Ed Batista

On Change: Inclination, Motivation, Action

UPDATE: With some time to reflect further on the graphic above and the essay below, I have a few clarifying thoughts on its purpose:

1) This model describes the conditions that support sustainable change.

2) The questions that accompany each of the model's components--inclination, motivation, and action--allow us to determine whether the conditions are right for change and to understand how we might influence those conditions.

3) And if we define sustainable change as "influencing ourselves," there's a clear parallel between this model and the Influence Pyramid--food for future thought.  (Must be something about yellow triangles.)

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How do we make change happen in our lives?  What supports our efforts?  And what gets in our way?

This post seeks to illustrate a universal topic--the process of change--using as a vehicle a very particular story about the role of exercise in my life.  It's a work-in-progress on a theme, so I hope you'll bear with me if it feels rough in spots.  I've written before about how I use Don't Break the Chain as a tool to help me exercise on a regular basis.  It's an extremely simple website that allows you to create "chains" consisting of days on a calendar that you fill in after completing an activity on a given day.  There's something compelling about the site's simplicity--you click on a day to fill it in, and that's all you can do.  There's also the visceral impact of an increasingly color-filled calendar when you successfully keep a chain alive (and, conversely, the impact of a long stretch of blank, white days when you've failed to complete your chosen task.)  Here's a (regrettably grainy) screenshot of my exercise calendar to date this year:

I was on a roll until March, when my wife and I both came down with a terrible cold, and between our recovery, helping Amy through her subsequent shoulder surgery, and an insanely busy Spring Quarter at Stanford, it took three months to really find my stride again.  But I'm kicking ass in July--yay me.

Reflecting on this experience has made me think about how and why I've been able to stay active--or, more accurately, to return to a fulfilling level of activity, over and over again, even when daily life gets in my way.  And that process led me to think at a more abstract level about the process of change.

I was an athlete in high school, and I stayed active throughout college, but once I began working full-time I found it difficult to exercise regularly on a sustainable basis.  Throughout my 20s and 30s I'd work out daily for a few months, and then I'd stop and not do a damn thing for weeks on end.  And then I'd start up again, and the cycle would repeat itself.  I was generally pretty fit and could sustain this process physically, but it was psychologically draining.  I wanted to change and to break this cycle but was perpetually unsuccessful.

But last year, after turning 40 in mid-2007, my body began telling me in no uncertain terms that being inactive for lengthy periods and then suddenly launching into a fitness regime was no longer an option.  If I wanted to be active at all, I was going to have to get active and stay active, permanently.  Just as importantly, this year I came to understand that physical activity is an essential element in my happiness; I can't be sustainably happy unless I'm sustainably active.

And so over the last two years I've suddenly found it possible to break this two-decade-long cycle and to make a sustainable commitment to my physical fitness.  Have I been 100% successful?  No, of course not--just look at some of those long white stretches in the calendar above.  But also notice how quickly I got back in the saddle, so to speak.  In the past, the cumulative effect of an illness, and caregiving for Amy, and a hectic period at work would have been months of inactivity.  But this year the longest I've gone without exercising was 15 days.

So what changed?  What factors contributed to my ability to make this change happen?  I believe that our actions rest on a foundation of inclination and motivation, as shown in the graphic at the top of this post.  Here's what I mean by those terms in the context of a proposed change:

Inclination

• Am likely to change?
• Am I inclined or not to make this change?
• How does it align with my life and my preferences?
• Why might this process be easy or difficult for me?

Motivation

• What are my goals?
• What motivates me to make this change?
• What optimal results do I expect?
• What minimal results will I accept?

Action

• What steps will result in forward motion?
• What will encourage me to act?
• How do I move from reflection to action?
• And what will keep me moving ahead?

Here's a graphic representation:

This model certainly applies to the case of my newly discovered ability to exercise sustainably.  In years past none of the actions I took led to lasting change because there was no foundation in place: I possessed neither the inclination nor the motivation to make that commitment.

But my changing (read: aging) body and intimations of mortality, as well as the realization that exercise isn't just enjoyable but is actually central to my happiness profoundly altered the context for this process.  My actions now had a solid foundation to support them--and this is why a simple little tool like Don't Break the Chain has been so useful.  The action of building a chain day by day and coloring in my calendar now builds upon an altered inclination to change and an enhanced motivation to change--so that action, and every other step I take to pursue this goal, has a much more profound impact than it would have had in the past.

I've had such success with changing my approach to exercise that I've recently decided to try changing my approach to sleep.  I often read or write or just goof off late into the night, resulting in a fairly irregular sleep pattern.  I've wanted to change this habit for years, but I've never been able to break it.  But in the past few months I've felt the effects of insufficient sleep more acutely, and I've been hearing about a growing body of medical research that suggests that regular sleep is important for long-term physical and mental health.  In other words, my inclination to change and my motivation to change have themselves changed--and I suspect that I'll be able to build on this foundation successfully going forward.  Don't Break the Chain allows you to create multiple chains for different activities, and here's mine for a good night's sleep, which I started 2 days ago:

So far, so good.

(Here's a 4-slide PowerPoint file [57 KB] of the graphics above.)

Photo by quinn.anya. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Stanford's Synthesis Seminar Bibliography

Update: The GSB library web page for the bibliography has been taken down, and I'm hoping to recreate it here when I get some free time.

One of my most rewarding experiences this year was participating on a team assembled by Prof. Carole Robin to design classes on "Fulfillment and Meaning," "Failure and Resilience," and "Transitions and Renewal" for Stanford's Synthesis Seminar, a new course for second-year students at the Business School.  The rationale for addressing these topics--in this order--was our team's belief in an underlying cycle of personal development:

1. Finding more fulfillment and meaning in life increases our resilience and prepares us to handle failure more effectively.
2. Greater resilience and an enhanced ability to handle failure prepares us to manage transitions more effectively.
3. Greater comfort with transition allows us to regularly engage in self-renewal.
4. A commitment to continued renewal allows us to find fulfillment and meaning in new ways over time.

And one of the greatest resources to come out of the Synthesis Seminar is the class's extensive bibliography, created by GSB librarians Daphne Chang and Nora Richardson, which compiles all the resources we used in the course (and more) on a single web page, with book synopses, author notes, and videos.  (Unfortunately, most of article links go to Stanford databases that require a university affiliation to access, but I assume most of them are available elsewhere.)

I continue to use this bibliography as a resource in my coaching practice, and I find something new and useful there on a regular basis.  Thanks to Carole and my colleagues on the design team, and thanks to Daphne and Nora!

Photo by Kris Cohen.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

David Foster Wallace on the Meaning of Life

Tonight I learned that a writer whose work I admired from a distance but hadn't read in a few years died of cancer in 2007.  She wasn't a public figure on a large scale, so none of my family or friends knew of her death or even that I was a fan of her work, and I'd never been in touch with her.  But the illusory sense that a reader has of "knowing" an author gave her passing a personal dimension for me, perhaps in part because it was such a surprise.

And this reminded me of another recent and surprising writer's death, the suicide of David Foster Wallace on September 12, 2008.  I lacked the patience for Wallace's sprawling, endlessly footnoted novels--a flaw in me, not in his work--but I found those same qualities compelling in his stories and nonfiction.  I knew little about him personally, but the persona that emerged from his work, particularly his essays--which covered every topic imaginable, sometimes in a single piece--was wise and humane, all too aware of our culture's flaws but also aware that each day flawed individuals were doing their best to make it better.

Shortly after Wallace's death, the Wall Street Journal published an essay adapted from a commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005.  I encourage you to read it all, but these two paragraphs near the end convey his message clearly:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.  There is no such thing as not worshipping.  Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.  And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.  If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough.  Never feel you have enough.  It's the truth.  Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.  On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story.  The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.  Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.  Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious.  They are default-settings.  They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.  And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.  Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.  The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.  This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.  But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.  That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

It is hard to take advice on how to live a good life from a man who chose to end his, and I don't simply mean that it's difficult--I mean that it's painful, because these words strike me as so true, so fundamentally right that I can't believe that they lacked the power to save the life of the man who wrote them.

I've read this essay many times, and each time I still feel a unique sense of grief and anger and terror and hope.  The grief is for Wallace, and the anger is for the fate that left such a talented man so tormented.  The terror and hope are for me; I'm terrified that I'll never transcend my own petty gods, the unworthy objects of my worship--and I'm hopeful that I will, that I'll find freedom in attention and awareness and discipline and effort, in caring and sacrifice for others, in consciousness.

Photo © Outline/Corbis.  All rights reserved.

Brand You in the 21st Century

Twelve years ago Tom Peters introduced the concept of Brand You:

We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc... [O]ur most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You...

[A]sk yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Give yourself the traditional 15-words-or-less contest challenge...

If your answer wouldn't light up the eyes of a prospective client or command a vote of confidence from a satisfied past client, or--worst of all--if it doesn't grab you, then you've got a big problem. It's time to give some serious thought and even more serious effort to imagining and developing yourself as a brand.

Start by identifying the qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors--or your colleagues. What have you done lately--this week--to make yourself stand out? What would your colleagues or your customers say is your greatest and clearest strength? Your most noteworthy (as in, worthy of note) personal trait?...

Your next step is to cast aside all the usual descriptors that employees and workers depend on to locate themselves in the company structure. Forget your job title. Ask yourself: What do I do that adds remarkable, measurable, distinguished, distinctive value? Forget your job description. Ask yourself: What do I do that I am most proud of? Most of all, forget about the standard rungs of progression you've climbed in your career up to now. Burn that damnable "ladder" and ask yourself: What have I accomplished that I can unabashedly brag about? If you're going to be a brand, you've got to become relentlessly focused on what you do that adds value, that you're proud of, and most important, that you can shamelessly take credit for.

When you've done that, sit down and ask yourself one more question to define your brand: What do I want to be famous for? That's right -- famous for!

Peters concluded by noting four key skills essential to the success of Brand You:

No matter what you're doing today, there are four things you've got to measure yourself against. First, you've got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you've got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you've got to be a broad-gauged visionary -- a leader, a teacher, a farsighted "imagineer." Fourth, you've got to be a businessperson -- you've got to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.

Chris Anderson recently built on Peters' last question--"What do you want to be famous for?"--and added a fifth key skill:

The key talent of the 21st century is self-promotion and creating celebrity...[and] the goal is to create celebrity, or reputation...and convert that into something that pays the rent.

One of the most skilled practitioners of this process is famous-for-being-famous Paris Hilton, cited by Anderson as "the perfect 21st century business model."  He wasn't holding her up as a role model--he was simply noting her success at defining a personal brand through self-promotion and using that reputation to pay the rent, so to speak.

And obviously I'm trading on that reputation here by assuming that Ms. Hilton's presence alongside Messrs. Peters and Anderson above will capture some additional attention.  I'm not suggesting that Hilton's a role model, either, but she's a logical (if regrettable) result of the dynamics that Peters and Anderson describe so well.

So what are you doing to take advantage of those same dynamics?  The technical and social transformations of the recent past have given all of us the ability to independently present our ideas, our talents, our passions to the world at large (or at least to that segment of the world that matters to us.)  We're now our own brand managers in a very tactical, tangible way.

Peters challenged us to identify the essential qualities that define our brand, and exhorted us to adopt four specific skills to enhance that brand.  Anderson is challenging us to use the new media environment at our disposal to build our brand equity.  He's saying that it's not enough to have all these terrific qualities described by Peters if no one knows about them--and it's never been easier to get that message out.

That's not always a good thing, of course--cf. Hilton's success.  And Anderson is quick to admit that the business of converting celebrity into something that pays the rent "can be just as dirty as it sounds."  We can interpret Hilton's prominence as a dismaying indicator of the rise of bad taste and the coarsening of popular culture.  But we should also view her as the product of a system that every one of us can take advantage of in one way or another.

No traditional cultural gatekeepers saw Hilton as an untapped talent waiting to be promoted.  She followed Anderson's formula to the letter--she promoted herself, created a celebrity identity, and converted that reputation into an ability to pay the rent.  Is the world a better place as a result?  No, but I don't blame Hilton for that.  She saw a market need and filled it.

No matter what we think of the "acting," "singing" and public misbehavior that made Hilton famous, she's worthy of attention as a "perfect 21st century business model" and as an example of the power of a personal brand.  I'm not suggesting that we should follow her lead in any specific way, but if she can take advantage of these dynamics to create and maintain a business based solely on that brand, they're clearly accessible to all of us in our own communities and markets, using our own talents and abilities.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Carl's Jr. commercial to make.

Photo of Tom Peters uncredited, photo of Chris Anderson by Joi, photo of Paris Hilton by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

Visual Images and Effective Communication

I've always found that well-designed images enhance effective communication, and current research in neuroscience is helping us to understand why.  Information designer Tom Wujec spoke at TED in February on the relationship between visual images and meaning:

What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations that create meaning?

Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead creates a series of mental models through a collection of "a-ha" moments or moments of discovery through various processing...

The act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning...

We make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation...

Wujec proposes three basic guidelines for anyone seeking to communicate more effectively:

1) Use images to clarify what we're trying to communicate.

2) Make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully.

3) Augment memory by creating a visual persistence.

Although my reliance on static images falls short on the interactive front, these concepts certainly underlie my recent posts on a framework for professional and personal development, the importance of time horizons, and the nature of influence.

And these same concepts explain why I'm continually drawn to the efforts of designers like Dustin Curtis and writers like Virginia Postrel, who highlight the utility of good design while also doing work that just looks great.  There's also a connection with the work of Howard Gardner on influence--he notes that "A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other," and with a particular emphasis on alternative visual forms of representation.

Finally, for some even more vivid examples of how effective communication can depend on visualization, see Nathan Yau's Flowing Data or the many projects undertaken by the breathtakingly creative people at Stamen.

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for the reference to Tom Wujec, and thanks to David Zinger for the reference to Nathan Yau.  If the meaning of the photo above from Spinal Tap is unclear, this clip might help.  (Warning: Profanity, power chords, mullets.)

Operator's Manual

A few weeks ago I posted six Self-Coaching Guides, compilations of edited posts on the topics of Communication, Leadership, Motivation, Change, Learning and Happiness.  Those six topics--listed here in the order they were written--emerged from a review of my work on this site over the past 5 years.  As I sifted through more than 600 posts, I found that the ones with lasting relevance to my work as a coach sorted themselves into these topics.

I've continued to reflect on these topics and feel that they cover the full range of issues that come up with my coaching clients and students while also providing a useful overview of my perspective on effectiveness and fulfillment.

Three topics--Communication, Leadership and Change--address our effectiveness relative to our external environment:

• How do we communicate with others?  How can we express ourselves more effectively?
• How do we lead and manage?  How can we direct subordinates, influence peers and "manage up" more effectively?
• How do we deal with change?  How do we make change happen?  How can we adapt to--and create--dynamic circumstances more effectively?

The remaining three topics--Happiness, Motivation and Learning--address our sense of fulfillment relative to our internal world:

• What makes us happy?  Are we both professionally and personally fulfilled?
• What motivates us to achieve our fullest potential?  Are those drives contributing to our fulfillment?  And how do we respond when we feel demotivated?
• How do we learn?  How do we maximize our fulfillment as learners to insure that our skills keep pace with our challenges?

Rolling this all up into the graphic above creates an Operator's Manual for professional and personal development.  We need to look out and assess our effectiveness as communicators, as leaders and as change agents, and we need to look in and determine whether we're truly happy, truly motivated, truly learning--in short, whether we're fulfilled.

There's something meaningful here for me, and I'm considering making this framework the foundation for some ongoing work.  If you have any input, I'd love to hear it.

Time Horizons

When we assess our lives--our fulfillment, our effectiveness, what's working, what's not working--how far ahead do we look?  How far ahead should we look?  Is that time horizon a good fit for the issues under consideration?  And what issues are most relevant to us in a given time horizon?

The 10 time horizons above are the ones that I find most useful.  They're each sufficiently distinct to provide a different perspective and raise a new set of issues, but they flow continuously from this immediate moment to my very last breath.  That's not to say that I have a clear plan for each horizon--hardly.  (I'm a searcher, not a planner.)

But when looking ahead it's helpful to realize that I've moved from one horizon into the next.  It prompts me to ask: Am I in the right timeframe?  Should I take a step back--or jump even further ahead?  Should my approach change?  Am I still asking the right questions?  Are the same issues in play?

I chose these specific horizons deliberately: Once I look beyond "Today" my next natural horizon is "This Week," and once I look past Friday the next signpost is a month-and-a-half out.  And the "18 Month" horizon fits with Peter Drucker's belief that clear and specific plans can't cover any more time than that.  You might choose a different set of horizons--perhaps "This Month" makes more sense to you than "6 Weeks."  Or perhaps 10 horizons is too many, and it's more useful to think in broader strokes.  For example:

The precise number and scope of the horizons is up to you--choose the ones that best meet your needs.  But my larger point is that sometimes we're looking too far ahead when focusing closer in would be more useful, and sometimes we're staring down at our shoes when we really should lift our gaze.

(Here's a 2-slide PowerPoint version [111 KB] of this post.)

Chris Anderson on "Free" at Global Business Network

I heard Chris Anderson speak tonight at the offices of the Global Business Network in San Francisco. He's promoting Free: The Future of a Radical Price and is tight with GBN co-founder and Chairman Peter Schwartz, who introduced Anderson and led the Q&A session, so this was presumably a friendly stopover on his media tour.

Anderson opened with the story of how Jell-O was launched in the early 20th century: they went door-to-door and gave away richly illustrated Jell-O cookbooks, creating demand for the new product among consumers, who then flocked to grocery stores seeking it.  (It's similar to the story of King Gillette subsidizing the cost of razors to sell blades, which Anderson used to open his original Wired article on the topic in early 2008.)

Anderson discussed the work of 19th century French economist Joseph Bertrand, who argued that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.  (A brief exploration of the Bertrand competition model suggests that Anderson is oversimplifying to make a point, but let's not quibble.)

In Anderson's words, "The Internet is the first truly competitive market the world has ever seen," and in this environment we experience "the law of gravity online: If marginal cost is zero, and competition is unlimited, price will fall to zero."  Anderson's quick to note that he's not saying the price should be zero or things should be free; he's merely observing the dynamics at work in the market for any products or services that can be converted to bits.

He also noted that it's not simply "free" vs. "paid" products and services, but rather free versions supported by advertising and "freemium" versions in which consumers and users pay to get something extra.  What will people pay for?  In Anderson's words...

• People will pay to save time.
• People will pay to lower risk.
• People will pay for things they love.
• People will pay for status.
• People will pay if you make them (once they're hooked.)

The key opportunity created by offering your products and services for free is that "free allows you to fully explore your customer space... How do we use free to increase our audience [for Wired] and convert some of them to a higher price?"  He noted that you can read Wired for free online, you can purchase single copies at newsstands for one price, and you can purchase a print subscription for yet another price.  But why be limited to just three prices?  "We need more prices... What is the $100 version of Wired?"  Referring to the recent uproar over the Washington Post's plans to host a "salon" for health care lobbyists at $25,000 a head, Anderson noted, "That wasn't the right answer, but it's a really interesting question: What is the $25,000 version of the Washington Post?"

Appropriately, Anderson is offering "Free" at a range of prices: The hardcover book was $26.99 tonight (and it's $16.19 on Amazon as I write this.)  Almost all digital versions of the book are free, but most come a with a variety of limits on how long you can access the materials.  The unabridged version (6 hours) is free, but the abridged version (3 hours) is $9.99.  (Now you know how Hyperion prices 3 hours of your time.)

And Anderson strongly believes in the future of books.  Printed materials will survive to the extent that they add value to the online version of the same content.  Anderson expects books, which are convenient for long-form content and "look nice on a shelf," to make it.  He expects newspapers to die (or at least to be radically reinvented.)  And magazines?  They'll eventually be replaced by Apple's version of the Kindle, but the rich graphic experience they offer will keep many of them safe for now.

Anderson was asked about Malcolm Gladwell's dismissive review of "Free" in The New Yorker, in particular Gladwell's skewering of YouTube as a paragon of this new economic model.  From Gladwell's review:

To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube's ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the "abundance thinking" that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

Anderson's not-quite-compelling response was that Gladwell underestimates the power of Google's economies of scale, his figures are off by a factor of 10, and "advertising always lags the audience" (i.e. they'll figure it out eventually.)  To Anderson's credit, he deftly acknowledged and defused the issue of his apparently inadvertant plagiarism from Wikipedia in "Free" by telling his questioner, who had apologized for asking such a tough question, that there were much tougher questions he could have asked, which prompted a chuckle from the audience.  A colleague said the Anderson-Gladwell dustup was "the nerd version of Biggie vs. Tupac."  Outstanding.  (I'll let him remain anonymous, unless he asks for attribution.)

I was reminded of my "attention economy" experience with AttentionTrust and others by Anderson's comment that the 'net and its attendant armies of bloggers, videographers and garage bands has yielded an overabundance of content, and today our attention is the truly scarce commodity.  And just as many attention-focused projects touched on the related issues of reputation and identity, Anderson sees links there as well.  He believes that "Facebook and Twitter are establishing the first quantifiable reputation markets," although I'd argue that groups like Rapleaf, Opinity and Trufina tried to do just that a few years ago, leveraging data from credit reports to eBay seller status.

Finally, one of Anderson's most interesting comments tonight was his assertion that "the key talent of the 21st century is self-promotion and creating celebrity...[and] the goal is to create celebrity, or reputation...and convert that into something that pays the rent." (On a cautionary note, he added, "And that business can be just as dirty as it sounds.")

Although one example of this is Paris Hilton and the "fame-for-being-famous" that she embodies, the openness of the Internet means that today anyone can at least get their ideas into the marketplace.  That's no guarantee of success, of course--you'll still need some luck, even with good ideas and a talent for self-promotion.  But as Anderson notes, we're now able to tap into "the long tail of talent... The Internet has lowered the transaction costs of finding talent...[and] talent will find a way."

This fascinates me as an executive coach, both on my own behalf and on behalf of my clients and students at Stanford Business School, because what Anderson is saying is that the rules are changing.  We used to rely solely on personal networks and resume credentials to locate and identify talent (and to be located and identified by others as talent.)  But in a more open marketplace of ideas, those filters are less and less useful as they screen out more "false negatives" (i.e. talented people unknown to us who lack traditional credentials) and allow through more "false positives" (i.e. people within our networks who possess traditional credentials but who aren't really all that talented.)

From a personal perspective, my writing on this site on coaching, leadership, change and related issues over the past few years has given me a reputation as someone with something of interest to say on these topics--a reputation that can be quantified in data such as my feed subscribers (932 today), my site visitors (192 so far today), even my Twitter followers (302 at the moment, enjoying all 105 of my tweets to date.)  These aren't big numbers in any absolute sense, but they're big enough (particularly given how infrequently I post) to give me a sense that what I'm saying is being heard, a sense of presence.

Calling this reputation "celebrity" would be a serious stretch, but that's a matter of degree.  And if you're interested in a topic such as "double-loop learning" or "ground rules for meetings" or the "definition of organizational effectiveness," you'll find me in Google's top 10 results for those terms (at least as of today), and that's certainly celebrity in a strange, narrow way.  (Hell, if you're just interested in "ed batista" I'm #1!)

What's the connection with "Free"?  Well, even though I don't post that often, the hours invested in my writing here over the past few years would add up to a substantial amount of unpaid time.  And I publish everything here under a Creative Commons license that gives anyone the right to share and remix my materials as long as they attribute it to me with a link and make any resulting work freely available under the same license.

So free work and free content have been the essential elements in developing a verifiable reputation and an identity as a trusted subject matter expert in my field, and I don't know how I could have done it any other way.  And seeing my own experience in this new light makes me wonder if I should be encouraging my clients and students to do more of the same.

Thanks to Chris Anderson for a thought-provoking and entertaining talk, and many thanks to Andrew Blau, Nancy Murphy and their colleagues at GBN for being such gracious hosts.

A Little Perspective

My day was going badly.  I'll spare you the details, but it involved traffic jams and missed phone calls and rescheduled meetings.  I wasn't blaming anyone but myself (and the unknown forces behind all that traffic), but I was feeling increasingly annoyed with the world, and I still had another 40 minutes to go in the car.  I could just tell that things were only going to get worse from here.

And then, in a moment of inspiration, I had a little dialogue with myself:

Do I need to continue down this path?  Do I need to push on?

No.

Could I turn around and go home?

Yes.

OK, then.  New plan for the day.

I was on 280 in San Bruno, and I took the next exit to turn around and return to San Francisco.  As I pulled off I saw signs for Golden Gate National Cemetery, a huge facility that I've driven past more than a thousand times but have never visited--until today.

I took a short detour, passed through the gates and drove slowly up to the summit of a huge mound at the center of the cemetery.  The view today was almost identical to the photo above (thank you, Pargon), although the Memorial Day flags were gone.

Looking out over the graves of 139,000 veterans was sobering, and it put my "bad day" in perspective pretty damn fast.  It was blustery and sunny, weather that makes me feel very much alive.  Being surrounded by the memories of so many people who had sacrificed their lives while I could stand there and enjoy the sun and the wind helped me see just how meaningless and insubstantial my problems were and how much I have to be grateful for.

So the first lesson I learned today was how easy it can be to simply stop and reverse course when things are not going well.  Sometimes persistence is called for, and sometimes it's merely a failure to consider all your options.

And the second lesson was that even when things seem not to be going well, they really are.  Really, they are.

Photo by Pargon.

A Week in Point Reyes

Every year Amy and I try to get up to Point Reyes, and at the end of June we spent a week at a cottage up on the ridge in Inverness.  We'd hike all day, pick up some amazing local produce (like Marin Sun Farms steaks), grill dinner on our back porch, and collapse, exhausted.  And then do it all over again the following day.

One of our favorite hikes up there is the Tomales Point Trail.  This stand of cypress is all that remains of the Lower Pierce Point Ranch, about 2/3 of the way from the trailhead to Tomales Bluff.  I always wonder what it was like to live here 120 years ago:

We made it all the way to the end (9.4 miles out and back), and it was so satisfying to rest on the hillside, eat a simple lunch of Molinari salami, bread and water, and watch the loons and pelicans and an occasional seal.  (Or sea lion--I never really know.) The yellow lupine that looks so charming in the background was out of control this year.  Chest-high and occasionally over our heads and sprawling across the last mile of the trail.

Later in the week we went out to Tomales Point again to hike down to McClure's Beach:

A great discovery this trip was the Estero Trail to Drake's Head (coincidentally, also 9.4 miles out and back.)  We saw 4 people in a full day of hiking, and 2 of them were in the last 1/4 mile.  (In addition to the cows scattered across this section of the park, we saw 2 coyotes, 2 mother deer with their fawns, scores of bat rays swimming in Drakes Estero, and a red dragonfly.)  From the top of Drake's Head, 150 feet above the Limantour Estero:

Another new destination was Marshall Beach.  You have to drive 2.5 miles of gravel road to reach the trailhead, and from there it's only a 1.5 mile hike down to the beach, but here's the view of Tomales Bay (the beach is nestled in among the pines at right):

As I learned last year, the four best happiness strategies for me are Increasing Flow Experiences, Taking Care of My Body, Practicing Acts of Kindness, and Expressing Gratitude.  Although hiking isn't always challenging enough to be a flow experience, there were certainly stretches on the longer days where I felt a sense of meditative peace.  It was a gloriously physical week, from the daily exertion to the deeply satisfying food.  And although we were kind only to ourselves, I am profoundly grateful for the experience.  (Thank you, Phil Burton.)