Endless Knots

A new low for Bank of America

Warning: if you have a banking problem and if, like me, you are a Bank of America business customer by virtue of a corporate round-up (my original perfectly fine BayBank was bought by BankBoston -- nee Bank of Boston -- which was bought by Fleet which was bought by ... ), don't call them. Let me make this more succinct and clear: if you, a business customer, have a problem, it will cost you $30 EVERY TIME YOU CALL THEM!

Sorry about the screaming. I know. You're thinking what I said. This can't possibly be true. "Yes, that's right. That's why we have our self-service center." Self-service center? Sorry, I've never heard of that. How long has that been around? "We've always had it." Always? Online banking hasn't *always* been around, I reasoned. But then I remembered: $30/per call+customer service ≠ logic.

I was sufficiently indignant that he waived the fee - just shortly before I said that going forward, every time Bank of America contacts me, I'll be charging them $30 and sending them hefty invoices since they're constantly sending me unsolicited material.

Not long thereafter, we were "disconnected," which is my way of assuaging my feelings, i.e. I don't want to believe he hung up on me because that would be really insulting to a customer who'd just, in desperation over being told to go to the library if I didn't have a fax machine because that's the only way my problem could be solved -- faxing forms back and forth in, am I wrong, 2012? -- I insisted on being transferred to CEO Brian Moynihan's office. That worked like a charm, obviously, resulting in this highly laudatory post for the great customer service at Bank of America.

I almost forgot: this whole saga began at the local branch with them giving me a number to call. It was the wrong number. They transferred me but before they did I asked for the right number in case I was disconnected. Need I say that they transferred me to the wrong number..where they transferred me to the $30/call number, great for them but oh-so-wrong for me.

And for the record, the last time Bank of America slapped a stupid fee on another small business account of mine, I withdrew my funds and marched down the street to Village Bank, a co-op, that can't be bought by a behemoth. No fees, no minimum balance, great service, online banking.  So there, Bank of America. As son-in-law #1 said, "I'm sure the Board of Directors called an emergency meeting."

The origin of good ideas -- again

Summer Turner, Director of  Organizational Development & Communication at Omgeo, has "turner-ed" me on to this excellent Steven Johnson video, taken from his book, Where Good Ideas Come From. With apologies to Mr. Johnson for a horrid over-simplification, he says what we know as group-lover cliches: two heads (if not more) are better than one, that ideas take a while to germinate (he does a nice riff on Tim Berners-Lee's 10-year gestation of the web), and that "the great driver in technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity." But he says it so well and with great examples.

We too have said this in a few of our books, even constructed a slide about it (see below) about a dozen years ago with clients at Shell Oil, that relates connectivity to the evolution of organizations. We've come a long way since smoke signals and tin cans. Technology innovation aside, connectivity even allows us to "innovate" -- invent, I guess you'd say, new organizations.

Great stuff, Steven. That your middle name is the same as my grandmother's makes me think that we're, how do you say, connected. Check out his website here.

 

 

 

 

Thank you, VIRTUAL TEAMS readers

Sixteen years ago, we went to lunch with our then-editor Jim Childs at John Wiley & Sons (Jim's now a publisher at Time Inc). It was time for our next book; we threw out the idea for a book about what was then a "new idea:" virtual teams. Jim liked it and within about a year, the first edition of Virtual Teams was published. The book did well enough that our new editor (Jim had moved on to become publisher of Taunton Press by then), Jeanne Glasser, who herself eventually moved on and is now at Pearson, suggested a second edition, which came out in 2000.

Yesterday, a nice royalty check arrived in the mail. The check (cut by the agent for that book) was concealed among scadzillions of pages of line items, most impossible to understand but their overall meaning was very clear. The book still sells after a dozen years both here in the US and in other countries (it's had a number of translations) -- and it sells in cyberspace. People buy the electronic edition, a time-twisting idea altogether since eBooks were just an idea when we first wrote the book. Indeed, Amazon had not even been incorporated. I also need to point out that the electronic version sells even though we did something a bit nutty after 9/11 by traditional publishing standards -- knowing that our writing about networks and how to work at a distance could be helpful to the 11,000 organizations whose workplaces were demolished or rendered unusable by the attacks, we posted all of our books online.

So why this post? It's not just to be boastful (though it may have that scent). It's to point out that for all the old-publisher bashing that goes on these days, the "old" model has its benefits. It's not hard to figure out why people self-publish -- even the greats are doing it to good effect. But when I analyze just the pure economics of what happened with this book -- two advances, multiple translations, each of which brought its own, albeit relatively small, advance, and twice-annual royalty checks for a decade-and-a-half (including the first edition), it was a wise choice. Not that it was the same choice back then as it is now but...

I'm sitting on a few manuscripts right now and deliberating about what to do with them. Go the agent/big publisher route again where, with luck, there's another advance, editing, cover design, production, distribution, and (some though increasingly less) marketing (just to name a few of the things that traditional publishers provide)? Or do I self-publish, taking it all on "in-house" here and thus also absorb most of the other responsibilities and all the expense? (See my post about the economics of all this, which comes down to the cold truth that publishing is not a high-margin business -- period.) That means working with an e-publisher where quality is largely a function of the author, not the pros. I applaud anyone who wants to publish their own books; it's a good thing for them, but it's just not the same as a vetted process with experienced people contributing their skills. As good as self-publishing is becoming, it's still in its early stages and seems a bit like building my own house -- I can be my own contractor; I can even be my own builder which brings me to another but...

I'm not naive. Publishing is not the same as it was when we were churning out books (three in four years; two before that; and one since). The marketing people weren't calling the shots at the big houses and editors still had their hands firmly on the material.

New realities lie in the shadow of old ones. We submitted the first electronically typeset manuscript that Doubleday ever published for our book Networking in 1982. We had to argue with the copyeditor of The TeamNet Factor who insisted on using an actual "dot" instead of a period in the email address we included in that 1993 book. And we had to explain what a domain name was in the first edition of Virtual Teams.

So...what should I do with those manuscripts? Not to mention The Age of the Network, the out-of-print book that has produced the most fascinating business for nearly 20 years? Should I rEpublish that one?

Jeff Stamps: "Consciously living with dying"

Jeff with Finny, 8/29/10

Two years ago today, my husband Jeff Stamps learned that he had Stage IV pancreatic cancer, a fatal disease (overall survival rate of less than 4%, according to cancer.gov). Jeff lived 13 months against an initial prognosis of 3-6 months, given the late stage of disease. Most pancreatic cancer is detected at the same stage as Jeff's. The pancreas lies deep in the body, behind other organs; typically the symptoms of "pancreas cancer" (how his oncologist always referred to it) don't present until something dire has happened, as was the case with Jeff.

This anniversary (indeed all that surround a death) is not the easiest of days. The tendency to relive the hours, recall the details, and wrestle with the absence is compelling. It's hard to know what to do with the maelstrom. One way is to publish Jeff's own words about this day. Herewith the opening section of "A Dangerous Experiment," his memoir, which he began seven weeks after Diagnosis Day.

Preface

On May 5, 2010, I went to my physician with a “stomach complaint.” By four that afternoon, I learned its origin: Stage IV pancreatic cancer. My life went from looking into an indeterminately long future to anticipating its end.

The Tibetan word bardo means between. It is a chunk of time in the ongoing process of life, death, and rebirth. I call this unique period of life-lived-with-immanent-death my “Terminal Bardo.”

This is my experiment in bringing awareness and openness to life’s greatest challenge. Naturally, it’s unavoidably fraught with the deepest emotions. There are real possibilities for joy and growth together with the ever-present risk of despair and contraction into a stunted psyche.

 

My Terminal Bardo

The diagnosis

A month of increasing stomach discomfort brings me to my long-time primary care physician. Dyspepsia, I’ve self-diagnosed.  However, the doctor says something different that Wednesday morning. “Obstructive jaundice,” he mumbles. “Gallstones are the most likely cause of blockage.” He does not look happy.  “You need an ultrasound.”

I text my wife Jessica with the news. She’s finishing a meeting at a local coffee shop and I have to pick her up. By the time I arrive, she’s prepared for us to go to the Beth Israel Deaconess Emergency Room. “Pack a bag,” she says. It’s an announcement, not a suggestion. “Tom says we need to go to the ER to get some tests.”  Tom Lamont, a next-door neighbor of 38 years and close friend, is Chief of Gastroenterology at the hospital. I listen to Tom.

Once in the ER, things move quickly. First an ultrasound. A technician does the exam, leaves the room, and returns with a radiologist, who does another series of pokes and prods. Not a good sign. It doesn’t sound like gallstones. Jessica watches him type two words on the ultrasound computer screen: “Panc head.”

The ER attending physician comes to the small cubicle where I’m being held until some determination is made of my condition. He stands with his back to the wall and looks down. “This is why I hate being a physician. This is the worst part of the job. This is really awful.” He goes on this way, talking about how difficult it is to say what he’s about to say, but not saying it. “Possible pancreatic cancer,” he mumbles. He’s ordered a CT scan. He is gone in a minute.

When I return to my little curtained-off piece of the ER after the CT, our friend who is then CEO of the hospital has arrived. The attending physician reappears and does a double-take when he sees the chief executive sitting there. This time we get a professional report with questions answered. Pancreatic cancer likely, he says, with suspicious lesions on the liver and possibly the lung. “Meaning,” I said, “it could be metastatic, Stage IV?”  “Yes.”

Jessica asks our friend to take notes: “they found a two-centimeter mass at the head of the pancreas. A small lesion on liver—may be an incidental finding—too soon to know; and a small lesion on a lung—may be an incidental finding—too soon to know…”

Leaving the cancer diagnosis hanging, the doctor addresses the immediate problem: the blocked bile duct clogging up my system and causing significant distress. I will be admitted to the hospital. Someone in Tom’s group will insert a stent in my bile duct the next day, open it up, and relieve the pressure.

What does the diagnosis mean, I wonder? Until age 65, I am the picture of health with the ignorance that goes along with that. I don’t know where pancreatic fits on the cancer spectrum. It isn’t sounding good, but really, how bad could it be? On the other hand, stage IV of anything is definitely not good.

From the moment I’d texted her, Jessica has been searching online. She is far more medically savvy than I am, and by the time the radiologist types “panc head,” she’s already figured out that this is what it might be and has an idea of what it means. Incurable at any stage. Most people (80 percent) are diagnosed at Stage IV because it is the symptoms of already advanced cancer that force people to the doctor. There are no tests for early detection.

Jessica has already contacted our daughters, Miranda and Eliza, who live in Brooklyn. By the time we get the CT report, the girls are on their way to Boston with Lake and Finn, Miranda and her husband Jay’s eight-month-old identical twins (Jay will shortly). We ask the doctor to put the phone on speaker, and are daughters are getting the news as we do, listening while driving north.

Over the long hours it takes to get a hospital bed, we have a lot of small talk; I get drugs for my symptoms. Jessica isn’t saying much about what she’s learning, although at one point, as I’m probing for how serious this might be, she tosses out five years in some unclear context. Ok, it’s serious, I think.  But I’ll wait for the full evaluation to decide how worried to be. I don’t yet know that the CT scan is so clear, so conclusive, that I am already being treated as if I have a confirmed diagnosis, which usually requires a biopsy.

It’s nearly midnight before I’m admitted, traveling the two blocks from the ER to the main hospital by ambulance. I have a terrible night. My roommate is very loud. His IV machine beeps constantly, and, as we are at the end of the hall, the squeals persist for a long time before a nurse arrives. And by now my bile obstruction really hurts, and I’m squirming in the bed to find a tolerable position.

I’m on the window side of the shared room. The dawn light is just breaking, a normally beloved moment in the day. My curtain rustles, and my trusted neighbor Tom sticks his head around. “Hi Jeff, can I come in?”

As I’m curled toward the window, Tom walks to a point between me and the light. All I see is a tall figure with a long white coat, the face shadowed, featureless. He talks. All I hear is one phrase, “…and some of my patients have lived as long as a year.” It was, Tom tells me a few days later, in tears, the most difficult moment in his professional career.

I am terminal with months to live.  Now I know with clarity.

After Tom leaves, the day becomes a blur of activity. Nurses, interns, and fellows precede the surgeon, Mandeep Sawhney, who is my “care coordinator” for the day. Jessica and the kids arrive. Surgery to open my bile duct with a stent takes longer than expected because of the size and position of the cancer mass, and no biopsy is taken. I am in pain and drugged as I am wheeled back to the hospital room following surgery.

Not long after, a young oncologist shows up, advanced by a fellow and trailed by interns.  Next steps are pretty clear: A course of two rounds of chemo followed by a CT scan to see how I respond to the palliative, not curative, drug. Treatment options, few as they are, would follow. The normal prognosis for untreated progression from the point of my diagnosis is 3-6 months. Successful chemo adds 2-4 months. Thinking positively, that offers a 5-10 month probable window of life.

Every day has just become very precious, but I’m not focused. I’m still having a difficult recovery from the surgery.  I flicker in and out of conversations as my people visit—my sister, Susan, and close friends, Kate and Ben Taylor and Jean Nichols. It doesn’t take long for Jean, a PhD microbiologist, to deduce from my appearance and behavior that I probably have a post-surgical infection. She calls Tom with her suspicion; he calls the hospital; and soon I’m on IV antibiotics. It is well into the early morning before the pain subsides and I drop off to sleep. By late that afternoon, I am home.

Beginner’s Mind

How did I feel when a dear friend tells me I am terminal?

Calm.

I have been processing the incoming news about my condition since the ultrasound, so I am not surprised. But, the time frame is considerably shorter than what I expected. For reasons I cannot fully understand, I move to acceptance.

This acceptance does not feel passive. I snap into a new reality, a moment that becomes a point of action. Acceptance begins a unique period of consciously living with dying.

My calm seems real, but my mind is racing to unpack how I must really feel. Fatal and fast-growing, this cancer is no ordinary diagnosis. This is a once-in-a-lifetime test.

How did I get to the place of acceptance? I wonder where denial and anger are.  Familiar with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s work on the stages of grief, I test the expected emotional pathways.

First, I am not expressing denial. No one around me is denying it, no family or friends or medical professionals have expressed mitigating possibilities. Here we are all helped by the clarity of the CT data to the doctors.

Moving beyond denial, I am enormously lucky that a trusted doctor provides the prognosis quickly.  There’s nowhere to hide. A new reality bounds my life.

More surprisingly, there is no anger. I am no stranger to that emotion, having struggled mightily with it over the years. Here it seems absent. At 66, I don’t feel cheated or robbed of time rightfully mine. Nor do I feel sentenced for some misdeed or punished for a badly lived life. Besides, no one suggests that anger helps at all.  It is just a waste of time. This no-anger attitude, never complete, persists and has a big effect on my psychology, social surrounds, and, I believe, avoids negatively impacting my chemical physiology.

Then there is no bargaining. I accept the diagnosis. However, within the Stage IV context, I will have choices, even if treatment options are limited and in any case are palliative not curative.

Some basic decisions fall into place. Yes, I will follow treatment to maximize the prognosis, but I will choose with high consideration for the quality of my remaining days. I will aim for a conscious death at home. Although I’m open to all options, I will not rush around trying every cure, trying to buy a few more weeks.  What I will do is offer my body and the therapies applied the best possible mental attitude for their success.

Depression, too, is largely absent. Intellectually, I understand why it appears in the gap between bargaining and acceptance when the bargain is lost. Often, the dying person begins to shut down his or her social network and retreat into grieving. I find myself, naturally an introvert, opening up to an ever-larger network—family, friends, even people I know only tangentially.

Finally, acceptance. I still cannot fully fathom how I am able to reach this point: calm and clear. Even after examination, I feel this acceptance with no hint of passivity. It’s an acceptance that frees me to live intensely and in the moment while preparing for death. This active, every-day-is-precious acceptance also permeates the new intimacy I’m developing with my nearest and dearest.

Don’t get me wrong. While the stages did not unfold in the prescribed manner, there was and is grieving. Sometimes I cry a little with Jessica, or the kids, or with a friend as they grieve openly, usually briefly (with me). Sometimes the grieving comes on unexpectedly.

Six weeks after my diagnosis, I am driving our boat across Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire with the whole family onboard. We are on a day trip to open our rustic island cabin on a piece of paradise connected to my earliest childhood memories. I find myself sobbing across the waves, no one aware over the roar of the engine. Grieving is a part of life.

One other feeling stands nakedly before me upon reaching terminal acceptance: Fear. You can’t fake it, not to yourself, particularly in the quiet moments, or the dark of night. How I hold fear will have an inescapable guiding influence on my inner experience of progress towards death.

For me, blessedly, so far fear has been largely absent. Indeed, old fears about dying in old age have disappeared. Most especially I will not die like my estranged father, who at 91, may well outlive me, albeit gripped by late-stage Alzheimer’s dementia and depression. Long life is not always wonderful.

These are the emotional “facts” as best as I can describe the indescribable. These feelings and their respective absences are all simultaneously present in the early morning light of my “terminal initiation.” Even as I experience “not-denial,” “not-anger,” and “not-bargaining,” I wonder why. Maybe the shock and denial are so massive I am dissociating from reality. Yet the emotional state that comes on in the hospital remains fairly stable as I approach the two-month mark and the beginning of this memoir.

For me, the word that best describes my state is equanimity.

What brings me to equanimity? I do not know, but I hope to understand more through this exploration of my Terminal Bardo.

Shock and Awe

That first Friday night home from the hospital is not so good, but not too bad. The next morning I get up early as usual, and stumble upstairs to my third-floor study.

I have had a third-floor place of work and thought since 1968 when I sat atop 46 Leckford Road in Oxford (famously occupied by Bill Clinton who moved in when I moved out). From that perch, I looked out my window across the famous spires of Oxford, often shrouded in wisps of fog. Those years as a Fulbright Scholar, co-founder of Oxford’s American anti-war group, and student of Thomas Hobbes and systems theory, were formative. Most importantly, it’s when Jessica and I met.

Since 1972, my third floor has been of an eighteenth-century Early Georgian house (c. 1723) on a park-like acre of land in Newton, Massachusetts. We had just married and were looking for a place to settle in the depressed housing market of the early 1970s, when no one wanted a really old run-down house. Raised in houses of this vintage in New Hampshire, I saw home. And so it has been ever since.

I have an easel of my own making, a standing board covered with butcher paper that overlooks the yard. This is where I externalize my thinking, recording thoughts and events, outlining tasks, drafting plans, writing notes, and making sketches. I have a pictorial history on “big white sheets” going back three decades.

On that day’s sheet I’ve written in red pen: ”May 8. Diagnosis:  PANCRATIC [sic] CANCER.  Stage 3 or 4. Months to live.” In green, “WHOLE FAMILY HERE.  Kids and grandkids staying. Will be an amazing time.” I can’t even spell the name of the cancer.

And, yes, it is an amazing time as family and friends converge. We had just become a multi-generational household. Again. Except now I am a new grandpa. Miranda has decided to work from here and is staying on with the twins as has Eliza while Jay becomes the bi-city commuter. 

From the moment I text Jessica with my symptomatic diagnosis, I have been surrounded by caring people. This social blast is greatly heightened by all the extra activity occasioned by the twins. First, of course, is the care required of two tots. Then there is the fact they are incredibly cute and everyone wants to see them. Many friends and friends of friends flow through as Miranda and Eliza grew up here in this house.

On Monday night we attend our regular book club across the street at Tom and Emily’s house. Tom, yes, GI Tom, and Em had started this group with several others twenty years earlier. We are newcomers, only ten years into it.  It is a highly emotional evening. This is when Tom tells his side of the “terminal moment” experience, with tears, not common to him. Later, the book clubbers ask about my experience, what I think about dying, and what I think of the afterlife. Over the next few weeks, this conversation will repeat many times. It is as about as intimate a conversation as you can have.

These are the days of shock and frenetic activity. On Tuesday we begin the process of deciding what to do with our speaking, consulting, and software business, NetAge. I see my long-time therapist and begin the process of rapid disengagement after ten years of work together. It is clear to me that this very talented Harvard-affiliated psychiatrist cannot face her patient’s new reality.

On that same day we go to Newton Cemetery to look at plots. For me, cremation is a settled choice so I am drawn to the simple urn garden by a pond. Jessica realizes that she has not really thought it through. “Can it be a burial without the sound of dirt banging on the casket?” she asks. Obviously, no bodies can be laid by an urn garden, but you can put an urn in a dual gravesite (none of which seem all that appealing, although we temporarily reserve a spot). Later, Jessica resolves her feelings—at least enough to make a decision—in favor of cremation. Six weeks later we buy a tiny patch of turf by a new pond—with the cemetery address “J1.” This resonates with our nickname, “J&J.”

The following day, a week post-diagnosis, finds Jessica presenting a long-scheduled webinar, and then both of us meeting with our financial advisor and an estate lawyer. That afternoon we have our first visit with an oncologist and schedule a course of chemotherapy. Wednesdays are to be our day.

It’s only Thursday, just eight days after the diagnosis. I go to my last therapy session. You’d think now is when I need expert counseling, but the therapist hides, in denial, not showing up for the appointment. I go for my prescheduled annual physical with my primary-care physician who has cared for me for over twenty years. My brother David arrives from New Hampshire. The yard and house are full. Friday, the same.

As the week progresses, a parallel stream of activity picks up. The Saturday after my diagnosis we are supposed to be in Brooklyn to attend a naming ceremony for the twins. Relatives and friends from around the country are coming. It is, of course, canceled. Well, postponed, really, as we all decide a few days later that we need to go ahead. Miranda and Jay re-conceive and reorganize the event for the forthcoming Saturday in West Newton. It is to be held in the very old Unitarian Universalist church in our local square where we had taken the kids during their tender years and where they both did a “Coming of Age” ceremony.

On a perfect spring Saturday morning, Miranda leaves early for the church. Eliza and I follow a little later, walking to the square. We arrive at the church as an unexpectedly large group gathers: Jay’s family, mother Ardis and brother Hunter, from Birmingham, my brother and sister, Jessica’s brother Eric and niece Amanda from Philadelphia, a contingent of friends from New York, and of course long-time Boston-area friends.

Many in the crowd know about my condition. Some are just finding out. Birth and death mix openly but do not distract from the event at hand, focused on the miracle twins, Finn and Lake. The lay minister does a wonderful job following and leading the script that Miranda and Jay have laid out for their sons.

Everyone, 60 people or so, comes back to the house. It’s a perfect day for an indoor-outdoor party. The ground floor of our house circulates from the kitchen around to an inside porch that leads to an outside patio and the yard that connects back to the kitchen. As the morning-afternoon crowd wanes, new people show up and the party doesn’t really break up until close to midnight. The next morning, a few people arrive for breakfast, more for lunch, and on into the afternoon.

On Monday, the previous week’s pace continues. It starts with an appointment with a pancreatic oncology surgeon. Although I am a highly unlikely candidate for surgery, he allows us to get a good high-resolution look at the CT scans that are the basis of the diagnosis, albeit in the sobering context of the cancer being so advanced it cannot be excised. In the afternoon we meet with the estate lawyer.  Late that night, Jessica is somehow able to write a blog post, A turning for J&J, that makes our personal situation public. There’s no let up the next day.

On Wednesday, May 19^th, we meet with Hester Hill Schnipper, an experienced oncology social worker… and I start chemo. My new life on drugs is underway.

As the cancer-specific pain has increased over the past week, a complicated set of medications, dosages, and times of application come into play. Now my first infusion of chemo also includes a range of ancillary drugs, some of which I don’t respond to well.

Our assigned oncologist doesn’t communicate clearly so we have to learn how to use the meds and sort out their conflicting side-effects from the baseline effects of the cancer and chemo ourselves. Bottom-line, I feel sick most of the time. Oddly, however, I have a good feeling that I will do well with this treatment.

Despite how badly I am feeling physically, the following day is similarly packed, including the terminal session of my multi-year therapy and treatment for anxiety. Ironic.

That evening we are the guests at a Tibetan baby-welcoming ceremony for Jasmine, daughter of our dear friends Phuni & Wangchuk. We are to open the ceremony and they gently encourage me to tell people of my diagnosis. Tibetans do not shy away from death, and it is natural for a ceremony welcoming life to include a reminder of its end, for we all live with the certainty of death.

Jessica tells the group about how we came to know these two remarkable people. I speak to the preciousness of life and preparing consciously for death. Some people appear moved. Most non-Tibetans have not heard anyone talk publicly about their impending death. I look the part as I am in a lot of pain.  We do not have the meds figured out yet, and we don’t have what I need with us, so we leave early.

 

At my calm, my daughters exclaim:  “Who are you? And what did you do with our father?” None of us can hide from our children, who know us all too well. This is a new side of Dad. Also a little crazy since this is not how people typically, I’m told, react to an out-of-the-blue terminal diagnosis. But, as Miranda keeps saying, “We’ll take it.”

Here, at the end, I can be the best role model of my life for my children. Now I can’t backslide. I have to stay the course of equanimity, acceptance of death with zest for life, and a continuing willingness to grow and transform. They hold me to the gift I offer them in the manner of my dying.

My unexpectedly calm emotional state is apparently contagious. The courage and grace of my wife and daughters amazes me. We are working together to make this time all it can be. We are all, each of us, reaching down deep and knowing this is a never-to-be-repeated moment. We are making this a signature time of our personal histories.

We will make this work for us.

 

 

Leaderless? No, leader-full in the virtual workplace

Terrence Seamon, whom I had the chance to work with a few years back when American Management Association was putting together a new course on leading virtual teams (I was subject matter expert for the course and Terry held the management development portfolio there; together we did a webinar that you can listen to here), has a nice reflective post on what it takes to work successfully from a distance. He calls out the role of leadership in his virtual experience -- in his example, there was no appointed leader, as is the case when this works successfully, many people took on leadership roles:

Leadership - We were a leaderless group, where no one was appointed (or elected) as the leader. However, since a team needs leadership to be successful, leadership emerged as we went along. For example, several members of our team kept us informed of direction and guidance from the editors. Getting this input from time-to-time kept us on track, and kept us going.

The myth that virtual groups -- and networks -- have no leaders is one of the most pernicious misunderstandings about these work arrangements. It leaves the impression that they have no direction and no accountability for results ... and it's wrong. One of the gifts of these organizational innovations is that they allow all kinds of leadership modalities to surface.

Thanks, Terry, for the chance to board this particular bandwagon again!