...and then she explained who he was, one of the great Latin American writers, and soon all of us were talking. (It was from Tomas that I later learned that Carlos Fuentes loves bluefish, a phrase that will eventually make it into an essay about such train encounters, drafted so far only in my head.)

But why were they coming to Boston? Tomas turned the right side of his head toward me, a very large and red scar searing down the side, just behind his ear. Glioblastoma, he said, and he was being treated here in Boston.

We struck up a friendship and a month or so later, Tomas and Gabriela, also an Argentine journalist and editor, came to book club. I wrote a note about the evening for my friends on Zoetrope (see below). About two years ago, we lost touch. I was sad to see the news this morning but amazed that he lived for so long with this terrible disease.

From my notes:

Tomas Eloy Martinez came to our book club last night to discuss Santa Evita. So far, Tomas has written seven novels, I believe, and a whole lot of journalism down the years, but has not had as much exposure in the US as abroad, at 71 not as familiar as other Lat American writers, Carlos Fuentes, for example, whom he’s known since he was 18 (Fuentes is 10 years older).  One of Tomas’s books, unpublished in the US, The Flight of the Queen has sold 500k sales globally, many translations, best foreign book in China (dunno year), and on. I found this interview with him in Three Monkeys Online and it squares with what I’ve been learning from him, worth reading.

Tomas and Gabriela Esquivada-Martinez, his wife, have been here in Boston for past couple of months where Tomas is being treated for brain tumor. I met them in early March on the train from NY to Boston ten days after his surgery; they were traveling to Boston from their home in Highland Park, NJ, where he’s been heading Lat Amer studies dept at Rutgers. Mission: his first round of chemo and radiation. When I picked them up last night, I expected him to look haggard and ill. He looks great. His incision is healing and he spoke well and clearly for many hours.

Tomas focused on the line between fiction and fact, blurry, saying that the woman writing the intro to the anthology of his work being pub’d in Venezuela (hope I’ve got this right) finds the theme of his work to be “doubt.” I agree, caveat being that I’ve only read one of his books…but it is impossible to know, reading it, whether it is fact or fiction. How could this be a novel, I kept asking myself, but Tomas told us last night that only the last three pages are true. He entered the “black hole” of nine missing months in Eva Peron’s history and from it spun this book. Very dark, no redeeming characters, except perhaps the “I” who appears late in the book, relatively speaking, and is never fully revealed.

My book club has been meeting for 15 or so years, monthly, 190 books to date, primarily classics. This evening was in its own category and I encourage everyone to read Tomas’s work.

"Computers, eReaders, and cell phones don’t grow on trees"

How green is your eReader/Kindle/iPad (not that anyone has one yet)? Common sense suggests that digital-anything is greener than the analog device it's replacing. "Which is Greener: Paper or Digital? The Answer May Surprise You" gives a bit of pause, right up there with the finding that Google searches are, yup, not without environmental impact.

One quote from the article worth thinking about:

“Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver, and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently, there was little, if any, voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle ‘backstory’ of digital media.”