Happy Father's Day...

I don't know where the concept of Father's Day came from, but I'll take it...

As I reflect this morning, I realize that my kids both exercise me in ways and also bring me pleasures that the world wouldn't otherwise without them.  There are upsets and challenges, but also successes and accomplishments along the way.  Without the kids, there would be no mother and no calling on us as a couple to show up and to exemplify good behaviors and decision-making that can set a good example.  They can also learn from our mistakes and missteps as well, as we are human and are not perfect.  This, hopefully, gives them both room to be authentically themselves and allows them to show up with their own gifts and to serve the world in their own special ways.

No, I do not know who invented Father's Day, but I am glad that they did.  Happy Father's Day to the fathers out there and to the mothers and kids that allow us fathers to show up.

Local Travel: Exploring the Inner Landscape

Last Friday,  I attended the first public session of the Search Inside Yourself course at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.  As I jotted my notes about the content of the course, I also found myself doodling in the margins.  What came up?

Early on, we wrote about the characteristics of leaders that distinguished them and the usual suspects came to mind: integrity, vision, transparency, authenticity.  But, also, did peaceful.  Interesting.  Somehow, I feel that I discern a sense of peace.  Why?  How did I pick that up?  Something to think on for a bit…

Later, we were discussing emotional awareness and regulation; the edge of my paper discerns our mood as the “climate that we live in” and emotion as the “current weather pattern.”  It helps me adjust my mood when my emotions get the best of me.

When we introduced ourselves, we also gave a word that described where we were at the moment.  What was my word?  Curious.  I was curious to explore the material and to see where it might take me on my professional journey.  As I described to a few of my friends that have joined the course with me, even though I have learned this material, taught it to others and even read Meng’s book, I (we) need to experience it in order to really know it.  That was what I was here for; the good news is that I was able to show up as a beginner.

The great New Yorker comic of a billboard with one of those “you are here” sendups that Meg showed us reminded me of the est seminar, “Be Here Now”, that I attended back in the 80s.  BHN helped us access and remember that being present is being alive…  Mindfulness and attention are the keys to staying present or bringing ourselves back when we inevitably drift off again.  We were encouraged to be kind to ourselves as we prepared to practice a bit during the class; it appears that we are distracted 47% of the time, so we have a long way to go still.

While we meditated, Meg described the posture: back like an arrow, legs in lotus position, etc. to be both alert and relaxed.  My body felt more like a coiled snake, a description that I envision whenever I feel a bit too vigilant or my threat response getting warmed up.  As I relaxed and relax yet again, I realize that there are “a lot of floors in that building” and that my breathing was an elevator taking me down to the basement.  Hmm, perhaps another 20 years of practice and I might get somewhere…  Along the way, I get to show up for life rather than watch the movie or imagine how it might be.

I look forward to further thinking on this and well as the next few weeks of the course and what lies beyond.

The 3rd Third...

When I turned 40 a decade or so ago, I rejoiced that I still had half of my life in front of me and that I had made pretty good use of the other half that had already taken place.  A few years back, I again used the same refrain in celebrating the 50 years that had passed and the "other half" of my life that lie ahead.  Last week, however, I turned 52 and I realized that I couldn't necessarily convince myself that I could envision myself at 104.  It was then that I remembered my friend, Ken Lichtenstein, speaking about what he called the "last third" or "final third".  Not finding those labels particularly enticing, I thought that reflecting on the “3^rd Third” would be more palatable.

As I consider how to design “the rest of my life” (including reduced usage of quotes in my writing), I look at three areas of contribution that I’d like to focus my efforts and time on.  Even though I see the first third of life as time to “till the soil” and the second third accentuates our “sowing” years, I believe that my later years should focus on giving as well as “reaping” from the investments that I have made over the years.

The first area that I’d like to allocate time toward is in my local community.  When we moved to California almost thirty years ago, I continued my investment of discretionary time toward non-profit efforts and easily found organizations dedicated to both educational and at-risk youth causes.  Starting in the early 90s, welcoming our girls to the world meant that our time would be altered to focus on their schools and sports, from pre-school through high school and club teams in soccer, basketball, field hockey and softball.  Now that the girls are both in college, my pro-bono hours are mostly in professional arenas, although I am still working with an educational foundation in the addition to my efforts with startup entrepreneurs.  I’ll have to do some design with Joy to figure out where we can make an investment as a couple to the betterment of the community that we call home.

In addition to nurturing our home village, I want to give back professionally.  I have been fortunate (and more than a bit lucky) to have three careers that have both nurtured and exercised me over the past 30 or so years.  Product design and commercial roles made up my operational years and I now consult to companies in the cultural and team dynamics.  While I have heavily invested in these domains over the years, the style and locus of my efforts seem to need some reconsideration going forward.

Lastly, I am looking at how I can contribute to the ecosystem that has so graciously supported me over the years.  I have contemplated and planned my efforts to do so over the years, working with entrepreneurial groups around the Bay Area and beyond, as well as organizational development associations.  Now, with the “3^rd Third” framework, I have a new lens to observe and consider my time going forward.

I look forward to conversations with many of my friends and colleagues as I move forward with this project; please let me know if I can be helpful in your design time regardless of what “third” you find yourself in.

“Carpe Diem!”

It was the best of times; it was the best of times…

As I stirred from a good night’s sleep this morning, I relished the thought of lounging in bed with my wife, a few cups of coffee and the newspaper; this being one of my favorite ways of starting my weekend days and it being the last day of the year. But, as I slowly came to consciousness, I thought better of it and decided to spend a few minutes reflecting on the passing year and looking forward to another new one…

2011 has been a year of change and transition: Joy and I both turned 50 this year and celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary, Jamie turned 21, and Lauren turned 18, graduated high school and started college. As newly minted empty-nesters, Joy and I traveled to China together and are going to Cabo with friends in six weeks.

At 50, I find myself a step slower, my eyes not as good as they used to be (I got my first pair of glasses) and we’ll have to see what the treadmill test and other magic 50-year old scans have to say in the next few weeks. Overall, I would say that, while perhaps I am a little bit worn, I am still very serviceable. Joy, on the other hand, looks amazing and seems to just keep getting better with age.

After 25 years of marriage (and over 31 years together), Joy and I fit together like hand and glove. We get clearer on what we are willing to put up with (or not), who we want to be around, where we want to go and what we want to do. The relationship is still evolving and we are starting to design what the next phase of life holds for us and what we want to accomplish together. Travel and giving back are both important themes for us, as is having a warm, inviting home for the girls, our extended family and friends to visit.

At 21, Jamie is a junior in college and is staring to look at internships and what life will be like after graduation. She does well in school and has learned what it is like to live on her own; able to graduate early, I am encouraging her to take a minor and use the full four years at university to her advantage. No stranger to the Xbox or the nearby beaches, she is certainly not all work and no play.

Lauren has now left the familiarity and relative security of high school for the newness and explorations of university life in San Diego. While Jamie is a 3-hour car ride away, La flies back and forth to school and it is a bit harder for us to visit her there. She is adjusting well, as are we as new empty-nesters; she took my advice to take a fun class every semester and just go her first ‘A’ in surfing. I was initially surprised (and now am very pleased) when Lauren joined a sorority on campus; she has been participating in their community service events and getting to know new people.

Business-wise, I am just completing my fourth year with the Strayer Consulting Group. I am grateful for the opportunity that the Strayers afforded me and am glad that I took the step when given the opening. Financially, it has been a rewarding trip with increasing revenues even through the downturn. Beyond the financials, though, I am fulfilled in the work that I do and appreciative of the client teams who bring me into their confidences and trust me to help them work more effectively together by making new choices around commitments and accountability. They (and I through them) learn that responsibility really means able to choose our responses.

So what does 2012 hold for me (and us)? Let’s work backwards through the list above… My business seems to be starting the year well, with a few projects crossing the date line and a few new ones just starting up; I will also continue in my retained role guiding the curriculum and coaching the Kauffman Fellows. I will bring a few people into the business to help extend our capacity in the marketplace. Lauren and Jamie will continue to evolve as students and young adults at school and as members of the work force in their part time roles at school and during the summer. Joy will continue her work at the hospital while she figures out what she wants to do when she grows up; meanwhile, she provides us with good benefits and accumulates PTO so we can travel to distant lands. We can finally focus on the front yard and finishing decorating touches inside our house.

Ultimately, we ask: what is success? Success in 2012 means softening my demeanor and approach to others, slowing down the pace a bit, and getting more work/life balance (less work and more joie de vivre). Success is allocating more time for reflecting and writing. Success in 2012 is rewarding conversations with friends and family over good food and nice wines. Success is watching my women continue to grow and learn and explore their worlds.

A friend of mine wrote an interesting blog entry on energy yesterday; he spoke about generating and being around positive energy and getting rid of negative energy. I enjoyed the post and found it both funny and poignant at the same time; I appreciate his perspective and reflections on what works and doesn’t for him. It made me think about expectations and alignment, which, beyond energy, for me define how I shape my life and help others do the same. Setting and managing expectations are central to managing our relationships at home, at work and in the world at large; establishing and recreating alignment is what allows us to build commitment and achieve results against our goals. My hope for 2012 is that I set and manage expectations with you and that we remain aligned; let me know how I can be of help in your goals for 2012.

Cheers and here’s anticipation for a healthy, happy and prosperous new year. All for now…

How cool is that???

My relationship with Apple, and by extension with the Steves, has shaped my entire adult life. I am not a super nerd, hype addict that absolutely needs the newest, greatest thing on the market (at least not any longer…), but have been a customer and an affiliate of the Apple ecosystem for most of the past 30 years.

My journey along the Apple path began as a senior in college back in the mid-1980s when my university declared that all incoming freshman would start their matriculation accompanied by the newly announced Macintosh. These strange little machines were still very interesting even for someone who had started his own freshman year with punch cards, Fortran and timeshared mainframes.

When I graduated in 1984, I was recruited to work on the 386 at Intel as a product engineer at an office not far from Apple HQ. The Mac was not welcome at Intel, as it ran on a Motorola 68xx processor, but it would not be long before I was back on a Mac keyboard.

I was lucky to continue my learning path with engineering classes at Stanford and my computer graphics class was based on the Lisa, the Mac’s big sister and market failed predecessor. Before long, I found the only Mac at Intel, owned by the head of the graphics co-processor group there, and his generosity in letting us use it saved us a trip to Stanford a few times per week. I remember many late nights and weekends (we couldn’t use it while its owner was working during the day).

The original Mac was slow, had a small screen, not much memory and only a single floppy drive; there was no hard drive. How frustrating was it for me and my colleague to be swapping the Pascal compiler disc in and out while we tried to save our programs to another disc…

Not much later, my colleague, Clay, found a friend at his church who’s design firm had built the original optical mouse and soon we were using his borrowed machine on my fireplace or Clay’s kitchen island. The clear Plexiglas prototype compelled me to get out of the chip business and back to the systems that they were built upon…

In 1987, I started working at Ampex at the beginning of the revolution from all analog to all digital audio-video systems; more on that later. In late 1988 we started to contemplate a new video editing system that would break the price and performance barriers that the single function $100k boxes that were being sold at the time by Ampex and our competitors. By the time of the Loma Prieta earthquake less than a year later, we had built the innards of that editing system, Tatakna, and it was fronted by the then reigning PowerMac. Tatakna never made it to market due to internal decisions at Ampex, but that team was one of the best and tightest design teams that I ever worked with.

When I left Ampex in 1990, I joined RasterOps, a young, newly public company that was an Apple “sister” company. These sister companies helped make the Macintosh ecosystem more complete (and before Apple would integrate these new features into their next platform turn or software revision). At RasterOps, we had to hack the operating system to get out initial video capture cards to work, but eventually, we partnered with the Apple advanced technology software team to help create QuickTime 1.0 on top of our hardware. We went on to build video accelerators, video compression systems, CMYK framebuffers, color laser printers and monitors for the Mac and we were happy enough for Apple to eat our young along the way.

At the behest of the VP of engineering and co-founder of RasterOps, I started consulting with RasterOps customers that were integrating our boards (and by extension, the Mac) into their own specialized systems. By late 1992, I was recruited by an early Mac evangelist, Trip Hawkins, to join his post-Electronic Arts start-up 3DO. Again, at our core, we developed a lot of our software, graphics, and early games on the Mac and most of ran the business side of our lives on the Mac…

Back to the personal side of life, my wife “retired” from Intel shortly after the birth of our first daughter. She wanted to have a home business to help finance some of the risk of my startup proclivity (I held my RasterOps stock a bit too long and lost money, but “diversified” a bit while at 3DO and socked a bit away…) and while speaking with a fellow new mom, she launched her medical transcription business on my old PowerMac, a RasterOps big-screen and an Apple laser printer. How cool is that?

As my daughters grew into toddlers, they wanted to sit on our laps and grab the mouse so that they could be like us; soon they were playing games and drawing on that very intuitive platform. By 1997, I was able to help their elementary school get their T1 line up and running and their first computer lab running. Of course, that lab was populated by the new colorful iMacs (courtesy of the other Steve, Woz). We were blessed by that early generosity and a few years later, the fourth graders were getting MacBooks upon entry to populate the middle school and the younger grades had access via portable laptop pods. These kids were doing multimedia projects and group assignments from day one.

Even though I had various versions of iPods around the house, I was still jealous of my kids as they both had Mac laptops and I was stuck on a PC (PwC centered all communications on Lotus notes), but I have now been able to get back to my roots and have a MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad to run my business. As I mentioned, my adult life has been shaped by Apple and Steve’s genius and products; I’d go a bit further and say that my life, both personal and professional, would not be what they are today without their contributions. For all of that, I am extremely grateful.

It is a bit ironic to be sitting and writing this whilst I listen to one of Steve’s original Mac evangelists, Guy Kawasaki, speak about the “12 lessons that I learned from Steve” and I will add a link to it once he puts it up. It all comes full circle…

PS: Guy's video is posted here; let me know if how you like it.

Uncertainty... What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing! (Say it again...)

I was headed to see a friend last Saturday who has temporarily lost his freedom. Through some poor choices, he has also lost his home and his connection to family and friends. While I was very sad for him and was going to support him in his situation, I was struck by how I quickly went to my own situation and became very insular. By the time I headed home, I found myself in a deep funk borne of existential despair.

As a true extrovert would, I spoke to a few people that morning to try and sort out what was going on. Two themes emerged: first, I had become somewhat disconnected from my overall ambition (what I care about) and, second, an underlying feeling of uncertainty was driving my less than positive mood.

What an opportunity(!) to explore and learn; although it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time. I have remembered Fred Kofman’s assertion that emotions (like the anxiety that I was feeling about the future) should not to be suppressed or avoided (as many people try to) and that they are not inherently good or bad. Emotions are signals that we should listen to and that point to something more fundamental. The anxiety that I felt was an indication that something that I cared about was at risk. The uncertain future put everything I cared about at risk; family and friends, home, and livelihood were at the core.

What fueled my uncertainty? I later see that it is not just me, but our culture and the world beyond that is uncertain. But the world is always uncertain, sometimes more so than others; it is we who try to build safety, security and predictability into our indeterminate lives. Who would have predicted a year ago that we would have our first black president elected, that the shaky mortgages that were given away like candy would affect more than those who took them on or who underwrote them, that the financial markets would be down by 40% or that the world economy including high-flying China would grind to such a sudden, lurching halt? Again, I couldn’t focus on the larger picture, as I was caught up in my own story: an vague outlook for the new business that I successfully launched this year, my changing role as a father as my oldest prepares for college, and the shifting relationship in our marriage as Joy and I practice to be empty-nesters over the next few years. Perhaps most disorienting to me now was the loss of my father in July; he was an outsized presence in the network of voices in my life and would have helped bring calm to my chaotic thinking today.

In my conversations, I was reminded that I needed to reconnect to my ambition and plan for what I could control. Again, I had the opportunity to use this time at the end of the year to reconsider what I was committed to and where I could be in action to move those projects forward in 2009. My good friend Woody Allen (no not that one...) taught me that "we are what we practice"; reviewing my current practices to see where there were breakdowns seemed like a good place to start. I am looking at how I budget and allocate my time (each waking hour is roughly 1% of our day; is what we are doing right now the most important?) so that I can look back at the end of this next year and be confident that I energized the right projects and moved things forward as effectively as I could.

Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance" and I realized that was where I found myself. The rational accounting for my current situation looked remarkable: I concluded my best income year ever, my family is relatively healthy, my children are doing well in school, sports and life in general, my wife and I are in conversation about the future and I have good conversations going on with my friends and colleagues in the community. On the other hand, the uncertainty that I described above was dominating my mood. Clearly, my rational being was not able to influence my emotional side to create some balance.

As I looked more closely, I realized that I let some of my fundamental practices slip during the rush of the holidays and had subsequently lost that always precarious emotional strength that is so needed in these times. In my work with clients, I always stress the importance of the body as our primary tool in life; now, I needed to heed my own advice. I needed to attend to the body practices that reduced my natural stress level as much as possible; that would give me the dynamic range needed to deal with normal breakdowns along with the body blows that the world was delivering on a seemingly daily basis.

I modified my daily routine to get back on track, even though I am on a bit of a holiday timetable. I skip sleeping in and instead do my sitting meditation (to keep me connected and open to the world) and then some push-ups, sit-ups and light weights. In addition to good sleep and exercise, I am cutting back on the celebratory eating and partying that I love to do. The results have been quick to help me stay more grounded in my day-to-day and I hope that you have your own routines to help you keep your head, heart and feet aligned in these uncertain times...

For the New Year, my context is "essence." In my business, I am working to transform my network of individuals into a network of networks. As a consultant and coach, I am a change catalyst that helps individuals, teams and companies overcome gaps and move to new levels of performance. Two personal initiatives for the year are around facilitating strategic talent management conversations and using our personal brand to become distinctive and as a competitive advantage.

I hope that this essay is of help to you in your thinking and planning for 2009, just writing it has clarified many things for me. Besides keeping my personal practices on track, my other resolution is to be writing regularly. Let me know what you think and if there are topics that you’d like to hear more about.

Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous (however you define it) new year. Cheers!


PS: Some of you reading will remember the lyrics from the 1969 Edwin Starr anti-war song that I riffed on in the title of this blog...

Another book recommendation worth noting:

Growing Pains by Eric Flamholtz & Yvonne Randle. Is expensive, but worth it. The authors studied many successful product-based and service companies to discover critical success factors and the timing of when they are most needed. Can help diagnose current issues or help plan future strategic investments. Great tool to be used by entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors alike.