Stan Plays Shirley

It's true. Some spams I don't toss.

Usually it's because I have a lotto-ticket-sized hope in my pocket. It's not about increasing my penis or reducing my mortgage debt but other worldly aspirations. In this case it's about the likelihood that a cult-hood hero with a decidedly regional west coast flavor would wonder back east. Stan Ridgway is wading into what Peter Gabriel once referred to as his 1982 fall tour through darkest America when he played Utica, NY.

Shirley is not a beauty or a parlor but a place that I pass 52 times per year on my way to seeing my son in Western Mass. The only time I dropped in was two bubble bursts ago when I first walked the Avon 3-day and some school children stepped outside to cheer our way through the town.

The improbability is furthered because my son's rock concert experience has never ventured beyond another regional flavor closer to home -- Haydenville, MA-based songwriter Ray Mason. Now I have never foisted my heroes on my son, let alone entire inheritances of mine he's more than happy to let lapse (Judaism and baseball for starters). But Stan's music snuck under his guard and came to settle in a similar, rewarding place. Now we'll get from email distance to actual sonics of a vibration-basking range.

Stan's last studio work Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs actually inspired Jerry's first video. As you'll see my son's rendition of Crow Hollow Blues takes the surrealism of the album title as literally as a blacktop fugitive can take it. He tried to email Stan with the news of its release but it blew up on its way to the big honcho gate-keeping tycoon that guards Stan's in-box. He'll have to send that release again when I have him this weekend.

Shirley beckons.

Stan Plays Shirley

It's true. Some spams I don't toss.

Usually it's because I have a lotto-ticket-sized hope in my pocket. It's not about increasing my penis or reducing my mortgage debt but other worldly aspirations. In this case it's about the likelihood that a cult-hood hero with a decidedly regional west coast flavor would wonder back east. Stan Ridgway is wading into what Peter Gabriel once referred to as his 1982 fall tour through darkest America when he played Utica, NY.

Shirley is not a beauty or a parlor but a place that I pass 52 times per year on my way to seeing my son in Western Mass. The only time I dropped in was two bubble bursts ago when I first walked the Avon 3-day and some school children stepped outside to cheer our way through the town.

The improbability is furthered because my son's rock concert experience has never ventured beyond another regional flavor closer to home -- Haydenville, MA-based songwriter Ray Mason. Now I have never foisted my heroes on my son, let alone entire inheritances of mine he's more than happy to let lapse (Judaism and baseball for starters). But Stan's music snuck under his guard and came to settle in a similar, rewarding place. Now we'll get from email distance to actual sonics of a vibration-basking range.

Stan's last studio work Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs actually inspired Jerry's first video. As you'll see my son's rendition of Crow Hollow Blues takes the surrealism of the album title as literally as a blacktop fugitive can take it. He tried to email Stan with the news of its release but it blew up on its way to the big honcho gate-keeping tycoon that guards Stan's in-box. He'll have to send that release again when I have him this weekend.

Shirley beckons.

Given what we know is happening around the world...

There was some fresh talk around a conference table in Back Bay yesterday hosted by Sharon Wilson, Bain & Company KM leader. A group of us knowledge geeks rolled up our rambling sleeves and had an all morning back-and-forth in the grand tradition of rocking chairs, porch swings, and pitchers of lemonade.

I'm referring to the Boston chapter of the SIKM Leaders -- a virtual community of know-ledginess practitioners, forged by the prolific KM firebrand Stan Garfield a few years back. The group was then adopted by Gian Jagai as a list for generating some well-placed face time among the local, Boston-based members. I'm actually making it sound more formal than it is. It's all based on an opt-in basis for self-selection and the low overhead only heightens the value and richness of the meetings.

The agenda is in full view -- there is none -- just a free and even flow of ideas. The breakout session is the keynote. There are no vendor booths or dues to pay or deadlines -- either by committee or self-imposed. We are not beholden to a presentations or applications.

If someone makes a casual probe into a knowledge delivery method then a formal model is referred to and the slide appears. If someone else wants to know how a gaggle of social media could fly as a way to sell new business then the gadget, page, or prospect in question is never more than a click away from where the conversation around the table turns and pivots.

The lack of group-affiliated baggage reminded me of what it's like to wave one's blogging credentials around a group of peers with no hierarchy, market focus, or even a shared professional pathway. The unifying factor here is the sharing of ideas. The uninhibited flow of our exchange is a welcome departure from a culture of scarcity -- not just the drying up of capital and job markets but creative problem-solving. The face-to-face is an essential restoration of this. Experimentation is an unacceptable form of risk. Mistakes can and must be made. Failure is an option that must be back on the table!

Exploration is the prerequisite for laughing at the misfires and drawing on the larger lessons. What a relief to seat this assumption at our conference table. In the unraveling of structure we aren't rushing towards any certainties or defensible postures. Our escape lies in knowing the uncertainties that confront us beyond the conference room and what we can do with KM as a verb -- not as a budget category or enterprise technology.

What is that confrontation?

Beyond (1) the silo-busting transparency of the post web 2.0 economy, (2) the austerities of diminished appetites for greed, and (3), the profound regulatory climate change that is sure to come there will be much call for unadorned, well-documented truth-telling. Case-in-point: Dan Abramson details departmental redundancies at his former, high-flying financial services giant and who's first on the chopping block? The truth-teller, that's who.

How will this play out over the next few years? What truths are prime for selection and who gets to testify?

There's a looming discovery that needs to be part of our collective recovery. We need to know how we got where we are before we can get out. This is not for blame-hungry, fingerpointing partisans. This is a post crash climate where politically-agnostic, process-centric investigations can shine. Some of the seeds of this truth-telling are spread in the knowledge harvests led by Kate Pugh and Nancy Dickson. Kate is teaming with Kiette Tucker to be leading one soon at the Institute for Health Improvement.

This higher calling is not about outlasting the competition, retiring early, or the self-enrichment of unfettered bubbles but about restoring the social contract. As Robert Johnson noted tonight on Bill Moyers, without it the architecture of the integrated world could be shattered. Interdependency is not about campfires and bi-partisanship. It's the long postponed realization that the zero sum game is a losing battle. Case-in-point: the winners will be asked for their resignation letters as soon as the taxpayer becomes the primary shareholder in their banks.

Regardless of whether our next pay day comes from a value-driving innovation, a stimulous package, or a loan from China, my gains better well be our gains or the losing streak will continue.

Given what we know is happening around the world...

There was some fresh talk around a conference table in Back Bay yesterday hosted by Sharon Wilson, Bain & Company KM leader. A group of us knowledge geeks rolled up our rambling sleeves and had an all morning back-and-forth in the grand tradition of rocking chairs, porch swings, and pitchers of lemonade.

I'm referring to the Boston chapter of the SIKM Leaders -- a virtual community of know-ledginess practitioners, forged by the prolific KM firebrand Stan Garfield a few years back. The group was then adopted by Gian Jagai as a list for generating some well-placed face time among the local, Boston-based members. I'm actually making it sound more formal than it is. It's all based on an opt-in basis for self-selection and the low overhead only heightens the value and richness of the meetings.

The agenda is in full view -- there is none -- just a free and even flow of ideas. The breakout session is the keynote. There are no vendor booths or dues to pay or deadlines -- either by committee or self-imposed. We are not beholden to a presentations or applications.

If someone makes a casual probe into a knowledge delivery method then a formal model is referred to and the slide appears. If someone else wants to know how a gaggle of social media could fly as a way to sell new business then the gadget, page, or prospect in question is never more than a click away from where the conversation around the table turns and pivots.

The lack of group-affiliated baggage reminded me of what it's like to wave one's blogging credentials around a group of peers with no hierarchy, market focus, or even a shared professional pathway. The unifying factor here is the sharing of ideas. The uninhibited flow of our exchange is a welcome departure from a culture of scarcity -- not just the drying up of capital and job markets but creative problem-solving. The face-to-face is an essential restoration of this. Experimentation is an unacceptable form of risk. Mistakes can and must be made. Failure is an option that must be back on the table!

Exploration is the prerequisite for laughing at the misfires and drawing on the larger lessons. What a relief to seat this assumption at our conference table. In the unraveling of structure we aren't rushing towards any certainties or defensible postures. Our escape lies in knowing the uncertainties that confront us beyond the conference room and what we can do with KM as a verb -- not as a budget category or enterprise technology.

What is that confrontation?

Beyond (1) the silo-busting transparency of the post web 2.0 economy, (2) the austerities of diminished appetites for greed, and (3), the profound regulatory climate change that is sure to come there will be much call for unadorned, well-documented truth-telling. Case-in-point: Dan Abramson details departmental redundancies at his former, high-flying financial services giant and who's first on the chopping block? The truth-teller, that's who.

How will this play out over the next few years? What truths are prime for selection and who gets to testify?

There's a looming discovery that needs to be part of our collective recovery. We need to know how we got where we are before we can get out. This is not for blame-hungry, fingerpointing partisans. This is a post crash climate where politically-agnostic, process-centric investigations can shine. Some of the seeds of this truth-telling are spread in the knowledge harvests led by Kate Pugh and Nancy Dickson. Kate is teaming with Kiette Tucker to be leading one soon at the Institute for Health Improvement.

This higher calling is not about outlasting the competition, retiring early, or the self-enrichment of unfettered bubbles but about restoring the social contract. As Robert Johnson noted tonight on Bill Moyers, without it the architecture of the integrated world could be shattered. Interdependency is not about campfires and bi-partisanship. It's the long postponed realization that the zero sum game is a losing battle. Case-in-point: the winners will be asked for their resignation letters as soon as the taxpayer becomes the primary shareholder in their banks.

Regardless of whether our next pay day comes from a value-driving innovation, a stimulous package, or a loan from China, my gains better well be our gains or the losing streak will continue.

Site in the clouds

The last couple of weeks I've been nibbling away at a new approach to staging knowledge portals by staging a pilot through Google Sites. It's the anti-intranet. It's the thousand tiny SharePoints of light. It's not proprietary although it is password protected. It's a portal into something larger -- not smaller than the sum of its hyperlinks. No one needs an encryptocard or a secret handshake other than the invite to join.

The one frustration is that the so-called scripts that pass for gadgets are as erratic as a unexpected and unwelcome one-two patch on a Windows update. I must have toyed with a half-dozen customizable RSS interfaces. They all fell apart the minute I went into tweak them. That's my kneejerk response to the false positives pouring from references to Obama that include neither 'government' nor 'politics.' (Talk about departing from false positives as usual).

The ticker display widgets, especially from one source called SaneBull are a hearty lot. The driving directions from MapQuest won't drain the batteries on your GPS compass. I am in awe of the Google spreadsheets that sing and dance or cry and mope depending on the market gyration du jour. It's also a guilty pleasure to be searching on filetype and trolling for all these "kickass PowerPoints." That's not my emotional connection but those of the consultants who respirate, perspire and dream in slideware. The punch line is that it's public domain presentations so the getting something for nothing buzz lasts a lot longer than the going rate on RSS feeds.

The nicest part about cloud computing for builders and users alike is that you've replaced Little IT with Big Google. And there are no bruised egos, server crashes, or even pink slips -- how beneficent can Google be?

The other knot that I still haven't untangled is that the Custom Google Search closes for business whenever I log off the web. This is never an issue on the blog where the Javascript holds the custom search in place regardless of whether hot PowerPoints can keep me burning through spent fuel rods well after the intranet shuts its doors.

Site in the clouds

The last couple of weeks I've been nibbling away at a new approach to staging knowledge portals by staging a pilot through Google Sites. It's the anti-intranet. It's the thousand tiny SharePoints of light. It's not proprietary although it is password protected. It's a portal into something larger -- not smaller than the sum of its hyperlinks. No one needs an encryptocard or a secret handshake other than the invite to join.

The one frustration is that the so-called scripts that pass for gadgets are as erratic as a unexpected and unwelcome one-two patch on a Windows update. I must have toyed with a half-dozen customizable RSS interfaces. They all fell apart the minute I went into tweak them. That's my kneejerk response to the false positives pouring from references to Obama that include neither 'government' nor 'politics.' (Talk about departing from false positives as usual).

The ticker display widgets, especially from one source called SaneBull are a hearty lot. The driving directions from MapQuest won't drain the batteries on your GPS compass. I am in awe of the Google spreadsheets that sing and dance or cry and mope depending on the market gyration du jour. It's also a guilty pleasure to be searching on filetype and trolling for all these "kickass PowerPoints." That's not my emotional connection but those of the consultants who respirate, perspire and dream in slideware. The punch line is that it's public domain presentations so the getting something for nothing buzz lasts a lot longer than the going rate on RSS feeds.

The nicest part about cloud computing for builders and users alike is that you've replaced Little IT with Big Google. And there are no bruised egos, server crashes, or even pink slips -- how beneficent can Google be?

The other knot that I still haven't untangled is that the Custom Google Search closes for business whenever I log off the web. This is never an issue on the blog where the Javascript holds the custom search in place regardless of whether hot PowerPoints can keep me burning through spent fuel rods well after the intranet shuts its doors.

The Splurge

Insofar as theirs is a generation that we've had trouble just saying no to, does it follow that the absurd degree to which we live beyond our means reflects not so much our rapacity, but our unwillingness to stem it in our children?

This thought byte comes from a recent email thread between me and some dearest cronies who besides a lifelong friendship have the common bond of belonging to no groups that would have us as members.

From a mass scale telescopic view I can see how we as a generation have utterly failed the next one in the same way we've tried so hard to succeed: we've done what our parents didn't dream possible. We've become friends of our children. The hierarchy has collapsed. No more man's-home-as-castle or spare-rods-and-spoiling-progeny. We monitor their Facebook sessions. Then we skulk because they haven't friended us.

Part of our buddy play may well be to buy-off our childrens' gratifications through gadgets and junkets. We had one year of "the surge" but are now going on 30 years of splurge -- soon be etched in history as the run-up to the end of self-correcting capitalism.

However, peel away the macro perspective and my own micro perspective is out of step in the big splurge picture. I have a non neuro-typical son with an Asperger's diagnosis who I have a difficult time saying no to. This is because he has such a difficult time asking for things. I know that because he longs to be on his own. Unlike his dad he neither:

1. has the precedent to show himself the door from childhood nor,
2. the cognitive workings to figure out what it means to survive in the world.

Still he gets a seat at the table as his IEP team assembles. He is lobbied intensively by his divorced parents who are on opposite sides of whether to continue speech and language sessions at the high school. In the end he casts the deciding vote. He sides with mom -- as does the under-resourced school. In fact the school and she are in lockstep as documented by her response to my concern about ending special needs services and the official Refusal of Services letter I received the next day:

MOTHER: "[B]ecause the meeting concluded with the determination that, at his age, life experience (such as volunteering, community activities, etc.) is more appropriate than an artificial setting for gaining social skills, there is nothing I am seeking from the school system."

SCHOOL: "It is likely he will derive more benefit from real life interactions, and their natural consequences, through real life interactions as opposed to instructional practice with contrived and artificial situations."

My son does not understand this is a false choice. He does not see the connection between learning pragmatics and his leading an independent life. He doesn't connect all his confusions and anxieties about nonverbal language, contextual cues, inferential logic to basic social problem-solving 101. That's the program where life creates the problems and the course to address them is through the special needs services required by the many high-functioning and non-verbal learning disabled children that came of age in his generation.

He is not proficient in using his hands or working in the physical environment. He is not naturally gifted at math or science or other disciplines where he can lead a hermetic existence. He needs to live within the world of human contact. He has to be taught to process and handle intricacies he neither understands nor sees as important to his own growth and discovery.

So now that I've established what he doesn't want -- artificial and contrived situations perhaps? Here's what he is getting: He's in his second year of algebra and he still can’t figure out how to convert hours worked into dollars earned. He completes workbook upon workbook in his solitary home school setting filled with multiple choice trivia that relies on his one indomitable scholastic survival skill -- rote memorization. It is a curriculum that does nothing to help him in his deficit areas. I draw that conclusion from a succession of outside speech and language evaluations. Ironically the last one was completed the same week the most recent therapy ended at the school.

It's equally frustrating that he really knows what he wants to communicate. It's the how part he needs help with. He's a terrific writer. He's written funny sketches. He enjoys acting, dance, and chorus. But when rehearsals end he's totally out of the loop. He didn't know what a text message was until one was demonstrated on an episode of Heroes we watched together. He looks at his watch incessantly without realizing the signal it gives to others. Does he even feel a tinge of doubt or sadness that at 16 he's told to watch his younger siblings but that he’s ill-equipped to babysit-for-hire? No, because then he might enroll in social problem-solving 101 -- probably retake it several times at least. No time for it? Too much homeschool memorization? Too bad.

His trouble with abstractions holds real -- not abstract -- consequences. It's hard to live up to one's potential when not even knowing what it means. He can't even define the term "potential." Never heard of it. He can pretend though. He feigns understanding. When I applauded him this past weekend for admitting to not “getting it” he said that he just has to wait for his birthday and then he’ll get “it” – whatever it is.

Someone much brighter than me once said it's not fair to ask a child with a disability what they want. My birthday wish for my son is that he can put aside his doubts and anger and embrace the support that will move him past the blank stares, IEP meetings, feckless administrators, and his parents' bickering. He is the most genuine and kind soul I've ever met. That would be true if I wasn't his parent.