Mary Panttaja

Wednesday was a long day. Awake before dawn I laid on the futon and watch the moon set; I headed out into the dawn to watch the sun rise. Then I worked all day, though we got out into the sunshine for lunch. It was so beautiful after work that I could not stay in, so after a 40 minute weight session at the gym, I headed out into the arriving crowds. It was the last game of the season for the Giants and people were in a happy flurry everywhere. The moon rose over the bay, golden and full. Full circle in just a few hours. I walked over the to field to catch the ambiance of the game—quite a lot of fun. On the way back, paddling out of the dimness came a flotilla of kayaks into McCovey Cove.

Here are some of my snaps.

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.

Yesterday I had the bright idea to spend the day touring the Taos area. See the Taos Pueblo, the DH Lawrence ranch, maybe spin by Los Alamos. I made several mistakes, one of them thinking that it would be a brisk two hour drive to Taos.

Well, it was four hours there (some of it from goofs of my own, some from traffic, some from road work) and two hours forty-five back (for the return I figure out what “Santa Fe Relief Road” meant). It was a beautiful drive most of the way. (Though I cannot recommend Espanola or Santa Fe from the road.) Much of the drive follows the Rio Grande, some of it in a narrow canyon. The clouds were majestic over the desert bluffs and canyons. There is some beautiful country east of Santa Fe—a thick forest of pinyon and pine with few man-made landmarks. (How I should come to be east of Santa Fe on a route to Taos may come into question. Needless to say there are very long stretches of road that direction without any freeway exits (13 miles in one particular case.))

Taos itself I just drove through; it seemed very busy and touristy, though on another day might very well be interesting. I spent an hour walking the Taos Pueblo. It is very ancient and beautiful, though fairly brushed up and clean. The claim is that it has been steadily occupied for 1000 years. Quite an accomplishment on this continent.

So, a tiring day on the road with not much to show for it. I will calculate more carefully next time.

PS. All would have been made easier with use of some of the vast technology we own. But I didn’t take the GPS, I discovered 20 miles up the road that I  had only 20% charge on my phone (so I couldn’t use its mapping tools; just enough to SMS with Jim all day if I shut it off in between), and I didn’t take my computer. Of course, if I had read the map correctly (old fashioned technology), that would have solved some of my problems.

As we were about to leave, I casted about for something to read—not just anything (I have a large stack of business and technical books on the desktop)—but something comforting and inspiring to read. In the library, I was scanning my nature essay section and pulled out “Desert Solitaire, A Season in the Wilderness” by Edward Abbey. Of course, since we are heading to the red rock country, it was especially pertinent.

I mused a bit on those books that I would always own, those writers that always speak to me very personally. Many of the most important books in my life are of the experience of the person/soul/sensibility coming into contact with the natural world. That experience of nature and the planet is, for me, a key touchstone in my process of keeping in touch with who I really am. It helps me move passed my egoic worries and concerns and feel what really is.

So my mind started to make a list of who these people were. One day I’ll will do it more completely, but here is a start:

• Gary Snyder
• Edward Abbey
• Aldo Leopold
• Wendell Berry
• Gretel Erhlich
• Barry Lopez
• Robert Thurman
• Peter Mathiessen
• Farley Mowat

I know there are more—but today it’s E Abbey and the red rock desert. And that is quite enough.

some technical issues to work out, but possible

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.

In reviewing the comments on the earlier noted Guy Kawasaki post, I found this interesting site:  The Janus Center: Changing the World by Changing Its People: The Hero Workshop.  Matt Langdon also picked up on the reference to teaching our children to be heroes-in-waiting. It seems to be what he does. It’s a bit of a compelling idea.

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.

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