Merger in the First Degree (and 2nd and 3rd)

The SIKM Boston group convened last week for a lively workshopping session. There was lots of discussion and very little discussion on what to discuss. The focus? What to do when peering straight into the inscrutable eyes of Chess Piece Face. Yes. we're talking about takeovers of the most alien kind across the hostility spectrum. I especially liked the idea that the discussion gravitated to source conjugation:

* First degree: what can I do unilaterally to keep my job?
* Second degree: what can I do to convince you?
* Third degree: how would the disinterested consultant organization counsel their acquirer-client?

The premise starts not with the pieces but the game board. The game we're playing is capitalism and the rules are by, for, and to the owners of capital. Us custodians, gardeners, farmers, bodyguards, and gatekeepers must take in a deep breath and a full step back from our cubes and Outlook boxes at the dawn of a newly waking work day, knowing that the lights may already be turned off.

To be on board is to be prepared to jump ship once the manifesto has passed from one shipping magnet to the next. The crew, however, is not part of the negotiation or even the inventory. To miss that reality is to be held hostage to our own lethargy and inflated sense of importance. Unlike the good captain, we can't go down with the ship. It's not our board to begin with.

Part of the ship-jumping drill is conducted in the self-renewal of our daily vows (including refresher swimming lessons). From the first degree perspective Kate Pugh recommends declaring "a major" to resist being tagged as cargo (overhead). In the consolidations to come it helps to eclipse counterpart "majors" by playing the "best practices" hand in trying to stave off commodity status and marginalization. I concede that the part about personal branding and sucking up to the brigadier smacks of a Fast Company survival guide written by that same doomed captain after the life boats have left for good. Animal magnetism is what seals deals and wins business. There are limits, however, to personal charisma outside the school of self-preservation.

The options seem more leveragable in the second degree where self-declared majors can double as brokers for the teams they've assisted and the projects they've led. One of the more thoughtful second degree contributions to our meeting came from Dave Wallace who spoke in terms of what farmers provide hunters in acquisition terms that is also certain not to show up on a balance sheet:

"How do you reward firefighters for the fires that never happen? he asks. "How can you document that demonstrated ability to diffuse the crises?"

Here it helps to take a page out of Kate's playbook for connecting personal outputs to winning outcomes by elevating those contributions to revenue-generating status. Dave was also quick to address the match-ups and shake-outs around the re-ordering of org charts: who is your equivalent in the new organization? Do they have a higher title, a lower salary band? What expectations do they answer to and what problems do they resolve?"

The third degree is about the ultimate out-of-body merger drama. The active disinterest that speaks to the dispassionate observance for how outsiders advise their conquering clients to carve out the crown jewels of the predatory spoils. Beyond the aggressive cost-cutting that finds a home in bull and bear markets alike there is the need to safeguard the knowledge flows that drive the sales cycles -- not just the profit centers they flow to. I've always carried this implicit understanding with the type A bosses I've supported in their sales efforts. KMA's Mike Gilronan was incredulous how under the radar this realization lands on the operational side: "Some non-revenue-bearing folks don't get it -- How do we justify ourselves?" This is not a rhetorical question to Mike: "Have you ever been held to a quota?"

That unwritten contract trades knowledge flows in the form of competitive intelligence, task-based search results, and accelerated proposal generation for job security. Pure and simple. The easiest way to demonstrate this systemically to an outsider.

That's where the appeal of an enterprisewide tool like SharePoint can play to a farmer's advantage. There's nothing a hunter-gatherer likes better than the map to the treasure -- especially if it spares them any unnecessary turf battles or homegrown improvised explosives designed to blow-up in their faces. That's the beauty of what Chris Rivinus described in my KMWorld Reality Series as the Rorschach test-like properties of SharePoint.

It's a system designed to unify and synchronize all the moving pieces -- prized assets and headcounts alike. Flush the red dye of a bloodless acquisition coup through the SharePoint plumbing and you'll see where the information travels through the anatomical heart of the enterprise. Conversely you'll see the blockages too -- where gangrene is setting into the outer corporate limbs because of information-hoarding, silo-keepers, and other forms of fear, loathing, and clog-hardening lethargy.

Here's a conversation that an acquisition leader and a SharePoint manager can have. It's not "take me to your leader." It's more like the building inspector flushing the pipes to show the rust in the plumbing. That's the kind of knowledge that transcends where the bones are buried and speaks to where the integration needs to happen -- hint: it lies below the financial reporting radar.

Sadie Van Buren referenced the ultimate third degree solution based on a New York City-based copy editor who joined Google Adsense and gamed the vanity results. Every time the agency googled itself it got the gamer's resume. He got his choice of offers.

Merger in the First Degree (and 2nd and 3rd)

The SIKM Boston group convened last week for a lively workshopping session. There was lots of discussion and very little discussion on what to discuss. The focus? What to do when peering straight into the inscrutable eyes of Chess Piece Face. Yes. we're talking about takeovers of the most alien kind across the hostility spectrum. I especially liked the idea that the discussion gravitated to source conjugation:

* First degree: what can I do unilaterally to keep my job?
* Second degree: what can I do to convince you?
* Third degree: how would the disinterested consultant organization counsel their acquirer-client?

The premise starts not with the pieces but the game board. The game we're playing is capitalism and the rules are by, for, and to the owners of capital. Us custodians, gardeners, farmers, bodyguards, and gatekeepers must take in a deep breath and a full step back from our cubes and Outlook boxes at the dawn of a newly waking work day, knowing that the lights may already be turned off.

To be on board is to be prepared to jump ship once the manifesto has passed from one shipping magnet to the next. The crew, however, is not part of the negotiation or even the inventory. To miss that reality is to be held hostage to our own lethargy and inflated sense of importance. Unlike the good captain, we can't go down with the ship. It's not our board to begin with.

Part of the ship-jumping drill is conducted in the self-renewal of our daily vows (including refresher swimming lessons). From the first degree perspective Kate Pugh recommends declaring "a major" to resist being tagged as cargo (overhead). In the consolidations to come it helps to eclipse counterpart "majors" by playing the "best practices" hand in trying to stave off commodity status and marginalization. I concede that the part about personal branding and sucking up to the brigadier smacks of a Fast Company survival guide written by that same doomed captain after the life boats have left for good. Animal magnetism is what seals deals and wins business. There are limits, however, to personal charisma outside the school of self-preservation.

The options seem more leveragable in the second degree where self-declared majors can double as brokers for the teams they've assisted and the projects they've led. One of the more thoughtful second degree contributions to our meeting came from Dave Wallace who spoke in terms of what farmers provide hunters in acquisition terms that is also certain not to show up on a balance sheet:

"How do you reward firefighters for the fires that never happen? he asks. "How can you document that demonstrated ability to diffuse the crises?"

Here it helps to take a page out of Kate's playbook for connecting personal outputs to winning outcomes by elevating those contributions to revenue-generating status. Dave was also quick to address the match-ups and shake-outs around the re-ordering of org charts: who is your equivalent in the new organization? Do they have a higher title, a lower salary band? What expectations do they answer to and what problems do they resolve?"

The third degree is about the ultimate out-of-body merger drama. The active disinterest that speaks to the dispassionate observance for how outsiders advise their conquering clients to carve out the crown jewels of the predatory spoils. Beyond the aggressive cost-cutting that finds a home in bull and bear markets alike there is the need to safeguard the knowledge flows that drive the sales cycles -- not just the profit centers they flow to. I've always carried this implicit understanding with the type A bosses I've supported in their sales efforts. KMA's Mike Gilronan was incredulous how under the radar this realization lands on the operational side: "Some non-revenue-bearing folks don't get it -- How do we justify ourselves?" This is not a rhetorical question to Mike: "Have you ever been held to a quota?"

That unwritten contract trades knowledge flows in the form of competitive intelligence, task-based search results, and accelerated proposal generation for job security. Pure and simple. The easiest way to demonstrate this systemically to an outsider.

That's where the appeal of an enterprisewide tool like SharePoint can play to a farmer's advantage. There's nothing a hunter-gatherer likes better than the map to the treasure -- especially if it spares them any unnecessary turf battles or homegrown improvised explosives designed to blow-up in their faces. That's the beauty of what Chris Rivinus described in my KMWorld Reality Series as the Rorschach test-like properties of SharePoint.

It's a system designed to unify and synchronize all the moving pieces -- prized assets and headcounts alike. Flush the red dye of a bloodless acquisition coup through the SharePoint plumbing and you'll see where the information travels through the anatomical heart of the enterprise. Conversely you'll see the blockages too -- where gangrene is setting into the outer corporate limbs because of information-hoarding, silo-keepers, and other forms of fear, loathing, and clog-hardening lethargy.

Here's a conversation that an acquisition leader and a SharePoint manager can have. It's not "take me to your leader." It's more like the building inspector flushing the pipes to show the rust in the plumbing. That's the kind of knowledge that transcends where the bones are buried and speaks to where the integration needs to happen -- hint: it lies below the financial reporting radar.

Sadie Van Buren referenced the ultimate third degree solution based on a New York City-based copy editor who joined Google Adsense and gamed the vanity results. Every time the agency googled itself it got the gamer's resume. He got his choice of offers.

Fan of Inevitability

I know that information management is my vocational calling. I know this because whenever I communicate its impact I can talk to any related topic, wander off on a tangent, and circle back to the central premise, helping students, colleagues, and friends become better managers of their own information domains.

Nobody plotted this path for me. I did not apprentice in an information factory. My father was not a voting member of the Information Manager's Guild. I started reading newspapers when I was five and I knew that I was more productive outside of class by the time I was eight. But I had no idea what the name of the place was where passion and practicality coincided to form the small, affirming patch of understanding that seeds and nurtures the teaching, writing, and collaboration (all are gifts I have coming and going).

This mental universe has a new physical home which is in some respects not new at all. My son and I have stayed weekends together with our extended Hadley family of Andy and Michele Morris-Friedman. Prior to that Pioneer Valley was the rescue that harbored an escape from Farmageddon -- an oddly-conceived plot in the early nineties to start a family in deepest Appalachia on the backs of a goatherd, my son's mother's homespun talents, and a license to distribute M.A.I.D. -- Marketing Analysis and Information Database -- from Atlanta to the RTP ("Research Triangle Park").

The bet on the farm lost, the marriage eventually failed, and my son was raised by his mom in Greenfield. But even after I left Western Mass for a new love and the prosperity of Boston I still felt rooted to the rich, pastoral hills and gulches of the happy valley. An improbable confluence of events has hastened my return and so too has the sense that being lost is a good feeling when it can only lead to a sharper cut over and more beauty and the unforeseen intersection of two meandering roads.

That's what I remember from my first spring semester at Hampshire College back in 1981. Everyone had gone home for spring break except my friends Steven Marcus (then Weiner) and Michael Schwarz. We tooled around in Steven's car in a constant state of intentional wander-tripping, stumbling into the blossoming color burst of back roads that never failed to lead us back from where we came. I could not know at 19 that this was home with ancestral certainty any more than I could have told you that what I wanted to be when I grew up was the person I was to become.

The arc of personal history pulls these transitional days into the keep and trash piles. We make all the right moves for all the wrong reasons. We curse the punishing fury of changes beyond our controls and then we see the shiny linings wear down the festering stain. We pin down our lifelong hopes long enough to create perfections in our miniature fortresses, policed by our own inflated sense of control. But then the concrete castles of our own creation crumble because the virtues from our former neighborhoods don't beat a path to our newly gated doors. Instead of shedding some street noise or outgrowing a partner, we find our nests inhabited by squirrels. Who invited them?

Regardless of how tortured the logic or how unforeseen the consequences the consummate mover is an expert at what to keep -- if not what to keep out. One of the pleasures of dragging your artifacts from one bubble-wrap unraveling to the next reel of packing tape is that you are the curator and vessel for the beauty that your loved ones have brought into this world. There is never enough wall or floor space to hold the museum of treasures that only seem to resurface in the belly of a rented van. Conversely the shedding of ancient tax returns and other vestiges and placeholders is a rapture worthy of a greatest hits release party. After the landfill leaves town I find myself polishing and sparkling my crystal ball binoculars in the most myopic of ways. Exhibit A: rejection notice for Mastercard/Visa payment services dated April 21, 1993 from a customer service rep with the First Commercial Bank in Burnsville, NC:

"... [A]fter speaking with you I called a contact with our merchant company. She did some research and has informed me that the type of business you're in is prohibited. I understand that the reason this type of business is prohibited is because it is not tangible."

The cost of moving to Bumfuck? Having our possessions lost in transit by Mayflower Moving Co., fully razed / renovated barn, animal husbanding for dozens of livestock, including goats, sheep, bovine; taking an ill-suited job and driving tens of thousands of miles in a puke green Datsun pick-up for sales appointments...

The cost of not being able to bill for my information management services as a credit transaction? Priceless.

All I know is that if the pilgrims had hired Mayflower our beloved Bay Colony might have remained inhabited by darker-skinned people with lighter footprints. I am home again in Amherst and time can now care for itself.

Fan of Inevitability

I know that information management is my vocational calling. I know this because whenever I communicate its impact I can talk to any related topic, wander off on a tangent, and circle back to the central premise, helping students, colleagues, and friends become better managers of their own information domains.

Nobody plotted this path for me. I did not apprentice in an information factory. My father was not a voting member of the Information Manager's Guild. I started reading newspapers when I was five and I knew that I was more productive outside of class by the time I was eight. But I had no idea what the name of the place was where passion and practicality coincided to form the small, affirming patch of understanding that seeds and nurtures the teaching, writing, and collaboration (all are gifts I have coming and going).

This mental universe has a new physical home which is in some respects not new at all. My son and I have stayed weekends together with our extended Hadley family of Andy and Michele Morris-Friedman. Prior to that Pioneer Valley was the rescue that harbored an escape from Farmageddon -- an oddly-conceived plot in the early nineties to start a family in deepest Appalachia on the backs of a goatherd, my son's mother's homespun talents, and a license to distribute M.A.I.D. -- Marketing Analysis and Information Database -- from Atlanta to the RTP ("Research Triangle Park").

The bet on the farm lost, the marriage eventually failed, and my son was raised by his mom in Greenfield. But even after I left Western Mass for a new love and the prosperity of Boston I still felt rooted to the rich, pastoral hills and gulches of the happy valley. An improbable confluence of events has hastened my return and so too has the sense that being lost is a good feeling when it can only lead to a sharper cut over and more beauty and the unforeseen intersection of two meandering roads.

That's what I remember from my first spring semester at Hampshire College back in 1981. Everyone had gone home for spring break except my friends Steven Marcus (then Weiner) and Michael Schwarz. We tooled around in Steven's car in a constant state of intentional wander-tripping, stumbling into the blossoming color burst of back roads that never failed to lead us back from where we came. I could not know at 19 that this was home with ancestral certainty any more than I could have told you that what I wanted to be when I grew up was the person I was to become.

The arc of personal history pulls these transitional days into the keep and trash piles. We make all the right moves for all the wrong reasons. We curse the punishing fury of changes beyond our controls and then we see the shiny linings wear down the festering stain. We pin down our lifelong hopes long enough to create perfections in our miniature fortresses, policed by our own inflated sense of control. But then the concrete castles of our own creation crumble because the virtues from our former neighborhoods don't beat a path to our newly gated doors. Instead of shedding some street noise or outgrowing a partner, we find our nests inhabited by squirrels. Who invited them?

Regardless of how tortured the logic or how unforeseen the consequences the consummate mover is an expert at what to keep -- if not what to keep out. One of the pleasures of dragging your artifacts from one bubble-wrap unraveling to the next reel of packing tape is that you are the curator and vessel for the beauty that your loved ones have brought into this world. There is never enough wall or floor space to hold the museum of treasures that only seem to resurface in the belly of a rented van. Conversely the shedding of ancient tax returns and other vestiges and placeholders is a rapture worthy of a greatest hits release party. After the landfill leaves town I find myself polishing and sparkling my crystal ball binoculars in the most myopic of ways. Exhibit A: rejection notice for Mastercard/Visa payment services dated April 21, 1993 from a customer service rep with the First Commercial Bank in Burnsville, NC:

"... [A]fter speaking with you I called a contact with our merchant company. She did some research and has informed me that the type of business you're in is prohibited. I understand that the reason this type of business is prohibited is because it is not tangible."

The cost of moving to Bumfuck? Having our possessions lost in transit by Mayflower Moving Co., fully razed / renovated barn, animal husbanding for dozens of livestock, including goats, sheep, bovine; taking an ill-suited job and driving tens of thousands of miles in a puke green Datsun pick-up for sales appointments...

The cost of not being able to bill for my information management services as a credit transaction? Priceless.

All I know is that if the pilgrims had hired Mayflower our beloved Bay Colony might have remained inhabited by darker-skinned people with lighter footprints. I am home again in Amherst and time can now care for itself.

Who'll be the Next in Line?

I like to think that I can absorb (and reappropriate) large, cavernous pockets of unclaimed time. I remember a former relation who used to lament the loss of an entire day if I arrived 15 minutes late for an appointment. I never had much empathy -- not because being late is excusable but because these time bubbles float to the top of everyone's surface. Adjusting to unscheduled stoppages and startages is all part of the flow. If you go with it you're a zen master. But if you fight against it you're overestimating your gravitational voting rights. But you also miss the chance to choose the flow that can carry you back on track to your original course.

Surfers don't place "make-or-break" expectations on any one wave no matter how promising or powerful. The same can be said of unplanned layovers, power outages, or even twisted tendons and shattered bones. Our policies around unstructured time won't wish uncertainty away or render pain irrelevant. But it can add purpose and direction to the otherwise wasted inventory that bumper stickers label as "shit" happenings. One goal around this is to dive in and out of whatever I was working on before idleness grows inert. In an unplanned layover the impending stupor is dislodged by the clear-throated static of a boarding announcement delay:

* Oops -- we've got a mechanical malfunction in the braking system? I'll put a pedal to an article revision, nest a blurb, list out an argument, arrange a play list, or steal some whimsical fragment -- a random scatter shot of brainwaves on holiday.

* Argh -- someone snuck through security? I'll commiserate with the next flying stiff how this is the third time this month the works have gummed up without the benefit of a TSA announcement or assurance that our planes will remain stuck in the same formation as the passengers.

* Errr -- the new crew is still backlogged from the last flight? I've got stockpiles -- a Drs. office-full of back issues (purchased through unclaimed frequent flier miles...)

But there's one uncertainty that always seem to put my coping skills to the test. It's when to board or more precisely "who boards when" after the baby strollers, elderly folks, and loyalty members. It's not that I'm hankering to go on next. It's just that I need to know the order and that it reflects some reducible form of justification -- first come, first served tops my list. Everyone's small enough to go first. No one is too big to board last. How Marxist is that?

This need for order is so deeply ingrained that I won't wait at deli counters that don't supply numbered service tickets. OK -- that's a stretch. But even figuring out when it's my turn presupposes everyone else performs that collaboration in the same way. That assumption is a stretch that outruns any line where we know our numbers.

The social engineers at Southwestern Airlines have this figured all out. The folks stuck with the middle seats aren't necessarily the least frugal or the most obese but the one's who board last. Now that's justice. The folks who are on first are the first off. There are no seat assignments. Instead there is a boarding order where the A and B lines are separated by the $20 it takes to join the A list. And just like in childhood mythologies everyone knows "where they stand" and where they shall sit. Bravo, Southwest. The natural order of self-regulation is clear for takeoff.

Who'll be the Next in Line?

I like to think that I can absorb (and reappropriate) large, cavernous pockets of unclaimed time. I remember a former relation who used to lament the loss of an entire day if I arrived 15 minutes late for an appointment. I never had much empathy -- not because being late is excusable but because these time bubbles float to the top of everyone's surface. Adjusting to unscheduled stoppages and startages is all part of the flow. If you go with it you're a zen master. But if you fight against it you're overestimating your gravitational voting rights. But you also miss the chance to choose the flow that can carry you back on track to your original course.

Surfers don't place "make-or-break" expectations on any one wave no matter how promising or powerful. The same can be said of unplanned layovers, power outages, or even twisted tendons and shattered bones. Our policies around unstructured time won't wish uncertainty away or render pain irrelevant. But it can add purpose and direction to the otherwise wasted inventory that bumper stickers label as "shit" happenings. One goal around this is to dive in and out of whatever I was working on before idleness grows inert. In an unplanned layover the impending stupor is dislodged by the clear-throated static of a boarding announcement delay:

* Oops -- we've got a mechanical malfunction in the braking system? I'll put a pedal to an article revision, nest a blurb, list out an argument, arrange a play list, or steal some whimsical fragment -- a random scatter shot of brainwaves on holiday.

* Argh -- someone snuck through security? I'll commiserate with the next flying stiff how this is the third time this month the works have gummed up without the benefit of a TSA announcement or assurance that our planes will remain stuck in the same formation as the passengers.

* Errr -- the new crew is still backlogged from the last flight? I've got stockpiles -- a Drs. office-full of back issues (purchased through unclaimed frequent flier miles...)

But there's one uncertainty that always seem to put my coping skills to the test. It's when to board or more precisely "who boards when" after the baby strollers, elderly folks, and loyalty members. It's not that I'm hankering to go on next. It's just that I need to know the order and that it reflects some reducible form of justification -- first come, first served tops my list. Everyone's small enough to go first. No one is too big to board last. How Marxist is that?

This need for order is so deeply ingrained that I won't wait at deli counters that don't supply numbered service tickets. OK -- that's a stretch. But even figuring out when it's my turn presupposes everyone else performs that collaboration in the same way. That assumption is a stretch that outruns any line where we know our numbers.

The social engineers at Southwestern Airlines have this figured all out. The folks stuck with the middle seats aren't necessarily the least frugal or the most obese but the one's who board last. Now that's justice. The folks who are on first are the first off. There are no seat assignments. Instead there is a boarding order where the A and B lines are separated by the $20 it takes to join the A list. And just like in childhood mythologies everyone knows "where they stand" and where they shall sit. Bravo, Southwest. The natural order of self-regulation is clear for takeoff.