KM in the Jerkplace – Postmortem: Crossing the Knowledge Divide

(c) clashdaily.com

Installment Summary:  The series concludes with a reflection on the power of jerks and their confrontational relationship with us – the folks charged with transferring knowledge across cubicles, silos, business units, and generations of would-be collaborators. Those conflicts boil down to an irreconcilable difference between knowledge concentrators and distributors – a rift that favors coercion over dispersion. Ultimately the conflict cannot be resolved by placing knowledge in the corner office but by placing it in the corner of every change agent and meeting table across the organization.

crossing the KNOWLEDGE divide

Over the last seven installments we’ve visited four wildly diverging workplaces united by one thread besides a revenue model, a payroll, a services catalog, and a badging scanner at the front entrance – the decision to pay a smart person with the necessary blend of naiveté and self-confidence to include the term “knowledge” in their job title.

The arguments play out like this:

      Some organizations might say KM distills the essence of the meta-level inference: Who can plausibly oppose knowledge about knowledge?

    

         Who can argue with hiring smart people who consider ivy towers to be silos worth avoiding? Q: I wish we knew what we know? A: Hire a KM guy.

         Who can dispute the fact that the collective organizational brain is both overworked and underutilized – trapped in the hamster wheel of earning-one’s-keep justifications?

Beyond collaboration, efficiency, and shear speed-of-learning, KM is perceived as the bottomless cup of caffeinated process acceleration. It’s also looked at as a hedge against attrition as-in knowledge walking out the door. It’s a container of code; hence the fixation on system knowledge. And as the thesis of this blog series maintains, it’s a protection against the intellectual and emotional vandalism of jerks. That’s because it encourages reciprocity – not simply sharing for its own reward. It promotes transparency to gain trust. It codifies repeatable lessons so they don’t need to be relearned and so the successes they spawn can be reapplied. Is there really any place for jerk behavior to breed in such an empathic setting?

Well … yes.

The problem with this theory is that it crashes faster than the QA server entrusted with your gold-plated production assets. How is it that something that matches patterns as nimbly as it connects the strategic dots fold instantly at the jerk table? That is the looming doubt that shadows each ensuing KM program and the enterprise that failed to support it.

There are ways to fight the power. None of them land more than one separation degree from measurement. Measure the world in units of knowledge and …

·         No one suffers from an abundance of it.

·         If anything there’s a scarcity of it.

What would it take to close that deficit?

Knowledge Needs Know-How to Play Nice With Jerks

The hyphenated answer is know-how. There’s nothing sacred, value-based, or recoverable about knowledge in its static form. It’s a trophy piece – a collectible – until pressed into the service of problem-solving. What’s the most popular one-word definition of knowledge? It’s power. And we appreciate that before we even know what to do with our knowledge.

But here’s the rub. Information wants to be free and knowledge doesn’t aspire to anything. Power closes down dissent and debate. Knowledge is an open book. It’s a quality that many of us covet more than any capture-worthy material or ideal we could ever hope to possess. So here’s the question: How do we get from “free” to “power”? They’re not polar opposites but they’re not exactly complementary. 

Or are they?

If we work among peers who see knowledge as process, then aspirations like team-building, communities of excellence, and end-to-end transformations become a reality we create at work – a channel for reciprocity, a reward unto itself.

That transformation cannot be willed into operation through platitudes or imposed by knowledge czars looking to inflate their knowledge adoption metrics. If the organization sees knowledge as a destination, we’re sunk. Nothing corrupts the power of knowledge more absolutely than treating it like a product.

Closing Arguments

So what do we know about the split between knowledge hoarders and givers? We know that the battle is often a private one. The resolution isn’t decided by competency frameworks and social informatics. Mostly it boils down to proximity to power.

We know that impediments to pooling knowledge are rarely correlated to missing revenue targets. The intention of sharing is likelier to find its way to mission statements than actual boardroom conversation. Yet the transfer of knowledge impacts the downstream verdict on the ultimate workplace rationale: Are our employers anything more than the sum of our paystubs? From a KM perspective it’s not the size of the pay check where the answer lies. It’s an organization’s belief it holds the cards to its own fate.

Here’s now is the conclusion of the lessons learned from the jerkplace.

    6.       Don’t fetishize the look and feel

One of the great misuses of technology is that we get hung up on presentation over substance. Function follows form. We clean data without actually putting it to work. We don’t digest, absorb, or assimilate it into a series of actions or outcomes. That’s not to suggest we can’t have a pretty screen to tease the data patterns out of our work product. But most web design fixates on the interface – not on the interaction itself where the actual substance lives. It’s an uphill argument for KM folks who find themselves sequestered on intranet teams.

     7.       Show the how (and strive for imperfection)

There’s an endless supply of “what” matched with a finite number of “how.” The former is a near certain argue over definitions. The latter is an open invitation to gain interest, buy-in, and eventual leverage with your stakeholders. The difference can best be gauged as the distinction between the collecting of knowledge and the applying of know-how. That’s the cause-and-effect of operational KM. It’s not a static repository that requires data storage and system passwords. It’s a fluid transfer between practitioners trying to shorten the distance between the outcomes they desire and the actions required to trigger them. The imperfection of that process refers to the surprise that comes with the excitement of sharing – not a sure thing or an obvious answer but the corrections and adjustments necessary to match the demand for answers with a responsive supply of prior experience.

    8.       Never fall prey to the messenger’s ego

There is a bias in most news rooms that has little to do with your political bent and everything to do with your speed-to-market. Scooping the competition will not guarantee thoughtfulness or a responsive approach to the news you’re delivering. But it gives your audience the distinct impression of your connectedness to the news-making – even if you’re only collecting the dots and not actually connecting them. If this plays to a KMer advantage it’s that we’re arguing “why” this news flash is newsworthy. Not why it compromises the folks who may sit outside the news traveling circle. One example would be to say why we’re surprised and how it shifts our expectations as we take this new direction onboard with our earlier thinking.

    9.       Be the active observer

KMers are largely institutionalists. They see organizational struggles from the larger, shared perspective. They follow bottlenecks through to the boundaries of matrixed organizations where cross-functional incentives lag behind the need to think holistically. In such structures the interplay of internal divisions inspires uncontrolled layering, overlapping resources, and a lack of cohesion. Each of these shortcomings are sage opportunities for outside intervention. And from an insider view, the KMer is most poised to offer a more open alternative to these ingrained behaviors and parochial tendencies.   

    10.   Do not attempt to influence through threat-making

“OR ELSE …” is an argument that hangs itself when it comes to moving the needle that KM is supposed to thread and stitch into the fabric of how organizations: 1) coordinate internally, and 2) compete in the market. No one’s going to score points for helping the risk-averse to see the KM light or getting right with the knowledge gods. There are few punitive cards in play here, perhaps because there are few dedicated KM departments and even fewer protected from the rigors of quarterly profit-taking. Most KM influence is vested in accentuating the positive impacts of adoption – not the negative consequences of inaction. Regrettably, inaction is referred to life before KM; unfortunate because “before” transitions to “after” if those pilot programs aren’t more widely established.

    11.   11^th Commandment – Know Thy Jerk

         Executive: insecure or boorish?
You would think that the arrival of executive status would usher away the insecurities which drive the promotional cycle. However, this romantic notion cools quickly once our selective company is on the hot seat for timely, specific results.

         Supervisor: protective or insular?
It would seem that one’s immediate superior is the most prevalent command chain positioning for picking fights of a rigged nature or the pulling of rank in the absence of group consensus. Look to expand the stakeholder pool when making the boss look good means being set up to fail by same boss. 

        Peer: controlling or off-the-handle? 
One could easily assume that peer relations inhabit neutral territory and not natural breeding grounds for jerkiness. Maintain the status quo of “doing more with less” is the common mantra of the mid-level manager and it behooves them to cooperate in support of this implicit understanding.

            Subordinate: passive-aggressive or risk averse?

      One might conclude that incalcitrant, immovable forces are not within province of the lower rungs of the pecking order. One could easily equate the junior status of the less experienced staff members as a more exploratory approach to conventional problem-solving. Maybe they tinker with technologies that intimidate their elders or a devil-may-care attitude for attacking chronic or seemingly intractable tech-leaning workplace glitches that KM is expected to resolve.

KM In the Jerkplace: Postmortem – Social Management in the Knowledge Media

Postmortem: Social Management in the Knowledge Media

(c) cybermancy.com/

Installment Summary:  We take stock of the flying elbows around the management table and find that much of the turf wars between KM and jerks are seeded by a series of pre-existing conditions. They include a fixation on security, gamification, and social media. 

Powering Down on Knowledge

Since no serious student of politics (geopolitical, office or otherwise) disputes the proposition that knowledge is power we will start our jerkplace postmortem with a less traveled corollary:

Power in its purest, undiluted form is an awesome aphrodisiac.

Agree with that logic and no wonder we're on the path to knowledge as our habitual gateway drug. Being compensated on the managing of knowledge, it's hard to deny ...

1. The plummeting price of storage
2. The proliferation of isolated sources
3. The congealing spaghetti of passwords slamming the doors to those silo-prone disconnections

But maybe the biggest change in the knowledge calculation is the business value placed on the internal pack behavior that's swelling the newsfeeds across our intranets.

The Power Hungry Chow Down at the Newsfeed Trough

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgment passing for a browser-contained experience. Emoticons, hashtags, likes ... All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that justification is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter. And it's not just a matter of mounting repositories or the virtual barbed wire we place around them.

No serious advancing of knowledge management can occur without the sober realization that social media is not some temporary distraction from tackling the real KM work. It's a daunting impediment to the collaboration we were hired to promote and capture. That’s not because ...

• The power hungry are busy accruing virtual badges (confirming a ravenous appetite for collegial know-how)
• Social media lowers the barriers to collaboration and who needs KM anyhow?
• You blocked me from reading your newsfeed

It’s that social media has lowered the knowledge bar to the point where challenging ideas are regarded as provocations. On social media terms that reckoning could be described as:

1. An insatiable need for praise,
2. The nagging doubt that compliments are insincere attempts to curry favor, or
3.  That it’s the world of ideas that are the true distractions.

It’s our outsized personalities that must be privileged before we address any demands on our collective expertise for solving problems.

Yikes.  

No Country for Honest Disagreements

I'm talking about a world where we placate our taciturn cousins with friended status while narrow-casting our way clear of a potential firestorm. The irony is that our sincerity buttons are being pushed by the same publishing features that shield us from the need to listen to, much less negotiate points of contention among conflicting opinions. I'm not suggesting that the foundational aims of KM are at risk the moment we deploy Yammer, Jive, or some other virtual water cooler for keeping our colleagues in the organizational loop:

• Oversharing is not the same thing as over-collaborating.
• TMI ("Too Much Information") is not the same thing as running a surplus of collective know-how. 

The rub is that keeping up our social appearances runs the risk not only of diluting findable content but pushes the need to produce, host, and maintain high quality content off the home page and into a sea of dead links and decommissioned servers. And before we're left debating whether humans are even capable of rationalizing through the back stacks of organizational sense-making, consider this. There is a jerk willing and able to...

1) Affix their jerk signature to a working definition of obsolescence – whatever got built before it faced the turnaround artistry of their wrecking balls.

2) Sandbag the wheels of change with so much process that even the option of deleting a non-functional site is an open invitation to paralysis creep.

The Knowledge Management Code of Practice: Takeaways 1-5

It’s been five years since the termination of System Wisdom. In that time I’ve worked at four knowledge-starved organizations. In each case they all held to the theoretical justification for hosting a knowledge function and failed to realize the benefits for doing so. The lessons I draw from these otherwise divergent enterprises is the real and lasting damage done by individual jerks. At each management level jerks sabotaged the focus, structure, and cooperation needed to operationalize the capture and transfer of know-how between communities and individual practitioners.

While I’m humbled by my own track record of working with these challenging colleagues, these mixed successes only reinforce the fundamental takeaways from the seven years of KM plenty at System Wisdom that preceded the current diaspora.

Here then are ten ways to that KM professionals can work through, around, in-between, and ultimately past the drain on collective energies from dealing with jerks.

   1.       Be a credible ambassador 

Be the group lead from the department of understanding. Credibility needs the impartiality of detachment to be both truthful and non-threatening. Don’t be vested in the mercurial personality or the following of tomorrow’s temporary mantra. Credibility is enhanced by a single-minded focus on moving the community needle into positive territory. That territory needs to be clear of conventional performance indicators. It’s not about the counting of “stuff.” KM is not measured by the composite sum of its parts. It’s not drawn to or rewarded by the appeal for shinier screens. And KM credibility doesn’t play well with budgetary authority or blanket justifications for maintaining dormant assets and inventories.

   2.       Operationalize the good of the group

Keep a maniacal pulse on the transfer points – be it via email threads, project retrospectives, attendance at user forums, or colleagues queuing for assistance in a request list. There are a surprising lack of analytics associated with knowledge-on-demand. There are even fewer for connecting that demand to the pipeline that this transfer point signifies. Knowledge managers are not gatekeepers or coders or subject matter experts so much as brokers between knowledge demand and content supply. Formulating that equation not only heightens awareness about resources but helps unblock the back channels where informal networks prosper but where transparency can move the entire community forward.

   3.       Metricize the un-trackables

Like we said, you will undermine your credibility if your knowledge budget comes down to the non-value-bearing cost of carrying stuff: software licenses, market research, travel expenses. They’re all one-way tickets to the most leading of all the cost questions – you can’t afford the freight if you have to ask the price. The value worthy of capture lies in the quality of the cohesion in the teams we support. The better the chemistry, the more interchangeable the pieces. The more dynamic the knowledge transfer within the community, the more chances to capture those transfer points. That’s where KM’s fluid nature is no longer seen as a nice-to-have but a critical competence for channeling the organization’s resources to the right challenges and opportunities.

   4.       Give everyone a seat at the table (and rent a big table)

Nothing rings more soundly in theory and half-baked in practice than the notion of open access. While everyone gets and agrees that privileged information needs to be padlocked there’s not much consensus around what constitutes the information commons – that sweet spot where all organizational boats are lifted by a single point of access. An effective KM program sets up a governance process where you know where you stand from the get-default-go, i.e. everyone can see everything unless it’s a case of A, B, or C. Delaying the process is an invitation to a convoluted rules that are prone to change based on revolving sets of rule-makers. Do you have rule-makers with exclusive sights on rules only they can stamp their signatures on? All the more reason for open access.

   5.       Call the bluff of exclusionism

Many organizations are becoming less open – even to themselves. How else to explain the extenuating nature of security sprawl – that advancing premise that information is foremost to be protected, no matter how benign its nature.

Hence, open site access – once the default setting of an organization’s communities -- is now an open access question. These increasing boundaries to access have their bad actors. But these are not the likely boundary-inducing suspects. This is not about cavorting, or lording, or even hoarding information for personal betterment. Pure and simple it’s about trust in the system and delivering on a consistent user experience.

So what’s an inconsistent one?

How about being sent the link that leads nowhere. Being sent the link to sites you can’t access typically means the site owner’s moved on or that the administrator’s overmatched. Pretty benign barriers. The problem is that a KM-centric view of information-sharing requires a level of intentionality and upkeep that eclipses the awareness and resource levels of most intranet site teams, run by folks whose primary role has zilcho to do with managing knowledge.

One key takeaway for KMers is to couch the care and feeding of company intranets in terms of what’s worth recognizing by the wider organization – much of this HR-centric.

Next week: The lessons keep learning with takeaways 6-10.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Knowledge Management in the Jerkplace

Is Knowledge Capital Our Most Prized Asset and …

Do Knowledge Guys Finish Last?

(c) http://www.intelligentdialogue.com

An article last summer in The Atlantic brings refinement, nuance, and dynamics of this most familiar dichotomy:

• It’s a constant in any workplace, registering on performance reviews in all shades of documentation.
• It bubbles 24/7 just below the water cooler surface. It’s the leading age-old management question, the equivalent of what makes for a good marriage.

I’m talking of course from the safety of my hard hat inside the office park construction zone. The sign on the fence reads: Caution: Jerks at Work.

My interest in this sore, fascinating subject is both personal and professional. I don’t just mean in terms of who I work with and the residual impact on career. I mean what I chose as my career path. Knowledge Management or “KM” and its success or failure to my employers depends on its practitioners: (1) not being pulled into the jerk zone, and (2) enabling our colleagues to achieve the same.

The idea is that KM is supposed to organize experience in a shareable way so that it pays to be a generous colleague and that jerk behavior becomes more of a career limiting move for the majority of jerk practitioners.

After all, managing knowledge is an abstraction made employable by long-accepted information age assumptions. That means brains-over-brawn in the knowledge-is-power world of …

1.       Reciprocating social networks,

2.       No one knowing as much as everyone, and

3.       Two-way dialog that produces informed bottom-up decisions.

Knowledge is also the single most reducible currency of what the consulting industry converts into credit-claiming revenue. Whether that interaction is a launch cycle, a maintenance plan, or a fire sale, it takes a knowledge exchange to swing the forces of change in the client's favor.

For all my blind spots, skill deficits, and impatience with jerks, I have learned with time to trade on knowledge currency. That means shopping the benefits of collaborations enriched by expedient on-boarding, accelerated proposal-making, and the simple math of repurposing documents from pitch decks to code snippets. In management ranks reusable assets have come to mean the frameworks derived from a firm’s core IP – the secret sauce promoted in the books, symposia, and articles in places that consider the trade-offs of corporate jerks. Regardless of the channel, these artifacts are brandable as knowledge products – stamped by the elder statesmen and their high-flying heir apparents.

With each new position and employer however a recurring wrinkle began running outside this formula. A pattern emerged that marginalized the traditional arguments for hiring knowledge-dedicated staff. This new twist even challenged whether the benefits for adopting KM were better delivered by full-time employees or through project-based contractors. Buoyed by the intrinsic ease of Google, limitless storage, and the self-organizing allure of social media, many organizations began to question the need even for contractors. Why not pass those benefits directly onto those knowledge-consuming elites? Hey, anyone with a browser is in constant pursuit of faster, better, cheaper content. 

Why hire intermediaries who don’t …

1. Produce it,
2. Administer the hardware, or
3. Bill their time back to clients?

In this new calculation either a knowledge system is rolling out or a bright, unbillable knowledge manager is shipping out ahead of it. That “IT horse” before the “knowledge cart” aptly describes the three organizations I’ve joined and left in a recent three year cycle of knowledge roulette. In each case those ingrained virtues of collaboration and community bonds of knowledge sharing took a backseat to the rollout of the knowledge system. 

Teasing out leverage-worthy project cases, how they’re socialized, and building buy-in for the ways to organize them was reduced to background noise. In the foreground lie the three dominant IT project markers known as: (a) DEV, (b) QA, and (c) PROD – as in production where the knowledge cart goes on full display. 

Knowledge Systems: Art or Artifice?

The fact that the experiential nature of knowledge-sharing has been sandbagged by deployment priorities suggests that the system is no longer a means to an ends. It is the destination for the funding organization and the termination point for the deployment team. Either it’s launched and can care and feed itself or never gets off the ground in the first place. If four knowledge jobs in four years is any indication, the knowledge currency I traded on in the past is buying a lot fewer believers. Facilitating the transfer of knowledge between learning-inclined colleagues has gone from the foundational goal of KM to an afterthought of system implementation.

Now I’m not saying the lights have dimmed on the long view that calls for the intentional transfer of knowledge as a practicing discipline and competitive advantage. What I am saying is that knowledge is an enabler of a process. It is not “the promised land” – even for the most community-minded or altruistic of those knowledge-seeking intentions. No greater proof of this exists with the notion that dogged me through those four years in the KM weeds: that I was hired to carve a well-tended knowledge garden out of a sprawling and unruly thicket of information. In each of these cases knowledge represented “a system” and the knowledge system was a destination – a container of the great organizational learnings that could be tapped regardless of …

·         The lesson being drawn

·         The question being asked,

·         The lesson being modeled, or

·         The conclusions being drawn.

I was a party to these flawed understandings. It is too easy to blame them on the coercions of jerks. What makes the takeaways from these fallacies most instructive is that I too was culpable. I contributed to the confusion that formed when the system failed to hold the expectations of those counting on it.

Knowledge Stock and Trade

Metadata, search, and taxonomy form the holy trinity of knowledge system deployments. These are the tools of the knowledge trade. Most KM professionals I know have a penchant organizing virtual assets. But it’s more than classifying documents. Often it’s reshuffling a jumble of pages, images, links, site roots, and file folders that offer little more than a time stamp and a cryptic file name to determine its value, connection to the past, or merit for preserving it. In most cases the knowledge has outlived its creators or the explanatory power of sense-making artifacts. The KM manager becomes a forensics analyst – an archivist who doesn’t just collect the pieces but threads them into a narrative which justifies all the learnings and rationales that were reduced to rubble and nonsense:

·         In the aftermath of a hasty merger,

·         A rash and wholesale restructuring of a former division, or

·         The marginalizing of assets that were never properly curated in the first place.

Now try finding these pattern-matching challenges in the outcomes of the rollout. The truth is that there’s nothing cultural, organic, or people-based about it. The further off schedule or offline the production system slides, the more on-the-line the KM manager becomes for the collateral damage of bringing that much touted knowledge system into creation. 

* * *

For the remainder of the Jerkplace series I will put this higher level summation into a series of nine installments: 

1. Each post will cover my last four positions. 
2. Each a failed attempt to build and facilitate three distinct cultures of knowledge. 
3. Each its own climate of uncertainty, suspicion, and a nominal reserve of cooperation, compromised by the actions of knowledge jerks. 

In each installment I will demonstrate the conditions that jeopardized the adoption of the knowledge programs I managed and the hard reckoning that comes from…

·         Working with difficult colleagues, and

·         Using knowledge as a counterweight to difficulties they imposed.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Sky Has Its Limits

[caption id="attachment_2108" align="alignleft" width="300"] A sample of Cymfony's Brand Dashboard.[/caption]

I commemorated 9-11-2014 in a strange, improbable way. I met with the same guy I was scheduled to meet with 13 years earlier in the hopes of accepting my 9/11/01 consulting proposal. Like a lot of pre 9/11 plans this too was destined for the recycle bin. The best laid, evidence-based calculations lost their logic that day and remained speechless in deference to the victims of the alternately bright blue, pervasively dark morning.

I was holding some promising cards prior to that meeting. Earlier that summer I had joined up with a venture-funded search engine start-up called Cymfony. The company derived a lovely black box of algorithms that were based on what machines call "natural language" or how humans record their affairs. Computer scientists from the University of Buffalo had compiled code that consume large chunks of text and break them down into parts of speech that the software's creators called "grammars." The result was the ability to surface relationships and correlations lost to the more basic keyword matches and link associations that passed for relevancy in the Alta Vista search universe of the earliest 2000s.

The challenge for Cymfony was that there was no business model behind the search science. The leadership team called it "business intelligence" or BI. But to anyone outside of espionage circles that was a maturing market to tease the secrets out of spreadsheets for consolidating balance sheets and forecasting pipelines -- in effect BI was about the math of numbers -- not words.

Curiously I was working as a middle competitive intelligence manager for one of those BI firms when I got a call from Cymfony's CEO. Andrew Bernstein was recruiting potential test sites for building a proof of concept -- some evidence-based case studies they could use to springboard their go-to-market efforts. It was the fate of shifting economic fortunes that my interest in natural language search engines was peaking at the same time that my non-revenue-producing employment prospects were plummeting in the landing wreckage of the post dotcom nosedive.

Instead of trying to find the same work somewhere else I decided to pitch these Cymfony guys on a vision for sense-making that existed in the spreadsheets of analysts but nowhere on the results pages of Internet news searches -- let alone on the dashboards of influence-peddling news suppliers whose fortunes ride on those results. The opportunity as I explained to Andrew was that these guys are living from one traction-seeking distraction to the next. They put their fingers to the wind without any sense of how those winds are shifting or even taking shape within an overall news climate. Andrew found this compelling as a vision.

But the vision became the tangible game plan when he floated the idea of a media intelligence tool to an ally and image consultant who decried the need to quantify the squishy, personality-driven craft of branding management: not only who was flying higher or trending lower but where were the actual analytics to benchmark media coverage? Better still; quantify its impact on the segments carved out by the most visible agencies and advertisers.

Thus the Brand Dashboard was born and I was in the heady and somewhat awkward position of trying to carve out a role that was neither founder, developer, sales / marketing, or advisor / relationship-based. Besides helping to shape the new direction in the form of what the UX designer referred to as a "whiteboard doodle," I was the taxonomist -- the guy who could aggregate those grammars manifested in the black box so that the dashboard would contain the correct metrics for the right customer.

What I refused to see was that there were no ownership stakes for grammarians and taxonomists. I spent $2,000 on attorney fees to draft a contract that negotiated on those terms which never saw the light of its post 9/11 signature line. In retrospect I understand the basic flaws in my positioning as well as the resentments I carried well past the rejected proposal about having helped change the business model with no recognition by the business. I believe I turned down a pre IPO offer of preferred stock by Andrew. I was pissed and this was the most direct way I could maintain the dignity I could substitute in lieu of any parachute payments.

Thirteen years later I've earned my keep with as a taxonomist metadata mind. I don't run with my bedraggled tongue (where my sniffer should) be towards Silicon VC dollars. I support consulting organizations by making the knowledge donuts. That's meant a continuous cycle of SharePoint deployments and search configurations within the margins of firewalls and fixed budgets. There's no doubt it's for the best. Then again I've never met a change with no hand in changing that I didn't tailor into some kind of hidden blessing. There is no "all for the worst" in expression or in feeling when you outlive those blessed changes.

I've used the latest of these transitions to steer away from my functional headcount role as a knowledge manager to applying those tools of the trade into a more plausible business model -- doing KM work in a market-facing capacity as a content strategist. So who came to mind for testing my new content strategy idea? A series of incremental engagements I could sell to the same industry for which knowledge management is either a humbling confession of a knowledge problem, or at best, a necessary evil? An industry that gets no favors from Google in its quest for the right keyword campaigns and tends to view most marketing and design agencies with suspicion?

That's right. I dialed Andrew Bernstein up on LinkedIn. Andrew's still local to Boston and heading up Kearsarge Energy -- a project management firm that packages large solar farms for towns, municipalities, and large landowners. I asked him how it felt selling something more tangible these days than natural language-based branding barometers. He said the real liberation was the skeletal crew -- down from the hundred or so he managed at Cymfony before the first of two buy-outs.

The irony is that I goofed at the bargaining table of our last ill-fated meeting. I shoulda been making the donuts all along. It was a relief to admit that and positively cathartic to hear the 13 year response: “We could have used you.” That’s one winsome exchange that carries the lessons of the past over the boundaries of regret and a not-so-hidden blessing to commemorate this 9-11 Day.

Jerry's Place

[caption id="attachment_2105" align="alignleft" width="225"] A life of sundaes[/caption]

Last week marked the launch of my 21 year-old son’s entrance of adulthood. It didn’t all happen last week. It just seems that way this week.

This deeply symbolic passage comes in the form of a one fire escape walk-up efficiency that is nearly equidistant between his childhood home and the two part-time jobs that gave Jerry the confidence and capitalization to move into his own place.

It’s not just Jerry that’s feeling his way around this dramatic shift in roles and perceptions. Even his landlord who fills ten other units at the same address appeared stumped when asked where Jerry should park his commuter mountain bike. His folks were equally challenged to navigate the rules of engagement when it comes to the necessary hands-off, hands-on adjustments to this heady transition.

One potential path to success here is to follow the roadmap that brought Jerry to the doors of his newfound independence. That means being given an arduous series of tasks that don’t change much from day-to-day. While Jerry didn’t master his dual roles of food portioning and custodial work off the bat, he did come to master those jobs during his trial period. Both his supervisors probably get the sincerity and genuine appreciation that Jerry derives from this honest, repetitive work. I say probably because providing more certainty is not my role here.

It’s Jerry who found these jobs. It’s Jerry who did the interviews and the call-backs. It’s Jerry who arrives on-time and prepared for work at hours many of us can scarcely function.

When Jerry tells his boss that he loves his job, it’s not that he has any fanciful relationship to cleaning floors or waking up before dawn to have them done before the first customer arrives. It’s that he’s been given the chance to succeed on terms he understands and in tasks he’s come to master. It’s on the strength of his rote memorization that this mastery can free his mind to escape to the world of superheroes, YouTube videos, and Facebook pages where Jerry is free to hit his personal play and record buttons while mopping up messes and counting out chicken fingers.

But while Jerry’s memory can cycle through those repetitions, he’s unfamiliar with the hard and fast rules of online banking, advocating for himself in the workplace, or reflecting those needs in the form of a schedule; for instance, more predictable hours on the time clock to go with his weekly routines.

That’s not to say that Jerry can’t make up his mind or lacks the willpower and motivation to develop these skills. Jerry’s emancipation wasn’t based on any grand design, parental prodding, or peer models (although I was immensely proud of him for placing independent living at the top of his agenda nearly two years ago and sticking to it). That’s also not to say that the executive function required prioritizing, negotiating, and self-manage are challenges for most 21 year-olds -- regardless of how one’s brain works or their prospects pan out.

It’s my hope for Jerry that a year from now he’ll look back on all the hard knocks, confusing signals, hidden surprises and unscripted disruptions, and he’ll out-surprise all of us (as his priest foretold when Jerry received a scholarship from his parish). His responses will be more surprising than the unplanned learning that springs from all these tuition-free lessons. He’ll be better equipped to absorb them and turn these challenges into his own precisely because he didn’t read the correct book, go to the right school, kiss the right ass, or pass the right test with the highest score. Jerry’s ticket to success will not be punched in some gold-plated diploma mill. His past achievements and future horizons are uniquely his.

He’s grown up in a time where the role of parenting has expanded from providing a “roof over your head” to a dome clear over your future. Sometimes … okay … more than sometimes … it’s hard to know when to let go and when to rush in: call the meetings, neutralize the likeliest risks, or organize the new nest. But before I rush in to save the day, I need to ask: whose day am I saving? Am I sparing Jerry from the jaws of calamity or am I serving at the foot of expediency so that I can vanish as swiftly as I swooped in?

There are many executive level decisions I’ve spared Jerry in the past. Either he was going to encounter it later under some trained supervisor in some accredited program or some other as-yet unnamed responsible member of another social circle and scheduling orbit was going to fill Jerry’s shopping cart of independent living with the tools and the mental models needed to bring a sense of order and priority. Like all false hopes that day never arrived. What was there all along was Jerry’s resolve. His sense that if it was part of his experience, it was part of his own self-paced curriculum; that he could learn and even master the finer and rougher points of this unprotected world.

I’m going over to Jerry’s place tomorrow to help simplify the paperwork needed to apply for health insurance. Later in the afternoon his mom will be helping him with budgeting. I will not be organizing his books. I will not be washing the splatters of sauce that gather on his stove. But I will be thinking of the day I’m no longer required to sign Jerry up for vital services.

When that day comes there will be some other complication. I’m confident that when this new difficulty arises Jerry will rise up to meet it. He will learn the problem’s name and maybe even turned an initial drawback into a more neutral puzzle that he can solve – nor not? Perhaps he’ll dismiss it as so much background noise – not worthy of his attention or energy, like the 97% of the BS that will land in the mail deliveries to come. Those are the lesson plans on which a graying father supports an adult son to live his own rich life – not on the father’s terms, or on those of these future challenges, but on Jerry’s own.

The Philanthropilization of Commerce

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="487"] Clean-up crew descends on Great Pacific Garbage Patch[/caption]

Since our species has evolved from hunting, gathering, ducking, and unplucking, our trading systems have moved up the same maturity chain. Once cowing, plowing, and bowing to lords and kings, we are no longer judged on what we produce but how we acquire. And while we agonize over how this all reflects on our values and grandchildren, our unblinking systems patiently await our future purchasing histories.

In a couple of dozen centuries we've gone from unwritten agreements and provincial codes to the recording of every articulation and graphical utterance. From fist clenches and handshakes to security tokens and payment releases.

Our free modern markets are at the ready for setting prices and finalizing sales but speechless when it comes to processing the loss of things once valued but never priced. We lose radio contact with value at the point where cheaper is the rationale for shortening a supply chain, doing more with less, not covering preexisting conditions, and the familiar litany of "house bets." Those free market calculations designed to lower prices without regard to their costs.

The Tyranny of the Free

Any 21st Century content connoisseur will tell you that we are drowning in the social costs for making information free. Information for a price is a world in which producers compete to know the priciest information, and then trade on that knowledge, benefiting the information, the linings of of their pockets, and the trading systems that carry their instructions. The world of free belongs to all of us and we're drowning in the details. It's a fishbowl, echo chamber, and labyrinth of transactions. A ticker-tape parade of personal metadata confetti. Our own claims of privacy aboard a Texas-sized flotilla of personal information garbage, brought to us by opaque password bypassers and lax regulations (with a capable assist from our own lethargy).

Is it any wonder we can't build a consensus around a set of shared priorities in a world where everyone gets to hear themselves think and the slightest dissension is an unwelcome distraction?

I'm not suggesting we go back to a world of publishing magnets, three national TV networks, and gatekeepers who defined the public interest through the prism of their own. But just because the content spigot is more control resistant  these days doesn't mean the biggest media mouths and ears can go on smearing and eavesdropping with impunity. And that brings us back to the marketplace of ideas where we shop. In these kiosks and stalls and pushcarts anyone with a bill-supporting income can ascend to the roll of benefactor -- a supporter of sounds, tastes, looks, and priorities that amplify our sense of what counts, knowing that the dollar we spend will be counted regardless of what the counters are thinking in their calculations.

Keepers of the Analog

Being a patron of the arts is not just about buying your CDs directly from the performers as mementos of the concert experience. It's more basic than that. It's about preserving the musical worship ritual itself.

The highlight of this past gift-giving season centered on buying two albums at Newbury Comics for my wry-witted, macro-analytical, and culturally clairvoyant step daughters. It felt both odd and compelling that the $40 for the two works equaled ten LPs back in the golden days of Disc-O-Mat, Sam Goody's, and Titus Oaks. It was also a trifle under the $40 more that I've managed to spend on downloads through the 2013 music season. But I'd be just as mistaken to confer a 1979 dollar value on the post record label musical food chain as I would for labeling the LP, its fluffy sleeves, luxuriating foldouts, and epic cover art as mere "packaging." Behind that hedonistic splurging of harmonic layerings lies a tactile immersion that focuses the mind on the concept behind the album, the liner notes behind the lyrics, the devotion to the vision in the sound.

If vinyl makes a comeback, can other pay-for-content packagings be revivable? Printing and reading text on paper instead of screens has a way of marshalling the concentration that is otherwise claimed by the labors of a competitive world, i.e. memorizing answers to tests. Another clarifying benefit of paper-based information is that it's static, doesn't beep or flicker, and awaits the scratching within the editorial margins to activate the reader. Print on screen is content that never sleeps. It's resistant to reflection, analysis, and the perspective-taking carried by the authority of definitive works.

We've lost that one big time in the online.

The Future Makes a Comeback

The question of getting it back is not reducible to whether there's a business model for offline content or a marketing edge for self-referential authority. The answer is to pay for the information whose usefulness will grow with time.

That doesn't mean a pointless retreat into a nostalgic past of argument-settling finality. It does mean cultivating the restraint, introspection, and deference given to containers that not only preserve the original contents but reveal that larger framework for committing positive and memorable change in our unyielding and inarticulate age. A time where the present is no better suited to take in the future than the haste and prejudice of our own self-selection.

Question: When the last time you picked over the hidden messages and visual nuances of the art on a CD cover? If you're like me you're harkening back to a time that never passed because it never happened. It's funny what choices the free, modern marketplaces make for us. Especially the choices it takes away that were never counted in the first place.

"Go See Your Uncle Stephen."

When I was young, spongy, unformed and self-absorbed I attended a young, idealistic, and small New England college. Hampshire convinced flocking Hamsters like me that you could mold that spongy absorption into your career clay, your alloy of choice.

My Hampshire diploma was my pink slip from the self-made sculpting factory. I received it 1984. "Morning in America" was my early wake-up nightmare to the reality that the days of self-made expressions visited on Kangaroo review committees had no currency outside of Camp Hamp.

I do remember the deflated bubbles, the kicks to the curb, and the queasy disorientation from the world of ideas to the world of shelter and clothing. But mostly I remember the woman with the megaphone blaring into my fallen house of young adulthood. The megaphoner-inner would be Grandma Harriet. Grandma would say:

"Go see your Uncle Stephen. He's very smart."

It wasn't a threat and it wasn't quite a reward. But there was an implied "... or else." Don't go ... at your own peril.

Harriet saw my bachelor’s degree from the self-ordained and the bona fide flakiness that comes with encouraging (if not outright expecting) payment for self-expression. Her suggestion felt more like an order. It's not that I lacked direction, role models, or a running list of intriguing career outfits to try on. She said go see your uncle because whenever I expressed those ambitions or desires she was clueless what I was talking about. She said go see Uncle Stephen because that was the single most direct way out of my head and into a job that paid something.

Career Characters

Stephen I should point out was not just Uncle Stephen. He had the unjaundiced eye. He wished the best for his little kid sister's oldest son. He defined that wish by the roles of people he'd either portrayed or tried to persuade through his own unflinching candor:

• The collateral-seeking lender,


• The risk-averse hiring manager,


• The status-conscious schmoozer, or,


• The distracted indifference of the restless producer.

It was that parade of characters who found their way into Stephen's mini publishing empire. For a 25 year stretch he and Mark Levine lined the Barnes and Noble self-help table with field guides, coaching manuals and life scripts. He wasn't just in my corner and kicking my ass. This was Uncle Stephen, one of America's leading personal finance mentors and a professional life strategist. His perceptions and influence fell into orbits that traveled far and wide of our extended family circle. Inside that circle, Stephen was the official voice of reason. He talked me through my unofficial failures to launch as a twenty-something. He talked me through my improvised workarounds. There were many of those.

Diplomas from Schools of Doubt

* I could tell you that a review copy of a runaway Stephen bestseller was my take home homework from those earlier coaching sessions. That would be misleading. He's always shown more interest in refining, channeling and ultimately investing his clients in their own destinies where self-discovery drives the narrative.

* I could tell you that I used the nesting impulse to impose my need for control and practicality onto my personal life.  I could tell you that I plunked my young adult savings down on a Park Slope co-op and road the coattails of the NYC real estate boom to financial stability. That would be someone else's investment success. Spoiler-alert: I held onto that apartment for a decade and still managed to lose 10% of the original sale price.

* I could tell you that I down-shifted from career drive to a more family-based focus. But my life's been one protracted stretch between where I work and where I live. That split has factored into great disruption, upheaval, and dissolution of several marriages.

So I won't lie. I will tell you straight as (Harriet is my witness) that Stephen is my secular rabbi and spiritual bookkeeper. In nearly all of Stephen's many interventions (barters, guiding questions, and petitions for my practicality) he's given me the gift of perspective-taking. He helped me unload the professional baggage we carry when the career options we select don't choose us back.

Our job, as he's often counseled, doesn't define us or who or what we mean to the people we cherish. It's a stream of income. It's just as fluid and prone to change as our income stream prospects.

13 Step Program

I went back to visit Stephen recently. It wasn't that I needed career advice, negotiation pointers for some negotiation in the balance, or greater appreciation for letting go of forces beyond my control.

I needed to tell him about a wonderful new job that among other things caused people I barely know to contact me out of the blue for career pointers and job-hunting approaches. I told Stephen that the experiences are my firsthand bumps and mid-course corrections. The messaging, however, is a page straight from the Stephen playbook. That alignment between personal ambition and market reality is a lifetime balancing act written, produced, and scored by Stephen Pollan.

The day I got to his office, his current admin (in a bad run of temporary admins) had bailed on the later afternoon appointments. Fresh from an AM appointment the same day, my sister-in-law prepared me for the empty reception area and the likelihood that Stephen would be jumping through honking congestion to make it back for our 4 pm (-- he strode in at 4:01 without breaking a sweat and asking how late he was).

I noticed then that his bookcases were bare and the wall was lined with moving crates. He had his office bags packed. No more cross-town hurdle-jumping wind sprints. Just an elevator commute from his east-side residence to a first floor professional suite in the same building.

He told me that he was starting his newest book. The working title? The Tyranny of Self. He wasn't too attached to it as he offered to let me steal it. After enough of Stephen's counsel, I understand. This was the 13th in a 12 step program to address the same demons I confronted when I left Hampshire: The raging seduction of a workaholic, who hides behind the virtue of the provider, and in the concealment, loses the dignity of his labor.

They share their better selves with the work, not with the selected people that a less involved laborer would simply understand as their home, their shelter from the ungenerous world. After enough trips to Stephen, I understand the need to give away working titles.

Three Strikes and You're In

I've been married three times. I don't know anyone else who has their names on three divorce decrees. And as improbable as it may be to have been undone by three declarations, eyes, hearts, and futures wide open. Three former wedding anniversaries. Three former mothers-in-law. Three former wedding toasts. It almost sounds exotic by the enormity of its dimension. Reminds me of my father's legendary request for his second wife to marry him on the same day as his first marriage so he'd only need to remember one date. With practicalities that impulsive, who needs secret valentines?

I am just now starting to appreciate the majesty of living in an unwavering state of love. I am stilled by the calm and quivering in the excitement of this very same love. It's an exploration of a mutual understanding that begins in adventure and carries me to a place I had only dreamt of before I met this love. That place is home and I'm surrounded by a nest that exudes anything but emptiness.

It's easy to overthink the role that destiny plays within the prism of possibilities that form the backdrop of a flowering romance. Easier still is to over-reach the emotional lift of falling in love. That it will bring stability to all we hold onto and change to every temptation we can't resist for letting go.

In retrospect each marriage was a reaction to a prior commitment -- not the right expression of a passing courtship, no matter how lasting or genuine the nature of these friendships. In but one of the disolutions was there someone else to spark the break-up. The truth is that I could no more ask my first three wives to honor their marriage vows than I could ask them to change their own guiding path or true nature. I accepted divorce not as a judgment of faith or commitment but the simple admission that three people had tried to maintain an appearance, to be something they were not. I accepted they were no longer in love with me as the rejoinder of an inertia-laden descent into a calculation best approximated as Bal's law of "diminishing returns."

It's a bit like the Central Square Payless shoe store I was shopping in last night. I tried on the 9.5s and they were too wiggly. I went down to the 9s. They were overly snug. I walked away from marriage with the sinking feeling I was walking on 9.25 feet in an unpaved world of unwearable fashion. That feeling only persisted when I went back to online dating -- especially when I tried to explain to potential dates the sincerity behind not wishing to walk directly into marriage #4.

Check Box of Open Questions

The first time I dated Patty I had checked the open relationship box. At the time it was hard to see how monogamy was going to expand my experiential horizons. It almost seemed a bystander, a pattern that held fidelity hostage to a lifelong quest for home and family. The more I played by the rules, the more they played me, boxing me into a corner of choices that found their voice in the language of rejection:

• Marriage 1: "The harder I try to make things easy, the less of a difference it makes."


• Marriage 2: "I 'have' to work three hours away to support us."


• Marriage 3: "My son 'lives' in Western Mass."

The sentiment feeding all these lines comes from a Matt Pond PA song called Locate the Pieces. It describes the isolation of a break-up when a couple's feelings for each other can't outlast changes in their relationship:

"Lately, I don't know what I could want from anyone."

That was my idea of holding on: to ask for nothing and expect less in return -- not exactly the cry for help that might inspire reaching back to Mister Solo-mon! Could I accept the uncertainty of a sputtering journey, a makeshift arrangement? All I could offer in exchange for hard-stop choices was the gentle acceptance that these misgivings were exception-proof. I can tell you through experience that loving someone for whom they are (apart from the best laid wedding plans) is not a marriage-preserving separation. It's a deal breaker.

Relationships abhor placeholders even worse than nature has it in for vacuums.  Whatever hurdles real or imagined would be cleared in time for a love to rekindle is one hope I have learned to extinguish. But the hope I held out for is the most intoxicating rush a spouse-worthy love scout can fathom: one where we're loved for who we are -- no matter the rawness of our wounds or the staleness of our circumstances.

In the Cards

It was that promise I heard being answered when Patty looked down at her plate on that first date and told me she could not abide by open relationships. I folded my cards almost as quickly as my dinner napkin. I'm one clumsy negotiator -- and proud of it. The pride lies in knowing my forte is in setting scenes, not in telling stories.

Patty and my story is a marvel of reverse engineering. Every tender adversity is an affirmation that we have something right and true to share. Our respective experience resonates through every loose end and unkept resolution. It's like we met in the relationship repair shop -- and we were both minding the store!

If I haven't already said it plainly there is all give and no rebound at work here. I can tell because...

* I ask things of Patty and she responds by spoiling me.

* She asks things of me and I'm honored.

* I laugh. She laughs back.

* We don't share a 50:50 split. It's more like a 100 all inclusive.

* When I leave to work in Eastern Mass she supports my travel. That's an inescapable presence in a drifting void for most of my adult life. I acknowledge this and call each night we're apart.

I pour my life into hers. I do it with the gratitude that I won't die with this replenishing love still inside me. I give it without qualifiers, conversions or justifications. On this Valentine’s Day, I give it to us. Measurement free.

The truth is that for all my passing grades and failing marriages all these lessons together add up to a smidgeon of why I found my life partner while I'm here. The rest is luck. It's purity diluted somewhat by my appreciation of the past as prologue. The rest is just an inkling of probability. There is no deserving this but a simple grace uncoerced in the heart.