January 1, 2009
What would life look like if you took one photograph each day for a year and then reviewed them all at the end of the year? That's exactly what one guy did, and he called it Project365
Imagine: watching your tastes, your home, your friends, your romantic interests, and your appearance change over an entire year. In photographic evidence.
I think it's a neat idea and I invite you to join in watching me do it. I've created a photo album up there under Photo Albums and I'll be uploading pics every one to three days (but one picture per day!) Let's see where we are on December 31, 2009!
11:40 pm | Comment (2) | Print | Categories: Adventures
December 27, 2008
Christmas was a blast - we even got some white, in the form of a Christmas Day thunderstorm (complete with hail). Most of the items I received were flat enough to stuff into bags and carry on the plane, but a crock pot should await my return home.
The prime rib was fantastic, and the long visit with my sister - someone I hadn't seen in some seven years - was great. All in all, a wonderful holiday with friends and family.
1:51 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Adventures, Holidays
December 20, 2008
Yesterday morning I flew back to California for the Christmas holiday. I took a direct flight from Dulles to San Francisco on Virgin America, where I flew on a First Class upgrade. Though the flight was slightly delayed due to being overbooked and too heavy (some bags were even left behind), flying First Class was the best experience with flight I've had. And who can complain about a dedicated security line, a dedicated check in line, and a nicer lounge chair than I have in my living room? Certainly not I. And, being direct, I missed the mess in the Midwest.
My mother picked me up along with my brother, and we headed up to San Francisco where we visited Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Crate & Barrel, Apple, and other stores downtown. We finished the day off with a great dinner at the rooftop Cheesecake Factory, which is on top of Macy's. There we had outdoor seating (something you can only do in California in December!) and a wonderful view of Union Square Park.
Tomorrow we have a Christmas party planned, followed by a week of shopping and celebrating. I've bought my train tickets for when I head back home, and I'm looking forward to a great vacation. For those I'll see tomorrow I look forward to it; the rest of you I will see soon!
6:11 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Adventures, Holidays, Travel
December 18, 2008
How many times do people say that? It seems like nobody takes responsibility for anything anymore.
Homeowners were "duped" into signing mortgages they couldn't afford. Carmakers are not the victims of their own poor choices but victims of the economy and Saudi Arabia. States aren't victims of their own mismanagement of their budgets, but victims of lower tax revenues. People living in hurricane zones are "victims" because the government didn't help them, as if FEMA is prescribed in Article 2 Section 8 of the Constitution.
That's not to say there aren't legitimate victims...the people who go to work every day and will lose their jobs because of the economic crisis are certainly in this group.
But it seems that we've developed a culture of victimization. "It's not my fault" is a mantra and "It's because..." is a watchword.
It seems that people abdicate personal responsibility because they want to feel less responsible for their circumstances. "I failed because..." "It's not my fault I lost my job..." No, you failed because you didn't go to class, and you lost your job because you didn't do a good job at work. Period. You know that, so why lie to the rest of the world?
Taking personal responsibility can be hard, but it does have some benefits. Like the ability to forgive oneself, and the fact that others don't look at you skeptically going "uh huh, I'm sure that's why." Plus, it revokes the authority of "circumstances" and puts it back where it belongs: with the person. It makes us managers of our own lives, rather than wondering how we got here, and makes the circumstances we genuinely can't control (the economy, the weather) into more manageable events.
Otherwise we're just a nation of excuses.
4:12 pm | Comment (2) | Print | Categories: Soapbox
December 13, 2008
Recently, a person posed a question on Twitter, asking whether or not Generation Y would begin to appreciate their jobs in the receding economy, rather than approaching the world as they have been.
It's very well known that Generation Y, with its twenty-somethings have a very different attitude about the workplace. By our older, perhaps more seasoned colleagues we're seen as lazy, inept, fraught with attitude, and lazy. The tweet regarding Generation Y was a classic clash between the older and younger worlds: "don't you young yuppies appreciate what the company is doing here? You should be thankful to have a job!"
Though it may work like that for the moment, I think that a monumental shift will be taking place in the workforce in the next few years. And so, in response to this question, here are ten things I think Generation Y will do in the next few years (tip: show "appreciation" isn't one of them):
- We'll show even less loyalty to the companies we work for than we do now. It used to be that if you got hired you kept your job, and if the company went out of business there were lots of jobs. Then the seventies came, and the word "layoff" entered the public consciousness. Our unwillingness to display loyalty has nothing to do with our lack of loyalty - it has to do with YOUR lack of loyalty, Baby Boomers. You've shown us, quite effectively, that you don't give a damn about us - your employees - or our needs. We're expendable. Fine; but don't expect us to consider you unexpendable either.
- We'll end Social Security. None of us actually think we're going to get it anyway; you and your government policies of the 1980's saw to that. Boomers might get their checks, but we're going to plan for our own retirement, we're going to invest on our own, and we're going to stop funding a failed system.
- A huge number of us will be self-employed. This goes right along with #1. We don't trust the company. Besides, most of us have highly technical skills, we know how to use the internet, and we can make more money working for ourselves than we can working for you. I see this already in the community I work in: more than half the developers have their own side businesses. Many of them make six figures when you add in their day jobs. Plus, it adds a second source of income, reduces the reliance on the company, and increases flexibility.
- We'll shrink the size of government. You clearly cannot be trusted to run the government. See bailing out criminals with $700 billion in money that you know you'll never have to pay back as Exhibit A. To be sure, we'll engage in more social and political causes; that is to be sure. But you can bet we'll also shrink the size, scope, and reach of the government, leaving more up to NGOs and the goodness of people who care about particular causes.
- We won't retire. We've watched you all work for decades, expecting to retire, only to find the economy tanking and the values of your investments destroyed. Instead, we'll take mini-retirements: short periods of time, not lasting more than three or four years, where we travel, explore, and experiment. After all, isn't it better to take two years and travel with the kids when we're 40 than to be too old to do it when we're 70?
- We'll have 20 jobs in our careers. It used to be you joined a company and stayed there. Not us. We move too fast, learn too quickly, change too often, and want to accomplish too much. Good employers will know this, and invest in keeping us around, not with the old "delayed rewards" like higher salaries after a period of time or two weeks of vacation after three years, but immediate things like catered meals, free health insurance, increasing retention bonuses, and signing advances.
- Health care won't look the same in ten years. We're smart enough to know everyone gets sick and you shouldn't have to be wealthy in order to afford a doctor. Medicine will once again be a service industry, and we'll redesign the way we pay for health care in America.
- We'll enforce work-life balance. Dozens of popular artists have written songs about how horrible it'd be not to live life to the fullest: Rascal Flatts, Mark Shultz, 33 Miles, Five for Fighting, Tim McGraw, just to name a few. We get it. Life is short. And we don't want to spend it behind our desks. We don't know when life will be over, and we want to spend time with the people that matter. Working to live will beat out living to work, and the companies we work for will have to understand that.
- Our lives will have a point. Tired old mission statements are useless to us. You'd better show up with a vision or we're going to yawn and change the channel. We've all read Dilbert and we find The Office funny because we see it as YOUR life, not ours. We're going to have a vision for the future, and we're going to pursue it relentlessly.
- We'll keep learning, keep inventing, keep growing. The greatest inventions of 1990's and the early 21st century were invented by people 30 or under. Amazon.com by Jeff Bezos (30), Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (20), Netscape by Marc Andreessen (22), to name only a few. Ideas come from young people too, and we'll embrace that. (The ages reflect their age at the time of the invention)
8:11 pm | Comment (2) | Print | Categories: Soapbox
December 10, 2008
Wanted: prime parking. Must be able to store 10,000 tour buses. Contact Washington Inaugural Planners.
The Washington Post has been running articles all week talking about the Inaugural, saying that planners estimate that 2 million to 4 million people could come to Washington to see it. It's expected that they'll come in cars and tour buses, planes and trains, and place a strain on the local infrastructure never before seen - or for that matter, planned for.
Some of the items the local news media believes might happen in the apocalyptic event known as the Inauguration:
- Cell phones may fail to work due to the crush of activity.
- So many media outlets want to cover the event that many may not get full access.
- Broadband internet access may be slowed down by the large number of visitors.
- Metro delays could be substantial, with Metro planning 15 hours of rush-hour service (a record) on inauguration day [WMATA].
- Hundreds of thousands of people may remain in DC for days before and after the inauguration, tying up traffic for those of us who live here.
- 10,000 tour buses may arrive, with no place to park.
- DC government officials are urging local residents to stock up on essentials like bread and milk, because supply trucks may not make it through and stores will be inundated.
I, for one, may attempt to vacate the District during the "festivities", or the apocalypse, whichever actually happens. The company may close the office on January 20th, and perhaps even the day before; that would be a reasonably good idea given the crush of people that will make parking, driving, walking, or really, moving at all impossible.
For comparisons sake, the most attended inauguration to this point was Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 swearing-in. Washington, DC has an average population of 500,000 people, with 6 million in the metro area (that is, the area served by Metro). The minimum expectation to be in Washington is 2 million, meaning that visitors will outnumber residents 4:1.
2:26 am | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Washington, DC
December 7, 2008
Last night we got our first snow here in Washington. Though we'd had a few flurries in November, this was the first snow to either accumulate or make the streets wet. Some cars (like mine) that hadn't been moved in a while accumulated a quarter-inch or so, which was a perfect reminder to me that I needed to purchase an ice scraper - a task I performed last night.
Friday night my church went to Build-A-Bear and built stuffed animals to give to Toys 4 Tots. We then went back to the Fullerton home to watch Across the Universe, a musical built around many Beatles songs.
In two short weeks I'll be home for Christmas, and I'm looking forward to seeing many of you while I'm there!
9:54 am | Comment (3) | Print | Categories: Holidays, Washington, DC, Weather
December 3, 2008
The FDIC criticized banks today for fee policies that prey on the young and low-income. No longer content to simply hold your deposit as a revenue-generator, banks are looking more than ever at their deposit accounts as fee-generating revenue enhancers, and they're targeting the group most likely to do things like overdraw: those who are poor and those who are just starting out.
Though I have only overdrawn one time in life (in South Korea after making an exchange rate error with some four hours sleep), I side with the FDIC in that some of these practices are exceptionally shady. In particular, one shady practice is when banks reorder transactions not in the order they are received by the bank, but in the order of the largest transaction to the smallest, thus generating extra overdrafts for themselves.
For example, imagine you begin the day with $1,225.00 and you spend $3.75 on coffee at Starbucks, $26 on gasoline, $79 on cable TV, $32 on dinner and $1,130 on rent (since checks are presented at the end of the day). If processed in the order in which the transactions took place, your rent check would overdraw your account by $45.75 and generating $29.00 for the bank in overdraft fees. However, if you place the transactions in the order of largest to smallest you actually overdraft after dinner, incurring three overdrafts for a total of $87.00 and the most expensive latte you've ever had in your life.
These fees hit young and poor customers because they are most likely to have small amounts, which are detrimental to the bank (since it likes large, stable amounts to fund its lending department). Still, though, these customers need bank accounts, and these fees are helping drive them deeper and deeper into debt, especially if they're on fixed incomes (e.g. Social Security recipients).
The government should end this practice, or limit the number of overdraft fees per day, to protect consumers and ensure that banks try focusing their mathematics efforts on their balance sheets where they belong.
11:17 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Economics
November 30, 2008
I started the month in New York City, and ended it with a fantastic Thanksgiving meal surrounded by great friends. November is always a great month, with it's long holiday, the change in the seasons, but the absence of the December pressure cooker.
The most unique thing about New York is just the sheer size of it. The buildings are enormous, the people walk faster, and the city seems to exist independent any particular person. People have lived in this area since the 1600's; the city was there long before you and will be there long after. It's just the way it is; it's not personal. Each city has a personality, and the personality of New York seems to be indifference.
For those still traveling, have a safe return trip home, and I'll see everyone in three short weeks for Christmas. It's almost upon us!
10:13 am | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Adventures, Holidays
November 24, 2008
Apparently for the Washington Post, a $23,000 retreat for 46 government employees was too much.
Raw Fisher of the Post writes in an article titled Where's Firing Fenty When You Need Him? that "...the unbelievable gall it takes to mount such an expedition, especially as the city faces a nine-figure budget shortfall, is certainly worthy of some mayoral attention, in the form of a symbolic firing or two."
His problem seems to be that because we're facing a budget deficit, treating hard-working employees to some team-building is out of line.
He didn't take them to the Ritz. Nor did he order caviar and wine for his staff. He spent $500 per employee, or even less if you count him (which would make a theoretical 47 people). In an era of $500,000 retreats on the taxpayer dime (a.k.a. AIG), $23,000 for some leadership training and some team building doesn't seem that out of line.
There are certainly wastes in the DC government budget worth pursuing. This isn't one of them.
4:54 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Washington, DC
November 22, 2008
Though DC's public transportation system is fantastic, it does have some shortcomings, especially if you want to get beyond the beltway and explore. With that in mind, I wanted to find a car that was sporty but not useless for errands, and I think I've found that in this one.
The car had 22 miles on it at the dealership, and I've expanded that to 240 miles or so. Though I won't drive much during the weeks, I'll probably add miles during the weekends (I estimated about 1,000 miles a month at most).
So expect me to color in more of the states on my travels page...starting with today's adventure to West Virginia.
5:28 pm | Comment (5) | Print | Categories: Adventures
November 15, 2008
All around the country people are nervously holding their collective breath, hoping that there's no "next shoe" in the economic slowdown. In Washington, the talk is about cautious optimism that Federal budgets are not slashed, and that interest groups continue spending. But so far, Washington has been spared the horrific economic storm.
Why?
For the last six months, that answer could be attributed to the election. Most entities were spending or had committed their spending for the election cycle far before the downturn cut into budgets. For candidates and issues using Washington firms, their fundraising largely survived because of the point in time the downturn came about.
But I also believe that Washington (or at least the part of Washington I work for) is insulated based on what it does. We don't generally serve large companies that are subject to the whims of consumer spending. Instead, the majority of my work is focused on interest groups, corporate law firms, Federal compliance issues and the like.
Interest groups are going to be impacted but will still focus on the web as a means of inexpensively getting their message out. So there is no great decline there.
Law firms and corporations that wish to influence policy will continue spending, as it is almost a necessity. They cannot halt lobbying on, say, energy reform, for fear that it will pass before the economy comes back and they'll be left out.
If we served small shops or, say, carmakers, we could possibly face a downturn. But I think the larger Washington technology community will weather the storm. The largest part of our focus is on those groups who either want to get their tasks accomplished regardless of the economy. They will spend less to be sure, but will not halt spending entirely; I believe this will largely protect Washington from the onslaught of the economic downturn.
10:12 am | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Economics
November 9, 2008
Assume that the map will temper over the next thirty years but here's the map if the election were decided by just 18-29 year olds (who will be the core voting bloc in 20 years).
11:13 am | Comment (4) | Print | Categories: Election '08
November 6, 2008
This piece by Umair Haque of Harvard describes better than any words I could write the lessons learned by Obama's victory. Enjoy.
Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators
It's a momentous day for America - and the world. Barack Obama is poised to take the reins of the Presidency.
So how did this unlikeliest of candidates do it? How did Obama utilize radically asymmetrical competition to shatter Washington's toxic, bitter 20th century status quo?
The most critical part of the story is the organization Obama built. Though conservatives are still arguing that Obama has little executive experience, nothing could be further from the truth.
Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday's political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday's corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today.
Obama presidential bid succeeded, in other words, as our research at the Lab has discussed for the past several years, through the power of new DNA: new rules for new kinds of institutions.
So let's discuss the new DNA Obama brought to the table, by outlining seven rules for tomorrow's radical innovators.
1. Have a self-organization design. What was really different about Obama's organization? We're used to thinking about organizations in 20th century terms: do we design them to be tall, or flat?
But tall and flat are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think - spatially and literally - in two dimensions: tall organizations command unresponsively, and flat organizations respond uncontrollably.
Obama's organization blew past these orthodoxies: it was able to combine the virtues of both tall and flat organizations. How? By tapping the game-changing power of self-organization. Obama's organization was less tall or flat than spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges. The result? Obama's organization was able to reverse tremendous asymmetries in finance, marketing, and distribution - while McCain's organization was left trapped by a stifling command-and-control paradigm.
2. Seek elasticity of resilience. Obama's 21st century organization was built for a 21st century goal - not to maximize outputs, or minimize inputs, but to, as Gary Hamel has discussed, remain resilient to turbulence. What happened when McCain attacked Obama with negative ads in September? Such attacks would have depleted the coffers of a 20th century organization, who would have been forced to retaliate quickly and decisively in kind. Yet, Obama's organization responded furiously in exactly the opposite way: with record-breaking fundraising. That's resilience: reflexively bouncing back to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources.
3. Minimize strategy. Obama's campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naive sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn't waste resources trying to dominate the news cycle, game the system, strong-arm the party, or out-triangulate competitors' positions. Rather, Obama's campaign took a scalpel to strategy - because they realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.
4. Maximize purpose. Change the game? That's 20th century thinking at its finest - and narrowest. The 21st century is about changing the world. What does "yes we can" really mean? Obama's goal wasn't simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign. It was larger and more urgent: to change the world.
Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.
And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can. You must maximize, stretch, and utterly explode your sense of purpose.
5. Broaden unity. What do marketers traditionally do? Segment and target, slice and dice. We've become great at dividing markets into tinier and tinier bits. But we're terrible at unifying them. Yet Obama succeeded not through division, but through unification: we are, he contended, "not a collection of Red States and Blue States -- We are the United States of America".
Obama intuitively understands a larger truth of next-generation economics. Unified markets are what a world driven to collapse by hyperconsumption is desperately going to need. We're going to need not a hundred different kinds of razors - and their spiralling costs of complexity and waste - but a single razor that everybody, from the slums of Rio to the lofts of Tribeca, is overjoyed to use.
6. Thicken power. The power many corporations wield is thin power: the power to instill fear and inculcate greed. True power is what Obama has learned wield: the power to inspire, lead, and engender belief. You can beat people into subjugation - but you can never command their loyalty, creativity, or passion. Thick power is true power: it's radically more durable, less costly, and more intense.
7. Remember that there is nothing more asymmetrical than an ideal. Obama ended his last speech before the election by saying: "let's go change the world." Why are those words important? Because the world needs changing. A world riven by economic meltdown, religious conflict, resource scarcity, and intractable poverty and violence - such a world demands fresh ideals. We must mold and shape a better world - or we will surely all suffer together. As Obama said: "we rise or fall ... as one people."
In such a world, forget about a short-lived, often meaningless "competitive advantage". It's a concept built for the 20th century. In the 21st century, there is nothing more asymmetrical - more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative -- than the world-changing power of an ideal.
Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing - absent, bankrupt, stolen - from your economy, industry, or market? What ideals will you fight and struggle for - and live? Because the ultimate problem with industrial-era business was, as Wall Street has so convincingly demonstrated, this: there weren't any.
That seventh lesson is the starting point for tomorrow's radical innovators - because it's the thread that knits the others together. And it's where you should start if you want to use these seven rules to start building 21st century institutions - whether businesses, non-profits, social enterprises, or political campaigns.
As a young brown American, I couldn't be more deeply or powerfully inspired by the "defining moment" of an Obama presidency. Yet, the seeds of a new challenge have been planted by that victory: for us to harness the lessons of his quiet revolution - our quiet revolution - to seed many, many more.
Source: Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators ~ Harvard Business Publishing, 11/5/2008
1:42 am | Comment (1) | Print
November 5, 2008
At 11:00 PM Eastern time, the polls closed in California.
Then the party started.
Fireworks could be heard all around DC, as people celebrated the victory of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
A spontaneous party at the White House wouldn't have been more fitting if they'd brought a rail along, as locals and tourists alike celebrated one thing: that change is coming.
Elsewhere, Democrats picked up 5 seats in the Senate and a jaw-dropping 18 seats in the House, with 3 and 10 races undecided in the two chambers. These supermajorities undoubtedly mean that legislation to help struggling home owners is on the way, as is health care reform, pension reform, and government reform.
The numbers are still being calculated, but it's expected that turnout will be higher in this election than any other in history. Obama's wins in states like Virginia, North Carolina, and even in Indiana, an always-early patch of red each election, will change the map for a long time to come and expand the number of battleground states that must be defended.
Congratulations to Senator Obama. It was a long campaign and we welcome you here in Washington.
9:21 am | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Election '08