Overrunning Your Vision?

There are functionaries who exist to hold a position.

There are leaders who work to fulfill a vision.

As a team matures, the difficult will be done immediately, the impossible may take a little longer.

What happens when you overrun your vision? How do you recover?

What causes overrunning your vision?

Not succeeding?

I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

Success is a minute. Failure is the focus and grind leading to success.

Most of us spend the majority of our time not being successful. How you handle that is up to you.

After Einstein’s Wonderful Year, he spent the next 50 years trying to rationalize the four forces. He worked the problem hard and long, dying before completing the solution.

As Coach Lombardi said, “The Packers never lose, sometimes the clock runs out.”

How do you get your vision back?

Go back to core principles. What do you stand for? How will that apply now?

I listened to a very capable senior executive explain how successfully building a mature team that took his company out of a death spiral resulted in losing support from his organization. Twice, two different organizations. The new lesson? – Never Again.

Once we settled that, he was ready to mount up. There will always be new ways to fail.

My golf buddy, Tommy Jackson schooled me many years ago, “We look really good in between getting knocked on our butts.”

It sure is quiet in here! Must be August. Comments? Wake Up!

Five Bags of Ice

My Grandfather’s Son is Clarence Thomas’ autobiography up to confirmation as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Jack asked me if I wanted to read his copy, that he got from Clarence.

I read it like a thriller, because it was. Some of the people who illuminated Clarence’s quest of becoming his grandfather’s son were some of the same people who had given me instruction for becoming a man. We went to different schools together.

About halfway through the book I thought, “I’m not necessarily believing what Clarence says about himself, because if I was writing it, I would make me look as good as I could.”

Clarence could have, but he didn’t. Better were his observations about the people around him.

He lost his wallet and John Bolton found it. I already like John.

One time, when he was perpetually broke, Clarence found a wallet with $600 in it. Called the owner, who came by and was graceless. Thinking it through, Clarence figured out that his financial needs or the owner’s social skills didn’t have anything to do with the rightness of returning the wallet. I liked that lesson.

His relationships with Jack Danforth and Joe Biden might not have taught me a lot about Clarence, but they showed me volumes about Jack Danforth and Joe Biden.

So what do I know about Clarence Thomas?

Jack’s son and Clarence’s son went to the same school. The parents were holding a fundraiser, Jack was honchoing some activities.

Clarence comes up, says, “I’m volunteering. What do you need right now?”

Jack says he could use five bags of ice.

Clarence says, “It’s coming,” and disappears.

A short time later he trots in with five bags of ice.

Jack says, “Give me your receipt, and I’ll get you reimbursed.” Clarence gives Jack the same look Jack would have shot at someone who offered to reimburse him an incidental expense at a fundraiser.

Add that to the book and it’s everything I need to know about Clarence Thomas.

If you’re looking to feel better about being a human being, go read My Grandfather’s Son.

I Liked Him Better Before I Met Him

Introducing two business owners, I made an effort with each to explain why I liked the other person and what value I thought they could provide each other.

I did not attend their meeting. However when I asked each one a few days later how the meeting had gone, they each said the same thing...

I liked him better before I met him.

A meditation on the value of teeing up someone and then the requirement for living up to advance billing. 

Video: I Liked Him Better Before I Met Him

Seagull Collaboration

In a recent post What Happened To The Management Pyramid? I alleged Seagull Management occurred when someone comes in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then flies off, leaving a lot of heat and no light.

A faithful reader one-upped me with the more modern Seagull Collaboration, where some manager of dubious provenance comes in, begs for input, craps all over the input, then leaves in a high dudgeon (you hope) while the project wallows with no forward motion.

Amazing what you can learn from blog readers!

Open or Complete?

A man is incomplete until he is married. After that, he is finished. - Zsa Zsa Gabor

For the last five years I have been trying to understand the tension between enterprise or proprietary development and open source development. A prominent example has been the competition between the iPhone and the Android operating system.

When it first came out, Android was pretty clunky, and wireless carriers were adding crapware and strange “custom” components to inflate airtime billing. By contrast, the iPhone was practically perfect, the realization of Steve Jobs vision of a smartphone. With an iPhone, you just power it up and start using it.

iPhone was the early smartphone leader, transforming mobile communication. We were entering the future!

Today, by what I read, there are more Android phones than iPhones sold every day, made possible by the incredible leverage of the open source model.

Twenty years ago the lunatic fringe was espousing open source, while level headed types were installing and using “enterprise software.”

Eric Raymond wrote and released The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1992. CatB explains how open source was invented and what will happen as open source is adopted. CatB had been read by millions before it was published by O’Reilly in 2010.

Think about that. The book followed the inverse of the normal (at the time) publication model, becoming a commercial success after millions read it.

That outlier becomes even more significant when you consider what has happened to the traditional publication model over the last twenty years.

This week I had an opportunity to attend the Google IO developer’s forum. No, I didn’t go to the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Are you nuts?

I walked over to Google’s downtown DC office for a livestream of two days with some buds from the Google Developer Group DC “GeeDogDeeCee”.

I saw a cascade of new projects and opportunities. What I realized was that as impressive as they were, they weren’t finished. They are just beginning.

Users are going to customize the rich opportunities created by Google to make their lives better and more efficient. What we saw was amazing, including what technology veteran Steven J Vaughn-Nichols calls “Best Tech Demo ever.”

Now the work that will change our world begins. Once we imagine something we want to build, we change our work processes to take advantage of it.

For me, the new Events capability, where Google Plus, Docs, YouTube and other products combine to provide a better virtual experience, is going to change my world. First Events explanation, go to 1:18:00. It’s going to change how we produce and chronicle events, training, all kinds of virtual events.

I would rather read a transcript than watch most videos. A single camera and doubtful audio are boring.

However, when Buffalo Springfield played the Bridge School Concert in 2011, I spent an hour watching a half dozen audience videos. At the party after Day One of Google IO 2012, participants posted over 13,000 photos.

A client asked me how I would keep control of a presentation participants can enrich? I would rather have people spend time following material that interests them than my direction. They will get more from the experience.

I am continually being delighted by reader comments on blogs, especially to my own posts. Technology is enabling crowdsourced learning.

The night after the first session, Fred Wilson, A VC in NY started a project to apply the new file translation capabilities of Google Drive from Microsoft documents to open source documents. Fred hasn’t been a programmer for many years, but he’s willing to hack the Google ecosystem to create an important benefit.

That’s what I think the real strength of open source. Sure, we have guys like Bob Hancock, who at last count was a fluent programmer in 19 languages. But the best thing he showed me was when he used his Google Plus Page as the start point for his presentations.

Pamela Fox another Google presenter did the same thing, and shortly after, so did Jack and Dick. R & D is research and duplicate.

Early on, I showed Jack my Google profile (the predecessor to Google Plus). He was impressed, said it was the best use of web real estate he had seen. That wasn’t idle chatter.

At the time we had built and continue to maintain over a half dozen Google blogs and websites. We’re hardly professional geeks...and the work gets done.

The strength of open source is collaboration, from the very good to the very new, and everyone is getting all the value they can stand.

Joe Shumard went out a bought an Android phone a couple of years ago. He runs several Alexandria civic projects on Google Docs and Google websites he has built. He’s a banker, not a programmer.

Two weeks after he bought his Droid he gave me an hour demonstration of how he had changed it to make it do what he wanted. His tutor had been the Google search box, and the result was really slick, better than either of us had ever had on a phone previously.

If you can imagine it and then work at it, you can have it.

The old paradigm, It’s OK to compute as long as you have a qualified expert on retainer has been replaced by a new paradigm, Go ahead, you probably won’t break the internet today.

Open source will win because it supplies what the user wants bad enough to create. That and several million cooperative hackers provide an inventory where someone is working on what you need.

Reminds me of the story of Many Hands, the Native American electrician/marketer out there on the reservation. On the side of his pickup he’d written, Many Hands Makes The Light Work!

Do something.