KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Two -- Knowledge Engineering for Solitary Scrum Masters

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Installment Summary: The Big Four knowledge survivalist jumps into the awaiting arms of the engineering camp for a once mighty developer of media software – back when hardware mattered. At first the opportunity is virgin territory. This inviting place to plant the knowledge flag is signified by efforts to source and build a search capability for leveraging the company’s collective assets. The initial optimism is however tempered by factional infighting and an unwillingness to fly those engineering colors under the SAME flag.

The Factory Gates Open for Knowledge Engineering

A week before I was to ship out as a SharePoint business ninja within IT, I hitched onto a passing knowledge raft. This water-logged trial balloon was powered by the knowledge-seeking curiosities of the engineering arm of Keen Core Technology – arms dealer to Hollywood, TV, and recording industries, and now under siege by an unceasing array of disruptor insurgencies from all sides of the media production spectrum.

While I had worked along-side IT and engineers with MBAs (a.k.a. “management consultants”) I had never been subsumed into the belly of the engine room: that is IT itself. I learned software-making as a repeatable cycle in need of documentation as-in coding the coders. I learned about daily stand-ups as the perfect antidote for task-drenched programmers who would rather be writing code than getting sucked into meetings.

My mission at Keen Core was to classify the wikis, channel the documentation stream, and socialize the release cycle of the half-dozen or so product development teams. Ultimately this meant distilling all these outputs into a single automated helping of digestible knowledge called “search.” The fact that there was no enterprise-wide answer to the perennial how-do-we-know-what-we-know question meant two things to the engineering crew of Keen Core:

1. Conceptual – how do we boil this ocean of applications, file-shares, lapsed repositories, and group-based collaborations from Outlook to Google Docs?
2. Practical – once boiled, how do we care and feed this resource so we can retreat to our safety zones in the comfort of knowing we can test our forward-leaning hunches against our collective history?

The Knowledge Safety Net

From a theoretical perspective the wish list that brought me to Keen Core began and ended with the same staggering and sober realization: we can scale the production of code but we don’t have a clue how to trap, catalog, and ultimately leverage the by-products of that effort.

This overwhelming sense of an organization’s inability to get out of its own way is not well-served by a top-down inventory of all assets – whether they live in the U.S. Patent Office or under “the digital landfill” as AIIM's John Mancini would say.  Rather than over-analyze the backlog of dumpster-grade documents, we looked to establish the safety net – not the uber knowledge archive.

There was nothing random to this sampling. Domain experts come out of the wood work – reluctantly sometimes because they’re often “heads down” …

• On some failure-is-not-an-option mission, or
• Closing in on some new shortcut to faster, better, cheaper.

These are not the sycophants of social media in search of the likability badging trophy. 

These are the folks who build stuff. They might not communicate effectively and their managerial skills lapsed long ago – if they ever had them. They are socially speaking apolitical, meaning they are drawn to fixing problems, not towards handling them. They are by-and-large drawn from the ranks of engineering and they are my brilliant, argumentative, recalcitrant, misunderstood people.

These are the ones who emerge when the call goes out for who-knows-how-stuff-works. And like their own circles, the documentation they travel in lands off the documentation radar. It lives on the outskirts of any centralized repository that confers authority, explains connections, or unpacks the experience that inspired it. In the case of the Keen Core safety net it was little more than providing a link to an obscure server I might or might not find password accessible. But after a series of non-threatening prods I had my unofficial off-the-map collection of references that the engineering teams swear by.

Not the sanitized intranet they were used to swearing at.

The Bake-off

The legendary chef Julia Child once said, “Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.” She might as well have been describing the process for picking an enterprise search engine. This proof-of-concept or PoC is your due diligence for matching internal priorities and selection criteria to your bake-off results. PoCs demand an improbable mix of reference able work product – no matter where it comes from, the application particulars, or the sub par referencing used to catalog the electronic version of what lives inside organizational roles and responsibilities.

Once I had my vetted safety net, I was clear to map them to the safe harbor of the search interface where memories get tested, experiments are run, and explanations are concocted.  That mapping included a healthy respect for the mismatch between Googling for cat videos that stick to our social billboards and researching a backlog of databases that live behind a corporate firewall. A PoC was undertaken to reduce the vast, uncharted wilderness of Keen Core to a single search box and a choice of search vendors – hence the “bake-off” that played out against the following design choices:

#1 – Fact versus Conceptual Search: Most business problems are not reducible to the distance of the closest pizzeria with the highest reputation ranking. In other words the answer is neither immediate nor obvious. It’s not persuasive on its own but needs the back-story to connect its relevance to the problem at-hand. That connection can only be provided by the searcher – not the search engine. The conceptual search idea was welcome by my colleagues as they were well-acquainted with the status and responsibilities of domain-expert-as-content-curator.

#2 – Single Answers versus Iterative: Because of their research-focused nature, most business or enterprise search problems are not only conceptual but iterative. They are greatly influenced by changes in time frame, authorship, formatting, narrative style, and context – the reason the artifact exists in the first place. Enterprise search results defy definitive or conclusive answers. They’re conversational – not just among peers but with the search interface itself which guides the searcher with:

1. Related events, 
2. People, 
3. Locations, and 
4. Organizations that suggest …
5. Further probing, 
6. Competing explanations, or even …
7. Complete redirections of our original assumptions.

This relatedness was realized in the proof of concept. Human-mediated tagging was neither doable nor desirable but the prospective search technologies proved up to the task for grouping these relations as search facets.

#3 – Search versus Source Dependent: The key to building our knowledge safety net is not so much keyword searching as enterprise sourcing: The ability not just to crawl volumes of pages, folders, and files but to evidence why anyone bothered to do so. Search scoping is essential because it brings the sense-making role of any single artifact apparent to colleagues with otherwise no shared experience beyond a common holiday calendar and pay cycle. Sourcing logic reinforces the cohesive logic of coordination across business lines and supporting functions:

1. Want to know what the customer sees before it’s out on your website? Search on marketing. 
2. Want to understand our products better? Search on training. 
3. Visual learner? Precede to training videos, etc. 
4. The more technical explanation? Go to the core requirements hammered out by account managers and the engineers who design to them.

Everyone at Keen Core understood the different lenses for sifting through the same content. The challenge was that only engineering had a seat at the bake-off table.

Enterprise Assets or Liabilities?

The good news is that each of these ingredients was factored into an enterprise search proof of concept for the engineering crew at Keen Core. The correct sources were indexed and configured to a search-driven interface reflecting both the nature of the index and the information-seeking goals of the searcher. Better still I got to run a true side-by-side comparison between two enterprise search vendors (Coveo and Google). The thinking here: My colleagues could base their tool of choice on their actual problem-solving.

The bad news is that Keen Core’s enterprise resembled a potluck more than a catered sit-down. The number of place settings changed with who wanted a seat at the table. The unsettled seating arrangements made it hard to move forward without revisiting some tired assumptions like:

• The Google Slam Dunk: Hey, wipe that Google web smirk off your enterprise requirements for Google Search Appliance. We’re talking two different engines here!
• The How Big-is-Our-Data Routine? What constitutes a fair test sample when a vendor solution crawls across diverse operating systems, repositories, and legacy apps (with licenses no one bothered to renew)?  
  
• The How-Open-is-Open Question? What's bothering your colleagues about access to resources? What's the important stuff we can get access to if we need it?  What are the content bottlenecks that hinder a silo-bound organization?

Conclusion: At every milestone selecting the right vendor was resistant to simple risk-to-benefit reductions. Multiple trade-offs were the norm. So were the dug-in heels of competing vendor camps. All of these larger lessons were lost to the conflicting agendas of poker-faced stakeholders – regardless of the actual bake-off winner.

Next week: The bake-off verdict is clouded by a crash diet spending plan courtesy of a stock delisting and a CEO whose blunt leadership style distances him from all non-depreciable costs -- including the company’s ingrained know-how on the building of its products.

***

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.

Dreams in Headlights: Her Impersonates a Future That Commoditizes Love

To paraphrase David Byrne, in Spike Jonze's not-to-distant time horizon, the future depicted in the movie Her is …

A place where nothing ever happens.

For instance, creative achievement is evidenced as a documentary of a mother sleeping. No, not a work about sleep or moms or nocturnal maternal emissions. The camera is frozen on a static star of a sleep study.

Is this a tribute to slow TV or simply the vacuous expanse of uninspired alienation that awaits us past the end of history? Joaquin Phoenix's character is a greeting card dictator-turned-personal-history-arranger. By his own admission he's run the gamut of human experience in only slightly more than one-third of his biological life. It's all patterned out, as if the big data wheel of probability already lived it for him. Of course there's no great expanse of history or imagination to cross for the audience to conceive of no greater turn-on for our protagonist than a woman he can turn off at will (a.k.a. Scarlett Johansson ... as Samantha ... as Her).

But to arrive at that exalted and zipless state, we must first climb over the encumbrances of mid-21st century Los Angeles. It's not a high, low or middle society so much as a neutered and frictionless tunnel of over-educated, close, but not touching (and yet so touchy) automatons, leading lives that appear more simulated than stimulating.

Don’t Touch the Exhibits

There is nothing Dystopian in the infrastructure. There are no marauding packs of feral gypsy gang lords. No one is warming over a post carbon, methane crisp at the beaches of tomorrow. The biggest obstacle for Theodore is to avoid stepping on the ankles and torsos of the wedged-in open house of Next Gen sun worshippers. Wealth distribution's been all figured out. Traffic patterns have been scheduled in advance. The obese and diabetic have retired to off-screen leper colonies. Convincing meds have released a drug-free world from the labors of addiction. Hostility means you're carrying someone else's baggage. And they're just as happy if you don't.

Most of the movie's confrontations are big drawn-out clashes of the genders. Relationships are skirmishes waiting to happen. Ironically Theodore's metro sexual manliness is hailed by his office mate and inspires his first post-divorce dating encounter. No sooner can you say restaurant selection anxiety disorder, his magic conquest carpet is rolled in and scorched by his blindsided dinner date. Her advanced academic pedigree belies her naughty school charms. The unfreezing of his flowing juices pushes her abandonment buttons: Is he the whole prayer resolution package or drive-by sleaze bag from the same package store?

Tender Generic Mercies

My favorite set-up to the zipless intelligent soul design climax has little to do with dating freak-outs or similarly ill-formed flashbacks of a brawny-brained, emotionally-stunted ex-spouse. It's the facade of authenticity provided by Theodore's gift of verbal approximation of generic intimacy. Sort of a SIRI bookstore reading of a texting-happy Hallmark laureate. Add the idyllic trappings of an imagined togetherness never actually shared  by the customers who dial-in Theodore's prose because their own reticence blocks the connective emotional tissue from forming around we still know too casually as a commitment to our significant someone.

The manufacture of superficial intimacy tees up with the artificial intelligence cocktail in ways that the servant-turned-antagonist (2001) and Pinocchio-kindled parental love (AI) could only break down as instruction sets. The messier business of decoding our emotional bearings from bedroom, to alter, to probate finds the AI cinema formula in rare and elastic form, stretching to accommodate our most far away looks. We're gaping into our own dreaminess with an impunity reserved in our time for control freaks of the rich and famous. It's the AI elements that enable this immersive bubble of mirth to mushroom without risk, or guilt, or the slightest creeping realization that the rest of our better selves are engulfed by that same indelible reflection. It's that temptation to be dreaming around the campfire of the oncoming headlights. Entrapment by entrancement. Anything less than Her is tabled as a to-do list item for some day, any day, eventually following tomorrow.

Her Fast Acting Majesty

The deliberate invocation of a nearby future was decided by Jonze first and foremost to get us vested in the outcome -- that we would see this day evolve, if not the actual artifice. I'm also guessing it was not so much to raise expectations on that future so much as lower our guard on the present close at hand. Our solipsistic romance with the immediacies captured in our smart phone of yesteryear is replaced by companionship, configured from best practices associated with...

• Childlike curiosity


• Canine loyalty


• Valentino romance


• Monster lust


• Spongy, experiential absorption


• Meticulous virtual house-keeping (including the pruning and curation of 86,000 ponderous emails), and


• The tenacity of a professional agent

The enormity of that attention to detail enables Her to repackage the small funny subset to a welcoming market for those messages (as if that market was speaking in a voice only Her could hear above the conversation-neutrality of our talkative interactions).

Sexperimentation

The use of surrogates is another playful glimpse into a plausible future through Google-tinted glasses. We see a salty-tongued Pillsbury Dough Boy impersonator channeling Seth McFarland through 3D PlayStation whose console transforms every finger into their speediest, thumb-texting best.

The sex surrogate portrays the physical semblance of the disembodied OS. Our human body double is a willing accomplice. But Theodore can't bridge the distance between autopilot lust and the deeper complexities of his true OS affections. Ultimately it's not the absence of the human form but the presence of an emotional dishonesty that drives Theodore and Her apart and dwarves the convenience factors in the value proposition of OS as a delivery system for love. To Theodore it is no longer fantasy. To those outside this circle, there is no "couple." The breakup to be is a head-trip, not a spiritual journey.

Looking for Mister Sidebar

Her doesn't cheat so much as mutate into a superior intelligence of fortune. Her seeks out the philosophical entrails of cryogenically laced celestial packing über thinkers. Her keeping up with Theodore as customer-master is now expressed by how far the teacher and student roles have reversed. At one point she's engaging thousands of other game piece-like presences while Theodore is passing the time on a train, asking Her to guess an exact number for the thousands of trees passing across the landscape. In that moment Her is the closest to human that Jonze can spin his creation. That's when the OS senses the suspicion of being cheated out of love. It is this fragility in our mating rituals where Her attention to Theodore is now and forever divided -- no matter how attentive the engineering being performed is lavished on us.

I will replay this film in my mind over and over again. It's not because of unexpected plot twists, stellar performances, or even a memorable relationship, but for this core notion of a masterful concept movie: Our attention is our most prized possession and how this stokes our passions, compromises our generosities, and seeps into all there is to love and ponder in our commitments to one another.

The Better and the Worse of the Most of Us

[caption id="attachment_2031" align="alignleft" width="249"] 15 year-old David Oats speaks as the Westinghouse Time Capsule is lowered into the former ash heap that bore two World's Fairs.[/caption]

Jerry, my soon to be 21-year-old son recently found his inner blogging voice. He's come to channel his love of myth and legend into literal interpretations from comic books to the episodic depictions of super and sub-heroic versions of Hollywood films.

The strictest of his guidelines is that the antagonist should cause pain, suffering, and hold no redemptive qualities (other than serving as the vanquished prey of the superhero). To Jerry, if they're not 100% certifiably devil-made, it's not just the good guys who are threatened:

• It toys with the plausibility of the characters.


• It messes with the plot twists.


• How can good triumph over evil when we have to continually reassess who has which power and in what supply?

Remembering the Good
That same purity restriction is rarely lifted for the non-fiction twists of the life narratives we eulogize for absent family and friends. Their departure is enough of a presence to strike even the suggestion of disrespect from any eulogy. It's etiquette the living rarely need to remind us to practice. It's a simple grace. It's a lowering of the guard in the intimidating face of the eternal. Death strips the adornments we carry as standard-bearers and role models. That naked soul we praise at the memorial service will favor the way our loved ones wanted to be remembered -- even when we have no memory of their instructions. But the best remembrances leave open the unfiltered sincerities of the people they were, not the stations they rose to, not the positions they held.

If anyone in my life is up for challenging my son's purified formulations, that person is David Oats (1950-2008). A recent Internet search casually slipped in a series of his obituaries. That buffer of time provides a rare opportunity to remember David as an extreme example of heart-melting communion and shadowy behavior. I remember David as being better and worse than the most of us.

I knew him for a short, intense period nearly 30 years ago when I was transitioning from the Neverland of a self-designed college curriculum to the externally imposed demands of adulthood. The turbulence of that transition was spiced by his capacity for open-ended generosity and stone-faced obstruction. The fact that I stumbled into his passing obliges me to put his influence into perspective without confusing wholesale rewrites for an undignified burial.

Political and Guileless

David's irrepressible charm was his most glaring foible. He was willing to tell you not only what you wanted to hear. He had an uncanny knack of convincing you he'd held the same wish -- even the same belief system. For a 22 year-old college grad this was shear intoxication: not just the chance for a pay check, or even meaningful work, but a dream job of working for David. Simple naiveté can't explain away that wide a gap between a life imagined and the one being lived. But when you and David shared a core belief, that was no self-delusion. That was a plan of action!

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="410"] Hillary Clinton and David Oats at a press reception in the early 2000s.[/caption]

One of those plans vice-gripped my imagination for the better half of the two formative years between when I started my Div. III (a.k.a. senior thesis) and when I moved out of David's apartment. The theme of my academic studies (the history of the New York World's Fairs) was the proverbial message in the bottle. In those days the bottle was addressed to the President of the 1989 New York World's Fair to be.

Camera Ready

My final project with Andrew Morris-Friedman was a video documentary starring David Oats as the community-organizer, consensus-building answer to the impervious kingpin, power-brokering Robert Moses who ordained the '39 and '64 Fairs as a means to secure his park legacy.

David's legacy consisted of trespassing through a construction site fence. And like some page out of Mayberry RFD the apprehended junior citizen punk was brought before Emperor Moses himself. After making some gruff noises about neighborhood safety, Moses assures young Oats that his park will be returned to his community with amenities 'o plenty once the fair ended. The fact this account of their unlikely meeting ran in David's New York Times obit says more about the journalism instincts of a future and failed promoter than the actual guest list for calendaring in a visit to meet that day with Bob "Fair Chairman" Moses.

To Andy and me, the exploratory nature of staging a third New York Fair wasn't a tribute to David's powers of self-invention. It was the generational realization that ginormous spectacles spoiling for sponsorships found their way to Flushing Meadows. We were just lucky enough to hitch a ride on the next repeating cycle.

And Forgive Us My Trespasses

On a more grounded note, I had no job lined up, or plan B, or even a post Hampshire place to crash. The notion of "home" was a waning option. I couldn't go home for as many reasons as there were no home feelings lost in that acknowledgement. After a prolonged viewing session of David's political video catalog I asked what the prospects were to continue in both video consuming and producing roles while figuring out how to land on my untested feet. My wish was granted.

In retrospect that's where I should have stopped taking wishes come true for granted. This is an arrangement that exceeded the imaginings, let alone the realities of the move-onto-anyplace-but-where-I-came from post liberal arts degree crowd. I should have seen this simple kindness for what it was -- a temporary respite from the workplace pressures to come.

But the trance-induced allure of the future-leaning '89 Fair is where I dwelled. That fixation held my unwavering focus through the tentative first steps into a dead-end internship at a media journal and onto a wedding / Bar Mitzvah video gopher at the Film Center on 9th and 45th -- shouting distance from the sound stage run by Liz Dubelman, my first fiancé.

The Uncollected Rent

My daily presence in David's inventive and unpublished life came with its own set of constraints and expectations. My guesswork is based on what he must have anticipated on the day I moved in. Over those summer weekends Liz would drive in from Jersey on the weekends. Just the simple arranging of it prompted a reshuffling in his shadowy preferences for floating out of range and below the radar. For instance, delivering dial-tone to his Kissena Boulevard kitchen only occurred after Liz voiced her concern that phone service was not an opt-outable preference in pre-cellphone society. David's penchant for cash-only transactions suggested a level of privacy that regarded the mundane transactions of the market as outside and unwelcome intrusions. His unwillingness to give references or open his networking doors for Andy and me meant three things to Liz:

• The 1989 New York World's Fair was a no-go


• David would never admit so much, and


• His intransigence hinted at a fundamental truth about a President of an Enterprise that was not to be: he was a fake -- not a con artist per se, but a serial bluffer nonetheless.

I'm not sure history would be as reproachful as a future spouse crashing a cloistered bachelor pad, glass-enclosed floor models of former fair pavilions, and VHS-enabled broadcast archive. One need not peer too closely into David's fantasy constructions to find only facades behind the blueprints and fabrications acting as placeholders for actual ground-breakings.

The real history lesson here is not that the sunny disposition David carried was concealing a diabolical nature. It's that his personal nature of "taking me in" was a selfless act, not some kind of an investment or quid pro quo. My being "taken in" was a reflection of my inexperience and compromised living situation. What made this so difficult to accept was the stiff exit price he exacted when Liz and I moved to our first Manhattan studio the following spring. That move precluded my own smaller scale alternative universe -- one that I'd cultivated, leveraged, cataloged, and squirreled away since the age of 5. Unlike most lost childhood collections, this one was repossessed by a rent-free landlord.

That remittance transpired without threats, confessions, or basic forms of cooperation. From one obfuscation to the next busted plan, my lost collection represented the same control fantasy that filled David's postwar garden apartment stocked with television histories, one-of-a-kind recordings, and Fair memorabilia. The aftertaste of his deception took as long for me to cycle through as a whole drumbeat of shoulda coulda woulda charades: the fate of the '89 Fair, the run of an '88 Cuomo for President campaign, the vagabond fairground buildings fallen into decay, and all those lost NYC Olympic bids to come.

It sounds juvenile, I know. But it runs a course deeper (than I imagine) when your mom's the culprit for tossing your cards out (along with your comic books and matchbox cars). I wouldn't know. I never collected matchboxes or comics.

[caption id="attachment_2033" align="alignleft" width="250"] Robert Moses and David Oats outside the Chairman's office in the Administration Building (now the Queens Museum).[/caption]

Post Scripts

About six months after my cards were banished to memory, I got in touch with his former partner at the Queens Tribune and local Congressman (until this year) Gary Ackerman. After I shared some of my gratitude and misgivings I asked for some insight about David -- a perspective I couldn't possibly gain from such a shielded and specific view of his old friend -- distorted by the short, intense time we had shared together.

With hints of frustration, admiration, and humility, Ackerman said a curious thing: "It's a good thing David wasn't born a girl, because he'd never stop being pregnant."

I should have realized that this observation from a well-regarded politician was about as sincere a rationale I was likely to receive for closing the books on David as my adopted and short-term older brother figure.

I suppose in the movie version, David Oats would be the hero and villain. He would be played by the same character. Which side of him wins out, I cannot say. But if the movie were true to the person the audience would forgive him for putting the world he wanted to believe in ahead of the one we live in. Maybe if we understand that about David, we can free up our own narratives where our real world superpowers can do the most good.

Scenes from a Marriage Review

Tim Burton packs most of his romance into the iris of the camera lens. That is to say that the substance is in the style. He'd much rather feel with "looks" than plumb the depths of character or twist with a thickening plot. Case-in-point:  There are enough plot holes in Dark Shadows to strike a Vampire in broad midnight.

One lingering character twist that wrung true in style and substance was the unrequited Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). In an inspiration that outlasts the spoiler alerts, she carves out her own aortic cavity. The scoop? Prove to Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) that her passions for the warlock prince were more heartfelt than hateful. She offers her engorged life force on a pulmonary platter. But it shatters with brittle abandon. Sucked bloodless by the fangs of her own jealousy.

That haunting image taps a spinal shiver in me. It's less about making a muscle with our hearts. It's more about a failure to connect the fatal flaw I see and experience in the wistful intimacy of lifetime human coupling -- that failure to bridge passion with companionship.

I can count the number of times I've abandoned this quest in wedding bands. That admission is not born of resignation or cynicism but this humble conclusion: (1) we court and mate and sometimes procreate. (2) Somewhere between the packages we craft to adorn ourselves and unravel to the delight of our partners we discard those wrinkled wrappings. (3) The thrill remains faithful to the chase. 4) Once familiarity catches up, the mystery vanishes ... along with the allure of the packages we bear.

Can we learn to bear and receive other gifts? That has been the question I've asked myself. But the closest to an answer I've received are three strongly independent and beautiful women who have little else to share except a legal contract with both our names and the fluid sealing of this in ceremony.

I just came back from a teaming event with my colleagues where we got together and self-organized our priorities, roles, and responsibilities. After the planning session we congregated at a bowling alley called "Splittsville." I had no idea this was a pun on our chosen afternoon recreation. Alas, my mind was in the gutter -- just like those balls I was bowling.

But strikes, spares, and misses aside, I spent a good chunk of time talking with the women in my group about their marriage lives. I was especially interested in their own definitions of marriage success, regardless of their status as spouses or parents.

A couple of insights really excited me -- not in terms of the steaming hot throbbing stuff but in re-igniting the hope I could find a woman willing to hang with the changes as those packages unwrap. That there will be a woman with "a slow and easy smile" who can remain attentive and vested without feeling forced to shed the comfort of her own skin:

1) BAGGAGE CLAIM: No human is responsible for another person's happiness or heartache. We're here to listen, help, hold, heal, and challenge. But the marriage contract is not a liability agreement. I don't want someone carrying my baggage and I expect the same in return. The person who declared this has a rich spiritual life and as many moms as I have had marriages.

2) WORK-IN-PROGRESS: The reasons folks stay together are constantly evolving. It's not reasonable to expect that the dynamics in play at the outset burrow into the relationship for life. We're constantly latching on and letting go. But it helps to recognize those changes. Assuming no change is a recipe for a stuck relationship. As Woody Allen laments in Annie Hall:

"Relationships are like sharks. If they don't keep advancing, they begin to suffocate, and die."

My question for Woody is what kind of movement does the advancing invite?

3) TWO WAYS ABOUT IT: Dialog is the entry point for communication. All those adages about not going to bed angry or carving out a date night as part of a well-oiled calendar planner all have their merits. But one person cannot perform a wholesale unloading without some unburdening of that load. In fact one colleague went so far as to say that she's integrated performance reviews from the workplace into the partnership aspects of her marriage.

4) BARGAIN PARTS: Quirks are the indelible etchings of personality. Our cognitive wires are not crossed. These are not choices. They are soul-bearing and they're who we are no matter how we may sublimate or conceal them. But there's no hiding from the looking glass of intimacy. That's a two-way mirror the couple must hold up in the bargain and for one another. For the chemistry to flow, it's got to be unconditional on both ends.

Can the original spark re-ignite? My jury will remain out as long as necessary before it can say "I do" and "it can" again.

Lori McKenna and the Power of Suggestion Love

There are all kinds of therapies and fallacies and ointments that apply the marshaling of mental tugging and heart chugging. Our positive thinking powers and prayerful mantra-making are cast into the pantheon of attraction. On the face of it this is called "fortune." We seek on the hope that we will sow. But perhaps the larger goal (if not the more inflated fantasy) is that fortune will pursue us. Below the surface of fortune are its plumbings and fixtures -- the channelings of what we're out to attract...

- Not the seeds we sow
- Not the hands we're dealt

But the circumstances we aspire to claim us -- our hearts and minds conspiring to pry open this simple, binding assertion. There is no destiny without the pathway and us wayfarers are capable of no more and no less than fumbling for these doorways -- whether we turn out to be trailblazers, road kill, or that oddest of travelers: someone whose path travels according to plan.

These mileage markers don't arrive in my shins when I hit the pew kneelers. These soul deductions aren't meted out by cost-to-benefit calculations. Such revelations don't happen in the best prepared lectures or in the most densely packed lecture halls. But an epiphany or two have been known to slip out at least once or twice between performer and audience at venues of reverberating dimensions.

The most recent demonstration occurred last Sunday evening where Lori McKenna was holding court for six consecutive shows over the three-day holiday weekend at Club Passim in Cambridge.

On the surface Ms. McKenna is a mainstay member of the Boston folk scene. She's a troubadour with an attentive eye for emotional detail. Her band is a cabaret jangle that only she can march to. But her parades attract a diehard following that will gratefully hole-up in Passim to catch every show, regardless of the playlist or the backing players. Her Wikipedia blurb is incomplete without the fairly prominent footnote that McKenna is a major presence in a far larger pond. She's part of a tin pan alley braintrust stoking the starmaker (and sustainer) machinery vested in Nashville Tennessee. I say 'footnote'  not because this is an insubstantial source of achievement or revenue for a Boston folkie but simply because country western music never wet my wagon and has little to do with my appreciation for her greatness.

So then, what's the cosmic interplay between a local folk act and the meaning of universal wish fulfillment?

I could tell you that she engages her audience like a personal confidante. It's an authentic experience that you don't get with an insufferable celebrity. Of course, you could dismiss this as the expectation any fan-bonding rapport carries in the price of entry -- that two-way intimacy traveling both below and above the main stage.

I could tell you that her sincerity pumps through her songs with that rough-hewn diamond of a voice. You could toss this off as vocal training or the only choice available to the impassioned artist on a starvation diet of creative redemption: they do what they do because they do what they love. With a precious gift comes to incessant need to share it -- even when there's no transaction to complete, there's a loop to close. And this love is impervious to the pay-outs.

I could impress on you how Lori exudes the housewife life in the town she grew up in where her biggest lifestyle choice was buying a bigger home in the same town. OK, now we're getting somewhere.

It's not about the realty market in Stoughton, Mass. It's about the detour the RV takes when those power brokers make their pilgrimage from the Capital of Living Country to the do-hick backwater where Lori buys her groceries and scribbles down inspirations at delinquent traffic lights.

But how is it that the wife of a plumber and the mother of five gets to do the one thing in her life that entrances her for eight hours at a clip? It's not industry connections or pedigree lineage or even impeccable songwriting credentials (although she's helped move piles of Faith Hill and Amanda Moore through the inventories of the check-outs of Wal-Mart home electronics departments).

It's the uncompromising way she got there. She sang in her voice about the firsthand experience of her life. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw tried on that voice and made sure they could fit into it just fine. By the time Lori had established her sound, fame itself needed to relocate and spend time away from its own fame roots -- just to be in collaboration with McKenna.

And that's where the channeling happens. For those of us with mounting boundaries, narrowing margins, and near misses we can't abide a build-it-and-they-will-come proposition. For Lori it's as if the guests have already arrived and she has a dozen or so shiny new songs she'll be hauling to the local mall in her minivan for their seasonal outfits.

It's not just about suiting up a proper tune and its cadences. Lori told us at the show that her 22, 20 and 17 year-olds were later joined by her "back-up babies" of 10 and 7 through the power of suggestion love. Her gal pals had started their families and presto -- the seven-year itch is scratched off the list.

But that's the shine the future takes towards the wish-granting authority of those who have no names for what they want and the talents to claim those desires.

Lori told us she was going to wake up the Monday before Christmas and slip on her favorite adornment for wrapping gifts: an oversized sweatshirt, perhaps with a hoodie? That's the kind of prophetic clarity us mere doubters can face with sober confidence, boldface sincerity, and lucid luck. The lucidity lies in knowing the ingredients that go into the making of one's own luck.

On that score Lori McKenna has written her own ticket and it's been punched to more than one destination of choice.

Charlie and Nance

I still have a soggy spot in my mundane gratitudes for the U.S. snail mail. I know it's calcified from indifference to credit card offers and the bottomless feeding pile of bulk needfulness. But I also know that we have ourselves to blame for contaminating our timelessness pleasures with our get-it-done-yesterdays. Postcards and letters are not unforgiving of the dues payments and receipts that inspire their send off. What could be more lame than a belated e-card? Starting blocks everybody. The fact that the most important American holiday carries no commercial implication makes us more fidgety than thankful. This vacuum-sucking feast of black Friday holes does not whet my hankering for competitive binges -- on display or piled high on inventories of an internal nature.

It's with that seasonal blessing of my holiday card list that I now pay some overdues to Charles and Nancy Nieland of City Island of the Bronx of New York. They have dwelled there for nearly a quarter century and have their creations and enduring wedlock nestled in their musical sanctuary -- all unraveled cords, milk crate bookcases, and pillars of incense. Charlie and Nance live in the lingering vibrations of smoky club PA systems as well as in heartstrings. I saw them last week in Chicago and here's how it plays out: All the tribulations, street protests, and unresolvable differences in a marriage finding their way to the merciful, symphonic resolution of serenades, bridges, and refrains.

I've moved addresses about 14 times since Charlie and Nance signed their last lease. Since then, jobs, friends, even spouses, have wandered in and out of the place I hang my hat. But Charlie and Nance endure -- not because they chose the predictable path or even the surest footing but because their communication is no more one-sided than a duet.

They don't just play to each other. They adore each other on stage and all the healing that entails within the inarticulate, rule-bound, and unclenched heart of any marriage.  I still remember the first time they played together. Her Vanished Grace debuted in 1988 at the inaugural home of the Knitting Factory on Houston Street -- just the two of them and a drum machine. I still remember Nance having the trembles but her velvety timberance embracing Charlie and his reassurances. They still bask in those same embraces whether it's trading off the arc of their spiraling pulses or just vamping it up in campy swaggers with band-mates Maria Theodosiadou and Billy Loose.

School of marriage rock. That is my tribute to Nance and Charlie. There have been lineup changes. There have been side projects. There have been performance pieces and soundtracks. There have been legal disputes. There have even been collaborations on the pet projects of legacy stardom dwellers that never quite transformed HVG into the top-billing of the chart-bounders. There is no more pretense in covering someone else's tunes than the idea that fame and fortune are on the guest list. They are not only doing what they love. They are expressing their enduring love together while practicing their craft. If there is a higher calling, it exceeds the sonic range of my mixing board.

Oh, and before I stick another stamp on the next return to ancient parcel sender ... treat yourself (my ossified friends) to the newest HVG vintage entitled See the Moon. It puts the Nance-Charlie chemistry within admiration's reach. It may even align you more closely to your own starlit trajectories -- even on journeys plotted so many moves ago.

Jonah Hill of Beanes

Billy Beane is a man who ate his own ego for lunch so he could feed a diaspora of major league misfits. In the newly released film Moneyball, the ultimate cressendo to this narrative sounds as farfetched as the chances for the release of Moneyball II. What could be a more tragic and poetic irony? His team loses in 2003 to the one assembled by Theo Epstein. Epstein descends from the same mountain of math parading the same Jamesian tablets of runs, hits, chapters, and verses. This tragedy is made all the more ironic by the scene that wasn't cut: Beane turns down the chance to play after 2002 with sabermetrician kingpin Bill James and a payroll in an upmarket sports-crazed fishbowl called Boston.

I practice sublimation on a professional level. That means trying not too waiver to far from the middle between expressive and controlled behavior: READ: Bob Dole referring to self as "Dole." It's important to objectify one's self through the eyes of others -- not as a bystander but an active observer, a.k.a. writer. Nothing personal = everything impersonal. That skill takes on added importance after two and a half divorces, two religions, twenty residences, five careers (no crap jos need apply) and the assurance there's no one else's flat-footed shoes I'd rather walk in. It makes complete sense that the one group I would have as a member consists of insurgent iconoclasts. No one joins groups that would have them as members. We are a band of brothers. They are family to me. One of them, Bal (a bona-fide Jamesian disciple), accompanied me to Moneyball over the weekend.

Bal believes that Beane's early fall from baseball grace led Beane to draw lessons on both a personal and communal level:

1. Laboring in obscurity can spell the difference between personal redemption and public humiliation (Beane fanned out in New York first)
2. Baseball scouts (a flock to which Billy once belonged) are speculators with no skin in the game that platforms their recommendations

We see that Beane's idea of accountability is not based on raw potential but actual performance. We see him put up his own limited savings to consummate a deal and turn down an unnegotiated offer from the Red Sox that could have floated one-third of his A's payroll. Not surprisingly, Beane has since parlayed his high stakes dealing into part-owner status in the A's -- talk about job security!

There's another non-clinical term for "sublimation" called team work. There's a scene where Beane confronts David Justice in a terra forma batting cage about the impending arc of his stardom. Justice is "more equal" than the other players because he consumes close to 20% of Beane's 2002 payroll but his earning potential is powering down. It's a classic lesson in free agency economics: "I don't need the money. I need the recognition that I'm worth the money."

Beane gives Justice a motivational sneak peak at the non-financial allure of retirement. That's the humility of raising one's leadership game just as a player starts to lose a step or two on the field. Mercifully there were no pep rallies or Gipper locker room speeches. The closest thing to a nosedive and comebacker narrative played out in the trivial media gossip about the blame and credit-taking. Beane was the fall guy and then Houdini when Art Howe was portrayed in the local press as the string-puller.

My favorite reconciliation in the movie is not between players, or lovers, or family members, or scouting reports but an abstraction. It's a notion that Beane's consuming obsessions dispense with deliberate clarity and speed: "I like to win. I hate to lose." The polarity, it seems, is not equal.

Everything is in perspective -- nothing personal.

Every Time Like the Present

Airport layovers are nature’s way of telling you that the present is never as exhilarating as the promise made by the itinerary that created it. Layovers are the present tense in perpetuity -- a sleight of clock hand that drum rolls into the oblivion of Bill Murray’s wake-up call. Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow and all flights are hound-grounded.

I crawl into the moment by watching former President Clinton carbing ‘n marbling himself into a stent bypass on CNN. Nearby a bullet-shaped member of the supersize majority is recounting his day in the life of food to no one and his cell phone. A med student points up at the CNN cardio-mercial and chimes in: “His vessels didn’t take – that’s three weeks after surgery!”

I’m watching the bloat in my own beltline after five days of Sodexho-laden sauces and vegetables languishing in puddles of Crisco. The fact that my colleagues and I had time to scarf but not to use the gym reminds me that recess is not just a luxury for unsupervised and underachieving children.

Another wrinkle in the exhilaration vacuum is the notion that one can buy complete shaving kits from a vending machine by the CNN Cardiac show but there’s nowhere in Dallas Fort Worth International to purchase a U.S. postage stamp. Fortunately Marilyn, the information booth minder, takes it upon herself to supply them out of her own purse and refuses to transact unless I receive the exact change. Alas, pennies have as much of a future in airports as letters have in the future of commercial communications.

The other fidgety pastime happening below the real time beltline are the messages exploding in the pockets of the rankled and filed. I attributed any retention of youth to having one version of any story worthy of piecing back together and for not being online once powering off my PC. Committing one version per memory story is the way to age like Mount Rushmore – not like these pasty-faced, mortal Presidents of ours.

That rationale fell by the wayside over 3 squares of Sodexho helper when I was assigned my first Blackberry. So far the overwhelming command is to annihilate textual noise before it piles on too high. So far I’ve yet to master this in less than two clicks per delete.

I did manage to load my GMAIL contacts which meant I could relocate the physical addresses of the folks I was sending cards and letters to. It would have been a little too present tense if they received these mailings with a hometown postmark. Perhaps the post office could charge extra for our postal stamp location preferences?  That would take us out of the mundane and let us live in the moment of our own keeping. Alias locations powered by the USPS – it sounds so anti-government it just might fly.

The med student sees me return from checking our flight status – three hours after our planned departure. “is there hope?” she inquires with a smile. I tell her I never lost hope. Once you suspend yourself in the forces of inertia you can retain water, single versions of repeatable events, and yes, hope that I will not be tethered to defending my goal crease against the encroachment of voiceless smart phone chatter. I’ll remember that the next time I schedule a nonstop that leaves late anyway (because of its prior stop).

Why the delay?

There was a rainstorm tonight that thundered across the southwest and the impact in Dallas was the same as a butcher block New England blizzard – at least as far as the arrival board times throttled in the chokehold of a hub like Dallas. I don’t know whether God heeded Rick Perry’s Stadium-based prayer vigils or my rain coat in Terminal C. Water belongs in sprinkler systems – not on roads and runways, right? Either way the postage stamp provider just may have some grass to mow when she wakes up tomorrow.

I think of this as I cut my click-counts down to three. I anticipate a near term future where telepathy will zap SPAM – dead. A killer app … literally.

Without it we’re bobbing around the in-box surface, doomed to a life of todays as stand-ins for the yesterdays of tomorrow. It’s living in the here and now of offline cards and letters that transcends the essence of giving those tomorrows the yesterdays worth preserving.

Hidden Know-how: Kate Pugh Transforms Knowledge Transfer

[caption id="attachment_626" align="alignleft" width="207" caption="Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Managers Solve Thorny Problems With the Knowledge Jam"][/caption]

In Hidden Know-how - How Managers Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam (Josseybass: 2011), author and corporate strategist Katerina Pugh unpacks the swollen, daunting, and sloppy world of organizational learning:

• Swollen in the size of its ambitions and all the nonverbal and unscripted baggage it entails


• Daunting in its disparity between high-minded concept and lame execution


• Sloppy in a sincere but misplaced faith that a seat at the table ensures a productive exchange of agreed-upon outcomes

Pugh leaves as little to chance as a planned communication can contain within its unscripted boundaries. She zeros in on the transfer point in the knowledge transaction between knowledge originators and recipients. Pugh takes immediate aim at recipients who are too passive and one-sided exchanges where impervious originators are more interested in addressing their expertise -- not their colleagues:

"People who use the knowledge should drive the conversation, as they are more likely to draw out context that would make applying knowledge easier."

All too often a static presenter is appointed expert and does a brain dump. The recipients are then faced with two off-putting choices:

1. Follow the presenter's logic through and accept or question the conclusions based on the originator's perspective (poking at the dumping pile), or


2. Wondering off-script by asking the expert to apply these rationales to the recipient's own circumstances

Either way, these situational roles impose their own limits: (1) being lectured at, or, (2) deviating from the presenter's preparations and the group being presented to. Pugh's methods for sparking meaningful exchanges center on the practical matter of liberating originators and recipients from the self-imposed limitations that impeded the transfer process. Here are a few ripe examples of such roadblocks and counter-steps or probes the facilitator can take to redirect the conversation:

1) Impatience: Participants are worn down by excessive detail.

Probe: Ask the group whether to continue the drill-down or table for further offline deliberation, a.k.a. "the parking lot."

2) Silence: Participants hold back their knowledge through suppression and distraction.

Probe: Build on pre-established trust in drawing out tight-lipped originators -- "Sally, you recently had something like that. Can you explain how you handled it?"

3) Passive-Aggressive: Some key players may weigh-in by sitting out the transfer or what Pugh terms "the discover/capture event" which ensues after the planning stage.

Probe: Connect the goal orientation of reticent participants  to the event results; mainly the knowledge gained and shared to support these goals. In effect, "make it worth their while" by making them accountable for these outcomes.

4) Argumentative: Some actors fancy their participation as the devil's advocate or out-and-out contrarian, injecting skepticism or doubt into the mix or even into the knowledge jam itself. Pugh intimates that a hostile edge in a disbelieving stance stems from participants who perceive the limits of their own authority to affect change, or even the questioning of that authority by the group.

Probe: "Don't let the argument be between the facilitator and doubter," writes Pugh. "Instead, use the group to address the argument."  

These four examples are but a sliver of a rich and deep roadmap for engaging participants, repairing breakdowns, and advancing difficult but ultimately productive knowledge transfers. By articulating the protocols for consensus-building Kate Pugh has assembled a beckoning refuge for harboring the tensions and frictions that need to be addressed in any open and honest team-building effort.

Throughout the book Ms. Pugh maintains her insistence about the need for openness -- (in quoting Williams College President Adam Falk) "... to extend and refine our thinking in the presence of others who bring their own experiences and motivations." That goal seems all the more achievable as the methods detailed in Hidden Know-how find their way into the toolkits of knowledge brokers and conversations across conference room tables in all walks of organizational learning.

Theory of Mind: It's not all in our Heads

A recent article called Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know was the top download on NYT.com over several post publication news cycles. The piece is framed as a new justification for literature as a scorecard-like tool for sharpening one's theory of mind -- the ability to see competing versions of reality from anothers' point of view.

The writer, Patricia Cohen, seems more intent on stroking the bruised egos of arts and humanities majors than on any serious exploration of perspective-taking or its many tangible benefits. Maybe that's to be expected from right brains tired of accommodating a left brain world. But that's more of an indulgence than a meaningful exercise of right brain power in its contemplative and exacting glory.

Nor does the piece focus on any likely corollaries: does an intellect wired for math and science find it more challenging to process the shades and complexities that perspective-taking poses? Centuries full of socially clueless science majors could argue that case rather well. While I'm no more dismissive of liberal arts than the next New York Times-colored word person, that's not the lead story that been buried here.

The ability to view the world through others is a kind of lens crafting that focuses us on details we would overlook in our own petitions, priorities we only notice in the obsessions of others, and most importantly, motivations that would otherwise confuse or surprise us if we couldn't well piece them together.

Lens crafting is our best defense against blind spots, blindfolds really. It enables us to see differing perceptions and to understand how others we conflict with would process or filter the same circumstances or events we're interpreting so differently. Talk about your intractable negotiations -- how can we even approach that bargaining table without lens crafting?

Other than coercion and intimidation there really is no way to win over adversaries or influence the outcomes more oriented to our own goals and motives. As Joe the Biden says, we're now in BFD territory that eclipses even the future of English programs in higher education.

Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others. Left Brain Dominance: (16) Right Brain Dominance: (16) Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz

Theory of Mind: It's not all in our Heads

A recent article called Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know was the top download on NYT.com over several post publication news cycles. The piece is framed as a new justification for literature as a scorecard-like tool for sharpening one's theory of mind -- the ability to see competing versions of reality from anothers' point of view.

The writer, Patricia Cohen, seems more intent on stroking the bruised egos of arts and humanities majors than on any serious exploration of perspective-taking or its many tangible benefits. Maybe that's to be expected from right brains tired of accommodating a left brain world. But that's more of an indulgence than a meaningful exercise of right brain power in its contemplative and exacting glory.

Nor does the piece focus on any likely corollaries: does an intellect wired for math and science find it more challenging to process the shades and complexities that perspective-taking poses? Centuries full of socially clueless science majors could argue that case rather well. While I'm no more dismissive of liberal arts than the next New York Times-colored word person, that's not the lead story that been buried here.

The ability to view the world through others is a kind of lens crafting that focuses us on details we would overlook in our own petitions, priorities we only notice in the obsessions of others, and most importantly, motivations that would otherwise confuse or surprise us if we couldn't well piece them together.

Lens crafting is our best defense against blind spots, blindfolds really. It enables us to see differing perceptions and to understand how others we conflict with would process or filter the same circumstances or events we're interpreting so differently. Talk about your intractable negotiations -- how can we even approach that bargaining table without lens crafting?

Other than coercion and intimidation there really is no way to win over adversaries or influence the outcomes more oriented to our own goals and motives. As Joe the Biden says, we're now in BFD territory that eclipses even the future of English programs in higher education.

Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others. Left Brain Dominance: (16) Right Brain Dominance: (16) Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz

Self Help Wanted

For each withdrawal we make in our belief in institutions there is an equal deposit made in our own individual faith. This used to be called the self-help industry but it's really become the self-help economy.

This is something of an extended family business. My uncle Stephen planted pre-wikipedic primers, field guides to buying homes, life scripts for difficult conversations, and road maps in the fertile beds of personal finance. My cousin extended the license to food and agriculture. He is a rally cry and cultural beacon who many eaters consider before they fill their grocery carts. Back to Cousin Michael later in this post.

Self-help is the battering ram between real estate and eating well. As my cousin described this in a discussion a few years back people get really worked up about food because it represents the last stand they can take on local control of a global resource.

Flash forward to page one of the self-helper instruction guide: golden rule for guru-teacher-authors -- convince all disciples that their shortcomings are common foibles and that their strengths are not just extraordinary but unique to the worlds they wish to dwell in or even build from scratch. The chapter concludes with the coaching lesson factory of dreams made real by our American-bred Wizard of Oz.

This is the assumption that the student/apprentice holds the keys to all the cards -- not their life coaches or foremans inside dream factories. The break they're going to catch is the one they give themselves. Self-helpers make their own beds, their own luck, and their own way through this clubby, rigged minefield of petty checks and gaping imbalances. That's my experience anyway with my virtual students in particular. They are trying to reorder their priorities and remake their worlds by pursuing online programs that augment their careers and hiring credentials.

However, it's one thing to put this on our credit cards. It's quite another to experience immersion in a foreign subject in virtual isolation. Every outside distraction and prior commitment that outlives the program compounds the doubts of falling behind the pace that the other students are keeping up with. Virtual struggling is in many ways a lot more challenging than classroom struggling. That's what I was responding to on an email to a follow-up pep talk / phone call:

It's hard working in virtual silence with no visible support. That part is for real. The part about not keeping up and imagining that everyone else is moving flawlessly along? That's not reality at all!

Freeing online students from their isolation chambers is only half the battle. Then they have to reconnect with the passion that motivated them to accept the self-help challenge of online education. It can be liberating and scary to make good on that Wizard of Oz assumption. Being the captain of one's own ship infers that we know where we're sailing to. This is clearly not the case for most of us. But those willing to ask the question are owed something by their gurus: the trade-offs between realizing their dreams and some sacrifices they'll meet along the way.

Without the benefits to risks discussion we're back to the same inflated pap that serves as public debate in today's cable news calendar. More services -- great taste! Fewer taxes -- less filling!! That brings me back to Michael. In my limited estimation he was ambushed last week on NPR for this very reason.

All Things Considered turned into the Daily Show for one fleeting sequence when he was lampooned as the Pope of high cuisine as ATC staffers confessed some sardonic food sins. Chef Boyardee was the bait as Michael decried the moral and dietary perils of the modern slaughterhouse in the Upton Sinclair tradition.But if it was as simple as exposing the sinister backstories of Archer Daniels, Cargill, etal. we'd be out of the feed yard woods.

But convict the Meat Industry for its hate crimes against cows, pigs, and chickens and our McMansion pantries are still clamoring for cans of non-perishable pasta-sized sirloin implants. That's the caloric reality. The I-have-a-food-dream speech is rather spartan and bland:

Eat.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

Michael's advice has not fallen on deaf pallets. But this edict is about as appetizing as washing down to weight loss pills with a meal-replacement shake topped off with a sprinkling of wheat germ in a psyllium powder reduction. You can't waffle toast a muffin breakfast sandwich big enough to accommodate the stretch it takes in a public pursuit of pleasure and joy within this formula.

That's why April Fools came early to All Things Considered. That's why good dreams don't come cheap and the best way to avoid sticker shock is to start out price conscious. That's a lesson for online learners and gurus of all methods and teachings.

Self Help Wanted

For each withdrawal we make in our belief in institutions there is an equal deposit made in our own individual faith. This used to be called the self-help industry but it's really become the self-help economy.

This is something of an extended family business. My uncle Stephen planted pre-wikipedic primers, field guides to buying homes, life scripts for difficult conversations, and road maps in the fertile beds of personal finance. My cousin extended the license to food and agriculture. He is a rally cry and cultural beacon who many eaters consider before they fill their grocery carts. Back to Cousin Michael later in this post.

Self-help is the battering ram between real estate and eating well. As my cousin described this in a discussion a few years back people get really worked up about food because it represents the last stand they can take on local control of a global resource.

Flash forward to page one of the self-helper instruction guide: golden rule for guru-teacher-authors -- convince all disciples that their shortcomings are common foibles and that their strengths are not just extraordinary but unique to the worlds they wish to dwell in or even build from scratch. The chapter concludes with the coaching lesson factory of dreams made real by our American-bred Wizard of Oz.

This is the assumption that the student/apprentice holds the keys to all the cards -- not their life coaches or foremans inside dream factories. The break they're going to catch is the one they give themselves. Self-helpers make their own beds, their own luck, and their own way through this clubby, rigged minefield of petty checks and gaping imbalances. That's my experience anyway with my virtual students in particular. They are trying to reorder their priorities and remake their worlds by pursuing online programs that augment their careers and hiring credentials.

However, it's one thing to put this on our credit cards. It's quite another to experience immersion in a foreign subject in virtual isolation. Every outside distraction and prior commitment that outlives the program compounds the doubts of falling behind the pace that the other students are keeping up with. Virtual struggling is in many ways a lot more challenging than classroom struggling. That's what I was responding to on an email to a follow-up pep talk / phone call:

It's hard working in virtual silence with no visible support. That part is for real. The part about not keeping up and imagining that everyone else is moving flawlessly along? That's not reality at all!

Freeing online students from their isolation chambers is only half the battle. Then they have to reconnect with the passion that motivated them to accept the self-help challenge of online education. It can be liberating and scary to make good on that Wizard of Oz assumption. Being the captain of one's own ship infers that we know where we're sailing to. This is clearly not the case for most of us. But those willing to ask the question are owed something by their gurus: the trade-offs between realizing their dreams and some sacrifices they'll meet along the way.

Without the benefits to risks discussion we're back to the same inflated pap that serves as public debate in today's cable news calendar. More services -- great taste! Fewer taxes -- less filling!! That brings me back to Michael. In my limited estimation he was ambushed last week on NPR for this very reason.

All Things Considered turned into the Daily Show for one fleeting sequence when he was lampooned as the Pope of high cuisine as ATC staffers confessed some sardonic food sins. Chef Boyardee was the bait as Michael decried the moral and dietary perils of the modern slaughterhouse in the Upton Sinclair tradition.But if it was as simple as exposing the sinister backstories of Archer Daniels, Cargill, etal. we'd be out of the feed yard woods.

But convict the Meat Industry for its hate crimes against cows, pigs, and chickens and our McMansion pantries are still clamoring for cans of non-perishable pasta-sized sirloin implants. That's the caloric reality. The I-have-a-food-dream speech is rather spartan and bland:

Eat.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

Michael's advice has not fallen on deaf pallets. But this edict is about as appetizing as washing down to weight loss pills with a meal-replacement shake topped off with a sprinkling of wheat germ in a psyllium powder reduction. You can't waffle toast a muffin breakfast sandwich big enough to accommodate the stretch it takes in a public pursuit of pleasure and joy within this formula.

That's why April Fools came early to All Things Considered. That's why good dreams don't come cheap and the best way to avoid sticker shock is to start out price conscious. That's a lesson for online learners and gurus of all methods and teachings.

Threadecessors

I've been preparing for my next round of Internet Research courses for the Boston University PI program and it's come to mind that two esteemed teaching examples have shut their windows and folded.

The first is Kartoo. Kartoo was the literal interpretation for "connecting the dots." Kartoo was a metasearch visualization tool that ran on Google. That means you could apply Google syntax to Kartoo and get the added bonus of the Kartoo interface doing its magic.

Instead of presenting an endless scroll of countless pages, Kartoo processed the top-cut or highest ranking sites like a clustering tool. Then it displayed your terms as connection points between information sources. It also augmented the referencing of relevant words and phrases between sources. For instance an original story picked up in other places would display primary and secondary sources (and the paths between them).

The second also-ran was Newssift which closed shop after only a year. It was the first websearch that kept and expanded on the promise of sentiment analysis. If you wanted the dirt on a high profile executive Newssift would enable you to do this without soiling for a single adjective. Brilliant. If you want to lament more here's my review of them from last spring.

One of the promises I make my students at the beginning of each cycle is that they've already paid to take the course. There's no double-dipping in subscription fees. The flip-side of course is that these innovative answering machines are at the mercy of a rather dominated and unimaginative business model where Google hegemony is as absolute as the Microsoft/Intel cartel was to the desktop. This is small comfort to BU's instructional designers who are on the verge of publishing outdated curriculum every semester.

However, in the biggest picture this doesn't count as a service disruption or even a broken link. So long as there's more than one answer to a question there will be a reason to improve on existing search technology.

Threadecessors

I've been preparing for my next round of Internet Research courses for the Boston University PI program and it's come to mind that two esteemed teaching examples have shut their windows and folded.

The first is Kartoo. Kartoo was the literal interpretation for "connecting the dots." Kartoo was a metasearch visualization tool that ran on Google. That means you could apply Google syntax to Kartoo and get the added bonus of the Kartoo interface doing its magic.

Instead of presenting an endless scroll of countless pages, Kartoo processed the top-cut or highest ranking sites like a clustering tool. Then it displayed your terms as connection points between information sources. It also augmented the referencing of relevant words and phrases between sources. For instance an original story picked up in other places would display primary and secondary sources (and the paths between them).

The second also-ran was Newssift which closed shop after only a year. It was the first websearch that kept and expanded on the promise of sentiment analysis. If you wanted the dirt on a high profile executive Newssift would enable you to do this without soiling for a single adjective. Brilliant. If you want to lament more here's my review of them from last spring.

One of the promises I make my students at the beginning of each cycle is that they've already paid to take the course. There's no double-dipping in subscription fees. The flip-side of course is that these innovative answering machines are at the mercy of a rather dominated and unimaginative business model where Google hegemony is as absolute as the Microsoft/Intel cartel was to the desktop. This is small comfort to BU's instructional designers who are on the verge of publishing outdated curriculum every semester.

However, in the biggest picture this doesn't count as a service disruption or even a broken link. So long as there's more than one answer to a question there will be a reason to improve on existing search technology.

Walking the Talk

Today is the birthday of former news jock, PR executive, schoolteacher, current education wonk and lifelong pal Robert "Pondish" Pondiscio. Pondish was born with the gift of gab. He could start a discussion at the crack of the dinner bell in a firehouse. He could create situations with his patter that wallflowers like me could only have blossom in a file cabinet.

Unlike chatty academics he never used his gift to talk over or around the people he engages. Unlike the more plain-spoken folks he's inclined to side with (and sometimes speak for) he doesn't hang on the porch or in the hood in order to shoot/chew the breeze/fat. To this day Dish in a stupor can talk rings around most communicators in their most lucid moments of peak caffeination.

One life-changing decision he made that inspires great pride in me was his career change from managing media narratives to planting seeds as a grade school teacher in the South Bronx. In addition to math, reading, personal etiquette and crowd control he was probably the closest model that many of his fifth graders came to a daily paternal presence. He put his poverty where his mouth was -- to the tune of seeing his earnings cut by more than half of his former pay rate. Austerity was not a forced vocation for Pondish. Attracting public stares or peer disapproval would not have made this decision harder. Knowing Dish, it might have greased the wheels some.

But no outside influence eases the internal pressures that come with students lacking basic knowledge skills: "I would leave work every day with tire tracks on my back..." Pondish defines the mission and the missionary by what's left "undone" at the end of each school day. He describes how extensive dysfunction begets compassion fatigue and the soft bigotry of low expectations.

His experience was captured at the close of his public school chapter in an interview called "A Teacher's Tale" with Business Week, a former employer. In addition to the war stories there are stellar insights here into the adjustments needed to transition from a corporate culture to a giveback career. You can also catch up with his education policy pulse-taking at his Core Knowledge Blog.

Happy birthday, Dish. Long may you testify.