Mary Panttaja

Well, what a surprise. I did not know how timely I was in my comments on Cormac McCarthy’s most recent book, “The Road”. I am amazed that Oprah is recommending it, knowing what a broad reach of people will now read it. I am pleased for Cormac McCarthy and the readers who will get to experience this wonderful artistic effort. But I am still a little concerned for some sensitive readers who will take some time getting over the experience.

The violence in “The Road” is by no means gratuitous. It is core to his vision and allows him to set his elegy on human devotion in the most stark contrast possible. As I have said, it is a beautiful and startling achievement. But my daughter has taught me that we each need to be responsibile for what we read and watch knowing and caring for our own sensibilities, and that some of us are not able to find a manageable perspective or a relationship to difficult work.

I, for example, have tended not to read books or watch movies on the subject of losing a parent to Alzeihmers. It’s too close to my life and something I haven’t wanted to watch dramatized. Though I am starting to consider exploring the topic myself in my next novel. (And, for a weirdity, I never have watched “Jaws”.)

So read “The Road” if you are brave. (I think Oprah is quite brave to recommend it so broadly.) But don’t read it if you are prone to nightmares. At least don’t read it when you are home alone.

This week I am starting to post some of the materials for my next book—not the next novel, but the book on the creative process. I am starting to play with building navigational models for how to move through the material. There are so many directions to choose from, many types of material that can address many audiences. I see that there is the capacity and ability to write books—well, not books per se, but some kind of published object—-that are totally non-linear. They can be read non-linearly, but that I can also envision writing them that way.

I knew when I was writing my novel, Illumine, that linearity was something I wanted to play with, that is, it was important that the structure of the telling of the story reflect some of the ambiguity inherent in the philosophy underlying the story. And that without some ambiguity in time and sequence the novel would not properly embody the meaning. The structure needed to reflect the meaning so the reader would experience some of the ambiguity that the subject matter represents. So the threads of the novel are woven into a texture that represents the meaning of the book itself. I have chosen a sequence for the weaving, though the material could as likely be reorganized to produce a different experience.

My next book, which is to start appearing shortly on the site catchingtheupdraft.com, is even more complex. This is one reason it has taken me so long to write it. (In fact, I have already written three versions of it and hundreds of powerpoint slides.) It is very difficult to choose an optimal entry point: for who, or which topic, or which style of reading, or which interest group?

I see that this book in particular has a whole meta-structure. It looks something like this:

• The Overall Topic (which has many flavors of explanation)
• Three Key Ingredients
• Depth: Introductory to Complex Explanations
• Voice: Personal, Coaching, Very Technical, Spiritual
• Audiences: Artists, Individuals, Organizations, Philosophers
• Media Types: Fables, Discourse, Essays, Stories
• Multi-Media: Text, Images, Audio, Video

So one of the intriguing ideas percolating on the edge between my writing and my technology research is about how to build tools that help the writer and then the reader to describe, employ, and deploy the meta-text that can structure publishing objects that are inherently non-linear. What do the meta-structures look like? How could one implement them? What do the readers do with the meta-structures? How does the whole experience with the material evolve?

I believe that this model of meta-structural writing reflects the evolution of ideas as they come into being and that perhaps now we can reflect multiple approaches to complex material in one such meta-object that includes the structure and the writing. I find it liberating to not have to find “the one” linear structure in material that does not lend itself to a single line of attack. I also think that we can produce more ambient fiction—that is, where the new model of digesting the material has more flexibility, context, and ambivalence, allowing more flexibility for the writer to reflect meaning in more complex structure.

New thoughts percolating. Now I need to research to see who is doing this and what tools are arising, and see how the meta-structures arise in the work as I go.

As we get to a certain age in America, thoughts move towards the concept of retirement. This is traditionally a movement towards less: mostly less work and less responsibility. But the second half of life isn’t primarily about stopping anything, it is now about transforming life to meet a new set of criteria. And the change in critieria, what we need and want from life, can be the most liberating concept of all.

My husband and I have arrived, with much pluck and luck, at a new frontier, likened only to a few moments when we, as young college singles, had every choice in front of us and few, if any, determined responsibilities. We then proceeded to choose and commit and engage in projects that seem to take a lifetime—all worthwhile, but in many ways determining who we were and what we needed to be doing.

But now, the children are moved on to their own lives, our one remaining parent is well and thriving, our business associates and former employees are otherwise occupied, we have our health and our capacity to work, engage, and explore. So now we have reached one of those key moments when all the choices are again on the table. No one needs us to be someone particular. Nothing requires us to be anywhere specific. No activities—except those we choose—demand our attention.

Who are we when no one needs us to be any particular thing? What are you free to be? Free to do? It seems that there is a entire world of choices that can be chosen, an entire palette of life styles that can be fashioned.

One of the keys to a whole realm of freedom is the realization that it doesn’t take much to live on the planet if one is a healthy, functioning adult with few responsibilities. Then, every responsibility you take on is either a choice or a bad habit. Sifting the bad habits from real choices is the path to freedom. Identifying what is truly meaningful beyond what is merely customary is the task. We have learned to think that freedom comes from permanent financial security, by which we used to mean a lot of money in a money market account. But nothing is certain and real financial security comes from being able to create just enough income to live the lightest (least costly) life you can imagine enjoying. So reducing what you need, reduces the number of constraints or responsibilities you have have to support, creating more freedom to do whatever it is you want.

Who do you want to be today? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? If you let go of your constraints, untether yourself in the arising updraft of your life, what happens next?

Well, that’s the experiment we are embarked on by hook or by crook. And we intend to be writing about our experiences, how we got here, what we are discovering, and what’s interesting.

It is truly an exercise in catching the updraft.

PS. Still looking for the catchy title, theme, category for these posts. I wanted to use American Sanyasi denoting that it is the time of life beyond the requirements of a householder enabling one to walk away from some of our tethers—but that name is in use already and so I’m still searching.

A personal note:

Today was the day to finally recover my writing schedule. No such luck as it turns out. 3 weeks of construction (successful) and 2 weeks of being sick turns out to have been all I could accomplish in the last few weeks. I did save some money hauling, cleaning, and fetching on the projects; and they were things I could do even as my brain was too fritzed by the virus to write. (Though being sick probably made me more vulnerable to spraining my back last Monday.)

But I lost this morning to chores, research on the next project (the broken air conditioner), and family tasks. Well, I’ll keep trying. Tomorrow will be the day.

Other good/bad news was that I lost 3 pounds last week and it was likely the muscle I had spent the winter building….poof! But the last winter storm is bashing us today, the trees in the midst of their green unfurling, and the garden is beginning to recapture some shape after its severe winter-shorn look.

So tomorrow (if I can ignore the repair/fixup/cleaning issues in the house)…..for sure.

I just finished reading “The Road”, an amazing novel by Cormac McCarthy.

The book is actually shocking on so many fronts. It is a delicate elegy to the bond of love between a father and his son set against the most horrific situation you can imagine (and I’ve dreamed some pretty bad scenarios). The effect is stunning. I am still in awe of how Mr. McCarthy accomplished such a wondrous thing. Of course, these characters live with him and he had only to put them in this eviscerated world he envisioned using his brilliant skill and inspiration.

The odd thing is that I cannot recommend the book to you. You will have to come to on your own. It is a very dark thing and has some very difficult moments. (I discovered that I should not read it while home alone at night.) So on its merits, I would say that this is a brilliant book—but its material is not for everyone. Some sensitive souls might not bear up. (I would not recommend this to my daughter, for example, though she may want to read it.)

On a personal note: I apologize for the week’s disappearance. A construction project and bad virus sapped my week. Not yet well and not yet done. We’ll see how this week goes.

(Well, it’s not really a competition. It’s really about joint and parallel evolution.)

I read the San Francisco Chronicle article on mobile workers—by their examples, young, hip, technology workers living and working in the coffee shops of San Francisco. It’s fun to see where it is going, but it’s fabulous to realize this kind of independence in your work.

I started tele-commuting in the mid-80’s when it was very slow over a phone line. I could just edit source files with vi, compile, and run—lucky when I got through a full sequence before getting into garble-trouble.

But having been a part of this movement for over 20 years it’s good to see it is alive, well, and continuing to evolve. The ability to work anywhere is another part of the new freedom that technology is providing. (In addition to last week’s discussion about “small is powerful.”)

My earliest incarnation of telecommuting included a early model IBM PC and a 1200 baud modem (and later an early Sun workstation over the same modem.) I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains and had two school-age children. I managed to go into the office of my client in Saratoga about once a week. And, almost every day until they were both in junior high school, I was home when the kids got home from school. Of course, over the decades the tools, techniques, and what you could accomplish have grown immensely.

Today, my husband and I travel in a car which has a cellular modem and a wireless network, or we use our portable Verizon wireless network card with a router. We can have network anywhere we have battery power or electricity. We travel with two Macs. When we are driving at least one of us can be working—as needed.

Our pop-up tent camper also has solar panels for electricity—our goal being to work absolutely anywhere. (The solar panels were a response to our experiences camping offline (without power) in late October in the Rockies—a single battery couldn’t keep even the fan for the propane heater running long enough—fortunately, we sleep fine in our artic bags at 29 degrees.)

We live in the country and our version of “going to Starbucks” is to move outdoors where the wireless network reaches most places. The challenge, as always, is power, and I actually had to run wires to the most suitable work sites. As a writer I am inspired to do whatever it is that keeps me writing. And I’ve discovered (and I’m somewhat embarrassed by this) is that I can almost always write if I find the comfortable spot. Often a reclining chair in the sun or shade (depending on the temperature), or sprawled on a sofa. Not very pretty, but I figure—whatever works.

Now our goal is to continue to expand our independence of place—and for many things independence in time. Maybe technology can allow us to arrange our work around our lives instead of trying to squeeze our lives in around our work. It’s a scramble, but in working at home I am able to keep the vegetable garden going, prepare more humane meals, spend my time in the spot that I’ve chosen to live—these are all worthwhile goals for everyone.

In addition, we want to travel more, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to work. We just want to take our lives with us wherever we want to be. Mix it up.

So it’s fun to imagine (and if you can imagine it, you can probably make it happen) what our lives can look like now that so much of the support we need for many jobs is both ubiquitous and mobile.

We’ll be hitting the road now any time. See you out there.

Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

There have always been ways for people to create businesses and organizations that are small and controlled. But in most situations, this meant that the organization would have a small reach: a local contractor, a small printer, a regional consulting service. You could often control the quality of your partners, pick and choose who to work with, find a small consort of like-minded individuals.

But for the most part, you could only build a company with a small reach—that is, it was difficult to speak to a lot of people, or provide services across the country, or to market around the world. If you had a really big dream, a far reaching goal, you needed to build a larger organization, taking on all the subsequent distraction that size brings.

But the advances in communication and connectivity have delivered profound solutions: distributed platforms for working with partners and employees, dynamic platforms for outreach to your customers. In addition, as Chris Anderson and others point out, the means of production for some many of our products are now in the hands of individuals: I can write, print, publish, and market my own books from the comfort of my living room; film makers can write, shoot, edit, and distribute video from any where in the world and connect with an available audience; I have a single laptop on which I can develop almost any kind of software with tools that I can buy without getting up off the sofa. (One of my favorite work sites.)

Because of ubiquitous communications, powerful personal computers, and evolving software tools, delivering a product or service to market now takes:

• Less money

• Less time

• AND FEWER PEOPLE

And, from my current perspective, as one looking for ways to deliver my inspirations to the market place, I am intrigued with how important it is that it can be done with fewer people. A concentrated, inspired set of partners can deliver products and services of value to millions of people. How incredible is that? How focused can our potential be? How much can we control our efforts and minimize the possibilities of diluted potential? With fewer of us, can we be more effective at staying aligned and coherent in our goals, intentions, and actions?

Of course, most of us love to work with others and we want to have partners in crime and inspiration. But since every inspired participant can do more and be more productive, we can each leverage more of our personal potential to the fulfilling of our joint dreams, with better odds of building a organization that can truly build potential geometrically.

E.F. Schumacher, the economist, in his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, inspired a generation of us to examine our lives and and our work through another lense. As the new economic realities come into play, we can see that small is not only beautiful, but that it can be globally powerful as well.

What are you going to be doing next?

The Idea of Net Potential

We are all trying to create things—lives, families, product, projects, businesses, communities. We are trying to create a future in which our creations are part and parcel of our lives, and perhaps the lives of many others. This seems to be our role in the evolution of the cosmos—to create what inspires us. Our ability to create is measured by how all our activities and beliefs net out—productive actions minus non-productive actions. Our results are the “net” of what we do. (Along with everything else that’s going on.) So the more aligned or coherent we are in what we do (assuming we find the right trajectory) the more “net” positive motion we can cause. So we can see that sometimes we do the right thing, and sometimes we do the wrong thing. And sometimes our beliefs can conflict so we don’t really know we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s hard to get it right even for ourselves and our private goals.

But when you build an organization (family, community, business) you have to coordinate the net positive potential of everyone. Everyone has to be working toward the same goal (we call that taking aim on a trajectory.) And then the hard part, everyone needs to execute productive actions—do the right thing. And there are so many more ways now that things can go awry. The further the group expands beyond the truly inspired, the more dilute becomes the net potential. Sometimes adding a body is a net negative, not even a small net positive.

Of course, we all know this. We can see that the complexities of size in organizations is a cost. But what we sometimes don’t appreciate (and totally forgot in the year 1999) was the possibility of size producing nothing but a negative to the potential of an organization. Suddenly we spend more time on the support structures than on the creative work; more time organizing ourselves than inspiring our customers and partners. More is often less. And usually the inspired ones are distracted from their efforts by the need to support the organization.

So what does this have to do with technology and smaller companies?

In any organization you need the key inspired folks who create the product. They have the idea, understand their customer, and have the passion to make something happen. Then, it seems, you need a lot of support (management, marketing, sales, system admin, office management, etc.) Any of these roles can be fulfilled by inspired partners—but as the numbers get bigger the likelihood is that some people you hire will not come the table with the passion and engagement that the key players embody. They will be playing at another level. These folks dilute the potential of an organization. And they can be anywhere in an organization.

(There is nothing wrong with these players. I have found myself to be one when I got into an organization that had a great deal of passion for something that I didn’t share. I wasn’t a bad person and on paper I looked useful, but I had gotten in over my head with respect to my ability to really commit myself to their passion. After struggling for awhile, I figured out that I should just leave. I was a net negative to their ability to maximize their potential. I wasn’t really helping (even though I did useful things) and I wasn’t having fun either. Both good measures of whether you should be doing any particular thing.)

Modern technology enables the source, the people who are the inspired participants, to deliver their wares/message/media to their audience with a lot less support from those who might be diluting the potential. So what goes wrong? That is, how is the potential of a company diluted when it requires “bodies”, people that “have jobs” in support of the creative effort?

(Now don’t get me wrong, anyone in any role can be a source of additive potential. It’s not the role that causes net negative, it’s the level of engagement. The janitor, the marketing support team, and the system administrators can be incredible contributors to the potential of an organization. The scariest thing is to have anyone in the leadership of an organization not be an inspired, engaged participant—a net add. As an organization grows, the difficulty in managing net potential grows more quickly.)

Think about dancing. If you are dancing by yourself, and your potential is how much creative enjoyment you get, you see that you are in control of what you get out of your effort. (Any activity you love will do if dancing isn’t your thing.) But if I match you up with a partner (let’s say a friend), then the enjoyment you can extract is complicated by your need to work/understand/communication with one other. Now the possible potential, should things work out really well, is higher. But getting the necessary coordination together makes it more difficult to realize.

So imagine that I pair you with a random person. Or four random persons. How hard will it be to extract the same quality of enjoyment or quality of work, and how long will it take you to get to a level that supersedes what you could generate by yourself?

The truth is that if we very carefully choose partners who are as inspired as we are, our potential can grow exponentially. But as an organization gets larger, and we’re probably not talking about dozens of people, then the likelihood is that self-selection or hiring-selection is moving more towards being random than it is to capturing people who are truly inspired. (You can hope that they will become inspired—but they might just want the job.) And, of course, they not all uninspired, but geometrically increasing creative potential requires that the team be really focused on the same value proposition. If they are going even slightly different directions or using slightly different trajectories (in the terminology of Catching the Updraft!), then the potential does not increase, but can actually be degrading all the time. We’ve all seen this happen.

And why do I care? Well, I’m working on what happens next and I’d love to find or figure out what combination of people, technology, and business models can fuel my inspirations. I think its different than it was twenty years ago when I started my first company and I don’t want to use any old assumptions in this very different environment.

Tomorrow:
Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

A Thought Meander on New Business Model Opportunities

I have spent the last few months studying new business models, new technology, what’s happening, who’s happening. There seems to be a lot of turmoil, a lot of thrash and crash, and also a lot of steady business and technology development.

As someone who is in the midst, as always, of figuring out what wants to happen next in my life, I look on curiously to see what can apply to my situation. What can I leverage? Where can I contribute?

In my previous business endeavors, I essentially used one key skill to build a career and a company. I could learn new technologies fairly quickly and see how to leverage them in a structured fashion. My husband and I built our first consulting company by always being the earliest adopter on the block—after carefully picking the right adoptee. It was the only way a small consulting company could stay ahead of the Andersons, as it were.

So now I’m looking at what’s happening with an eye to see if there is any place for me in this dynamically changing environment, and if so, what would the opportunity look like?

One thing I see is that the new wave of extraordinary technological capabilities has enabled some incredible ideas to come to fruition. Some of them are potent, and some of them are, well, a little dorky. (There are many directions to go with these observations, many of which have been covered. Read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson for one discussion of why technology has made the world a new place. Read Tim O’Reilly and his gang, who write on many of these opportunities.)

What’s new? Well,

• Tools are better and enable you to design and build anything more quickly.
  We have a world-wide delivery system. And it’s instant for digital products, like music, books, software.
• We have a world-communication system. You can have a conference call with any group of people distributed almost anywhere in the world.
• We have a world marketing platform that enables you to talk with your customers all day long from your bedroom.
• This is not to mention the very new things that you can build with the current technologies.

The major point for me is that suddenly you can do more with much, much less that was ever possible. And that turns out to be critical for maximizing the potential of a young organization.

(Remember the heady days at the end of the century when HR was hiring so many people per day that it was frightening? Turns out we were right to be very afraid.)

More (with less) tomorrow.

In 2001, for various reasons, some personal and some business, all of my ongoing plans and activities were interrupted, seemingly all at once: a business evaporated, a family member died, a baby was born. This is not to say that life all fell apart for me. It did not, for my immediate family was fine and healthy, my home still stood, my health and capacity to work remained. But the things that were driving my activities all fell away and it became clear that I was going to need to make new choices.

At a moment like this, it is very easy to reach out and grab one of our habitual responses—and sometimes that is helpful. But sometimes, if one can surrender to the stillness, manage to be unreactive and feel the flow of life’s direction, such a moment can allow us to align with a truer direction.

In this time of disruption, threads began to come to me. In the joy and exhaustion of the new life of my niece, a children’s illustrated book came into being along with drawings, paintings, and illustrations. In a slow meander and pilgramage to the arctic in our truck, the work on the creative process began to speak to me and flow daily onto pages in my notebook. And one night, laughing at the possibilities of making a living with children’s books or creative philosophy, to the cosmos I posed the question of how I was to pay the bills.

I awoke in the morning from a lucid dream, a very, very rare occurance in my life. The dream was a vision of the opening scene of a story, a movie really, rich and detailed, a profound situation, emotionally taut. I did not remember having such a vision before and spent an hour writing it all down as best I could. And this turned out to be the thread that became the novel. And this stream of potential, this gift of a story, has never abated. It is still there and as I work its weft and weave, it continues to flow.

Writing fiction was never, ever a dream of mine. It was never an idea that came into my head. But this story is an updraft for me, an original source. And part of my confidence in it is its ongoing resourcefulness, the depth to which I can plumb it. Notice, that I do not believe that I make any of it up, but that it is present and I am able to pull it in. That is the best way I can describe my relationship to it.

And so, I can find the precise moment when this updraft came into my consciousness, when everything aligned and I was still enough to see life present it to me, when I was open to new possibilities, even, I would say, searching for my path, but without any particular ideas of what it would be.

And this is not to say that this book is necessarily good, or that it will be successful (though those things are possible in the future). In the arising world there are creative endeavors to be engaged in and learned from regardless of any measure of success that we might have for them. Businesses that falter, writers who still need to grow, philosophies that never quite take wing, these are the ways that the universe evolves. Capacity and skill are continuing to grow. One of the things we know from the creative philosophy is that concern for the state of the outcome is a disabling relationship to the creative process. The creative process must be free of constraints—including the one that says it must be successful. And, as it turns out, that is the best way to improve the odds of being sucessful in the creative process. If you know the result, then you are not creating anything new.

So sometimes we meditate ourselves into an internal quiet; or come to a moment when we struggle to pay attention; or sometimes life crushes our busy-ness into stillness. However we get there, in that momentary reprieve from doingness, sometimes we catch an updraft.