Category: Wireless Resorters

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S2 E112 — Betting on the Progress of 5 Innovation Teams

But, more importantly to showcase the progress of 5 Innovation Teams paving the way to their reinvented future.  I intended to create a constructive “fish bowl” quality.  The reinvention experiment was in the center.  Those on the conversational sidelines could contribute ideas and insights teams would find valuable.

“5”  Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “You can afford to be honest and direct. Some cannot do this without the requisite amount of charm. Some have too much baggage to do it without causing harm with the impact. Not you. You’re light today. Just say what you mean.” Leo

Hi and welcome to Friday’s Episode 112 in Season 2 of  “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 11th day of September in the fall of 2020.  

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E111 — Against All Odds 530 is Alive!; S2 E110 — Keys for Reinventing a FUD-Soaked Enterprise; S2 E109 — Rebuilding Trust Doesn’t Happen Overnight

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E112 —  When Was the Last Time You Wrangled Your Past?; S1 E111 — Is There Half-life of Wisdom?; S1 E110 — Love, Longing, Belonging, Connection and Loss; S1 E109 — Do All Introverts Take the Long Acetylcholine Pathway?

Context

This is a continuation of a “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In previous episodes we described Start Up, Emerging Growth, Rapid Growth, Sustained Growth, Maturity, Decline and now Reinvention stages.

Reinvention without Decline

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

We described mini-cases about major declines.  Now turn from our 4-part Reinvention mini-case operating from within a technology company,  Part One,  Part Two and Part Three to a different industry with similar needs, but from a consulting assignment. We profiled Part One , Two  and Three in the most recent episodes.

Reinvention

27. Knowledge Management — Brand Company — 

A Strategy and Brand Consultancy. 

Part Four

Orchestrating delayed components in our internal campaign led to some nail biting moments.  530’s launch appealed to early adopters. We couldn’t stop with them.  Our goal included building upon their conversations by enticing more employees to hop on board. 

But, more importantly to showcase the progress of 5 Innovation Teams paving the way to their reinvented future.  I intended to create a constructive “fish bowl” quality.  The reinvention experiment was in the center. 

Those on the conversational sidelines could contribute ideas and insights teams would find valuable. 

Website Copy:

So as you can tell, you don’t have to be a lunatic to dip into the 530 conversation pool. We are these living organisms within this company. We all have stories of discovery and insight that can inspire others. These stories need to be told.  Jump in and tell us yours! 

Early Adopters:

What a Golden Opportunity for a Gal !!

“(After poking my finger around in the seed packet and then smelling them and shaking them and then comparing my seeds to others’ seeds) I put the packet of Seeds on my Computer desk at Home, next to a book called the Tao of Pooh, and another book — Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, an old brownie movie camera and some candles.  and one night, i crossed out complexia and wrote Simplifica. what DID everyone else do?” (Link to Talk Back Forum)

Innovation Moderator:

THE VOICES OF 530

INNOVATION:  Lead the Revolution

“… For the first time in history our heritage is no longer our destiny.  Our dreams are no longer fantasies, but possibilities.  There isn’t a human being who has ever lived who wouldn’t want to be alive right now, at this moment so pregnant with promise.  Among all your forebears, among the countless generations who had no hope of progress, among all those whose spirits were betrayed by progress, you are the one who now stands on the threshold of a new age — the age of revolution.  You are blessed beyond belief.  Don’t falter.  Don’t hesitate. You were given this opportunity for a reason.  Find it.  Lead the revolution.”  — Gary Hamel in “Leading the Revolution”

Past Question: If you were given unlimited resources to create a company that would put PRERS out of business in two years, what would you do?

Early Adopters:

I’d Organize a Skunk Works, a Think Tank “If I were going to create a business to put us out of business, I would do the following. I would give customers what they want–and more. I would do it quickly. I would get rid of voice mail. I would ensure our business model guarantees that someone or some technology will be available–with an answer to virtually any question–24 hours a day, every day, and in multiple languages. I would build a system that allows customers to get information in a variety of ways–not just the traditional ways as we know them. I would ensure that every aspect of a move–whether a corporate sponsored move or a “retail” move, was designed to make the whole event easy and simple. I would ensure we had a customer contact system that not only gives us what we want when we need it, but contained information our customers need as well. I would create exit barriers so significant that it would be painful for a company to leave. I would create such value add that customers were compelled to tell their friends and family about our services that are second to none. We would create a web of alliances that addressed every need a family might have during a move, and that actually predicts what they might need. I would start by asking what customers expect, and then back into and build a new service model. 

May be crazy and far fetched, but it can be done. 

Innovation Moderator:

Current Question: What’s IMPOSSIBLE to do in our rapidly evolving industry — something so unthinkably revolutionary — that if it could be done (by someone – why not you?) the impact would FUNDAMENTALLY change the business rules?

Call it a strategic inflection point, a disruptive business model — whatever you want — what’s the innovation that will reset every competitive advantage back to zero?  (Link to “LUNATIC FRINGE)

Early Adopters:

“I’m looking forward to everyone getting ‘online’ and participating in some dynamic discussions …”

“Yes, we certainly have a lot to be thankful for living in this day and age. And thanks to 530, we’ll always be connected just like all the families living on the ‘Rock'”

Website Copy:

THE VOICES OF 530

NEWS AND VIEWS  FROM THE FIELD

Early Adopters:

Stay Connected, Exchange Ideas

“For those of us in the field, this site will provide us a communication tool for idea exchanging, especially with those groups with whom we do not have much interaction. Hopefully, by reading how others meet client challenges, it will spur ideas and solutions for others.”

Learn, Share, Grow, Have Fun Together

“I believe it was Dale Carnegie that said “There’s nothing more effective and rewarding than showing a genuine interest in other people”. With that said, it’s refreshing to know: 

        1. We work with people that may be sensitive to our wants and needs, 
        2. Someone was creative enough to put this forum together, 
        3. That we can learn, share, grow and have fun together. I’m looking forward to everyone getting ‘on-line’ and participating in some dynamic discussions. This will be especially appreciated by those of us in the “field”…Thanks everyone”

Innovation Moderator:

Sticky Problems, Stories, and Window Shopping

It’s an enabler for conversations in cyberspace, where the conversation might be impossible if time or space-bounded. Here’s my challenge to you — share one of your stories. Or ask for help on one of your sticky problems. 

Don’t just window shop at 530. Leave your footprints.” (Link to TALK BACK)

Website Copy:

Added Topics

THE VOICES OF 530

LUNACY

    • New Rules for the New Economy
    • First to Market
    • Setting the Trend Ourselves
    • Two Scenarios:  Predicting the Moves of Competitors
    • 3rd Scenario:  Industry Evolving into a Very Different Space
    • Fertilize Your Thinking

Innovation Moderator:

New Rules for the New Economy

Kevin Kelly writing in New Rules for the New Economy states, “The new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible things–ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks.” 

Early Adopters:

First to Market

In so far as alliances go, we are late to the party. The best ones have been and will most likely continue to be acquired by Cendant. The new players aren’t willing to hurdle the formidable barriers to our access. You needn’t strain your brain trying to find a way to put us out of business. Let us die a natural death. Instead apply all that creative energy to the forced evolution of the next business model.

          • What are customers willing to pay for? 
          • Can we provide this product/service given what we know about the industry(s)? How much will they pay? 
          • Or, should we be prepared to seek compensation from a secondary source, i.e., free product/service to the customer. 
          • Can enough value be added to develop a product/service? 
          • What is our delivery platform? 
          • What are our costs of bringing this product/service to market? 
          • Which space will we occupy? 
          • Can we see a vertical market opportunity? How do we balance the equation of human capital vs. technological intelligence? 
          • Can we be the FIRST to market?

Early Adopters:

Setting the Trend Ourselves

Should we not be the ones to set the trend instead of trying to predict what trend someone else is going to be setting?? 

Was this not the purpose of the move to Phoenix?? 

To stay one step ahead!! 

The one thing that I do believe people often ask is “why fix what is not broken”. 

I believe in making what is not broken even better.

Early Adopters:

Two Scenarios:  Predicting the Moves of Competitors

“Our present conservative business model is too linked to the past to be differentiated and sustainable in the near future. The bricks in the tower come tumbling down every day. Let’s not be one of those who get konked on the head whilst we ponder why the old tower keeps coming apart.”

Early Adopters:

“Internal and external customers PAY FOR or USE products/services that: …allow them go home a few minutes/hours earlier each night. …make them look like heros to their management.  …flawlessly achieve what was promised after the sales hype. …have a direct bearing on their careers, profitability and peace of mind. If demand is high, supply is low and quality is assured — profits follow. The most valuable commodity I know of is Information. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Early Adopters:

“I respect the perspective with which you challenge my strategy. You are right. Somebody must “set the trend”. However, I suspect that trends result from both initiatives. The creative and bold process as well as the observation, analysis and action. Think about a game of chess. Our major competitor’s advantages to be derived from really thinking like your competitor thinks when your competitor is unable to do the same. 

 Do you suspect that our competitors regret not having predicted our initiatives in Phoenix? 

If so can you predict what they are likely to do about it?

Early Adopters:

“I know our major competitor has recently sold some small, non-core businesses in order to raise cash, and just announced an almost billion dollar purchase of the remaining shares in Number 2, but without the currency of stock to throw around, I think their ability to engage …

Early Adopters:

THE VOICES OF 530

Any Benefits from an Integrated PRERS? 

I would like to use 530 to get the audience’s thoughts on the following…. 

In your mind, what does it mean to be the only integrated real estate and relocation company in the industry? 

What are the benefits? 

Here’s a few ideas to get you started…  Please keep adding to the list… 

Because we’re integrated… 

* we’re stronger 

* we’re collaborative 

* we have a greater control over the transaction when working with PREA affiliates 

* transferees can expect consistent, high-quality services throughout the PREA network 

* relo can work with affiliates to win new business 

* relocation clients generate qualified leads for our affiliates

Your thoughts and feedback are truly appreciated. (Link to TALKBACK FORUM)

Website Copy:

THE VOICES OF 530

The Greenhouse Lab Getting Ideas off the White Board to Put them to the Test “The speed at which a company gets the wheel of innovation turning determines… (Link to GREENHOUSE)

Innovation Moderator:

The speed at which a company gets the wheel of innovation turning determines the amount of new wealth it creates.  Lunatics imagine new possibilities.  They design business concepts around those ideas.  Then, they launch small-scale experiments to test viability.  What works and what doesn’t.  With an experiment or two under their belts, they assess what they’ve learned.  Then it’s a decision to scale up and roll out, or to run through another experiment cycle.

Innovation Teams:

“Nobody enjoys the middle parts of any project,” says Tom, Relationship Management Team Member. “Most people like the beginnings because they’re excited about the vision for the new future.  And most people love the endings because that’s when they see the project’s end results come to life.”

Innovation Moderator:

Innovation seems straight forward when sketched out on a white board.  But putting it into practice –- that’s the rub.

Innovation Teams:

Speaking for all five innovation teams, Paton continues, “It’s always hardest during the middle of any project when the hard work needs to get done, when momentum starts to slag, when uncertainties or unknowns begin to be felt and where some of the toughest hurdles are typically encountered.”

Innovation Moderator:

But, despite working together over great geographic distances, while balancing the additional project work with their existing PRERS jobs, and experiencing turnover within the Team due to career changes and re-structuring, the Relationship Management Team’s key recommendations are now in gear for the next phase of on-going research.  

Innovation Moderator:

Relationship Management

Fred, Sr. AE for Oxy & Steve T, VP of the account, took innovation to heart when they invented a new business model to recapture a competitive advantage. 

Innovation Teams:

Craig, Relationship Management Team Leader says, “In our fiercely competitive market the perception about us was our DS business product was inferior.”  While still in the early pilot stage, the new model requires collaboration with several offices – Houston, Dallas, and 2 in LA/ Orange County — and  a variety of PREA experts to more effectively compete in the Destination Services marketplace.  They’ll be testing its viability before rolling it out universally.

Innovation Moderator:

Alliance Management

… Original team member,  heads up the RewardsPlus alliance project – one of three significant new alliance initiatives, requiring close collaboration and shared leadership among functional units and teams across migration paths, according Scott, the Alliance Management Team Leader. 

Innovation Teams:

During initial meetings with RewardsPlus, a company involved in providing an integrated benefits platform for the worksite market, it became clear that there is an opportunity to generate more leads for our affiliate network, and to add leverage to our efforts to build an alliance management competency.  

Evidence

“3”  Steve Zahn, 51: “The thing about peace is that it can’t be peace all the time or it wouldn’t be peace. Peace, like all things, needs a contrast. Is this any comfort — knowing that times of disharmony help you spot peace when it comes?” Scorpio

Can I apply this TauBit of Wisdom to then, but not now?  No?  OK.  So, it’s a “3” for today and a “5” for then.  Only peace wasn’t the contrast at PRERS.  A better term would be status quo trending towards high anxiety.  But, early adopters slowly built out 530 with their contributions.  

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“4”  Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “You may feel sympathetic to someone’s plight but try not to indulge the emotion of pity. When you see strength in people, you help them to see the strong parts of themselves.”   Aries

One or more early adopters felt they had a forum to air their grievances.  Without naming names, I used back channels to coach their leaders through a public and private give and take.  If nothing occurred in public, all the time we spent building trust together would be wasted.

“4”  Steve Smith, 30: “Small gestures often mean more than anyone realizes at the time. There are exchanges that occurred over a decade ago that you still think about today. Your mind is a beautiful mystery.” Gemini

How can’t this be true.  And, isn’t this draft of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” proof?

“5”  Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “You can afford to be honest and direct. Some cannot do this without the requisite amount of charm. Some have too much baggage to do it without causing harm with the impact. Not you. You’re light today. Just say what you mean.” Leo

As the designated innovation moderator, if I wasn’t both direct and nurturing in my roll, how could any of the 530 community take a risk during our reinvention commitments?

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll 

    • @KnowLabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4990 to 5060.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

    • Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trip

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S2 E109 — Rebuilding Trust Doesn’t Happen Overnight

Tomorrow they drop a bomb on the organization — the closing of 6 regional offices and the recombination of the key personnel into one location in Phoenix (over a two year period). They spent a lot of energy on crafting the announcement, but none on what they would do as follow-on actions to manage the shock.

“5”  Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “Sometimes, it’s as though you can read minds and tell the future. But right now, it’s better just to ask people what they are thinking and to respect the future as a question mark.” Leo

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s Episode 109 in Season 2 of  “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 5th day of September in the fall of 2020.  

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E108 — Why Our Reinvention Efforts Failed (and Yours Will Too); S2 E107 — Leaving Us Adrift in a Sea of Change;  S2 E106 — How We Brainwashed Curmudgeons

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E109 — Do All Introverts Take the Long Acetylcholine Pathway?; S1 E108 — After So Many Defeats is it Time to Catch a New Trajectory?; S1 E107 — How Do You Rate Your Sense of Curiosity?; S1 E106 — Attempts to Upset 9 of My Life Stages Apple Cart

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In previous episodes we described Start Up, Emerging Growth, Rapid Growth, Sustained Growth, Maturity, Decline and now Reinvention stages.  

Reinvention without Decline

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

We described a mini-case of a major decline,  Part One, Part Two and Part Three. And, before that we profiled two mini case studies about what it was like working behind the scenes at a mature company in a financial, in a consumer industry and two more in another century-old university system — Part One and Two. 

Now turn from our 3-part Reinvention mini-case operating from within a technology company,  Part One,  Part Two and Part Three to a different industry with similar needs, but from a consulting assignment.

Reinvention

27. Knowledge Management — Brand Company — 

A Strategy and Brand Consultancy. 

Part One

At Think!City a boutique consulting firm we crashed our models together — learning and development, knowledge creation, media production, internet communities, strategy, advertising and marketing. 

We worked together in a highly creative environment within a corrugated metal building designed by a local architecture firm in Laguna Beach, on a curve in Laguna Canyon Road. 

I fell headlong into sharing new knowledge that springs out of new innovations.

We pioneered a way of capturing the essence of a brand on digital video, searched through audio tracks for the touch points and reused portions of the interviews for orienting new coders hired at accelerated rates. 

From our studio we continued internal and external branding with clients ranging from startups to Fortune 100.

This is about our work with a Fortune 100 Mature Real Estate and Relocation Services, similar to the financial case already described.

After conducting knowledge labs for two disruptively innovative fast companies, the opportunity presented itself to apply what we learned to a mature, bureaucratic company responding to the internet threat.

Their greatest challenge was to convince survivors and potential survivors to stick around as the East Coast headquarters called the restructuring shots.  Their situational challenges mirrored those of the Engineering and Construction company in decline — history of miscommunications, changes in top management, merger of two different operating units, a move to Phoenix and the closing of regional offices. 

I received an update from Gasper about our potential engagement. 

Steve,  I was unable to connect with Bob in New York (about our Start Up consulting project there). He was shuttling around two candidates who were being interviewed: a potential VP of Product Marketing and the new VP of Marketing. I will connect with him tomorrow.  Meanwhile, I have a meeting with Steve of Prudential at noon tomorrow to further explore the relationship — get enough information to propose something. 

He has gaps in his organizational development plans. He is running an “agenda for change” and wonders why it is scaring the shit out of everyone. Tomorrow they drop a bomb on the organization — the closing of 6 regional offices and the recombination of the key personnel into one location in Phoenix (over at two year period)

They spent a lot of energy on crafting the announcement, but none on what they would do as follow-on actions to manage the shock. 

Gasper

From the outside it was obvious that in the real world, in their industry, no one was framing their actions by asking:

How would a great company handle this major transition, so in before, during, and after the move it is easy to attract, retain, and develop key talent?  

    • Requires talent transition team of key influencers from day one with this charter, and an open invitation for employees at large to contact, question rigorously, and contribute ideas.  
    • Self-selection out and in.  
    • Manage unintended consequences.

PRERS divisions never really formed a common identity – their cultures so different.  One culture lost their beloved leader as a result of the restructuring.  

The surviving CEO attempted to reengineer a solution, but it never took.  He had a vision of what a wired future would look like and attempted to lay the foundation for closing the gap between their current dysfunctional culture and the desired state by launching an agenda for change. 

However, without any real leadership, 5 teams set out to identify core competencies and to make recommendations about how to close the gaps.  

    • All five teams eventually reported their findings, but nothing substantial happened as a result.  
    • Except, the top 2 executives left the company.  
    • The chairman and vice chairman inherited the baggage. 

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt

It began with what was supposed to be a 2 year advance announcement to give everyone affected plenty of time to consider their options — move, retire or stay and look for another job in Orange County.

That was the intended message. 

    • But we found out “the suits” got a hold of it (lawyers) on the East Coast, and rewrote the bulk of the announcement to protect the corporation from any liability. 
    • What was communicated was loaded with buzzwords and phrases like consolidation, without any details.  So the only real message received triggered negative implications. And watercolor estimates about when will the other shoe drop?  
    • After several of their false starts, we proposed a campaign of communications releases in a variety of formats to help reshape the culture, to support the transition to a new desired state, and to support thinking and acting more innovatively. 

We Started Immediately 

Crazy creative Dave with his digital video gear and I drove to San Diego to meet with volunteers from the other division who were attending their regional meeting — which included, by the way, an afternoon check in session in which employees could talk about any and all issues they’re challenged with by working remotely.

Since one half of the organization had already successfully navigated the transformation from working out of an office to working out of a home office, cut off from former social ties, we interviewed a dozen “experts” who had been there and done that.  

And they were eager to advise those about to confront what they had to years earlier:

    • One woman remembered how she felt others working in the office would assume she was loafing at home.  So she put in longer and longer hours in her home office at her computer, until she burned herself out.  No one felt she was slacking off.
    • One analyst told us that he wanted to make the FedEx guy his new best friend.  Everyday he’d deliver packages and pick up packages for work, but declined a cup of coffee and a danish each time.
    • One vice president told us on camera how he was in shock when word came out that he wouldn’t have a luxurious office with all the other senior executives.  “I mean here I pushed and pushed and climbed up each rung of the ladder, and then what?  They want me to work at my new townhome’s kitchen table?”
    • Others told us how they had to mimic their office routines.  In the morning after coffee and a light breakfast, for example, some would walk, or jog, or work out at the gym before returning home.  Then they’d shower, change clothes, and commute from their second floor to their first floor office and close the door.
    • Mothers told us they established the same routine basically, but still had to monitor what was going on with their kids in another room, even when grandma helped babysit.
    • Some said they carried the office routine to extremes by locking their office door in the evening.  As a reminder to them, that work was over and even if the computer pinged or the office phone rang they weren’t falling for it.  That took extreme effort to avoid the temptation to return.  But, they learned how to manage customers and bosses about their hours.

Those digital video interviews spawned two newsletters full of tips and tricks, video tapes for review in meetings of those eventually moving to Phoenix, and set in motion a series of on-camera appearances by the chairman and vice-chairman which helped them formulate their new leadership messages.  

We (they) had a long way to go, building trust doesn’t happen overnight. 

Evidence

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“3”  Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Today, you’ll learn how badly you want something. Either you won’t get it and you’ll use that loss as a gauge, or you will get it, and your subsequent satisfaction will teach all.”  Taurus

One can only hope, right?

“5” Steve Howey, 42: “Bad moods are caused not by what happens, but by two culprits: negative thoughts and distorted thoughts. Everything that occurs is an opportunity to practice your interpretive skills.”Cancer

Not necessarily for today, but Part One, boiled down to countering how poorly the East Coast description of what was about to occur over the next 24 months triggered.

“5”  Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “Sometimes, it’s as though you can read minds and tell the future. But right now, it’s better just to ask people what they are thinking and to respect the future as a question mark.” Leo

Not necessarily for today, but when Crazy creative Dave and videoed the San Diego survivors of forced remote work we learned more tips and tricks and advice than what we could have created to share with the other division.  Plus, real people, sincere people shared secrets that worked for them.

“3”  Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61: “As you relate to family, help friends, get after work projects and do more, you’ll notice that everything you take on is a little easier than it was only a month ago. You’re just better.” Virgo

As far as the Pandemic goes, sure we’ve figured out our routines so we don’t catch the virus.  As far as this passion project goes, yeah, but, Duh!

“3”  Steve Kerr, 54: “Though you feel emotionally bound to the people and projects you care about, it will benefit you to ask this thought exercise: What if your only real duty is to your own sense of adventure?” Libra

Probably sound advice, but today I’ve got more than enough things to think about!

“5”  Steve Aoki, 41: “There’s a new goal to strive for, but you’ll accomplish it with the same approach that’s worked for you in the past. You’ll start with a sketch — an outline of a general vision — and then fill in the blanks.” Sagittarius

So, I have this pandemic to thank?  It’s given me time to sketch out and fill in this work-in-progress at least.

“4”  Steve Nash, 45: “There are many situations that are helped by black-or-white thinking, for instance, when you have to assess quickly, act decisively, commit deeply. But for most things, allow for as full a range of color as you can.”  Aquarius

Am I wrong or as a nation don’t we have this inverted?  The black and white thinking which should be objective, is really what passes for red and blue polarized extremes.

“4”  Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “You might not like the information that comes your way initially, but it will be good to know, as it will deepen your understanding of the scene you’re in, thus giving you more power in it.” Pisces

Information is one thing, misinformation — not mistaken, but politically motivated is another entirely.  Why do we as a country have to politicize everything?  Dealing with this pandemic is more than enough, right?

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll 

    • @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4906 to 4990.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

    • Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trip

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S4 E38 — Billy and Buckey Blow My Brain in Whiskey Row’s Palace

He was a sheriff, newspaper editor, miner, politician,Georgist, gambler and lawyer, mainly in Arizona. His nickname came from his tendency to “buck the tiger” (play contrary to the odds) at faro or other card games. He later became a captain in Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and died in battle.

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trips

Knowledge ATMs 

A peak behind the scenes of self-publishing, crowdfunding, and working for yourself

Table of Contents

Hi and welcome to Thursday’s 38th Episode in Season 4 of  “Our Disruptively Resilient Year” on this 12th day of May in the spring of 2022.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

    • @KnowLabs suite of 36 digital magazines, according to my analytics, grew from 12880 this week to 12943 organically grown followers.
    • Orange County Beach Towns 220 viewers stopped by the week before.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Context

As we strolled around, waiting for the cycling race to slow down so we could safely cross Whiskey Row without altering the race results, I wondered who that statue represented — somebody like Wyatt Earp? 

Image Credit: https://www.visitarizona.com/

It would makes sense, because Prescott tourism definitely played up the Old West Themes.

“No,” Jay said as we entered the dark wood old west bordello and saloon-themed restaurant “he’s a Rough Rider named Buckey somebody who was a mayor.“ 

Turns out a little later on Wikipedia I discovered  Bucky O’Neill was a man of his time like Wyatt Earp — a Permanently Temporary.

He was a sheriff, newspaper editor, miner, politician, Geologist, gambler and lawyer, mainly in Arizona. His nickname came from his tendency to “buck the tiger” (play contrary to the odds) at faro or other card games. He later became a captain in Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and died in battle.

But, a Georgist, WTF? Not a typo? I never heard of that and it can’t be a version of his name like Esquire, right? 

Single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society.

He believed in what today’s Representative to Congress from his district, Paul Gosar, would openly consider as socialism.

But, I couldn’t contain myself once my eyes grew accustomed to the dark interior having passed the famous western bar — brown wood walls with dark wood trim — and pictures and paintings and drawing on every wall. I browsed one wall after another.

After we ordered some appetizers to share and I took pull on a long neck bottle of Corona I excused myself to visit more history on both sides of the hallway to the lavatory.  Once in the head standing at the urinal I couldn’t help but laugh.  

Image Credit: WikiCommons

Not everyone remembers William Boyd aka Hopalong Cassidy a stable of cowboy westerns filmed around WWII and later shown on television in the ‘50s, but there he was with his white hair in black hat and black shirt and pants looking down at me in what seemed like a 4-foot poster astride his trademark white horse.

“Anybody remember the name of Hopalong Cassidy’s horse,” I teased Jay, Elle and Emma.  Jay had it on the tip of his tongue.  I then said, “Champion and I’m pretty sure I peed on his feet.”  They laughed and Jay announced he wanted to see for himself. 

Anyone driving towards Mammoth Mountain for a ski holiday slows down to 35 mph while passing through three small towns before accelerating back to 70 on Hwy 395.  

Is it Independence?  Or Lone Pine? I should look it up, right?

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard Copyright 2022

Each time we pass we tell ourselves we should stop one time and explore the museum dedicated to all those western movies filmed in the Alabama Hills, including those staring William Boyd.

As Betsy, our dyed blonde server sauntered over in her corseted costume with a knife in a sheath fastened over the small of her back, you know like you’d expect for sex workers here at the faux brothel upstairs, I noticed a little history on the menu.

The Palace is the oldest frontier saloon in Arizona, and the most well-known and historic restaurant and bar in the state.  Past patrons include Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, Doc Holliday and Big Nose Kate. Virgil was Prescott’s Town Constable.  Originally built in 1877, The Palace was destroyed in the Whiskey Row fire in 1900.  Patrons moved the bar and lower back bar across the street and drank and watched Whiskey Row burn to the ground.  It was rebuilt in 1901.  Today, The Palace maintains its history, grandeur and old west atmosphere, is a favorite for locals, and attracts visitors from all over the world.

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard Copyright 2022

Sitting at our round wood table I glanced at the wall almost directly behind Jay’s shoulder.  A glass display of mining tools used back in the day caught my eye. 

But immediately to the left of the display I saw a small brown framed black and white picture with a brass black below the photo, 

 

“Yavapai County, Burro Man Circa 1890s.”

Two seemingly unrelated factoids tumbled in my mind and came together like a conspiracy theory.  

Could it be?

In the photo a gold seeker in a broad-brimmed hat kneels next to a small makeshift wooden sifting structure.  To his right you can see two pails and a home made scooper — a short wooden handle attached somehow to a metal can.

I vaguely recall pieces of a family story about someone my father’s aunts wrote about in a newsletter which told the story of our extended family ancestors.

Image Credit: WikiCommons

And something I discovered about O’Neill.

O’Neill arrived in Prescott in the spring of 1882. There he rapidly progressed in his journalistic career. Starting as a court reporter, he soon founded his own newspaper, Hoof and Horn, a paper for the livestock industry. He became the editor of the Arizona Miner weekly newspaper in 1884 to February 1885.

That’s it.  Uncle Billy ended up in two Prescott articles and with a little research I discovered one story appeared in the Arizona Miner.  Is it possible Bucky interviewed Billy?

Roughly five years apart Uncle Billy made both the Arizona Miner and the Prescott Enterprise.  Seems as though my great, great uncle’s letter got published in the Prescott Enterprise in 1871.

In the summer of 2005 here’s what I wrote about him in, Uncle Billy, the Earl of Dunraven, Pearl Street & Emaciated Mountain Goats” 

He wrote it to the Honorable S.C. Miller telling him he is living in Castle Rock in Douglas County, Colorado. Uncle Billy wandered from Osage County, Missouri sometime after the 1850 census listed him – as it had Confederate War casualty Nathan – my great, great grandfather.

That got me thinking about Samuel Clemons who began his writing career by sending letters to newspapers signing them “Mark Twain”.  Like Mark Twain, he was drawn to the West to find his fortune working mining claims. 

Twain roamed California and Nevada, while Billy mined his 400 feet lode on Lynx Creek in what is today a quaint vacation spot near Prescott, Arizona – north of Phoenix and south of Flagstaff.

Did he strike it rich? 

Like almost everybody else, he made and lost a fortune in the Gilpin County gold leads. 

In an 1871 report on mining, he’s described as “… a fine specimen of a Western Pioneer, one of the men who have always kept in advance of railroads, and who doesn’t feel well unless separated from civilization by hundreds of miles of Indian country.”

Indian country before trains, huh?

Continuing in the 1871 Arizona Miner interview he describes an incident while going from Prescott to Walker’s Camp, at the head of Lynx Creek. 

Near Yellow Jacket Gulch, he sees a huge fire and rising smoke. He says parties recently from Skull and Kirkland valleys “report Indians aplenty down that way. They are around, sure, and there is no telling when or where they will strike the first blow.”

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard Copyright 2022

So, I’m not saying that photo on the wall next to the glass display is Uncle Billy, but I do know we passed through Skull and Kirkland valleys on the way to Jay and Elle’s Prescott home.

And, the timing is off by a decade or more for Bucky O’Neill to have interviewed Billy, like it sometimes is when you do any ancestry research.  

In letters he wrote back home to Missouri he describes the struggle between guarding against Indian attacks, robbers and the long distance he has to travel for supplies. 

Before Bucky sauntered into Prescott, I’m fairly certain Billy had pulled up stakes already.

Forced to move on due to bad luck, he tries his hand mining in the Black Hills and tries settling for a short time in Castle Rock, before finally returning to his family farm in Missouri.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

“5”  Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Everyone is not on the same page. Some around you are not even in the same book. For this story to go right you must establish common ground and build from there.” Taurus

We concluded the three-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed — during the “normal” pre-pandemic year compared to the pandemic year, and more recently to the paradoxically normal year. 

Season Four continues now within domestic and global chaos.

Previously in Season Four, The Disruptively Resilient Year

S4 E37 — Racing a Little Wobbly on Whiskey Row; S4 E36 — Big Rigs, Skull Valley and Yarnell Hotshots ; S4 E35 — Prescott Pitstop Knocks Me Off Balance

Related from Season Three, the Paradoxically Normal Year

S3 E38 — Sliding on a Super Slippery Slope to 2nd or 3rd Cousins; S3 E37 — Tell Me More Lies I Can Believe In; S3 E36 — Placebo, Meaningful Coincidence or Just Feeling Lucky; S3 E35 — This Ain’t No Zemblanity

Related from Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E38 — What Should You Do If You Stumble Across Loaded Information?; S2 E37 — How Deep is the Chasm? What Do We Do?; S2 E36 — Turning Lemons into Margaritas; S2 E35 — Was this Pandemic Year a 1-Off or New Way of Life?

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E38 — Day 38 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E37 — Day 37 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E36 — Day 36 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E35 — Day 35 of My 1-Year Experiment;

Evidence

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

Today’s Holiday Birthday: 

Your victories will be satisfying and numerous. Through the next 10 weeks you work unwaveringly, with unshakeable focus and resilient intelligence. A complicated relationship irons out. As a result of your efforts to broaden your intellectual horizons, your earning potential will increase.

Ten weeks you say?  That’s ending sometime after the middle or the end of July, but I shouldn’t get my hopes up because this is probably your birthday and not mine.

“5”  Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Everyone is not on the same page. Some around you are not even in the same book. For this story to go right you must establish common ground and build from there.” Taurus

Well, so far so good.  Elle and Jay have been long-time friends even having traveled to Italy for our anniversary vacation.  But, in terms of politics I don’t hold out any hope that we’d be in the same chapter.  Common ground, yeah that’s the ticket.  Fingers crossed. 

“3”  Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “You may decide to do things differently from how your predecessors did because new tools are available. Experimentation takes time and the risk doesn’t always pay off, but you’d be remiss not to try. The future is for the brave!” Virgo

So my predecessors wrote long-hand letters, but my mother typed all of hers and posted them by mail.  She included clipped articles from her newspapers or magazine subscriptions.  Me?  I didn’t want all the clutter from paper and files, so I always looked for digital alternatives.  But, even now I feel I can’t keep up.

“4”  Steve Kerr, 54: “As for the one who doesn’t understand what you’re doing… it could be a perceptual limitation of theirs, but it could also be that you’ve yet to effectively impart the vision. How can you explain it differently?” Libra

So true, I’m in the weeds on most of my passion projects.  And, because I’m one of those endangered introverts, at least by percentage of similar temperaments, I get how most (95 to 97%) won’t understand what I’m doing until I can simplify and simplify some more.  Am I getting closer?

“5”  Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “Here’s an argument for keeping it simple: If the issue at hand grows more complex, and the stakes are raised too, the analysis of choices will consume more energy, which may lead to decision fatigue and delays.” Pisces

WTF have you been eavesdropping?  I couldn’t put it any better than that.  Nailed it!

Long-Form

    • “Here, Right Matters: An American Story” by Alexander Vindman. “We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of accommodation and appeasement of Russia, the United States’ most pressing major adversary. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean Peninsula, attacking its industrial heartland, the Donbass, from the capital, Kyiv. By 2019, little had changed, Russian military and security forces and their proxy separatists continued to occupy the Donbass. The biggest change was to Ukraine’s importance as a bulwark against Russian aggression weeks earlier, the White House had abruptly put a hold on nearly four hundred million dollars.” 
    • David Enrich begins his book with a suicide in “Deutsche Bank Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction” and then meticulously details the bank’s Russian money laundering operations. Deutsche’s Russian business surged after revenues had fallen 50% due to the 2008 financial crisis. Putin’s Russia, poured in to Deutsche from deals it did with VTB Bank, linked to the Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus. Deutsche positioned itself as a crucial cog in “The Laundromat” by doing what couldn’t be done — processing cross-border transactions for banks that were too small  and didn’t have offices outside their home countries.
    • “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy” by Jamie Raskin recalls one tragedy no parent should endure — the suicide of his son — and then a second tragedy at almost the same time — the insurrection on January 6th 2021, that terrified he and his congressional peers who were tasked by the Constitution to routinely oversee the orderly transfer of power from one former president to the duly elected new President. 
    • “A Warning” by Anonymous (Miles Taylor) written prior to the January 6th Insurrection as an insider’s account documenting how frequently the former President’s behavior and rage without any “guard rails” showed just how far he would go to win the next election at any cost while spinning lies and misinformation on top of each other.  
    • “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides anecdotes, stories and inside reporting documenting the controversial last days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as the presidential transition and early presidency of Joe Biden. 
    • “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising,” by Joshua Green tracks the money behind the scenes leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the growing influence of Steve Bannon’s network of extreme nationalists.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

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S2 E89 — Garage Bonking and Chasm Jumping

It’s a culture that encourages individual imagination and achievement, as well as, stellar out-of-the-box thinking. It caters to the special kind of mindset that is driven by a desire to create the future — the most original, best and brightest among gadflies, concept champions, mavericks, the unconventional and eccentric.

“5”  Steve Harvey, 62: “While many pay lip service to a principle, you’re all about the proof, the hard evidence that the idea will work. You want to live the improvement, and so you’ll roll up your sleeves and get to work.” Capricorn

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s Episode 89 in Season 2 of  “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 1st day of August in the summer of 2020.  

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E88 — Convincing Family, Friends, Fools and Angels; S2 E87 — Start Ups Aren’t For Everyone. Are They a Better or Worse Fit for You?; S2 E86 — How To Avoid a Disastrous Career Like Mine

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E89 — Because If You Don’t Someone Else Will. It’s Worth It!; S1 E88 — Who’s Marc Maron and What’s da Vinci got to do with him?; S1 E87 — Pipe Bombs Destroy Vacation Bliss; S1 E86 — Day 86 of My 1-Year Natural Experiment

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In a previous episode I summarized everything you need to know about four basic organizations to stack the odds in your favor when shopping around for your next job opportunity.  

Oh, what disaster to avoid (unlike me) in your next career move. 

Now we’re building on each of the 16 talent profiles and how they can take advantage of opportunities in stages of organizational growth from Start Up to Maturity and from Decline to Reinvention.

Five Major Stages of Growth for Organizations

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

The longer it takes to convert visionary influence into early pragmatist orders tests the start-up’s capacity for survival.  

It has to generate enough cash initially, and then stabilize its business by eliminating cash flow problems. 

And that my friend is the crux of the problem.

Oh, and the vast majority of “garage” Start Ups “bonk” against the garage door and never make it out of the first stage.  

But if they do, they may not make it out of the growth stage or prevent themselves from becoming a mere shell of their former mature selves or worse yet decline and go out of business.

Consequences of not Mastering Growth Crises

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

If your organization continues unchanged, the reversing success factors will trigger failure during the transitions from Start Up to Growth, to Maturity, into Decline and Reinvention.

Many of the Executive MBA students I advised hadn’t considered that the key success factors they operated under currently could derail their employer’s success in the near, medium or distant future.

It’s sorta like what brought you to the party has to be reversed to make it to the next stage.  So, first they had to realize which stage they were in and which was next.  And then, they had to identify the new and opposite set of key success factors — 180 degrees different.

Results of Mastering 180 Degree Opposite Set of Key Success Factors

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

In a start-up the founder sells a compelling vision of their future.  Just like our clients’ at Think!City did.  Or what happened to Proxima’s early employees who wore a lot of hats and loved it.  They also expected to be first in line when it came to heading up functions.  

That transition from organic free flowing ways of creating a company turned out to be the opposite of what helped them in the second stage.  And pissed off a lot of them when outsiders from bigger companies stepped all over them when they were hired.

Case of “Arrested Development”

It ain’t pretty.  But, it’s so predictable.  My Executive MBA students had to figure out how to close the “gaping chasm” and with their course work and the help of mentors I matched them with, how to navigate the “transformation” required for a bumpy landing into the next growth stage.  Not every employer makes it, at least not at first.

Now we’re going to walk through each stage’s crisis challenge — crossing the chasm between each growth stage — and identifying the 180 degree solution required.

Solving Each Stage’s Unique Challenge

Stage of Growth

Crisis Challenge

180 Degree Solution

Start Up

Leadership

Tighten Operations

Emerging Growth

Functional

Loosen Operations

Rapid Growth

Autonomy

Tighten Operations

Sustained Growth

Repetition

Loosen Operations

Maturity

Control

Tighten Operations

Decline

Red Tape

Loosen Operations

Reinvention

Culture Blindness

Tighten then Loosen Operations

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Bridging the Gap Between Start Up and Emerging Growth  

During the final leg of the product development process the looming deadlines and commitments tense the work that increases velocity and accelerated activity.

Teams work at hyper-speed. So it takes a certain kind of person to put up with last minute shifts in direction and make or break pressures.

What kind?

The most original, best and brightest among gadflies, concept champions, mavericks, the unconventional and eccentric. It’s a culture that encourages individual imagination and achievement, as well as, stellar out-of-the-box thinking. It caters to the special kind of mindset that is driven by a desire to create the future. 

What about the leadership crisis? 

Bridging Leadership Gap Between Start Up to Emerging Growth

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

It’s a culture that encourages individual imagination and achievement, as well as, stellar out-of-the-box thinking. It caters to the special kind of mindset that is driven by a desire to create the future. 

What about the leadership crisis? 

Once the start-up survives and begins to grow, new knowledge about efficiencies and quality is required. 

More employees coming into the organization can’t be managed exclusively through informal communication, as before.

And, coming in after the fact, most new employees aren’t motivated by that same intense dedication to the product and its vision.

New capital needed to fund expansion. And new accounting procedures for financial control. So, the founders find themselves burdened with the unwanted management responsibilities. They long for the good old days and still act as they did in the past.

They don’t realize that’s the kiss of death.

Not until the crisis arises out of the conflicts.

So when the key talent begins to ask, “Who will lead the company out of this confusion and solve the management problems we are facing?” 

It becomes painfully clear that the answer is not the founder.

Two Talent Profiles Attracted to Emerging Growth

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

In many cases. A strong manager is needed who has the necessary knowledge and skill to introduce new business techniques to help them bridge the widening gulf between start-up and early growth stage.

Often it’s up to 107 Resilient Product Teams to develop “the formula” by reducing the amount of random experimentation while accelerating new business by learning from early customers.  They streamline the rapid product development process and convert emerging knowledge into repeatable processes.

Emerging-Entrepreneurs in a 108 Core Business Group expand the number of products and variations available often preceding the need to break the organization into functional specialties.  They manage through the variable demand, but focus on building the capacity for higher growth with efficient ramp-ups for initial products

Founders hate to step aside during this turning point, even though they don’t have the temperament to be managers.

If they don’t, they prolong the inevitable. But, as we see in the next stage the directive management style plants the seeds for a new crisis at the end of the early growth stage.

Evidence

“3”  Steve Zahn, 51: “It’s not expensive to amp up your powers of attraction, nor does it require special talent or particular features. The more present you are to the moment, the more attractive you are.” Scorpio

How can I disagree?  Who would want to.  I’m flattered that this is a legitimate Holiday Tau for me, but I’m not feeling its relevance today — so far.

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

Today’s Holiday Birthday:  

“Your imaginative powers are strong and your sense of purpose even stronger. Mentors help you pull together a plan. The new season will be marked with a sense of belonging and group pride. You’ll rebuild with your team. There’s a stroke of financial luck in November and shiny new tools will make more possible.”

Wait, how wouldn’t this be a perfect birthday present for either 107 Resilient Product Teams or 108 Core Business Group talent profiles?

“3”  Steve Howey, 42: “Selflessness leads to satisfaction. It’s the moves you make to see other people smile or to alleviate their worry or their suffering that will ultimately bring you the most joy.” Cancer

I have to agree in general, and even though it’s Saturday, I’m not experiencing this one yet.

“4”  Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King,72: “Though work may go faster when done by others and fun may be more affordable when someone else is paying, this doesn’t change your plan. You’re determined to do it yourself.” Virgo

I have to experience what I teach and learn from my mistakes before I can turn the work over to somebody else.

“4”  Steve Aoki, 41: “You’ve been at the task for a while now and are ready for the new challenges that can be thrown in your mix. What some would consider to be increasing stress from every direction, you consider fun.” Sagittarius

Just as long as I’m not a German Short-Haired Pointer and the new challenges aren’t squirrels scampering from limb to tree limb laughing at me.

“5”  Steve Harvey, 62: “While many pay lip service to a principle, you’re all about the proof, the hard evidence that the idea will work. You want to live the improvement, and so you’ll roll up your sleeves and get to work.” Capricorn

Not only for my self as I have been field testing this work, but for matching mentors to students to help them apply what the professors taught in their Executive MBA course work over a decade.

“4”  Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “Check your sources. There’s plenty of bad information out there today, which would be a regrettable share. You can avoid mistakes. Pause, question, and then make your move.” Pisces

Wow.  Doesn’t sum up this whole Season Two so far — our collective Pandemic Year?

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll 

    • @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4427 to 4516.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

    • Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trip

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S2 E88 — Convincing Family, Friends, Fools and Angels

We flew into Manhattan, digitally videoed almost all of their software engineers, surfaced their “core foundational story” and crafted a marketing and advertising campaign for the CEO, and the internal story to keep and retain the brains in the fold.

“5”  Steve Howey, 42: “The brilliant solution will be simple, but it’s not always so easy to think like that. What would an outsider see? A child? Ask the naive questions that your sophisticated mind often skips.” Cancer

Hi and welcome to Friday’s Episode 88 in Season 2 of  “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 31st day of July in the summer of 2020.  

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E87 — Start Ups Aren’t For Everyone. Are They a Better or Worse Fit for You?; S2 E86 — How To Avoid a Disastrous Career Like Mine; S2 E85 — How to Up the Odds in Your Favor

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E88 — Who’s Marc Maron and What’s da Vinci got to do with him?; S1 E87 — Pipe Bombs Destroy Vacation Bliss; S1 E86 — Day 86 of My 1-Year Natural Experiment; S1 E85 — What happens when the fear subsides?

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In a previous episode I summarized everything you need to know about four basic organizations to stack the odds in your favor when shopping around for your next job opportunity.  

Oh, what disaster to avoid (unlike me) in your next career move. 

Now we’re building on each of the 16 talent profiles and how they can take advantage of opportunities in stages of organizational growth from Start Up to Maturity and from Decline to Reinvention.

Five Major Stages of Growth for Organizations

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Start Ups

Their founders are often described as a maniac on a mission. In the very beginning they grow organically through loose collaborations. Innovation leads to an IPO or acquisition by a larger company like Google or Amazon or other more mature players in the space. 

What they develop, independently, usually dramatically speeds up a standard process, or eliminates major steps, or in some radical way revolutionizes business-as-usual.

30. Venture Guidance —

As a Systematic-Professional advisor I prepped potential startup entrepreneurs seeking investments from a group of entrepreneurs and former executives who agreed to pledge $50,000 each as seed or A-series funding.  Presenting with a deck of 10 slides, after being coached individually, they stood and delivered to a group of us role playing the sharks and throwing them curve balls challenging their assumptions.

Wannabe Entrepreneurs Seeking Angels 

I’d meet each person with a great idea, hear them out, conduct a preliminary in take against the criteria for receiving our free services provided by a budget from The Small Business Association.  

Instead of qualifying for a business loan at a vetted SBA bank affiliate that they’d have to pay back, we were there to vet their idea against evolving criteria provided to us by Tech Coast Angels — a group of entrepreneurs and former executives who agree to pledge $50,000 each as seed or A-series funding.  

In my own career I had failed so many times at start-ups that I could pick apart most of their plans and presentations almost instantaneously.  But, that didn’t mean I wasn’t a sucker for ideas I felt would be sure hits.  Even after I left the SBA program I continued to meet and mentor some of “my” entrepreneurs.

Individual Tech Coast Angels investors rarely got their money back on my clients.  

Our game plan was to divide the amount you needed by $50,000 increments and then you knew how many of those investors you needed to convince. Two for $100,000 or 20 for $1 million.

If our wannabes “graduated” from our “harassment” they submitted an application for an invitation to the next Tech Coast Angel meeting of all investors.  If they passed their initial screening, then they were invited to present to the large group. And, if lucky, to other Angel investors in the region until they collected enough $50,000 commitments.

Before Shark Tank

One of the mentors I invited to participate in The Executive to Executive MBA mentoring program provided a service just like Shark Tank, but way before. His proposition was for a founder to present to his group , get evaluated on strengths and weaknesses, work on the weaknesses with advisors within the network and pitch again.

Part of his value proposition, besides providing billable hours for advisors in their network, was introductions to investors who favored their model of vetting startup ideas.  

The Angels usually recouped their investments when the venture capitalists invested with hundreds of millions or they made their money when a startup was acquired by a larger company or registered for an initial public offering (IPO) on one of the stock exchanges.

But to be honest, the statistics rang true.  Most start ups fail within the first 5 years, but that’s after tapping into friends, family and fools and maxing out all of their credit cards and taking out second mortgages.  If one of my clients didn’t secure Angel Funding, then the game was over.  They never jumped the chasm to land on emerging growth. 

27. Knowledge Management — Brand Company

At Think!City and again as Systematic-Professional consultants, we crashed our models together — learning and development, knowledge creation, media production, internet communities, strategy, advertising and marketing. 

We worked together in a highly creative environment within a corrugated metal building designed by a local architecture firm in Laguna Beach, on a curve in Laguna Canyon Road.

Start Up Talent Culture

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

From our studio we continued internal and external branding with clients ranging from startups to Fortune 100.  I fell headlong into sharing new knowledge that springs out of new innovations.

We pioneered a way of capturing the essence of a brand on digital video, searched through audio tracks for the touch points and reused portions of the interviews for orienting new coders hired at accelerated rates. 

Start Up #1

One of our clients, Interworld, was so new their CEO, a 101 Breakpoint Inventor,  just didn’t know how to talk about what they did.  So, we flew into Manhattan, digitally videoed almost all of their software engineers, surface their “core foundational story” and crafted a marketing and advertising campaign for the CEO, and the internal story inside to keep and retain the brains in the fold.

The CEO was able to coherently sell Interworld’s story to potential investors and customer within an advertising campaign framed by their brand.

Before engaging the 103 Commercial Innovators and 105 Marketing Athletes in our process Interworld’s turnover rate hit 90%. But, because they had told us what their core foundational story was, they fervently believed in that mission they defined and the vision we fedback to them.  And, they voluntarily stopped taking the two or three daily recruiter calls from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Interworld loved our work. 

Start Up #2

A technology opportunity emerged quickly which focused primarily on retail investors throwing money at an e-commerce platform that addressed Amazon’s bookselling initial business.  They saw the writing on the wall. The business model customized each “brick and mortar” business and took them online with the same look and feel of the store. 

As each new company signed on, the company with the platform, Online Retail Partners, learned new stuff, and developed newer bells and whistles they then shared with their “investment partners”.

The retailers knew their business, but didn’t understand technology.  So they invested in a company that did.  And as Online Retail Partners grew out, the new and legacy retail investors would share in the rewards. 

Warren of Incubating Start Ups

So, up on the 11th floor of a dingy gray building with only one operating elevator and noise chugging steam heaters sat a warren of start-up companies squirreled off into sections of large and small rooms — basically large enough to fit in tables with chairs facing each other and a lot of digital screens and yards and yards of cables.  

Online Retail Partners was one of them. We arrived to surface their business model like we did at Interworld.  The CEO laid out several problems for our help.  He said they worked on Internet-time — ever accelerating time-to-market like we faced at Proxima creating 2-way “meeting room tools”; they couldn’t afford any stinking time away from their pace to go to no stinking training; they “popped” retail businesses online in 75 to 90 days in a slow quarter; they needed to hire and assimilate 100 new employees and …

When we met them they had a core team of 5 or 6 geniuses — 103 Commercial Innovators and 105 Marketing Athletes — who learned how to finish each other’s sentences.  Everything worked like butter.  Nothing bad happened, until they began to break up the foundational team as they took on new partners and spread them out among them.  

Chaos But In a Good Way

New hires told us they would see people walking around between the shared couches and conversation areas in the incubator, back to one or two other tabled rooms, but had no idea which one of them was the team lead on a project they were hired into.

To us it just seemed like a ferris wheel spinning faster and faster until somebody launches out into space.

Crazy creative Dave and I interviewed those first geniuses and recording those on digital video with B-roll footage to capture the early warehouse environment with exposed pipes — kinda like where we worked in the corrugated metal building in the bend of Laguna Canyon Road.  

No Time For This

First of all they couldn’t agree on how many product development steps it took from new idea to finished product — in their case a password and access to their customers online environment.  We interviewed them separately, then held a group session where in an old school way had them draw their product development process on butcher paper taped to a wall

A new hire came up to me and said that was the single best thing that happened to him in the first 30 days — watching them convince each other what their process should be — as he was sitting off in the conversation pit looking on.  

He told me as we were breaking down the lights, that when we identified who we interviewed, asked for their phone and email he found out who his boss was and finally knew what he should be working on in “Phase 1”.

Team Follows the Leader to the Next Company

The CEO, who came from Staples of all places, body-snatched the original team almost intact from one of Amazon’s competitors and gave them complete freedom in founding the company.  And the technology team’s leader —  a 101 Breakpoint Inventor —   absolutely walked on water all the others said, so his personality, reputation and competence provided enough “stickiness” in the beginning.  But the second and third wave of new hires didn’t know him or about him.

So, as they grew, turnover accelerated.

Stickiness and Accelerated Time-to-Mastery

Our challenge was to accelerate each new team member’s time-to-mastery, without drawing too much away from everyone’s concentration on shortening product cycles, and without sending them to orientation off-sites for a week like we did in the old days.

Crazy Dave and I knew from our experiences with “Strategic Safari Tools” and technology innovation challenges circulating the new knowledge innovation teams “throw off” as emerging best practices was critical to their survival as they tried to scale and grow.

We focused on those emerging best practices.  We drew out the product development phases, using our digital video we briefly explained what happened in of them from my interview with each expert, using just the first frame of their picture we captioned them with their email and phone number.

It became embarrassingly easy to find each other quickly and efficiently. And solved the eternal problem with best practices for as long as I can remember.

In the old world, when you finished a project the leader was to see to it a best practice was written up — what the situation and context demanded, something about surprises, what worked well and what didn’t, and maybe a question about “if you had it to do again, what would you have done differently?”

Product geniuses didn’t have the time to write something up.  They raced around attending to first-time problems and gnarly solutions.

Knowledge Leakage

We used to call it knowledge leakage.  It just evaporated. But the issue was composing something in writing. 

If you wanted me to write up a best practice about what we’ve covered here it would be a chore.  

It’s so much easier for you to interview me,  to pull it out of an expert and capture it.  As you interview them, they’re given the opportunity to unspool.

They’re replaying it for the first time from beginning to end and re-discovering what they learned, but hadn’t thought of before.  It could be the real lesson.

We Slowed Them Down Until …

I found a software tool that scanned down through the audio tracks of video and logged in time codes and content automatically.  They provided an editor tool and a search function so we could very quickly zero in on all the instances that “Phase Five” appears in that hour of tape.

We didn’t all have to be in the studio at the same time.

That was the real pinch point in our behind the scenes magic.  With ORP or Interworld, or 18Global, or even Zany Brainy we couldn’t slow them down and the way we did business originally did just that

Our Systematic-Professional practice offered digital asset management — that just-in-time, just enough capability delivered to any creative team member’s desktop.

We Practiced What We Preached

Our Verage searchable knowledge base allowed us to view the entire 1-hour digital video, a smaller section of the video or little snippets within a clip.   If someone rolled onto our production team without having traveled to Ireland, Australia or Dallas they could view everything to get up to speed with the client.

Summary

Why are these talent profiles magnetized to Start Ups?  Usually the “Maniac on a Mission” aka 101 Breakpoint Inventor thrives on the highest degrees of Independence, Speed and Disruptive Innovation. 

As founders they bet it all on the line — “Go Big of Go Home!”  Usually they’ve cultivated a loose team of co-conspirators who may not entirely grasp the expansiveness of vision, 

16 Talent Profiles by Organization Type

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

but as one 103 Commercial Innovator told us, “Whenever Ian calls, we know to drop everything and join him.”  They know the new venture, base on past adventures, promises to be one-of-a-kind that they will regret if they don’t hop on board the train leaving the station — destination unknown.  Wherever founders take them the market, industry or themselves will never be the same.

Start Up Culture Attracting Three Talent Profiles

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

The early team can’t all share founders need for disruption and speed at the same highest degree.  To bring the vision to life and launch it into the marketplace some team players need medium degrees independence, disruptive innovation and speed to function aka 103 Commercial Innovators without unnecessarily challenging what the founders see that they can’t yet. Part of what they’re able to bring to the table is a translation function.  Figuring out how to define and deliver a proof of concept, a rapid prototype — something that is more tangible even for the rest of the team.  They’re always on the lookout for commercializing early applications of the vision, figuring out strategies for licensing their intellectual property and setting up joint R&D projects to fill in missing pieces and technologies. 

The first two usually hang out in Paradoxy-Moron organizations and can stay and grow as that organization matures through growth stages and reaches maturity. But finding a home in another start up, as serial entrepreneurs often do, they’re joined by folks, 105 Marketing Athletes who value speed (high) and affiliation (medium), but interject a focus on new knowledge creation.  They plug the holes in knowledge leakage that cutting edge processes produce by capturing it and sharing it and protecting it as proprietary processes almost as much as intellectual property.

Evidence

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

Today’s Holiday Birthday: 

 Life always gets more interesting when you follow that whisper of curiosity. Your interests and skills evolve. You’ll take risks and gather up the freedoms available to you on the other side. You’ll be applauded in a familiar group and accepted into an elite one. You’ll win with someone you feel driven to impress.

The whisper of curiosity — I love that turn of phrase.  This ain’t my legitimate Holiday Birthday, but it certainly applies to how I’ve led my career and original research which I’m trying to stuff into this here “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” my work-in-progress.

“3”  Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “The point will be just to show up and see what you discover. If you can lower your expectation or, better yet, go in totally without one, you’ll be primed for a stellar day.” Aries 

Go in?  With this pandemic I hardly go out.  I pine for a stellar day, but I’m not seeing the signs of one yet, but it’s still early.

“5”  Steve Howey, 42: “The brilliant solution will be simple, but it’s not always so easy to think like that. What would an outsider see? A child? Ask the naive questions that your sophisticated mind often skips.” Cancer

So often I had to ask myself that question and asked my clients similar sets of questions to move over, under, or around seemingly insurmountable barriers.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll 

    • @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4427 to 4516.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

    • Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trip

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S2 E85 — How to Up the Odds in Your Favor

Up until this point, the discussion about better and worse fit jobs and clients focused on me for illustrative purposes.  But you may have, hopefully, noticed an affinity for one or more of the four organizations.  And you may have felt an attraction to one or more of the 16 talent profiles which define an employer’s culture.  

“5”  Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “It would be cool if you had a manual for this project, but all the information out there is either too plentiful or too scanty to be of use to you. Reach out to a mentor for information that’s the right size.” Virgo

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s Episode 85 in Season 2 of  “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 25th day of July in the summer of 2020.  

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E84 — Maybe Robin Hood Got It Right After All, Eh?; S2 E83 — Why Shouldn’t You Always Lean On Things That Worked Before?; S2 E82 — How Do You Inject Innovation into a Century’s Old Company?

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E85 — What happens when the fear subsides?; S1 E84 — Crisis averted?  Energy depleted?  What are we going to do?; S1 E83 —The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book; S1 E82 — Why Writers Aren’t the Only Endangered Species. Sigh.

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In recent episodes (S2 E78, S2 E80, S2 E82 and S2 E84) I shared my Worse and Better fit experiences to illustrate a little more in depth description of what it is like working in and for clients in Paradoxy-Morons, Emerging-Entrepreneurs, Sustaining-Associates and Systematic-Professionals.

In this episode, let me summarize the key points you may to know to avoid your next career disaster.

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Paradoxy-Moron Organizations

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Summary

What makes Paradoxy-Morons tick?

Disruptive Innovation, Independence and Speed

They notice how limited the traditional, status quo solves the really complex problems and challenges

Disrupting. 

A fast-paced, innovative culture that attracts and retains the best of the best. 

Motto?

“It’s better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission.”

What are their unique challenges? 

        • They champion paradigms based on new science discoveries.
        • Once is not enough. From one world beater to several again an again
        • Finding commercial applications of disruptive innovation in the form of new product categories — which haven’t been proven until flawed prototypes and buggy technology work themselves out

What are the takeaways?  

Innovations have to come faster.  Concurrent overlapping talent demands.

In the start up stage they are capable of anticipating something new and act decisively to establish a new market, industry, technology or a new scientific discipline.

Which Talent Profiles find a better fit with Paradoxy-Morons?

        • 101 PMBI Breakpoint Inventors
        • 102 PMTL Thought Leaders
        • 103 PMCI Commercial Innovators 
        • 104 R&D Experimenters

In which organization will they find a worse fit?

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Sustaining-Associates with their emphasis on:

          • Higher degrees of Sustained Improvement, Affiliation and Mastery
          • Building predictably upon past history and loyal customer retention.

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Emerging-Entrepreneur Organizations

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Summary

What makes Emerging-Entrepreneurs tick?

They rapidly introduce new products into new rapidly moving niches while capturing emerging knowledge no-one else has and based on that experience introduce tweets to early business formulas.

Bias for Action. 

New Knowledge, Affiliation and Speed

Knowledge creation — teams introduce new products by applying emerging new knowledge for a competitive advantage.

Motto?

“There’s no time like the present”

What are their unique challenges? 

        • The 20% accomplish 80% of the results.
        • They learn rapidly by doing.
        • Figuring out what has to happen to boost performance with fewer and fewer trials and errors.

What are the takeaways?  

Imagine a relay race with individual record holders.  But, it takes flawless baton passing as a team to achieve world-class status.

Affiliation bonding is to the team.  It’s up to the team to learn the fastest way to take a new idea and introduce it into the marketplace.

They need to guard their organization’s core capabilities and emerging proprietary processes while quickly managing increasing degrees of complexity as they grow.

Which Talent Profiles find a better fit with Emerging-Entrepreneurs?

          • 105 EEMA Marketing Athletes
          • 106 EEOA Operational Accelerants
          • 107 EERPT Resilient Product Teams 
          • 108 EECBG Core Business Groups

In which organization will they find a worse fit?

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020 

Systematic-Professionals with their emphasis on: 

          • Higher degrees of Embedded Knowledge, Independence and Mastery
          • Classified, categorized, tested and benchmarked knowledge.

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Sustaining-Associate Organizations

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Summary

What makes Sustaining-Associates tick?

112 SALS Loyal Survivalists anchor the Sustaining-Associates culture. They manage people, technologies, processes, and organizational structures to sustain the innovation they’ve already mastered. Employees identify with the organization and have high affiliation needs that favor slower paced industries and cultures.

Brand Loyalty. 

Sustained Improvement, Affiliation and Mastery

Building predictably upon past history and loyal customer retention.

Motto?

“If it win’t broke don’t fix it.”

What are their unique challenges? 

        • Missing competitive threats and responding too late.
        • Resting on their traditional successes.
        • Preparing the next generation of leaders for a different competitive environment.

What are the takeaways?  

To mature and survive their brand needs to be accepted by the majority of the total available market.

A loyal affiliated talent culture needs constant retention so associates maintain the organization’s reputation.

Through their behaviors they develop a trust mark that keeps bringing long-term customers back again and again

Which Talent Profiles find a better fit with Sustaining-Associates?

      • 109 SAICA Internal Change Agents
      • 110 SAAS Analytical Specialists
      • 111 SAAT Agile Tiger Teams 
      • 112 SALS  Loyal Survivalists

In which organization will they find a worse fit?

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Paradoxy-Morons with their emphasis on: 

          • Higher degrees of Disruptive Innovation, Independence and Speed
          • How limited the traditional, status quo solves the really complex problems and challenges

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Systematic-Professional Organizations

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Summary

What makes Systematic-Professionals tick?

These are the experts who love their profession instead of a specific organization like Sustaining-Associates do. They’re the Idea Packagers, Professional Practitioners, Traditional Institutionalists in standards-setting associations led by well-known Branded Experts in the field.

Advanced Degrees and Certifications. 

Embedded Knowledge, Independence and Mastery

Emerging knowledge is classified, categorized, tested and benchmarked.

Motto?

“Robin Hood had it right”

What are their unique challenges? 

        • Research into complex problems and complicated large systems
        • Working in knowledge organizations and consulting partnerships.
        • Application of proprietary best practices and knowledge gleaned from their benchmark databases.

What are the takeaways?  

Methods and Metrics.  They prefer to distance themselves to remain objective and follow a well-articulated and tested methodology.

Their majority of clients are large-cap companies, government partners and the medical industry systems.

Studying these organizations provides a giant learning laboratory.

Acknowledged expertise attracts potential clients.

Rainmakers play an outsized role developing new and repeat business. 

Which Talent Profiles find a better fit with Systematic-Professionals?

          • 113 SPIC Idea Packagers
          • 114 SPBE Brand-as-Experts
          • 115 SPPP Professional Practitioners 
          • 116 SPIT Institutional Traditionalists

In which organization will they find a worse fit?

Image Credit: Stephen G. Howard  Copyright 2020

Emerging-Entrepreneurs with their emphasis on: 

          • Higher degrees of New Knowledge, Affiliation and Speed
          • Knowledge creation — teams introduce new products by applying emerging new knowledge for a competitive advantage.

Up until this point.

The discussion about better and worse fit focused on me, for illustrative purposes.  Hopefully, you may have noticed an affinity for one or more of the organizations.  And you may have felt a tendency for one or more of the 16 talent profiles.  

Next up,

We’ll build on better and worse fit options as we review stages of organizational growth from Start Up to Maturity and from Decline to Reinvention.  

But, first what do the Steves offer as TauBits of Wisdom?

Evidence

“5”  Steve Zahn, 51: “Things may not change immediately or even slowly, but the important thing is that they will change eventually. Never give in to cynicism. Your mind is made for beautiful thinking.” Scorpio

Got it, you are preaching to the choir with the first sentence.  It’s the second one that is extremely hard for me in this pandemic world today.

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“4”  Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “If you worry about what you are going to say, then it will prevent you from listening to what is being said. Whatever you can do to put yourself at ease will give you an advantage.” Aries  

Gotta tell you I followed this TauBit of Wisdom after learning it the hard way.  I was so intimidated by advising former Vice Presidents and CEOs when I never was one, until I asked a simple question, “What have you been doing about …?” and listened.

“3”  Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Are you holding on to false hope? No. Hope, in and of itself, is an act of truth and light. Believe the best and hold on, white-knuckled, to that version.” Taurus 

Or does hope lead to false expectations? And do false expectations lead to confirmation bias.  And does confirmation bias lead on a slippery slope to conspiracy theories?  Seem like it, eh?

“4”  Steve Smith, 30: “Your head and your heart have not had a meeting in a while, and they will go in two different directions until you bring them into alignment through something peaceful, like meditation, dance or creative play.” Gemini

I choose the first and last alignment choices.

“4”  Steve Howey, 42: “Make space. Get rid of things before you have a replacement. Emptiness is not nothingness. Space is a “something” even if you don’t know what it is. Potential counts.” Cancer

Yeah, I see how being cooped up for so long drives you a little crazy without space.

“4”  Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “Assume that people are doing their very best. If they don’t act like this is the case, they may be consumed with fighting a battle you do not know about. Give the benefit of the doubt wherever possible.” Leo

I’ll have to repeat this over and over today for when I venture out to my local Ralph’s grocery store and encounter the number of unmasked COVID-19 spreaders.

“5”  Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “It would be cool if you had a manual for this project, but all the information out there is either too plentiful or too scanty to be of use to you. Reach out to a mentor for information that’s the right size.” Virgo

OK, it would have been cool years ago when I conducted my original research for this work-in-progress, my WorkFit manuscript. Maybe you can use it as a manual for you.

“5”  Steve Harvey, 62: “You won’t get that push from the world today, so you’ll have to give it to yourself. Do so in the form of an intention. Setting an intention leads to actions you wouldn’t have taken otherwise.” Capricorn

Totally see how this TauBit applies — in a lockdown pandemic world intention comes a little easier for us introverts.

“4”  Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “You’ll thank the roadblock, as it helps you find your own path. You’ll thank the mistakes, as they are your best teachers. You’ll thank the enemy that keeps you so strong.” Pisces

So, two out of three is still pretty good, right?

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll 

    • @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4397 to 4427.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

    • Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trip

Posted on

S2 E82 — How Do You Inject Innovation into a Century’s Old Company?

I left law school to fulfill my military obligation is a polite way of saying it.  In the Army I learned two things I can talk about.  One was how unprepared the service was after recruiting college graduates who had other better ideas of what their future would look like and who weren’t loyal like the lifers.

“5”  Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Your knowledge of words and symbols will lead you to analyze a situation and comprehend it so well that you’ll be a point of reference for others. You’ll contribute significantly to team decisions.” Taurus

Hi and welcome to Sunday’s Episode 82 in Season 2 of  “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 19th day of July in the summer of 2020.  

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E81 — 3rd of 4 Secrets to a Better WorkFit; S2 E80 — Unrealistic Expectations Hatched Green Box Lessons the Hard Way; S2 E79 — Ain’t No Paradoxy-Moron? How About an Emerging-Entrepreneur?

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E82 — Why Writers Aren’t the Only Endangered Species. Sigh.; S1 E81— Is This My Wake Up Call, Steve?; S1 E80 — I’ll Give You Adverse Conditions, Steve; S1 E79 — Can I Keep It Up? For a Year?

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In a recent episodes we broke out talent profiles for each of the 4 Organization Types starting with Paradoxy-Morons, Emerging-Entrepreneurs and Sustaining-Associates.

Here are some examples from my list of best fit companies and clients to illustrate what it means to love Sustaining-Associates the “tan box” organization with it’s unique blend of talent profiles:

    • 109 SAICA Internal Change Agents
    • 110 SAAS Analytical Specialists
    • 111 SAAT Agile Tiger Teams 
    • 112 SALA Loyal Survivalists

Oops, this first example turned out to be eye-opening, educational and potentially deadly. And, definitely not a better fit for me or my posse.  

3.  US Army — Worse Fit

I definitely was not loyal, having not much in common with lifers, but I got to know and work with all kinds of people from different backgrounds and I felt I needed to fulfill my obligation. 

Luckily part of my time was spent in more challenging work in preventive medicine. But to tell you the truth I hated standard operating procedures, “There’s the right way, the wrong way and the Army way.”

Why?

I left law school to fulfill my military obligation is a polite way of saying it.  In the Army I learned two things I can talk about.  

One was how unprepared the service was after recruiting college graduates who had other better ideas of what their future would look like and weren’t loyal like the lifers.  

We took on more skilled MOS specialties.  

I graduated from medic to preventive medicine and eventually worked in an air-condition laboratory in Vietnam for processing water samples.  And we palled around with the officers — many trained in medicine in my unit which caused frustration up and down the chain of command.  

I learned I wasn’t cut out to blindly follow orders as standard operating procedures when it seemed like there were more efficient processes that could deliver the results in half the time.  

You know what they say, “There’s the right way, the wrong way and the Army way.”

At Fort Dix, New Jersey for basic training as a freshly minted psychology college graduate the Army’s “game” revealed itself to me. Unfortunately for my drill sergeant my psychology training made me resistant to his methods and kept me anticipating what his next tactics would be.  Like getting my platoon to sing along while marching to chants of “kill Charlie.”  Sergeant Ski told us he came back from Nam and we’d better listen up, because all or most of us would be on our way there shortly after a brief stint in Advanced Training following Basic’s indoctrination of new recruits.  

At Ft. Sam Houston in Texas and later in Long Binh, Vietnam my buddies — college graduates too — had much more in common with the officers.  Our common interests created challenges up and down the chain of command. I wanted to solve problems and suggested new more efficient ways to improve procedures, but those fell on deaf ears.  So, I learned to “go underground” with work arounds that made my job easier without calling attention to it.

As a Sustaining-Associates Organization Type, the military thrived with 111 SAAT Agile Tiger Teams and 112 SALS Loyal Survivalists primarily with 110 SAAS Analytical Specialists in administrative and headquarters functions.  

I never came in contact with any 109 SAICA Internal Change Agents— if you discount us college-educated passive-aggressive, but two decades I later discovered their introduction of rapid sharing of best practices into a resistant culture in a video I’d shown to managers and product leaders in a high tech company stretching from emerging to rapid growth.  

Based upon higher affiliation and medium pace and improvement dimensions I now categorize my manufacturing, gas station, Good Humor Ice Cream and even department store retail jobs. Yes, those were summer jobs, including becoming an insurance agent, but the business model was recruit them, orient them to represent the brand, and replace them when they don’t work out.  

9. Consultant Life and Mutual Fund Company —Better Fit

This one worked out much better.

I scored a long-term retainer with a life insurance and mutual fund firm.  It was the kind of mature organization that employed maintenance workers just to polish its brick entry way.  

A few years earlier they had won company of the year honors like we did in my “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission” company.  

Their challenge was — how can you inject innovation into a century’s old mature company?  

I figured, why not try. 

It was a complex, complicated maneuver with tons of new knowledge and new idea packaging.  

My direct client, a 110 SAAS Analytical Specialist with help from a small team of 109 SAICA Internal Change Agents worked together to influence the company’s “immune system” through leadership classes. 

The long-term retainer, a consultant’s dream, provided billable hours for three days a week collaborating on the advanced leadership curriculum. I picked up some other projects — one with Ford Aerospace when their division,  Ford Aeronutronic’s Human Resources staff required coaching during the closing of the Newport Beach facility,  

I taught reengineering and continuous improvement through the local university and collaborated with the Vice President of Human Resources at a headquarters of a medical laboratory to build out a Leadership Academy.

A few years later my long-term retainer client left to form his own consultancy, snagged a similar assignment with another 100-year-old plus company operating in the food industry.

He (110 SAAS Analytical Specialist) brought me in to create a similar leadership curriculum for his client who was a 109 SAICA Internal Change Agent to inject change into their Strategic Leadership. He worried that their organization had operated at the stage of growth for years for so long that the up and coming current managers (112 SALS Loyal Survivalists) hadn’t experienced any other way of operating . It was a prescription he felt for a disaster on their career watch.

Well, like at Fluor anytime you try to maneuver a mature organization away from what had worked so well for so long the entrenched management resists the opposite set of key success factors like your immune system repels diseases.

Summary

What makes Sustaining-Associates tick?

112 SALS Loyal Survivalists anchor the Sustaining-Associates culture. They manage people, technologies, processes, and organizational structures to sustain the innovation they’ve already mastered. Employees identify with the organization and have high affiliation needs that favor slower paced industries and cultures.

Brand Loyalty. 

Sustained Improvement, Affiliation and Mastery

Building predictably upon past history and loyal customer retention.

Motto?

“If it win’t broke don’t fix it.”

What are their unique challenges? 

        • Missing competitive threats and responding too late.
        • Resting on their traditional successes.
        • Preparing the next generation of leaders for a different competitive environment.

What are the takeaways?  

To mature and survive their brand needs to be accepted by the majority of the total available market.

A loyal affiliated talent culture needs constant retention so associates maintain the organization’s reputation.

Through their behaviors they develop a trust mark that keeps bringing long-term customers back again and again.

Next up — Systematic-Professionals.

Evidence

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“5”  Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Your knowledge of words and symbols will lead you to analyze a situation and comprehend it so well that you’ll be a point of reference for others. You’ll contribute significantly to team decisions.” Taurus 

So, I’ll drink to that.  After field testing my original research in the executive MBA program hopefully my manuscript I’m tentatively calling WorkFit serves as a point of reference for you and your decisions. I know it has at the university level so far.

“4”  Steve Aoki, 41: “With so much going on, your mind will toggle between being engaged, distracted, engaged, etc. Finally, you’ll have a heavenly stretch of time to ponder what you are and what you might be.” Sagittarius

Since this is definitely not legitimately meant for me, wouldn’t it go without saying that my research may contribute to your heavily stretch of time to ponder …

“4”  Steve Nash, 45: “A joyful life is a custom job. No one recipe will work for everyone. In fact, if you were to do someone else’s joy-program it would bore you at best. Create your own adventure.” Aquarius

Am I wrong to loosely interpret this TauBit of Wisdom as living at the heart of my original research into Organization Types and Talent Profiles?

“4”  Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “The thing that makes you call an activity ‘work’ is that it’s at least a little harder than doing nothing at all. However much effort it takes, it can also be exceedingly pleasant. That’s how it will go down today at least.” Pisces

And I’m guessing that’s how it will go down on each day going forward as I beat this content into submission to make it more palatable.

Holiday Forecast for the Week Ahead:  

In the early days of biology, many scientists believed that all beings developed from miniature versions of themselves, and these ‘seed germs’ were the same in microscopic form as they were in forms full-grown. 

The radical transformations of some creatures, and the ability of certain creatures to reproduce in various ways, including asexually, could not be explained with this theory, which eventually had to give way to ideas of generation more varied and plausible.

There are many ways in which we, as individuals, grow in spirit. Sometimes, we do stay about the same as we simply grow bigger until our soul and personality fill out the space in a way that feels more ‘full-sized.’ But more often than not, the spiritual aspects of our being thrive in more unusual, varied and transformative ways. Often we don’t grow so much as change.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll 

    • @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4397 to 4427.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life 

Long-Form

    • Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trip

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S2 E55 — Dreaming of 30 Tempting Getaways

Looking for that Perfect Weekend Getaway?  30 Tempting Escapes to Consider Now! Shifting from trends, opportunities and foresight this episode focuses on the quality-of-life adventures for planning when the pandemic abates.

“5”  Steve Zahn, 51: “Working hard and solving many problems doesn’t always tire you out. In fact, now you’ll find it invigorating due to the fair amount of adrenaline coursing through your day.” Scorpio

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s Episode 55 in Season 2 of  “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 30th day of May in the spring of 2020.  

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E54 — 90 Days to Future-Proof Your Career Trajectory and Lifetime Investments; S2 E53 — The Fourth Step’s Passing Storm Botched Beyond Belief; S2 E52 — What’s So Wrong with Conventional Wisdom Unless … 

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E55 — All Roads Lead to the Future; S1 E54 — A Version That’s a TauBit Grander; S1 E53 — High 5’s for Tau Secrets Revealed; S1 E52 — Missing Chapters and Paths Not Taken

Context

Shifting from trends, opportunities and foresight this episode focuses on the quality-of-life adventures available.

“Telling yourself to change without changing the environment, too, rarely works. But if all you change is the environment, chances are good that what’s inside will follow suit.”

Holiday Mathis, Creators Syndicate Inc.

The Tau: Week Ending 5/30/20

Tags: Beaches, Camping, Deserts, Islands, Lakes, Mountains, Regions, Resorts, Road Trips, Seas, Trails  

Precious insights could come from anywhere. Try new environments for fun and for changing your routines in the best possible way. Choose from any of these 30 habit-shifting getaways. 

Remember while we’re getting closer, we here on the Atoll don’t expect or encourage you to go check them out immediately. Instead we hope our articles inspire your future adventures!

But, today there’s no reason not to join our growing group of 3484 followers …. 

See what you’ve been missing.

Check out this week’s headlines pulled from our daily “Top 30 Digest” delivered, “Fresh from the Labs. Literally bottled and set adrift from KnowWhere Atoll.“

Where … ?

Mountains, Rivers and Lakes

            • ”The Perfect Weekend Getaway: Mammoth Lakes and Mono Lake From Los Angeles or San Francisco”
            • ”The Perfect Weekend Getaway: Lake Tahoe from San Francisco”
            • ”David Coverdale Lowers Price For His Lake Tahoe ‘Paradise’ Home”
            • ”Montanans Will Never Forget Their First Time Visiting Saint Mary Lake”
            • ”Tough lesson: Bear breaks into Bay Area family’s car in Lake Tahoe, forages for food”
            • ”Big Bear Lake to stop communicating or enforcing state’s coronavirus stay-at-home order”
            • ”Planning to visit South Lake Tahoe for Memorial Day weekend? Expect to pay $1,000 fine”

Pristine Treks

            • ”10 Orange County Hikes to Take You From Sea to Summit”
            • ”Explore Over 8 Miles Of Hiking Trails At City Of Rocks State Park in New Mexico”
            • ”Evergreen Artist Julie Leidel Will Donate 50 Percent of Her May Sales to the Red Cross”
            • ”SoCal campgrounds start to slowly reopen, some in time for Memorial Day”

Deserts, Slopes and Ranges

            • “Top 10 Best Luxury Hotels In Napa Valley”
            • ”Colorado Restaurants Can Reopen for Dine-In Service On May 27”
            • ”Heat wave will bring excessive heat warnings to Southern California desert areas”
            • ”Santa Fe To Gallup: A New Mexico Road Trip Steeped In History And Culture”
            • ”Inside Sylvester Stallone $3.3M Palm Springs getaway mansion featuring fire pit, hot tub and stunning mountain views” 

PCH Regions

            • ”The Perfect Weekend Getaway: San Diego From Los Angeles”
            • ”Coronavirus economy: Silicon Valley wields tech shield against layoffs”
            • ”Here’s how the Golden Gate Bridge was actually built”
            • ”’Long Beach-based Virgin Orbit set to test orbital launch system today“
            • ”Homebuying is an adventure’: Bigfoot found sheltering in place at million dollar Santa Cruz house for sale”
            • ”Opening Half Moon Bay beach lots proves hard”
            • ”San Diego, Ventura and Santa Barbara can reopen restaurants for dine-in service”
            • ”As California reopens, shops will see if customers feel confident or cautious”

Islands and Currents

            • ”Craving Caribbean sunshine? Saint Lucia planning phased reopening on 4 June”
            • ”Hurricane season 2020: When is hurricane season in US and Caribbean?”
            • ”COVID-19 Has Turned Paradise Into a Privacy Nightmare”
            • ”Wish you were here: Caribbean tourism reels from coronavirus”
            • ”Can Hawaii open up to tourists without letting in the coronavirus?”
            • ”These Caribbean countries are reopening for tourists next month”
            • ”COVID-19 Update: It’s Still Not Time To Travel To Hawaii”
            • ”Hawaii is enforcing 14-day self-quarantines with single-use hotel keys” 

Tau 12 Months Ago 

“If wisdom were a needle in a haystack, you’d find it.  Precious insights could come from anywhere.”

Holiday Mathis, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Evidence

“5”  Steve Zahn, 51: “Working hard and solving many problems doesn’t always tire you out. In fact, now you’ll find it invigorating due to the fair amount of adrenaline coursing through your day.” Scorpio

Truth be told, I may unconsciously overcomplicate challenges and problems to experience that adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“4”  Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “When you plan, deliberate and make big efforts you create your life. When you wing it, you create your life. When you do nothing, or just whatever, you create your life. You’ll come up with a brilliant mix of modalities.” Virgo

So where’s the lesson here?  Do nothing, plan everything, wing it too?  Or something else?

“4”  Steve Kerr, 54: “You’re melded to another and are so incredibly close that you sometimes wonder if you have the qualities necessary to withstand such an intense synthesis. Stop overthinking. Believe that collectively, you’re stronger.” Libra

I kinda look at it this way.  Until you meld, you cultivate your Remembering Self which you refine over and over again.  When you meld you become one Remembering Self together out of two separate Selves.  Emma-the-Baroness-Steve is a thing.  

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll 

    • @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 2839 to 3188.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life 

Long-Form

    • Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

The Knowledge Path | Know Laboratories | Knowledge Banking | Knowledge ATMs | Western Skies and Island Currents | Best West Road Trip

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Season One: The One-Year Natural Experiment

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One: The One-Year Natural Experiment

S1 E1 – Day One of My 1-Year Experiment

S1 E2 — Day 2 of My 1-Year Experiment

S1 E3 — Day 3 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E4 — Day 4 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E5 — Day 5 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E6 — Day 6 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E7 — Day 7 of My 1-Year Experiment

S1 E8 — Day 8 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E9 — Day 9 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E10 — Day 10 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E11 — Day 11 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E12 — Day 12 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E13 — Day 13 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E14 — Day 14 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E15 — Day 15 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E16 — Day 16 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E17 — Day 17 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E18 — Day 18 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E19 — Day 19 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E20 — Day 20 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E21 — Day 21 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E22 — Day 22 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E23 — Day 23 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E23 — Day 23 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E24 — Day 24 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E25— Day 25 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E26 — Day 26  of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E27 — Day 27 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E28 — Day 28 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E29 — Day 29 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E30 — Day 30 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E31 — Day 31 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E32 — Day 32 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E33 — Day 33 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E34 — Day 34 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E35 — Day 35 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E36 — Day 36 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E37 — Day 37 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E38 — Day 38 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E39 — What’s Up with Facebook? 

S1 E40 — Nothing to See Here, Keep Moving On 

S1 E41 — The Dream Was Over, Long Live the Dream 

S1 E42 — Love on the Run 

S1 E43 — Desperation on Such a Summer’s Day 

S1 E44 — Google Me Some Chopped Liver 

S1 E45 — Day 45 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E46 — Day 46 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E47 — Day 47 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E48 — Holiday TauBit Trumps Funk 

S1 E49 — Magnetize the Version You Imagine 

S1 E50 – The Bias Brothers or Just Plain Losers? 

S1 E51 – Brief, Broad, Fast, Wow and Delight 

S1 E52 – Missing Chapters and Paths Not Taken 

S1 E53 – High 5’s for Tau Secrets Revealed 

S1 E54 – A Version That’s a TauBit Grander 

S1 E55 – All Roads Lead to the Future 

S1 E56 – It’s Frickin’ Summer and So Are You 

12 Hidden Secrets and Stolen Wisdom – Month Two 

S1 E57 — More or Less in the Know 

S1 E58 — Judging a Stroll from the Hotel Santa Barbara to the Lobero Theater 

S1 E59 — Where Did All the Dillon Millennials Go? Eureka! 

S1 E60 — Overlapping Cycles of Life 

S1 E61 — Investment of Time and Effort 

S1 E62 – Next Reality? 

S1 E63 — Day 63 of My 1-Year Experiment 

S1 E64 — Father and Son Rituals out of Storage 

S1 E65 — Focus Your Mental Energy 

S1 E66 — Do Your Proposals Lead to Contracts? 

S1 E67 — Don’t Misunderstand Me 

S1 E68 — Overcompensating for Disappointing Results? 

S1 E69 — Anniversary Trip of a Lifetime Deep in the Heart of Tuscany 

S1 E70 — Lingering Fear My Cover Was Blown 

S1 E71 — Isn’t There a Placebo for This? 

S1 E72 — It’s Taken so Long, I Could be Wrong 

S1 E73 — Do You Need a Little Leo da V Time Too? 

S1 E74 — You Know What To Do, Yeah Right! 

S1 E75 — Dreams and Schemes and Workarounds 

S1 E76 — “The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

S1 E77 — Why This Caper Is Breaking My Mind 

S1 E78 — Drag Me to Obsolescence, Clear the Way to the Future 

S1 E79 — Can I Keep It Up? For a Year? 

S1 E80 — I’ll Give You Adverse Conditions, Steve 

S1 E81— Is This My Wake Up Call, Steve? 

S1 E82 — Why Writers Aren’t the Only Endangered Species. Sigh. 

S1 E83 —The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book 

S1 E90 — Day 90 of My 1-Year Natural Experiment 

S1 E84 — Crisis averted?  Energy depleted?  What are we going to do? 

S1 E85 — What happens when the fear subsides? 

S1 E86 — Day 86 of My 1-Year Natural Experiment 

S1 E87 — Pipe Bombs Destroy Vacation Bliss 

S1 E88 — Who’s Marc Maron and What’s da Vinci got to do with him? 

S1 E89 — Because If You Don’t Someone Else Will. It’s Worth It! 

S1 E90 — Day 90 of My 1-Year Natural Experiment 

S1 E91 — If that, then this … ? The daily double?

S1 E92 — Shh … Secrets Husbands Keep to Ourselves 

S1 E93 — Why is it easier to Hate than to Love the other Half? 

S1 E94 — Wasn’t There a Movie about the Tau of Steve? 

S1 E95 — No Back to Work Days or Hump Days Allowed 

S1 E96 — Old Rabbits Die Hard 

S1 E97 — My Top 19 Reasons for Failing 

S1 E98 — Why Can’t I Leave 26 Orphans for a Well Deserved Vacation? 

S1 E99 — What’s in a Name? Baby Boy Names? 

S1 E100 — Running out of Determination and Grit by the 100th Day 

S1 E101 — From Saint to Soul Mate and Trusted Friend 

S1 E102 — Why Is It Always Hidden in the Fine Print? 

S1 E103 — Innies and Outies and Other Potential Catastrophes 

S1 E104 — How Yesterday’s Success Triggers Tomorrow’s Failure 

S1 E105 — Will Fortune Smile on Us Later in the Evening? 

S1 E106 — Attempts to Upset 9 of My Life Stages Apple Cart 

S1 E107 — How Do You Rate Your Sense of Curiosity? 

S1 E108 — After So Many Defeats is it Time to Catch a New Trajectory? 

S1 E109 — Do All Introverts Take the Long Acetylcholine Pathway? 

S1 E110 — Love, Longing, Belonging, Connection and Loss 

S1 E111 — Is There Half-life of Wisdom? 

S1 E112 —  When Was the Last Time You Wrangled Your Past? 

S1 E113 — Is This an Omen? 

S1 E114 — Setbacks, Frustration, Epic Fails but How Was Your Day? 

S1 E115 — Meandering Minds, Falling Branches and Strange Pacing Until … 

S1 E116 — The Jolt of Lightning that Changed Everything 

S1 E117 — Poets and Priests and Testifying Under Oath … 

S1 E118 — Swiping Your Birthday Is What I Do, So Sue Me 

S1 E119 — What Happens When You Hold an Idea? 

S1 E120 — Metamorphosis, Exhilaration and a Life of Crime 

S1 E121 — When Should You Work Backwards and When Should You Shop? 

S1 E122 — Is the Next Best Thing a Friend with a Bad Memory? 

S1 E123 — Knowing it Wasn’t a Good Choice, But … 

S1 E124 — No Longer a Misunderstood Genius or Child Celebrity 

S1 E125 — No Names Again this Year but Pass the Gravy 

S1 E126 — Who Wouldn’t Want to Choose Steve, Stephen or Stevie for Your Newborn Infant? 

S1 E127 — Why Does My Horoscope Suck Compared to Yours? 

S1 E128 — Messy, Creative Leonardo-like Procrastinations 

S1 E129 — An Elephant, A 500 lb. Gorilla and a Chicken Walk into the …  

S1 E130 — How Do You Go On When Sheer Panic Sets In? 

S1 E131 — Brain Rattling, Self-Criticism and Second Guessing 

S1 E132 — Freudian Pink Slips for Endangered Writers and Bloggers 

S1 E133 — Why Don’t More Creators Write or Blog? 

S1 E134 — What Will This Force Me to Become? No Black Cats Allowed 

S1 E135 — The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book 

S1 E136 — Just How Do Zip Codes Prevent Homebuyer Remorse? 

S1 E137 — Shouldn’t I Bet It All on the Four 5s I’ve Been Dealt? 

S1 E138 — The Inscrutable Paradox of Tom Petty and Joan Irvine’s Estates 

S1 E139  — Crap, OTE, Just Crap 

S1 E140 — Chasing Squirrels While Barking At Nothing 

S1 E141 — Be Your Inner Artist and Let Her Fly 

S1 E 142 — Wisdom Arrives by Putting Knowledge into Action 

S1 E143 — The Grand Prize Winner 

S1 E144 — Down to Final Two Days Left 

S1 E145 — Three Miles of Coincidental Dancing 

S1 E146 — 3 am Dreams Lend No Support 

S1 E147 — Whistleblowing, Melancholy and Curbing Fallen Needles 

S1 E148 — Unforced Errors, Disruptions and Discord 

S1 E149 — Tales and Trails and Mind Blowing Dents 

S1 E150 — Two Tiers Shed for a Dying 4Runner Classic 

S1 E151 — Stepping onto the Pitch with a Lean MVP 

S1 E152 — Why? Again. Why? 

S1 E153 — Only The Names Have Been Changed. And Some of It’s True. 

S1 E154 — Ever Gotten That 3 am Call from Gilligan? 

S1 E155 — Distraction or Viewing Addiction? 

S1 E156 — Hope? Placeholder? Sign? 

S1 E157 — Schemes, Plots and Plans 

S1 E158 — Car-Crash Addiction or Integrated Self? 

S1 E159 — 5 Wise Guy Rankings, Why? 

S1 E160 — Mourning Kobe 

S1 E161— Secret Combinations only Life Hacking Marketeers Know 

S1 E162 — Why Do Her Covert Back Channels End in Discord? 

S1 E163 — A Balboa Island Thank You 

S1 E164 — Picking up Followers While Cascading Down the Face of the Falls 

S1 E165 — 11 Simple Steps for Finding the Authentic Quality-of-Life You Deserve 

S1 E166 — Falling Down the Time Sucking Rabbit Hole 

S1 E167 — Why is Tau the Golden Ratio Showing Up in Nautilus Shells?

 S1 E168 — A Mammoth Thank You to Kobe and Steve Jobs 

S1 E169 — Lockouts and Taxing 1-Year Season Coming to an End 

S1 E170 — Isn’t This Good-Bye?! 

S1 E171 — When’s the Best Time to Air Dirty Laundry? 

S1 E172 — Got it, Nash.  Rules, Heart, Mouth, Action. 

S1 E173 — AI, EVs, MRIs, Me and Steves 

S1 E174 — Isn’t the Lesser of Two Evils Still Evil? 

S1 E175 — Where’s the Finish Line? Is This Ever Going to End? 

S1 E176 — The Cliff Hanging Season One Finale

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

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Season Two: The Pandemic Year

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season Two:  the Pandemic Year

How will our world unfold on the other side of this pandemic?  Back to normal? Or something entirely different?

S2 E1 — Sneak Preview Asking “How Toxic is Your Work Life?” 

S2 E2 — New Season Preview: Rippling Effects, Implications and Consequences We Didn’t See Coming

S2 E3 — Day 3 of My Pandemic Year Experiment 

S2 E4 — Sneak Preview: Day 4 of My Pandemic Year’s Natural Experiment 

S2 E5 — Second Season Sneak Preview: My Pandemic Year’s Natural Experiment 

S2 E6 — No We Don’t Share Your Precious Little Frickin’ Data 

S2 E7 — Smart Moves and Shifting Opportunities 

S2 E8 — How Does the Entangled Fish Hook Theory of Creativity Work? 

S2 E9 — Blame It On Your D4DR Gene, Not Me!

S2 E10 — Cats, Ladders and Shaking Salt … 

S2 E11 — Waiting for the 3rd Shoe to Drop 

S2 E12 — Too Anxious to Meet and Eat 

S2 E13 — Slipping on a Bar of Dove Soap and other Ripple Effects 

S2 E14 — Reading Tea Leaves Bottled and Set Adrift 

S2 E15 — Behaving Badly, Why Big Sur made “Fodor’s Travel NO List” 

S2 E16 — Scroll to the Bottom for Foresight and Quality-of-Life, Right Leo? 

S2 E17 — Shutting Mountain Resorts Down, Closing Boutiques, Kicking Tourists Out

S2 E18 — What is the Truth and How Can You Tell? 

S2 E19 — What’s Percolating in Our Collective Unconscious? 

S2 E20 — Panic, Fertilizer and Least Expected Meaningful Moments 

S2 E21 — Cycles of History Rhyming with Endlessly Disruptive Rhythms? 

S2 E22 —Paranoid Rose Review and Traffic-Copped Check Out Lines 

S2 E23 — Gaping Loss No Amount of Mourning Will Heal 

S2 E24— Working Remote from KnowWhere Atoll 

S2 E25— Are You an Innie or Outie Thinker? 

S2 E26 — Rethinking the N-Word 

S2 E27 — Why I Have to Keep Leo da V on a Leash and So Should You 

S2 E28 — Hosting Norwegian Zooms While Trump Eliminated the Virus in April

 S2 E29 — Three Months That Changed the World 

S2 E30 — It’s Crazy. Why does Amazon Prime Work, but Netflix Doesn’t? 

S2 E31 — Getting Charged from Box Automattic-aly 

S2 E32 — Trapped and Bored? Or Unleashing a Reinvention Wave? 

S2 E33 — What Happens When Your Business Collapses? 

S2 E34 — Why Is This Kicking Off the 4th Industrial Revolution? 

S2 E35 — Was this Pandemic Year a 1-Off or New Way of Life? 

S2 E36 — Turning Lemons into Margaritas 

S2 E37 — How Deep is the Chasm? What Do We Do? 

S2 E38 — What Should You Do If You Stumble Across Loaded Information? 

S2 E39 — The Best Tau for the Pandemic Year, Don’t You Agree? 

S2 E40 — The Profound Impact of the Pandemic on Nouns 

S2 E41 — A Pandemic End to Real Estate and Consulting? 

S2 E42 — It Was Short and Sweet, but Heart-Felt 

S2 E43 — See What You’ve Been Missing … 

S2 E44 — Celebrating Emma the Baroness Tribal Quarantine Style 

S2 E45 — Wildcard What Ifs and Doobie Bros Bias 

S2 E46 — Whimsy Passion Project or Epic Novel of Adventure? 

S2 E47 — 27 Adventure Regions for Your Remote-Working Bucket List 

S2 E48 — Tracking Millennials from One Resort to Another

S2 E49 — Navigating Waves of Disruption When You’ve Lost Your Bearings 

S2 E50 — 5 Fundamental Uncertainties

S2 E51 — Let’s Agree to Make Things Worse, Shall We?

S2 E52 — What’s So Wrong with Conventional Wisdom Unless …

S2 E53 — The Fourth Step’s Passing Storm Botched Beyond Belief 

S2 E54 — 90 Days to Future-Proof Your Career Trajectory and Lifetime Investments

S2 E55 — Dreaming of 30 Tempting Getaways 

S2 E56 — What Iffing

S2 E57 — Science and Medicine or Politically-Motivated Misinformation?

S2 E58 — Check Back in 18 Months

S2 E59 — See What You’ve Been Missing

S2 E60 — She Began to Weep…

S2 E61 — Pink Behind the Reflections

S2 E62 — “Shh. Did You Hear That?”

S2 E63 — Easier Than Finding His MacBook Air Password?

S2 E64 — Let the Beers and Weekend Partying Begin

S2 E65 — Pandemic Uncovered 11 Life-Changing Secrets You Shouldn’t Ignore

S2 E66 — The Romance of a Good Humor Man in Detroit

S2 E67 — Here’s What I Didn’t Know That Will Help You

S2 E68 — Take More Breakthrough Showers 

S2 E69 — How Can You Tell Who’s an Engineer at a Party?

S2 E70 — Persistent Failure

S2 E71 — My Top 13 Worst Jobs of All Time 

S2 E72 — 20 Niche-Specific Opportunities Found After Making Soul Crushing Mistakes

S2 E73 — WorkFit: Chopping Off 12 Losers at the Intersection of Speed and Independence

S2 E74 — Summing Up Your Situation in an Intensely Psychological Game

S2 E75 —  Guinea Pig Projections

S2 E76 — Do You Have What It Takes to Become a Paradoxy-Moron?

S2 E77 — 10 Years of Field Research for Better or Worse

S2 E78 — What Do Paradoxy-Morons Want and Need? 

S2 E79 — Ain’t No Paradoxy-Moron? How About an Emerging-Entrepreneur?

S2 E80 — Unrealistic Expectations Hatched Green Box Lessons the Hard Way

S2 E81 — 3rd of 4 Secrets to a Better WorkFit

S2 E82 — How Do You Inject Innovation into a Century’s Old Company?

S2 E83 — Why Shouldn’t You Always Lean On Things That Worked Before?

S2 E84 — Maybe Robin Hood Got It Right After All, Eh?

S2 E85 — How to Up the Odds in Your Favor 

S2 E86 — How To Avoid a Disastrous Career Like Mine

S2 E87 — Start Ups Aren’t For Everyone. Are They a Better or Worse Fit for You? 

S2 E88 — Convincing Family, Friends, Fools and Angels

S2 E89 — Garage Bonking and Chasm Jumping

S2 E90 — How Many Road Warriors Does It Take to Fuel Our Growth?

S2 E91 — How to Master Rapid Growth Without Gifting Your Competitors

S2 E92 — Herding Cats Towards a Tornado

 S2 E93 — Who It Takes to Keep Growth at It’s Peak

S2 E94 — Sustained Growth: Slicing Turnover and Grooming Experts

S2 E95 — The Founder’s Curse Unleashed by the Edifice Complex

S2 E96 — Two Kindred Spirits Drawn to Mature Complications

S2 E97 — Frame Blindness and Decision Traps

S2 E98 — Why Your Company Simply Won’t Make It Out of Puberty

S2 E99 — Why Pay Over $100,000 When You Don’t Have To?

S2 E100 — Live, Love, Work, Play, Invest and Leave a Legacy

S2 E101 — The Story of Strange Bedfellows Saving the Day

S2 E102 — Caught by Surprise in a Major Gut-Wrenching Decline 

S2 E103 — Confronting Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, Resistance and Unrelenting Stress

S2 E104 — Worst Monday Ever. Very, Very Grim … 

S2 E105 — When Cosmic Leads to Decline, Pair Extremes Intentionally

S2 E106 — How We Brainwashed Curmudgeons

S2 E107 — Leaving Us Adrift in a Sea of Change

S2 E108 — Why Our Reinvention Efforts Failed (and Yours Will Too)

S2 E109 — Rebuilding Trust Doesn’t Happen Overnight

S2 E110 — Keys for Reinventing a FUD-Soaked Enterprise

S2 E111 — Against All Odds 530 is Alive!

S2 E112 — Betting on the Progress of 5 Innovation Teams

S2 E113 — 9 Pitfalls to Avoid

S2 E114 — Top 10 Ways to Rebuild Trust and Reinvent Complex Enterprises

 

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