Mary Panttaja

My good friends Sandeep and Sunita Giri (and young ones Ashwin and Priya) just returned from a trip to their families in Nepal. It seems it was a wonderful trip, and we are sorry to have missed it.

Sandeep reports that his good friend Mahabir Pun (they both attended university in Nebraska) has received a major award for this work bringing education, computers, and internet connectivity to remote villages outside of Beni and Pokhara. Mahabir has managed to inspire a whole region and has installed a complete wireless network where every part and computer has to be carried into the mountains. (Nangi Village in Myagdi, Nepal is a day’s walk from Beni Bazaar.) Here is a link to some great trekking photos of Sandeep’s travels to Nangi Village.

If you want information on how you can contribute to Mahabir’s work, check out his website on Nepal Wireless.

Also, Sandeep’s parents are now running a bed and breakfast just north of Kathmandu. I have stayed there and can attest to how wonderful they are and what a thrill it is to stay in a Nepalese home that also has all the comforts we are shamelessly used to. If you want to go and have any questions, feel free to contact me. I love to encourage people to head to Nepal, especially since things are much calmer there these days.

Okay, it seems cheesy to talk more about the iPhone, but it is taking up a lot of mips at my house, including Jim’s post on his iPhone. So here goes.

What amazes me about the phone:

1. It’s damn beautiful. Really. The unit is beautiful, the images are beautiful, the interface is beautiful. The box it came in is beautiful, as is the bag the box came in. Wow. Every bit of it is a pleasure to look at and hold.
2. The color and resolution enable the images to just glow; and I love the way the images flip when you twist the unit 90 degrees.
3. It’s fabulous to actually just pull up a web pages and browse them. Extra fun that our website, which is so sparely designed, looks elegant on the iPhone. And you can actually read our blogs easily.
4. But what I really love, which is only mentioned in all the writeups, is access to the maps of the entire world with corresponding satellite images. I can see houses in villages in Spain—on my phone. So clearly. The waves coming in from Alaska off the coast of California are as clear as the eddies and drops in the Urumbamba River that surrounds the walls of Machu Picchu—also visible on the phone. Of course, this is just what Google maps does, but to have it always with me is like having a atlas to dream over whenever I want. Very cool.

I’m sure that there will be things wrong with the phone in the long run, but the initial experience really is quite joyous. Now we’ll have to deal with data synchronization (which applications can be made to work, etc) and more nitty-gritty details of contacts and calendars (though musics, photos, email, bookmarks all work easily).

So, is it worth it? Not clear. But if you really enjoy seeing beautiful technology that can change how we think about things—maybe so.

I was reading the latest Gary Snyder book last night: “Back on the Fire”. It contains a series of recent essays on a variety of topics relating to nature, art, writing, and the preservation of our world. (Snyder has always been one of my favorite thinkers and important resources. I discovered once that a close friend and I were two young adults who actually wanted to be Gary Snyder. Strange. But then again not every young poet has a famous novel written about his life: “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac is actually about Gary Snyder. So we actually wanted to be the hero of a story.)

In his essay, “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder”, Snyder talks about poetry and literature in relation to the language and patterns of the natural world: ecology, environment, nature.

We speak of the ‘ecology of the imagination’ or even of ‘language’, with justification: ‘ecology’ is a valuable shorthand term for complexity in motion.

He quotes a wonderful passage from “The Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry” by Jed Rasula which develops a metaphor for the artistic process, but which can also be used to understand the creative process in all its forms.

Detritus cycle energy is liberated by funghi and lots of insects. I would then suggest: as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so ‘enlightened mind’ is to daily ego mind, and Art to the recycling of neglected inner potential. When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like mature ecosystems. turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation, and thrill; and reviewing memory…blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator for unfelt experience, perception, sensation, and memory for the whole society. It comes not as a flower, but—to complete the metaphor—as a mushroom: the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycella that run widely through the soil, intricately married to the root hairs of all the trees. ‘Fruiting’—at that point—is the completion of the work of the poet, and the point where the artist reenters the cycle: gives what she or he has re-created through reflection, returning a ‘thought of enlightenment’ to community.

The concept of recycling and liberating neglected inner potential really resonates with me, that inner potential really being an updraft of our own lives (or in the life of our societies) with which we have not really connected.

I spent part of the day yesterday at the CMP and O’Reilly sponsored Web. 2.0 Expo in California. It brought together people and companies who are working at the edge of the internet computing platform. Of course, it was for industry folks and their customers: technology providers, the engineers who build things, and customers who buy things. (When you follow this industry in the blogosphere, sometimes you get to feeling that it’s just a few folks talking to each other; but seeing the attendance you did get the sense that there are real “working” folks and companies actually figuring out how and whether to use these new tools.) There were a mix of development platforms (Coghead, BungeeLabs, Etolos, Adobe Apollo were the most visible); site enhancement tools (Snap [Do you like the SnapShot features?]); some social networking platforms (Yoono,) wikis (Socialtext, Mindtouch) and other writing tools (Buzzword).

Here is the most interesting product I saw; one of the winning Ignite presentors:

Wireless Power from Potenco presented by Colin Bulthaup of Squid Labs: A hand-held electric generator about the size of a large yo-yo: pull the string constantly for one minute and get about 45 minutes of talk time—that seems tremendously efficient. The product is targeted for the world that has yet to be wired and is so valuable nowadays because many of the community-enhancing electronic tools (like the cell phone) are so relatively cheap to power. The company is partnering with the $100 laptop project. (If you don’t know about this project—you should look it up.) The pair will transform many communities in less developed areas (wireless, as it were). I would propose a interesting funding maneuver: sell them to folks like us as at substantial markup to fund sending many more overseas. Having spent part of the weekend rebuilding the harnesses for the solar panels that help power our little camper, I am reminded of how possible its to actually live on much less power than we generally use.

Okay. Tomorrow I’ll talk about software in the rest of the report. And about the dearth of solutions for my writing and publishing challenges. (I was surprised.)

The Clean Garage

It is key to realize that we are not trying to create a single moment in time when our goals are reality, only to have those goals dissolve into dust. We want to create lives/products/businesses where our goals are continually realized and continually getting better. (They have to evolve as our dreams and goals continue to evolve.) It will never be enough to use a short-term technique (hire 10 people) to get the garage clean—unless they stay around, of course—for the patterns of life and action that got the garage in disarray are still there.

On the other side of the coin, if you figured out the behaviors and mechanisms that would keep a garage clean (just imagine it), then you wouldn’t actually have to clean the garage. You would just have to start living those mechanisms and the evolution of the clean garage would come into being. Get that—-you wouldn’t have to clean the garage, it would become clean as a matter of course.

What we really want is a life style or set of mechanisms (actions and use patterns) that evolve a clean garage. The clean garage is the state that we want to create—and we need to create a preponderance of potential that the clean garage will always (or mostly) exist in our future.

Silly way to think about it? Maybe. But if you substitute your future career, your growing business, the ability to continually evolve your product line, it starts to become a richer idea. The truth is that what you are trying to create is a particular state of the world in the future—and that means we need to build the potential of that now, in the present. And not for it to happen just once—one moment. We want it to exist with us until we dream of something better.

So what could a set of mechanisms look like for the garage? Let’s play with some ideas, some tactics and practices.

1. I will never set anything down in the garage except in the place where it belongs.
2. As I use each thing in the garage, I will make sure it has a place to live.
3. For each project that involves items in the garage (tools, toys, storage) I will allocate a little extra time in my project to organize those items.
4. Once a month I will sweep through the garage and look for 3 things that I can get rid of.
5. At the end of each season, I will put unneeded items away properly.

Maybe not a complete list; I’m sure you can do better. You never stop and clean the garage, but your actions will slowly evolve a more and more organized work space.

And darn, suddenly we realize that we have to rewrite all the rules as “we will”, and get everyone to agree. Mechanisms for group goals are more challenging—mechanisms for individual goals in which others can mess with you can be really tough (you want the garage clean but brother Sam doesn’t really care). But that is where leadership always lives—on the outside edge of what is easy to motivate in others where you need to develop the ability to empower and inspire others to participate.

And, of course, this is a relatively easy goal to visualize. Most of our personal goals are not so direct. But what we see is that we want to be continually building the potential of our goal state, so that the likelihood is that our goal will be realized. That’s what we mean by the preponderance of potential (the potential for our goal is greater in amount or value than that which is against our goal.) If we want to create anything, that is our job.

And a kicker is to notice that whatever is today is the the state that has had the most potential created; whether you like it or not. Our world is precisely as it is because this is what we have created together. Want something else? Then your job is to change the potential of the future to be different. And no one else can play your part in that evolution.

Note: Another time we’ll discuss control and lack of control—once we realize that we’re not in control the way we thought we should be, we sometimes just give up. We have to learn that there is a kind of control we do have (it’s just more subtle) and that giving up is not really an option.

Michael Pollan in “The Botany of Desire” beautifully lays out how species can evolve patterns and mechanisms to help each other through the process of living together in a common enviroment : bees and flowers, sharks and cleaner fish, humans and fruit. The mechanisms get more complex. Fruits meet a need (or desire according to Pollan) of humans and humans provide a service to the fruit. The evolutionary participants uncovered another active member of its neighborhood and found a way to build a relationship that helps the gene pool to survive.

The apple is one of his interesting examples. It has an relatively unusual survival tactic in that its primary form of reproduction produces an excess of variety—its mechanism focuses on the “new ways to get along”-part of the simple evolutionary pattern. So it creates an incredible array of new options. It can always evolve rapidly to meet changes in its environment, which gives it stability in maintaining and spreading its genes as a species. But any given form of the apple is doomed, as cross-polinated seeds do not breed true to the parents. But this pattern of mechanistic evolution is great for another species who comes into contact with the apple: humans. There are lots of kinds of apples with a great many different qualities. And we found many that met some of our needs and desires: sweet, dependable food sources. And, importantly, we discovered that we could control the reproduction of those features we like through cloning and grafting genetic material.

So the apple-human mechanism is based on the apple producing a lot of variety genetically, and the human controlling the apples genetic variation (when it wants) with its awareness and intelligence. The apple’s genes are spread over the planet and people have a manageable food source. The overall mechanism is built out of the skills and needs of independent species. The mechanisms together build a preponderance of potential that the future will continue to meet their needs and desires.

Successful models of business, and many of the “new” business models arising in Web 2.0 style, are evolutionary mechanisms for their markets. That is, they embody mechanistic behaviors or actions that reinforce their desired state of change—growth of their audience or customer base. The early versions of these were called “viral” after one the most successful evolvers we know.

These viral mechanisms—patterns of action and use—reinforce the spread of the virus, which means the adoption of the product. The product’s growth in the marketplace is entrained by the mechanisms. You can watch the mechanism work to change and evolve the state of the market as the potential for the goal to be continually realized is increased by the mechanism.

To cause a change in the state of an organization, whether it be market growth, product development, or improved ROI, you must not just “fix” a problem, but ingrain process mechanisms that reinforce the desired path. We must create dynamic evolutionary mechanisms that default to taking us where we want to go.

One of my favorite examples is an everyday problem: for many people the garage is always a total disaster and they really want to have a clean garage. (It could be anything that is consistently arriving in our present moment which we see as a “problem”—we don’t like it, but we always have it: missing deadlines,  uphappy customers,  processes that don’t meet current needs.)

We think that what we want is just a clean garage. We think that if we had enough time and help we could just get it clean. But this is a wrong-headed idea. We don’t really want just a clean garage—that would just be a moment in time (a brief moment) when we like the state of the garage. What we really want and need is a lifestyle, or a set of mechanisms, that result in a clean garage—automatically.

What does that mean? More tomorrow.

Back to the subject of creating organizations….

I have been reading two different books that are basically about evolution: “Nonzero” by Robert Wright, and “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan. One traces the power of evolutionary forces from biology through the evolution of cultures. The other illuminates the power of co-evolution, species evolving in concert for the benefit of both. Another new focus of evolutionary thought these days is the evolution of individual and group consciousness, growth in our capacity for awareness and action.

Evolution is a great model for managing our relationship to the things we are trying to create as well. Our effort to create things (lives, families, corporations, products) is just a slightly more conscious movement of that creative impulse that has evolved everything we experience.

How does the evolutionary model help us think about the choices we make?

The process of evolution itself is a creative mechanism, that is, it is a pattern of discovering success and failure through a natural mechanism of creativity. The universe has created/discovered/evolved (??) a process that results in ever more of what it is trying to create (which seems to be more diversity, awareness, complexity, and creativity.)

Once you find a functioning mechanism that through its regular actions succeeds in continuing to create what you want, or moves in the direction of what you want, you only have to allow the mechanism to keep functioning. Of course, if you are creating something new then the mechanism must allow for movement towards something you don’t want, and adjust for that. Path correction must be part of the mechanism.

So what do these mechanisms look like?

(In the case of evolution, I will, of course, be oversimplifying.)

A plant evolves by doing its thing the best way it knows how and living to create offspring that mostly know what it knows. In addition, it blends what it knows with a sexual partner in a slightly random sort of way that mixes it up—creates some new and different ways of getting by. Some of those succeed in the environment and some fail—some don’t live to create offspring, or create fewer successful offspring. So the mechanism is something like this: make more of what works and keep throwing new ideas into the mix. The “new ideas” are really important because the enviroment is not a single stable thing, but is itself changing making survival more or less likely. Biological evolution doesn’t have to know what its going for in terms of form or function—the mechanism results in life continuing to find a way in a changing world. (Of course, sometimes the mechanism comes up against an environmental change it can’t cope with—it takes times to find new ways of getting by. A meteorite was more than the dinosaurs could work their way out of.)

More about co-evolving next time.

(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