140 Training

In a hyperprevious work incarnation, I was a high school English teacher. It was many sleeps ago. It was fun. The snacks were good and I usually found myself on a basketball court by 3;30.

What wasn’t fun was trying to erase years of students being allowed to say what they wanted to say or write what they wanted to write in as many words as they chose to use.

That was really un-fun like a traffic jam on the way to the football game or a really long lineup at DQ when all you want is a quick soft serve like you used to have almost all the time when you were a kid or like waiting for a bus that you know should arrive at 9:17 and you’re there at 9:15 and are sure of it because you’re using your phone to tell the time and it’s synced to some atomic clock and anyway it’s not fun.

I taught them to edit.

To use words with precision.

As one uses a single blade to shave. With economy of motion. Deliberation.

Which is part of why I love Twitter and am advocating that all writing teachers should use it as a training tool for their kids.

It’s simple, when you think about it. Twitter limits you to 140 characters. It is by nature a highly powerful tool to teach not only lean writing, but lean thinking.

I used Twitter training in my teaching decades before Twitter was invented. I’d use these things they used to have called “index cards.” They came in colors. I’d have a student use four colors. White would be their current thought. They usually filled the card if they didn’t write on the back. Red would be their fist edit. We’d meet, then yellow would be their second edit. Same thought, significantly fewer words. Then we’d meet again and the green card would contain a coherent, tight, perhaps even elegant thought.

It was a pleasure to read, that green card was. It was a cool breeze slicing a Southern summer sun.

It was probably 140 characters, perhaps down from, say, 700. Or more.

Why is this important? Because we write as we think. And we think as we write. So if you can’t edit on paper, you can’t edit your thoughts when you’re talking about an idea. Or pitching someone on something or anything. Like giving you money. Or a chance. Which is really important.

So, I’m advocating that in real life and for practice, more teachers use the 140 model. And for more good practice, have kids try writing emails to each other on this: http://three.sentenc.es/, a device that limits the unlimited verbosity of email to three sentences per communication.

Ideas need to resonate. They do so better when well-crafted.

Techvolution

In 1992, I could think that I was on the leading edge of consumer use of technology. I was on my third computer since college, had moved in to the world of Apple products, and knew how to use my things to get done what I needed to get done as a teacher, coach, watch collector and trader, sports statistics fanatic, and writer.

I understood basic DOS prompts (I had to having owned the IBM PC Jr. a few years before), could word process with some facility, and could even “fix” friends’ computers, as long as said fix involved restarting the machine and looking unsurprised when everything was fine.

Then, while I still used my MacIntosh desktop (I just love writing ”MacIntosh”), I invested in a PowerBook. This was a “laptop” and it was a brand new game. It was a portable brick that I could carry with me and be productive and all cutting edge. So I did that, carting said PowerBook through all three years of law school.

I never used email in law school. There were 148 people in my law school class. Only in my final year, did I learn that one of them sent an “electronic mail.” Why one would do so eluded me. It was 1995. Clearly, if the era of the Jetsons was coming, I’d rather have the automated food and space cars first.

I first used the Internet in 1995. I bore people with this story all the time and have written about it here before. But since you’re a captive audience, I’ll tell it again.

I was loading a map of my home province of Quebec on my PowerBook. I was told how to do it and how amazing it would be.

It wasn’t. The image of Quebec loaded pixel-by-pixel, thanks in part to the roadrunner-fast connection at the library in Las Vegas, where I was working that day. Noting to self that this would never catch on, I flipped the cassette in my Walkman and continued my day.

Look. I know that there were people coding in 1995. I know that people were using email and I know that people used these machines more effectively and powerfully than I did.

But I was just a guy. I was an athlete-turned-student-turned-teacher-turned-law student. I wasn’t a programmer and didn’t work for the government and wasn’t a scientist on some special project.

Next step in my techvolution was my watch habit. Having received my first watch at 13 for my Bar Mitzvah, I was hooked. I’ve spend my life since then buying, selling, trading watches and looking at all of the pretty pictures that comes along with that. To me, the annual Basel watch fair is better than the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit edition.

So in the late 90s, I was one of the first members of this thing called eBay. It was a message board – no pictures, no ripoffs, no sharks. Just kind of a classified ads thingy on your computer. And I could buy a watch from someone in Los Angeles even though I lived near Washington, DC.

That was cool.

And then pictures came and I could use this amazing new thing – a ”scanner” – and lay a watch on it and, fairly complicated process later, could try to sell that watch with the buyer having confidence that it wouldn’t arrive in a million pieces and might actually look like that watch I scanned.

And through learning about eBay and building my little but profitable watch trading hobby, I learned a bit about these machines and began gravitating towards tech guys. They were, then, at least in my world, all guys.

So it was 1998 when I’d be as frustrated as hell that I didn’t understand a think that any tech guy would say. But I pushed through it and in 1999, while instill understood little of what was said, my ignorance was a thirst. And that’s still where I am today. It no longer bothers me when something is above my head. If its something I want to know, I figure it out.

In 1999, two amazing tech things happened to me. The first was that I was identified as an educator who not only was bound for leadership, but also had a love and aptitude for technology. That resulted in my first touch with Stanford, which I clearly mark as the entry point to who I am today and the amazing things I get to work on, particularly SVbstance.

The second was that I was asked to update hundreds of computers for the Y2K switchover. Yeah, me. I was trained how to do it, paid really decently, and spent a summer playing with computers. And taking breaks to buy and sell watches. Oh, why did I ever sell that Orfina Porsche Design chronograph?

This millennium hit, all of my machines survived, and I was hooked.

I talk about technology all the time. I wrote about it, think about it, probably dream about it, and am as surprised as all of you when I predict some tech thing to come and it actually happens.

But I’m still just a guy. I’m not a techie, I have no training in technology, and I can still fix any of your computers (as long as the repair process involves turning the machine off then on again – I’m highly skilled at that).

I still don’t get frustrated when I learn about something new in technology that’s over my head. Probably because so much today is. I love technology and while I’m not addicted to it (based on any of the true metrics of addiction) I’m not a fan of being off the grid. Part of who I am as a person and as a worker is to be accessible. I truly believe that sharing who I am an sharing my time, in person and through technology, is part of giving back the gifts I’ve been so fortunate to receive in my life. Yeah, that’s corny, but it’s how I feel. So I continue to struggle with email volume and how to get my technology to work for me and not vice-versa for a change, and I always get lost in thoughts of imaginary worlds where my tech tools are smooth and seamlessly integrated and open doors to a world full of content and leisure time.

And every day I’m still amazed at how far we’ve come in fewer years than it takes to properly age an eminently drinkable bottle of whisky.

Free Vultures

I don’t like free because it’s way too expensive.

I learned as a little kid that nothing was free. I assumed that others were learning the same thing but, evidently, I was wrong. So I’m writing a short post today to share how free looks from where I sit.

1. There is no such thing as free: Free exists for a reason. When I was a kid, I saw the birth of massive grocery stores (the direct English translation of the stores that launched when I was a kid were “Hyper Markets”). They aimed (and succeeded) to kill every mom and pop grocery in their catchment area. They brought new foods to the city and had people stationed in each aisle to give you tastes of what they were selling. These were things (enter the fried cheese stick) that we had lived well without. But we tried the samples and liked them and bought what they were purveying for free.

2. Free uses us: What percentage of people who accept a company’s offer for a free trial follow all of the requisite steps to cancel their free trial before the credit card is charged for the first month? It’s lower than we think. And even were a free trial actually free, it’s still not. If we’re not being used for credit card information, we’re being used for personal information. I still get emails from TEC de Monterrey, seven years after I did a one-day consulting job for them. Getting off their mailing list is a human impossibility. I fear that my email information will be in their archives until NBA players again behave like gentlemen on and off the court or the velociraptor reappears at your local zoo, whichever comes first.

3. Free is engineered: Free is a competition killer. Free is a loss leader where one side can absorb said loss with the intent to eliminate competition. You do realize that this is how the Wal-Marts of the world grind the bones of the aforementioned mom and pop shops to bake their bread, yes? They do 2-for-1 deals and roll back prices on certain items to lure you into the store. They lose money every time you accept their offer to purchase one of these deeply discounted items. But they also now have you in their lair, and there’s no way you’re going to leave without buying more things, all of which still undercut the small local competitor (or not – you’ll never know) but because of these uberstores’ massive buying power, still give them a healthy margin per unit times massive volume. They engineer an artificial price reality where they include free things to kill off the competitor who always offered you quality things but at a price point that allowed the people who own that business to make a reasonable living and in turn be able to buy other things from other local merchants.

4. Free is an insidious metric: In 2012, we live in a world where money follows traction and traction is measured in part by the number of eyes on a website. It doesn’t matter one lick how you get people to your site. VCs want to see eyes on your site, and when you can show not only the potential for lots and lots of eyes looking at your site, but can show that they are in fact doing so, you’re in a very, very good place when it comes to funding.

Free scares me the most in education. The EDU space, as I think of it, will always have limited resources (that’s a given in education) and (trust me on this) it is a space just teeming with vultures. I remember working on projects in Ho Chi Minh City, where I spoke with families and government officials about the challenges in a nation where there is only one university place available for every three qualified candidates. There just isn’t enough of anything to go around, and this is a global issue of the utmost importance.

So what do you think we should make of well-funded EDU startups, offering free education? I don’t need to call any of them out – you can do your homework and guess to whom I’m referring. But the idea that some famous educators are going to get together, offer life-changing courses for free, are doing so with millions of dollars of venture (that’s the key word) capital, and expect nothing in return is, in the words of Styx, The Grand Illusion.

Wake up. There is coffee to be smelled.

Social Bowl

So yesterday was the Super Bowl, all ten hours of it, when you add everything up starting from the many pre-game shows, right to the final Hail Mary pass (but not including Giselle’s post-game rant about how her husband’s receivers are all, essentially, addled, stone-handed losers). And during those ten hours one thing became crystal clear, more so in 2012 than ever: Sport is insanely big business.

This wasn’t really news to us. We’d seen the Super Bowl commercials before. This wasn’t the first time that we had witnessed Danica Patrick sell her commercial soul in embarrassingly bad spots for the unctuous peeps at Go Daddy. What was different this time was how the event lived and breathed through the lens of social media. I watch a lot of sports and this was the first event ever where I feel safe saying that the breadth and depth of commentary on social media, especially Twitter, not only eclipsed the event but became the event itself.

Case in point: Madonna’s halftime show.

First, let me say that after what I thought was a kind of bizarre and disturbing opening to her set, the rest of the performance itself was superb, particularly when Cee Lo Green joined her onstage. Were I feeling pun-ish, I’d say that “it got crazy” at that point. But I won’t. Crazy being the reference to the Gnarls – okay, you get it.

But that halftime show was also when shit hit the fan on social media outlets. On Twitter, @audreywatters made this superb observation:

“And oh how our culture hates older women’s sexuality. See: twitter stream for proof”

She was, of course, right on. The vitriol that accompanied Madonna’s performance was scary and came from all corners of the world. That an attractive 53-year-old entertainer should be on stage in front of, oh, a billion or so people, and wear outfits that showed that she was indeed attractive and in shape, irked millions.

But that’s really not the issue. What is the issue is that the forum for the dialogue surrounding Madonna is social media. And it’s now an inverted paradigm: where social media used to look to traditional media for content and cues, now everyone from traditional media trolls Twitter and Facebook for content. Last night was arguably the historical (and hysterical) apex of this. Twitter was, in so many ways, the game itself and this was magnified by the fact that, as football games go, three quarters of it was kinda meh.

Two weeks ago, I watched the NFC championship game in one of my favorite sports bars in the world – The Old Pro in Palo Alto. The amazing thing to observe was how many people were interacting with social media on their mobiles or tablets (okay – it’s Silicon Valley, so let’s call it like it is and just say “iPhone and iPads”). I’d venture a guess that 70% of the thousand or so people in that room were as engaged with social media during and about the game than they were with the event itself.

What this means in the business context is that there’s immediate and sometimes brutal feedback on what you put on the air. Last night’s Samsung commercial was a great example. Reaction was immediate and universally negative, with Twitter comments ranging from “Apple didn’t need a Super Bowl ad but Samsung made one for them anyway,” to “Samsung spent ten million dollars to show off a stylus.” The ad struck people as being ill-conceived and downright dumb-headed. In tangible ways, it seemed to take as its proposition that people always go to absurd lengths to get the competitor’s product but ours is readily accessible by a glaring absence of demand.

The problem with a Super Bowl ad is that it’s a massive bet. Good business is about lots of small bets intermingled with a few big bets. But as we last night, we’re living in a land of immediate reactions and big bets that have changed the landscape of how we consume major sports events and the products around them.

Hope you enjoyed the game(s).

Even Steven

I’ve never been a huge fan of Seinfeld but the episode I best remember and probably most like is the one where Jerry realizes that he always breaks even in his life. In self-describing as the paradigmatic “Even Steven,” this episode is the usual Seinfeld reductio al absurdo, but, also as always, with a foundation of truth.

In the episode, whenever Jerry loses something, another something of equal value comes to him. The funniest moment is when his girlfriend breaks up with him and he casually responds with a “No problem. It was nice to date you and have a great life,” fully realizing, by this point in the plot, that he’ll meet someone else of equal or better quality right away.

There’s something to this. Jerry was actually identifying life in Flow. When you live in Flow, you’re moving in a positive direction – while it may seem that things come to you, you’re actually attracting them.

When I decided, once and for all, to go off and my own and build a professional life with Lots of different projects and clients, I was afraid that I’d fail and probably starve to death. This Fear lasted minutes, not hours, and was also fortuitously counterbalanced by images in my mind of working for only one client forever. But it was a Fear nonetheless.

And it was something that I embraced because I had no choice but to do so. Anything else would have derailed me. Ignoring my Fear would have placed heavy obstacles in my path as I’d need to deal with them later. Instead, I took everything I had and moved forward.

Part of my moving forward in late 2010 was a cleaning out of things. Some were emotional, some intellectual, and some physical. Changes needed to be made and one of them was simply getting rid of a lot of the shit I’d accumulated over years of living in multiple cities and finding cool things wherever I went.

I parted with 80% of what I owned and realized that I was actually attached to not one thing. There wasn’t one thing that I owned that I needed. Yes, I liked by retro Nike sneaker collection and my watch collecting hobby that I’ve had since I was 13. But to prove that I didn’t need these things, I got rid of the pieces I liked the best and never thought twice about it.

From there, I decided that my life would be Even Steven. Want to buy a shirt? Give away a shirt. Want to add that cool new watch to the collection? Get rid of one first.

And it extended to my professional life when I wasn’t looking. This was really driven home last January, when I was offered the chance to represent a good client in Asia. It would have involved more 16-hour flights than I was willing to take on at this point in my life. More importantly, as I spent time with the client, what I felt inside wasn’t resonance. I saw what they wanted to accomplish strategically and I knew that I could get them to their goals. But, honestly, I really didn’t care. So I passed and opened the door for Fear because I’d passed on a three-year project at a price point that would buy a lot of fun watches and the occasional visit to Dean and Deluca.

And everything worked out and did so pretty quickly. New clients, whose mission I really loved, found me. And I became busier than I ever imagined being and still am. It was Flow. Trusting that you’re in the currents of something that’s larger than you are and letting yourself fall into it.

It’s about embracing Jerry’s Even Steven and realizing that what comes next is full of promise if you just let yourself go.

< 140 Leadership Primer

If something doesn’t feel like leadership, it’s not.

Leadership is the most overused term in business. Few know what it looks like.

Imagine explaining a leadership concept to your grandfather. If you see him looking sceptical, so should you.

Reading books about leadership is an infinitely less valuable exercise than reading books about lives well-lived.

If a leadership concept doesn’t fit the world, it won’t fit your home either.

A true leader rarely thinks about the term “leadership.”

Leadership is always about empathy, never about tolerance.

Leaders walk the walk and guide others in doing so. Leadership without teaching is hollow.

Leadership is thought plus action, never thought alone.

Look for leadership outside of your comfort zone. Understanding leadership in different contexts is key.

There are no negative leadership lessons. Seeing how not to lead is a remarkable gift.

There is no leadership without reflection and meditation. A leader knows how to find their center.

Leadership needs to be communicated virally.

Leadership can be learned by and from people of all ages. We are never too young or old.

False praise is to leadership what arsenic is to a soup recipe.

Leadership is not a contest.

Leadership is iteration plus awareness.

Ego is leadership kryptonite.

Leadership is never a final document. It is an ongoing series of rough drafts.